After the initial announcement and subsequent immediate comparisons to the iPhone, it looks like BlackBerry Bolds are finally starting to drop.

CrackBerry unboxes it for everyone and entices the heck out of us with it’s dazzle.

For anyone that hasn’t been up to speed on BlackBerry, the full-screen touch-screen that more closely maps to the iPhone is the BlackBerry Thunder (if you were curious), but the Bold looks like an awesome enterprise device for anyone lucky enough for their company to spot them one.

We wrote about the Class Action lawsuit against Hewlett-Packard over printer-ink monopoly pricing and false “empty catridge” warnings that force customers to guy buy more ink long before the cartridge is really empty. What made today important was a story over on Yahoo about a guy named Farhad Manjoo that was not going to take his Brother printer’s false “empty cartridge” messages lying down, and found a way around the bullshit.

Manjoo figured out that if he placed black electrical tape over the sensor on the side of the ink cartridge in his printer, the false warnings would stop and he’s so far gotten another 6 months of life out of the ink and another 100 pages of printing.

Another site that the story links to is the FixYourOwnPrinter resource that will direct you on different ways you can work around the monopolistic shit that companies like Brother, HP and Epson have engineered into their printers because they have been allowed to without penalty.

Does the subversive and scummy etiquette of large companies, when gone unwatched, disturb anyone else? It seems to existing in a perfect 1:1 relationship… Big Company:Shit Behavior=Giant Profits, oh GOOD.

Thanks Yahoo!

Ars has a piece up about the Tracemonkey JavaScript engine work that we will first see in Firefox 3.1 (currently in nightlies) but is the first part of major JavaScript work known as Tamarin that won’t be seen until Firefox 4.0.

Apparently the Mozilla JavaScript engine is getting worked over from the ground up with an optimization technique known as tracing. Tracing allows the execution path of code to be remembered between executions and saved, so any optimizations (e.g. loop-unrolling) that are performed during runtime in the VM, are written out, stored and re-used on the next launch. Benchmarks have shown that in some scenarios operations can be sped up 20-40x when this method is employed.

This particular approach has been discussed to death in the Java arena, mostly around 4 years ago when Java on the desktop was really crawling. A lot of the community members suggested that Sun modify the Java VM to do exactly this so on subsequent loads the fully optimized code would load instead of the Java VM optimizing the code on the fly every single time the app was started up.

With machines being faster now it isn’t such an issue, but it’s interesting seeing JavaScript going this route. Ars also makes the note that the tracing approach to optimization is popular with dynamic languages where runtime is the only time the app really takes it’s full form, I’m curious to see what this may do to the Ruby crowd and their VM work.

Update #1: Looks like the Mozilla group posted a screencast showing the difference in performance between the two engines when applying effects to an image in real time (like Brightness and Contrast). This more “real world” example looks to be about a 6x speed up, hardly the 20-40x “micro-testing” speedup reported, but hopefully this will improve with time as we work towards Firefox 4.

(Click to watch screencast)

Thanks Ars!

Virtual Desktops in Vista has been a sore point for massive multi-taskers since Linux made virtual desktops cool 114 years ago and Apple took it mainstream with OS X 10.5 and Spaces.

We’ve been on the hunt for a good Virtual Desktop application for Vista for quite a while; we wrote about Vista/XP Virtual Desktop Manager a while ago, but generally found the app too unstable and little niggling annoyances drove you nuts over the period of days working with the software.

Grant Gochnauer sent in news today that the Sysinternals team (bought up by Microsoft years ago) has released an ultra-simple multiple-desktop utility called Desktops.

If you are not familiar with Sysinternals, they are the code-ninjas that created all the wicked-awesome Windows system tools that just about every savvy Windows admin ever used. Desktops is no different; it’s so tight and locked down it’s a 62kb download and not even an installer, just an EXE.

On first install it fires up the options menu, you can dial in exactly how you want to switch between your 4 virtual desktops (cannot be adjusted) and hit OK… that’s it.

On first switch you might notice a long-lag or a black screen while the desktop loads (I believe this only occurs the first time when you switch to a new desktop) but then things seem fairly snappy.

There don’t seem to be any graphical anomolies but the application is basic… really really basic.

I miss being able to switch desktops using ALT+CTRL+<ARROW KEYS> as is with most other virtual desktop apps, and there is no hovering desktop indicator that changes as you flip between desktops, so if you mis-hit a key it’s easy to get disoriented as to where you are (and you have no real good way of knowing, unless you popup the switcher and stare at it to figure that out).

With some minor tweaks I think this app would more or less rock my socks, let’s hope version 2.0 brings them to the table, or Microsoft just decides that Virtual Desktops aren’t only for hippy, left-wing tree-hudding graphic designers and that the rest of us like them too.

Ted Regulski just sent this hot news in, when you watch the video below, don’t make the same mistake I did and pass by this thinking it’s essential Nintendogs without a touch screen. It looks like Sony is finally doing something with the PlayStation Eye, in the form of motion/object recognition.

I believe there were some PlayStation Eye apps that let you play with fish and paint, but with the announcement recently by Sony that going to accomplish what Nintendo had been trying to accomplish for 2 years (1:1 motion tracking) and completely without any accelerometers or gadgets, but just with the simple PlayStation Eye camera; now it looks like Sony is dead serious about this HCI stuff using the Eye and not requiring any 3rd party peripherals to help out… pretty damn interesting when you consider games like EyePet are more or less a tech demo of what could be done with bigger titles, API support and enhanced PS3 developer tools.

Maybe Metal Gear Solid 5 will let us choke people to death for real?

Thanks Joystiq!

After our first peek at Far Cry 2 last year, subsequent engine Tech Demo videos and most recently, excellently directed game trailers we’ll admit, we are going ga-ga for Far Cry 2.

As if all that wasn’t already enough for us to be fawning over the title like Ubisoft was paying us in gold bricks, a video on IGN dropped of the Far Cry 2 editor in action and not only does it look dead easy, the entire video is from the Xbox 360 build of the game… there isn’t even a mouse or a keyboard to be using with this puppy. Check it out:

Someone fill me in when we got to the point that you could “drop into” your map you were designing in real time andplay it? I know in Half Life’s it’s never been that way, you had to compile the thing, I think Crysis was the closest we got but even that the “in editor” experience was trimmed down from the end game playable version wasn’t it? This is looking really epic… the Ubisoft team hired a bunch of magician coders or something.

Brad Agdern sent in news that a California digital imaging company, Image Metrics, (who produced the animation seen in Grand Theft Auto 4 and who’s homepage has an excellent example of what kind of capture their technology results in) has launched what might be the most accurate facial animation seen to date; possibly jumping the “Uncanny Valley” gap.

The difference between what Image Metrics is doing for example, and what typical facial mo-cap did is that instead of using little balls positioned on the actors face, and capturing the balls, Image Metrics is actually capture pixel-by-pixel the little shifts and nuances in the actor’s face and then translating that to a 3D mesh. This mean that the smallest change (eye judder, creasing around the mouth, etc.) can all be tracked and modeled.

You have to ask yourself, if the simulation of humans becomes more and more accurate, and the production of these simulation increases in complexity and production time, at what point would it just be easier to capture the actor him or herself and using some advanced compression techniques, get a high def animation of them in the game somehow?

Maybe we will skip right past the part where total 3D simulation is cool, and go right back to “just record the damn actors” Command Conquer style!

Thanks TimesOnline!

We covered the MDI-designed “Air Car” back in May, with a very cool video describing the design of the air engine and technology behind the futuristic “to be” car as well as the existing in-use applications of the hyper-powerful compressed-air-based engines.

Jens Eckels has sent along news that it looks like US company Zero Pollution Motors is the first to purchase an MDI “Air Car” license in order to mass-produce the car here in the US by 2010.

The estimated price point for the vehicle will be in the ballpark of $18,000 and get drivers around 108 mpg (more than twice what the Toyota Prius gets).

And interesting note about the car is that it will continue to use gasoline to power an motor used to heat up air, causing it to expand and provide more power when the car goes over 35 mph. For short/slow runs the car will run exclusively on the compressed air in it’s tanks but during higher speed travel the air will need to be energized by heating it to get the car up to an estimated max of 90 mph.

Another interesting note from the video that we originally posted was that idea that the internal motor could also be used to repressurize (refill) the compressed air tanks on the fly, very similar to how hybrid combustion motors are used to recharge batteries as they drain and not necessarily power the drive-train.

While none of these hybrid approaches completely solve the problem we are currently seeing with our dependence on oil, they are bringing to the table very interesting ideas on how to shift away from that single source or at the least move the choke-point of dependency off of each individual car (e.g. need to fill it with gas) and onto more centrally controlled locations that can be upgraded or modified over time with more success (e.g. power plants).

Thanks CNN!

Reading through phoronix I ran across an article about NVIDIA’s updated driver release and some links to some forum posts about how NVIDIA’s 2D rendering performance has progressively gotten so bad as the Linux desktop had migrated towards more advanced rendering solutions like XRender (used a lot in KDE 4.x).

Some members have said that 2D software rendering is even faster than what the NVIDIA drivers with hardware rendering can do right now, giving an example of scrolling through an OpenOffice Impress wizard taking seconds to render (a freaking wizard scrollbar).

The problems seem to be focused on the 8000 and 9000 series of NVIDIA cards, that includes many many mobile users as NVIDIA shipped a huge number of the (now confirmed to be faulty) G84 and G86 chipsets in mobile devices over the last year or so.

As user in the phoronix forums had this to say on the issue:

Yes, I have 8600M GS in my laptop and have an extremely bad performance with Ubuntu 8.04. First of all it’s slow, especially text scrolling in gnome-terminal. When using Midnight Commander, trying to view/edit files is very painful. nvidia-settings -a InitialPixmapPlacement=2 (-a GlyphCache=1 doesn’t work for some reason, there’s no such setting in my case) helps with that, but somehow it manages to totally screw all the rest of my system, especially when I switch between windows. It’s as if active window has cached fonts and everything is fast, but as soon as I switch to another window all the caches are dropped and nvidia starts rendering it cold. Note that all of this happens even without compiz. Compiz makes it worse. Compiz+Emerald make it unbearable, the delays are two and more seconds, and what’s the most funny part, become noticeable without InitialPixmapPlacement=2.

For folks running into performance problems have your voice heard by NVIDIA by posting to the unofficial NVIDIA support forums. While NVIDIA hasn’t historically been very responsive to the Linux crowd (no significant income from that crowd) the hope is that the blast of bad press on the issue will get them to clean up those portions of the drivers and speed things up.

There does seem to be rumored light at the end of the tunnel in the form of some massive driver refreshes that folks think NVIDIA might push out to all platforms. This could be the result of the NVIDIA/AGEIA PhysX integration work that has been going on and the big Forceware 177.79 driver release coming to Windows, but it’s anyone’s guess as to the lag time that we will actually see before that work makes it’s way to Linux in the form of updated drivers from NVIDIA.

Thanks phoronix!

Looks like after August 11th Gmail outtage things went down again today around 1:45pm PST. Even though Gmail typically offers a 99% uptime, for some reason the few times it’s down I want to tear my hair out.

Update #1: 5mins later it seems to be up again… but this happened on the 11th as well, fingers crossed!

It looks like the OpenGL 3.0 spec has finally been released by the Khronos™ Group and so far the community response has been: “You can shove that right back up your ass, we are going to DirectX”.

Ouch…

Shortly after the announcement game development forums were a-buzz with negative reactions to the spec essentially saying that it was nothing more than OpenGL 2.2, not 3.0, as it was missing all of the major redesign that had been promised during an entire year of silence.

Eddy Luten from the OpenGL.org forums summed up the release to be:

• API support for the new texture lookup, texture format, and integer and unsigned integer capabilities of the OpenGL Shading Language 1.30 specification (GL EXT gpu shader4).
  
• Conditional rendering (GL NV conditional render).
  
• Fine control over mapping buffer subranges into client space and flushing modified data.
  
• Floating-point color and depth internal formats for textures and renderbuffers (GL ARB color buffer float, GL NV depth buffer float, 455 N.2. DEPRECATION MODEL 456 GL ARB texture float, GL EXT packed float, and GL EXT texture shared exponent).
  
• Framebuffer objects (GL EXT framebuffer object).
  
• Half-float (16-bit) vertex array and pixel data formats
  (GL NV half float and GL ARB half float pixel).
  
• Multisample stretch blit functionality (GL EXT framebuffer multisample and GL EXT framebuffer blit).
  
• Non-normalized integer color internal formats for textures and renderbuffers (GL EXT texture integer).
  
• One- and two-dimensional layered texture targets
  (GL EXT texture array).
  
• Packed depth/stencil internal formats for combined depth+stencil textures and renderbuffers (GL EXT packed depth stencil).
  
• Per-color-attachment blend enables and color writemasks
  (GL EXT draw buffers2).
  
• RGTC specific internal compressed formats (GL EXT texture compression rgtc).
  
• Single- and double-channel (R and RG) internal formats for textures and renderbuffers.
  
• Transform feedback (GL EXT transform feedback).
  
• Vertex array objects (GL APPLE vertex array object).
  
• sRGB framebuffer mode (GL EXT framebuffer sRGB)
• Deprecation of older features.

Rumors so far have it that the reason the spec was held back from many changes so aggressively was to maintain compatability with all the existing CAD apps out there.

As many users pointed out, then why not do a 2.2 release, or just let the existing CAD apps continue to grow in the OpenGL 2.1 space while all new OpenGL-based development would take place against the 3.0 spec?

There didn’t seem to be a clear answer to that from the OpenGL governing body, but overall sentiment seems to be lack-luster at best and pissed-off-switching-to-DirectX-10 at worst.

This likely spells further disaster for PC gaming on Linux, not that it was actually going anywhere anyway.

Thanks Slashdot!

Grant Gochnauer sends in news to a video that blows my goddamn mind, I’m honestly not sure what to make of this. Either it’s an extreme mockup, or the graphical/interactive/virtual-world bar that exists today is about to get broken in half and shoved right up someone’s ass.

The video below is supposedly an unauthorized leak of a sneak-peak video of an upcoming virtual world product called City Space. The only tidbits known about the product right now is that:

• It runs in the browser (or “from a phone”) with “no plugins or downloads” — I have absolutely no idea how.
• It uses the OTOY 3D rendering engine
• The video was originally posted to LivePlace.com, which has a WHOIS entry for Brad Greenspan, one of the co-founders of MySpace.

Take a look:

What do you even say to that? The level of realism and detail in the scenes is out of this world, the fact that it’s all “rendered server side” and then apparently delivered to browsers of any kind, even mobile ones makes me think that it has to use some JavaScript based library and just relies on delivering basic images to the client in series?

I’m guessing that’s not the right answer because how could that possible deliver the individual frames fast enough to provide the experience demonstrated in this example? The other thing I don’t understand is regardless of the “rendering on the server”, how could the server be scalable enough to render every single person’s individual perspective in real-time and deliver it to them?

I’m really baffled by all this… but the one thing I do know, is that someone else, again, is doing Sony Home better than Sony (ohhhh burn).
Thanks TechCrunch!

Hardly the most exciting video ever, but for the folks that have been standing around waiting for Google’s Android-based phones to finally make it to market, this might give you a glimmer of hope.

What we have today is a really terrible quality video of the HTC Dream in action:

Looks like HTC’s plans to fill out their lineup with Android-based phones is finally coming to fruition.

I can safely say that behind the iPhone and even the original video that was released when Android was announced, this one is pretty basic (not being able to make out what the screen even says doesn’t help either). The whole thing looks a lot like a Sidekick melded with some Sony handset and the HTC Touch… which is garbage.

Thanks PCPro!

Right after we got done covering the news that the upcoming 177.79 Forceware drivers from NVIDIA would add the PhysX physics engine support, NVIDIA made liars out of us and released that PhysX engine support in their new 177.83 drivers… so burn… on us I guess…

Either way, getting tasty physics in games via your existing GeForce 8000 or 9000 series card with no need for separate hardware freaking rocks.

You can check out the landing page for the PhysX work, or jump right to the “Power Pack Downloads” page that more or less lets you grab the drivers plus every single tech demo for PhysX that NVIDIA is providing; including things like Unreal Tournament 3 PhysX packs and liquid material tech demo.

Full download list looks like this:

• GeForce Graphics Driver - v177.83
• Unreal Tournament 3 - PhysX Mod
• badaboom Video Transcoding: 30-day Trial
• Warmonger - Full Game
• Foldering@Home
• Sneak Peak: Nurien Demo
• Sneak Peak: Metal Knight Zero Demo
• The Great Kulu: Technology Demo
• Fluids: Technology Demo

Full Announcement:

NVIDIA Makes Physics A Reality For Gamers

NVIDIA PhysX Technology and GeForce GPUs Usher in a New Era of Immersion for PC Games

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

SANTA CLARA, CA—August 12, 2008—Gamers would agree that they would love to see the worlds in their favorite games be depicted as realistic as possible. For total immersion, the gaming environment has to “feel” as real as possible, and characters must be able to move and interact with the objects in the environment that have a compelling, dramatic impact on game play. With customized physics effects, developers can design trees that bend in the wind, water that ebbs and flows naturally, and include objects in the environment that dramatically impact the gaming experience. To deliver this level of interactivity, developers are rapidly taking advantage of NVIDIA® PhysX™ technology, interactive entertainment’s most pervasive physics engine, already used in more than 140 shipping titles for Sony Playstation 3, Microsoft Xbox 360, and Nintendo Wii. With today’s release of the GeForce Power Pack, a compilation of games, demos, and mod packs for the PC platform that is available for free at www.nvidia.com/theforcewithin, NVIDIA is now bringing this new depth of gameplay to PC gamers everywhere.

On the PC, PhysX technology harnesses the power of any CUDA-enabled general-purpose parallel computing processor, including any NVIDIA GeForce® 8 Series or higher GPU, to handle 10-20 times more visual complexity than what’s possible on today’s traditional PC platforms. All of the 80 million plus GeForce 8 Series and higher GPUs in the field are CUDA-enabled, the largest installed base of general-purpose, parallel-computing processors ever created.

And, unlike competitive solutions which do not offer hardware scaling capability, only PhysX technology can leverage the best of both CPU and GPU architectures to deliver the ultimate, immersive, end user experience. Upcoming PC titles that incorporate PhysX technology include Cryostasis, Backbreaker, Aliens: Colonial Marines, with close to 20 more PC titles expected before the year-end holiday seasons.

“Game physics is essential in enabling deeper interactivity and real-world effects in any game. Epic is pleased to offer PhysX as a standard feature within Unreal Engine 3 to enable such effects,” said Mark Rein, Vice President of Epic Games. “The introduction of GPU acceleration for PhysX promises both additional potential effects and faster performance. You can get a glimpse of the possibilities of what PhysX is able to do with the special levels for Unreal Tournament 3 where damage effects greatly enhance the gameplay.”

Starting today, any owner of a GeForce 8 Series or higher GPU can immediately discover the immersive playability that NVIDIA PhysX technology brings to PC gaming. This first of many planned “GeForce Power Packs” is a fascinating showcase of how PhysX technology is fundamentally changing video games and interactive entertainment.

Available for free from www.nvidia.com/theforcewithin, the PhysX-enabled content from this first GeForce Power Pack includes:

* Warmonger—Full free game! Destroy walls, floors, and whole buildings to open up new paths or close existing ones. Destructive power is more than eye candy here—it’s a tactical weapon in this ground-breaking action game.
* Unreal Tournament 3 PhysX Mod Pack—includes three maps with amazing effects that fundamentally change the gameplay (requires full version of Unreal Tournament 3)
* A sneak peek at the upcoming Nurien social networking service, based on the Unreal Engine 3 (with built-in benchmark)
* A sneak peek at the upcoming game Metal Knight Zero (with built-in benchmark)
* All new NVIDIA “The Great Kulu” tech demo that showcases the use of PhysX soft bodies in a real game play environment
* All new NVIDIA “Fluid” tech demo—a simulation of realistic fluid effects with a variety of liquids

In conjunction with the release of the GeForce Power Pack, NVIDIA has also released new WHQL-certified drivers that enable PhysX acceleration for all GeForce 8, 9, and GTX 200 Series GPUs. This new driver also adds support for PhysX-accelerated features in the commercially available Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter 2 game.

By installing these drivers, GeForce owners can immediately experience much higher levels of interactivity, special effects, and realism on their PC. In addition, GeForce owners will love being able to run PhysX-accelerated applications faster on their GeForce GPU than on competitive GPUs. For example, in the PhysX-enabled levels of Unreal Tournament 3, the GeForce 9800 GTX+ runs 180% faster than on the AMD Radeon HD 4850.

“The use of physics in games is highly effective in enabling new levels of interactivity and gameplay options. Gearbox is excited about these developments and we are rapidly finding new ways to use NVIDIA PhysX to improve the game’s immersive feel and overall excitement factor,” said Randy Pitchford, CEO of Gearbox Software. “The addition of GPU acceleration allows us to add even more effects whilst maintaining great performance. Gearbox titles, including Borderlands and others, will feature increased use of PhysX and we look forward to developing more with the support of NVIDIA.”

“Seeing really is believing and is the reason why we compiled all of this great PhysX content into a free download for our end users,” said Ujesh Desai, general manager for GeForce GPUs at NVIDIA. “We want GeForce owners to experience for themselves these amazing effects to get an idea how PhysX will make games much more lifelike in the years to come. Physics-accelerated content is already here, and there are a ton more titles on the way. We can’t wait for our customers to jump in, get wet, and tell us what they think!”

Thanks Kotaku!

Introduction

This quick guide covers the process I took to install the iPhone 2.0.1 firmware on my 1st generation, JailBroken, T-Mobile iPhone. It’s outlined here for anyone else that wants to do the same, but has been holding off on doing so until the process was a bit more documented and easier to do (with nice GUI tools).

Before You Get Started

I did want to take a chance to point out that I know this guide looks really long and complicated, but what is being on in the guide is actually really straight forward, to summarize it goes something like this:

1. Using the official iPhone 2.0.1 firmware, we create a new customized/cracked firmware using WinPwn.
2. We then trick iTunes into thinking this custom firmware is legit
3. We put our phone into recovery mode, which will cause iTunes to install a firmware to it to “Recovery” it… because we duped iTunes into thinking our custom firmware is legit, it installs that for us.
4. Viola, iPhone 2.0.x firmware on our 1st generation iPhone on T-Mobile!

So don’t get too discouraged, I just wanted to make it as detailed as possible so no one would get hung up at any part or confused as to what they were doing (I found a lot of other guides out there assumed you knew what all the lingo meant and just throws around crazy terms with no introduction as to what you are doing… I tried to clarify that).

Installing the iPhone 2.0.x Firmware

So I’ve been playing it safe since the iPhone 2.0 firmware was released and holding off on trying to install it on my JailBroken T-Mobile iPhone because I didn’t want to be one of the handful of people to find out that the convoluted install steps bricks my phone. Today was the day and I finally bit, the install actually went really smoothly and I promised myself that I would write this all up for other folks once I was done with it, so here it is.

NOTE: I found this guide very helpful if anything written here is unclear, check that guide out for clarification.

1. First, if you are on a Mac, just use Pwnage 2.0.2, it’s pretty much a point-and-click process with this nice-ass tool.
2. For everyone else on Windows, you will be using WinPwn 2.0.0.4 (that’s what I used at the time of this writing). Go ahead and download and install that application.
3. Download the 2.0.1 firmware for the 1st generation iPhone here.
   • TIP: You can grab the 3G 2.0.1 firmware here.
   • TIP: You can grab the iPod Touch 2.0.1 firmware here.
4. Now, plug in your iPhone and make sure iTunes 7.7 starts up as it normally does.
5. Launch WinPwn now, you will see the main screen:
   
6. The numbering you see in the screenshot above is more or less the order we will go through the interface now, more specifically:
   1. Click Browse .ipsw, and browse to the location where you downloaded the .ipsw file from Step #3, select it, and hit Open
   2. Click IPSW Builder. You can now configure the types of things you want in the iPhone firmware image that will be installed. We recommend enabling Cydia and Installer 2.0 under the Applications tab:
      
      and under the Advanced tab we had to leave the Activate Phone option checked:
      
      if you don’t do this, after the firmware install was done, iTunes just came up with some “This is an unknown SIM card. Please insert a supported SIM card in the phone and activate it”. The original guide mentions not using the Activate Phone checkbox, but I believe that is because they were on the AT&T network already, while we are all on T-Mobile.

      Now that we have our IPSW firmware all configured, click Build .ipsw down in the bottom left hand corner, select a directory to write the new firmware file out to and let WinPwn build the IPSW file for you.

      NOTE: You can use the IPSW Builder to further customize your firmware image before writing it to the device with things like custom boot/shut down images as well as custom application software payloads… we didn’t do any of this though. Just left it all defaults.

   3. After the new IPSW file is built, click the iPwner button, select the new IPSW file and hit Open. You’ll notice that iTunes (from Step #3) will close in the background and WinPwn will display a small popup indicating that iTunes has been “pwned”:
      
7. Now that you have built your new firmware image and pwned iTunes, we need to put the iPhone into DFU Mode in order to get iTunes to go into “recovery mode”, at which point we point it at the firmware we just made and force it to “restore” (install) that firmware onto our iPhone for us.
8. To put your phone into DFU Mode, hold down the Power Button (top right corner, the thing you push to lock and turn it off) and the Home Button (front page, bottom center… the button you push all the time to get back to the home screen); hold both buttons together for 10 secs, you’ll see the “Power Off” screen come up, and just keep holding, and about 3 secs later the screen will go black.
9. As soon as the screen goes black, release the Power Button (top right corner) but keep holding the Home Button for another 10 secs by itself and then release it.
10. At some point before you release the Home Button, you’ll probably notice your computer start doing stuff, like installing USB drivers or see iTunes come up and say something like “iPhone is in Recovery Mode” or something like that.
11. After the 10 secs, release the home button and you will see the iTunes Restore screen asking you to Restore the device.
12. Hold down the Shift Key and Left Click the Restore button, you will be prompted with a File Open dialog, now go find and select the IPSW we made back in Step #6.2 (not the original one we downloaded in Step #3), select it and click Open. iTunes will begin the Restore of the iPhone (in reality it’s installing the new firmware we just made).
13. After the restore is done, the iPhone will reboot and you can resync with iTunes, restoring all the data that was on your phone before you wiped it. The whole restore process took maybe 8-10mins but my data-resync process took much longer, I had a ton of media on there.

Conclusion

And that’s it… it looks like a long process, but it’s pretty straight forward as to what you are doing. I hope this helped someone else out there wanting to get their phone all udpated to 2.0.1 on T-Mobile and has been waiting for something easier like I have.

Update #1: User phani pointed out that if you run into a situation where after going through this guide exactly for T-Mobile, and you still end up wth “No Service”, you might need to use different bootloader files. Thanks phani!

Greg Amerson sent along news that after NVIDIA’s purchase of AGEIA a few months back the porting of the PhysX hardware-accelerated physics engine to NVIDIA’s CUDA software platform is complete and will be shipping in the GeForce 177.79 Forceware drivers.

This addition will allow folks playing PhysX-enhanced games with supported 8000 series and 9000 series cards to enable the PhysX enhancements of those games and let the graphic’s cards GPU do the physics acceleration instead of a dedicated PhysX card.

I’m not sure what this means for the 7 people that actually bought PhysX cards… my guess is that you’ll just keep using it as the stand alone accelerator harkening back to the days of Voodoo2 cards and the like.

Thanks CrunchGear!

Well it’s that time of the year again folks. If anyone is going, we’ll see you there!

In a Quake-Con 08 interview with the GameTrailers crew, John Carmack (lead genius behind the engines of id Software) was talking about console development.

He said that while the PS3 is harder to develop for (you spend more time separating the work and collaborating with all 8 processors) it is much better than “back in the day”. He did admit that Xbox 360 software development was easier, but that the DVD requirement will “require some quality consessions” in order to even get their game on 3 DVDs, but they will likely be forced to get it onto 2 DVDs at most by Microsoft.

An interesting note is how much it costs to add a DVD to your game; Microsoft charges you an “erroneous licensing fee” just to make it painful to do, so most folks will just over-compress their game assets and call it a day instead of paying a few hundred thousand extra (I’m guessing that is how much it costs).

Carmack also discussed the “no HD requirement” order from Microsoft that was handed down that will make game performance and texture loading much harder to do and likely again cause performance to suffer.

After the notable texture quality differences in Soulcalibur IV between the Xbox 360 and the PS3, are we finally starting to see the two consoles diverge and the PS3’s superior technology pull ahead?

I’m hearing from folks that have played Metal Gear Solid IV that this is the beginning of “Game Over” for Microsoft as far as comparable graphics go; it seems devs are finally figuring out the Sony hardware.

Before getting your panties in a ruffle though at that comment, consider that graphics mean very little in this day of gameplay and interaction. Look at the Wii, it looks like an Xbox 1 or worse and it’s out-selling everyone.

When KDE 4.0 was first released with major portions of the desktop rewritten and pieces of the desktop (from a user’s perspective) still left mostly raw or in some cases semi-functional, there was a large user lash-back to the “massive rewrite” approach taken; some calling to brand KDE 3.x and taking that branch forward instead of paying attention to the new 4.0 branch from the KDE team.

Wow, what a difference a day… or rather a point-release makes.

KDE 4.1 was announced yesterday and my god if that desktop doesn’t look about 100% better and slick enough to make me do a double and triple take.

KDE 4.1 was focused almost entirely on 3 things:

• Getting KDE-PIM (Mail, Organizer, RSS, Newsgroups) all updated and back in the desktop
• Getting Plasma polished, tightened up and looking ready for the ball (eye candy)
• New applications that had been almost ready for 4.0 prepped and included

We heard when 4.0 was released and the user response was mostly either “meh” or “what the hell”, that the massive amount of work that gone into KDE 4.0 had been almost all about getting the right plumbing and “under the covers” technical work done, which is why a lot of the spit and polish hadn’t been done on the UI yet.

Well it looks like the KDE devs weren’t kidding, after 4.0 got out the door they started in immediately on updates to the 4.0 release (patch releases) as well as milestones leading up to 4.1. The end result was a huge amount of polish to the user interface to tighten it down and streamline it, but also add little bells and whistles like the new filtering support in Dolphin (the file manager):

Not to mention any number of the other enhancements to the rest of the file manager, desktop, window manager and included applications.

You can check out a summarized list of the user-visible changes here:

• KDE-PIM is back with 4.1, containing the applications necessary for your personal information and communication. KMail as mail client, KOrganizer as planning component, Akregator as RSS feed reader and others are now available again in KDE 4 look.
• Dragon Player, an easy to use video player enters the stage
• Okteta is the new well-integrated and feature-rich hexeditor
• Step, the physics emulator makes learning physics fun and easy
• KSystemLog, helps you keep track of what is going on in your system
• New games such as KDiamond (a bejeweled clone), Kollision, KBreakOut and Kubrick make taking a break from your work irresistible
• Lokalize, helps translators to make KDE4 available in your language (if it’s not among the 50-odd languages KDE4 already supports)
• KSCD, your desktop CD player has been resurrected
• Dolphin, KDE’s filemanager has a new treeview in the main view, also new is the support for tabs. A new and innovative single-click selection allows for a more consistent user experience, and copy-to and move-to context actions make those actions easier accessible. Of course Konqueror is also available as alternative to Dolphin, taking advantage of most of the above features as well.
• Konqueror, KDE’s webbrowser now has support for re-opening already closed windows and tabs, it also scrolls smoothly through webpages.
• Gwenview, KDE’s image viewer has gotten a new fullscreen view, a thumbnail bar for easy access to other photos, a smart Undo system and support for rating images.
• KRDC, KDE’s remote desktop client now detects remote desktops on the local network automatically using the ZeroConf protocol.
• Marble, KDE’s desktop globe now integrates with OpenStreetMap so you can find your way everywhere using the Free Maps.
• KSysGuard, now supports monitoring process output or running applications so there is no need to restart your apps from a terminal anymore when you want to know what’s going on.
• KWin’s compositing window manager features have been more stabilized and extended. New effects such as the Coverswitch window switcher and the famous “wobbly windows” have been added.
• Plasma’s panel configuration has been extended. The new panel controller makes it easy to customize your panel providing direct visual feedback. You can also add panels and put them on different edges of your screen(s). The new folderview applet allows you to store files on your desktop (in fact it provides a view of a directory on your system). You can put zero, one or more folderviews onto your desktop, providing for easy and flexible access to the files you are working with.

You can check out the official announcement here, and if you really like reading, you can check out the 4.1 Feature Plan here (it’s a giant matrix of everything worked on, targetted or wished for in 4.1)

And of course a KDE 4.1 Screenshot gallery for your browsing pleasure:

In a move that rivals online payment leader PayPal and sidels up next to (and possible out-runs at launch) Google Checkout, Amazon has announced the launch of their new online payment system aptly named: Amazon Checkout.

The kicker that makes this service have longer legs out of the gate than Google’s offering is that every single one of the approximately 81 million people that have shopped on Amazon, can take their already entered (and stored) payment information and seamlessly transfer it over to be used on any other sites that participate with the Amazon Checkout system.

That means that if Nieman Marcus, Sears, Target and any other major online retailer decided to participate, instead of youneeding to re-enter your shopping information on their site, you simply fill up your cart and hit “buy”, just like you have been doing on Amazon already.

Nice touch really, I’m excited to see where this goes and am very happy to see more folks competing with PayPal.

Thanks NYT!

For the investors or financial bloggers in the group this is some really hot news. It looks like wikinvest has launched new support for embeddable and interactive stock charts that are also annotable.

For example (click and drag around this thing):

You can check out the main chart page for Google here.

It’s a really nice touch with the same approach to video as YouTube (accessible/embeddable to all, no barriers to entry) and will certain augment a lot of the financial writing out there for bloggers as well as news outlets that want to make use of or contribute to the information on the charts (annotations) in a Wiki-based fashion.

We don’t normally start tracking the Ubuntu releases until they hit about the Alpha 3 stage; after all the big software updates have made it in, any theme work is mostly done and the final release is starting to take shape. Well, that happened yesterday: Ubuntu 8.10 “Intrepid Ibex” Alpha 3 was released.

New Ubuntu 8.10 Theme

The first thing you notice looking at the Ubuntu desktop is the new theme… it’s trendy, dark, refined and overall a pretty different look for the desktop and just desktops in general; I would have expected this theme from something like XFCE but not a mainstream desktop.

It looks fine to me, but not great. When we started covering the new theme development almost 8 months ago, the trend towards a “dark desktop” had already started:

But then in January there were rumors that Hardy Heron (8.04) would get the new LTS theme and a new, much brighter, curvier theme called “Gelatin” was proposed:

I really liked the look of Gelatin just because I tend to be drawn towards lighter themes; they seem easier on my eyes and emotionally put me in a more chipper mood.

Oddly enough, on the Ubuntu 8.10 Art Team Theme page, I ran across a mockup for what I think was a refined Human theme that as far as I can tell was never used beyond the initial proposal, I think it’s named “Clear”:

It’s a bright theme, it uses muted colors (not too bold or in your face), and I liked the refinement to some of the core UI buttons like the back and forward buttons in the explorer. Still looks noticably “Human” in nature for sure, but I thought that theme did an excellent job and am not necessarily inlove with the new darker approach.

Lastly I ran across another proposed GTK theme by Kimmik for Intrepid Ibex that was essentially human, with a slightly lighter component coloring as well as a lot of gloss ontop of everything. I liked some of the aspects of this design, but thought overall it felt cramped:

I would be interested, looking at existing installs, how many people switched their Windows themes to the darker themes in Windows XP or if you even have that choice on Mac? Things seem generally pretty light on those operating systems.

Ubuntu is certainly trying to keep to it’s word that it will challenge Apple on the design front and try and find it’s own look and feel.

Icons

On the Ubuntu Art Team’s Intrepid Ibex Icon page there are a few suggestions and proposals on how the icons will be worked over to make things look… well, more Vista-ey from what I can see:

It doesn’t look bad, the art actually looks pretty cool. I’m probably just an old geezer in that I still think the original Icons (left) have some good life left in them. I think it’s just my appeal for symmetrical shapes.

X.org 7.4

Ubuntu 8.10 will include X.org 7.4 for whatever that is worth. From the looks of things online, X.org 7.4 seems to have very very few new features and a general cloud of concern around the quality of the X.org releases looms over that project. I’m not sure if the X.org team trimmed back 7.4 in order to deliver a more stable platform or if project atrophy did; either way let’s hope the Ubuntu 8.10 release team has time to stabalize the release if necessary.

Misc. Goodies

Reading through the Ubuntu 8.10 Blueprint is a good way to get an idea of what else will be coming in this release. Here are the other highlights we thought were worth noting (NOTE: As Ubuntu 8.10 is currently only at the Alpha 3 release stage, don’t take this list as bible, things can still get cut/added as time progresses):

• Ubuntu VM Builder updates
• 3G Networking Support (Motivated by Ubuntu Mobile Edition?)
• Improved Flash Experience (Flash has 1st-class citizen status, make installing/using it dead-easy)
• Improve Login Performance
• Promote SpamAssassin and ClamAV to be easily integrated into mail servers
• Auto-Download of Printer Drivers from OpenPrinting’s website
• Font-Selector Front End to fontconfig
• Basic LDAP-based Identity Management
• Consolidate All Spell Check Libraries
• Support an Encrypted ~/Private Directory for Every User (Cool!)
• Update Compiz to 0.8 Stable, stay current from GIT repo as best as possible
• Enhanced Power Management (Again, I’m sure motivated from Mobile Edition)

Overall looking like a decent refresh release with nothing too epic in it. Lots of updates and refinements with an occasional new feature or new piece of software, but besides new theme, I don’t see a lot of people immediately seeing the difference with their 8.10 desktop once it’s installed.

Sometimes though, that can be a good thing and means the release will be on time, tightened up and plenty of polish in it. Good luck to the Ubuntu Team, you’ve always impressed us!

Thanks SoftPedia!

My apologies, this is actually older news back from May, but we hadn’t run across it until now. It seems that the media semi-blitz required to reset people’s perspectives of Microsoft (and erase the bad name they got for Vista) are starting early… way early.

Microsoft isn’t slated to release Windows 7 (Vienna?) until January 2010, but the demos of the new user interface items and enhanced HCI (human-computer interaction) work they have been doing are starting now; sort of like how the 3D User Interface demos started for Vista years in advance as well.

During the D6 conference Julie Larson-Green showed off the new Multi-Touch demo. The important part about this is that Julie Larson-Green is the oft-recognized genius behind the Office 2007 (and prior 2003 and XP) user interface redesign (aka the “Ribbon”) that was brought onto the Windows team a year ago to help spec out and design interfaces for Windows 7 as well as enhanced HCI work. Below is a video of Julie showing things off, and for the most part… it looks like a giant iPhone:

Not to knock the effort, but the one interesting bit I saw is the suggested trend the demo makes that future laptops will implicitly ship touch-screens as their primary display device; allowing you to interact with your computer using your hands instead of your touch pad or mouse.

Is this the wave of the future? Is your computing massively enhanced by being allowed to touch the screen? I’m honestly curious… I certainly see the enhancements here… and almost think that the ability to touch the screen and interact with the information on it is what our parents (and older first-time computer users) have been trying to do since day 1 when they would smear their fingers across your computer screen pointing at something: “Wait, can you click there.” or “Can you zoom in and show me that part?”

This certainly does seem to be a natural extension of that impulse we all have from time to time.

Thanks OSNews!

Heise Online reports that there have been recent findings that suggest there are surveillance back doors built directly into Skype.

While Skype refuses to comment directly on the findings by the community, at an ISP meeting on June 25th higher-ups at an unnamed Austrian ISP made the comment that spying on Skype-based phone calls was not a problem.

It has long been assumed that special decryption keys for Skype media streams has been distributed to interested parties that allow them tap in and decrypt any Skype conversation.

Besides the obvious surveillance implications there are now growing concerns from enterprises that have either deployed Skype enterprise-wide or are considering it.

While most people would shrug at this news, imagining disconnected Research & Development groups from high end technology companies that shape our future (like Intel, Cisco, etc.) being concerned about some random ISP employee listening in on research meetings is a valid concern.

Thanks Heise Online!