Internet.org, the brainchild of Facebook (NASDAQ:FB) co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg, has the ambitious goal of “connecting the next 5 billion” Internet users by focusing on the emerging economies — the lower tiers of mobile users whose primary means of getting online is via mobile devices.

With a goal of having a presence in 100 countries within 2015, Internet.org sets foot in Southeast Asia through PLDT (NYSE:PHI), which operates the Philippines’ biggest mobile and fixed line network by subscriber base. According to estimates, only 38% of the country’s population had Internet access as of mid 2014. Meanwhile, mobile penetration rate has surpassed 100%, although only a minority are on smartphones.

Facebook’s effort to connect the otherwise underserved sectors of society is done in partnership with public and private organizations in its target countries. Internet.org vice president Chris Evans said in a keynote at the recently-concluded Mobile World Congress in Barcelona that the effort will essentially provide basic Internet services like access to educational and health information. But it also aims to be a feeder to other mobile services, as well, envisioning to “see more people coming online, buying data and voice and SMS bundles.”

Internet.org launched initially in countries like Zambia, Tanzania, Kenya, Colombia, Ghana and India. The Philippines launch marks the first Southeast Asian country that carries free basic Internet access through the initiative.

Through Internet.org, users can access a curated set of websites, currently numbering 24, which include sites like Wikipedia for news, Inquirer for news, Accuweather for meteorology and Jobstreet for job hunting (the list of services differs by market). As expected, the service will also provide free access to social networking staples Facebook and Facebook Messenger.

Access will be available to users within PLDT’s mobile brands, which includes SMART, Sun Cellular and Talk n’ Text. The biggest mobile network by subscriber base, the group counts about 71.2 million prepaid subscribers, which comprise about 90% of its cellular business.

Prior to the local Internet.org launch, PLDT already initiated its “Internet for All” campaign, which provided free access to mobile users, with 50MB daily allocation. While this is decidedly a small amount for most, it was deemed enough for basic access like instant messaging and light social networking.

“Smart’s partnership with Facebook is a big boost to our ‘Internet for All’ campaign, an advocacy we have been strongly pushing for,” says Smart president and CEO Napoleon L. Nazareno. “By launching Internet.org app with Facebook in the Philippines, we are making useful information within reach of millions of Filipinos.”

Earler this month, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg shared some statistics on Internet.org, saying about 7 million people used the Internet for the first time through the service. In addition, the carriers involved also saw an upsurge in data subscriptions and usage of basic services, an indication that Internet.org does not only serve to enhance access to the underserved, but it also contributes positively to carriers’ business. Other companies, such as Nokia, are also finding ways to enable Internet access with inexpensive Internet-enabled devices for the emerging markets.

The post Internet.org Launches in SEAsia With Free Access to Essential Online Services appeared first on VR World.

With Windows 10, Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) will be introducing a brand new browser codenamed Project Spartan, with Internet Explorer finally set to become obsolete. The browser will continue on as an alternative, mainly for enterprise customers, but for other users Project Spartan will be the go-to browser.

Microsoft’s marketing chief Chris Capossela announced during the Microsoft Convergence event yesterday that the manufacturer was working on a new name and brand for the Porject Spartan browser. Some of the new features that are set to be ushered in with Project Spartan include a new Edge rendering engine that can parse HTML markup directly, with the ability to also load legacy IE11 websites.

The browser will be delivered as a universal app, which means that for the first time, the same version of the browser will be available on Windows 10 as well as Windows 10 for phones. Considering Microsoft’s One Windows vision, it is possible a slimmed-down variant of the browser will be available for Xbox One as well. Ability to update directly from the store means that Microsoft can introduce new features without having to roll out an OS update. Also available in Spartan is extension support, and Cortana is also highlighted as an integral feature in the browser.

One of the main reasons in ditching the Internet Explorer brand is the negative connotation it carriers in the tech world. Microsoft tried to shake off the negative image of the browser by rolling out commercials, but ultimately failed to challenge the growing dominance of Chrome and Firefox. With Windows 10 heralding a new direction for Microsoft as a whole, Redmond is now looking to start afresh in the browser segment as well.

Microsoft is yet to figure out a name for Project Spartan, although it is likely given market research trends that it will feature Microsoft’s brand name in front of it. Microsoft Spartan, anyone?

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Since cryptographers from the IMDEA, IRIA and Microsoft Research found a serious vulnerability in the SSL/TLS security standards that are used to keep passwords and other sensitive information safe in modern browsers, security researchers have been scrambling to uncover the range of everything that has been affected as a result.

Since then, it has been discovered that Microsoft’s (NASDAQ: MSFT) server software was vulnerable, along with a host of sensitive websites, including those of Facebook (NASDAQ: FB), American Express (NYSE: AXP), the NSA, the White House, and others. Additionally, many and most popular web browsers were vulnerable to the exploit: the extent was, on the whole, very impressive.

Parties using vulnerable computers could quickly find themselves on the receiving end of man-in-the-middle attacks, that could be used to steal payment information, passwords, and other extremely sensitive data. Webmasters fared even worse, as the vulnerability could be used to inject malicious code onto server and web buttons.

Companies were quick to roll out patches and fixes for the attack, but this whole mess could have been mitigated, and definitely should not have happened in the first place.

Who is responsible for the FREAK SSL exploit?

Who is to blame for a flaw in the most commonly used security protocol in the world, that managed to affect more than one-third of websites offering SSL?

According to cryptographer at John Hopkins university Matthew Green, the flaw was built into SSL from the very start. “The SSL protocol itself was deliberately designed to be broken,” Green wrote on his blog.

Back in the 1990s, when (it is fair to say) computers were significantly slower than they are today, and the World Wide Web was still in its infancy, cryptography was not very strong by modern standards. After Netscape revealed it’s new SSL technology, the U.S government was quick to regulate the standard. U.S versions of the browser came with 1024 bit public keys, but these keys could not be exported to other countries. The International edition was significantly weaker, with 512 bit public keys.

Since the government made this rule in the interests of being able to break into other nations’ SSL, the standard was quite literally designed to be broken.

Since the 1990s, of course, computers have moved on, and so have politics. The U.S has relaxed its laws about international encryption, and in 2013, a broad push was made to introduce 2048-bit SSL encryption, which is now the standard across the Internet.

So why, fifteen years later, are we being haunted by SSL’s poor security?

Because of the varying degrees of encryption offered by servers and browsers, ‘cipher suites’ were used to negotiate the strongest available encryption standards between a client and a host. While this is barely used nowadays, the option still exists in the clockwork behind operating systems and browsers. The essence of the FREAK attack is, therefore, very simple: interrupt a vulnerable client, and downgrade its encryption from standard RSA to ‘export RSA’.

The resultant encryption is so weak by today’s standards that it can be cracked in a manner of hours using Amazon Web Services.

FREAK never needed to be an issue, and it’s the classic result of companies failing to keep up with rapidly deprecating technology standards.

Fixing the FREAK SSL vunerability

Here are three ways to prevent another FREAK attack from occurring:

1. The government should not try to regulate Internet security standards. The government should be involved in security, and it should certainly regulate the security of its own systems: but laws should not be in place that will hamper the development of security technologies in the private sector. Criminals will continue innovating, and computers will only get faster. The government cannot shut down the Internet, or control its rate of progress, and it shouldn’t try. When it does, bad things happen.
2. Software and web developers – especially larger ones, like Microsoft and Facebook – must actively curate its software for deprecated standards, and disable it. It can be a pain, and a hassle to keep changing systems when old ones are in place that worked in the past. But a little pain in the present could prevent massive disasters down the road.
3. Consumers must be willing to let go of old, familiar technologies and upgrade to ones that are newer and safer on a consistent basis. Individuals – and especially companies – who insist on keeping software solutions that are deprecated in terms of decades must dedicate the time and money to keep up with the changing environment of threats and dangers by upgrading. At the very least, if they must keep the old solutions, they must seek ways to actively improve and safeguard them from potential exploits (similar to what the active Windows XP community is doing now).

This isn’t a novelty, and it isn’t rocket science. This is common sense, and it’s what people should be doing in the first place.

The post How the FREAK SSL Flaw Could Have Been Prevented appeared first on VR World.

Recently, I met with a friend of mine and we had an interesting discussion regarding decisions a person has to take when designing a website. Just like the paper magazine, there are numerous considerations to take… in this case we decided to go with 1050 pixel wide resolution because we felt it is the right resolution to go for the world of today, where most users use widescreen displays and large resolutions.

His case in point was valid: numerous netbooks feature a resolution of 1024×600 and those users will be left behind… technically, that was true, but the design offered way to reduce the size by one notch. But basic design had to stay above the 1000-pixel wide. Second point, about numerous users using 800×600 was… inaccurate, to say the least. While making our design call, we all followed stats such as Steam Hardware Survey, and numbers there were clear.

Looking back at these three weeks, our stats show that without any doubt, people moved on. These are the stats for our site for first three weeks, just as a preview to something that we are doing:

What is the profile of your average tech reader? One thing is sure - he uses a widescreen display.

As you can see, 83.2% [first 76.8%] of BSN* readers use a screen wider than 1050 pixels, 9.36% use sub-1050 resolution, and we have 7.41% that use alternative resolutions – not shown in this pie-chart, 3.17% use 800×600 pixel resolution, while the remainder goes to the Cellphone browsers such as iPhones and Blackberries.

But what was interesting was dominance of widescreen displays: just like Steam’s survey, more than 60% of all readers use a widescreen display. And Dell really sold a gazillion of those 24″ displays

The post Making the right design calls appeared first on VR World.

At the same time, similar thing happened on the new site… we clocked more than 10,000 visitors in mere days after the launch, even with all the issues that happened with our provider – DNS resolve issue, e-mail server issues and so on. But now, things are getting on track and we should be out of the woods, as far as our server is concerned.

Lack of updates in the past several days was mostly due to issues that happened on BSN*. Will amend this weekend I am also pretty active on Twitter, so you’re welcome to follow me and comment on stories – twitter.com/theovalich .

The post Blog hits 150K mark, BSN* passes 10K mark & issues update appeared first on VR World.

So, if 100 Mbps is something that we can expect in a year or two, why should we bother with the deployment of expensive fiber-optics cabling that (currently) achieves only 20/20 or 50/50 Mbps, if you’re lucky?

Good old copper wire proved its invaluable status – I am writing this while being connected to the Internet using 20Mbps stream coming down through 43-year old telephone installations (yeah, I do have those three-pin large connectors), but it seems that copper-based networking standards aren’t dead yet.

Networking wizards at Swedish telecommunications giant Ericsson came up with improvements that are nothing else but breathtaking. Researches at the company managed to introduce couple of new technologies to VDSL2+ protocol. Key feature is now “crosstalk cancellation” and “line bonding”… Crosstalk Cancellation works by looking for any presence of noise on the line and increasing the signal strength and is the main culprit why your home will have Internet connection in excess of 500 Mbps (62,5 MB/s). If your house is withing 500m from the modem pool, that is.

And now wait to hear “analysts” and “experts” who are saying that Internet will collapse. Get a decent internet connection before crying loud, guys’n’gals.

The post Ericsson achieves 500Mbps Internet connection using copper wire! appeared first on VR World.

Browser wars are back, and they’re back in full strength: who is going to win? Mozilla Firefox leads the market share of alternative browsers and in some countries, such as Germany – enjoys leading market share. Google’s Chrome came out of beta, and then returned to beta status within the same year (1.0 beta becomes 1.0 – and 2.0 beta arrived this week) , while Apple made great progress forward with more stable and mature Safari. Version 4 is currently the leading browser in recently released Peacemaker, browser benchmark from “The Flying Finns” (Futremark).

So, what is Microsoft doing? Releasing its last internet browser based on current Internet Explorer technology. IE8 is the default web browser for Windows 7, but it is removable due to the completely new browser engine coming in late 2010.

IE8 was released some hours ago, and this version of “Exploder” will have to hold the fort for Microsoft until the next-gen technology debuts. If you want to try IE8, head over to official Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 8 download page or go to alternative sites such as TechPowerUp! or Softpedia.

The post Microsoft releases IE8: Last gasp or a fresh start? appeared first on VR World.

Given that a RAID0 array with five Intel or OCZ SSDs gives out 1GB/s, why did Samsung need 19 more drives to only double the speed? 24 drives should achieve 5.2 GB/s read and 4.8GB/s write speed. The problem lies within our current PC architecture. The authors used two PCI Express x4 controllers that cannot give out more bandwidth than 2GB/s read and 2GB/s write – thus, from eight drives onwards, the speed of each individual drive only decreased, from 220MB/s to a lowly 85MB/s.
Secondly, using Skulltrail for seeking maximum bandwidth was never a good idea. Intel Core i7 or AMD’s Phenom II would do much better, without the limitations of archaic FSB architecture.

Guys were so excited that they even made a typo at the number of drives... ;)

If Samsung had access to PCIe Gen2 x16 controller (not certain that anyone makes it), then those 24 drives would run at its peak speed, 5.2/4.8 GB/s in R/W operations. This is not to say that the video wasn’t awesome, but bear in mind that those drives could perform way better once that the RAID controller industry catches up. On the other note, I managed to max out Intel’s ICH10R controller – it took six Raptors (no SSDs for me), but the top bandwidth figure out was 450 MB/s, roughly identical to limit which Nova found in his 4-drive SSD test a while ago. If we would put these Samsung hard drives onto ICH10R, you would only need two drives to max it out.

One thing is certain: for SSD technology, PCI Express Gen3 and SATA 3.0 can’t come soon enough.

P.S. Video was awesome guys, now, do the same thing on i7 just for kicks – see the difference in bandwidth between 5.5GB/s Skulltrail and 38.4 GB/s on i7 platform (DDR3-1600).

UPDATE – March 10, 2009 15:10 CET - I have received reports that the story is not appearing on the homepage – seems like an odd thing to happen, but this isn’t the first story that experienced “disappearing act” on this blog. One reason more for going with Custom CMS for upcoming site, BSN*. I apologise for any inconvienience this might have caused, but have no control over it.

The post Samsung’s 24 SSD video reminds us of all the speed brakes appeared first on VR World.

But for some odd reason, Gmail is currently (12:19PM CET) experiencing its second large outage in the past 30 days. The service is unavailable for the third hour in a row. Outtage began somewhere around midnight California time (09:00AM CET), and continued through the whole morning into a lunch break. I received several e-mails from California and various European countries, and the problem isn’t local, but global. Affected users are from both gmail.com and googlemail.com domains (no wonders there, googlemail.com is just an alias), so if you want to check your e-mail, tough luck.

For some odd reason, Gtalk works with no issues at all, and even shows what e-mails are coming to your inbox. But web interface and iPhone/Blackberry simply cannot acces them.

Another case of server scripts gone awry?

UPDATE #1 February 24, 2009, 12:34 CET - We have received a short statement from Google: “We know how important GMail is to our users so we take this very seriously. We are working on solving the problem in hand.”

UPDATE #2 February 24, 2009, 15:40 CET - Gmail and Gtalk are back, but roughly 20-30% of all visitors can still expect severe difficulties at login. According to Google, no e-mail has been bounced, and the problem lied in interfaces, not in the database. This confirmed our doubt in the article itself.

The post UPDATE #2: Gmail goes down… again. appeared first on VR World.

If you’re wondering who is Sedo.com and why the company does not sell Nigerian make-money-fast schemes, the fact of the matter is that Sedo is a serious company – at least they’re trying to get you to believe that. According to their own website, Sedo: “employs close to 180 employees from 25 countries at the offices in London (UK), Cologne (Germany) and Boston (USA). Sedo has brokered some of the industry’s most important sales over the last five years, including Vodka.com, website.com, blue.com and wifi.com”

Mr. Sedo Cybersquatter, for the last time, MAD AMD is not Dubai, it's ABU DHABI!

To make things absolutely clear, Sedo is just a domain reseller for the domains somebody cybersquatted. We won’t go into details who from Sedo (or their customer) cybersquatted www.thefoundrycompany.com , but the fact of the matter is that they’ve enlisted themselves in a potentially dangerous legal situation. We contacted Sedo.com with an interest to purchase The Foundry Company .com domain and got the following answer:

“Unfortunately your offer is too low and cannot be accepted! Please submit an offer above the seller’s minimum price of: 7500 EUR.”

So, AMD’s Marketing/Legal/Public Relations division made a $10 save by not reserving thefoundrycompany.com domain and now they won’t pony up 7500 Euro for “first come, first served” domain registration. If AMD was saving cash, the company should have known that there are sites that offer free .com domain registrations (you just have to endure ads for male enhancement pills).

All in all, sad affair for company that is now splitting in two.

P.S. At the time of writing, www.amdglobalfoundry.com wasn’t registered. We wonder is AMD now waiting that somebody cybersquats them again

The post 200th Story: AMD’s cybersquatter wants 7500 Euro for TFC domain appeared first on VR World.

Facebook retracts its new TOS, returns to the older text...

As you can see, Facebook decided to return their old TOS into use, and even though with that Terms of Service Agreement is still pretty loose when it comes to your rights, some improvements happened. Good thing is that Facebook also pushed Bill of Rights and Responsibilities.

Interesting to see what a little bit of negative press can turn into (avalanche of discontent).

The post Facebook retracts its new TOS agreement appeared first on VR World.

When Intel announced project Moblin in 2007, Microsoft frowned upon Intel, given the effort the company put in gearing its next gen OS “Vienna” (aka Windows 7) towards netbooks and MIDs. The love-hate relationship begun with Intel frowning on Microsoft in the case of Xbox 360 and AMD’s 64-bit instruction set “x86-64″ (AMD64). But with the Moblin V2 Core OS coming to life, Intel is threatening Microsoft for the very first time on Microsoft’s home turf – software.

Our sources claim that upcoming Windows Mobile 6.5 is just a preparation for Windows Mobile 7, OS that will cover smartphones, GPS devices and MIDs from the lower end segment, topped with Windows 7 Embedded Edition for the higher end spectrum of GPS/MID/Netbook market. The company that gave Microsoft a helping hand is no other than Nvidia. Bear in mind that it was ATI Technologies that worked hand-in-hand with Microsoft on Windows Mobile 6, 6.5 and 7, but AMD’s leadership (should we write, lack of?) sold that part for small change to Freescale and Qualcomm. This is for the second time in two years that AMD walked away from the market it helped create (OLPC and netbooks were the first), and Jen-Hsun is probably the luckiest guy in the world. All he needs to do is watch what markets AMD is investing in right now, and then walk right in as soon as AMD starts to walk out. Personally, I just don’t understand AMD – the company spends millions of dollars and tens of thousands of man-hours developing projects that the company will walk out from, loose brilliant people in the process, and then nobody will point a finger when a company melts down with more than $3B losses in 2008 alone.

Getting back on the story, I was surprised to hear that Nvidia works hand-in-hand with Microsoft on that level. Previously, my MSFT sources always mentioned Intel and ATI/AMD, but now, the company that is most spoken of is Graphzilla from Satan Clara. Oddly how world turns. That also answered my question why Nvidia shunned Nokia’s offer and sold hundreds of millions of Tegra chips to this Finnish giant. Jen-Hsun thinks Windows Mobile is safer bet than Symbian OS. Looking from this perspective, he might even be right.

Even in prototype form, this nPhone dev platform showed great promise. Time for limelight is approaching...

Even though the 1st gen Tegra (APX2500) or 2nd gen Tegra (600/650) didn’t exactly showed up in smartphones when we expected them, it turned out that first and second generation were nothing but Trojan horses for Nvidia in the handheld market. Tegra 600/650 is based on GeForce 6 chip, while Tegra 700(?) is looking up for a debut this year with CUDA-capable and OpenCL-capable GeForce 9 core. 3rd generation Tegra is the SoC that will have Microsoft backing, so nPhone isn’t a concept, but a reality. Windows Mobile 7 + Tegra 700 should be the winning combination for Microsoft in the mobile space, as a payback to Intel.

In fact, don’t be surprised if Microsoft decides to give Nvidia’s Ion a helping hand by offering Windows 7 and Windows XP deals on MIDs and netbooks on Intel Atom+GeForce 9400, and shunning Intel’s integrated graphics parts. When this scenario comes to life, don’t be surprised if you read “Wintel is dead” comments from bloggers and editors on their respective networks.

Just remember where you read it first

The post The End of Wintel saga…beginning of Microvidia and nPhone? appeared first on VR World.

On the other hand, Novafora is a company headed by Shlomo and Zaki Rakib, successful engineer and enterpreneur who worked together at Terayon Communication Systems. Their vision is to create products to video content processing for the Internet era. With this acquisition, there is little doubt that companies such as Qualcomm, Freescale, TI, Philips, Nvidia and others are getting some competition.

Only time will tell how Novafora will pan out, but there is some serious engineering talent in Israel, and being backed by funds that have over 1.3 billion USD just might result in a new star on system-on-chip market.
Last great architecture to come from Israel was no other than Intel Core architecture, also known as “Chip that saved Intel’s bacon”.

The post Israeli-backed company completes acquisition of Transmeta appeared first on VR World.

Internet played a decisive role in this election, and it is very appropriate that an internet video service is giving full coverage of the inauguration. If you visit Joost today from 5PM CET (11AM EST), you can watch not just the inauguration, or a “single channel mode” that reminds us of TV of 20th century, but rather enjoy in a lot of additional content, such as “Saying Good Bye to Bush”.

It is good to see Joost pulling the extra punches… since next elections are probably going to be lead more online than on TV networks (it may be a given to us techies, but mainstream crowd still doesn’t know what will hit them very soon).

You can watch Obama’s presidential inauguration by clicking on this sentence.

The post Watch Obama’s inauguration online appeared first on VR World.

From Friday morning until today, roughly 3000 people saw the trailer and made more than 25GB of traffic. Overall, we passed the 33GB mark. The plan is to load the full trailer week before the launch of the site, and that trailer will have our final versions of XML and streaming engines. That trailer will be followed with a push in order to see can our servers hold up the load. Ideally, I would like to have more than 1000 people streaming at the same time, but that test will probably only be possible after we launch the site.

Authors are working on content to be ready for the launch, and we plan to launch the site with a bang. We’re open for suggestions, and they’re welcomed. Not long now

The post Testing, testing appeared first on VR World.

Steam Hardware Survey, December 2008

Following our article with November 2008 details, here are the changes:

• AMD lost 1.04% of CPU share in December alone – Intel gained that share
• Nvidia lost 0.47% of its GPU share, while AMD/ATI gained 0.45%
• Out of those 0.47%, 0.25% bought a graphics card with 1GB of video memory
• Quad-Core processors are now used by 10.76%, up 0.64% from Nov ’08
• 50.81% of all users have at least 2 cores to play with
• DirectX 10 API is now used by 22.88% of all users, up 1.45% from Nov ’08
• 41.5% users use widescreen resolution, gained 1.47% from Nov’08
• Multi-GPU configurations are still used by less than 2% of all users, with 1.84% (+0.06%). This means that just 300.000 Steam gamers have more than one GPU in their computer.
• Revenue-wise, these 300.000 gamers spent 200+ million USD on their GPU hardware alone, or equal revenue to 1.2 million mainstream users (if they spent $199 on a card)

We can conclude that roughly 1% of all users (150.000) bought new systems, mostly equipped with quad-core processors and ATI Radeon graphics cards. Given the fact that cut-off for SHS is 10th in the month, only Steam Hardware Survey for January 2009 will show all the Christmas sales results. Then, we can see what happened with the base of Steam users.

This does not include the whole world, so there is a lot of room for free interpretation, but bear in mind that this number includes more than 15.5 million users worldwide. And Steam itself is gaining users, so it will be interesting to see how it will all equal out.

The post STEAM: Intel, ATI gain users, AMD+Nvidia continue the negative trend appeared first on VR World.

IT industry is a disruptive one, and if there was one industry that completely changed the world, we’re living and working in it. We intend to bring you information from the world of IT and ICT, but not just through products, but through ways how to use the technology in the best possible way.

This teaser was shot using RED One camera and edited on our 8-core Mac Pro machines. We’re evaluating video hosting services at the moment, and the possibility of launching our own service is not excluded. Like we wrote previously, we want to provide you with seamless experience on your computers, cellphones, TVs and many more.

For starters, enjoy in this small teaser trailer at www.brightsideofnews.com

The post ANNOUCEMENT: Bright Side of News teaser is online appeared first on VR World.

Most popular sites like The Pirate Bay, isoHunt and ArenaBG are peaking with requests from users that are dying to see what Windows 7 is all about. Colleagues at ZDnet also didn’t stay astray; they downloaded the latest version (6.1.7000.0.081212-1400) as well, and posted a very detailed preview. Judging by their feedback, this beta is so stable that Microsoft does not need to work on W7 anymore. Given by sour taste left by Vista, I could not agree more. C’mon Microsoft, release this baby as soon as possible.

When it comes to release date, it seems that my sources were dead right and that this operating system is on track with release in August 2009, in time for Back to School. Will we see 22 and 24″ touch screens from Dell, HP and others in tandem with W7? That remains to be seen.

Oh right, if you want to download the beta version of Windows 7, you have to have bit-torrent client installed. Personally, I prefer to use µTorrent (microtorrent). Be warned, as with all beta software, I am not responsible if you mess up your computer in any way. But if you don’t have at least two partitions (dedicated one for the OS, other for data and apps), chances are that you are not the best candidate to evaluate beta software.

The post Download Windows 7 today! appeared first on VR World.

The awards in this auction are really something special – hand-painted SmoothCreations PC gaming system and over 80 other prizes. Thus, investing $5 seems really worthwhile, and there are no limits. $100 would buy you 20 entries into the grand giveaway.

Personally, I am surprised to see the lack of reaction by colleagues in the US-based media, since this auction is really worth mentioning. After all, you’re doing something good. And it all lasted until I read rules of engagement – the auction is limited to legal residents in 50 states of United States of America and Canada (except Quebec). Thus, to all of North American readers, I would at least ask you to go and visit the Toys for Tots site, and check it out. To organizers – it might be a good idea to forego these daft limitations, because I would argue that there are people around the globe that would want to contribute.

Even though I am now based in Croatia, my US address and credit cards enabled me to donate for the cause. If I win anything, expect a giveaway on this blog

The post Win an 8.000 USD PC and parts by doing something good appeared first on VR World.

Sadly for the enthusiasts, ABIT was always known as the “weird” managed company, even by far eastern standards. It was well known that the old owner and CEO was “high on horoscopes as a junkie”. Hearing that somebody got fired with a simple explanation “your horoscope is bad today” was just unbelievable for a serious company. These moves undermined the confidence of engineers in the company and many jumped ship to competition, creating products such as Republic of Gamers, LANParty, Dominators and many more.

Well, everything comes to an end, and mismanaged moves ultimately drove ABIT to extinction. Courtesy of Cameron from TweakTown, I learned that Universal ABIT will close its doors on December 31, 2008.
This is an end of an era, but also an omen: if your management seriously mismanages the company, it will come back to haunt you, regardless of how powerful you might be at present time.

The post Death of a legend: ABIT closes doors on December 31, 2008 appeared first on VR World.