3 unusual gadgets gifts for this Christmas
Nov 18, 2008
In today post you will find 3 unusual gadgets for this Christmas. All the gadgets presented here are available at Boots.com.
1. Dog Speakers
Dog Speakers can be used with most computers, MP3 players or mini disc players. With an amplifier, powered by an adapter.
This gadget price tag is £15.00.
2. Radio Controlled Moped
Ever fancied your own Vespa or Lambretta back in the day? Well with this radio controlled moped you can fulfil your dreams and scoot along in style.
The matching fully functioning controller allows you to move forwards, backwards left and right, excellent for taking to the highways of your living room.
This Remote Controlled Mod Scooter is sure to appeal to anyone, even Rockers! (The mortal enemies of the Mod’s) If your allegiances lay with the Motorcycle loving Rockers you can always have endless hours of amusement putting the poor helpless Mod on board through some dare-devil Evil Knievel style stunts!
The gadget cost £20.00.
3. MP3 Bathroom wireless speaker
Listen to your audio player in the bathroom without getting it wet. Suitable for use with most external audio players.
The MP3 Bathroom Wireless Speaker will be a great gift.
Price tag? £25.00.
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Eee PC 901GO with faster SSD and a bigger battery surfaces in France
The Eee PC 901 has always been the sweet spot model in ASUS's alphabet soup of a netbook line, and the 901GO launched today in France makes it even more desirable with a larger 8700mAh battery and a faster 16GB SSD capable of 50MB/s writes and 87MB/s reads.
Of course, you can get the same 1.6GHz Atom processor, 1GB of RAM and 8.9-inch screen in the 900A for $280, so the new 901GO's €399 ($505) pricetag seems perhaps a bit much, but the cutting edge ain't a cheap place to live, kids.
Source: Engadget
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USB 3.0 full specs promise 10X speed boost
The USB 3.0 Promoter Group today revealed the full specifications for its namesake interface standard and so greenlit development of computer platforms and devices using the technology. The new peripheral format will now officially peak at 5Gbps, or about ten times faster than the 2.0 protocol. In actual tests, 25GB of data transfers in nearly 14 minutes over USB 2.0 but just 70 seconds over USB 3.0, significantly outpacing FireWire 800 as well as many hard drives.
Some of the often-cited other limits of USB versus FireWire have also been tackled in the official 3.0 release. While it consumes less power overall, the spec also lets USB 3.0 push more power from the host to an attached device and should result in fewer external hard drives or other add-ons that need a separate AC power source to run properly.
USB 3.0 is backwards-compatible with USB 2.0 hardware but won't work with USB 1.0 devices due to significant changes between the original format and its third generation, which comes more than ten years later.
Hardware that supports USB 3.0 is still distant and won't show until the second half of 2009, when device controllers that can recognize and use the format are available. End devices also aren't due until 2010.
FireWire isn't remaining static and should be upgraded to the S3200 standard ahead of USB 3.0 to provide about 3.2Gbps of bandwidth and similar power management features.
Source: Elctronista
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Internet, IP legislation gets promoted to House big leagues
When the new Congress reconvenes in January, every geek's favorite subcommittee—the House Judiciary Committee's Subcommittee on Courts, the Internet, and Intellectual Property—will be in the market for a new name. Judiciary Committee Chair John Conyers (D-MI) plans to strip the SCIIP of its authority over IP issues, which will henceforth be handled at the full committee level, and instead give it jurisdiction over antitrust questions.
Included in the ambit of that IP jurisdiction is legislation, set to expire next year, that allows satellite TV providers to retransmit broadcast signals to rural customers.
Much initial coverage of the switch has hinted—and some positively screamed—that it represents a victory for content owners who had feared that with "Hollywood" Howard Berman (D-CA) slated to take the chair at Foreign Affairs, reform-friendly Rick Boucher (D-VA) might take the helm at SCIIP. But the Committee-watchers we contacted said that doesn't compute.
Legal scholar Lawrence Lessig and Public Knowledge communications director Art Brodsky both suggested that Boucher was more likely interested in holding on to a top position at Energy and Commerce, where he currently chairs the Energy and Air Quality Subcommittee. As Brodsky observed, Boucher's intellectual interests may lean toward copyright and patent policy, but his constituents in southwestern Virginia care about coal. (Boucher's office had not returned a call for comment at press time.) 
Rather, according to a committee aide who spoke with Ars on background, the decision was driven by simple numbers: as interest in IP issues has grown in recent years, so has the SCIIP. Handling them at the full committee level allows all the members to get their fingers in the pie. The swap also recognizes the complexity of legislation affecting IP, and avoids the need to get half the Judiciary Committee caught up with the subcommittee's discussions.
Moving antitrust issues to the subcommittee aligns the House Judiciary structure more closely with that in the Senate, where there's already a Subcommittee on Antitrust, Competition Policy and Consumer Rights. The scope of that authority should include net neutrality issues, creating a potential counterweight to Massachusetts Rep. Ed Markey's Subcommittee on Telecommunications and the Internet.
Markey has been a neutrality proponent, but his subcommittee's approach has thus far gone through the Federal Communications Commission, over which it has jurisdiction. The Internet Freedom Preservation Act, introduced in February, consisted of a general set of policy goals and a proposal to convene a series of "broadband summits" and solicit public comments. Neutrality legislation coming out of a Judiciary subcommittee might be more likely to bare the sharper teeth of the Justice Department's antitrust litigators.
A vote in January will be needed to ratify the reorganization.
Source: Arstechnica
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Fallout 3 Review (Xbox 360)
By Joe Haygood
“War. War never changes.” With those immortal words from Ron Perlman, Bethesda re-opens the Vault door on Fallout 3, a triumphant return to our favorite post-apocalyptic wasteland.
Fallout 3 takes a new spin on the classic franchise, by not only moving the clock forward, but by taking you to a whole new location in the world, good old Washington D.C. You have been tasked with trying to find out why, under strange circumstances, your father has left the safety of The Vault, a giant fallout shelter built inside a mountain. You follow him into the Capital Wasteland, not only to find his trail, but to explore and take in this new, forbidden world.
Bethesda has always used neat, unique ways to build character traits, but in Fallout 3, we are treated to what might be the greatest sequence of events to create your character. In Fallout 3, you start the game at your birth, with your father and mother greeting you into the world. Your father presents you with a screen that will show you what you will look like at the age of 18. Here you build your appearance and characteristics. You then are flashed forward to a point where you pick your stats and another where you pick your perk stats, all up to the point where you finally are left with the quest to leave the vault. It is a highly creative process, which truly represents character development, as you are growing with each stage Fallout 3.
Once released into the post-apocalyptic wasteland, you are left to your own devices on how to proceed in the world. You can start following the trail of your father, or you can just wander around the world, exploring this new and strange world that you have walked into. There are no boundaries as to where you can go, or on what you can do. The path you take is all based on what you want to do in the world. It is a bit daunting at first, because there is no direction when you leave the vault. There is nothing that is necessarily forcing you to do the main quest, which results in a great amount of freedom and confusion to the player.
Fallout 3 at its heart is a morality play. When you are tasked with a mission, you can go about and complete it in several ways. Do you take the high road and make the right choices, or do you put on a set of horns and act as evil as possible. You are always judged by people, based on the actions that you take. Kill innocents and you are deemed to be blight upon humanity, but save the innocent and you become a champion of good. One of the situations you will run across is a man by the name of Tenpenny. Tenpenny hates ghouls, hideous figures that were hit with mega-doses of radiation, and refused to die. You are asked to rid a local underground train station of these ghouls, but when you arrive at the train station, you are given a counter proposal. You can try to negotiate a peaceful settlement between the two factions, you can backstab Tenpenny and help the ghouls overrun Tenpenny’s haven, or you can be an evil s.o.b. like myself and murder the ghouls while they sleep. How you proceed gives you karma, and the decision you make will follow you through the game.
Fallout 3 is a gritty and ugly world, and Bethesda has captured this world in great fashion. Walking around the wasteland presents a world that has been thoroughly decimated by war and destruction. At every turn, something is there to remind you of the power of the bombs that dropped. It is a tough reality to portray, and it is done in Fallout 3 with painful efficiency. When you first get a chance to walk into the downtown center of what is left of Washington D.C., you see how bad the devastation was to the world, as you see landmarks like the Capitol building, the Washington Monument, and even the horrible destruction of the museums that line the Washington Mall. The vision of retro future also stands out here, with the future looking like development stopped in the 1950’s, but with a dab of future technology in there, like functional robots and laser weaponry. Fallout 3 paints this visual spender with the best looking graphics engine we have witnessed on the 360 hardware as of yet.
Several actor step in to provide voices for Fallout 3. Liam Neeson gives life to the voice of your father, and does a good job with what he is given. Some of it seems forced and clichéd, but overall, he puts a lot of passion into the role. Malcom McDowell, no stranger to video game work, puts in a great performance as President John Henry Eden. Listening to his lines about baseball and the Enclave is great fun as he mixes in between seriousness and hilarity. Unfortunately, there is not much else in the way of good voice overs, by any of the other characters outside of the omni-present DJ, Three Dog. As a matter of fact, I think most of the voice work by other characters was done by the same twelve people at Bethesda. Every other mercenary and caravan trader seems to sound like the same guy looping over and over. With a budget like Bethesda had with Fallout 3, it seems like they put all their eggs into the star power and less into the support roles. Making up for some of the poor voice acting is the Ink Spots, adding some of their great music along with other old school 40’s and 50’s artists to give some great ambiance to the world.
Combat and violence go hand and hand in Fallout 3, adding up to some great looking, and grizzly violent encounters with the native population. Fallout 3 gives the player a choice in how they handle combat. You can use real time combat where you shoot away at your enemy, or you can enter the VATS mode of combat. VATS (Vault-Tec Assisted Targeting System) pauses combat, and allows for players to target a specific part of the body, queuing up attacks to unleash upon the enemy. VATS combat, works and feels very similar to the old turn based combat style of the first Fallout games, even down to the idea of Action Points, making sure that players do not spam the VATS system. While both combat systems are there, the real time combat feels fake, as the shooting is still based on your skills, and not on your actual ability to hit the target. This means that even though you line up a shot at someone’s head at point blank range, you still have a statistical chance to miss, due to your skills being a factor, instead of how well you can aim. VATS works rather well and in the long run will probably be the combat system of choice for most people. It does make for a lot of backpedalling fights, but it just seems to give more realistic combat results. Once you make the hit on a target, be prepared for some gruesome results, which may churn some stomachs. There is something sadistic, yet satisfying about watching someone’s skull imploding from a shotgun blast, and seeing the eyeballs fly out of the head. This kind of violence may not sit well with everyone that plays Fallout 3, but it does fit the ugliness of the world that you are a part of now.
While we have a game that offers tons of play and fun for its price tag, there are two glaring issues that really detract from Fallout 3’s overall polish. There is nothing worse than walking along a mountain ridge, or between two buildings and getting your character caught in the terrain, essentially locking your character up, and having the player load a previous save game. Also having major problems is the third person view, which is in the game, but fully non-functional. Your character looks to glide on the terrain in third person view, and when you get into combat, the view really just hampers any sense of combat flow.
Fallout 3, does present a masterpiece on how to set up mission structure, moral choices and solid combat, all laid out in a horrible, yet intriguing post-apocalyptic wasteland. Bethesda has made broad steps to cater to the old guard, as well as new visitors to the Fallout franchise. There are still a few blemishes here and there that should have been fixed before Fallout 3 left the building. That said, Fallout 3 is a fantastic game that should be played by anyone and everyone over the age of 17 this fall.Read more on this article...
Yahoo CEO Yang to step down
Posted by Stephen Shankland
Yahoo, under fierce financial pressure, has begun a search to replace company co-founder Jerry Yang as chief executive, the company said Monday.
"Jerry and the board have had an ongoing dialogue about succession timing, and we all agree that now is the right time to make the transition to a new CEO who can take the company to the next level," Chairman Roy Bostock said in a statement. "We are deeply grateful to Jerry for his many contributions as CEO over the past 18 months, and we are pleased that he plans to stay actively involved at Yahoo as a key executive and member of the Board."
Yang will resume his position as chief Yahoo, the company said, the role he had before taking over in 2007 after former CEO Terry Semel departed.
After reporting a 64 percent drop in net income and warning that the advertising market is softening, Yahoo announced a layoff of at least 1,430 by the end of 2008 in October. The cut follows another in which about 1,000 Yahoo employees lost their jobs in February.
All Things D's Kara Swisher reported the move earlier Monday.
Hitting the reset button
"I think it's the right move for the company," said Eric Jackson, an activist Yahoo shareholder who has pressured the company for big changes. However, he added, "It's really too little too late. This is a board failure more than it is Jerry's failure. These problems have been around at Yahoo for well over two years now."
It's unclear at this stage what changes will come with a new CEO, but one possibility is another shot at a deal with Microsoft. "I would expect Microsoft to come back within the next three or four months," Jackson said.
Yang needed to step aside to give Yahoo a chance to start fresh, said David Wertheimer, the former president of Paramount Digital Entertainment and now the chief of the Entertainment Technology Center at the University of Southern California.
"The problem Yahoo has now is they've got to redefine themselves in a different landscape than they were when Jerry built the company," Wertheimer said. "As much as I like Jerry personally, I think employees, and Wall Street are looking for something revolutionary, a sign that the company is reinventing itself."
Yang patted himself on the back for moving the company in a new direction during his recent CEO tenure. His full statement:
From founding this company to guiding its growth into a trusted global brand that is indispensible to millions of people, I have always sought to do what is best for our franchise. When the board asked me to become CEO and lead the transformation of the company, I did so because it was important to re-envision the business for a different era to drive more effective growth. Having set Yahoo on a new, more open path, the time is right for me to transition the CEO role and our global talent to a new leader. I will continue to focus on global strategy and to do everything I can to help Yahoo realize its full potential and enhance its leading culture of technology and product excellence and innovation.
Yahoo said the search will include internal and external candidates. One leading contender no doubt is President Sue Decker, who has been a close Yang ally. The New York Times reported that other candidates include Dan Rosensweig, Yahoo's former chief operating officer and now with Quadrangle Group, and former AOL CEO Jon Miller.
Struggling for a fix
Yahoo has been struggling for months to improve its financial performance, but things have gone from bad to worse for the company this year, and its stock has sunk to a closing price of $10.63 on Monday. First, the company thwarted Microsoft's unfriendly attempt to acquire Yahoo outright, and later just its search business, though Yahoo appeared to grow more interested in a deal even as Microsoft grew cooler. At one point, Microsoft offered to acquire the company at $33 per share.
The next blow was the economic collapse, which is hurting the advertising market on which Yahoo depends. Even though many expect online ads to fare better than those on TV or in print, Yahoo relies more on graphical "display" ads that are expected to be hit harder than the search-related text ads that supply the vast majority of Google's profits.
Finally, a search-ad partnership with Google fell apart in November when Google decided it didn't have the stomach to fight the Justice Department's threatened antitrust lawsuit.
Is the fix in?
Yang can't claim credit for righting the company, but he has certainly changed it.
One major component, just now launching is the Yahoo Open Strategy, which is designed to rewire Yahoo's computing infrastructure. The goal is to link Yahoo users with social networking elements, enable others to energize Yahoo properties with new applications, and build Yahoo activities into other sites on the Internet. Ultimately, the company hopes for new users and more activity from existing users.
The company also is trying to overhaul its advertising business. Part of that effort involves improving the profitability of its search ads, but a higher-profile element is the Amp technology for display ads. With Amp, Yahoo hopes to make it easier for advertisers to find places to run ads, easier for publishers to find advertisers, and easier for all parties to track just how well ads are doing.
Source:
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Will consumers slash spending on wireless, TV, and broadband?
As large employers, such as Citigroup, prepare for massive layoffs, the bad economic news is starting to hit home for consumers afraid of losing their jobs and already looking for ways to tighten their belts.
The recent spate of poor earnings from all kinds of consumer companies, like coffee giant Starbucks, tell us that consumers are nervous about the economy. And it looks like consumers will continue to be skittish about spending over the next several months. Last week Nokia, the largest maker of mobile phones in the world, announced it's already seen sales slip, and it projected that sales will likely continue to be weak in the fourth quarter and into 2009.
While it's obvious that consumers are cutting back spending on certain luxuries like lattes and new cell phones, I wonder if they are also looking to cut spending on monthly services, like wireless, broadband, and cable TV. I recently looked at my stack of monthly bills to find where I could trim some fat from my budget, and I realized that aside from my electric bill, my cable/broadband and wireless phone bills are my top money suckers every month.
Executives from some of the nation's largest wireless and broadband companies have said publicly they don't expect to see huge numbers of people canceling service. For one, wireless, cable TV, and broadband services have become staples in American culture. And second, most people are under some kind of contract for one, if not all, of these services. So canceling their service outright could end up costing them more.
I know I couldn't do without my cell phone, cable TV, or broadband services. But maybe I could manage with less.
That's exactly what CEOs from Sprint Nextel and Verizon Communications have said they expect people to do over the next few months. They expect to see consumers curtail their spending somewhat by cutting back on services. This might mean reducing the number of voice minutes on a voice plan or cutting down the number of channels received as part of a cable TV service. Or maybe people will downgrade from a higher-speed broadband connection to a slower connection for a better price. Perhaps it means getting rid of a traditional voice landline or even a second voice over IP line.
Source: Cnet
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Samsung X460 14.1-Incher Now Shipping in U.S.
Nov 17, 2008
Samsung’s X460, a new 14.1-inch thin-and-light laptop, is now available in the United States.
NewEgg offers the 4-pound notebook, which is 0.80-1.25 inches thin, in two versions. The X460-44G model features the Intel Core 2 Duo P7350 processor at 2GHz and a 250GB hard drive, whereas the X460-44P has the 2.26GHz Core 2 Duo P8400 and a 320GB HDD. Both laptops feature the NVIDIA GeForce 9200M GS 256MB dedicated graphics, 3GB of DDR3 memory, and a DVD burner. The LED-backlit display has a resolution of 1280×800 pixels.
There are also a built-in 1.3MP web camera, 802.11a/b/g/n wireless, Gigabit Ethernet LAN, Bluetooth, and a 56k modem, as well as HDMI and VGA outputs, three USB ports, an ExpressCard slot, and 7-in-1 media card reader.
The notebooks ship with a 6-cell battery and run Windows Vista Business operating system.
The Samsung X460-44G and X460-44P are priced at $1,499.99 and $1,699.99 respectively.
The X460-44P model has been already reviewed by Laptop Magazine.
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PANASONIC Lumix DMC-TZ5 black camera
PANASONIC Lumix DMC-TZ5 black camera has a 28 mm wide-angle setting to fit sweeping landscapes into a single frame,and a telephoto setting to pull in subjects from far away and capture even the subtlest details in facial expressions. It records video in 720p and is equipped with a 10-megapixel sensor, with a high sensitivity range going up to 6400 ISO and a light detection system with several levels.
The DMC-TZ3 has an ultra-compact superzoom with a 10x and 28-200mm lens.
PANASONIC Lumix DMC-TZ5 features
# 28mm wide-angle shooting plus powerful 10x optical zoom. At the 28mm wide-angle setting, you can fit more friends into the frame or capture more of a sweeping landscape. The 10x optical zoom brings those distant subjects up-close and personal for more detail. And when combined with the Extra Optical Zoom of 16.9x and the digital zoom of 4x, this camera is capable of a gigantic 67.5x total zoom — making even the most distant shots come to life.
# Capture subjects without blur — despite shaky hands. MEGA Optical Image Stabilization and Motion Detection combine to capture your subjects clearly — despite hand or subject movement. Face Detection, Scene Detection and Light Detection work to produce the most natural, realistic pictures possible by sensing and adjusting to lighting, back-lighting or the use of flash. Intelligent Auto Technology (iA) can detect and correct 5 settings at once for easy, beautiful shots.
# Huge 3″ LCD automatically adjusts to lighting conditions. The LCD’s brightness adjusts automatically in 11 steps as the light level changes. This makes it easy to view and share your images… day or night, indoors or outdoors.
# Shoot in dim lighting without a flash. Sometimes lower light sets the mood and the use of a flash can alter that special lighting. In High-Sensitivity Mode, you can keep the flash off and capture the moment as it was meant to be.
# Take up to 5 shots per second! Capture all of the action and facial expressions. You can pick which ones to keep and which to delete.
# Take ultra-smooth HD video at 30 frames per second. When a still shot just won’t capture the moment…shoot a movie! At 30 fps, the DMC-TZ5 lets you capture lifelike HD video that can be viewed afterward on the built-in LCD screen, your TV via the included AV cable or even on your HDTV with a special HD cable (sold separately).
# Pick the best settings for your situation. Whether you’re shooting night scenes, vast landscapes, portraits or flowers, simply choose the most appropriate options…and the DMC-TZ5 will adjust its setting for the best results. Offers over 25 scene positions and shooting modes!
# Store plenty of pictures and video on 50MB of internal memory. Also accepts SD™, SDHC™ and MultiMediaCard™ memory cards (sold separately). Use memory cards to store as many images as you want — and keep them for posterity, or write over them with newer images!
# Rechargeable li-ion battery and charger included. Also includes USB cable, AV cable, battery carrying case, strap and CD-ROM.
The price tag for PANASONIC Lumix DMC-TZ5 features is £ 189 and it is available at Pixmania.
Source: Gadget-Club
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Dell's 32GB Inspiron Mini 9 netbook blushes pink and red in Japan
What's black and white and now red in Japan? Why Dell's Inspiron Mini 9 of course -- who reads newspapers? Starting tomorrow
Dell's little netbook will finally be available in red to match the initial teaser shots that had the entire laptop world looking Dell's way back in May. Pink too, to offset the decidedly more staid, obsidian black and alpine white versions available elsewhere. Japan also nabbed an Inspiron Mini 9 Platinum Package that features a relative biggie 32GB SSD for a tax inclusive price of ¥54,980 or about $565. No word on a rest of world release date for these Mini 9 updates but we expect them go Stateside in time for Cindy-Lou Who. Mini 9 in pink after the break.
Source: Engadget
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