When companies like ASUS are reasonably legitimately launching desktop supercomputers, describing your performance PC as a “personal supercomputer” seems like asking for trouble. Still, that’s how Maingear are referring to their latest desktop, the SHIFT, packing as it does a choice of Intel Core i7 processor, stacks of DDR3-1600 memory, Asetek liquid-cooling and a choice of up to six regular hard-drives or twelve SSDs.
This holiday season may well see the mass adoption of Blu-ray in many homes. We have the PS3 at a new bargain price sporting its Blu-ray capability and we are seeing new stand-alone Blu-ray players pop up at much more affordable prices. It wasn’t so long ago that Blu-ray players were still well over $300. JVC has just announced a new Blu-ray player called the XV-BP11 that is available right now.
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There are gobs of media formats out there that are supported by PMPs, Blu-ray players and other devices. One of the most popular of all the available formats is DivX. DivX and MediaTek Inc announced today that the MediaTek MT8530 has become the world's first DivX Plus certified chip for powering Blu-ray players.
Remember all the furore back in August, when Microsoft announced they’d locked up Netflix movie streaming for the Xbox 360 and basically told us it was an “exclusive” partnership? Well, that exclusivity seems to have been short-lived; Sony have announced that from November Netflix subscribers will be able to stream content on their PS3.
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Good ol' Steve Ballmer has been known to let the cat out of the bag a few times with new items and accessories coming from Redmond. This week Ballmer seemingly hinted that Microsoft would be offering up a Blu-ray accessory for the Xbox 360. That was a surprising little hint considering Microsoft has long said it would not bring Blu-ray to the Xbox.
One of the ongoing frustrations for Xbox 360 owners is the absence of a Blu-ray accessory; they keep pestering Microsoft for one, and Microsoft keep rolling out the same “we have no plans” excuses. Now, finally, the company appears to be changing its tune, though it takes some between-the-lines reading of outspoken CEO Steve Ballmer in order to fathom it. Talking to Gizmodo, Ballmer told interviewer Wilson Rothman that “you’ll be able to get Blu-ray drives as accessories”.
Love or hate Apple, we can all agree that the company has been at the forefront of design for computers for a long time. Back before every computer marker around was producing all-in-one machines; Apple had its line of iMac computers. There were rumors going around that the new line of iMac computers would have Blu-ray players. In a case of a rumor spawned by a rumor, we hear today that Blu-ray was pulled from the new iMac line shortly before the machines went into production last month.
HP have also updated their business notebooks and desktop range today, in the shape of the HP ProBook 6445b and ProBook 6545b laptops and the HP Elite 7000 Business Desktop PC. The two notebooks each offer a choice of AMD Turion II, Athlon II or Sempron processors, together with up to 8GB of RAM, up to 500GB HDD/128GB SSD, and ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4200 graphics. The ProBook 6445b has a 14-inch display running at 1,366 x 768 while the ProBook 6545b has a 15.6-inch display running at either 1,366 x 768 or 1,600 x 900.
HP have gone touch-crazy in the run-up to Windows 7’s release, pushing out several new touch-sensitive products including a 42-inch widescreen LCD. The HP TouchSmart tx2 updates the original convertible tx2, and has a 12.1-inch capacitive touchscreen which also accepts stylus input; meanwhile there are two new TouchSmart desktop ranges, in the shape of the consumer-oriented HP TouchSmart 300 and 600 – at 20- and 23-inches respectively – and the business-centric HP TouchSmart 9100, a 23-inch model targeted at the hospitality and retail markets.
NES console mods are cool, HTPCs are pretty cool, and nettops with NVIDIA Ion graphics are darned cool too, so when you put all three elements together you’ve got a recipe for something with a whole lot of cool potential. Modder drumboog has been video documenting his work transforming a NES into an Atom 330 based Blu-ray HTPC with GeForce 9400M graphics, and while it’s not quite complete yet, it’s certainly 99-percent awesome.
Video after the cut
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