Dell will offer limited warranty enhancement to all affected customers worldwide on Nvidia die packaging issue. This announcement follows the BIOS updates releases that is trying to reduce the heat throttle. Until now only HP has announced similar actions. There are no announcement from other companies on this issue although many MacBook owners seem to face the same issue. Since Dell and HP have announced the models affected there is no doubt that series of G84 and G86 GPUs are affected but the affected list might include also the G92 and G94 GPUs as an increasing number of posts regarding issues generated by graphic cards that feature those cores have been noticed lately.

Week 28, July 6 - July 13

Nvidia has not disclosed yet what chips are affected by the “certain die/packaging material” problem.

““While we have not been able to determine a root cause for these failures, testing suggests a weak material set of die/package combination, system thermal management designs, and customer use patterns are contributing factors.”

Besides not assuming the blame Nvidia sends an invitation for spreading rumours and just drives the customers crazy.  An article published by The Inquirer states that the failure is not generated by overheating and failures occur due to numerous temperature variations : cold-hot-cold-hot and that the affected GPU’s are G84 and G86 (8400 and 8600 Geforce video cards). Due to the power management, laptops throttle down much more than desktops. This makes the affected mobile GPU’s to fail sooner.

On the other hand G84 and G86 are still present in various Dell and Apple notebook models, just to name two big players, so it’s hard to belive they would continue to sell notebooks with a faulty part.  Nvidia just needs to clear all the rumours and to deal with all the mess.

Yahoo! announced the launch of Search BOSS (Build your Own Search Service) making another move with their open strategy . BOSS is a new, open web services platform that offers programmatic access to the entire Yahoo! Search index via an API. BOSS allows developers to take advantage of Yahoo!’s production search infrastructure and technology, combine that with their own unique assets, and create their own search experiences by utilizing the same infrastructure and technology that powers Yahoo! Search.  During this time Microsoft - Yahoo discutions got a new chapter with the same ending, Yahoo rejected the offer again.

Just as a note: iPhone 3G is out, after days of waiting in lines in front of the stores, after the O2 servers crashed due to the high number of requests and lots of stories. I’m already bored of iPhone 3G news.

Week 27,  June 30 - July 7

Adobe Systems  announced, on Tuesday, a plan that involves Google and Yahoo and aims to improve search results for dynamic Web content Relevant Products/Services and rich Internet applications (RIAs).  The search engines will be able to index the Flash file format and uncover information currently undiscoverable by robots.

ITunes got a new competitor as Real Networks announced the opening of its MP store, Rhapsody. The new service will allow visitors to listen a full preview of a melody before buying. First 100,000 people who sign up for an account will get $10 credit, that is enough to buy an album.

Just a few days after Bill Gates’s last day at Microsoft, the official blog of the Live Search team at Microsoft announced that they reached an agreement to acquire Powerset. Poweset is a San Francisco-based search and natural language company. According to Microsoft “That shared vision is to take Search to the next level by adding understanding of the intent and meaning behind the words in searches and webpages.”

NVIDIA Second Quarter Fiscal 2009 Business Update revealed a problem that might affect a significant quantity of older mobile GPUs.  “NVIDIA plans to take a one-time charge from $150 million to $200 million against cost of revenue for the second quarter to cover anticipated warranty, repair, return, replacement and other costs and expenses, arising from a weak die/packaging material set in certain versions of its previous generation GPU and MCP products used in notebook systems. Certain notebook configurations with GPUs and MCPs manufactured with a certain die/packaging material set are failing in the field at higher than normal rates.“  There is no information about the series affected by this problem but Nvidia released an updated driver that will start the fan sooner, at a lower temperature , to prevent overheating. Unofficially there was noticed that many customers complained about 8400GS overheating, and after the Nvidia release the  driver update,  Dell updated the driver for 8400GS GPU. This makes 8400GS the prime susspect.

It is official, Mozilla Firefox 3.0 holds the Guinness World Record for the most downloaded software in 24 hours with 8,002,530 downloads.

Mozilla Firefox  3 was officially launched and it has already close  to establish a new world record as the most downloaded software in 24 hours. 17th June was named The Download Day by the  Firefox community who got prepared for this event quite well since  over 8.000.000 people downloaded the new version in the first day.

“With more than 15,000 improvements, Firefox 3 is faster, safer and smarter than before.”

It looks nicer , it seems to be faster, it has some new tricks that makes it smarter and although a possible vulnerability  was reported at a short time after it was releases since it affects also the older version some people think it was discovered before 17th and reported latter to gain more attention  (The Conspiracy Theory against the Download Day)

Sony Ericsson has officially announced its new Cyber-shot top model: C905 that features a 8.1 mega-pixels camera with image stabilization and face recognition. Also F305 the first member of a new portable gaming series that features motion gaming was revealed.
On the other hand it seems that P5 code named Paris and G702 code named BeiBei are canceled. It has been suggested P5 was canceled due to a large volume of criticism as it was based on an old architecture and the specifications were already deprecated .

AMD has launched its new generation of  graphic cards the Radeon HD 4000 series featuring the new RV770 chipset. The first model is HD 4850 that will be followed in a short time by HD 4870.  After first reviews, HD 4850 is quite impressive and  the conclusion is that the landscape of the mid-range to high-end GPU market is going to be shifting dramatically in the coming weeks

When you register with Yahoo, you automatically create a Yahoo! Public Profile page for each Yahoo ID and alias that you establish. You can create up to five different profiles with different aliases for a single Yahoo ID.
Yahoo Profiles gives you the ability to post personal information about yourself including your name, city and state, age, and email address, to name a few. All of this information is optional and all of the information that you choose to enter will be available for anyone to see. You can use any alias you have created on a variety of Yahoo! services including Yahoo! Chat, Clubs, Classifieds, Messenger, Games, and Message Boards.

But a regular profile does not act as forwarding e-mail address. this means you will not be able to get receive emails sent on your alias instead of your ID. Maybe you have different categories of contacts—like Personal and Business—and you’d like to separate the addresses you use with each. Having two accounts is not comfortable. Maybe you don’t like your old address anymore and you are stuck with it cause you can not change your username and you do not want to start a new account cause you would lose your old contacts. In this case you can create an extra mail address.

An extra mail address is a special kind of profile that you can use specifically with Yahoo! Mail.
It is a second Yahoo! Mail address that you can use with your existing Yahoo! Mail account. It’s not a separate Yahoo! ID, and it’s not a separate Yahoo! Mail account. It’s just another address you can use to send and receive email, and any messages you get go into the same Inbox you already use.

If you already have other profiles set up, you can choose to turn one of them into your extra mail address. At this point the extra address will act as a valid email address and will have all the features of a regular profile. You will have a single inbox for your yahoo email address and the extra address and you will be able to select the from one of them as sender address address when you compose a new email.

To create an extra mail address

• Login into your email account
• Click Options in the upper-right corner of your Mail page and select Mail Options.
• From the list on the left, click Accounts.
• The second section of this page is “Extra Mail Address.” Click Get Started and follow the instructions to create an extra mail address.