Consumers prefer DVDs to downloads

Consumers have spoken. They'd still rather pop a disc in a DVD player than download or watch a video online, at least according to one new market report.

Sales and rentals of DVDs and Blu-ray discs in the U.S. made up 88 percent of consumer home video spending over the past three months, according to a survey released Tuesday by market researcher NPD Group.

Your average U.S. consumer paid about $25 per month on video purchases and rentals, with 63 percent on DVD purchases, 7 percent on Blu-ray Disc purchases, 18 percent on rentals, 9 percent on video on demand, and only 3 percent on digital downloads. [Read more...]

Rackable takes SGI name after purchase

For the deal, Rackable created a subsidiary called Silicon Graphics International. That subsidiary then acquired the assets and liabilities of Silicon Graphics Inc. Rackable will now be known as "a Silicon Graphics International entity," and Silicon Graphics International will be branded as SGI. [Read more...]

NVIDIA Preps Three 40nm Chips This Year

Sunnyvale, California-based graphics chip maker NVIDIA is expected to debut its first graphics processing units, featuring the next-generation 40nm manufacturing process. The exact details regarding the company's foray into the 40nm process technology are yet to emerge, but according to some recently made comments by its CEO, it is aggressively ramping production on three new GPUs, leveraging TSMC's 40nm manufacturing node. These new graphics accelerators are expected to debut before the end of the year and will account for about 25-30 percent of NVIDIA's all shipping GPUs in 2009. [Read more...]

Drones: America's new Air Force


Every so often in the history of war, a new weapon comes along that fundamentally rewrites the rules of battle. This is a story about a revolution in unmanned aviation that is doing just that. Most people know them as drones; the Air Force calls them unmanned aerial vehicles, or UAVs. And right now, there are dozens of them in the skies over Iraq and Afghanistan, hunting down insurgents, every minute of every day. They've become one of the most important planes in the United States Air Force--and yet the pilot is nowhere near the aircraft or the battlefield. They are controlled by remote control, from thousands of miles away. [Read more...]

[CBS Video Report]

Wolverine Photos

Hi-Res movie photos of Wolverine. [Link]

DDR SSD claims a massive 300,000 IOPS

There is a new company that offers a solid state drive solution that targets all those applications that need the highest IOPS performance available. DDRdrive claims that its DDRdrive X1 can hit 300,000 IOPS, the highest performance we are aware of in this segment, and even more if DDRdrives are daisy-chained. [Read more...]

CPU Cooler Roundup - 23 Heatsinks for Intel/AMD Reviewed

It’s been a while since our last big heatsink roundup, back in November 2007 we added 13 heatsinks to our performance/noise comparison database. 

Between then and now we did do a couple of stand alone product reviews, 12 of them be exact; but now it’s time for a major update.

Today we’ll be testing 23 new heatsinks and comparing them to the 49 already tested in the past. [Read more...]

ATI Radeon HD 4770: ATI's First 40nm GPU


As the underdog in the chip wars, AMD has traditionally targeted users with products that offer good relative value, rather than maximum performance. A prime current example is their fastest desktop processor, the Phenom II. Their current flagship CPU, the Phenom II 955 Black Edition falls a bit short of Intel's fastest and and more costly Core 2 or Core i7 chips, but it was well received by the most of the tech web press due to AMD's aggressive pricing. Their graphics division, ATI, has been following a similar path, offering great value cards like the energy efficient Radeon HD 4670 and HD 4830 for gamers with tighter pockets. In these troubled financial times, it's could well turn out to be a very effective strategy. [Read more...]

Hacker-proof communications get one step closer

It's the dream of governments, banks and large businesses - quantum cryptography, a completely watertight means of communication.

It is now a big step closer to being used practically, as researchers from Toshiba and Cambridge University's Cavendish Laboratory have developed high speed detectors capable of receiving information with much higher key rates, thereby able to receive more information faster. [Read more...]

Rackable gets go ahead to buy Silicon Graphics

The assets for Silicon Graphics can be transferred to Rackable Systems, a US court has decided.

Rackable will buy nearly all the assets of Silicon Graphics for $42.5 million in cash, a US Bankruptcy court has decided. The deal will be completed in just one week.

The CEO of Rackable, Mark J. Barrenchea, said the deal will make his company stronger. The company will have "differentiated product lines and professional services reaching commercial, government and scientific sectors on a worldwide basis."

It seems that the final price paid for SGI is higher than the original bid of $25 million.

It's not entirely clear yet what impact Rackable's acquisition will have on jobs at SGI.

Low-energy LEDs make debut


Renaissance Lighting has developed a range of low-energy LED lights that are much brighter and more efficient than ever before.

Its new, all white solid-state LED downlight fixtures have two and a half times more lumens per watt (efficacy) than previous generations, and are available in a downlight format. [Read more...]

Dell Departure Could Ravage Limerick

The big PC maker's relocation to Poland may push unemployment in Ireland's No. 4 city to 25%—and shocked local politicians have no Plan B [Read more...]


Scientists develop super spider silk

Scientists at the Max Planck Institute of Microstructure Physics in Germany have discovered a way to make spider silk three times stronger by adding small amounts of metal.

The new technique could make the material useful for manufacturing super-tough textiles and high-tech medical materials, inlcuding artificial bones and tendons. 

The innovative method, developed by Seung-Mo Lee, utilizes a process called atomic layer deposition. The process coats spider dragline silks with zinc, titanium or aluminum, causing certain ions to penetrate the fibers and react within their protein structures. 

Kim Thompson, CEO of Kraig Biocraft Laboratories, termed the discovery "absolutely incredible." 

"Spider silk is already known as one of the strongest fibers found in nature and is recognized for its unparalleled capacity to absorb and dissipate energy in a very controlled manner. Being five times stronger than steel of the same diameter in its natural form, this enhancement reminds us again of the extraordinary potential spider silk has," said Thompson.

Photo-direct vehicle camouflage matches battlefield


While military camouflage patterns for vehicles have evolved, the application process has been stuck in the spray booth. Now, however, GI equivalents of Earl Scheib can apply a precut "wrap" of adhesive vinyl that will blend in on virtually any battlefield.

The process is similar to the advertising and decorative wraps commonly seen on cars and buses, except that this product from Military Wraps, called Photo Veil, is lightweight and incorporates images from cameras on drones, satellites, or lidar in the field and loops them back to be applied to vehicles or equipment as site-specific, high-resolution camouflage.

It combines "megapixel digital images, state-of-the-art inking systems and revolutionary lightweight and waterproof mesh material to duplicate precisely any operational environment," be it mountain, desert, jungle, forest, or urban terrain, according to Military Wraps. [Read more...]

FESTO Bionic Penguins that Swim and Fly!

Festo robotics has made some really freakin' cool robotic creatures and has applied them to tool automation and dynamic architecture.

VMware announces vSphere


There's a lot of speculation (not to mention misconceptions) flying around about VMware's recent move towards the "Cloud". Critics believe it to be absolute rubbish, a step back to the age of the mainframe, warning us of the dangers of centralized data storage and the security/availability issues that might bring about. "Only your own PC is safe enough for your data." Proponents counter these arguments by quoting the numerous applications that people use that basically require no more than a dumb terminal anyway. For example, our readers wouldn't technically need a monster PC to read our articles and their emails; just a thin client with web access would suffice. [Read more...]

Korean Beyonce Sexy Dance (Rihanna Let Me)

Scientists discover a nearly Earth-sized planet

In the search for Earth-like planets, astronomers zeroed in Tuesday on two places that look awfully familiar to home. One is close to the right size. The other is in the right place. European researchers said they not only found the smallest exoplanet ever, called Gliese 581 e, but realized that a neighboring planet discovered earlier, Gliese 581 d, was in the prime habitable zone for potential life.

"The Holy Grail of current exoplanet research is the detection of a rocky, Earth-like planet in the 'habitable zone,'" said Michel Mayor, an astrophysicist at Geneva University in Switzerland.

An American expert called the discovery of the tiny planet "extraordinary." [Read more...]

F-Secure says stop using Adobe Acrobat Reader

With all the Internet attacks that exploit Adobe Acrobat Reader people should switch to using an alternative PDF reader, a security expert said at the RSA security conference on Tuesday.

Of the targeted attacks so far this year, more than 47 percent of them exploit holes in Acrobat Reader while six vulnerabilities have been discovered that target the program, Mikko Hypponen, chief research officer of security firm F-Secure, said in a briefing with journalists. [Read more...]

Nvidia jumps on OpenCL for GPUs

vidia today released its first OpenCL driver and software development kit (SDK) for GeForce GPUs and Tesla HPC cards. It is a critical move for Nvidia that is yet another sign that OpenCL is emerging as the common development platform for GPGPU acceleration in software – and will show its impact in Apple’s Snow Leopard OS, scheduled for release later this year. [Read more...]

IBM cools 3D chips with integrated water channels

Why cool semiconductors with liquid on the surface when you can run water right through them? IBM believes that “tiny rivers of water” within stacked chips may not only advance Moore’s Law, but also pave the way to “green data centers”, significantly reducing the energy requirements by computers. [Read more...]

Qualcomm : SnapDragon Platform


This is the new phone using Q's new SnapDragon chip [Read more...]

Soon soldiers will have 3 tiny choppers in their pocket

The PD-100 isn't the same as your common-or-garden cheapo remote control toy copter, great as those are. As owners will know, these little machines don't offer full control of the sort a real chopper does: there's no real option to hover in one place, speed up, decelerate etc. Remote-control copters which can fly like a real full-size one are comparatively large, complex and expensive - indeed, some of them are full size. [Read more...]

ATI vs. NVIDIA on Linux - the showdown

For 2009 which video card company produces the best card for Linux users? It seems it's still nVidia with their current proprietary driver lineup. Let's take a look at the details. [Read more...]

The Pentagon's bionic arm

When Americans are wounded in Afghanistan or Iraq, no expense is spared to save their lives. But once they're home, if they have suffered an amputation of their arm, they usually end up wearing an artificial limb that hasn't changed much since World War II.

In all the wonders of modern medicine, building a robotic arm with a fully functioning hand has not been remotely possible.

But as 60 Minutes correspondent Scott Pelley reports, that is starting to change. One remarkable leap in technology is called the DEKA arm and it's just one of the breakthroughs in a $100 million Pentagon program called "Revolutionizing Prosthetics." [Read more...]

Spies hacked into U.S. electricity grid

Spies from other countries have hacked into the United State's electricity grid, leaving traces of their activity and raising concerns over the security of the U.S. energy infrastructure to cyberattacks.

The Wall Street Journal on Wednesday published a report saying that spies sought ways to navigate and control the power grid as well the water and sewage infrastructure. It's part of a rising number of intrusions, the article said, quoting former and current national security officials. [Read more...]

New Version of Super LoiLoScope Makes HD Video Editing Quick and Easy With NVIDIA CUDA-Enabled GPUs

Super LoiLoScope Editing Software Edits, Plays and Outputs Full HD Movies at Incredible Speed on NVIDIA GeForce GPUs

FUJISAWA CITY, Japan, April 8 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- LoiLo Inc. (CEO: Koji Sugiyama) has released Super LoiLoScope MARS , a new version of the company's easy to use video editing software that makes editing high definition (HD) movies accessible for the average consumer. By using the parallel processing power of NVIDIA(R) GeForce CUDA-enabled GPUs, Super LoiLoScope MARS creates movie files up to 10 times faster(1) than CPU powered encoders, dramatically lowering the cost of a PC powerful enough to edit high definition content.

"Most amateur videographers will attest that playing, editing and rendering HD movies on an average personal computer was a frustrating task that took an exorbitant amount of time," said Koji Sugiyama, CEO of LoiLo Inc. "Super LoiLoScope MARS lets you edit full resolution HD movies quickly and output files for playback on various devices, and the web at incredible speed thanks to NVIDIA." [Read more...]

Acer PC joins Nvidia's 'Ion' with Intel's Atom


Acer launched a PC Tuesday that attempts to bring PC-class performance to Atom-processor-based PCs. The Acer AspireRevo, about the size of a hardcover book, combines Nvidia graphics with the Intel Atom processor. The Acer AspireRevo is the first Atom-based PC from a major PC supplier to use Nvidia's Ion chipset that packs GeForce 9400M graphics, the same graphics used in the Apple 13-inch MacBook and MacBook Air. By design, Atom is a more power frugal and, concomitantly, slower processor than Intel's mainstream Core 2 chip architecture. [Read more...]

Hydrogen-powered UAV in the works



In what it says is a "first of its kind" initiative, the U.S. Navy plans to launch sometime this spring an unmanned aerial vehicle for a 24-hour endurance flight carrying a 5-pound payload and powered entirely by a hydrogen-powered fuel cell. [Read more...]



Apple's iPhone emerges as gaming platform

Apple's iPhone has emerged as a serious videogame platform, fulfilling the long-held promise of mobile phone gaming and positioning itself as a legitimate competitor to handheld consoles. [Read more...]

IBM to enter "cloud computing" software market

IBM will sell a suite of Web-based collaboration software for businesses, including contact management, instant messaging and file sharing programs, the computing giant's biggest effort to date to sell software as a service. [Read more...]

Ripping movies and shredding rules with FFmpeg


If you've ever used the open-source application Handbrake to rip a DVD to your hard drive, the chances are good that you've used FFmpeg, an open-source multimedia project that makes it possible to convert video to different formats, among other things. [Read more...]

Creepy Crawly Segway Thingy

I’m telling you right now, this thing would totally kick your Segway’s wimpy ass. Would probably work well as a Japanese back massager as well.

Robots On The Runway

As if anorexic runway models weren’t creepy enough, now we have robotic runway models. Heh, the Robot hasn’t even done a show yet and here I am hoping it does a header off the catwalk. [Read more...]

Everything You Need to Know About Digital Camera Lenses


The lens of a camera is truly the eye to the world in photography. It is the viewer through which the camera sees the shot you want to take. The lens is an essential element needed to take good photographs. So when you purchase a new camera, you should always check out the type and quality of the lens. Even a camera with a superior sensor and an adequate number of megapixels will not produce good photographs if the lens is of inferior quality. [Read more...]

U.S. engineers find way to build a better battery

U.S. engineers have found a way to make lithium batteries that are smaller, lighter, longer lasting and capable of recharging in seconds.

The researchers believe the quick-charging batteries could open up new applications, including better batteries for electric cars. [Read more...]

The world's largest swimming pool in Chile


Thinking about swimming a few laps before breakfast?

Check out this man-made "lagoon" — dubbed the world's largest outdoor swimming pool — at the San Alfonso del Mar vacation property resort at Algarrobo, Chile.

The coast-hugging pool is all man-made with a bit of patented technology that uses water from the nearby Pacific Ocean to fill it.
(Crystal Lagoons)

Lockheed Martin Unveils Exoskeleton Technology


Lockheed Martin [NYSE: LMT] debuted an advanced robotic exoskeleton designed to augment Soldiers’ strength and endurance and prevent their premature fatigue.

The Human Universal Load Carrier (HULC™) exoskeleton, introduced at the Association of the United States’ Army Winter Symposium in Fort Lauderdale, FL, will meet future mobility and sustainment needs of Warfighters by providing strength and survivability. Under an exclusive licensing agreement with Berkeley BionicsTM, a world leader in exoskeleton technologies, Lockheed Martin will advance the development of the HULC design to provide Soldiers a powerful advantage in ground operations. [Read more...]

Sony SLR sensor ranks below Nikon, above Canon

DxO Labs, a French company, makes a business of measuring camera image quality, developing technology for image-processing hardware and software, and selling software to convert the raw files produced by higher-end cameras into less flexible but more convenient formats such as JPEG. The DxOMark score measures sensor performance based on the raw file, a foundation for overall image quality but only a facet of a camera's overall performance. [Read more...]

Why Microsoft should fear Ubuntu's Cloud efforts

In the past Microsoft could show up late to a party and still win. That's becoming harder to do as it's forced to compete on so many fronts. Despite a vast developer army, Microsoft's efforts have been highly confusing and occasionally nonsensical. Microsoft needs developers to win in the cloud. [Read more...]

Cooler Master's Monstrous V10 CPU Cooler


Building on the reputation of the Cooler Master V8, the new V10 with hybrid Thermal Electric Cooler, or also known as peltier cooling, brings even more thermal dissipating power to your Intel Core i7 LGA1366 PC. [Read more...]

Scientists make advances on "nano" electronics

Two U.S. teams have developed new materials that may pave the way for ever smaller, faster and more powerful electronics as current semiconductor technology begins to reach the limits of miniaturization. [Read more...]

The firewall vs. the cloud

The hosted model makes financial sense. It's much cheaper to contract with a service like Yammer than to buy and install software inside a business. However, it's not realistic to think that the people inside businesses currently running their own e-mail servers will happily encourage sensitive and timely employee conversations to head outside the firewall to a hosted service. Saving money doesn't trump control. [Read more...]

Nehalem servers to anchor Intel cloud computing


New "Nehalem" servers will anchor Intel's renewed push into cloud computing, as the chipmaker focuses on mega data centers with hundreds of thousands of servers.

Intel's cloud-computing efforts this year will be centered on a new server that uses upcoming Nehalem technology, Intel said Tuesday in a teleconference on its cloud-computing strategy. Nehalem is Intel's new chip architecture currently used only in its Core i7 desktop processors. [Read more...]

SugarCRM open sources the cloud

SugarCRM is deployed on more than 55,000 servers worldwide and growing. Where are the servers? Those servers are in the cloud, they're not in local data centers. They're in all the cloud infrastructure providers from Amazon to Rackspace to British Telecom to IBM. They need applications, and SugarCRM is an application that runs basically on every cloud environment that is being built right now. [Read more...]

13 SDHC Memory Cards Reviewed



Most of the elite SDHC memory cards we've reviewed are “Class 6” rated, a label that promises high performance. However, we found significant performance differences among them. [Read more...]

JavaFX : A Powerful Mobile Platform


JavaFX combines the best capabilities of the Java platform with comprehensive, immersive media functionality into an intuitive and comprehensive, one-stop development environment. [Read more...]

Intel's 32nm Update: The Follow-on to Core i7 and More


And you thought Core i7 was fast, how about a 6-core, 32nm version due out early next year? It's not all high...

Seven billion dollars.

That’s the amount that Intel is going to spend in the US alone on bringing up its 32nm manufacturing process in 2009 and 2010. [Read more...]

Ubuntu desktop apparently scares Microsoft

Ubuntu must be giving Microsoft fits on the desktop. That's the only reason I can come up with for Microsoft's LinkedIn search for a new director of open-source strategy, with a focus on the desktop:

"The Windows Competitive Strategy team is looking for a strong team member to lead Microsoft's global desktop competitive strategy as it relates to open source competitors."

[Read more...]

Fusion-io : PCI Express-based Solid State Disk (SSD) drive



Fusion-io manufactures the ioDrive, a PCI Express-based Solid State Disk (SSD) drive. Fusion-io claims the ioDrive is capable of performance comparable to DRAM and storage capacity parallel to hard disks — the ioDrive is available in 80GB, 160GB and 320GB capacities. That device is serving as the basis of two additional products, the ioSAN and the ioXtreme. [Read more...]

X Prize announces green-idea : Ultra Capacitor

"Capacitors recharge in seconds, survive thousands of recharge cycles, and provide high-efficiency electricity by using environmentally benign materials. But here's the challenge: capacitors are far more expensive (and) provide far less energy than common batteries," Le said in his team's contest pitch video on YouTube (below). "We invite the next generation of inventors and engineers to construct an energy storage device far more advanced, far more environmentally friendly, far more affordable than we have yet to see in our lifetime." [Read more...]

ACME Portable Folding Multiple Display













So, how about enjoying StarCraft on three display screens? This prototype foldable multi display from ACME Portable looks totally awesome. While it isn't exactly built for gaming use, it's actually for server use, who can stop IT Managers from enjoying their StarCraft game on these babies?

Defense Department sets up its own Defense Department sets up its own SourceForgeSourceForge

The dam holding back U.S. federal adoption of open source just burst with the introduction of the Defense Department's Forge.mil [Read more...]

Got my wife the Samsung Blast cellphone today


Got the new T-Mobile Samsung Blast (slider) cellphone today to replace her old Motorola Razr flip. It's quite nice, she likes it alot. So, we will see how well this phone works as she learns its new functionality. I'll keep you posted on anything we find interesting with the phone.

Eee Keyboard (PC)


The Eee Keyboard looks like a full sized keyboard (reminiscent of Apple’s aluminum keyboard) but with two major differences: an integrated PC and an integrated 5” touchscreen display.
[Read more...]

The Eee Top, it adds a new all-in-one device to the Eee Family.













It has a touch sensitive interface, so you end up with something like an Eee iMac. ASUS says the Eee Top will be a useful tool for collaborative learning, with an intuitive interface that's easy to navigate.
[Read more...]

Foxconn Blood Rage - If Looks Could Kill


The Blood Rage is one of the hottest looking X58 boards to grace our test bench, but what lies beneath the... [Read more]

NVIDIA's Ion Platform


Take Intel's Atom processor and pair it with NVIDIA's GeForce 9400M chipset and you've got the Ion platform. The latest bold move from NVIDIA offers an alternative to the anemic 945G chipset in current Atom based PC designs, with a faster, more capable chipset that can fully accelerate HD video decode among other things... [Read more...]

MP5 + Wii Remote = WeeP5


Modding a Wii remote is nothing new but modding one into a semi-realistic looking MP5 9mm submachine gun is pretty damn cool. [Read more...]

Video Games Feed Male Urge To Conquer

Scientists at the Center for Interdisciplinary Brain Sciences Research at Stanford University claim that video games feed the male urge to conquer. On the other hand, women in the study didn’t exhibit the same behavior. I’ll bet the results would be the opposite if they studied “shopping” instead of video games.

"I think it's fair to say that males tend to be more intrinsically territorial. It doesn't take a genius to figure out who historically are the conquerors and tyrants of our species – they're the males. "Most of the computer games that are really popular with males are territory and aggression-type games."

Corsair TX850W Power Supply


Corsair reaches out to grab the part of the power supply market that could easily be thought of as the enthusiast "sweet spot." 600 watts too little...1000 watts too much....ah, 850 watts, just right. [Read more...]

Lenovo to Release Dual-Head Laptop


The ThinkPad W700ds appears to be the first laptop ever to sport two LCD screens -- a 17-in. primary and a 10.6-in. secondary screen. The souped-up "mobile workstation," as Lenovo calls it, also comes with customers' choice of quad-core Intel Core 2 processors and Nvidia Quadro mobile graphics CPU with as many as 128 cores. It also comes with as much as 8GB of DDR3 memory and a pair of hard drive/solid-state drive bays for up to 960GB of storage. [Read more...]

Apple’s New Multi-touch Mighty Mouse // Aluminum??


















Let’s face it, the Mighty Mouse is flawed. Luckily, Apple has filed for numerous patents directly hinting at a multi-touch Mighty Mouse, which could prove to bring us an unexpected treat sometime in the near future. [Read more...]

Intel Core i7 920 and 965 review


Intel launches these Nehalem based puppies on the new name Core i7 as in their 7th architectural generation. [Read more...]

Myst Online Goes Fully Open Source


Massively reports that developer Cyan Worlds has turned their MMOG Myst Online: URU Live into an experiment by releasing all of the game’s assets to the public as open source. They hope that a development community will grow around the project. I’m sure someone will introduce porn into the game world and someone else will create a scam around it.

Amazingly, they aren't simply releasing it into the wild and leaving it alone; Cyan has decided to hold one Myst Online server shard open for players to have a centralized world, despite the fact that others can now freely put up their own Myst Online servers.

Self-Balancing Robot Table Demo’ed

A Japanese engineer has built a self-balancing robot table that can even deliver food and play some irritating beep music. Check out the video to see this thing in action. Funky. [See video...]

PhysX by nVidia


Effects physics, as you may recall, is the physical simulation of things that don't impact gameplay but simply enhance the visual impact of a game. [Read more...]

October Video Card Price Guide

We break down the trends and prices from the entry-level, mainstream and enthusiast-level cards, and find the best overall values. If you're looking for a new video card, or just want to see where the market is heading. [Read more...]

October Hard Drive Price Guide

The break down on the trends for Parallel and Serial ATA desktop drives, and SSDs, finding the best overall values in each area. If you're looking for additional storage, or just want to see where the market is heading, then be sure to check out the detailed price lists and commentary. [Read more...]

Weekly CPU Prices - Week of October 27, 2008

While the AMD and Intel processor charts are continue to show stable prices, there is at least a hint of increased activity. Although small, there are more price changes than last week, and many of these are on mainstream processors. [Read more...]

High-End Memory Prices - Week of October 27, 2008

If you want the inside scoop on the high-end memory market. [Read more...]

MDS Brings Skynet One Step Closer with Expressive Robot

Creepy robot alert! Nexi is a robot that is able to learn and can interact with humans using speech, expression, and body language. Dubbed an MDS (Mobile Dexterous Social) robot, it gets around by being mounted to a Segway-like chassis. Kinda looks like Chucky to me. [See video...]

An Introduction to Virtualization


An introductory piece that should allow anyone an easy entry into the fascinating world of virtualization. Did we mention it also plays games? [Read more...]

Sony A900 is just $3000


The 24.6 Megapixel Sony A900 is the highest resolution sensor in the full-frame DSLR class. Does high ISO noise mar the picture? [Read more...]

Intel's X25-M solid-state drive


Here is some news about Intel coming into the SSD market with their version of Flash HDDs. If you are into Gaming and High-Performance PCs, this is an interesting read.

The first of these SSDs to hit the market will be the X25-M, which boasts an impressive 250MB/s sustained read rate, a 70MB/s sustained write rate, 80GB of storage capacity in a 2.5" form factor, and support for Native Command Queuing. Read on to see how this drive stacks up against a mix of solid-state and mechanical alternatives through our exhaustive suite of performance, noise level, and power consumption tests. [Read more...]

Rovio robot from WowWee


The Rovio is finally ready to roam around domiciles and keep baddies at bay. First announced (and spotted) at CES 2008, this long-awaited robotic sentry is up for pre-order right now, and it comes packing a 640 x 480 webcam to stream back live video in MPEG4 format. Furthermore, it can snap stills, head out on a customized patrol route and avoid obstacles with its infrared sensor.