If you are in the market for a bargain HDTV or Blu-ray player, hang on for couple more months. Although holiday season is still a while away, technology expects have predicted a full forecast of the Black Friday sale. Analysts from Dealnews are speculating sale price to fall as low as $149 for a generic Blu-ray player, $499 for a 42-inch 720p Plasma and $799 for a 1080P 46/47-inch no-brand-name LCD HDTV.
Bargain hunters should know what they will get into queuing up for hours in a cold thanksgiving night, and make sure they are not being sold. The generic $149 Blu-ray is more likely a budget lineup from Funai NB500 or Memorex MVBD-2510. Dynex, Insignia, Westinghouse or Maxent flat screen TV are likely to be the candidate on Black Friday.
Shoppers look for Apple products are going to be disappointed with the speculation. Ipod, Iphone, Imac or I-What-ever would not be heavily discounted, about 5-10% sale with free shipping online.
As a matter of fact, I just returned from local Fry
Information has reached our doorsteps that Trapeze Networks proposed Wi-Fi standard that should reduce the high power use of wireless networks. Known as 802.11v, the tentative format would more intelligently check for a connection and shut off the radio on either the router or devices themselves earlier when they idle, reducing the wasted energy and drawing out battery life.
It would further send traffic maps to prevent end devices from having to send as much information on the network.
The technology should also have a side benefit for turning devices back on, the company says. While it exists in some form for newer business notebooks using Intel's vPro platform, a new addition would support software waking up any 802.11v device over the wireless network for it to run a task without users themselves being nearby. More location-based features are also built-in that would be useful for emergencies and other times when GPS isn't available.
The IEEE standards group, which controls the Wi-Fi standard, isn't set to have a final version of 802.11v ready until 2010 but also has yet to unveil every aspect of the technology, including its speed versus 802.11n
Spotted at their own website it seems that Creative Labs silently introduced two new models SoundBlaster X-Fi Titanium cards into their lineup. The two new cards are the X-Fi Titanium and X-Fi Titanium Professional Audio.
Now I had to do some digging to spot the actual difference between the original version and these two the new cards come with a PCIe x1 port, 7.1 channel sound, standard 24-bit/192KHz and 109 dB SNR (signal to noise ratio). Als the same, 64MB of X-RAM and EMI shield protection though the looks have changed a little. The only difference that we spotted is that the X-Fi Titanium Professional Audio comes with a "pro" grade 3.5mm stereo to RCA cable and the Creative Media Toolbox application
The price is
A report by Edge Online shows that Activision has sued a New York resident for allegedly copying Call of Duty 3 for the Xbox 360 and other, unnamed games.
Activision seeks $30,000 to $150,000 in damages "for each infringement of each copyrighted videogame." After looking into the issue, GamePolitics uncovered six other instances of piracy-related Activision lawsuits. Settlements in those cases ranged from $1,000 to $100,000, the site says, adding that five of the six defendants lacked representation.
It is unknown whether the copyright violations occurred in the course of file sharing, or whether there was some more complex mechanism afoot. Activision's court filings do not specify the manner in which their copyrights were violated, or how they came to learn of the violations.
The new Realtek HD Audio 2.04 driver is available for download. The binaries support Windows 2000, Windows Server 2003, Windows Server 2003 x64, Windows Vista, Windows Vista x64, Windows XP, Windows XP x64.
Realtek HD Audio Driver supports all of Realtek HD Audio Codec in Vista/WinXP/Win2000/Win2003 .
Add/Fix Driver:
Download - click here.
A few days after HP announced massive layoffs, and even today similar news from Creative Labs who will be dismissing the majority of its employees across Europe as of the end of this month there's another company in rough weather.
NVIDIA issued a press-released with unfortunately bad news for a change. Earlier this afternoon we where informed that NVIDIA will have to layoff roughly 6.5 % of their global workforce. As you guys know, NVIDIA has been on a roller-coaster ride for the past eight years or so. They grew rapidly and very extreme. Their workforce in that time expanded to (to date) over 5000 employees. The job cuts are going to be across the board, not targeted at any specific group. Whispers also say that this is because the chip maker is going to badly miss numbers this quarter, it makes sense it is taking preemptive moves to get costs under control.
Lately NVIDIA has been a cascading set of problems related to bad mobile GPU parts and declining sales as AMD ATI has been steadily on a roll the last quarter of 2008 with their Radeon HD 4600/4800 products.
We receive a quote from Jen-Shun Huang, CEO of NVIDIA in the situation at hand:
We take a look at a new mainboard from ECS. It comes with the all new integrated Intel Dual Core Atom 330 processor. It has integrated sound, 10/100 Ethernet and integrated graphics. Really all you need to do is insert a slice of DDR2 533 memory and connect a HD, and you are on the web ... browsing at fairly normal speeds, listening to songs, or watching a DVD ... heck it all works fine on that Intel Atom 330 for sure.
Next to that, the power consumption is obviously amazing. The platform completely maxed out merely utilizes 55 Watts, and half of that your PSU will account for all by itself as that Atom 330 dual-core processor .. uses 8 Watt, amazing.
Read the Guru3D review click here.
The lacks of profile 2.0, 7.1 analogue out and internal decoder for DTS-MA aren
Lexar has partnered with Eye-Fi to bring out its own range of WiFi enabled SD cards for digital cameras. As with Eye-Fi
The Skeleton
Two reports appeared on the web that expect that Intel will lower prices in its low-end dual-core and quad-core CPU lines on October 19. These cuts reportedly will reduce the Core 2 Quad Q8200 from its existing $224 to $193, while the Core 2 Quad Q6600 will fall $10 to $183-still a little higher than what AMD's Phenom X4 9950 costs now. Intel's price cut will coincide with the arrival of the $133 Core 2 Duo E7400, which will run at 2.8GHz. T
he E7400's arrival will push the 2.66GHz Core 2 Duo E7300 down to $113. Also, the Pentium E2220 will drop to $74 and the E2200 to $64, both $10-15 below current pricing. According to DigiTimes, Intel will follow up on November 30 with three brand-new Core-based CPUs: a $224 Core 2 Quad Q8300 clocked at 2.5GHz, an $86 Pentium E5300 at 2.6GHz, and a $53 Celeron E1500 at 2.2GHz. Even more price cuts will come on January 18, when the Core 2 Quad Q8200 will supposedly fall to $183, and the Core 2 Duo E7400 will drop to $113.
Apparantly the Bill Gates/Jerry Seinfeld Microsoft ads will stop running. This story keeps getting weirder. Microsoft is now set to run new ads featuring an actor who looks and dresses just like John Hodgman
