Thursday, March 17, 2011

AMD Bulldozer - the answer to Intel Sandy Bridge?

The latest AMD architecture designed from the ground up codename BULLDOZER maybe the answer of AMD to Intel's i7 "Sandy Bridge".  At preset AMD has no processor that can go toe-to-toe with Core i7 especially the new build Sandy Bridge.

The new AMD "Zambezi" is a 32nm multi-threaded high performance x86 processor  with 4, 6, and 8 cores variants based on the BULLDOZER architecture. Features are AMD's TurboCore 2.0 technology, over-clocked cores, dual graphics, OpenCL and GPU capabilities. Making this new CPU an integrated chip than a normal desktop CPU. This Zambezi  is belong to the FX family where few years back AMDs high-end CPU.


AMD’s Zambezi chip will feature eight processing engines with its cores packed into four modules. The Bulldozer includes two integer units, along with one floating-point unit and two threads on separate integer units instead of the single-core solution.
Based on the diagram AMD intends to dramatically improve multithreading performance of its CPUs: two INT schedulers, an FP scheduler and separate data caches for each of four cores. Credit: AMD

AMD is hoping to gain market share after the manufacturing error found on Intel Sandy Bridge. Currently Intel holds 80.8 percent of the market share with 0.4 increase and AMD has 19.9% with 0.4 decrease.

Personal thought:
If AMD "Zambezi" belongs to FX Family I am just hoping that AMD will not price this much. The AMD FX "Sledge Hammer" back in 2003 cost around $1000 due to the high cost it did nothit the market plus Intel released the Core 2 Duo which was much faster and cheaper.

The 4, 6 and 8 variants will give the consumer a good choice, and Quad-Core system nowadays is the norm desktop computing.

[via]Physorg

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Tuesday, March 15, 2011

Download Microsoft Internet Explorer 9

Microsoft Internet Explorer 9 is out! The on IE9 shows the score of 95/100 where Firefox 4 RC scored 97/100 and Chrome 10 scored 100/100 (higher is better). Internet Explorer 9 is HTML5 rich browser by Microsoft which is said to perform brilliantly on Windows PC.

Here is an excerpt from the Microsoft Press Release,
Microsoft Corp. today announced the launch of the latest version of the world’s most-used browser with the release of Windows Internet Explorer 9 in 39 languages at an event at the SXSW Interactive conference. Internet Explorer 9 is Microsoft’s most-downloaded browser beta of all time, with more than 40 million downloads, and it has already has gained more than 2 percent usage on Windows 7. Already more than 250 top sites from around the globe are taking advantage of the capabilities in Internet Explorer 9 to deliver differentiated experiences to their customers, with many featured on http://www.BeautyoftheWeb.com. Together, these partners reach more than 1 billion active Internet users on the Web.
“The best experience of the Web is on Windows with Internet Explorer 9,” said Dean Hachamovitch, corporate vice president, Windows Internet Explorer, at Microsoft. “Today, the Web can unlock the power and performance of the best PC hardware through Windows and Internet Explorer 9. Websites also can act more like applications within Windows 7, with features such as Pinned Sites. In less than a year, Internet Explorer 9 went from early preview to final release with the help of hardware partners and the Web community.”

You can download the latest IE 9 via Microsoft Download Center.

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Wednesday, March 9, 2011

ASUS O! Play Mini - price and specs

Asus O! Play Mini

Asus O! Play Mini is the first media player to take advantage of USB 3.0. This is one of slimmest media player with 151.85mm x 106.7mm x 29.03 mm but don't get wrong it can play anything you can through at it.

The front side has two readers one is a USB 2.0 and one for SD Card. At the back is for the connectors an HDMI 1.3 that delivers 1080p and 7.1 audio in Dolby Digital AC3, DTS 2.0+, even TrueHD and DTS-HD, plus a variety of other formats. There are also RCA outputs if you prefer your digital steam in audio.

O! Mini File Format Support:
Video : MPEG1,MPEG2,MPEG4,RM,RMVB,VC-1,H.264
Video File Extension : TRP,MP4,MOV,XVID,AVI,ASF,WMV,MKV,RMVB 720p,RMVB 1080p,FLV,TS,MTS,M2TS,DAT,MPG,VOB,ISO,IFO,M1V,M2V,M4V

ASUS O! Play Mini price is Php 3,900.00 at Rsun.com.ph

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Monday, March 7, 2011

Katana 2.0 - Best Security Suite

I first saw Katana 2.0 in the episode of Hak5  – Shmoocon 2011 – Part 2: Android Botnets, Hacking from a cave and IPv6. If you are done with Backtrack this is a new toy for you to play.

Really recommended for people who work in  system security and aside from BT4 on it, it is packed  with other security and utilities that you need in troubleshooting and monitoring your network.

Katana 2.0 is free and download is posted below. Credit goes to the builder of Katana.

Description:
"Katana is a portable multi-boot security suite which brings together many of today's best security distributions and portable applications to run off a single Flash Drive. It includes distributions which focus on Pen-Testing, Auditing, Forensics, System Recovery, Network Analysis, and Malware Removal. Katana also comes with over 100 portable Windows applications; such as Wireshark, Metasploit, NMAP, Cain & Abel, and many more."

- Backtrack
- the Ultimate Boot CD
- CAINE
- Ultimate Boot CD for Windows
- Ophcrack Live
- Puppy Linux
- Trinity Rescue Kit
- Clonezilla
- Derik's Boot and Nuke
- Kon-Boot (See boot fix here
Katana Tool Kit

- Metasploit
- Wireshark
- NMAP
- John the Ripper
- Cain & Abel
- Firefox
- PuTTY
- the Unstoppable Copier
- OllyDBG
- Cygwin
- ClamAV
- IECookiesView
- MozillaCacheView
- FreeOTFE
- FindSSN
- The Sleuth Kit
- OpenOffice
and many more.
Download
Name: Katana v2.0
File: katana-v2.0.rar
Size: ~ 4 GB
MD5: d77f1fec607657b6d82264e8b5ca47a4
DOWNLOAD:

TORRENT: katana-v2.0.torrent

Official Website:  HackFromACave

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Windows 8 screenshots leaked - cloud log-on via Windows Live

Windows 8 pictures leaked! - I dug this from Mashable and pretty interesting, according to Win7China the Windows 8 is a fast installation roughly 8 minutes to install and 2.5 times faster than Windows 7.
 According to  Windows8News the test system is a 8-core system, 24GIG of RAM and 2TB of HD probably SSDs to get this number.

The above picture is focused on the very interesting capability of Windows 8. You can use Windows Live to log-in on Windows 8. This is one of the focus of Microsoft to integrate their system to the cloud. I guess CLOUD is really the future.



via Mashable
Images credit: Win7China and Windws8News

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Microsoft Campaign to kill IE 6

Microsoft has a new campaign. Kill IE6, in the recent announcement by Microsoft “Friend's don't let friends use Internet Explorer 6,".

IE6 Countdown site:
Its name was Internet Explorer 6. Now that we’re in 2011, in an era of modern web standards, it’s time to say goodbye.

Internet explorer 6 is a 10 year  old browser with outdated web standard, as a web designer we usually pay much attention in building websites that is compatible with this browser and this adds to our work load.

So why there are still IE 6.0?
There are two  reason why IE 6 is still being used. First, It is the default brower for Windows XP. The second reason is piracy. Pirated installation of Windows XP limits the user to upgrade to the latest  version of Internet Explorer because users are afraid to Microsoft license tracking. Using IE 6 posses security threat since it is an old browser and loaded with vulnerabilities.

China (34 .5%), South Korea (24.8%), Saudi Vietnam and Taiwan (10%) are among the highest number of IE 6 users. While the Philippines has only 2.2% mainly because of the use of open-source browser like Firefox and Chorme which are modern and updated browsers.

The goal of Microsoft is to bring the global use of Internet Explorer  6.0 to less than to 1%.

If you are using Windows XP you can upgrade to IE 7 or IE 8. For Vista and Sev7n you can test the IE 9 beta.

My suggestion is use open-source like Firefox, Chrome, Opera and Safari. This browser are updated with latest web  standards and also don't forget to update your IE even you're not using it. This will add security to your system.

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Wednesday, March 2, 2011

How to Make Windows 7 USB Installer

This tutorial will guide you on how to make USB bootable windows installer. This is useful for installing Windows 7 on systems with no optical drive e.g DVD-ROM.

Requirements:
Copy of Windows 7 Installer
USB Flash drive (4GIG) Minimum
Computer with DVD-ROM

Step 1: Format the Drive
Plug in your USB Flash Drive
Open a command prompt as administrator (Right click on Start > All Programs > Accessories > Command Prompt and select \"Run as administrator\")

We need the drive number of your USB Drive, on Command Prompt window type the following:
diskpart
list disk

The number of your USB drive will be now listed.In this tutorial I will assume that your USB drive no. is "1"

Format the drive by typing the next instructions into the same window. Replace the number \"1\" with the number of your disk below.
select disk 1
clean
create partition primary
select partition 1
active
format fs=NTFS
assign
exit
The USB drive is now formatted and ready for bootable process..

Step 2: How to make the Drive Bootable

Insert your Windows Vista / 7 DVD into your drive.

Change directory to the DVD’s boot directory where bootsect lives:
d:
cd d:\\boot
bootsect will make your USB bootable and ready for Vista or Windows 7 image. The "g" is the drive letter of your USB just change it to your current USB drive letter.

   bootsect /nt60 g:

We're done!

Step 3: Copy the installation DVD to the USB drive
Step 4: Set your BIOS to boot from USB

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