Notebook Shipments Up 35 Percent

If there was any doubt that notebooks are becoming the preferred computing platform of choice, then let DisplaySearch's Quarterly Notebook PC Shipment and Forecast Report set the record straight. DisplaySearch reports that the worldwide notebook computer market saw a 35 percent growth in shipments...

Netflix Bows To a Vocal Minority

Sometimes a "very, very, very small minority" can have a big impact--especially if that minority is a very, very, very vocal one. A week and a half ago, Netflix announced that it would be killing off its Profiles feature. But following the outpouring of a not-so-silent minority who were less-than thrilled with this decision...

Netflix to Axe Family-Friendly Profiles Feature

A curious announcement went out to Netflix customers yesterday, informing them that Netflix Profiles will be eliminated as of September 1. Netflix Profiles allow customers to set up separate queues for a single account. The ability to set up separate queues has been a favorite feature...

Asus MK241H 24" Widescreen LCD Monitor

LCD monitors were supposed to free up our precious desk real estate as they relegated bulky CRTs to the local landfill. But with the quantity and quality of high-definition content increasing and LCD prices continuing to drop, widescreen LCDs are becoming increasingly prevalent...

Over 8 Million Firefox 3 Downloads in 24 Hours

Despite running into a few glitches at the start of the record-setting attempt for the most software downloaded in 24 hours, approximately 8.3 million full copies of Firefox 3 were downloaded during the first 24 hours of its availability. The Mozilla folks are working with the blokes from Guinness World Records...

Toshiba Kinda Claims World's Lightest Laptop

Toshiba recently announced that its lightweight Portégé R500 ultraportable laptop is now available with a 128GB solid state drive (SSD). With this new, but pricey option, Toshiba claims that the Portégé R500-S5007V is now "the world's lightest laptop with a 128GB SSD and DVD SuperMulti drive...

Fembots Say Touché

The yet-to-be-released E.M.A. ("Eternal, Maiden, Actualization") fembot from Sega Toys has been generating quite a lot of buzz on the Internet since it was first announced last week. The decidedly female robot is 38cm tall and is capable of fluid movements via its "5 motors and 12 degrees of freedom." Those movements include dancing and kissing...

Skype Releases Beta Client With a Whole New Look

The folks over at Skype are hoping that you want to be a beta tester. Starting today, Skype 4.0 Beta 1 for Windows goes into public beta, and there are a number of significant changes in the new version...

FiOS About to Get Even Faster For Some Customers

Verizon FiOS customers tend to be the envy of the rest of us non-FiOS, broadband users. Well, that envy quotient is about to go up another notch, as Verizon announced that as of next week, its 50/20 and 20/20 Mbps services will be available "across all of Verizon's FiOS Internet service footprint in 16 states...

AMD's Cinema 2.0 to Tackle Movie-Quality Realism

AMD wants to push the envelope of realism in interactive games with its new "Cinema 2.0 experience." Using its upcoming RV770 GPU as the engine driving the demonstration, AMD showed off "the fusion of dynamic real-time interactivity with convincing cinematic digital effects that appear to be real places and things captured on video...

Spore Creature Creator Finally Unleashed

Gamers, start your tentacles! Today is the day that Electronic Arts releases the long awaited, first step of the Spore evolution: Spore Creature Creator. For the uninitiated, Spore is a single-player, simulation game where you manipulate the evolution of an entire species of creatures...

iPods On a Plane! Part Deux

Starting today, a select few United Airlines customers will be able to plug their iPods and iPhones into their flight's in-flight entertainment (IFE) systems and watch the content from their own devices on the seatback's 15.4-inch displays--and their iPods and iPhones will also charge while doing it...

AMD Announces its Latest GP-GPU

The future of high-performance computing might very well depend on graphics cards. It's not just CPUs that are crunching numbers faster and faster. Today's GPUs are just as efficient at performing floating-point calculations--perhaps even more so, especially when special floating-point hardware is integrated directly into the GPUs...

It's Official: Geek Chicks are Chic

If there was any doubt that brainy women could be sexy too, this week's Newsweek article, Revenge of the Nerdette, should set naysayers straight. The article features a group of brilliant, confident, and attractive women who call themselves the Nerd Girls...

Google To Develop ISP Throttling Detector

Google has been very vocal on its stance for net neutrality. Now, Richard Whitt--Senior Policy Director for Google--announces that Google will take an even more active role in the debate by arming consumers with the tools to determine first-hand if their broadband connections are being monkeyed with by their ISPs...

Microsoft Surface Flirts in Las Vegas

Las Vegas's Rio All-Suite Hotel & Casino becomes the second commercial location to sport Microsoft's Surface devices--table-top, multi-touch-input computers. The first commercial implementation of Surface was this last April in select AT&T stores...

Strange Bedfellows: AMD and Havok Cooperating

Upon first glance, today's press release from AMD, "AMD and Havok to Optimize Physics for Gaming," caused us to do a double take. Considering the long-time feud between AMD and Intel, it seemed surprising that any sort of amicable partnership could develop between AMD and an Intel-owned company, such as Havok...

Intel's USB 3 Work: No Good Deed Goes Unpunished

According to Intel, it gets no respect. The company has spent "gazillions of dollars and bazillions of engineering man hours" on co-developing the new USB 3.0 spec and the commensurate USB 3.0 Intel host controller spec...

Toshiba Announces 1.8" 160GB 5,400-rpm SATA HDD

Toshiba's Storage Device Division claims to have produced the first 1.8-inch, 5,400-rpm, SATA hard drive with a 160GB storage capacity. The MK161GSG uses a micro-SATA connector and supports a 1.5Gb/sec SATA interface. The drive is positioned as an ideal addition to the quickly growing small-form-factor portable market...

EA Announces Minimum Specs For Spore

Electronic Arts' Spore could easily be one of the most-anticipated games of all time. Created by Will Wright--the genius behind the Sims series of game titles--Spore has been referred to as "Sim Everything." It is a game where you manipulate the evolution of an entire species of creatures from single-cell organisms...

HP's DreamColor LCD Displays One Billion Colors

There should be no doubt as to whether the engineers at HP dream in black-and-white or in color. The question should be: How many colors do they dream in? The answer: over one billion. That's how many colors HP's new DreamColor LP2480ZX LCD is capable of displaying...

Study Finds Instant Messaging Helps Productivity

The results of a recently published study of workers' instant messaging (IM) use shows that IM can actually improve workplace productivity. This contradicts a widely held belief that IM in the workplace is a hindrance to productivity. IM is often perceived as an interruption...

iPhone3G to Cost More Than Previous iPhones

Yes, you read the headline correct; you will pay more for a new Apple iPhone3G than you would have spent on the previous version of the iPhone. How can this be, you ask? The iPhone3G models are priced a full $100 cheaper than their predecessors. True...

HP Announces a Whole Bunch of New Laptops

At HP's invitation-only "Connecting Your World" media event in Berlin today, HP unveiled a slew of new laptop designs--some of which will be available in just a few weeks. Leading off the gaggle of new laptops is HP's Pavillion "dv" consumer series...

Toshiba Satellite A305-S6845 Notebook

Long gone are the days when the primary differentiating factors between competing laptops models were just battery life and weight. Don't be mistaken---battery life and weight are still important; but with so many folks now using a laptop as their only computer...

Spear-Phishing Attacks Land Some Whales

Sophisticated, targeted phishing attacks have successfully swiped data from roughly 15,000 victims within the last 15 months according to Internet security company, VeriSign. VeriSign believes that almost all of these attacks are coming from just two groups...

IBM Chips: A River Runs Through It

Researchers at IBM's Zurich Research Laboratory have developed a new technique that gives a whole new meaning to water cooling: Circulating water inside the chip itself. The concept is not meant for today's CPUs, but actually for the chips of tomorrow...

Asus Laptop Prototype With Built-in Projector

One of the more curious items spied at this week's Computex trade show in Taipei, is an Asus laptop prototype with a built-in mini projector. There is still not too much known about the unlabeled notebook, other than that the laptop has a large space above the display's bezel, in which a working, pivoting mini projector is housed...

Lost is Most Downloaded TV Show on BitTorrent

According to BitTorrent news site, TorrentFreak, at any given moment, nearly half of all active BitTorrent users are downloading pirated TV shows. TorrentFreak estimates that one of the most popular TV shows, Lost, garners "close to 10 million downloads per episode...

The 2009 Audi Q5 to Include an Nvidia GPU

When the 2009 Audi Q5 "compact crossover vehicle" debuts this fall, it will feature an additional kind of powerful engine: Driving the car's audio/visual interface control panel will be an Nvidia GPU. The Q5 will include the latest generation of Audi's Multi-Media Interface (MMI)...

McAfee Identifies World's Most Dangerous Domains

McAfee has released its annual "Mapping the Mal Web" report, which reports on "the riskiest and safest places on the Web," after analyzing "9.9 million heavily trafficked Web sites" using its own McAfee Site Advisor technology...

Big Apple Announcements Coming Next Monday

Wednesday, June 04, 2008 - by Daniel A. Begun
This coming Monday, June 9, should be a big day for Apple. It is the first day of Apple's 2008 Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC08) in San Francisco--which not coincidentally--has been at sold out at capacity for some time now...

Comcast's Network Management Experiment

This week marks the beginning of Comcast's month-long experiment with protocol-agnostic network management practices in Chambersburg, PA and Warrenton, VA. Comcast has come under fire recently for throttling certain types of traffic on its network, such as with data for P2P clients...

Starbucks to Offer Free AT&T Wi-Fi

Not only has Starbucks been busy outfitting all of its company-operated Starbucks locations with AT&T-supplied Wi-Fi, but that Wi-Fi will now be free to Starbucks card holders for up to two hours per day...

Study Finds Most Returned CE Devices Not Broken

Results from a study just released by global consulting company, Accenture, find that only about five percent of all consumer electronics product returns are due to actual failures or defects. The rest of the returns can be categorized as "no trouble found" (68 percent) or "buyer's remorse" (27 percent)...