January News and Updates.

[Justin]

Here is some of the news for January 2008;

[Justin]

Radiohead made a bold move by offering its latest album as a name-your-own-price digital download, eschewing a record label entirely.  According to ComScore, which tracks digital sales, 1.2 million people downloaded the album in October.  Of these, roughly 60% chose 'free' as their price. The remainder paid an average of $8 in the US, and $6 worldwide.
 Yet, despite most useres getting the album for free (and at least another 500,000 more pirating it), Radiohead is stil looking to make a tidy sum: Without a label the band gets a much bigger slice of the pie.  And the hard copy of the album is due to hit stores sometime in the next month.

[Justin]

Next-gen AMD, after months of delay and name rejiggering. Amd has finally unveiled its next-gen Phenom CPU, but not without concern.  The company didn't provide any media outlets with early previews, opting instead to let the press touch the chip only under controlled circumstances just days before the launch.  That prompted suspicions of damage control, but company officials told Maximum PC that "the lack of early reviews was due to a shortage of parts in the factories". 
  Rob Enderle, principal analyst with the Enderle Group, said it's "also quite possible that AMD is borrowing a page from Apple's playbook."  Instead of dribbling out the info months in advance, the company might just be trying to hit with the hype all at once.  The Phenom is a Quad-core based, running an L3 cache and is backward-compatible with the socket AM2.  The company's fastest part planned for release, the Phenom 9700, runs at 2.4GHz, the 9600 runs at 2.3GHz, and the 9500 is clocked at 2.2GHz.  That puts the chip on par with Intel's low-end quad-core, and well shy of Intel's fastest CPUs

[Justin]

Maximum PC ran an article in last months mag, that was about tuning M$ Windows Vista to make it a little bit easier to use, there were several options and while every little bit helps, at the end of the aricle was a section on how to downgrade to XP with the caption of "Head back to what actually works."  I don't want to use vista, and have no intention of ever doing so, but for those of you who may have gotten a new pc with it pre-installed, and want to 'clean it up'  By ALL means, take a look at this, it may just save your life!

[Justin]

I saw this case and thought, holy crap, I don't even own that many usb devices!  This case not only gives you enough ports to power your house, but gives you 2 additional mic ports on the front as well!  What a bonus!