From Tom's Hardware: It's no secret that making Fermi has been a harder-than-expected task for Nvidia, but the company will officially unveil its finalized product in the GeForce GTX 480 at the end of next week on March 26.

While you can expect to see an announcement at an event at PAX East coupled with plenty of benchmarks, a story posted on Shane Baxtor's site says that retail availability will come after the announcement date.

According to Baxtor, the original retail date was supposed to be March 29 but now that's been moved to April 6.

We reached out to Nvidia for clarification, but we were told to stay tuned to the company's stage show from 6 p.m. to 7 p.m. next Friday. At any rate, hopefully those boxes for Inno3D GeForce GTX 480 were filled with product and ready to greet gamers as soon as possible.

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From X-bit Labs: Intel Corp. this week formally announced availability of six-core microprocessors for desktops as well as servers and/or workstations. The company reportedly indicated that it had shipped more than one hundred thousand of Intel Xeon 5600-series chips with six cores, which means that availability of the processors will be pretty broad.

The new Intel Xeon 5600-series and Intel Core i7-980X central processing units (CPUs) are based on the code-named Westmere micro-architecture (an updated version of Nehalem) and are made using 32nm fabrication technology. The new processors deliver two new security features – Intel advanced encryption standard new instructions (Intel AES-NI), and Intel trusted execution technology (Intel TXT) – that enable faster encryption and decryption performance for more secure transactions and virtualized environments, providing data centers with a stronger foundation for cloud security.

“The Intel Xeon Processor 5600 series will be the backbone of mainstream computing environments. New security capabilities will boost the confidence of IT managers. Improvements in performance, server virtualization and power consumption will foster productivity and efficiency for a broad range of applications ranging from data transactions to workstations performing medical imaging and digital prototyping,” said Kirk Skaugen, vice president and general manager of the Intel architecture group.

In addition to launching new six-core microprocessors based on Westmere micro-architecture, Intel also released several new chips powered by previous-generation Nehalem micro-architecture and made using 45nm fabrication process and a number of quad-core CPUs based on Westmere design. In total, Intel released twelve 32nm Xeon 5600-series chips, five of which sport six processing engines and seven of which are quad-core products.

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From InfoWorld: Phone maker HTC and wireless carrier T-Mobile announced the highly anticipated HD2 smartphone in the U.S. on Tuesday, but also said that no plans were in place to put Microsoft's upcoming Windows Phone 7 OS on the device yet.

The smartphone includes a large 4.3-inch touchscreen and runs the Windows Mobile 6.5 Professional OS. The HD2 was originally launched in October in Europe, and Microsoft has said Windows Mobile 6.5 devices could not be upgraded to Windows Phone 7.

Users could therefore be left with a device that can't be upgraded when Microsoft's Windows Phone 7 is officially released. Microsoft has said that smartphones based on new OS could become available starting late this year.

Despite the growing enthusiasm surrounding Windows Phone 7, the companies didn't want to wait for the new OS to release the HD2 in the U.S., said Jon Eliav, a T-Mobile spokesman. Eliav said that HTC is not providing a projection on when or whether HD2 smartphones will carry the Windows Phone 7 OS.

"We don't know when the first [Windows 7 Phone OS] device is coming out," Eliav said.

At the time of the Windows 7 OS launch, a number of carriers worldwide, including T-Mobile, committed to offer Windows Phone 7 Series devices as part of their phone offerings.

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From PC World: Social networking just became a little riskier to your privacy. MySpace has begun to sell user data to third parties ranging from academics and analysts to marketers.

The data will include any activity or information that is attached to an account. That includes blog posts, location, photos, reviews, and status updates-among others. InfoChimps, an Austin, Texas company that collects and sells structured data, is one of the firms that is selling the data.

Of course, MySpace is perfectly within its right to do that, because it legally owns the data and the server logs. Users waive their right to privacy in exchange for free Web hosting and access to its social features. "Free" comes at a cost. Here's snippet of what "they" know about you.

This is exactly the type of scenario that Eben Moglen, a Columbia University law professor and founder of the Software Freedom Law Center warned of at a seminar about privacy in cloud computing last month. Except I wouldn't have imagined that MySpace would be one of the really aggressive purveyors of personal data. News Corporation must be regretting that it forked over $580 million to acquire MySpace in 2005.

In his talk, Moglen advocated for the development of peer-to-peer social networks where users retain ownership of their data. His suggestion is looking more appealing (and prophetic) now that one of the biggest names in social networking has sold out its users' privacy.

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From CNET News.com: For those who doubted that Microsoft was serious in its effort to re-engage with the Web, it's time to put the skepticism aside.

At its Mix conference in Las Vegas on Tuesday, Microsoft gave programmers, Web developers, and the world at large a taste of things to come with its Web browser. Specifically, Microsoft released what it's calling the Internet Explorer 9 Platform Preview, a prototype that's designed to show off the company's effort to improve how the browser deals with the Web as it exists today and, just as important, to add support for new Web technologies that are coming right now.

The new software is only a framework, raw enough that it's still missing a "back" button. But with "a few" updated preview versions set to arrive at eight-week intervals, the project will develop into a beta, a release candidate, and eventually the full-fledged product IE9, said Dean Hachamovitch, general manager of Internet Explorer and the executive who'll describe the project at Mix.

Coming in the new version is support for new Web standards including plug-in-free video; better performance with graphics, text, and JavaSript by taking advantage of modern computing hardware; and a new effort at gathering and responding to feedback from those using the prototype software, Hachamovitch said.

IE9 is months from release, but already it holds the potential to alter the browser market. Not only could it reinvigorate competition with a host of new rivals, it could help usher in the cloud computing era that some of those rivals are eager to embrace. In that era, the Web transforms from a foundation for static documents and Web sites into a foundation for interactive programs.

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From CNET News.com: A group of Google's advertising partners in China has sent a letter to the Web giant, saying it has waited weeks in "profound pain" for word on the company's plans since it announced it might withdraw from the country.

The letter, which was signed by 27 partners, was sent on Monday via e-mail to John Liu, vice president of sales for greater China and posted to the Web site of Chinese state broadcaster CCTV. The letter says the partners' businesses are at risk of failure and demands to know how they will be compensated if Google shuts down Google.cn.

"We understand that Google has its own values, but what we can't understand is why, up to today, Google has not had any communication or talks about future solutions with us at all," the letter said, according to a Google translation.

Google could not immediately be reached for comment, but a company representative told the Wall Street Journal that it had received the letter and that it was reviewing it.

The letter comes at a time of heightened tension between Google and China. Google, which has a significant share of the search market in China, announced in January that it no longer intended to censor search results in that country and would consider leaving entirely. The company has been criticized in the past by privacy advocates for censoring search results deemed objectionable by the Chinese government.

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From DailyTech: Google's Nexus One made big waves on the internet when its details were leaked late last year and again when it was officially announced ahead of CES 2010. The Nexus One was described as the next "iPhone Killer" by many and was billed by Google as the "next stage in evolution for the Android".

The smartphone -- which is powered by Android 2.1 -- hit all the right hardware notes thanks to a 1GHz Snapdragon processor, 3.7" (480x800) AMOLED display, multi-touch, and a generous 1400 mAh battery. What could possibly go wrong with Google's full backing, a sleek exterior design, and geek-friendly hardware specs?

Well, everything has gone wrong according to Flurry Analytics. Flurry, if you recall, is the company that first spotted a few dozen iPad devices running iPhone OS 3.2 right before the official launch of the device. Flurry estimates that Google has managed to sell only 135,000 Nexus One smartphones in its first 74 days of availability – Flurry uses the 74 day benchmark because that's how many days it took for the original iPhone to reach the one million mark back in 2007.

If Flurry's numbers are accurate, the Nexus One appears to be actually losing momentum rather quickly considering that Google sold an estimated 80,000 units during the month of January and has only added another 55,000 sales in the past month and a half.

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From DailyTech: Two steps forward, one step back. That seems to be an emerging trend for Microsoft's upcoming Windows Phone 7 Series platform. The snazzy user interface, support for the XNA Framework/Silverlight/Adobe Flash 10.1, Windows Phone Marketplace, and plentiful device manufacturers to choose from are certainly pleasing to potential buyers. However, we're starting to learn a little bit more about the platform at MIX10 and it isn't all rosy.

Yesterday, we learned that Windows Phone 7 Series will not support true multitasking. Instead, the mobile operating system will support a push notification called Microsoft Notification Service (MNS). The MNS works almost exactly like the push notification system currently enabled on Apple's iPhone.

"How do you trade-off battery life at the same time? As soon as you allow arbitrary apps to do things in the background, it can run out the battery pretty quickly," said Microsoft's Scott Guthrie at a MIX10 roundtable according to Gizmodo.

Interestingly enough, Windows Mobile 6.x supports multitasking so it's a notable backwards move for the platform.

In another blow to power users -- and another feature that is present on current Windows Mobile smartphones -- is the news that copy and paste won't be supported initially at launch according to Engadget. Apple was lambasted for the lack of copy and paste on the iPhone and it wasn't until iPhone OS 3.0 that the feature was added to the smartphone. It's almost inconceivable that Microsoft would choose to show up late to the party (Q4 2010) without some semblance of copy and paste for its flagship mobile OS.

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