Month: June 2007

Creative Zen Stone Plus lobbed at consumers –

Filed under: Portable Audio

It was barely a month ago that Creative pelted the market with its Zen Stone, and now they’re rolling out a re-upped and revamped version known as the Zen Stone Plus. While pretty much keeping the form factor the same, Creative has added a blue OLED screen, FM tuner, karaoke mode, and a stopwatch. The capacity has been increased to 2GB, doubling the original Stone’s, but the color choices remain the same. Price and release date haven’t been mentioned, but you’ll know as soon as we do.

[Via epiZENter]

 

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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!

[EnGadget]

Annoyed, hospitalized teen unplugs neighbor's life support –

Filed under: Misc. Gadgets

It should probably go without saying that anything connected to a power source within the confines of a hospital has a fair shot at being pertinent to the livelihood of at least one individual, but obviously a 17-year old teenager in Germany needed the memo. After the perpetual noise of what would prove to be his neighbor’s life support machine “got on his nerves,” he proceeded to simply unplug the device without precaution in order to ensure that “he got his peace and quiet.” Of course, we can only assume that the sirens and squeals that were emitted due to his misreckoning were immensely louder than the prior hum, but some folks just love to learn the hard way. Thankfully, medical personnel stepped in and saved the man from perishing, but the teen at fault lost a lot more sleep after that whilst being questioned by police.

[Via El Reg, image courtesy of NAIAD]

 

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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!

[EnGadget]

JVC designs tiny 4k D-ILA chip –

Filed under: Displays, HDTV

JVC announced at InfoComm 2007 a 1.27-inch 4K2K D-ILA chip for use in projectors that offer up more than four times high-definition resolution. Intended initially for medical, modeling, and simulation use, the chip can produce a ten-megapixel 4096×2400 pixel image with a 20,000:1 contrast ratio. While DLP-based 4K projectors are currently in use in some digital cinemas, the JVC chip will be used in D-ILA, a variant of LCoS (Liquid Crystal on Silicon), and has a higher pixel density. Much like professional racing technologies trickle down to the average sedan on the street, the research that goes into 4K projectors can also make their way to HDTVs in the home, bringing smaller, higher-definition sets to a living room near you. We say bring on the quad-split-screen HD!

 

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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!

[EnGadget]

Wow, Hey Bill Gates your OS sucks, please send a Service Pack. K Thx.

DOJ Pushes Microsoft to Produce Vista SP1 Beta in '07 – It’s unusual, but confirmation of the availability of Windows Vista’s first service pack came Tuesday not from Microsoft Corp., but from the U.S. Department of Justice. Tucked into the government’s 27-page joint status settlement report released late Tuesday was evidence that Microsoft will put the beta of Vista SP1 into users’ hands before the end of the year. The report also confirmed Windows XP SP3, but did not specify beta or final release dates, although it said some code would be finalized this summer.

Microsoft has been loath to talk about either service pack, but has been particularly mum about Windows Vista SP1, a widely-anticipated bug update that some enterprise users are waiting on before deploying the new operating system. As recently as April, when Intel Corp.’s CEO Paul Otellini hinted that Vista SP1 would likely release in October or November, Microsoft refused to confirm any schedule. “We will continue to take customer feedback from programs like the TAP [Technology Adoption Program], and will ultimately determine an official delivery date as the service pack is nearer to completion,” a company spokeswoman said at the time.

View: Full Story
News source: PC World

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[NeoWin-Main]

Having problems with customizing your Vista? Look no further, TweakVista will allow you to do what you want with Vista.

TweakVista open beta begins – Popular tweaking site TweakVista.com and Stardock have teamed up to create a new utility for Windows Vista users called TweakVista. TweakVista allows users to change many low level settings in Windows Vista as well as makes many lesser known settings more user-friendly. The utility has settings for security (to manage the UAC), memory optimization, resource control, start-up management, performance assessments, benchmarks, and integration with TweakVista.com.

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[NeoWin-Software]

With anything that is open source, bugs and exploits will be found. However, this makes it easy for developers to patch these issues. As they know the code that is causing the problem, and usually the hacker will provide a patch for them that just needs to be reviewed. However, this is a real concern for myself, since I use over 10 FireFox extension.

Firefox Extensions Waiting to Be Exploited – Do you think you are safe with Firefox? In general, I would agree with you. But at the same time, I would also point out that there is a fairly sizable security concern that may be addressed, as effectively as some security experts might like. It’s called the Firefox extension. [WArp2Search]

I don’t why Yahoo! has MySpace on their mind. As it has already peak above all the other free social networks. A better candidate that seems to be growing steadily is FaceBook!

Yahoo! in Talk to Buy MySpace: Is That a Good Idea Nowadays? –

Well this is big. Apparently, Yahoo! has discussed buying MySpace from News Corp in a bid to save itself from irrelevance. In return, News Corp. would get 30 percent of the newly combined Yahoo!+MySpace. Or, in dollar amounts, News Corp would cash in to the tune of $11.1 billion. Considering Murdoch and Co. bought MySpace for $650 million, I’d say that’s a deal and a half. Too bad Yahoo!’s recent restructuring puts the deal, if there ever really was one, in jeopardy.

But you know what? A lot of us here think that buying Facebook is the better move for Yahoo! Let’s admit it: MySpace simply isn’t what it was two years ago and all the momentum in the world appears to be behind Facebook. Its community is just what advertisers love—kids with cash to burn—and the site isn’t a disaster to read like MySpace can be.

News Corp explores swap of MySpace site for Yahoo! stake [TimesOnline]

[CrunchGear]

Good Idea, but is it practical? Will there really be a difference while booting and loading data? Waiting for Solid State Disk’s will be a better choice, Dell’s new M series laptops will have 32G SSD’s.

Samsung’s Sexy Hybrid Hard Drive –

No, this hybrid hard drive isn’t actually sexy (though it is topless) and it is difficult to get excited about hard drives in general. But, since Samsung’s still an underdog in the category, the company’s doing its best to innovate the space instead of just cranking out larger sizes (though it did that, too). The 2.5-inch MH80 notebook hard drives feature 256MB of integrated flash memory to help you boot faster (though only about 10 seconds faster), wake from hibernation mode faster and get up to 25 percent more battery life for your laptop (though that’s compared to Samsung’s own M80 HDDs).

(more…)

[CrunchGear]

I haven’t seen this on any private trackers that I’m on. It looks like it hasn’t fully been leaked. Either way, I want to install this and try it out. I am definitely liking OSX more and more as they keep adding features and GUI improvements.

WWDC Leopard Beta Leaked Onto BitTorrent Site –

It looks like the WWDC beta of Leopard was leaked onto the Oink BitTorrent Web site. (I’m not about to download it, though, that’s for sure.) Here’s a screen shot. And another. And another. That last one made me laugh. Oops!

Nobody’s completely downloaded the 6GB file yet, but the site’s forum is red hot with activity and the file already has 205 comments. Choice lines about the leak in recent days have included “this is f*#$ing ridiculous. i want leopard, and i want it now. hurry, before some heads start to roll” and “Please do not talk about this torrent file outside of OINK.”

Someone should notify Apple.

[CrunchGear]