[ Sajith M ]

The entire set of Sysinternals Utilities, rolled up into a single Suite of tools. Download here.

Posted under: Technology , Downloads

DailyTech reports

The new NVIDIA graphics architecture will be fully compatible with Microsoft’s upcoming DirectX 10 API with support for shader model 4.0, and represents the company’s 8th generation GPU in the GeForce family.

NVIDIA has code-named G80 based products as the GeForce 8800 series. While the 7900 and 7800 series launched with GT and GTX suffixes, G80 will do away with the GT suffix. Instead, NVIDIA has revived the GTS suffix for its second fastest graphics product—a suffix that hasn’t been used since the GeForce 2 days.

NVIDIA’s GeForce 8800GTX will be the flagship product. The core clock will be factory clocked at 575 MHz. All GeForce 8800GTX cards will be equipped with 768MB of GDDR3 memory, to be clocked at 900 MHz. The GeForce 8800GTX will also have a 384-bit memory interface and deliver 86GB/second of memory bandwidth. GeForce 8800GTX graphics cards are equipped with 128 unified shaders clocked at 1350 MHz. The theoretical texture fill-rate is around 38.4 billion pixels per second.

Slotted right below the GeForce 8800GTX is the slightly cut-down GeForce 8800GTS. These graphics cards will have a G80 GPU clocked at a slower 500 MHz. The memory configuration for GeForce 8800GTS cards slightly differ from the GeForce 8800GTX. GeForce 8800GTS cards will be equipped with 640MB of GDDR3 graphics memory clocked at 900 MHz. The memory interface is reduced to 320-bit and overall memory bandwidth is 64GB/second. There will be fewer unified shaders with GeForce 8800GTS graphics cards. 96 unified shaders clocked at 1200 MHz are available on GeForce 8800GTS graphics cards.

Additionally GeForce 8800GTX and 8800GTS products are HDCP compliant with support for dual dual-link DVI, VIVO and HDTV outputs. All cards will have dual-slot coolers too. Expect GeForce 8800GTX and 8800GTS products to launch the second week of November 2006.

From another DailyTech report

The marketing material included with the card claims NVIDIA requires at least a 450W power supply for a single GeForce 8800GTX, and 400W for the 8800GTS. GeForce 8800 cards in SLI mode will likely carry a power supply “recommendation” of 800W.

While I am glad to see DirectX 10 compliant graphics card, the power requirement leaves me a bit disappointed.

Posted under: Technology , Gadgets
Tagged with: DirectX 10, GeForce 8800GTS, GeForce 8800GTX, NVIDIA

Zalman is not a company that is known for its audio products, and as such I was not sure what to expect when I ordered the Zalman ZM-RS6F (also known as Zalman Theatre 6) headphone on Indiatimes shopping. But after having put it to use for almost 6 hours now, I am a happy user…

I had ordered mine on Indiatimes shopping for Rs 2850 (INR), but you can probably get it cheaper from a real (and not online) store. But even at Rs 2850, I think its worth it.

Comes in a package that is very different from what I have seen for any headphone. A neat hemisphere with a transparent dome holding the headphone inside, it sure looks cool…

The package comes with a really long (3 meters long) cable and that is more than sufficient for most people. Owing to the 5.1 surround sound capabilities, it has 3 headphone plugs.

The earpieces are large leather-ish pads wrapped over foam-rubber. They nicely cover your ears when you put them on and insulate you from external noise pretty well.

The ear pieces have a strange but interesting shape, but thats due to functional reasons I believe. Each of them has 3 speakers inside for front, surround and rear.

On a side note, even though the package claims to be 5.1 equivalent (what exactly does the equivalent mean, I don’t know), it actually a 5.0 system with the sub-woofer missing – if you play something only on the sub-woofer channel and keep others mute, you won’t hear a thing. However, the absence of a sub-woofer does not prevent it from reproducing most low frequency sounds in a satisfactory manner.

The padding is good, and keeps you pretty comfortable. Had it on for more than 3 hours and it was very comfortable, could have possibly had it on for another 2-3 hours.

The sound quality was great for movies, you actually get the feeling of actually being immersed in the scene. Really commendable performance. Unfortunately if you decide that you want to listen to some stereo music after the movie, you are in for disappointment – the performance in this field is barely acceptable.

Good design, long cord, comfortable ear pieces and excellent surround sound are the positive factors in favor of this headphone, while I think the stereo audio leaves a lot to be desired (at this price point) and an inline volume control would have been nice. Overall a good quality headphone, well worth the money.

Posted under: Technology , Gadgets
Tagged with: audio, headphone, surround sound, Zalman, Zalman Theatre 6, Zalman ZM-RS6F

As the number of cores increase, what will be the languages that we use to control them? Two cores are pretty common, 4 will soon be. Intel is showing off 80 core processor (link1, link2) that it expects to be commercially available in about 5 years.

So where does this leave the software developers. Multi-threading is still a pain in any of the common languages that we use, be it C#, Java or any other main-stream language. Will these languages adapt to make multi-threading easier (and can they?), or will we see a movement towards languages that make multi-threading easier, or will we see Reverse Multithreading CPUs that make multiple cores appear like one to the software…

Posted under: Technology

Download from http://www.borland.com/downloads/download_turbo.html now :)

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Jackie Hewett of Clarety Consulting has this guide for managing use cases

Posted under: Technology , Software Development

Security Engineering by Ross Anderson is now available for free on the web.

Great Book, Must-Read if you are interested in security, or responsible for it.

Posted under: Technology , Downloads

Joseph Albahari has a great online tutorial on threading in C#, also available as a PDF document (direct link)

Posted under: Technology , Software Development

But how much work the software does is not what makes it remarkable. What makes it remarkable is how well the software works. This software never crashes. It never needs to be re-booted. This software is bug-free. It is perfect, as perfect as human beings have achieved. Consider these stats : the last three versions of the program — each 420,000 lines long-had just one error each. The last 11 versions of this software had a total of 17 errors. Commercial programs of equivalent complexity would have 5,000 errors.

That was www.fastcompany.com on Software developed by NASA. The process emphasises not just fixing the bugs, but also finding the source of the bug and fixing the process so that the bug never gets repeated.

Posted under: Technology , Software Development

Agreed. Read it here.

Posted under: Technology , Software Development