That's the essence of the message from Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer this week, who made some remarkably candid comments (for Microsoft, anyway) about the failures of Windows Vista and his hopes for the future.

In new comments, Ballmer referred to the Vista debacle as having been an issue of "some uneven reception" because "we made some design decisions to improve security at the expense of compatibility."

After much anticipation and following a string of continuous leaked rumors and details, the Sunnyvale, California-based Advanced Micro Devices has announced the launch of its next generation of desktop graphics processing units, the Radeon HD 5800 series, specifically designed to enable a performance boost over the company’s previous generation of cards, but also to provide users with a couple of new features. The series includes the Radeon HD 5870, AMD's new flagship card, and the HD 5850, both of which have been designed to enable full support of Microsoft's DirectX 11 API, but also for AMD's own Eyefinity multi-display technology and ATI Stream technology.

“With the ATI Radeon HD 5800 series of graphics cards driven by the most powerful processor on the planet, AMD is changing the game, both in terms of performance and the experience,” said Rick Bergman, senior vice president and general manager, Products Group, AMD. “As the first to market with full DirectX 11 support, an unmatched experience made possible with ATI Eyefinity technology, and ATI Stream technology harnessing open standards designed to help make Windows 7 that much better, I can say with confidence that AMD is the undisputed leader in graphics once more.”

In terms of pure performance, the new Radeon flagship model, the Radeon HD 5870, is capable of delivering up to 2.72 TeraFLOPS of compute power, according to the chip maker. Built using a “2nd generation evolved 40nm process technology,” the new Radeon HD 5870 boasts a clock speed of 850MHz, coupled with 1GB of GDDR5 memory, clocked at 1.2GHz. With 1600 Stream Processing Units, double the number of the chip maker's previous generation of cards, the new Radeon HD 5870 GPU has been featured with a dual-slot cooling solution and is said to reach a maximum board power of 188 Watts, while in idle the card sits at 27 Watts, according to AMD.

As far as the HD 5850 is concerned, this card doesn't fall too far behind and is likely to become a favorite among technology enthusiasts. Built on the same Cypress GPU core, the card is clocked at 725MHz and is also featured with 1GB of GDDR5 memory, clocked at 1GHz. Its maximum power is rated at 151 Watts, while in idle, the HD 5850 sits at a comfortable 27 Watts.

By now, you probably know of the death of pop legend and superstar Michael Jackson at the age of 50, following a heart attack. Well, actually, you may not know that the news pretty much broke the Internet, taking down site after site and service after service.

First to go down was AOL-owned TMZ, which actually broke the news. The site has been experiencing several down-times since the story got out. After TMZ went down, people flocked to Perez Hilton’s highly popular celebrity blog, which couldn't handle the traffic either. As people moved on to the LA Times, which at the time was saying that he was only in a coma, the site also went down. Keynote Systems, a company that tracks website performance, reported that, for the 30 news sites the company monitored, their availability went down an average 14 percent, dropping to 86 percent, and the latency of most websites more than doubled. Sites affected include ABC, AOL, CBS, CNN Money, MSNBC, NBC, SF Chronicle, and Yahoo! News.

In a new scientific study, researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have determined that oxidation inside the cell can lead to the onset and development of a large number of various tumors, linking the two phenomena together inseparably. In their experiments, the scientists used mouse models, and shut down the production of two genes involved in producing proteins that repaired damaged DNA.

http://www.bing.com

Bing is Microsoft's answer to all competitive search engines. And at the same time, the Redmond company's service to beat search engines, is not a “search engine.” Bing is a “decision engine,” the software giant claims, aiming to catalyze a change in user perception and make the evolution of Live Search stand out from the crowd. But of course Bing is about closing the gap separating Microsoft from Google on the search engine and online advertising markets, just as it is the result of the company's commitment to grow organically following the failed acquisition of Yahoo in 2008. The Bing website went live, mind you not in a Windows Live or a Live Search sense, on May 28, 2009, but the actual search decision engine will not go live until June 3rd, for the public.