Sony will drop the price of their leading Blu-Ray player (DP-S350) by $100 to $299. A higher end model (BDP-S550) will be coming in October, and selling for $399. The manufactuere, Funai, which produces Blu-Ray players under the brands of hilips/Magnavox, Sylvania and Insignia, will drop their prices to by $50 to $250 in September. If only the prices went to around $100, then it’d really get mainstream.

via HD Guru

The Acer Aspire One laptop packing Windows XP dropped from $399 to $349. The linux version will drop from $379 to $329. And the professional version will become $400 with a 6 cell battery and a 160 GB hard drive.  The Aspire One is only 2.17 pounds, has a Intel Atom Processor, 1 GB of ram, and a 120 GB hard drive. Aspire One>Eee PC, but that’s just me. It all depends on the type of operating system and hardware requirements one prefers.

via Engadget

Quad Core in laptops, already? Intel’s quad core for the mini market will be dubbed the Core 2 Extreme. Using 45 watts, it is currently unclear whether the architecture of the processor will be based on Penryn or the Nahalem. I wonder how they’re going to cool this thing. It might burn a whole through your laptop.

Image courtesy of NY Times

via PC Magazine

Seems like every time a new standard comes out, everything gets doubled nowadays. The Serial ATA International Organization has announced the almost-done specs and plans for SATA 3.0, and that big companies can start to design products for it. It is expected to be completed in the second half of this year. Furthermore, SATA 3.0 will remain backward compatible with current SATA 2.0 configurations.

via SmallNetBuilder

The AMD 64 2000+ (clocked at 1 GHz) has been found to rip the raved-about Atom processor by Intel, (clocked at 1.6 GHz), beating Intel in power and processing benchmarks. The stellar performance is mostly accredited to the very well designed K8 architecture.

AMD seems to be getting back on track, after having lost market share to Intel’s Core 2 Duo processors and Nvidias’s graphics cards. AMD now has the HD 4870 X2 , which was deemed the “world’s fastest graphics card”. Go AMD!

Specs:

via Tom’s Hardware

TomTom has already made a navigation for the iPhone that “looks good and works very well,.” Garmin and Magellan, on the other hand, do not have current plans yet but are looking into it.

The Apple SDK, however, forbids developing GPS software, perhaps because Apple wants to make the app itself. All we can say for sure is that a turn-by-turn GPS app is not out of the question, and even to be expected.

via MSNBC

The Wii now no longer needs a modchip to enable DVD playback. The people at Hackmii.com have been working on a DVD Access library. All you need to do is have a homebrew channel and get the installer.dol file in the package. Run it, and follow the onscreen instructions. Running video files off of an SD card is supported, but currently experimental.

via Gizmodo

Nitteo, a forum user at overclock.net, has posted pictures of his 16 rigs with 51 Nvidia 8800 series cards used for Folding@home, a distributed computing project to simulate and record results of protein folding. If proteins do not fold correctly, cancerous cells and other diseases result. Thus, understanding how proteins fold may eventually lead to the development of cures for diseases caused by protein misfolding.

We thank Nitteo for building and donating CPU/GPU power to help with research that can potentially lead to cures one day. Come to think of it, his electric bill is probably through the roof.

For more pictures and info, visit www.overclock.net.

DotSyntax has released the new test build of Digsby, with numerous fixes to memory leaks. On some systems, RAM usage would reach up to 150mb, and the new architecture reduces it by over 50%. Memory usage should now range from 20-50mb.

Menus and buttons now run up to 2-3 times faster, which is a really good. (It used hang my system whenever I hit the menu to change fonts by accident)

Bugs are still being worked out, of course, and a new build for the public will be released very soon. This should build should provide a huge performance gain over previous build. It’s a shame this isn’t out for Mac and Linux yet. (You can, however, sign up to be notified when it is.)

via Digsby Blog

So you’ve been messing around with your panel items such as Applications. And you’ve accidentally deleted some. And you want them back oh so dearly. Well have don’t worry, because the solution is very simple.

To get all your default panel items back, simply open terminal and type in

gconftool-2 –shutdown

rm -rf ~/.gconf/apps/panel

pkill gnome-panel

And then your panels should be back to their default settings. This should work for all GNOME based desktops, but I personally tried it in Ubuntu (Hardy Heron).

via Ethernal

Image courtesy of Mark Shuttleworth