Upgrading

Transform a X800 Pro to X800 XT… The Register

Ask ATI about it, and you’ll be told there’s no way to turn a Radeon X800 Pro into its higher-powered sibling, the Radeon X800 XT.

Ask a team of Russian hackers, however, and they’ll say that, yes, it is possible to make the modification.

Their investigation of the GPUs appears to have revealed a single resistor on the XT package that’s missing from the Pro. Reconnecting the two pins on the Pro chip, and copying an XT-based card’s on-board firmware over to the Pro-based board seems to enable the four extra pixel pipelines active in the 16-pipeline XT but disabled in the 12-pipeline Pro.

Website DigitLife, for one, has tried the procedure and claims success. It also managed to overclock the Pro to XT levels: a 520MHz core and 1.12GHz memory.

LOL. RIAA, you card.The Register

Not content with asking for an arm and a leg from consumers and artists, the music industry now wants your fingerprints, too. The RIAA is hoping that a new breed of music player which requires biometric authentication will put an end to file sharing…

…”In practical terms, VeriTouch’s breakthrough in anti-piracy technology means that no delivered content to a customer may be copied, shared or otherwise distributed because each file is uniquely locked by the customer’s live fingerprint scan,” claims the company.

Errmmm… right. I don’t think mp3 comes with built-in support for encoding a fingerprint as part of the meta-tag, so… that means the new player will probably have to use a proprietary format. The biometric component will probably increase the cost price of the unit. Encoding fingerprints into all the songs will increase the filesizes. Yes it will work.

THE FUTURE IS HERE!!! Wiscousin Technology Network

Jim Dumesic, a University of Wisconsin-Madison professor of chemical engineering and co-founder of Virent, explained how at the Nanotechnology Conference last Thursday. Dumesic and Randy Cortright, another UW-Madison chemical engineer, have discovered a way to turn sugar into hydrogen, right in the engine of a car.

Sweet car!… ok that was uncalled for… sorry.

THE vending machine for terrorists. Visalia Times-Delta

TULARE — The discovery of an explosive device in a Horizon Outlet Factory Center soda machine prom-pted authorities to shut down several stores for two hours Monday afternoon.

Tulare police said it’s unknown how long the device, disassembled by the Tulare County Sheriff’s Department bomb squad, had been in the machine. Authorities said it was a pipe bomb.

“One pipe bomb and a packet of anthrax please.” “Would you like fries with that?”