Content and news by Rob Williams

“A CHAT CHANNEL spat ended when a wannabe hacker was duped into deleting his own hard drive.

The 26 year-old German claimed he was the baddest hacker in town and threatened to attack a moderator on #stopHipHop’s RC Channel because he thought he’d been thrown out.”

The hacker was stupid enough to delete his own hard-drive. Of course, this is not surprising. If you have ever checked out the source code to some hacker programs, it’s immaculate. But then when you see the coder try to type, it’s rediculous. Funny nonetheless, so read about it at Inquirer.

“A QUESTIONNAIRE being taken online by Xbox Live users appears to give the final confirmation that Xbox 360 will be backwards compatible – at least, if you buy it with the optional hard drive.

The questionnaire deals with Xbox Live and says subscribers through the original Xbox will be able to play against gamers on Xbox 2 — as long as they are playing a current generation Xbox game.”

This is fantastic news, and only makes sense. When the Playstation2 came out, it played PS1 games, and that saved a lot of space around your television. Read all about it at Inquirer.

“Now that I have moved into the Athlon A64 world I figured I should have a look at a couple Thermalright heat sinks and do a direct comparison. I am going to look at the XP 90 Aluminum/Copper Retail package that includes a 92mm fan, and the all copper big brother the XP 90C.”

Check out the full comparison look at NGOHQ.

“Do you have a zillion remotes you need to play with to get your home theatre playing? Want to eliminate them down to just one? Then read on cuz we’ve just reviewed something that we know you’ll like. “

In-depth review on a GREAT looking remote control. Check it out at FutureLooks.

“Most of the cases that have been reviewed here at Phoronix have been gaming cases and almost all of them have been tower cases. Desktop cases are now few and far between, but today we have a desktop case from Logisys, which is designed for Home Theater PCs, the Home Theater Acrylic Case (CS688CL).”

Check out the full review over at Phoronix.

“Rather than sticking with the swords and sorcery that have served it so faithfully for the past six years, though, Sony Online Entertainment (SOE) is focusing on more modern weapons this time around.

While the company won’t make any formal announcements about its next massively multiplayer game for quite some time, president John Smedley told me recently that a new action title is in the works. And if things go according to plan, it will make its debut at E3 in 2006.”

Their first online action RPG, Planetside didn’t do to well with sales and subscriptions, so I am a bit skeptical with hearing this. Although, they definitely have the manpower and understanding to make another great online game, so we will have to wait and see. Check it out at CNN Money.

“I have reviewed many a video card in the last few years from several manufacturers. It has struck me as to how many video card companies have fundamentally changed or left the market since NVIDIA was founded in 1993. Some companies like Matrox have completely exited the high-end graphics market, simply refreshing their last graphics core to meet niche markets. Other companies like 3dfx simply do not exist in any form today. S3 was one of the oldest graphics card companies dating back to the late 1980s at least. The S3 Virge was the first video card to support 3D in hardware. It actually was a decelerator, as it was faster in software mode than in hardware mode. In 2000 the S3 graphics division was bought by VIA Corporation after the near disastrous release of the S3 Savage 2000 chipset in 1999 and the bankruptcy and divesture of most of S3’s assets in early 2000.”

Once again, this card get’s a poor review, due to lack of good drivers. It would be nice to see some great contenders in the GPU market though, to spice things up a little. Read the full review at Motherboards.org.

“In a blog entry posted Friday, a member of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer development team said the company plans to support key elements of World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) recommendations Portable Network Graphics (PNG), an image format, and Cascading Style Sheet (CSS), a Web page styling standard.”

Finally! This will make things easier trying to cater to IE and other browsers when developing a site. Check it all out here.

Greetings from the Central Wastelands! We are very excited this week as we have introduced the first set of beta testers to Auto Assault and will continue to do so in the coming weeks and months. It’s not too late to sign-up! Visit here to register. Our website at www.autoassault.com has undergone Comment (0) -->

“Computer Games – First, was LucasArts and Sony Online pleased with how the last expansion pack, Jump to Lightspeed, did with fans and game critics? Julio Torres – We were very happy with Jump to Lightspeed! We felt that it was a successful marriage of the turn-based combat on the ground and Comment (0) -->

“Every computer requires power. Any power supply will provide your computer power, but whether or not that power is stable, clean, and reliable is what every user should be concerned with. Census PC has supplied me with a new power supply by Rexus, the Rexus SPX500 500W ATX PSU. The power supply says it is “Super Cool & Ultra Quiet”. Whether or not it lives up to that claim will be one of the things we check out in this review.”

I believe this is the first PSU I have seen with three standard power sockets on the back. That’s interesting. Check out the full review at BigBruin.

“The vulnerability is “highly critical,” according to an advisory released by the Danish company late Tuesday. Version 6.2.3 and 7.2 of Netscape are affected and other versions may also be susceptible, the company said.”

Secunia actually recommends using another product to avoid comprimise, at least until a working patch is available. Read about it at News.com.

“Google ads began appearing late Monday within about 60 RSS feeds published by the LonghornBlogs.com Weblog, publisher Robert McLaws said. Those feeds appear to be the first implementation of a bigger pilot test that Google plans to conduct with select AdSense publisher partners.”

Click to read more over at Yahoo News. Yes, that’s ironic.

“A former Los Alamos National Laboratory computer specialist was sentenced to eight months in prison on Monday for hacking into and damaging the computers of several hi-tech companies, including online auction giant eBay Inc.”

Hacking get’s you no where! Except in jail, apparently. Check it out at News24.

If you are a Serious Sam fan, you would know that the sequal was just announced the other day. Well, never to let us go too long without screenshots, Shacknews has posted some this morning.

“To address the power issue, Microsoft is pushing laptop makers to add features such as flash memory-equipped drives, reducing the number of times a computer must spin a power-hungry hard drive.

Other planned changes include the addition of a “mobility center” that will serve as a single control panel for all manner of laptop-related settings. The concept is similar to the Security Center Microsoft added to Windows XP with Service Pack 2. Microsoft showed off its ideas for the mobility center last year, but Mitchell said the idea has advanced much farther.”

I think the main thing to realize is, that you will need a 64Bit laptop to even use Longhorn, unless they release a special version. Read about it here.

“The main advantages of 64-bit OS systems are twofold. First, by processing larger packages of data, 64-bit environments are better suited to processor-intensive tasks such as handling 3D graphics and gaming. Second, a 64-bit system can support a wider address range – increasing addressable memory from 4GB to 16TB, which benefits data-heavy applications such as enterprise databases and business analysis programs.”

This site seems buggy to me in Firefox, but you can check it out here.

“The goal of the personalized tool is to let Yahoo users archive their search activity and results, and then share that information with other people if they choose to, the company said. The search capability will also find its way into Yahoo’s browser toolbar.”

This sounds crazy familiar to what Google released last week. Read all about it here.

“When alternative rock group Good Charlotte took to the stage last night at Radio City Music Hall for a free concert to cap off an announcement by RealNetworks (Nasdaq: RNWK) that was originally hyped as a “revolution in digital music,” I’m wondering how shareholders in the audience felt as the band broke into its 2002 hit “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous.”

So, they didn’t have anything truly unique to offer, but who knows what’s they may have in store? Check out the full read at The Motley Fool.

“After a day or two of complete stability I found it so much fun that I decided to remove the mainboard from the casing again and equip it with some watercooling to see how well it overclocked. I opted for Asetek watercooling as it’s high-performance and these Prescott based Pentium 4’s run ridiculously hot. With watercooling we where able to get the temperature in Degrees C below 50 at full processor utilization.

Overclocking was quite a weird experience. As within seconds we had a 3.6 GHz CPU running at 4.12 GHz… 100% Stable. We settled for 4 GHz though as we are including some results from our nForce 4 AMD 64 4000+ SLI test system and wanted to match performance as closely as possible.”

Very in-depth article worth the read. Check it out at Guru3D.