Ehm, yeah i ahd to think about the title for a second or two as well, but

Stuff Live, a gadget show in Britain, is set to happen this weekend in London one of the things on display is this lounge chair that hovers. Designed by inventor, Keith Dixon, the Lounger uses magnets to make the chair float above the ground. Funnily enough, Dixon, of Hoverit Ltd, which is based out of Sussex, was inspired by the Star Wars films as a child. Especially, when it comes to those anti-gravity Landspeeders.

He described the idea of lying on a sitting in this chair as that of floating on a cloud. And that would seem comparable, for sure. However, the price tag is enough to jolt anyone from a pleasant snooze. At $9,620, this is no everyday piece of equipment and meant for the serious gadget investor, only.

» Read full story

Uh-oh !  Looks like we have another laptop battery recall situation on our hands. In fact, the US Consumer Product Safety Commission has announced a recall of 35,000 laptop batteries manufactured by Sony.

And the reason is what you would expect. It seems the Lithium-ion batteries have the tendency to overheat, catch on fire and pose a burn hazard to people. And this is no joke. Apparently, 19 people have already reported problems with overheating. 17 reports involved actual flames and 2 people received mild burns from the faulty batteries.

While the recall is merely voluntary at the moment, it wouldn

» Read full story

Unigine is a developer of 3D graphics engines which in the end can end up in games. Much like the dinosaur island from Crytek a couple of years ago, which became the engine for Far Cry.  

Unigine released version 1.1 of their Tropics demo, new in this version is the addition of DirectX 10.1 support. You can download it over here, it features some pretty sweet graphics. This benchmark uses the Unigine engine.

Key changes:

• Support of DirectX 10.1 multisampling features
• Performance boost
• Procedural grass
• Multisampled deferred buffer, which allows combination of light scattering with anti-aliasing
• Pixel Shader Model 3.0 support is required now, so minimal supported hardware is ATI Radeon X1xxx / NVIDIA GeForce 6xxx
• Additional AMD CrossFire optimizations
• Correct detection of NVIDIA GTX series

It's actually a very impressive demo to look at, and certainly for ATI series 3000 and enwerr owners as it supports DirectX 10.1.

To download - Click here.

» Read full story

Dell released an updated version of the XPS One, the new all-in-one XPS One 24 features a 24" LCD display with 1920 x 1080 pixel resolution.

Prices start at $1,699 for a system with a Intel Core 2 Q8200, Windows Vista Home Premium SP1, DVD burner, 4GB DDR2 memory, 320GB HDD and Intel GMA X4500HD integrated graphics and SoundBlaster Audigy HD Software Edition integrated audio. For $300 more you get a 750GB HDD and GeForce 9600M GT 512MB graphics.

» Read full story

Game publisher Rockstar's confirmed that the PC version of GTA IV has been delayed from November till December 2. In addition, minimum specs have been released. And here they are:

Minimum System Requirements
OS: Windows Vista - Service Pack 1 / XP - Service Pack 3
Processor: Intel Core 2 Duo 1.8Ghz, AMD Athlon X2 64 2.4Ghz
Memory: 1.5GB, 16GB Free Hard Drive Space
Video Card: 256MB NVIDIA 7900 / 256MB ATI X1900

Recommended System Requirements
OS: Windows Vista - Service Pack 1 / XP - Service Pack 3
Processor: Intel Core 2 Quad 2.4Ghz, AMD Phenom X3 2.1Ghz
Memory: 2 GB (Windows XP) 2.5 GB (Windows Vista)
18 GB Free Hard Drive Space
Video Card: 512MB NVIDIA 8600 / 512MB ATI 3870

» Read full story

And yes .. once again a game that runs into problems due to copy-protection. Apparently people are having problems to install boxed copy of Fallout 3 because of 'shady' third-party programs that they have installed on their machines which conflict with Fallout 3's (and other games) installer.

...the person on the phone informed me that you have to uninstall any cd writing programs or image programs like nero, roxio, sonic, alcohol, daemon tools etc and only have the default windows cd writer on your computer...Saying that securom recognizes these as piracy tools basically. They also said if this doesn't work then you have to contact securom yourself about the issue. She told me there is nothing bethesda can do about this problem because of the securom software. Basically according to the call, it is securom's fault, let them handle it. She said we will have to wait for securom to release a fix if this doesn't work so my advice is to start harassing them.

I also asked if they have been getting many calls related to these issues of not being able to install the game, she said yes naturally. She also said these image and writing programs tell securom to read the disc incorrectly hence no wonder none of us have the real game according to securom. I have already uninstalled my cd writing programs but securom still persists in not letting me play my game ...

There's another forum post for those who have SecuROM issues with workaround instructions and a pointer to the SecuROM Website where there's a replacement launcher for Fallout 3, as well as a replacement launcher for Far Cry 2.

Can I just point my middle finger towards Bethesda and SecuROM ? Here's another title I won't pick up for sure. I'll be the judge on what is installed on my PC, not you guys.

» Read full story

Here we nicely and lengthy test the HIS Radeon HD 4870 X2 2048MB. A graphics card with 1600 tiny little sub-processors on that X2 hauling ass on your frame rate, and that's the success of the Radeon HD 4870 X2 .. incredible 3D computing performance, RAW power.

Obviously HIS technology jumped that bandwagon as well, and though we regret to not see a customized cooler on this product, it once again managed to impress us very much.

You can click here to read this Guru3D review.

 

» Read full story

Dang ! or Wow. Just wow. I know I could make a WoW pun or something out of that but I won
» Read full story

Well, that's a little bit of an overstatement I'd say, and hey if ZDNet says it, i must be right .. right ? Blu-ray is in a death spiral. 12 months from now Blu-ray will be a videophile niche, not a mass market product predicts this ZNET Blog. With only a 4% share of US movie disc sales and HD download capability arriving, the Blu-ray disc Association (BDA) is still smoking dope. Even $150 Blu-ray players won't save it. According to Digital Content Producer Blu-ray doesn't cut it for business:

• Recordable discs don't play reliably across the range of Blu-ray players - so you can't do low-volume runs yourself. 
• Service bureau reproduction runs $20 per single layer disc in quantities of 300 or less. 
• Hollywood style printed/replicated Blu-ray discs are considerably cheaper once you reach the thousand unit quantity: just $3.50 per disc. 
• High-quality authoring programs like Sony Blu-print or Sonic Solutions Scenarist cost $40,000. 
•  The Advanced Access Content System - the already hacked DRM - has a one-time fee of $3000 plus a per project cost of almost $1600 plus $.04 per disk. And who defines project? 
•  Then the Blu-ray disc Association charges another $3000 annually to use their very exclusive - on 4% of all video disks! - logo.

More here.

» Read full story

Deep Silver has issued a new patch for S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Clear Sky, bringing the official prequel to the survival FPS game S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl to v1.5.06. The patch includes balance tweaks, bug fixes, and adds DirectX 10.1 support, for which ATI released a hotfix earlier today. Added MSAA for alpha-tested objects ("alpha-to-coverage" for DX10.0, custom "alpha-to-coverage" for DX10.1 for better performance, native DX10.1 implementation for better quality).  Added new quality level for sun-shadows (ultra) for better picture quality.  Added new min/max shadowmap technique (which takes advantage of DX10.1 when available) allows to speed up high quality sunshafts rendering for top video boards and high resolutions.  Added high quality sunshafts acceleration for DX9 renderer Note: 1.5.04 and 1.5.05 saved games will be compatible with new patch.
» Read full story

Neowin attended a Windows 7 reviewers workshop on Sunday. And they showed the user interface enhancements introduced with Windows 7.

"Keeping with the trend, Averett described herself as a PC, wearing a red top matching her fall colored desktop with orange and red aero glass tones.

The session was an overview of some new features demonstrated on Windows 7 build 6933.winmain.081020-1842. Unfortunately the build that will be handed out to PDC attendees will not feature most of the enhancements I am about to detail.

First up was the new Windows 7 desktop. The new desktop includes a thicker taskbar, improved system tray and no sidebar. The orb on the start menu also glistens after hover over." [Via Neowin]

 

 

» Read full story

Vienna, October 27th 2008 - Noctua today announced the impending availability of a new mounting kit which makes it possible to install Noctua CPU coolers on Intel's upcoming Core i7 processors for socket LGA1366. The new SecuFirm2

» Read full story

ATI released an updated hotfix to address the following issues:

Far Cry 2 - fixes image quality issue that was introduced in the preview Far Cry 2 hotfix release posted last week

Stalker Clear Sky - this hotfix includes Stalker performance enhancements for the DirectX 10 version of the game. Also be sure to download the Stalker Clear Sky DirectX 10.1 patch, which will provide further performance enhancements (up to 10% at higher resolutions) and image quality enhancements over DX10.

We strongly recommend you download the game patch and test it in conjunction with this Catalyst hotfix

» Read full story

Here we test the HIS Radeon HD 4870 X2 2048MB. A graphics card with 1600 tiny little sub-processors on that X2 hauling ass on your frame rate, and that's the success of the Radeon HD 4870 X2 .. incredible 3D computing performance, RAW power.

Now how sexy is that ?

 

» Read full story

If you have a serious amount of cash to burn ... look no further mate. And do invite me to watch a movie with you soon okay ?

The 65-inch Mitsubishi LASERVUE Rear Projection TV has been receiving great deal of attentions since its announcement in early April. It

» Read full story

Where's the bunny, I'm gonna stuff ...  ehm ... Duracell, the world-renowned copper-top battery brand, are moving in a new direction. In fact, they have decided to step into the world of flash memory with SD, microSD, USB drives and Compactflash cards in an effort to expand the brand.  

While best known for batteries of all kinds, Duracell is venturing into new territory with not just USB drives and other compact media. They will also produce media card readers. But the real attraction is the company will push out marketing efforts in the places where Duracell is already a trusted name, such as pharmacies and grocery stores.

And it makes sense. After all, batteries are used in many electronic products that require memory. It makes it easier then, if you can rely on the same brand for batteries and memory options. In order to pull off this endeavor, Duracell has teamed up with Dane-Elec, which already has distribution in the U.S., Europe and Asia.

» Read full story

If you

» Read full story

Okay, that's a little retro ... Numark has recently announced the PT-01USB, which enables users to convert songs from vinyl records to digital WAV or MP3 files. The portable, battery-powered turntable uses a USB port to connect to Windows PCs or Macs and save the music playing on or through the device. Apart from tracks recorded on vinyl, an auxiliary input makes it possible to convert tracks from cassette decks or other sources into digital formats. The PT-01USB operates as a traditional record player as well, with an RCA line output letting users connect it to a DJ, PA or stereo system. A built-in speaker lets it function on its own.
A carrying handle is integrated into the PT-01USB, which is capable of playing records at 33RPM, 45RPM or 78RPM speeds, and also includes a 10 percent pitch adjustment.

Software for either operating system is included, not requiring users to download any drivers. EZ Vinyl Converter 2 is PC-compatible, while EZ Audio Creator 2 serves Mac users. The former imports songs into a user's iTunes library, separating them. Included Audacity software helps users reduce noise such as clicks and pops in converted tracks.

The PT-01USB is past its announced release date, and pricing information has not yet been revealed.

» Read full story

Intel proudly announced it was recognized as EPA Green Power Partner of the Year for its efforts to address climate change through green power purchases and its impact in advancing the renewable energy market. Intel signed a multi-year commitment to purchase more than 1.3 billion kilowatt hours of renewable energy certificates (REC) per year, roughly 47 percent of its purchased electricity use. Furthermore, the firm also deployed renewable energy technologies at its sites in Bangalore, India, in Hillsboro, Oregon and New Mexico, while Intel Capital invested more than $100 million in solar energy projects this year.

"This is but one milestone in our long-term strategy to help make renewable energy more economically feasible and a realistic choice for individuals and corporations," said William Swope, vice president of Intel's Corporate Affairs Group. "Renewable energy investment is imperative to spur the growth of the nation's energy market and we'll continue this ramp along with our industry efforts."

In early 2008, Intel signed a multi-year commitment to purchase more than 1.3 billion kilowatt hours of renewable energy certificates (REC) per year - enough power to meet approximately 47 percent of its purchased electricity use - and putting the company at the No. 1 spot on the EPA Fortune 500 Green Power Partners List. With a combination of RECs from Sterling Planet, Austin Energy and PNM, Intel's wide-ranging renewable energy portfolio includes wind projects in the Southwest and Pacific Northwest as well as solar photovoltaic (PV) installations in California. The EPA estimates that Intel's record purchase has the equivalent environmental impact of taking more than 185,000 cars off the road, or avoiding the amount of electricity needed to power more than 130,000 average American homes annually.

"Since Intel's purchase, we have seen a clear increase in market demand for renewable energy," said Mel Jones, Sterling Planet president and CEO. "Our contract backlog has grown more than 90 percent over the same period last year. Intel's commitment is having a significant impact on the market, while raising the bar and setting the example for corporate purchasers large and small."

In addition to its focus on stimulating the renewable energy market through purchasing power, Intel invests and innovates across a range of energy conservation activities, helping save more than $40 million in Intel operations since 2001.

» Read full story

With the rest of the globe to follow soon I hope. It's one of these other nice titles I like to get my hand on. Bethesda Softworks has announced that Fallout 3 should now be available in North America:

Fallout 3 will be available on store shelves and online in North America on October 28, in Europe and Australia on October 30 and in the UK on October 31. Developed at Bethesda Game Studios - creators of the 2006 Game of the Year, The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion - Fallout 3 is slated for release on the Xbox 360, PLAYSTATION 3 and Games for Windows. Fallout 3 features one of the most realized game worlds ever created. Set more than 200 years following a nuclear war, you can create any kind of character you want and explore the open wastes of Washington, D.C. however you choose. Every minute is a fight for survival as you encounter Super Mutants, Ghouls, Raiders, and other dangers of the Wasteland.

» Read full story