Make Money

These days, user-generated content is everywhere, from the comments below newspaper articles, to the photos and videos shared on social networks. So it's no surprise that many publishers are monetizing this type of content with AdSense ads. But, while you're familiar with types of content which are compliant with the AdSense program policies, your users might not be. We understand that it's not always easy to monitor hundreds of new comments, posts, user profiles, videos, or photos every day, so here are a few ideas on how to maintain an advertiser-friendly environment on your pages.

As a quick note before we head into the tips, remember that inappropriate content can come in many forms -- images, forum posts, comments, links, and so on. For example, adult content isn't only limited to pornographic images; it can also be sexually explicit forum posts or spam bot comments with links to adult sites, which aren't permitted by our policies. We recommend reviewing our previous Inside AdSense post on this topic for further clarification and a few tests you can try on your content.

Now for the tips, which we've divided in two sections - 'Prevention' and 'Monitoring'.

Prevention

Here are some recommendations for ways to prevent your ads from appearing alongside user-generated content that isn't compliant with our policies:

1. Publish clear content guidelines and policies that your users will have to accept and adhere to in order to sign up and use your site's services.
   
   
2. If you own a photo or video sharing site where users are permitted to upload adult or other non-compliant content, clearly structure your content to avoid placing your ad code in sections/categories containing this type of content. The same idea could also be easily applied to online stores with adult sections or to classifieds sites which offer adult dating classifieds.
   
   
3. Ask users to tag their inappropriate content (e.g. sexually suggestive pictures or videos) as being non family-safe. This can help you perform human evaluations of potentially inappropriate content for AdSense ads. You can also try installing keyword filters for content related to adult topics, violence, or drugs, for instance. While we're unable to provide you with details about setting up these filters for your site, we recommend searching for terms such as "keyword filtering" or "content filtering" on Google.com.
   
   
4. Implement spambot protection for your comment forms, forums, and guest books. If you need more information on this topic, try a Google search for "spambot protection".

Monitoring

We suggest these tips to ensure that your existing user-generated content pages remain compliant with our policies:

1. Set up ways for your community to monitor itself. For example, try adding a "Report inappropriate content" link to your pages, to allow users to flag content for you to review.
   
   
2. Proactively review pages, videos, photos, etc. with high pageviews on a regular basis.
   
   
3. Spot-check content based on keywords, content search, or related user accounts. For example, try entering keywords related to inappropriate content in your own search engine and checking the results. Alternatively, you can search on Google.com using the following parameter, replacing 'example.com' with your own site's URL and 'keyword' with a specific word or phrase: "site:example.com keyword".
   
   
4. Create editorial policies and exercise moderator control in your comments, forums, and guestbook sections.

source:AdSenseTeam
Related Posts:
Adsense: Pinning it down to $10
From 0 to 2000+ Subscribers in 90 Days
Bidvertiser Add RSS Advertising
Plugins for BidVertiser Ads for Feeds
Earn up to $10,000 USD
Recommended Money Makers

These days, user-generated content is everywhere, from the comments below newspaper articles, to the photos and videos shared on social networks. So it's no surprise that many publishers are monetizing this type of content with AdSense ads. But, while you're familiar with types of content which are compliant with the AdSense program policies, your users might not be. We understand that it's not always easy to monitor hundreds of new comments, posts, user profiles, videos, or photos every day, so here are a few ideas on how to maintain an advertiser-friendly environment on your pages.

As a quick note before we head into the tips, remember that inappropriate content can come in many forms -- images, forum posts, comments, links, and so on. For example, adult content isn't only limited to pornographic images; it can also be sexually explicit forum posts or spam bot comments with links to adult sites, which aren't permitted by our policies. We recommend reviewing our previous Inside AdSense post on this topic for further clarification and a few tests you can try on your content.

Now for the tips, which we've divided in two sections - 'Prevention' and 'Monitoring'.

Prevention

Here are some recommendations for ways to prevent your ads from appearing alongside user-generated content that isn't compliant with our policies:

1. Publish clear content guidelines and policies that your users will have to accept and adhere to in order to sign up and use your site's services.
   
   
2. If you own a photo or video sharing site where users are permitted to upload adult or other non-compliant content, clearly structure your content to avoid placing your ad code in sections/categories containing this type of content. The same idea could also be easily applied to online stores with adult sections or to classifieds sites which offer adult dating classifieds.
   
   
3. Ask users to tag their inappropriate content (e.g. sexually suggestive pictures or videos) as being non family-safe. This can help you perform human evaluations of potentially inappropriate content for AdSense ads. You can also try installing keyword filters for content related to adult topics, violence, or drugs, for instance. While we're unable to provide you with details about setting up these filters for your site, we recommend searching for terms such as "keyword filtering" or "content filtering" on Google.com.
   
   
4. Implement spambot protection for your comment forms, forums, and guest books. If you need more information on this topic, try a Google search for "spambot protection".

Monitoring

We suggest these tips to ensure that your existing user-generated content pages remain compliant with our policies:

1. Set up ways for your community to monitor itself. For example, try adding a "Report inappropriate content" link to your pages, to allow users to flag content for you to review.
   
   
2. Proactively review pages, videos, photos, etc. with high pageviews on a regular basis.
   
   
3. Spot-check content based on keywords, content search, or related user accounts. For example, try entering keywords related to inappropriate content in your own search engine and checking the results. Alternatively, you can search on Google.com using the following parameter, replacing 'example.com' with your own site's URL and 'keyword' with a specific word or phrase: "site:example.com keyword".
   
   
4. Create editorial policies and exercise moderator control in your comments, forums, and guestbook sections.

source:AdSenseTeam
Related Posts:
Adsense: Pinning it down (to $10)
From 0 to 2000+ Subscribers in 90 Days
Bidvertiser Add RSS Advertising
Plugins for BidVertiser Ads for Feeds
Earn up to $10,000 USD
Recommended Money Makers

There are services on the web – mostly online utilities – that allow you to send anonymous emails. You can send simple messages from, and to everywhere in the world, without having to reveal your true identity.

AnonEmail

AnonEmail is a service by AnonyMouse. It allows you to send anonymous emails by resending your email several time through random nodes, thus making it impossible to trace back.

In AnonEmail, you can fill in your recipient, the subject, and a short plain-text message. Contrary to many other services AnonEmail does not (seem to) log your IP. However, we do urge you not to use it for anything illegal.

As an extra security measure, AnonEmail will then wait for an unknown period before sending your email along. Why? So no one  will be able to prove your ‘guilt’ based on time/location, or make geographic presumptions based on timezones.

It remains the question whether this particular functionality should be obligatory – as it might be a serious disadvantage if you don’t need it.

Formmail Anonymous Mailer

Formmail Anonymous Mailer, developed by Infinite Monkeys & Company, is a great alternative to AnonEmail.

Apart from the usual functionality, this website allows you to specify a sender’s address as well, allowing you to seemingly send it from a normal mail account. You can also select the specific remailers you want the website to use, from a list of 17 possibilities. Note that the message will take increasingly longer to send when re-rooting it through multiple remailers.

After pressing send, you’ll be able to watch the progress of your message through the different nodes. I used three remailers for a prank mail, and it took about a minute or two to send.


The debatable downside of Formmail Anonymous Mailer is that it logs your IP-addresses to keep you from doing anything stupid. They won’t include it in the emails you send, but if you do anything illegal, they’ll give it up.

Send Anonymous Mail

Like the name implies, this one is a third anonymous mailing utility. Although it lacks the complete anonymity of AnonEmail, and the remailer control of Formmail, this is the most simple one around.

You’ll also be able to specify a sender’s address, a ’supposed’ origin point for your secret message. Nothing else fancy is included, but if you’re looking for simplicity, this is your guy.
Again, this one logs your IP address, so you’ll have another reason not to try anything shady.
via:rarlinux.blogspot.com

For the first time, Opera Mini users viewed more than 10 billion pages in one month according to the State of the Mobile Web report by Opera. The report provides information on the top global trends affecting the mobile Web. The full report is available from http://www.opera.com/smw/ (English only). In addition to the top global trends and country snapshots, the report highlights trends in North America and the Caribbean.

source: Poweredlink

Related Posts:
Mozilla Demanding Firefox Display EULA In Ubuntu
Netscape Finally Put Down
60 Cool Websites
Automating Firefox with iMacros
Safari on Linux
Ten Firefox extensions to keep your browsing private and secure
Eight Firefox extensions you don't need

Disable USB Ports By Disabling Autorun

Most of the malware that spreads through USB devices spreads because of the Autorun feature which automatically executes a said file mentioned in the autorun.inf file located at the root of the USB device folder tree. Something as unsuspicious as “Open folder to view files” to the untrained eye can be easily made to run any desired file on the drive and can thus infect your computer. So disabling autorun is always one of the better options. To do so:

• First, the key combination Win + R and type Gpedit.msc
• Navigate to Computer Configuration > Administrative Templates > Windows Components, then click Autoplay Policies. (XP users should try Computer Configuration > Administrative Templates > System
• In the Details pane, double-click Turn off Autoplay.
• Click Enabled, select All drives in the Turn off Autoplay box to disable Autorun on all drives.

Microsoft Help and Support has more details and methods

Option 1. Disable users from connecting USB devices

You can prevent selected user accounts from connecting USB devices to your computer. So if you share your laptop/computer with a friend, you should create a separate user account and deny his/her account the ability to connect USB devices. Microsoft Help and Support provides steps to obtain such fine grain control.

Or you can simply navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\UsbStor and set the value of Start to 4. To enable access again change the value back to 3

Although the site mentions that this applies to Windows XP, 2000 and 2003 it worked just fine on Windows Vista and Windows 7 as well.

Option 2. Change BIOS, disable USB ports, password protect BIOS

Enter your system’s BIOS, just when you press the Power On button. Look for anything that allows you to disable USB ports, disable them and make sure you add a BIOS password.

Option 3. User Device Manager to disable USB

• Go to Device Manager (Right click My Computer, choose Manage, choose Device Manager in left pane)
• Now look for USB Devices in the right pane, right click on the device and choose disable.

Of course you would like to make it a little easier to enable/disable the USB ports. For that you need to create a reg file that modifies the appropriate registry key. Here is an example (make sure to spell everything correctly):

Now double clicking on this file will enable access, similarly you can change 00000003 to 00000004 to create a reg file for disabling access.

None of these are fool proof, there is always someone smart enough to find a way around. If you really want to go all the way you can fill the ports with some epoxy or a similar substance! This is of course not a recommended solution for your personal computer but might come in handy for large organizations trying to prevent employees from using USB devices.

All in all the options are good enough to stop accidental, non intentional spread of malware/compromise of your computer as mostly happens when a USB device is plugged into different computers. However don’t bet your life on these if some one is really determined to use a USB device on your computer for whatever reason.
source:makeuseof
Related Posts:
Protect your WINDOWS while Running Suspicious Programs
Enhance security with file encryption tools
Ten Firefox extensions to keep your browsing private and secure
Nintendo Wii hacked
10 Quick Fixes to Make your Windows Computer Faster

AMD has officially updated its Phenom II lineup today by introducing the fastest Phenom II X4 up to date, the Phenom II X4 965 Black Edition.

The new Phenom II X4 965 BE is practically the same Phenom II X4 955 BE, except for the slight 200MHz core bump and a TDP bump to 140W, something that was last seen on the old Phenom 9950. In any case this is the fastest, or more precisely, highest clocked processor that ever came from AMD.

On the other hand, according to the review over at Anandtech.com, the power consumption of this CPU is almost the same as that of the Phenom II X4 955 BE, as it only has a slight higher power consumption under load.

It managed to hold its ground in gaming against some Intel's Core i7 processors, and it is definitely faster than any LGA-775 processor. In any case it sounds like a great CPU, especially considering its US $245 price tag and the price of the entire platform.

Related Posts:
AMD Phenom II X4 965 Black Edition Review
AMD's Phenom II 965, 3.4GHz, 140 Watts, $245

here are 10 important and useful points that you may want to consider.

1. Adjust The Number Of History States

Maybe you already went through that bad feeling of clicking “undo” dozens of times and realizing that Photoshop wouldn’t provide you with more previous steps, but this problem can be easily resolved by changing the History States setting in the “Edit > Preferences > Performance” menu.


There are more efficient ways of going back and forward in your projects like using the “Snapshots” feature, which are essentially comfortable checkpoints of your work that you can go back to. But if you use Undo a lot, you may want to consider adding more states, e.g. set them to ‘30′. However, be aware that too many states on a single image will usually result in History Palette literally “eating” RAM and if you work with less than 2GB of RAM, you probably shouldn’t using the Undo Feature that often!

Overall, you may add up to 1,000 history state levels in Photoshop.

2. How Many Cache Levels Do You Need?

The Cache Levels setting can be found inside the “Edit > Preferences > Performance” menu, right under the History States. It controls the histogram and the time it takes an image to reappear on the screen after an action is applied to it.

By default, there are 6 cache levels; the number of levels can be increased to the maximum of 8 which will – obviously – increase the rendering speed. It is particular effective when you are working with high-resolution images. When workin with smaller view-sizes, e.g. viewing an image at 50% Zoom, the cache levels will determine the number of “down samplings” allowing Photoshop to perform operations faster.

Photoshop uses Image Caching and if you have a good amount of RAM, like at least 2GB and work with high-resolution images, you might want to raise the level to 8 as the speed performance will compensate the memory loss, but if you have a low RAM amount and usually work with small images only (1-4MB), you may want to lower the value to 1 or 2 as the RAM will be better allocated – storing the images rather then caching them.

3. Keep An Eye On Your Memory Usage

Photoshop really likes RAM and will use every little bit it can grab, but it also allows you to limit the RAM resources of your computer that Photoshop will use, and it even gives you good suggestions for the appropriate range of RAM values it wants. This setting, of course, can be found inside the “Edit > Preferences > Performance” menu, on the Left Side.

The displayed available RAM is the value left for applications after the Operating System loads into memory. If you are going to use mostly only Photoshop, or if you have a low amount of memory, you will probably want to give it 75-80% of the available RAM. But if, on the other hand, you are more of a multi-task kind of person with browser, word processor, mail, Twitter client etc. being always opened, then you might want to limit Photoshop to around 50%.

Efficient Use of Memory

After setting up your memory values, you can keep an eye on how Photoshop is performing. At the base of your image window, click to the right of the document size information and you will be able to choose “Efficiency” which will show you a percentage value. If this value is not 100%, it indicates that if you allocate more RAM to Photoshop, the operations would perform faster. Closing applications or images that you are not using can also increase the efficiency – not exactly a secret, but worth mentioning nevertheless.

4. Use Proper Scratch Disks

Similar to what happened with RAM, Photoshop also uses a good amount of your hard drive space as the so-called “scrath disk” which works as the secondary memory resource. Photoshop assumes that your primary hard drive is its scratch disk, but you can set it up differently with a secondary internal or external hard drive.

If you are going to work with large images, it is recommended that you have a dedicated scratch disk that is different from the one containing the image file. Using different scratch disks is good, especially to avoid killing your primary boot drive when you have just a few gigabytes left.

5. Turn Font Preview Off

Photoshop users (and especially designers) like to have a good selection of fonts always installed and ready to be used; but when the font preview is active, having too many fonts can slow you down. Turning the font preview feature off can be a simple and instant step towards improving your Photoshop performance. To do so, simply go to the “Edit > Preferences > Type” menu and remove the check mark from the “Font Preview Size” option, just as it is shown in the picture above.

6. Use Thumbnails In Your Palettes

Displaying preview thumbnails in the Layers, Channels, and Paths palettes will cause Photoshop to consume some more of your RAM as it will be constantly updating the thumbnails to reflect the changes you will be doing in your project. The memory consumption will keep growing with the amount of thumbnails you have opened at the same time as well as their size.

You could use the smaller thumbnail size or no thumbnail at all to increase your Photoshop performance. To do so, in each palette, select “panel options” from the palette menu as it is shown on the picture above and select the smallest thumbnail size or “None”.

7. Learn How To Use Purge

When you are working on your images, Photoshop stores image data for the Undo, Clipboard, and History features. This data consumes memory, especially if you have been working for a while and have a high number of History States defined (see Point 1 for more on History States).

To eliminate that extra image data consuming your RAM, go to: “Edit > Purge > ( option )”. Keep in mind that clearing History will remove all the history states saved previously and you will not be able to undo your latest actions.

8. Set Maximize PSD And PSB File Compatibility to Always or Ask

Maximize PSD and PSB File Compatibility increases the size of your file by attaching a flattened copy of your image when you save your image. A small amount of extra data is included in the file when you choose this option that ensures that PSD and PBS files saved in Photoshop will open in previous versions.

Additionally, if you want to use the Edit in Photoshop feature in Photoshop Lightroom, this option needs to be on. To change the Maximize File Compatibility option choose “Photoshop > Preferences > File Handling”.

9. Don’t clutter your Photoshop

Of course, you can easily find an enormous amount of free stuff to add up to the default Photoshop brushes, fonts, patterns, etc. but that doesn’t mean you need to download every freebie that comes in your way. Keep it simple! Having too many plugins and other resources installed in Photoshop will greatly decrease performance. Most top designers use a small selection of fonts and brushes that define their style and that can be used in a great amount of ways for literally millions of different results.

10. Reset Default Settings

If you are using a shared machine for your Photoshop needs there is a little Photoshop start-up trick that may come in handy. When the application is launching, if you press and hold: Alt + Control + Shift (Windows) or Command + Option + Shift (Mac), a window will pop up asking you if you want to delete the Photoshop settings file, resetting all of the preferences to their default.

source: Marco Sousa

While AMD does not have the muscle to push around the i7, they certainly have the ability to give the older and more common Core 2 Quads a run for their money. With the release of the Phenom II X4 965, AMD further attempts to dethrone the Core 2 Quad as the premier midrange CPU offering. While it may not be a world-beater by any stretch of the imagination, it certainly is catching Intel's attention in the breadbasket of the CPU market. The X4 965 is the fastest clocked processor that AMD has ever produced, much less shipped in mass quantities. While the speed bump is appreciated, the cost in terms of power and heat will make the introduction of the X4 965 problematic for some. Many of us thought that we would never see another 140 watt processor (as the Phenom 9950 was), but unfortunately those days are back. Still, AMD offers a compelling part at a reasonable price, and their motherboard support for this new 140 watt processor is robust.
More @

Sandro Tosi: My dear iceweasel,:

WTH are you doing with all this memory?

 $ top -b -n 1 | egrep "xulrunner|PID" 
PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND  3907 morph
20   0 2349m 859m  15m S   14 21.7   2013:33 xulrunner-stub 

say goodbye, you're going to die; mew

---

Matthew Palmer: Oh Firefox...

What are you doing in that the 1.1GB of resident memory (1357m of virtual memory) you have decided to consume in order to display three web pages? All fairly basic pages -- no flash, no excessive Javascript, and I haven't even done anything particularly exciting in the browser -- just loaded the pages up and let them sit for a few days.

Time to look at Conkeror on the Netbook, I suppose. I'm unlikely to be needing Firebug on there any time soon

---

Enrico Zini: Firefox garbage collection:

Some people complained about the insane memory usage of firefox.
It must be a misunderstanding. They probably are not aware of how to trigger the excellent garbage collector shipped with the browser.

Let's navigate heavily a bit, opening several new tabs, click click click around, then closing those tabs:

 $ top -b -n 1 | egrep "firefox|PID"   PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM
 TIME+  COMMAND  6842 enrico    20   0  882m 398m  17m S    2 19.9  24:29.55 firefox-bin 

Indeed Firefox memory usage quickly grew. I've seen it grow to a gigabyte and a half after keeping it open for a month.

Now let's trigger the garbage collector:

 $ kill -9 6842 $ # Rerun firefox $ # Click on "Restore previous session"
$ # Wait for the various open tabs to reload 

And voilà! Now Firefox uses much less memory than before:

 $ top -b -n 1 | egrep "firefox|PID"   PID USER
PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND  5242 enrico
  20   0  656m 205m  25m S    0 10.3   0:14.49 firefox-bin 

Labels: firefox, linux

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via "natural" ("organic" or "algorithmic") search results for targeted keywords. Usually, the earlier a site is presented in the search results, or the higher it "ranks", the more searchers will visit that site. SEO can also target different kinds of search, including image search, local search, and industry-specific vertical search engines.

As a marketing strategy for increasing a site's relevance, SEO considers how search algorithms work and what people search for. SEO efforts may involve a site's coding, presentation, and structure, as well as fixing problems that could prevent search engine indexing programs from fully spidering a site. Other, more noticeable efforts may include adding unique content to a site, ensuring that content is easily indexed by search engine robots, and making the site more appealing to users. Another class of techniques, known as black hat SEO or spamdexing, use methods such as link farms and keyword stuffing that tend to harm search engine user experience. Search engines look for sites that employ these techniques and may remove them from their indexes.

The initialism "SEO" can also refer to "search engine optimizers", a term adopted by an industry of consultants who carry out optimization projects on behalf of clients, and by employees who perform SEO services in-house. Search engine optimizers may offer SEO as a stand-alone service or as a part of a broader marketing campaign. Because effective SEO may require changes to the HTML source code of a site, SEO tactics may be incorporated into web site development and design. The term "search engine friendly" may be used to describe web site designs, menus, content management systems and shopping carts that are easy to optimize.
SEO Tips for Bloggers

1. Content is King
The quality of the posts you write is the single most important factor when it comes to Search Optimization on a Blog.

2. Anticipate What People Will be Searching For

Every time you write a post you should be automatically be considering what words people might be putting into search engines to find that type of information. Once you know what kinds of words they’re using you’re in a great position to position yourself for that search.

3. Titles Titles Titles
There are a number of things to keep in mind when it comes to titles. Google pays particular attention to titles - so make sure you get them right:

• first make sure that the way you set your blog up puts the title of your post in the ‘title tags’ on the back end of your blog. This is really important.
• if you’re just looking from an SEO perspective don’t include your blog name in the title tags of single posts. This dilutes your keywords. Of course if you’re looking more at branding including your blog’s name in the title tags might be worth doing.
• next - include the keywords that you identified in point #2 in your post title
• also, keep in mind that the words you use at the start of a title tend to carry more weight than words you use later in your title

4. Keywords in other parts of your post

Use the keywords you identified in point #2 within your post also. If you want Google to rank you for a term or phrase you need to use that term or phrase. Use it in sub headings in your post (use h tags where you can), use it in the content itself, use the words in the alt tags of images etc. Don’t go over the topic but do use the words where you can naturally in the post.

5. Link to Your Own Posts

Don’t over do this one but while links from other sites are a great way to increase your blog’s rankings so are links from your blog. Interlink your posts to share where readers can find more information on your topic (where relevant) but also consider linking to key posts on your blog from other places on the blog (sidebar, front page etc).

6. Links from Outside Your Blog

Links from other sites to yours are key in SEO but they can be hard to get. Start to linking to your blog from other sites that you have or are active on. Some (like on Twitter) won’t count for anything much as they have no-follow tags but they are all potential ways for people to access your site and some will help with SEO.

Don’t become obsessed with getting links - rather become obsessed about writing great content and the links will generally come in time. However if you’ve written a great post that you think will be relevant to another blog don’t be afraid to let that blogger or website owner know about it - they could just link up.

Also - take note of the type of posts that you write that do well at getting other sites to link to you. You can learn a lot about generating linkable content by doing so and might just develop a technique that will work again and again.

7. Readers Begat Readers

This isn’t an SEO technique as such but it plays a part. The more readers you have the more likely your blog is to be found by other readers. There’s a certain ’snowballing’ thing that happens on a site over time - as you get readers quite often momentum grows as those readers pass on your site to others in their network. They link to you, they bookmark you, they tweet about you, they email friends about you, they blog about you, they suggest your site in recommendation engines….

sources:problogger.net, poweredlink.blogspot.com & rarlinux.blogspot.com
Related Posts:
top 10 basic seo techniques
60 Cool Websites

After more than 10 million test runs and ample user feedback, Opera 10 is now available in its third beta version from http://www.opera.com/next/. Performance and stability were prioritized in beta 3, with improvements to Opera Turbo, a compression tool for faster surfing, and refinements to the overall look and feel of the previous Opera 10 betas.

Realated Posts:
Ten Firefox extensions to keep your browsing private and secure

source:Poweredlink

There is nothing wrong with an incremental update—especially an update that adds performance without affecting pricing. Such is the case with AMD’s new Phenom II X4 965 Black Edition, which arrived at our performance lab running at 3.4 GHz—200 MHz faster than its predecessor, the Phenom II X4 955 BE.

So, if the latest Phenom II is predictably faster than AMD’s former flagship, why is today’s launch so significant? In short, it comes just a few weeks ahead of Intel’s upcoming LGA 1156-based P55 platform debut—an event that’ll almost certainly play a bigger role in the adoption of Nehalem-based machines than either the LGA 1366 Core i7 or Xeon 5500-series CPUs have thus far. After all, LGA 1156 is going to be the interface that purportedly makes Intel’s latest architecture accessible to the mainstream, supplanting the Core 2 family at a number of affordable price points.

No doubt, those new Core i5/i7 CPUs will be faster than the Core 2 Quads they replace, and at competitive prices. Just when AMD looked like it had achieved performance parity with the top end of Intel’s Core micro-architecture, LGA 1156-based platforms seem almost certain to set the bar higher.

Thus, today’s Phenom II X4 965 BE introduction is actually a fairly important one for AMD. On one hand, it could earn the company its mainstream performance crown—at least for a few weeks. On the other, it could be the last time Phenom II looks as competitive as it does now. Of course, that’s going to depend mightily on how the upcoming Intel chips perform.

Up Against Core i5

Of course, we’re not able to publish performance numbers with the pre-production Core i5 processors currently running in the lab, so it’s hard to officially quantify how Phenom II will size up. But we can make best guesses using today’s Core i7s as rough test subjects.

You’ll find all of our usual benchmarks on the pages that follow. First, however, we wanted to set up Phenom II X4 965 BE against a hypothetical Core i5-750—a processor expected to cost less than $200 when it launches. We simulated the 2.66 GHz offering with a Core i7-920, which runs at the same clock rate. Of course, we had to pull out a single channel of memory (yielding two channels of DDR3-1333) and disable Hyper-Threading, since Core i5 won’t have that feature. The one variable we couldn’t reproduce was Core i5’s enhanced Turbo Boost, which is expected to accelerate clocks to 3.2 GHz when a single core is active. Core i7-920 only benefits from a single bin of Turbo Boost, yielding 2.8 GHz instead.

The only other platform capability setting LGA 1156 apart from LGA 1366 is the use of on-die PCI Express 2.0, which we’ve tested extensively and can say that, in single-card configurations, has almost zero impact on performance versus the X58’s chipset-based connectivity.

source: tomshardware

Related Posts:
AMD's Phenom II 965, 3.4GHz, 140 Watts, $245

Labels: hardware

K-Lite Codec Pack is a collection of codecs, DirectShow filters and tools. Codecs and DirectShow filters are needed for encoding and decoding (playing) audio and video formats. The K-Lite Codec Pack is designed as a user-friendly solution for playing all your movie files. With the K-Lite Codec Pack you should be able to play all the popular audio and video formats and even some rare formats. This download is for the Full package and contains all the codecs a normal user would ever need.
The K-Lite Codec Pack has a couple of major advantages compared to other codec packs:

• It it always very up-to-date with the newest (and/or best) versions of the components.
• It is very user-friendly.
• The installation is fully customizable, meaning that you are able install exactly those components that you really want.
• Uninstallation removes all files and registry entries created by the pack.
• It is extremely easy to make a fully customized unattended installation.
• It has been very well tested, so that the package doesn't contain any conflicting or buggy codecs.
• It tries to avoid potential problems with existing codecs and even fixes some problems. The pack is able to detect broken codecs and filters on your system, and remove them for you.
• It is a very complete package, containing everything you need to play your movies.
• There are different packages. From small to extra-large.
• Suitable for both novice and expert users.

change log:
# Updated ffdshow to revision 3054
# Updated AC3Filter to version 1.62b
# Updated AC3File to version 0.7b
# Updated FLV splitter to version 1.2.1207.0
# Updated Gabest MPEG splitter to version 1.2.1207.0
# Updated MediaInfo Lite to version 0.7.20
# Added more file association options for audio file types
# Minor changes

download:
Download K-Lite Codec Pack 5.05 FULL

Labels: download