Hardware

In the wake of Toshiba surrendering in the next-generation DVD format wars, the effects of Blu-ray's victory are becoming widespread: Circuit City has announced it's tripling the returns period for HD-DVD players. That means anyone who bought a ... player in the past three months can return it. Customers can't get a refund but will receive store credit. The offer doesn't apply to the discs themselves. Returned HD-DVD players will likely be sold on clearance, and the company says such sales are going well as some people are getting them as a cheap upgrade for watching standard DVDs in better ... (view more)

Only a matter of weeks after its coronation in front of the tech-happy, HD faithful, Sony is now taking some serious heat for not packing enough space into its Blu-ray discs. Launching the complaint is Hideo Kojima, famed designer behind upcoming ... PlayStation 3 heavyweight title Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots. In an interview with Famitsu, mogul Kojima lambasted Sony for being a bit shy on the storage for its Blu-ray disc format. In that interview, Kojima was adamant that the game, which should be a titan, was simply not going to fit on Sony's HD hardware. "There's not enough space ... (view more)

With the current state of technology, a computer user can manipulate their system in any way imaginable (shy of sticking their hands through the monitor and physically touching the icons that appear on the screen). Now, a group of researchers at ... Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, PA have seemingly broken all of the boundaries and jumped hands-first into a whole new dimension. The team has developed a controller allowing users to manipulate three-dimensional images and delve deeper into virtual areas. The control is currently the closest simulator of human touch ever created. The device ... (view more)

The mainframe computer, thought by many to be the equivalent of a "cyber-dinosaur", is not extinct yet. IBM is introducing a new one, the IBM Z10, a far faster computer with a much larger capacity than any of its IBM predecessors. According to IBM, ... the mainframe computer heralds a big step forward in high-performance, energy-efficient computing. (Source: nytimes.com ) At one time, PC manufacturers were quick to compare the performance of individual PCs, or clusters of PCs, to mainframes. The idea was that mainframes were big and expensive while PCs were small, and inexpensive. Now, IBM has ... (view more)

Just in case you were waiting for one more sign the next-gen movie format war was officially over, Microsoft has now announced that it will be severing ties with HD-DVD and will no longer sell its add-on high definition player for the Xbox 360. The ... drive, which plugs into the Xbox 360's USB port, originally retailed for $199, but was dropped to $149 and then $129 as demand for the peripheral waned. That's the result of Blu-ray's increasing dominance in the market, especially with HD-DVD's loss of notable studios, Best Buy's decision to favour Sony's competing format, and finally Toshiba's ... (view more)

Fifty years after being first unveiled, the Disneyland "House of the Future" is back with all-new innovations that could never have been imagined 50 years ago. The Disney "Dream Home" is the brainchild of The Walt Disney Co., Microsoft Corp., ... Hewlett-Packard Co., LifeWare and Taylor Morrison. All five companies hope to make the house into an actual retailed product one day, with initial estimations starting at 15 million dollars. (Source: sfgate.com ) In 1957, just two years after opening their gates for the very first time, Disneyland introduced the world to the "House of the Future" exhibit ... (view more)

The second major format war is over, and this time Sony has actually appeared to come out on top! Yesterday, Toshiba announced it was throwing in the towel and officially discontinuing its HD DVD format, former rival to Sony's Blu-ray. (Source: ... yahoo.com ) The announcement opens the way for Blu-ray to become the industry standard for the next generation of home video. The format war created a lot of hesitancy among customers to invest in second generation players while the two-tiered system existed. There are approximately 30 million high definition television sets in homes across the United ... (view more)

Earlier last week we reported that Best Buy decided to heavily back Blu-Ray in the next generation DVD format wars. We wrote that the battle appeared to be nearing its climax, and now Wal-Mart may be striking the killer blow to the rival HD-DVD ... system. While Best Buy plans to continue stocking both formats (but put all its promotional backing behind Blu-Ray), Wal-Mart is dropping HD-DVD completely. Their head of home entertainment, Gary Severson, said "We've listened to our customers, who are showing a clear preference toward Blu-Ray products and movies with their purchases." They'll be ... (view more)

Although one big blue electronics retailer couldn't quite knock Toshiba's HD-DVD off, another one may just do the trick. Less than a year after Blockbuster failed to swing the high-def movie war by exclusively carrying Blu-ray flicks, Best Buy has ... decided it will more prominently display Sony's hardware and openly recommend it over rival HD-DVD. Best Buy president Brian Dunn made the announcement earlier this week. Jumping on the Sony bandwagon, the big box brass was quoted as saying, "Because we believe that Blu-ray is fast emerging as that single format, we have decided to focus on Blu-ray ... (view more)

Intel surpassed their own world record by managing to store 2 billion transistors onto a single "quad-core" chip. The former record was set at 1.7 billion transistors crammed onto a "super" Itanium chip. This means that one new "super-duper" chip ... would double the processing power of the chips used in most supercomputers. (Source: yehey.com ) The new chips are expected to be the crown jewel in an impressive line of other Itanium processors. The quad-core chips made their first public appearance at the recent International Solid State Circuits Conference held in San Francisco. Intel made ... (view more)