Universe’s Tech Blog

Filed under: Remotes, Sony

With a name like RF Remote Commander, it has to be good, right? Unfortunately, this here device looks to be a forthcoming member of Sony’s IPELA family, which fits more in the boardroom than the living room, generally speaking. Nevertheless, the PCS-RF1 does have a few likable buttons, such as presentation, microphone, zoom in / out and connect / disconnect. Granted, it’s easy to see that this thing wasn’t designed with home theaters in mind, but we’re sure there are a few engineering minds out there already dreaming up ways to connect the aforementioned keys to something in their setup. Per usual, the price and release date remain unknown, but if history repeats yet again, it’s oh-so-close to being ready for primetime.

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The death knell has sounded for the Tcard project, with Minister for Transport John Watkins announcing the end of the troubled scheme — but there is still hope the e-ticketing show will go on, according to the Minister.

Filed under: Desktops, Laptops

Vista SP1 has already been previewed, gone through a Release Candidate cycle, and had a changelog released — so all that’s left is for Microsoft to hit us with it, right? Not so fast, Sparky — according to various sources, you’re still going to have wait three more weeks to get your hands on that hot SP1 action: circle February 15th on your Ballmer / Gates pinup calendar and start counting the days. Of course, Microsoft isn’t confirming anything one way or another other than Q108, so don’t get too excited, but after all we’ve been through together, we can’t imagine the Redmond crew not giving us a (late) Valentine’s Day present — we’re like, totally serious, right?

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There is really no interesting news today, beside Apple stock dropping horribly, and I don’t want to write about that. So here are a few things about the 1.1.3 update for the iPhone and the iPod touch. There are a few interesting changes in 1.1.3 that make it possible for iTunes to install official applications on it without an update. This is because the user of the phone is no longer root, but ‘mobile.’ There are no official applications out yet, but it can explain why the “iPod touch Upgrade Package” could actually be installed. But this is bad for third party apps, for most store their preferences in /var/root/Library/Preferences. That means that most third party applications will have to be edited. Also, SpringBoard has been rewritten so that it doesn’t have to be relaunched to show new applications in /Applications. Another interesting tidbit is that it appears to have widget support. Not much more is known about that at this time.

This one is pretty cool. You can now add speed dial icons on the home screen. Depending on the way you want to do it you can have a pretty icon or not. If you want the pretty icon, all you have to do is enter “number.tel.qlnk.net,” press cancel and then add to home screen. You will have a pretty icon and whenever you press it it will ask you if you want to call said number. If you don’t want to go through a 3rd party server, press add bookmark and enter “tel://number” as the address. This cannot be added to the home screen.

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PCWorld’s Ulrike Diehlmann passed away on January 17th, succumbing to cancer after a long battle. She was responsible for developing the performance charts of PC gear and later HDTV reviews. Rest in…

Filed under: Desktops

We wouldn’t normally get excited about two more random HP enterprise desktops, but you know how we love all things SSD, and if the HP Compaq dc7800 Ultra-Slim Desktop with SSD lights a fire in corporate IT departments, sales volumes may actually drive the price of SSD units down. So, uh, wow, check out this hot new HP Compaq dc7800 Ultra-Slim Desktop! Man, can you imagine how worker productivity would increase due to its speedy 2.3GHz Core 2 Duo processor? And how many more charts and folders you could fit on a desk thanks to its 46 percent smaller footprint? And let’s not even talk about the energy savings due to its compliance with the latest Energy Star guidelines — just TOO exciting. Truly the progressive, “with-it” large enterprise can’t afford NOT to purchase the $1,258 HP Compaq dc7800 Ultra-Slim Desktop with SSD in large enough volumes to affect the commodity pricing of SSD storage. No sir!

There is also a $579 HP Compaq dc5800 Business PC that has a regular hard drive, pictured after the break. It’s pretty much the same, but instead of productivity apps, it, uh, only runs MySpace. Yeah, that’s what we heard for real.

Continue reading HP bumps SSD to business class with new enterprise desktops

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Two years ago, the Acid2 test was announced in this column. Acid2 is a complex Web browser test page that shows a smiley face when rendered correctly

If Mac users fall for scams that PC users have faced for years, it will be an invitation for money-hungry crime gangs to exploit them, say security experts.

PC Gamer’s got a load of new info on the major changes coming to Team Fortress 2, which Valve teased us with earlier this month.

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Filed under: Desktops

They may not have quite the broad appeal of the companies more gaming graphics cards, but ATI and NVIDIA’s relatively recent FireGL V8650 and QuadroFX 5600 workstation graphics cards still have no shortage potential users, and an old-fashioned shootout between the two $1,000+ cards is hard to ignore. That spectacle comes courtesy of the folks at HotHardware, who loaded up each card in a suitably high-end system and put ‘em through the usual array of benchmarks and tests. After all that was said and done, they gave the edge ever so slightly to the NVIDIA card, although they say it’s “not completely cut and dry” as to what the absolute best option is. Working the ATI’s favor, however, is its lower MSRP (despite having more memory than the NVIDIA) and its top of the line Maya performance, although it fell short of the NVIDIA in overall Open GL and Direct 3D performance. If that’s not enough to sway you one way or the other, you can hit up the link below for the complete blow by blow benchmark action.

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NASA says “This object’s 1.4-lunar-distance approach on Jan. 29 is the closest for any
known Potentially Hazardous Asteroid until 2027.”

Why isn’t any media reporting this? Why are all the world’s elite in bomb-proof Switzerland? Why haven’t you watched a YouTube video about Ron Paul?

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The KDE development community is working on porting the open source desktop environment to Windows and Mac OS X. The ports aren’t quite finished yet, but early versions are now available for testing.

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