The “Break it Down” Blog

Vista SP1 Private Testing Begun

CNET reports that the Windows Vista SP1 private testing has begun with an initial seeding to 12k folks deemed special enough by Microsoft to get the service pack. As expected it looks like the SP includes all the existing bug fixes as well as the “Performance and Reliability” packs released earlier this year as well, in [...]

Halo Story, So Far…

Ok so you are about to buy Halo 3 and want to get up on the story line because you read that Halo 3 basically assumes you know the story and does nothing to get you up to speed. Don’t worry, thanks to a huge thread over on Xbox.com, there are about 1.5hrs of summary [...]

Upcoming iPhone Update Bricks Hacked Phones

Grant Gochnauer sends in the news that if you hacked your iPhone to work on another network, or just because you are hardcore, keep in mind that the next software update from Apple will likely brick the phone (read: “kill it”). Apple’s reason? They are saving baby seals and fighting terrorism with locked iPhones, or this: “Apple [...]

$1/Watt Solar Panels Will Soon See Commercial Use

Ripped straight from Slashdot, it looks like improvements in solar panel design (with 11-13% efficiency) is going to allow for some mass commercial roll-outs starting very soon. For the folks living in the South West or other crazy-sunny areas that have been waiting for solar tech to stop costing a mint for a small array setup, [...]

Gmail Version 2, On its Way

Looks like some internal testing of Gmail 2.0 has leaked information that it’s currently undergoing translation. Who knows what kind of release date that translates to, or if we’ll be able to see some screenshots, but I know I dig the new management interface for Google Docs, so I imagine Gmail 2.0 will be quite [...]

Halo 3 Review: 73 out of 10

Well the scores are in… Halo 3 is the greatest game made, by humans, on earth. The re-telling of the same story that wasn’t all that interesting years ago, combined with 3 new weapons and 3 new vehicles, in environments that look identical to the first game but with crazy post-processing on them is just [...]

Bus-Lane-Only + Idiots == DOH

Cat Video Mashup

Cat video mashups never get old… that’s the way we roll here:

Understanding Intel’s New Chips

TIP: The way Intel release cycles work is they release a new chip architecture, then shrink the design to a smaller die-size, make some minor improvements and re-release it, then start the cycle over again. Penryn is the die-shrink and minor improvement of the Conroe chip design, and Nehalem is the brand new chip design [...]

Bush Pardon’s Himself for Warcrimes

Hidden in a bill (of how prisoners are treated) that passed through the house, and is heading to the senate:

Crysis Demo Delayed 1 Month: Oct 26th

I’m sorry, but this isn’t either that surprising or that random to me… let’s look at the facts real quick: Microsoft is having a hard time getting DX 10 adopted by devs Multi-platform devs talk about how DX 10 is largely being ignored because DX 9 is what’s on the XBox 360 and it’s easier for them [...]

Hybrid Hard Drives Aren’t Impressive

The Register has a good writeup about how the big fan-fair around hybrid hard drives (hard drives that include 100s+ MB of flash ram on them to make access times faster) has gone largely unserviced. Hitachi admits to the facts that the performance around the current Hybrid drives (Seagate and Samsung both have some out) are [...]