MSI N560GTX-Ti Twin Frozr II/OC Review

The MSI isn’t just a Hawk with a GTX 560 Ti GPU slapped on instead of a GTX 460, though. Some power delivery and overclocking features have been disabled – you can only overvolt the GPU of this card, for example – but the card retains its 7+1-phase power delivery. This theoretically enables the card to deliver significantly more power to the GPU, allowing for aggressive overvolting using MSI’s excellent Afterburner overclocking utility. Some of the more superfluous features such as the manual voltage readout headers have also been removed from this card compared to the Hawk, but the vast majority of people won’t miss them. As the MSI uses a custom PCB, full-cover waterblocks won't be compatible either.

Alongside the upgraded PCB, MSI has also chosen to top this card with the excellent Twin Frozr II cooler. Two 6mm and two 8mm nickel-plated copper heatpipes emanate from the GPU contact plate and run through a huge and tightly packed aluminium fin stack that runs the length of the card.

Recessed into the heatsink are two 80mm fans, blowing air down through the fins and over the card’s PCB and 1GB of GDDR5 memory. This is a similar, but expanded, setup to the reference GTX 560 Ti 1GB cooler, but still has the downside that it exhausts waste heat into your case rather than out of it. The Twin Frozr II cooler also lacks the aluminium cooling plate for the memory and power circuitry. In the past we’ve found the Twin Frozr II cooler to be effective as well as quiet, so we’re not overly concerned by this omission.

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Know all about Chinese Dwarf Hamsters

Chinese dwarf hamsters has their origin in the deserts of Northern China and Mongolia. Cricetus Griseu is the scientific name of the Chinese dwarf hamsters. The popularity of the Chinese dwarf hamsters as a pet animal is not as great as their cousins – the Russian dwarf hamsters.

The Chinese dwarf hamsters usually have a life span of 2-3 years on an average. The length of their body is approximately 10-12cm with female being more sturdy and long than the males. They also possess a long tail of 3cm. The body colour of the Chinese dwarf hamsters are greyish brown. Almost all the Chinese dwarf hamsters have a prominent black strip that runs down its spine; have a white underside and a matching spot on the head. They mostly belong to the group of rat-like hamsters.

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How to take care of your Dwarf Hamster….

Tiny, cute, vivacious and robust dwarf hamster make amazing pets. However, you need to devote a lot of your time to take care of the little ones.

A Dwarf hamster is a delicate creature but at the same time they can be pretty fierce. They will seize the slightest opportunity to escape. Hence, when you choose to buy a cage, plastic cage or aquarium is preferable because it is enclosed on all sides. Today, the availability of tubular habitats for dwarf hamster has made their stay comfortable. 10-20 gallon tank or wire cage is also a good option. Dwarf hamsters are very active in nature, and they like to run about and play. Hence, keeping a wheel inside their small habitat is a must. Study shows that a typical hamster can run about five miles on their wheel.

A 2-3 inches substrate is a must for every cage, plastic cage or aquarium. It will help them to execute their favourite actives like burrowing, digging etc. Owners should clean the substrate on a regular basis. Dwarf hamster has the habit of making small nest out of this substrate. Other nesting supplies like paper towels, cotton, shredded paper or even tissues can be given. Providing them with a nesting box is also a good idea. They are basically shy animals and would prefer to stay in the privacy of their nest.

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Man narrowly escapes death after pet hamster bite

A father of two was almost killed after he was nipped by his daughter's pet hamster.

Ashley Green, 51, suffered an extreme allergic reaction to the bite after he tried to stop pet rodent Sydney from falling through a crack in the floor.

The frightened hamster sunk it's tiny teeth into Mr Green's thumb and palm and within minutes he had turned grey and begun making a gargling sound.

Mr Green has a severe allergic reaction to a hamster bite

His horrified wife, Michelle, 45, hurriedly dialled 999. Describing the dramatic ordeal she said: "Ashley was bleeding. Then his face went white and he said he felt itchy all over.

"Within seconds he began to wheeze. I knew straight away he must be allergic to the hamster bite because the previous year he had suffered a massive anaphylactic reaction to penicillin.

"Doctors warned he could develop allergies to anything. It meant we had to keep EpiPens - shots of adrenalin - in case of any unexpected reaction, and this was definitely it.

"He sank to the floor. I was so scared I pulled off his jeans. I plunged the EpiPen into his flesh - but he didn't react.

"His eyes were fluttering shut and it seemed like I was losing him."

Paramedics spent 10 minutes at the family home in Evesham, Worcs, trying to revive stricken Ashley with a host of drugs.

Michelle said: "One of them just turned to me and said: 'We can't seem to keep his blood pressure up'.

"All I could do was tap his face frantically. I was telling him to breathe, and begging him not to die.

"As we raced through the night in the ambulance, all I had to cling to was my prayers. Then as we pulled into the hospital, Ashley's eyelids began to flicker open.

"He had started to come round and I just broke down in relieved sobs. He clutched my hand and said: 'It'll take more than a hamster to finish me off'. Then he smiled."

It took doctors four days to stabilise Ashley's blood pressure, but he survived his bizarre brush with death.

Paramedic Stuart Philp said: "It was a highly unusual situation, We got the initial call to an allergic reaction but we didn't realise it was from a hamster until we got there.

"Calls to allergic reactions are fairly common but it's usually wasp or bee stings or sometimes people are allergic to medication. It's just a case of a particular hamster and a particular man ? it's very unlucky."

Tests later showed that Ashley was allergic to proteins in hamster saliva.

Now Sydney, who was bought as a gift for their daughters Annie and Sarah, has been sent packing to a relative's to live.

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Virident Validates New Strategy for Startups

There’s a hot formula for hardware startups these days: Take standard components that are declining steadily in price, and offer proprietary chips and software that make them work much better.

That’s the path being pursued by Virident Systems, a Silicon Valley company that plans to offer its own server systems as well as sell technology to much larger server makers.

The company’s chief executive is Raj Parekh, who held executive titles at Sun Microsystems in the 1990s and also was a co-founder of Silicon Graphics. He traces Virident’s existence to the fact that the design of most servers stacking up in computer rooms evolved years before the Internet. They often have massive number-crunching power, Parekh says, but aren’t particularly good at the main thing they are purchased to do–answer Web queries.

As a result, companies buy more servers than they need and only about 20% of the capacity of each machine is used, he says. That means companies also are wasting a lot of money on electricity and labor to keep extra hardware running. The response of using virtualization software–which improves utilization by allowing servers to run multiple operating systems–often isn’t workable for jobs where speed is paramount, Parekh adds.

“The current servers are just not correct,” Parekh says. “The more of them are stacked up, the inefficiency keeps multiplying.”

Virident couldn’t approach the problem with a clean sheet of paper. Industry-standard servers–those based on the ubiquitous x86 chips from Intel and Advanced Micro Devices–are too entrenched. So Virident opted to accelerate their performance. Among other things, it developed chips to allow such servers to store data on chips known as NOR flash memory–which are better-known for storing programs in cellphones–instead of on slower disk drives.

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Virident PCIe SSD delivers 320,000 read IOPS with 24-year service life

Add Virident to the growing list of companies that have introduced SSDs in the form of PCIe expansion cards to achieve higher storage throughput. The company’s just-introduced tachIOn Drive delivers 200,000 4-kbyte read/write IOPS for 75/25% read/write workloads. The SSD board incorporates a fan-cooled Flash controller and eight Flash modules to create a 200-Gbyte SSD. The Flash modules can be stacked and the board accommodates as many as eight additional Flash modules to create a 400-Gbyte, single-board SSD. These Flash modules can be added or replaced in the field for upgrade or repair purposes. Virident has reportedly qualified flash modules from Samsung, Toshiba, and Micron. According to NetworkWorld, the tachIOn Drive is Virident’s first “broadly launched” product although the company has been developing products for “about” three years.

PCIe drives require an extra software layer to make them look like drives to the OS. The downside of this requirement is that there’s an extra layer of software. However, there are several upsides. The first is raw performance. Peak random read performance for the tachIOn Drive is 320,000 IOPS for 4-kbyte random reads. Although the write performance is not specified in the data sheet, Flash write performance is always slower and the 200,000 IOPS rating for the 75/25% read/write workload suggests that the tachIOn Drive’s write speed is considerably below 200,000 IOPS.

The second advantage of a PCIe storage software driver is that it permits extensive processing of the storage data to optimize the mix and sequence of the read and write streams and to boost reliability and performance of the SSD through wear-leveling and advanced error-correction routines tailored specifically to NAND Flash failure mechanisms. As a result, Virident claims a 24-year lifetime for the tachIOn Drive with 5 terabytes worth of writes per day. The uncorrectable bit-error rate is 10-17. Because some of this management software runs on the server’s host processor, the software driver’s performance only improves as server processors get faster. One disadvantage of this approach, however, is that the drivers run only on x86 processors—for now.

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Squeezing Linux Mint Debian Edition

Linux Mint Debian Edition (LMDE) is awesome! Based on Debian Testing it is a rolling distro. That means if you are running LMDE you will always have an up-to-date system running, and as the saying and experiences go, Debian testing base is more stable than the so called final/stable releases of most other distros. But if you are a stability freak like me, you can make your Linux Mint Debian stable by pointing the apt sources.lst to squeeze. This ways you won't have to install point updates of applications every now and then. You will always have the most stable and workable system for quite a long period, till squeeze becomes obsolete. Here is how I did it.

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iBall NetTop 009 Cabinet - Flaw in the Design!

For long I was in the opinion that iBall is a leader/pioneer in IT products. My last encounter with its NetTop 009 (for my Intel D410PT board) proved that false in many ways, most important ones among them are: shoddy product quality and dumb customer support.

Here are the specs:

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PCLinuxOS 2010.12 Gnome - Rushed out too early

As I've written on a few occasions in the past, PCLinuxOS is probably the best small distro around. It shows what can be done by a small development team, with limited resources. Not a simple deal, especially when you go against big companies with lots of money. Still, it never quite managed to break through into the big league. There was always a bit of homebrew that would not make it reach the critical mass of users.

Over the years, PCLinuxOS showed a steady improvement, including hardware, the look and feel, the choice of programs, and more. Gnome always took a backbench compared to the mainstream KDE version, but it was a stellar work of art in the 2009 release. Well, it's time to see what the Gnome edition offers, once more, almost two years later. Tested and deployed on a 32-bit T60p machine with 2GB RAM and an ATI card.

Live session

There's only one question asked before you reach the desktop. You just need to setup your keyboard. And then, you enter a dark-themed session, which has subtly hinted KDE motifs, with a more square kind of look.

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PCLinuxOS 2010 Review

In the last couple of years I have tested many Linux distros. I was never a diehard fan of any of them, kept an open mind and was willing to simply use the one that best fit my needs. Fedora, Mandriva, OpenSuSE, Ubuntu, Linux Mint, Debian and others have been put to the test at some point or another. PCLinuxOS was one of the few popular ones I had not tested. Being based off Mandriva, I was assuming it would be similar to the Linux Mint - Ubuntu case, so no surprises expected. After all, I had tested several Mandriva releases, so what could be that interesting about PCLinuxOS? Now, let me tell you... boy, was I wrong!

Not since I tested Ubuntu for the first time have I been so excited and pleased with any Linux distro release. That says a lot, because back then I was using Linux for the first time after years of using Windows almost exclusively, so there was a lot of being in awe due to being a "first timer". After then, no matter what distro I tried, I always felt there was something missing and that kept pulling me back to Ubuntu, which was best balanced in my opinion. After a couple days using PCLinuxOS 2010 I must say that such 1st place in the ranking may change.

FEATURES

The PCLinuxOS 2010 list of FEATURES is very impressive. Nothing surprising there, all feature lists are when any new release comes out. That's probably why testing a release after reading such lists may result in a bit of a letdown, for the end result usually never matches the expectation. This time around it was pretty much the opposite, which is very significant considering I tested Ubuntu 10.04 just days ago.

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Is Centos Dieing?

There must be serious issues within the project though the core personnel don't acknowledge it!

RHEL 6 was released on 2010-11-10, RHEL 5.6 was released on 2011-01-13 and RHEL 6.1 Beta was released on 2011-03-22. Both Scientific Linux and OEL have released v. 5.6 and 6. CentOS counterparts are nowhere to be found. With every date slipping seems CentOS 6 will see the light of the day sometime in May 2011. Probably Redhat will push 6.1 through the door by then. The long delay (almost 5 months) in bringing out v.6 has triggered some black-comedy posts in the CentOS fora such as : "The 'C' in CEntOS means 'Closed'!" and "Things are getting from EL6 to HELL6.

I don't know why such annoying delay in rebuilding packages from a stable upstream. CentOS 6.0 development is not development proper, but the rebuilding of some hundreds of packages. CentOS has an easier job of doing a release. Projects such as Debian and FreeBSD do a heck of a lot more. It's multiple times more difficult to release a new FreeBSD or Debian than it is to do a rebuild. Wonder how long it would take to rebuild the system if CentOS base system would have the number of packages that Debian has. Both Oracle and Scientific Linux also do a lot more than just debranding and recompiling, but they don't slip the dates like CentOS, and if at all they do, there's due communication for the same.

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