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Tech News: A Day In The Sun

Hackers can’t wait for iPhone

Technology fetishists aren’t the only people itching to get their hands on an iPhone. Hackers want to play with Apple’s new toy, too.
by Robert McMillan.

Sun’s Fortran replacement goes open-source

Sun Microsystems took a new open-source step this week, enlisting the outside world’s help in an attempt to create a brand-new programming language called Fortress.
by Stephen Shankland.

Free Solaris 10 and Sun Studio Software Media Kit

For a limited time, Sun is offering a free DVD media kit which includes the Solaris 10 Operating System for both SPARC and x86 platforms as well as Sun Studio 11 software.
Take this opportunity to get familiar with the most advanced operating system on the planet and the tools which enable the highest optimizations and best runtime performance on the Solaris Operating System, bar-none.
Sun Studio software provides optimizing C, C++ and Fortan compilers, visual performance tools, and high performance libraries to enhance your Solaris development environment.
from Sun Microsystems.

Spring cleaning with DisplayLink: wireless USB monitor ICs announced

DisplayLink has announced its new DL-120 and DL-160 ICs which will provide video to USB laptop docks as well as the ability to transfer display data from your PC to your monitor without the use of a DVI/VGA cable. Data can be transferred over a wireless USB or a wired USB 2.0 connection and will display resolutions up to 1280 x 1024 and 1600 x 1200 using the Dl-120 or DL-160 interface respectively.
by Todd Haselton.

PCI-SIG releases the PCIe 2.0 spec

The PCI-SIG announced today that the final version of the PCI Express Base 2.0 Specification is now out and available to members. Version 0.9 of the spec was released back in October of 2006, and today’s release of the final version means that the spec is officially ready for prime time. Indeed, pretty soon it’ll be time for me to dust off the old PCI Express article and update to v2.0.
by Jon Stokes.

First pirated HD DVD movie hits BitTorrent

The pirates of the world have fired another salvo in their ongoing war with copy protection schemes with the first release of the first full-resolution rip of an HD DVD movie on BitTorrent. The movie, Serenity, was made available as a .EVO file and is playable on most DVD playback software packages such as PowerDVD. The file was encoded in MPEG-4 VC-1 and the resulting file size was a hefty 19.6 GB.
by Jeremy Reimer.

How $200 Goes a Lot Further

Last week we received a new budget performance card from Sapphire that might suit your appetite for higher frames per second while it takes it easy on your wallet. For close to one third to one half the cost of the high-end cards, the Radeon X1950 Pro Ultimate has the performance to satisfy the majority of gamers. We put this card up against the top performers as well as its peer, the GeForce 1950GT. As you will see from the results, both mid-range budget cards demonstrate that there is a sweet spot just under the leaders in terms of price per performance.
by Darren E. Polkowski.