Oops: Microsoft Asks Some Laid Off Workers To Send Back Part Of Their Severance
Talk about adding insult to injury. Apparently Microsoft has inadvertently overpaid severance to some of its recently laid off employees, and is now asking for some of the money back. It’s unclear how many of the 1,400 employees laid off last month were affected, but we’ve confirmed that it wasn’t a single isolated incident (we’ve contacted Microsoft for a response). We’re also hearing that some employees may have been underpaid as well.
While the payroll error must be irritating in and of itself to these laid off workers (severance is a sensitive subject), it appears that Microsoft HR isn’t even bothering to explain how it happened (employees are instructed to call the office, which is closed for the weekend, if they want to know the details). Given that it was Microsoft HR that screwed this up in the first place, you’d think they’d at least include the calculations they made and point out where the error took place.
Source: TechCrunch Update: CNET reports that Microsoft has decided to allow any workers who were overcompensated to keep the money. The story also notes that around 25 workers were overpaid, and around 20 underpaid. See full coverage here.
Scott Sherman over at Bjorn3D is giving away some prizes, including a n NVidia GTC 285 signed by Jen-Hsun Huang to help generate interest in Folding@Home.
As many of you know my 13 year old daughter Stephanie has Hodgkins Stage 4B Cancer. I have supported Folding@Home for over 5 years myself. Well this month I want people to Fold for Stephanie.
I announced this contest 2 days ago. Since then I have been contacted by NVIDIA and others that want to donate stuff also. I will update prizes as I find out about them. The community support for my daughter and my family is great.
All other prizes will be random drawn to people Folding for Stephanie. Other prizes so far:
1 XFX GTX285
1 2*1Gb of DDR3 Crucial Ballistix PC3-10600 From Niko at www.rbmods.com. He will ship worldwide.
2 Maxtill G-Pad Mouse Pads From Michael Phrakaysone at www.ModSynergy.com. He will ship USA/Canada.
At this time I can only ship to USA/Canada unless I get a sponsor that can ship outside of this area.
Here are the rules:
Now here is what you have to do.
1. Fold for Bjorn3D Team 41608.
2. If you Folding handle is Rob for the month Fold under a new name for the as Rob-Stephanie.
3. This will let people checking our team stats see your are Folding for my daughter.
4. Register on our forums with you normal name with out -Stephanie and make at least 2 post so I can notify you if you win.
I want to thank everyone that does this since it may help find a cure to this disease and others like it.
Scott Sherman
__________________
Pray for Stephanie to win the fight againts Cancer!!
Head on over to Bjorn3D and start Folding for Stephanie today!
By Mike Snider, USA TODAY Could The Force be with you? A toy due in stores this fall will let you test and hone your Jedi-like abilities. The Force Trainer (expected to be priced at $90 to $100) comes with a headset that uses brain waves to allow players to manipulate a sphere within a clear 10-inch-tall training tower, analogous to Yoda and Luke Skywalker's abilities in the Star Wars films. No, you're not tapping into some "all-powerful force controlling everything," as Han Solo said in the movies. But you are reaching out with mind power via one of the first mass-market brain-to-computer products. "It's been a fantasy everyone has had, using The Force," says Howard Roffman, president of Lucas Licensing. Mind-control games may be the coming thing: Mattel plans to demonstrate a Mind Flex game (also due this fall), which uses brain-wave activity to move a ball through a tabletop obstacle course, at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas on Thursday. In the Force Trainer, a wireless headset reads your brain activity, in a simplified version of EEG medical tests, and the circuitry translates it to physical action. If you focus well enough, the training sphere, which looks like a ping-pong ball, will rise in the tower. A state of deep concentration is needed to achieve a Force-full effect. "When you concentrate, it activates the training remote," says Frank Adler of toymaker Uncle Milton Industries, which is creating the Trainer. "There is a flow of air that will move the (ball). You can actually feel like you are in a zone." Star Wars sound effects and audio clips emitted from the base unit "cue you in to progress to the next level (from Padawan to Jedi) or when to move the sphere up or down to keep challenging yourself," Adler says. "Until today, EEG technology has been designed for rigorous medical and clinical applications with little regard to price (and) ease of use," says Greg Hyver of NeuroSky, which developed the brain-wave technology for both games. "We are putting this exciting technology into everyone's living room."
Friday was the big day for the general public to lay their hands on the Windows 7 beta. However, Microsoft's servers were quickly overloaded and downloaders were greeted with "Server is too busy" errors. Microsoft's official Windows 7 site is graced with the following message:
Thanks for your interest in the Windows 7 Beta. The volume has been phenomenal -- we're in the process of adding more servers to handle the demand. We're sorry for the delay and we'll re-post the Beta as soon as we can ensure a quality download experience.
For those that are simply too impatient to wait until Microsoft's official Windows 7 pages come back online, you can still directly download the 32-bit ISO and 64-bit ISO from Microsoft's servers. However, using the direct link means that you won't get a product activation key from Microsoft. As a result, the installation will go into limited functionality mode after 30 days.
For those that are patient enough to wait for Microsoft’s official download page to come back online, a product key will be provided with your ISO download which will be good for use on up to three different machines. The beta will expire on August 1, 2009.
Updated 1/10/2009
Windows 7 Beta 1 is now available again from Microsoft. You can download the ISO and get a key from this download location.
Want to build a gaming rig, but a little depressed by the cost of the latest Intel-based offerings? AMD may be just the ticket for you.
AMD hopes that Dragon platform will heat up sales of its new Phenom II processor
On Thursday, AMD released its new Phenom II processors. As DailyTech predicted the day before, the new processors came in a Phenom II X4 920 and an X4 940 quad core variant. The X4 940, dubbed the "Black Edition", is clocked at 3.0 GHz, while X4 920 is clocked at 2.8 GHz. Both processors have proved solid overclockers in early testing, falling just short of the Penryn and Nehalem (i7) Intel processors in terms of overclock, based on early testing.
The processors greatest advantage is price. The X4 920 retails at $235, while the X4 940 Black Edition retails at $275. A motherboard for the platform costs around $120 and memory comes at around $75. Together this is much cheaper than Intel's i7 platform, which has a processor cost of $295 for the i7 920 2.66 GHz model and a cost of $565 at Newegg for the i7 940 2.93 GHz model. It also does not require more expensive DDR3, which the i7 platform does. So while the i7 trumps the Phenom II significantly in performance, this is largely offset by a higher price.
Price wise, the Phenom II X4 940 is most comparable with Intel's Penryn quad-core, the Q9400 (2.66 GHz), while the 920 is similarly priced to the Q9300/Q8200. The Phenom IIs in initial testing appear to be the better pick at these price points.
Together with its already released 48xx series of ATI Radeon graphics cards and its 790 series chipsets, first released in November 2007, the new processor forms AMD's hot new Dragon platform.
The platform offers AMD's Fusion for Gaming technology, which suspends background tasks to channel extra resources into gaming. It also features AMD OverDrive, which allows an overclock to be more easily applied with a single button press, during system operation.
Choosing a killer CPU heatsink for an Intel CPU can be a challenging task, especially with all the different brands and models to pick from. How do you avoid the lemons and pick a quiet performer? How do to know whether one heatsink is really better, or maybe equal to the next?
You've come to the right website - Frostytech.com answers all in this months' billboard-sized Top 132 Intel socket 775 heatsinks chart! Intel heatsinks are ranked according to their performance on a 150W heat load, ranging from -50°C to 50°C over ambient! The warmer heatsinks in the chart account for many of the low-noise coolers, sound level data can be found in each of the full 132 detailed reviews.
YOYOTech launch the fastest machine the world has ever seen
INDEPENDENTLY VERIFIED AS THE FASTEST MACHINE THE WORLD HAS EVER SEEN
Until 5:00am this morning, the fastest, single-processor, production machine ever tested by world-authority SPEC was a hugely expensive, 8-core SUN UltraSPARC system which managed a score of 85.5 in the peak integer rate test. YOYOTech has now blown that away with a score of 130 on a machine costing half as much... the Fi7EPOWER MLK1610.
Built around an overclocked Intel Core i7 965 processor, the Fi7EPOWER MLK1610 runs with 9GB of high-performance Corsair DDR3 memory on an Asus P6T mainboard. That memory configuration gives 18BG/second throughput, literally blasting past all other data transfer architectures. Remember that with SMT (Symmetric Multi Threading) enabled, the Intel Core i7 965 presents 8 ‘cores’ to Windows Vista 64.
All I can say is I WANT!! Visit Elitebastards for more info.
Stop. You had us at oil submersed motherboard, CPU and GPUs. You didn’t even have to dunk the SSDs, PSU or create a custom motherboard and bullet resistant tank too to convince us that you’re really hard core, umm, Hardcore.
Of course, if you stare too hard at the tank, you’ll miss all the heavenly glory that the Hardcore PC truly is. From its beautiful aluminum case, to its top port routing and the easy to access hard drives, every centimeter of the machine oozes custom computing. And we can honestly say that after tinkering with the most exotic PCs available on Earth for a decade now. What Hardcore is trying to do is so over the top that no one has ever tried it before on a production machine.
Maximum PC has the whole story.
If you happen to have about $5000 US burning a hole in your pocket, you can get yours at www.hardcorecomputer.com
TGDaily has a writeup on their impressions of the new Firefox v3.1 beta.
First Look Review – Installing and running Firefox 3.1 beta 1 is a revealing experience. Just like Chrome reminded us a few weeks ago, the basics of a browser matter. While Microsoft is figuring out new proprietary features for Internet Explorer 8, Apple, Google and Chrome have been working on the browser foundation and made their software much more nimble. The speed improvements that have been made in less than a year are nothing short of amazing. We have been using Firefox 3.1 beta 1 for a day now and we have come to two conclusions: We refuse to go back to a previous version and Microsoft’s Internet Explorer is in deep trouble.
Talk about adding insult to injury. Apparently Microsoft has inadvertently overpaid severance to some of its recently laid off employees, and is now asking for some of the money back. It’s unclear how many of the 
Could The Force be with you? A toy due in stores this fall will let you test and hone your Jedi-like abilities. The Force Trainer (expected to be priced at $90 to $100) comes with a headset that uses brain waves to allow players to manipulate a sphere within a clear 10-inch-tall training tower, analogous to Yoda and Luke Skywalker's abilities in the Star Wars films. No, you're not tapping into some "all-powerful force controlling everything," as Han Solo said in the movies. But you are reaching out with mind power via one of the first mass-market brain-to-computer products. "It's been a fantasy everyone has had, using The Force," says Howard Roffman, president of Lucas Licensing. Mind-control games may be the coming thing: Mattel plans to demonstrate a Mind Flex game (also due this fall), which uses brain-wave activity to move a ball through a tabletop obstacle course, at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas on Thursday. In the Force Trainer, a wireless headset reads your brain activity, in a simplified version of EEG medical tests, and the circuitry translates it to physical action. If you focus well enough, the training sphere, which looks like a ping-pong ball, will rise in the tower. A state of deep concentration is needed to achieve a Force-full effect. "When you concentrate, it activates the training remote," says Frank Adler of toymaker Uncle Milton Industries, which is creating the Trainer. "There is a flow of air that will move the (ball). You can actually feel like you are in a zone." Star Wars sound effects and audio clips emitted from the base unit "cue you in to progress to the next level (from Padawan to Jedi) or when to move the sphere up or down to keep challenging yourself," Adler says. "Until today, EEG technology has been designed for rigorous medical and clinical applications with little regard to price (and) ease of use," says Greg Hyver of NeuroSky, which developed the brain-wave technology for both games. "We are putting this exciting technology into everyone's living room." 
Although Windows 7 Beta 1 has been 
On Thursday, AMD released its 
Until 5:00am this morning, the fastest, single-processor, production machine ever tested by world-authority SPEC was a hugely expensive, 8-core SUN UltraSPARC system which managed a score of 85.5 in the peak integer rate test. YOYOTech has now blown that away with a score of 130 on a machine costing half as much... the 
First Look Review – Installing and running Firefox 3.1 beta 1 is a revealing experience. Just like Chrome reminded us a few weeks ago, the basics of a browser matter. While Microsoft is figuring out new proprietary features for Internet Explorer 8, Apple, Google and Chrome have been working on the browser foundation and made their software much more nimble. The speed improvements that have been made in less than a year are nothing short of amazing. We have been using Firefox 3.1 beta 1 for a day now and we have come to two conclusions: We refuse to go back to a previous version and Microsoft’s Internet Explorer is in deep trouble.