It’s no secrect that AMD is struggling as of late due to problems executing and to intense competition from Intel and NVIDIA.  In the last few months a number of high ranking executives has resigned, the latest of which appears to be Phil Hester, the company’s CTO.”(AP) – The chief technology officer and vice president of chip maker Advanced Micro Devices is resigning, the company said Friday.Phil Hester, 52, joined the company in 2005 after working for IBM Corp. for more than 20 years.His resignation

NVIDIA held a Financial Analyst Day yesterday, where representatives spoke about the company’s strengths, market share, technology, and direction.  There was a lot of discussion regarding current products and competition, which seemed to get NVIDIA’s CEO Jen-Sun Huang fired up in a way that’s not often seen publicly. The always outspoken Jen-Sun really went on the offensive and essentially dismissed CPU-GPU fusion and Intel’s upcoming discreet graphics product (codenamed Larrabee).  He also downplayed

It’s true.  There is at least one feature in Windows Vista that was implemented on time, to spec, and fully functional when Vista was initially released: User Account Control (UAC).In a Thursday presentation at RSA 2008 in San Francisco, David Cross, a product unit manager at Microsoft who was part of the team that developed UAC, admitted that Microsoft’s strategy with UAC was to irritate users and ISVs in order to get them to change their behavior.”The reason we put UAC into the platform was to annoy users.

Filling out our California income tax this year, we laughed when we came upon the “Use Tax” section. Did we buy anything from out-of-state retailers that we owed California sales tax for? Of course we didn’t! But whether or not we did, New York state is close to closing that loophole for its residents with the so-called “Amazon Tax.”The so-called “Amazon tax” closes a loophole for Internet retailers who derive sales through affiliate programs in which Web site owners place a link to the merchant on their site

A few years ago when Fossil released a PDA watch, our hearts skipped a beat.  Now Van Der Led is releasing a watch with a feature list that made our hearts palpitate:“The Van Der Led WM2 is a quad-band GSM watch with itty bitty 1.3-inch, 260k color touchscreen display, stereo Bluetooth, up to 240-hours of standby or 300-minutes talk, and 1GB of storage for a few of your MP3 or MP4 files.”For the time being this is the closest you can get to owning a watch that would make you feel like the star of a 007 movie.

The end may be near for Windows as we know it, according to research firm Gartner:”Because Microsoft Windows is so large and complex, covering 20 years of legacy code, it can no longer adequately respond to market forces, and Windows needs to be securely redesigned, said Gartner analysts Michael Silver and Neil MacDonald. They delivered the news at the Gartner Symposium/ITxpo 2008 in Las Vegas this week.”We’re not entirely sure that this is the case just yet, but we could certainly see the argument for this

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It has been a somewhat slow weekend for tech news, but I just came across an interesting article over at the Live Science site that I wanted to share.  The article centers around a cutting edge MIT robotics project dubbed Nexi.What makes Nexi so interesting is that “she” has been designed to communicate with not only the spoken word, but with facial expressions too.”MIT’s Nexi robot expresses emotions the same way you do – with your highly mobile face. Nexi’s head and face were designed by Xitome Design

InfoWorld’s petition to save Windows XP has picked up steam, and not only is now over 111K signatures, but also has attracted the attention of mainstream media.InfoWorld, a publication that covers the information technology industry, launched a “Save Windows XP” petition drive in January. Microsoft originally planned to stop selling XP to retailers and computer manufacturers at the end of 2007, but extended that deadline to this June 30. Galen Gruman, executive editor of InfoWorld, said the petition drive was

When Apple formally announced plans for an iTunes rental service it was only inevitable that a conflict between Blockbuster and Apple was to occur.  We weren’t entirely sure how this conflict was going to be waged, but now things are becoming clearer:  Blockbuster is developing a set-top box to compete with the Apple TV.“The product would be an offshoot of Movielink, the online film service Blockbuster acquired last year that allows consumers to watch films licensed from the major studios on their PCs.Delivering