There are currently 2 DirectX versions in the market: DX9 (compatible with XP and Vista) and DX10 (used only by Vista).

Most games developed today are built using DirectX 9 dahil unang-una, matagal tayong minahal ng Windows XP. Pangalawa, konting gamers lang nagmamahal kay vista kaya ang mga developer eh napilitan pa ring gumamit ng DX9.

Then there are some games built using DirectX 10 but they still have DirectX 9 compatibility like Crysis. In fact mas mabilis pa nga ang DX9 version ng Crisys kaysa sa DX10 kaya konti lang ang mga games na ginawa gamit ito.

And now that Windows 7 is around the corner, we now have DirectX 11 API. Isa na namang pasakit sa mga game developer at pambutas ng bulsa sa ating mga gamer.

There are 4 major games announced that will support DirectX 11. They are Stalker, Dirt 2, Aliens versus Predator and Battleforge.

For us to use DX11 games that will arrive soon, we first need to have, of course, Windows 7 operating system. Windows 7 will cost around 7,000 pesos mga kapatid kaya be a good boy and girl na sa mga parents. Pakabait din tayo kay ninong at ninang lalo na at papalapit ang pasko.

For gamers who are into Vista na, you are lucky kasi Microsoft will release DX11 soon for Vista. It will arrive anytime soon after Windows 7 is launched. Sad though for XP users since stuck kayo sa DX9 for the rest of your gaming life kaya you should start considering upgrading your OS to vista or much better to 7.

Now that you have a proper operating system, ito na naman panibagong pambutas ng bulsa… you will need a new and shiny video card that supports DirectX 11.

As of this writing, only ATI supports DirectX 11 through their Radeon 5000 series products. Nvidia will follow soon, maybe next year with Fermi based GPUs.

ATI currently has Radeon 5870 – the fastest and most expensive single GPU card on the market, 5850, 5770 and 5750.

Those new video cards will cost you an arm and leg to acquire. Syempre walang problema kung mabait si mommy and daddy hahaha. For those quite unfortunate gamers, pagbutihin nyo ang pag-aaral and hopefully matuwa sa atin parents natin at bigyan tayo ng reward nyahahhaa.

So here’s my recap, DirectX 11 technology is arriving. It is the next big thing for us adek gamers. To enjoy this wonderful grace from the generous Steve Ballmer (sya po ang leader ng Microsoft ngayon), we have to purchase a new operating system such as Vista or Windows 7. We will also need a new video card. Buy only ATI Radeon 5000 series cards since the old 4000 series cards only supports DirectX 10.1. Same with Nvidias old and current products.

Intel announced Moblin 2.0, a stripped-down distribution of Linux optimized for smaller screens on netbooks and mobile Internet devices (MIDs). The new Linux flavor is fine-tuned to run on Atom powered netbooks to maximize its power efficiency and performance.

Netbooks such as Asus Eee PC and Lenovo’s Ideapad S10 are low cost laptops with under-powered Atom processor, maximum 2GB memory, 7 inch to 10.2 inch display and has Microsoft Windows XP as standard.  Early netbooks were run by different Linux distributions such as Sandros and Novell’s Suise.

Intel placed a new user interface to the beta which is optimized for netbook’s 10″ screen.The new UI aggregates social networks under a single interface, which should make interacting with friends easier, Fisher said. He also added that Moblin incorporates features that take advantage of Atom’s sleep state to extend battery.

Development of the Moblin OS was initiated by Intel in 2007 and was last month handed over to the nonprofit Linux Foundation, though Intel continues to contribute to the efforts.

The beta version of the Moblin OS is available on Moblin’s Web site.

Brandon LeBlanc confirmed the details on Microsoft blog about the availability.

I’m pleased to share that the RC is on track for April 30th for download by MSDN and TechNet subscribers. Broader, public availability will begin on May 5th.

For those who are curious, Windows 7 is the next flagship operating system by Microsoft. It features vastly improved kernel upgrades which can be evidently felt by its speed and compatibility compared to its predecessor Windows Vista.

Windows 7 beta was tested and proved fast and stable even on underpowered netbooks running 1.6GHz Atom microprocessor with 1GB of RAM. upgrading your system to at least 2GB of RAM is highly recommended though.

Little did we know about the alternatives. Of which, AMD is offering its Athlon and Phenom processors. AMD might not be able to match the power and efficiency of Intel’s Core 2 processors but nevertheless they are offering cheaper and more power efficient products that still provides decent speed for gaming, office and multimedia.

Yesterday sparked another aggressive marketing strategy by AMD by launching their Fusion suite of utilities and information for its upcoming processor – The Fusion.

The first utility they released is designed to speed up your gaming experience.  Called Fusion for Gaming tool, it promises to add more speed for your gaming by automatically turning off extra services running on your Vista operating system.  This includes your instant messenger, antivirus and antispyware, and other bunch of applications and utilities that you never need while playing.

Fusion for Gaming tool also automatically overclocks your AMD CPU and Graphics Card but not of course to the extent of fyring your chips.  It is smart enough to detect the heat around your PC to reasonably pick the best setting for overclocking.

Unfortunately, Fusion for Gaming tool will only run for people who have AMD CPU and ATI graphics cards. There’s no information yet if AMD will allow its software to run on hardware manufactured by Intel and nVidia.

Apart from the Fusion for Gaming tool, AMD is also preparing Fusion processors to succeed its Phenom processors.  Fusion will run best on AM3 socket motherboards and will support DDR3 memory modules. Fusion will be backward compatible with AM2 and AM2+ motherboard but if you want to enjoy its full glory then I suggest you use AM3 motherboards.  Expected release of the new processor will be on late 2009.

If you have AMD and ATI system then you can download a beta version of the utility here, found on the new AMD Fusion site.

Google follows with the surprise release of its browser Chrome.  Though lacking in customizability found in other browser, nevertheless it boasts fast browsing and minimalistic design.  Chrome also has the Tab Isolation feature found in IE8.

In retaliation, Mozilla previewed their new SeaMonkey improvement for JavaScript support.  No longer will the browser interpret java codes but with SeaMonkey, JavaScriptwill be compiled for faster execution.  This resulted in great speed improvement in sites that heavily rely on JavaScript.

But Opera will not sit idly by watching the big guys showcase their new technologies.  Today Opera Software released Opera 9.60 Beta 1 with new and improved features.

The list of new features and improvements are as follows:

OPERA LINK
Custom search engines and typed history (typed history is only the history you explicitly type or select from the address bar) are now joining bookmarks, speed dial, personal bar, and notes in Opera Link.

FEED PREVIEW
Now you can preview an RSS/Atom feed before subscribing.

OPERA MAIL
Low Bandwidth Mode
Low Bandwidth Mode is a setting on mail accounts that makes Opera Mail use as little bandwidth as possible.

• For IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol), this means that Opera will only synchronise new messages and it will not fetch message attachments unless requested
• For POP (Post Office Protocol), Opera will not fetch more than the first 100 lines of a message unless requested

Follow/Ignore threads and contacts
Follow and Ignore are new features for users that receive numerous messages. It makes it easier to dismiss unimportant messages and easier to recognise important messages.
Activate this feature by selecting Follow/Ignore in the email context menu (or click the message subject header), then select either Follow Thread or Ignore Thread. Also, you can click the names in the From or To headers to enable the following or ignoring of contacts.

Go To Thread
You can now also use “Go to thread” which means that you can view only the messages from that thread. This is useful for those that employ flat view.

Opera out of the box has the same functionality as Firefox with 40+ modules.  This makes it more ideal and stable for people who wants a browser with full of features upon installation.

Opera has built in email support and IRC client built into its browser.

You may download Opera 9.60 Beta 1 at http://www.opera.com/download/?ver=9.60b1

Features improved from 7.10

I am not yet familiar with this featurs but I’m sure whatever this is it will be beneficial especially to those who plan to migrate from Microsoft Windows XP/Vista OS to Linux. The improvements may also help your gaming experience especially the improvements they made on Xorg 7.3. I do hope that there will be a Gamma slider to increase gamma output of my aging monitor. Bleh, di ko ma enjoy ang Alien Arena na na download ko for Ubuntu because the environment is dark and the game itself doesn’t have gamma adjustment. I hope I could just search for the config file and adjust the settings there but I am no programmer and I am afraid I might mess things up. Other improvements are as follows.

• Xorg 7.3
• Linux kernel 2.6.24
• GNOME 2.22
• PolicyKit
• PulseAudio
• Firefox 3 Beta 4
• Transmission
• Vinagre
• Brasero
• World Clock Applet
• Inkscape
• Virtualization
• ActiveDirectory integration
• iSCSI support
• Firewall
• Memory Protection
• Wubi
• umenu
• Installation

You may download Ubuntu 8.04 Beta at their official website http://www.ubuntu.com and test it. Maybe you could find more things to improve and help release a better operating system.

Note: Mabuhay ang open source!~

As for my experience, there are no major differences before and after Service Pack 1. Though my Windows Media Player is smoother now. It used to hang all the time. Memory allocation is better too. For a full list of the supposed “improvements” and changes, take a look here CLICK.

Now on to the not so good news. When installing SP1, it does warn you that it causes problems with proprietary drivers and issues a warning. Kakatakot nga eh, pinapa back-up ka pa ng files. Payo narin sa inyo mga kapatid, mag back-up nga kayo. There have been lots of reports on Vista breaking their computing experience (CLICK ) and I was worried it might happen to me to. Pero sige, for the sake of the community I installed it.

So far, my experience has been a bit nightmarish. After installation an old IDE Hard Disk Drive which I use to archive my files stopped working. Also, I lost a major boot file that will allow vista to boot! I had to do a manual repair and restore the files to boot again! Also the errors that I used to get like driver timeouts (especially Nvidia video drivers) are still present. And, certain incompatibilites with other programs like the New York Times reader where I get my financial/business reports.

All in all, Vista Service Pack 1 isn’t that convincing to make others switch to Vista from XP. In fact, its twitchy at best. For those who are tech savvy, go for vista if you’d like to tame it. If you’re not, stay with XP and avoid sleepless nights and bluescreen nightmares.

So a lot of us have said that they’ll only upgrade to Vista when the service pack 1 comes out. Service Pack 1 is a HUGE patch that will hopefully fix most if not all the problems in Vista. It was scheduled to be released on the last week of January or first week of February this year. Sadly, wala parin! May mga Vista users diyan nang-iinit na sa inip pero di parin lumalabas!

Sabi ng Microsoft First Quarter of 2008 daw. They didn’t even specify an exact date! But rumors have been circulating around the web that its on Feb. 18-20. No confirmations yet from Bill Gate’s people.

So sa mga nagVista na, (lalo na yung Vista na di galing kay Jack Sparrow – alam niyo na kung ano yun) konting pasensiya muna mga kapatid.

Alrighty then mga kapatid, first and foremost, HUWAG MUNA KAYO KUMUHA NG VISTA! Yan, klaro na yan ha. We have many reasons why we say you shouldn’t get vista yet. Isa isahin natin ang mga dahilan mga kapatid.

Why not get vista? First, the entire PC community is still hooked on Windows XP. Software and hardware being developed previously had XP in mind when they were being made. Although many hardware developers now have signed on for vista and are now making drivers for it, it will still take a while for the bugs to be kicked out of these systems. Software on the other hand could be a bit easier in theory. Dito po pumapasok ang sinasabi nating “backward compatibility”. Vista is supposed to be able to run XP software with ease. This is because it was made to run some (some – not all) software written for XP. Don’t take the risk and try to figure out if vista can run it or not.

Second, Vista itself is buggy. As with most software, the first release is always laden with bugs, there is no exception. Grabbing a copy of vista now is like buying a half-cooked isaw (chicken intestine barbeque). Sa tingin mo masarap, pero pagkain mo, maya’t maya masakit na tiyan mo. Wait for it to cook first. Microsoft releases service packs for these things and I suggest you guys wait for the service pack to be released before getting vista.

Third, Vista is an operating system designed to run in a 64-bit computing environment. We mostly use 32-bit computing so that alone is a problem. I don’t want to get too technical and go on about it but this is worth mentioning as well (para sa ating mga techie na kapatid).

Bottomline, get Vista later. Mahirap na mag experimento lalo na kung may pera sa usapan. I-patch mo nalang windows XP mo mas masaya ka pa. I’ve always espoused a wait a see look when it comes to operating systems ever since the Windows ME fiasco. (Alala niyo yun? Yung Windows version na sobrang may topak). I repeat, don’t buy half-cooked isaw – maawa kayo sa sarili niyo. Tingnan niyo tuloy gutom na ako… bili nga ng isaw.