Today, if you were to go to the Apple front page, you would find that in place of the iPad promotional content is a tribute to an employee who passed away. They have put up a picture of him, along with the following message: “With deep sadness we announce the loss of a member of our corporate family and dear friend, Jerry York. Jerry courageously joined Apple’s Board of Directors in 1997, when many doubted the company’s future, and contributed his extraordinary character, business expertise, and leadership to help guide Apple for over a decade. Jerry was one of a kind – and we’re going to miss him dearly.”

Now that is one great tribute, being featured on Apple’s front page. While many of us may not be familiar with the people behind the scenes of Apple, or most companies for that matter, they do play a big role in each co...

While we haven’t had the largest coverage because of the lack of staffers being able to attend the conference, we have been doing what we can to get some of the most important highlights of MIX here at GeekSmack, but at the time of this writing, MIX is over, and here’s what we saw this year.

Windows Phone 7 in detail

While we got a little look of Windows Phone 7 at Mobile World Congress in February, Microsoft showed off the latest happenings for the new platform, and what they plan to do.

First things first, for those of you who don’t know what I am talking about, Windows Phone 7 Series is the name of the latest and upcoming Windows Phone release for smartphones. While it is technically the 7th major release of the Windows Mobile Platform, Windows Phone 7, unlike Windows Mobile is a completely d...

Tuesday, Intel Announced the release of their 32nm Xeon-based server CPU’s. Dubbing them, “the most secure data center processors”, and for good reasons. The Xeon 5600 series is Intel’s newest flagship server CPU at 32nm, replacing the 5500 series at 45nm.

Unlike the consumers-range “Core i” series, the new Xeon lineup buffs two brand new security features: Intel AES-NI (Advanced Encryption Standard New Instructions) and Intel TXT (Trusted Execution Technology). These two new technologies allow for faster encryption and decryption at the hardware level. Aimed at bringing more confidence to your transactions, including in virtualized cloud environments.

The Intel Xeon 5600 series will come in six and four-core flavors. Intel claims that the six-core 5600 series has a performance boost of up to 60% t...

The guys over at XDA-Developers have managed to do it again, and run Ubuntu on devices such as the HTC Touch Pro2, and the XPERIA X1. What’s most interesting about this story is that everything appears to run normally as it would if you were running it on a netbook, laptop or desktop, the only difference being that there are some things that may or may not work.

While this isn’t a new thing, getting Desktop-class Operating Systems on a mobile device to work is. We’ve seen Android on various Windows Mobile devices using the same method described over at XDA, but nothing like this.

If you’re interes...

Reports have been flooding in from all over the web. The newest NVIDIA WHQL drivers, 196.75, have been pulled from the NVIDIA downloads page, after reports surfaced of fried GPUs. There have been many posts on the NVIDIA forums already with little response. Their initial suspicion of this issue is that of fan speed controls, possibly some sort of malfunction that is still being rooted out.

There is no word yet on if NVIDIA will allow extended RMAs for these happenstances. There is yet no specific cause for these software faults and whether or not they only affect certain models or brands is inconclusive. Most of the time, problems are caused from resource intensive games such as WoW or Crysis.

An NVIDIA Technician has posted a somewhat relaxing comment on the NVIDIA forums:

“We are currently are investigating the matter to determine the appropriate next steps. I'll update the forums of any new developments.”

As per described, it’s highly recommended to uninstall these faulty drivers and use the...

In a move which was quite bold, Microsoft today announced that it would be discontinuing the Essential Business SKU of the Small Business Server line of Windows Server products. While the product was targeted to small businesses, Microsoft noted that they are trying to streamline their portfolio, leaving only the Standard edition left in the Small Business Server product line.

For those interested, or unsure of what Essential Business Server was, it was a suite of tools and services, bundled with Windows Server 2008 Small Business Server, it included Exchange Server and man...

Just when we thought we would never hear anything about Real Networks’ lawsuit against their product RealDVD, which allowed customers to essentially steal DVDs by letting them circumvent copy protection to rip DVDs. The lawsuit, brought fourth by many movie production sites started in 2008, and appears to have been settled.

In a statement, Real Networks noted,

As part of the settlement, RealNetworks will withdraw its pending appeal of the District Court's preliminary injunction.  The parties have agreed to the terms of a permanent injunction that will prohibit RealNetworks from distributing or supporting RealDVD or any other technology that enables the duplication of copyrighted content protected by the Content Scramble System, ...