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AMD announced today that Hector Ruiz is stepping down from his position as chief executive officer in favor of President and COO Dirk Meyer, who was elected by the board of directors to fill the newly opened position; in turn, will become executive chairman of AMD and chair of the board of directors. Ruiz, 62, joined AMD as president and chief operating officer in January 2000 and became AMD’s chief executive officer on April 25, 2002. “AMD has fundamentally altered the industry landscape, leading the innovation agenda while delivering greater choice and better experiences for our customers and users,” said Ruiz. “Dirk is a gifted leader who possesses the right skills and experience to continue driving AMD and the industry forward in new, compelling directions. I am placing the company in excellent hands.” [Neowin]

“Dirk’s election to CEO is the final phase of a two-year succession plan developed and implemented jointly by AMD’s board of directors and executive team,” said Robert Palmer, lead independent director. “Under Hector’s strong leadership, AMD drove the industry adoption of pervasive 64-bit and multicore computing, became a trusted enterprise-class partner to leading technology suppliers and significantly expanded its global footprint in high-growth markets like China.“

Intel gives users the tools to squeeze extra performance from their systems by overclocking the processor, but don’t expect the warranty to cover you if things go wrong. Overclocking capabilities are a main feature of Intel’s 4 series chipset, said Eric Mentzer, Intel’s vice president and general manager of the Graphics Development Group, in an interview at the Computex exhibition in Taipei
“We spend a lot of time working with our motherboard partners to figure out all the hidden bits inside, helping them figure out how to bring the best out of these platforms,” Mentzer said.That same ability is available to users, but it hasn’t always been. Intel used to lock down its chips to prevent overclocking, but the company’s mindset has changed. Overclockers are now viewed as an important market segment, rather than troublemakers.
View: The full story @ PCWorld

It has been brought to my attention that PlayStation Underground held a secret focus group earlier this year. A small group of PS3 owners were sent to a facility in ****** ****, California to test a new PlayStation product in development.

Once inside the testing facility, these PS3 owners were shown a mini-tripod that stood about 12 inches high. and what looked like 4 black PS3 “wiimotes”.  Well they were essentially “wiimotes” for the PS3, but didn’t need a “nunchuck” attachment.  I will refer to them as “PS3motes” for now on.

You can have up to 4 of these “PS3motes” connected at one time. A demonstrator at this focus group was there showing off the “PS3motes” capabilities, along with some mini-games to play.  The mini games ranged from tennis, to fencing, to a “really really cool” paintball game.  The demonstrator even used the “PS3mote” to play “Quake” on his laptop.

The “PS3mote” is said to be incredibly responsive and accurate.  When the demonstrator crouched while playing the paintball game, the character on screen did as well. [PSLifeStyle]

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It wasn’t exactly Minority Report but Bill Gates’ technology demonstration at the company’s CEO Summit earlier Wednesday may be remembered years from now as a harbinger of the end for the keyboard and mouse era. Not today. Maybe not tomorrow. But soon enough. (Cue Winston Churchill here about how this is not the end, the beginning of the end, but perhaps, it’s the end of the beginning.)
As Gates demoed a 4-foot-by-6-foot prototype called TouchWall, there was little resemblance to Tom Cruise’s futuristic data juggling in that 2002 sci-fi performance as he moved 3D screens around with simple hand gestures. Making what is likely his last appearance as master of ceremonies at this annual conclave of corporate heavy hitters, Gates used the show-and-tell session to offer a prediction.
In the future, he said, all surfaces will feature “an inexpensive screen display capability and software that sees what you’re doing there so that it’s completely interactive.” [news.com]

Paul Hollywood, Creative Lead for the upcoming MotorStorm: Pacific Rift, recently described his experience in working with the PlayStation 3, labeling Sony’s latest home console as “fantastic.”
Hollywood noted how impressed he has been with the console after the team at Evolution Studios managed to circumvent the machine’s notoriously “tricky” architecture.
“PS3 is just fantastic. It’s tricky to develop on, but that’s just a learning curve,” he said. “You work that out and you cut corners and squeeze more and more out of it with each game you do.”
“I remember one minute in time when I just sat there and thought, ‘I can’t believe what this console is doing.’ I’ve been making videogames for 18 years now and I’m quite jaded, but I was like, ‘bloody hell, have you seen this?’ And it’s just getting more and more like that.”
Although Hollywood conceded that things would inevitably plateau at some point, he remained highly optimistic at the console’s potential for the foreseeable future.
“I’m sure it will come to point where it plateaus and [the jump between] our games will become smaller, but at the minute, because it’s a whole different architecture and you have the SPUs running in parallel, it’s a different way of development and we’re just cultivating different ways to use the SPUs, different ways of feeding them different technologies and getting different results out of it,” he added.
“It’s not necessarily trial and error but you try something for a week, which then gives you another idea and you try something else, so we’re still on that curve at the moment, going up and the future looks really good.” [Next Gen]

Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation is in talks with Microsoft about joining in its contested bid for Yahoo, according to people involved in the discussions. The combination, which would join Yahoo, Microsoft’s MSN and News Corporation’s MySpace, would create a behemoth that would upend the Internet landscape.
The talks are a surprising twist in the two-month-long takeover story that began when Microsoft made a $44.6 billion bid for Yahoo. Yahoo has resisted Microsoft’s overtures, contending that it will not negotiate unless Microsoft raises its offer. Yahoo, which wants to remain independent, has been in a desperate search for white knights, holding conversations with Time Warner’s AOL and News Corporation.
If News Corporation throws its weight behind Microsoft’s offer, that could allow Microsoft to raise its bid, putting even more pressure on Yahoo and its shareholders. At the same time, the alignment of Microsoft and News Corporation would remove a possible alternative for Yahoo, leaving it with fewer opportunities to escape Microsoft’s grasp.
View: Full Article @ The New York Times

The fact that Microsoft has relaxed its antipiracy mechanism built into Windows Vista concomitantly with the release of Service Pack 1 failed to stop hackers from providing a crack for the latest version of Windows Genuine Advantage Validation. Various reports point out that Genuine Advantage Validation and Notifications versions 1.7.69.1 (1.7.0069.1) and 1.7.69.2 released in March 2008, following the March 18 availability of Windows Vista SP1 through Windows Update and the Microsoft Download Center, have been cracked.
The workaround is designed to be integrated with pirated copies of Windows XP and Windows Vista in order to render useless the WGA Validation mechanism. According to the reports, applying the WGA crack will permit users of counterfeit versions of Windows to access and download items from Windows Update, Microsoft Download Center and Microsoft Update. The pirated operating systems with the cracked WGA will pass all validations on Microsoft’s websites and offer anything from updates to applications that are restricted to users of genuine operating systems only.
View: Full Article @ Softpedia

It may be the quickest $10,000 Charlie Miller ever earned.
He took the first of three laptop computers — and a $10,000 cash prize — Thursday after breaking into a MacBook Air at the CanSecWest security conference’s PWN 2 OWN hacking contest.
Show organizers offered a Sony Vaio, Fujitsu U810, and the MacBook as prizes, saying that they could be won by anybody at the show who could find a way to hack into each of them and read the contents of a file on the system using a previously undisclosed “0day” attack.
Within 2 minutes, he directed the contest’s organizers to visit a Web site that contained his exploit code, which then allowed him to seize control of the computer, as about 20 onlookers cheered him on. He was the first contestant to attempt an attack on any of the systems.
Miller was quickly given a nondisclosure agreement to sign, and he’s not allowed to discuss particulars of his bug until the contest’s sponsor, TippingPoint, can notify the vendor.
Contest rules state that Miller could only take advantage of software that was preinstalled on the Mac, so the flaw he exploited must have been accessible by, or possibly inside, Apple’s Safari browser. [Yahoo! News]

University of Pennsylvania tech staffers are advising faculty and students not to upgrade to the new service pack for Microsoft’s Windows Vista operating system.
Windows Vista SP1 Is having a tough time getting into the Ivy League.
University of Pennsylvania tech staffers are advising faculty and students not to upgrade their computers to the new service pack for Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT)’s Windows Vista operating system.
The school’s Information Systems & Computing department said it will support Vista SP1 on new systems where it’s preinstalled, but added that it “strongly recommends that all other users adopt a ‘wait and see’ attitude,” according to a newly published department bulletin.
Penn’s ISC department advised “continuing to use previous versions of Windows XP and Windows Vista until after the initial bugs in SP1 are identified and fixed.”
Vista SP1 users have reported numerous glitches since the operating system became widely available on Tuesday. [Informationweek]

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