Content and news by Rob Williams

Logitech has updated their QuickCam Pro line to include Carl Zeiss glass, which should be a good thing for everyone involved. Zeiss is a leader in fine optics, so the quality exhibited from these cameras should be the best we have seen to date. For those interested, the QuickCam Pro is looking to be their new high-end offering, which will retail for $99.99. Notebook users are not left in the dark either, as the QuickCam Pro for Notebooks will also feature Zeiss glass and retail for the same $99.99.

The autofocus is super fast, for better use of hand props and wild gesticulation. And of course they come with Logitech’s legendary Video Effects and Fun Filters, like the king’s crown and the sweet 1920s movie filter, for instant YouTube stardom.

Source: Gizmodo

Warner is out to make our high-def lives a little bit easier, but not until at least early 2008. Total HD discs are designed to take the hassle out of the format war, where one movie would be released on one disc that would play in either a Blu-ray or HD-DVD player. It sounds great for both the consumers and the publishing companies, but it seems it’s a little more difficult a task than originally anticipated, hence the delay.

“The Total Hi Def disc is about giving consumers complete choice, providing creators and artists the greatest possible distribution of their work, and helping retailers thrive in the marketplace,” said Kevin Tsujihara, President of Warner Bros. Home Entertainment Group, at the CES unveiling. “By eliminating potential apprehension over formats, we believe this new disc could help consumers fully embrace the greatest home entertainment experience available.”

Source: DailyTech

Two months ago, AMD announced their 2×00 series of cards, although only the 2900 could be found at retail shortly after. NDA is now released on the rest of the cards, so 2400 and HD 2600 reviews are making their rounds today. What these mid-range cards offer is DX10 and SM 4.0 support and all the key features that the 2×00 series brought to the table. The big question is though, are they worth it?

Overall, the new Radeon HD 2600 XT, 2600 Pro, and 2400 XT cards should make for quiet, low-power upgrades from any integrated graphics solution and offer a relatively low-cost of entry into the world of DirectX 10. These cards are obviously not geared to hardcore gamers, but at lower resolutions without high levels of AA and anisotropic filtering enabled they’ll be adequate for casual gaming. – HotHardware

While gaming performance of the HD 2600 XT is generally a bit slower than the GeForce 8600 GTS, the price is lower as well. In this market segment price is often more important than a few percent more or less performance. The cooling solution of the 2600 XT works well, temperature controlled fan speeds keep the fan noise at a minimum. – techPowerUp!

Gamers on a budget should be pleased by the performance found with these cards, as they seem to scale well with NVIDIA’s offerings when pricing comes into play. These were the first two reviews we were sent, but no doubt more will be posted throughout the day. We will link to the rest in tomorrows daily roundup.

This doesn’t have much to do with tech, per se, but it’s definitely cool. A winner of a contest was awarded his “dream” which consisted of living under a lake for twelve days. The underwater cabin measured 7’x10’x7′ and included a bed, tools to convert carbon dioxide to oxygen, a lavatory and a exercise bike used to generate electricity. Not my cup of tea, but it’s a unique experience no doubt.

As the winner of a £20,000 “Live Your Dream” contest sponsored by the magazine Australian Geographic, 29-year-old Lloyd Godson lived in a 10-foot-long box at the bottom of a lake for 12 days. It doesn’t look like the cabin had windows.

Source: Boing Boing

I was really beginning to wonder if we were going to ever see another Sunbird/Lightning release, but here it is, and it looks sharp. For those unaware, Sunbird is a standalone calender application that allows you to keep track of anything, make notes and plan for upcoming events. Lightning is essentially the same thing, except it’s integrated with Thunderbird, as an extension. The new version brings on a better looking GUI, improved printing and also support for Google Calendar (no surprise).

About two months after our initial scheduled release date, Lightning 0.5 and Sunbird 0.5 bring us a huge step closer to our 1.0 release, which is scheduled for the first half of 2008. Lightning 0.5 and Sunbird 0.5 are available for Windows, Mac OS X (universal builds) and Linux in 22 different languages including English.

Source: Calender Weblog

In some good news for Linux users today, DesktopLinux is reporting that Google has finally released their Google Desktop application for the OS, adding to it’s Windows and OS X support. The search features have my interest a little piqued, so I might give it a try, despite being skeptical of installing too much Google software on my machine. The article notes that only Deb and Rpm versions of the installer are available, but as long as you have glibc 2.3.2+ and gtk+ 2.2.0+ installed, you should be fine.

Google Desktop for Linux is based on Google’s own desktop search algorithms. As such, it is not an open-source program. A Google representative also said that the program is not built on existing Linux search programs, such as Novell engineer Nat Friedman’s popular Beagle search program.

Source: DesktopLinux

GNOME is a beloved desktop environment for many Linux users, but can it be improved upon? Of course it can, and Venture Cake has a roundup of ten specific features that would help improve it as a whole. Ditching the acronym is at the top of the list, which I can’t personally agree with simply because it’s such a well known product… as GNOME, regardless of what it stands for. Other prospective features include highlighting of new apps, right-clicking an application to uninstall it, video screen capture among others.

Desktop Effects are great for impressing your non-Linux using colleagues, or dragging round windows during conference calls. But all that GPU usage comes at the cost of battery life. Gnome already knows when I’m plugged in, so why not let me skip the less productive effects when I’m roaming?

Source: Venture Cake

Intel is not quickly thought of as being a cable manufacturer, but todays announcement brought on an Intel Cluster Ready technology and Intel Connects Cables, which is designed to help simplify cluster use for high-performance computing. This is a business-side announcement, with the target market including medical research, weather forecasting, super computer use or generally large networks that require a lot of data to be passed along. What’s great about these cables especially though is the fact that they can handle 20 Gbps speeds over 100 meters and are also far thinner than current networking cables. Less weight and easier management.

SANTA CLARA, Calif. and DRESDEN, Germany, June 27, 2007 – Intel Corporation today announced new technologies that will advance and accelerate growth of high-performance computing (HPC) – from deskside supercomputers to high-end petaflop-sized clusters. Intel Cluster Ready and Intel Connects Cables help simplify cluster use and deployment as high-performance computing use expands from academic and scientific realms to more mainstream use in data centers. Increasingly clustered systems are powering a wide variety of activities including medical research, weather forecasting, computer-aided design and financial modeling.

Source: Intel Press Release

I’ve been quite lucky to avoid the dreaded red ring of death on my launch Xbox 360, but it seems that many people are not so lucky, especially Justin Lowe. He’s currently on his twelfth Xbox since he purchased his first a month after the launch. Three have been red rings of death, two had disc read errors, two were DOA, others had audio and video problems and one exploded.

I personally am having a hard time believing most of this. There is audio in the article that verifies that he had many Xbox 360s repaired, but the chances of running into this many issues by chance seems unlikely. Lottery chances. Regardless of what I think, it’s an interesting read, even if it is hard to believe.

As Justin garnered more experience with 360 repairs, he discovered something. The consoles consumers sent back by Microsoft are often refurbished, rather than brand-new. Justin found out that, with enough problems and by specifically making the request, Microsoft would send out brand-new consoles as replacements. Midway through his ordeal, he began doing this, but quickly found the downside: new consoles can take even longer to send out, with up to two weeks spent waiting for Microsoft approval.

Source: 1UP

The guys from ScrewAttack have thrown a new video on the GameTrailers website where they take a look at the top ten worst 2D to 3D conversions in gaming. Half of the games I have never played, but I can agree with them regardless, such as NARC and Altered Beast.. and Contra! The number one on the list won’t be a surprise to hardcore fans of the series as well. Why do companies need to ruin games by moving them to 3D? It’s not an easy thing to pull off, especially when most of the games seem so half-assed.

You can follow the link below to watch the video in a Flash player, or to download it to multiple formats.

Source: Game Trailers

Not only can the Cell Broadband Engine power our gaming consoles, but it can also aide the government to take on such challenges as national security, cyberspace and bioinformatics. The sheer power of the Cell is enough to analyze data streaming data in real-time, so it’s no wonder it’s in people’s sights. Next time you boot up your PS3, think about all the power being wasted on your games.

In the areas of defense and security, the new computing power could be used on unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to partially analyze incoming data onboard. Equipment on such platforms needs to be minimal in size, weight and power, such as the size of a games console.

Source: DailyTech

It looks as though YouTube has a serious competitor on their hands. Well, almost. MySpace Videos has been around for a little while, but I’ve never been there so I won’t pretend like I know what it’s all about. However, they are going to be renaming themselves to MySpace TV and will also become its own entity. It’s too early to jump the gun on assumptions, but if there is anyone to compete with YouTube, it’s MySpace.

Thursday’s launch of MySpaceTV may well be the long awaited NBC/ News Corp YouTube killer. It’s probably a case of MySpace TV being better late than never in launching, even if YouTube has doubled its traffic since October and is now even harder to challenge.

Source: TechCrunch

Gerry Block at IGN has taken a look at a very unique peripheral for the PS3. Essentially, it’s a mouse/mousepad and gamepad, all interconnected. It would be ideal for first person shooters, where you could aim and shoot with the mouse, but control your character and other things with your left hand. Very odd looking device, but it was awarded a 9.1/10 score. Whenever they become available, you can score yours for $69.99.

Nearly every aspect of the FragFX is customizable. Software available for download from Splitfish.com allows for button assignment reconfiguring for cases in which games don’t offer strong reassignment options. The sensitivity and neutral point of the left-stick-dongle’s motion sensing can also be configured. Throughout our testing we encountered no situations in which we were unable to get the FragFX to do what we wanted it to do, and we give SplitFish a lot of credit for not using the FragFX’s unique design as an excuse for omitting features or capabilities.

Source: IGN

The Inquirer noticed a new entry on the Microsoft support site which mentions a hotfix to aide in reliability of Intel processors. What this means exactly, no one seems to know. According to the Inq, it affects most recent Core CPUs including the E4000/E6000, Q6600 and both the QX6700 and QX6800. You can download the hotfix through Microsoft’s support site although I am sure it would be available through Windows update as well. For those not using Windows, there should be BIOS updates available for your board. If not now, soon. Now if we only knew why a hotfix was necessary…

In the mobile world, people with the Core 2 Duo T5000 and T7000 need to visit Microsoft’s site, while the server guys will want to use motherboard BIOSes if they do not rely on Microsoft Windows operating systems. The affected servers are Xeon 3000, 3200, 5100 and 5300s – or just about every model from the second generation of Core marchitecture. Oddly enough, Yonah – 32-bit Core Duo processor – isn’t among the affected cores.

Source: The Inquirer

We posted earlier this month that Real was planning to release RealPlayer 11 with the capability of ripping online streams, such as YouTube, MySpace, Revver and more. Well, the beta has finally been released and Ars Technica wasted no time in giving it a spin. Their verdict is that it’s overall a very useful feature, but needs a little bit of work for certain kinds of video. All I can say is.. please Real, bring this beta to other platforms, not just Windows.

Clicking on the context menu or the Download This Video button automatically brings up a download manager screen, which saves the stream to the directory specified in RealPlayer’s configuration. Downloading works in slightly different ways depending on the type of stream being saved: Flash files from YouTube downloaded as quickly as they could be retrieved from the server, while a Windows Media Video file from Channel 9 would only download in the same time as it would have taken to watch it.

Source: Ars Technica

The reviews for the iPhone are finally starting to trickle in, proving that Apple likes to leave these kinds of things to the last minute. The general consensus between all the reviewers thus far is that it’s a great product, but still has a few flaws. Walt Mossberg noted the fact that the call quality was just “ok”. Seems foolish to me for a $600 phone to have “ok” call quality, but we are in an age when people would rather shoot a text message than dial a number, so in a way it’s not so surprising.

Here are the reviews available so far:

• New York Post – Glenn Fleishman
• The Wall Street Journal – Walt Mossberg

• MSNBC – Steven Levy
• USA Today – Edward Baig

For those interested in knowing what the iPhone doesn’t have, both Engadget and Gizmodo have summed it up for you. Now, only two more days before this thing is launched…

Sunnyvale, Calif.–June 26, 2007–OCZ Technology Group, a worldwide leader in innovative, ultra-high performance memory and PC components, today announced the release of the Silencer(R) 750 Quad CrossFire(TM) Edition under the PC Power & Cooling line. Designed to offer consumers a combination of legendary PSU architecture and the ultimate in quiet power management, the CrossFire Silencer is the ideal power solution for gamers and ATI enthusiasts. The “fiery red” exterior of this special edition PSU is the perfect compliment to any CrossFire-based high performance graphics system or gaming PC.

Source: OCZ Press Release

Dell today has launched a new campaign called “Yours Is Here”, which caters to those who enjoy customizing their notebooks and other digital gadgets. If you visit the main website, you will see a banner showcasing numerous colors that Inspiron notebooks will be available in, including Sunshine Yellow and Flamingo Pink. Yeah. Flamingo Pink. For whatever reason, I cannot seem to customize a notebook on their site without error, so I’m not sure how the process goes.

Also released today are a few Inspiron desktop systems, an XPS M1330 which is the ‘worlds thinnest’ 13-inch notebook and also two monitors. The SE198WFP 19-inch monitor has a 1000:1 contrast ratio and a 1440×900 resolution. The 2407WFP-HC is similar to the non-HC edition, with the 1920×1200 resolution and 1000:1 contrast ratio. What’s new is the fact that it has a better color gamut, like the recently released 3007WFP-HC and 2707WFP.

NEW YORK, June 26, 2007 – Users looking for “haute couture” in a “hot computer” need search no further. Dell hit the runway today with notebooks cloaked in Sunshine Yellow and Flamingo Pink, and classic desktops accessorized with clean and crisp widescreen displays, all ready to be custom-tailored to meet user’s specific needs.

Source: Dell Press Release

You are sick of iPhone news, I know and understand. It’s seems like lately it’s been the only thing to read about, but all of the rage should die down a little bit next week, since release is this Friday. That aside, Apple has finally announced the AT&T plans for the phone, which start off at $59.99.

For the rock-bottom plan, you receive 450 minutes, unlimited data, voicemail, 200 text messages, roll-over minutes and unlimited mobile-to-mobile calling. You can bump yourself up to 900 minutes for $79.99 per month and 1,350 for $99.99. Prices for Canadians with the Rogers service have not been announced yet, but should be made available soon.

ATLANTA and CUPERTINO, Calif., June 26 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ — AT&T Inc.
and Apple(R) today announced three simple, affordable service plans for
iPhone(TM) which start at just $59.99 per month. All three plans include
unlimited data, Visual Voicemail, 200 SMS text messages, roll-over minutes and
unlimited mobile-to-mobile calling. With everything else already included,
iPhone customers can easily choose the plan that’s right for them based on the
amount of voice minutes they plan to use each month. In addition, iPhone
customers can choose from any of AT&T’s standard service plans.

Source: Apple Press Release

X-Bit Labs are reporting that NVIDIA is conjuring up an energy-efficient SLI Hybrid technology. It’s designed to cut power consumption and improve performance. It all has to do with power saving schemes mainly, disabling of cores when they are not being used, eg, when you are not playing a game that requires both. In an age where our power bills cost as much as car payments, anything energy efficient is welcomed.

Nvidia’s new Hybrid SLI technology will have two modes and that will target different applications: the Power Saving Mode, which will switch off discrete graphics core and use only integrated graphics engine when high performance is not needed, whereas Max Performance Mode will make integrated graphics processor (IGP) to assist discrete graphics processing unit (GPU) and boost performance when it is required.

Source: X-Bit Labs