Content and news by Rob Williams

If you think that there are no great games for Linux, think again! We are taking a look at 10 of some of the most popular Linux games… that just so happen to be completely free!

A secret investigation of news leaks at Hewlett-Packard was more elaborate than previously reported, and almost from the start involved the illicit gathering of private phone records and direct surveillance of board members and journalists, according to people briefed on the company’s review of the operation.

This case is going to take forever to get over with it seems. With each new article though, it just gets harder to believe that companies will go through such lengths. It appears they even tried to install a keylogger on one of the employees laptops. Ugh, is all I will say to that.

Denmark had a court case ruling deep linking illegal as did Germany, leading some to believe that linking to a website other than the front page was illegal throughout Europe. While a German court eventually overturned the ruling, it was Agence France Presse (AFP) that eventually sued Google News for brazenly daring to send traffic to their news articles.

With so much going on in the world that actually deserves attention, it’s hard to believe a site would about receiving traffic from Google. Some people are so clueless…

The day started with a keynote address by Bonnie Ross, director of production for Microsoft Games Studio publishing. She addressed the issue of some of the differences she’d seen over the years in how men and women deal with the fragile work/life balance, something that has come to the forefront of industry human resources issues recently, especially after well-publicized complaints and lawsuits by employees of Electronic Arts.

This is great a good read to see a womans perspective on things. I agree with most of it also, which is a rarity. Great stuff.

It is really just water cooled football players. The system, which can cool up to 12 players at a time, will flow chilled goodness through the pads of the football players. See, football isn’t that barbaric, they have some pretty sweet tech, too.

Hmm, I think I could use something like this while I am benchmarking!

DVDs will soon be tracked with embedded radio transmitter chips to prevent copying and piracy, according to the company which makes movie discs for Warner, Disney, Fox and other major studios. The technology, which can also be used for Blu-Ray and HD-DVD discs, will allow movie studios to remotely track individual discs as they travel from factories to retail shelves to consumers’ homes.

This is probably only be beginning of whats to come. If they can RFID commercial DVD’s, then you can bet blank media is on the agenda.

Cases & Enclosures
• Cooler Master Mystique 632 – Overclockers Online
• Genius Navigator 535 Agama – Cooling-Station
• Raidmax Smilodon – 3D Gameman
• Sena Treo650 Lateral Case – Gideon Tech
• Thermaltake Mozart TX VE1000SWA – TweakNews

Cooling
• Asetek WaterChill Complete WaterCooling Kit – Virtual-Hideout
• Coolermaster X Dream P775 Cooler – Technic3D
• Dangerden Watercooling – DNR Hardware
• Evercool VC-RG Geforce 6800 & 7800 VGA Cooler – Xtreme Computing
• Titan Amanda TEC Cooler – Think Computers

Memory & Storage
• Corsair Dominator TWIN2X2048-8888C4DF – HotHardware
• Corsair Dominator TWIN2X2048-8888C4DF – Legit Reviews
• Crucial Ballistix Tracer PC2-5300 2GB – InsaneTek
• OCZ DDR2 PC2-6400 2GB Special Ops Urban Elite – Think Computers
• Seagate 500gb eSATA External Hard Drive – ClubOC
• Seagate Barracuda ES 750GB Hard Drive – XYZ Computing

Motherboards & Processors
• ASRock 775Dual-VSTA & AM2V890-VSTA – Phoronix
• Foxconn and Gigabyte: Opposite ends of the Intel P965 mobo spectrum – Tech Report
• Foxconn P9657AA-8EKRS2H – HardCoreWare

Peripherals & Power Supplies
• Corepad Magna – BurnoutPC
• Enermax Galaxy 850W EGA850EWL – Bjorn3D
• Internet Multimedia Super-Slim Keyboard – Think Computers
• OCZ GameXStream 700w ATX PSU – Overclock3D
• Sennheiser HD 201 – DV Hardware
• SteelPad QcK+ – techFEAR
• Ultra Cable Sleeving Kit – Modders-Inc
• USB Web Camera with Telescope – DragonSteelMods
• Vantec SATA/IDE to USB 2.0 Adapter – Think Computers
• Zboard Merc Keyboard – Red & Blackness

Displays & Video Cards
• CrossFire and SLI dongle-less/bridgeless performance analysis – Hexus
• GeForce 7950 GT: Point-of-View versus XFX – Hardware Info

Complete Systems, Competitions & Etcetera
• Back to School Party Room Guide – Futurelooks
• Giveaway: Cooler Master Elite 330 – Overclockers Online
• Fedora Core 6 Test 3 – Phoronix
• “Kinc reaches 16,000 points with 3DMark06” – Nordic Hardware
• Toshiba Satellite Pro P100 – DV Hardware
• Webcam Buyer’s Guide – The Tech Zone

DFIs highly anticipated AM2 enthusiast board is finally here, after months of development. Like previous LanParty boards, this one caters to the overclocker, and simply checking out the BIOS screams that fact. Does it please this enthusiast? Read on…

FVWM-Crystal is an eye-candy, functional and ultra-fast desktop environment for GNU/Linux, based on FVWM. Crystal can be used even on very old machines, thus it is a noticeable alternative to popular desktop choices like XFCE or Fluxbox.

So yes, this only applies to a small amount of of viewers. But this is a great looking window manager for Linux. After reading through this article, I gave it a try and was impressed. It’s still not my cup of tea compared to KDE, but it’s a good competitor to the other minimal DE’s out there.

The founder of the ultra-popular Freenode IRC network was struck by a car on the 12th and fell into a coma. He passed early yesterday at his local hospital. Sadly, the person driving the vehicle is nowhere to be found. You can read numerous comments and additional information over at Slashdot. We at Techgage give our deepest thoughts to his family in this difficult time.

People say hindsight is 20/20. When it comes to the Web, hindsight is more like X-ray vision: In retrospect, it’s easy to see what was wrong with dot coms that tried to make a business out of giving stuff away for free (but making it up later in volume), or to make fun of venture capitalists who handed millions to budding Web titans who had never run a lemonade stand before, let alone an enterprise.

Luckily, we did not make the list this time around. MySpace, BonziBuddy and Hampsterdance did though.

For the 5th+ iPod generation Apple has just introduced downloadable games and so far they offer 9 games for $4.99 each. Looking back in the classic era of computer gaming we remember some real gems that would fit right into the “keep it simple stupid” philosophy of the iPod. So, let’s have some fun and suggest 10 classic games that would specifically work well with the iPod scroll wheel interface.

On the list is Bomberman, Luner Lander and even Neverball. Quite a solid list, but I still couldn’t picture myself playing these in an iPod.

Microsoft’s decision to not enforce patents on Web services standards underscores the growing acceptance of core open-source tenets. The software giant on Tuesday published the Microsoft Open Specification Promise, a document that says that Microsoft will not sue anyone who creates software based on Web services technology, a set of standardized communication protocols designed by Microsoft and other vendors.

Open source has definitely affected Microsoft, but I highly doubt it will ever get the better of them. It’s reassuring to know that they don’t intend to sue people for writing software based off web services… this should prove a win/win in the end.

A Microsoft-sponsored study found that Vista will be a boon to European economy, as it ‘will create more than 50,000 technology jobs in six large European countries and will lead to a flood of economic benefits for companies there,’ News.com reports. Europe will see a total of 1.2 mln paychecks thanks to the new operating system.

Though I am not one to immediately buy into Microsoft-based studies, this would prove incredible, really. Maybe there is some good to Vista after all.

Police are looking for a man who broke the bank – literally.
Last month, a man reprogrammed an automated teller machine at a gas station on Lynnhaven Parkway to spit out four times as much money as it should.

It took a full nine days before someone actually noticed… or at least “admitted” to seeing it happening. You have to wonder how many others benefited off this but kept quiet.

Here are the specific fixes for Firefox… rather small:

• Fix for a potential buffer overflow vulnerability when loading a hostname with all soft-hyphens
• Fix to prevent URLs passed from external programs from being parsed by the shell (Linux only)
• Fix to prevent a crash when loading a Proxy Auto-Config (PAC) script that uses an “eval” statement
• Fix to restore InstallTrigger.getVersion() for Extension authors
• Other stability and security fixes

It’s highly recommended to upgrade, and you may already be up to date if you are using a version not handled by your OS. You can read the notes and information here.

The brown-eyed second grader, Victor De Leon III, has been tutoring gaming greenhorns in Halo 2, an Xbox game in which the player fights to save Earth from destruction, for $25 an hour. That’s a ton of money, considering most of his peers have no income beyond their tooth-fairy stash.

Who’s kidding who here? $25 per hour is a lot for most anyone… let alone an $8 year old! This kid has quite the future ahead it seems.

Each week, Messrs. Hyneman and Savage conduct experiments to determine whether a given myth can be busted, confirmed, or deemed plausible. Viewers around the world now sleep soundly, knowing a rolling stone does gather moss but can’t grow it, air resistance prevents a penny thrown from the Empire State Building from becoming a deadly weapon, and, yes, water will stop a bullet.

If you love this show as much as I do, check out this article. It’s interesting that Hyneman never enjoyed talking in front of the camera at all, but that seems kind of apparent as he’s not exactly a chatterbox now. Good read.

The Chinese government is not happy with how easily corrupted its judges are, and so it is reducing their power a little bit – crimes will now be fed into a computer which will determine a ‘fair punishment.’ This includes putting someone to death.

It’s nuts that the legal system anywhere has become so corrupted that computers need to be queried for such information. Doesn’t sound that safe to me… computers err just like humans in decision making!

SANTA CLARA, Calif., Sept. 14, 2006 – Intel Corporation today announced that Intel® Serial Flash Memory (S33) products are shipping to meet the memory requirements of a range of applications, including digital TVs, DVDs, PCs, modems and printers. Intel’s serial flash is based on an industry-standard package, pin-out and command set to simplify board design and save board space.

You can read the full press release here.