Content and news by Rob Williams

SAN FRANCISCO – 09 Aug 2005 – This is the 10th or 11th LinuxWorld Expo I’ve attended. Or is it the 12th? Anyway, I’ve been to all the U.S. ones and they’re starting to blur together. Two seconds after I came through the door I ran into Mae Ling Mak and Clay Claiborne of Los Angeles-based Cosmos Engineering, two old friends from LinuxWorlds past, and we tried to estimate the percentage of people who were here because they were committed GNU/Linux advocates vs. the percentage who were here because they were paid to be here as part of their jobs. We figured at least 85% of all attendees were here for their jobs.

Check out the full first day report at Newsforge.

August 9, 2005 – It’s been two years since Advent Rising was first announced. From the onset the game was extremely ambitious. It was to be the first installment in a three part sci-fi epic with story elements contributed by famed science fiction author Orson Scott Card. The gameplay would blend third-person…..

When the Z-680 5.1 channel digital speakers from Logitech, gamers ranted and raved about finally getting a solid surround speaker set for under $500.

While they didn’t have mind-blowing specs, and personally I thought they sounded quite dull, they were better than anything in their price range. They were a good alternative to Klipsch, who at the time only had a 2.1 channel set available. And besides; the woofer pounded, and that’s all that matters to a lot of people.

Check out the review over at HardcoreWare.

Chris_D: First of all, it’s a great pleasure to have the opportunity to ask you a few questions. The announcement of SiN Episodes was a pleasant surprise for everyone, especially for fans of the original game. How long has the game actually been in development and when was it decided you’d venture…..

Turbine is pleased to announce that the public Alpha for Dungeons & Dragons Online®: Stormreach has officially started! This is the first phase of the public Alpha and we are very excited to share our work with our fans. Following our successful showing of the game at E3 and the incredible response…..

In such a small package, Samsung manages to cram 1GB storage, 1.8″ LCD screen, wide range of audio support, MPEG-4 video player, FM radio/recorder, voice recorder, photo viewer, motion sensor (for games), and last but not least, USB host inside the vertically oriented player.

Check out the full review at EverythingUSB.

SCSI may not be an economical solution for a desktop computer, but it doesn’t pretend to be. The high price tag comes with equally high performance and reliability, and in critical server and workstation applications, the added expense may easily be justified and recovered in a short period of time.

Head over to Big Bruin for the full article.

C++ Connections comes to the fabulous city that never sleeps, Las Vegas. Come join us for the 20th anniversary of your favorite development language C++! Come hear the best and brightest C++ speakers in the world, including keynote speaker Bjarne Stroustrup, Herb Sutter, Stanley B. Lippman, Andrei Alexandrescu, Scott Meyers, Doug Schmidt, and more.

Check out all the details here!

The addition to the Asetek arsenal is more traditional than a phase change or water cooling system, but still cutting edge in its own right. The VapoChill Micro series is powered by Asetek’s patented vapor chamber technology and is what I will be examining today.

Check out the full review over at Overclockers Online!

Many companies promise superb cooling with their HD Coolers, and Evercool is no different. We are taking a look at their SHDC-E model to see if it proves true with them.

…the titanium coated chassis, the black sleeving and the crystal clear 14cm fan adds a touch of class to the power supply but it there’s still room for improvement. It also comes with quad SATA connectors which should support up to four SATA drives in your system. For the price you’re paying, you’ll also get a decent power supply with a dedicated PCI-E connector and backward compatible 24/20-pin ATX connector. The best thing is having the ability to maximize cable management with the extra long power cables, which measures up to 3 feet long.

Check out the full review over at PC Modding Malaysia.

Mushkin recently announced their newly designed heatspreader that will premiere with their high performance Redline modules beginning August 16. Today we have our hands on these new Mushkin Redline heatspreaders, and have plenty of additional pictures along with a few words regarding their improved design and appearance.

Check it out at Phoronix.

Let’s take a step back in time… Back to when the games had no graphics, no sound and only printed and accepted text. Does anybody remember? Tagged as The Original Adventure Game, The Colossal Cave, written by Willie Crowther and Don Woods, first appeared on such computers as the PDP11 and the…..

VIA recently announced plans for another in the ‘C’ line of processors, this time dedicated to mobile use. The VIA C7-M is the mobile version of the C7 processor which was released in May of 2005. The VIA C7-M is slated to become available in November 2005 in speeds of 1.5GHz or 1.8GHz. During a recent briefing by the company, PCSTATS was shown the CPU in its A2 stepping. Possibly aiming to fill the market gap left by the apparent demise of Transmeta as a processor manufacturer, VIA has designed the C7-M with low power requirements and software security as the biggest areas of emphasis. The company is targeting the VIA C7-M at almost every segment of the laptop market, though it won’t directly compete with the high-powered Intel Pentium M and AMD Turion processors in full-size laptops on the benchmark front at least, power efficiency is another story altogether.

Check out the full article over at PC Stats.

SINGAPORE – August 8, 2005 – Creative Technology Ltd. (NASDAQ: CREAF), the worldwide leader in audio with over 250 million Sound Blaster® sound cards sold to date, today announced the future of audio with the introduction of its highly anticipated Sound Blaster X-Fiâ„¢ line of sound cards. Powered by the Creative X-Fi Xtreme Fidelityâ„¢ audio processor, the Sound Blaster X-Fi cards introduce Xtreme Fidelity, an entirely new audio standard for music, movies and games.

Check out the full press release here.

EDISON, N.J., Aug. 9 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ — Majesco Entertainment Company (Nasdaq: COOL – News), an innovative provider of digital entertainment products and content, today announced that it has shipped the PC version of Advent Rising to retail stores nationwide. Developed by GlyphX Games, Advent Rising thrusts players into an intergalactic adventure punctuated with…..

Back on June 22nd, NVIDIA managed to achieve something that was categorically unthinkable after the year of the paper launch. 2004 was not a great year for either of the big two GPU manufacturers and both ATI & NVIDIA suffered from very poor availability of their high end video cards for several months after the launch.

This time around, things were so different. The minute that the GeForce 7800 GTX was announced, we saw widespread availability from its board partners and there was no sign of any let up on availability. Sure enough, today, you can visit your favourite online retailer and purchase one (or two) of several solutions from NVIDIA’s partners with varying clock speeds.

Check out the full review at Bit-Tech.

SEOUL, South Korea (Reuters) — A South Korean man who played computer games for 50 hours almost non-stop died of heart failure minutes after finishing his mammoth session in an Internet cafe, authorities said on Tuesday.

Wow.. people need to get a life. Playing games for 50 hours is stupid.. check out the posting at CNN.com. Source: Hard|OCP.

Ever since its launch in the fall of last year, nForce 4 has brought us SLI capability. Configurations for PCI Express slots in nForce 4 SLI motherboards must be selected by using a paddle that can be flipped to allow for either 2 x8 connections or full bandwidth for one with the other disabled. There is added flexibility on an nForce 4 SLI motherboard, but this flexibility comes with some limitations. Today, NVIDIA sheds the shackles of the paddle selector and limited bandwidth with the new nForce 4 SLI X16 chipset.

It will be interesting to see results once boards are released to reviewers. Check out the article at AnandTech.

Currently, SUSE Linux 10.0 Beta 1 (code name: Prague) is an unsupported, open source only, preliminary edition of SUSE Linux that contains bleeding-edge packages and represents the latest development snapshot. If you intend to test for bugs or contribute patches, this version is for you.

Note: Development snapshots are sometimes unstable. Before installing the latest development build, we recommend that you read the list of most annoying bugs.

You can grab the build here, but sadly they do not have a DVD version available yet. It’s a 4 CD download currently.