A while ago we already reported that on some AMD Phenom II 720BE processors the 4th core could be enabled. It seems that the very popular Dual Core AMD Athlon X2 7750BE has four cores as well as it is Phenom based, though with two of them disabled.

Yet all can be enabled

This new’ phenomenon’ works exactly the same as back then with the Phenom II 720BE processors. In some older BIOSes you can enable Advanced Clock Calibration on your AMD 790 motherboard and after a reboot … you might end up lucky with four active CPU cores.

Yeah it’s really that simple, your processors will come back as AMD Phenom FX-7750 Quad-Core. Mind you that the two active cores ‘might’ be damaged and that it only works with some AMD 790 motherboards from ASROCK and BIOSTAR.

It’s a bit of a luck of the draw really, can’t hurt to try though. If it doesn’t work, clear CMOS and yu are back to normal.

The biggest challenge however will be finding a 7750 BE to purchase. Currently I can’t find it anywhere in the price lists.

via. Guru3D

Apple has responded to the new Microsoft PC Hunter ads with four new ‘Get a Mac’ ads.

Biohazard Suit
- PC is wearing a bio hazard suit to protect himself from a major new virus that is on the loose.

Legal Copy
- As PC makes claims about his ease of use legal copy is displayed on the screen.

Stacks
- PC is having a difficult time find his friend by looking through stacks of photos one by one.

Time Traveler
- PC travels into the future to see if PC has fixed their stability problems. Future PC freezes.

Apple has advised resellers to begin placing on clearance both the Apple Composite AV Cable and the Apple Component AV Cable, according to a PhoneNews.com report.

The site has learned that Apple will replace these with a single cable, which is known simply as the Apple AV Cable. The consolidated cable will support both component and composite output on the same cable.

More interestingly, PhoneNews.com has learned that the next generation of iPhone and iPod touch will offer at least one version of the iPhone and one version of iPod touch with an even higher resolution screen and capable of full HD video output.

Currently the iPhone and iPod touch do not exceed 480i and 480p (respectively) in terms of video resolution. However, the next iPhone and iPod touch will enable full HD playback, with 720p and 1080i output modes.

It is also believed that Apple will provide the ability for users to access their entire iTunes Library from the iPhone via Wi-Fi.

The end result is that a user can sit at their HDTV, using an Apple AV Dock and an Apple Remote, controlling their iPhone much as they do an Apple TV today. This ensures that a new iPhone owner will be able to purcase, for under $100, all the equipment needed to access (via the iPhone) all of their computer-stored HD content, on their HDTV.

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Due to be released likely somewhere in October the first Core i5 specifications and prices appeared on the web through HKEPC. As you guys know, the Core i5 series will be based on yet another socket design, socket LGA 1156, making them incompatible with current Core i7 X58 motherboards.

The new processors will of course replace the Core 2 Quad and Core 2 Duo series of processors in the long run.

From what we can tell there will be three models released at launch, all are quad-core processors and based on the Lynnfield core, using 45nm fabrication process.

Some key features:

* Four x86 processing cores with support for HyperThreading technology
* Dual-channel DDR3 memory controller specified to run DDR3-1066 and DDR3-1333 modules
* 8 MB of L3 cache, and support for TurboBoost technology.

The three processors will have clock frequencies of 2.66 GHz, 2.80 GHz, and 2.93 GHz and priced respectively $196, $284, and $562 USD, which does seem rather expensive.

Apple will soon discuss its results for the first quarter of 2009 but its the next three months that may be a defining moment for the company…

An article by Kevin Kelleher for GigaOM suggests that Apple’s activities in the last quarter have largely been incremental but in the near future the company will roll out initiatives that could involve considerably more risk.

Normally, this would be little more than a tricky juggling act for Apple, but hitting all these moving targets in the midst of a major shift in leadership will make it a defining moment for the company. While the Wall Street Journal reported this week that Jobs still regularly reviews products and product plans (a report that was greeted with some skepticism), if and when he takes up the reins at Apple again, he’ll be returning to a company that has made several crucial strategic decisions during his absence.

You can read the full article by clicking the link below…

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A court in Sweden has jailed four men behind The Pirate Bay (TPB), the world’s most high-profile file-sharing website, in a landmark case.

Frederik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, Carl Lundstrom and Peter Sunde were found guilty of breaking copyright law and were sentenced to a year in jail.

They were also ordered to pay $4.5m (£3m) in damages.

Record companies welcomed the verdict but the men are to appeal and Sunde said they would refuse to pay the fine.

Speaking at an online press conference, he described the verdict as “bizarre.

“It’s serious to actually be found guilty and get jail time. It’s really serious. And that’s a bit weird,” Sunde said.

“It’s so bizarre that we were convicted at all and it’s even more bizarre that we were [convicted] as a team. The court said we were organised. I can’t get Gottfrid out of bed in the morning. If you’re going to convict us, convict us of disorganised crime.

“We can’t pay and we wouldn’t pay. Even if I had the money I would rather burn everything I owned, and I wouldn’t even give them the ashes.”

It is almost certain that The Pirate Bay will keep on sailing, long after today’s court judgement.

Read more at the dot.life blog

Q&A: Pirate Bay verdict

The damages were awarded to a number of entertainment companies, including Warner Bros, Sony Music Entertainment, EMI, and Columbia Pictures.

However, the total awarded fell short of the $17.5m in damages and interest the firms were seeking.

Speaking to the BBC, the chairman of industry body the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) John Kennedy said the verdict sent out a clear message.

“These guys weren’t making a principled stand, they were out to line their own pockets. There was nothing meritorious about their behaviour, it was reprehensible.

“The Pirate Bay did immense harm and the damages awarded doesn’t even get close to compensation, but we never claimed it did.

“There has been a perception that piracy is OK and that the music industry should just have to accept it. This verdict will change that,” he said.

The four men denied the charges throughout the trial, saying that because they did not actually host any files, they were not doing anything wrong.

A lawyer for Carl Lundstrom, Per Samuelson told journalists he was shocked by the guilty verdict and the severity of the sentence.

“That’s outrageous, in my point of view. Of course we will appeal,” he was quoted as saying by Reuters news agency. “This is the first word, not the last. The last word will be ours.”

Political issue

Rickard Falkvinge, leader of The Pirate Party – which is trying to reform laws around copyright and patents in the digital age – told the BBC that the verdict was “a gross injustice”.

“This wasn’t a criminal trial, it was a political trial. It is just gross beyond description that you can jail four people for providing infrastructure.

“There is a lot of anger in Sweden right now. File-sharing is an institution here and while I can’t encourage people to break copyright law, I’m not following it and I don’t agree with it.

“Today’s events make file-sharing a hot political issue and we’re going to take this to the European Parliament.”

The Pirate Bay is the world’s most high profile file-sharing website and was set up in 2003 by anti-copyright organisation Piratbyran, but for the last five years it has been run by individuals.

Millions of files are exchanged using the service every day.

No copyright content is hosted on The Pirate Bay’s web servers; instead the site hosts “torrent” links to TV, film and music files held on its users’ computers.

via. BBC News

Previously developed as Firefox 3.1, Firefox 3.5 Beta 4 is expected to go into a code freeze soon. Adding enhancements to the TraceMonkey Javascript Engine, 3.5 Beta 4 should be available in the coming week, along side Firefox 3.0.9, which will be a regular maintenance update.

At the current rate, it is expected that Mozilla release the final version of Firefox 3.5 just one year after the 3.0 release.

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As a result of Time Warner Cable’s plan to charge its customers by the gigabyte in Rochester, New York, congressman Eric Massa “called TWC’s proposal to switch its 8.4 million cable broadband customers to metered internet billing an “outrageous plan to tax the American people.”

Critics say usage caps will cost users more and hurt innovation on the net – especially in new video services, as subscribers begin to calorie-count their internet usage. TWC’s new tiered pricing structure for its Roadrunner internet service starts at $15 for a plan that allows 1 GB a month with an overage charge of $2 per GB. (A GB of data equals about three hours of online video from Hulu.com and about half of a rented standard definition movie.) The company says bandwidth hogs need to pay their fair share and maintain that if the company doesn’t get enough money to build new infrastructure, “internet brownouts” will be inevitable.

In a conference call with reporters Tuesday, Massa dismissed those arguments, describing TWC as a greedy, unregulated monopoly providing a utility service. His yet-to-be-introduced bill would seek to increase competition among broadband providers and regulate monopolies, he said, though he declined to give specifics.”

Particularly interesting is the fact that “Time Warner Cable’s 2008 annual report shows its high-speed data costs actually declined by 12 percent to $146 million. Meanwhile its subscriber count increased by more than 10 percent to 8.4 million, and high-speed data revenues climbed to more than $4 billion.

“Congress must investigate these anti-competitive practices before they become a nationwide problem.” Timothy Karr, a campaign director at the consumer advocate group FreePress, said last week.

A Massa spokesman said the text of the bill would be ready late in the week.”

via. Guru3D

A newly published Apple patent filing describes unibody iPods and even a unibody television, according to a MacNN report.

While the MacBook is one of the products covered by this patent, it is in fact the iPod that is the design in focus. The thin sharp design, shown below, appears to reflect a future iteration of the iPod Classic – being that it still retains the classic iPod click-wheel.

Apple’s patent states that “the sheet metal may be formed in such a way that the final part looks like it was machined down from a large thick slab of material. By utilizing sheet metal, the overall cost of the part can be reduced.”

While the new process will apply to a plethora of future devices on the drawing board, Apple’s mention of a television is perhaps the one that we all secretly long for. That’s for another day. For now, it’s the unibody iPod Classic with a very cool aluminized makeover that Apple is focusing on.

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Apple has posted a list of the different sessions and labs that will be offered at WWDC 09.

At the heart of your WWDC experience are technical sessions and hands-on labs presented by Apple engineers. Get in-depth information on the technologies that power iPhone OS, Mac OS X Snow Leopard and Mac OS X Server Snow Leopard, gain insight into new development techniques, and learn best practices on integrating features that will define your product’s success.

You can view the entire list here