Content and news by Rob Williams

“A few weeks back, we reviewed the Ultra Products X-Finity 600W, the Ultra UV cable sleeving kit, and the Ultra Mini Portable HDD enclosure. Thanks to Ultra Product’s generosity, we have yet another one of their products for review, the Ultra 256MB MP3 Player (ULT31576).”

Read the full review at Phoronix.

“Arctic Cooling makes a few changes to their award winning VGA Silencers to allow compatibility with the new X850 and X800XL series of video cards.”

Check out the full review at InsaneTek.

“The navy blue and silver Sony VAIO VGN-T140P/L laptop is the size of a hardcover book and weighs only a little over three pounds. It packs a weighty list of features, beginning with a DVD/CDRW combo drive and a massive WXGA (1280×768) resolution on its tiny, shiny, 10.6″ widescreen LCD. The outer shells (lower and upper) of the notebook are made from aluminum, and typical of Sony, the build quality is very solid.”

Check it out at PC Stats.

“An overly excited Jon S. von Tetzchner, CEO, Opera Software, today proclaimed at an internal company meeting that if the download numbers of the new Opera 8 Web browser reach 1 million within the first four days of the launch, he will swim from Norway to the USA with only one stop-over for a cup of hot chocolate at his mother’s house in his home country, Iceland. Opera’s communications department could obviously not resist to make such a bold and inarguably over-confident statement public.”

Wow, that’s commitment! I am going to have to download the browser just to see what the excitements about. Read about it here.

“April 21, 2005 – ArenaNet announced today that Guild Wars is complete and has entered manufacturing — effectively, the game has “gone gold,” — and will ship out on April 28. Guild Wars was designed by several team members behind Blizzard’s StarCraft, Warcraft, Diablo and the Battle.net gaming network. Unique to Guild Comment (0) -->

Linux founder Linus Torvalds has reluctantly created his own software configuration management system, Git, to oversee Linux kernel development.

Previously, Torvalds had been using BitMover Inc.’s BitKeeper SCM (software configuration management) to manage Linux. “I’m pretty well known for not being a huge fan of source control that gets in the way and makes it harder to merge with all the people I work with all the time,” Torvalds said in a statement last year.”

Great article.. it’s definitely an interesting move. Check it out at eWeek.

“Microsoft have announced plans to add Linux support to its Virtual Server 2005 Service Pack 1. The new service pack will be the first Microsoft product to carry Linux support.

The announcement came during a keynote given by Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer at the Microsoft Management Summit in Las Vegas on Wednesday.”

Woot, Linux for the win. Check it out here.

“”Today I decided it was time to check both ATI and nVidia drivers for any Futuremark 3DMark03 optimizations. Both sets of drivers use filename detection to achieve their application specific optimizations. To try and get beyond their detection methods I renamed the 3DMark03 executable to another filename. I then ran a series of test so I could try and find any quality or performance differences. As we all know this issue has been debated many times with both sides saying the other side is cheating in their results.”

Check out the article at NGOHQ.

Buka Entertainment is pleased to announce a new title Hard Truck: Apocalyptic Wars. This third person action/RPG is set in the post-apocalyptic environment full of menacing mysteries and unfriendly inhabitants. Explore the new world using your heavy truck. The truck is your ultimate shelter, armor and a mean to earn your living. Comment (0) -->

“Overall the Titan Vanessa S-Type is a great heat sink. Performance is on par with other similar heat sinks, and the noise wise it is very quiet. If you don’t have a Socket 462, mounting will be a breeze, and the included fan controller gives you that much more control of the performance.”

Check out the full review at Viper Lair.

“The menu controls are self-explanatory. However a couple features really stand out. For one thing, there’s a very useful Auto button. Rather than having to go through several OSD menus to get automatic calibration, you can now do it with the press of one button. Even better is the “Turbo” key. This has 3 brightness presets, labeled “picture”, “text”, and “economy”. Each one is dimmer than the last. You can cycle through them by continuously pressing the Turbo key. It’s an incredible feature as most times you can quickly and effectively switch between settings depending on the application without having to manually adjust the brightness. For instance, you can now read text (“text” or “economy” setting) and then play some Doom 3 (incredibly dark game, set to “picture” mode) without having to always re-adjust the brightness. As far as the buttons themselves go, they’re nicely sized and simply a joy to press.”

Check out the full review at MikhailTech.

“There’s no denying that the Thailand Display Flexible Keyboard is a useful product. That much should be easy for everyone to see. It can be literally rolled up and put into a pocket to take with you. It can have spills soaked up from its surface with a damp sponge or paper towel, which means the next time you spill a soda on your keyboard it won’t be the end of gaming for the night. However, it is not a perfect keyboard, either, especially for the gamer. This is due to, ironically enough, the flexible design.”

Can’t say that’s not an interesting keyboard, hehe. Check it out at Lan Addict.

“The release today of AMD’s dual-core workstation and server parts is a significant landmark in the world of x86 computing for the enterprise and professional users. The ability to pack twice the processing power into the same space opens up new doors for clustering, research, data processing, data mining, webserving, content creation, digital media production, video editing, games development and much more. While the cost is high for the time being, economies of scale and a pervasive range of processors to choose from will only bring the price down, and significantly so.”

Check it out with a lot of benchmarks at Hexus.

There are so many MP3 Players out on the market, who can really keep count? There are some that do everything, and then some that do nothing but play MP3’s. What if you are looking for an MP3 Player that’s compact, and comes in at a great price? Find out more as we take a look at the RCA Lyra 1072 MP3 Player.

“We loved the cinematic intensity and nonstop action of the original Call of Duty—so much so that we’re finding the wait for the sequel excruciating, especially after getting a firsthand look at the dramatic changes the brand-new game engine and more open game design are bringing to the title.” It’s a very Comment (0) -->

“As an owner of one of Shuttle’s devices, I was hoping that the newcomer could take a high-end graphics card. Sadly, though, the answer was no. The SB86i is aimed at the business market and fitting such a card wasn’t thought to be a good idea at all.

And that, I fear, will be same with most SFF BTX models. Your average graphics card is no problem but these tiny boxes can’t take the sorts of card that gamers want to use. Their low-noise fans simply can’t deal with the heat, and there’s no obvious way of getting sufficient air throughput to prevent things starting cooking.”

Check out the full look at Hexus.

“A good pair of earphones is a must-have if you are always on the move and need the flexibility of a pair of earbuds, rather than a bulky headphone.

Today, Goofy takes a look at the Sennheiser MX500, a light-weight and comfortable pair of earbuds with truly amazing performance!”

I didn’t know Sennheiser made earphones.. interesting! Check out the full review at Rojak Pot.

It seems that over at the Atari Beta page, the RTC3: Soaked! and Dragonshard betas are soon to begin. “Atari thanks everyone for their patience while both of these betas prepare to begin. It is with pleasure that we would like to inform everyone that both betas should be available for download Comment (0) -->

Espoo, Finland, April 21, 2005 – Nokia and Bugbear Entertainment Ltd today released updated information on their highly anticipated racing title Glimmerati. Set in the 80’s glamorous jet set world, Glimmerati is an arcade style racing extravaganza with a gripping storyline and challenging missions offering players thrilling rides in designer super cars, Comment (0) -->

“Inside the Barracuda 7200.8, Seagate has implemented their own version of a fluid dynamic bearing motor called SoftSonic. Their quiet motor technology is said to produce very little sound, but Seagate’s specifications for the 7200.8 line says different as the drive specs list a higher bel rating than the 7200.7 line. We’ll take a look at these numbers more later in our acoustic tests.”

Read the full review at AnandTech.