Digg | River -

Home » Technology » Hardware

Why you'll never be able to legally rip your DVDs (791 diggs) This is the sad story of RealDVD, the company that recently screwed consumers everywhere by settling a lawsuit that makes it illegal to rip DVDs.

Intel 6-Core Processor Dominates Benchmarks (409 diggs) Intel has released a 6-core processor that will fit into existing X58 motherboards and really pushes the boundaries of computing performance. There are many cases where the CPU actually is 50% faster than the measly quad-core processors currently for sale! Time to open up the pocket book or steal your neighbors.

Unboxing the fake Intel Core i7 that NewEgg was shipping (1,846 diggs) By now, you've probably seen many of the homemade videos from people who ordered an Intel Core i7-920 processor from Newegg.com and received a bogus processor and hunk of plastic shaped like a fan. We have one in the office.

The Rise of Netbooks (Infographic) (331 diggs) 2009 saw dramatic growth in the popularity of netbooks. This trend is expected to continue in 2010 as they become increasingly affordable.

Crowd-sourced Toshiba Satellite Notebook = Thin & Sexy (362 diggs) If you could design a perfect laptop, what features would you include or leave out? Best Buy asked its customers, then channeled the info back to laptop manufacturers. The Satellite E205 is Toshiba's offering and it weighs in at a decent price, with solid performance and Intel WiDi wireless display to TV technology on board.

The World's First Commercial Brain-Computer Interface (331 diggs) The world's first commercial effort at a patient-ready brain computer interface is on display over at CeBIT 2010, but don't go throwing out your keyboard and mouse just yet.

The LAPD Gets Its Own, Supersized Robocop (301 diggs) It might not have a soul or emotion, but the Los Angeles Police Department's latest toy, a Remotec Inc. "Telehandler," could probably give Robocop a run for his money.

The World's Largest Amateur Rocket (997 diggs) Unlike wood-based models, the Heat 1X is a real metal rocket. At more than 9 meters high, it's also the largest amateur rocket in the world. The guys building it are planning one almost as large as the V-2.

Surf the Web at the Speed of Light (399 diggs) A new laser developed by scientists at MIT could make light-speed computing a reality.

Graphics Card Prices Could Rise by 10% Due to Shortage (386 diggs) Shortages obviously feed on the demand to raise prices and as we saw for the first two months of the 5000-series availability, prices where higher than the estimated pricing originally fed from AMD's marketing team.

Sony, LG, Samsung, Hitachi, Toshiba accused of price fixing (481 diggs) A Connecticut home electronics store has filed a class-action lawsuit against major manufacturers of optical disc drives, alleging that the companies colluded to raise and keep prices high for CDs, DVDs and Blu-ray Disc technology.

The evolution of removable storage: punchcards to datasticks (199 diggs) Over the years, people have tried to transfer information from one computer to another in a dizzying number of ways. Here's a look at some of the best, along with others that time forgot.

Rural America: The Land Broadband Forgot (349 diggs) Despite promising new technologies, rural America remains the land that telecom forgot. While many politicians claim that they will work toward cheap, reliable broadband for all Americans, it's still a long way off for much of the rural U.S., says our country-dwelling mobile expert.

My roommate didn't notice for 10 minutes [Pic] (4,135 diggs)

Massive Network is an Olympian Feat (468 diggs) The numbers start to overwhelm. In just the hockey venue, there are 25 kilometers of fiber optic cable, 80 kilometers of Cat 5 Ethernet cable, 1,500 Ethernet drops. And they had 12 days to install it all, after the Vancouver Canucks turned over the building to the Olympic organizing committee.

2GB/s Transfer Speed To Be available in 2010 From 1TB Drives (804 diggs) One-terabyte (TB) solid state drives (SSDs) are expected to be released in a couple of years, and they will be about the size of the average postage stamp.

HP slate to undercut iPad's price? (373 diggs) HP's slate PC should cost less than an equivalent iPad when it goes on sale, a leak has revealed late on Wednesday. Sources say that an entry version of the Windows 7 tablet with 3G will have similar specs to an iPad but will cost less than the $629 Apple wants to charge.

Hackers, Troops Rejoice: Pentagon Lifts Thumb Drive Ban (369 diggs) Soldiers, you are now cleared to use your thumb drives again. U.S. Strategic Command has lifted its ban on the tiny drives, memory sticks, CDs, and other “removable flash media” on military networks.

Today's best CPUs compared... to Pentium 4 3.8GHz (1,199 diggs) How do current $74 CPUs compare to the $133 ones? To exclusive $1K Extreme Editions? Interesting questions, but what if you took a five-year-old Pentium 4 3.8GHz and pitted it against today's CPUs in a slew of games and other apps? The results are eye-opening.

The Future of User Interfaces (470 diggs) User interfaces—the way we interact with our technologies—have evolved a lot over the years. But there's still a long way to go. In this article are than a dozen potential future user interfaces that we'll be seeing over the next few years (and some further into the future).

In Search of the Sub-30 Second Boot | Maximum PC (331 diggs) We sought to not only replicate Microsoft’s claim that Windows 7 could boot (from the BIOS) in 11 seconds, but to see how much time we could shave prior to the OS loading, with a combination of hardware and BIOS tweaks. Our ultimate goal: to have a machine up and running within 30 seconds of hitting the power switch.

NVIDIA Optimus Notebook Graphics Switching Impresses (376 diggs) Ideally, switchable notebook graphics would be seamless. Launch an app that doesn't require significant graphics resources & chipset graphics get used. Fire up a game & the discrete GPU kicks in. Up til now, a scenario like this wasn't available w/out a hard switch over and possible reboot but NVIDIA aims to change that w/ their Optimus technology.

Sapphire Radeon HD 5570 1,024MB graphics card: the jigsaw is (249 diggs) Filling in the gap left by the last two launches, £60 will buy you a Radeon HD 5570 1,024MB card. We find out how good it is.

Decent DX11 Capable Gaming For $79, Radeon HD 5570 Launched (347 diggs) A quick look at its model number, will reveal that the Radeon HD 5570 falls somewhere in between the Radeon HD 5450 and 5670 in AMD's current line-up. The card offers decent frame rates at moderately high resolutions for some of the latest and it's also a half-height, low-power card so perhaps ideal for an HTPC

Alan Turing and the Ace computer (356 diggs) The Automatic Computing Engine or Ace was designed by Alan Turing and brought together a team who would go on to design the technology that underpins the internet.