New In The News

Take it with a grain of salt, or many grains of sand, if you want, when the young volunteers say that every one of the 60 or 70 people helping to put on Wikipedia’s annual convention here (called Wikimania) is active on Facebook.Not one exception? No. The young women in head scarves who patiently explain what can or cannot be done on Friday, according to Islam? Absolutely.

Then there is the young man who is part of the Facebook group devoted to the TV show “Friends.” “Facebook for me is just a way to keep in touch with friends,” said Yehia Hassaan, 18, a medical student. “Some of my friends, they are addicts. Always updating their status, changing their photos.”

Ahmad Belal, a 23-year-old medical student who came from Cairo to attend the conference, is one of those particularly enthusiastic users with hundreds of friends.

“For Egyptians the visa procedure for any country is very difficult,” he said. “You need a visa to visit any country in the world. Facebook and Wikipedia connect us to the outside.”

In the spring, a protest against rising food prices and the government took root on Facebook, with a page that had more than 75,000 members. The Facebook movement overlapped with a textile workers strike, and the government response was swift and severe.

The main organizer was arrested, and according to The Washington Post, said he was stripped and beaten by the security services in Cairo. Another organizer, Israa Abdel Fattah, a 27-year-old human resources administrator with no political experience who helped administer the Facebook page, was also arrested. A Free Israa group quickly emerged - she was called the Facebook Girl - with, at one time, tens of thousands joining up.

The young people at Wikimania were not afraid to talk about those recent events. Some said they had feared that Facebook would be shut down, but Kareem Mohamed, 20, a student of engineering in Alexandria, stated matter-of-factly, “that is not possible.”

Perhaps it is this context that explains the enthusiasm for building a stronger Arabic Wikipedia among the young people here, and the evangelism about contributing articles in their native language.

Among the Arab attendees, who were not exclusively from the world of computer science - many are medical students, others in engineering and architecture - the woeful shape of the Arabic Wikipedia has been the cause of chagrin. It has fewer than 65,000 articles, and ranks 29th among the various Wikipedias, just behind Slovenian, and well behind the artificial tongue Esperanto.

Among the problems, less than 10 percent of the 80 million Egyptians are thought to have Internet access. And those with access tend to know English and prefer to communicate that way.

Elsewhere, writing articles for Wikipedia can appear to be a quirky obsession or mere hobby - other Wikipedia conferences have had a bit of a Star-Trek-convention feel to them. In Egypt, writing for Wikipedia is something more like a national priority.

“It is more important to spread free knowledge here,” said Mohamed Ibrahim, 22, who was born and raised in Alexandria, and just completed a degree in architecture. He said one of his fellow organizers had made a good point: “The gap between the Arab world and the Western world is not about money or politics. It is about knowledge. There are many examples of Egyptians who travel to Europe or the U.S. and become successful. If people had access to the same knowledge …, ” he said, trailing off.

Ahmed Tantawy, the technical director of IBM in the Middle East, spoke in the convention center of the new Alexandria Library and said, “Arabic content today is nothing,” holding his fingers close together. “Do kids chat with each other in English or Arabic? Most likely Arabic, I think.”

Into that vacuum enters Wikipedia. Ismail Serageldin, the director of the library, which is built on the site of the ancient treasury of manuscripts, said that Wikipedia could make up for the absence of a reliable, regularly updated encyclopedia, along the lines of Brittannica. “When intellectuals got around to transforming our country, in the 19th century, they were tackling other issues,” he said.

Material on Wikipedia is something that may be quickly ignored in the West, he said, but in Egypt, “it brings knowledge to the poor.”

“We have a generation gap that is huge,” Serageldin said. “Scholars in Egypt don’t use computers, and the younger people are very Internet savvy. We need to get young people involved.”

Nahla Ghoneim, a 23-year-old computer engineer at IT Works, said at the conference that young people in Egypt need to get involved in information technology “not just as consumers.”

“That is one of the problems here in Egypt,” she said. “We are consumers instead of contributors to technology. Wikipedia is a first step to getting involved.”

source: International Herald Tribune

This configuration of the Dell Latitude D830 is a 6-pound, general-purpose notebook computer. Compared to other mainstream consumer notebooks on the market, it is very inexpensive at around $940. Has Wi-Fi (wireless connectivity) built-in.

specs:

• Platform Technology: Intel Centrino Duo

• Built-in Devices: Stereo speakers, Wireless LAN antenna
• Embedded Security: Trusted Platform Module (TPM 1.2) Security Chip , Fingerprint reader

• Width: 14.2 in Depth: 10.4 in Height: 1.4 in Weight: 6 lbs
• Screen type: Wide-screen Wireless capabilities: 802.11a, 802.11b, 802.11g
• Processor: Intel Core 2 Duo T7250 / 2.00 GHz Data bus speed: 800 MHz
• Chipset type: Mobile Intel GM965 Express
• Cache Memory: Type L2 cache Cache size: 2 MB

• RAM: Installed Size 512 MB / 4 GB (max) Technology: DDR2 SDRAM - 667 MHz
• Storage controller type: Serial ATA/IDE Hard Drive: 80 GB - Serial ATA-150 - 7200
• Optical Storage: CD-RW/DVD - Plug-in module | CD / DVD read speed | 24X CD / DVD write speed | 24x (CD) / 8x (DVD±R) | CD / DVD rewrite speed | 10x (CD) / 6x (DVD-RW) / 8x (DVD+RW)

• Display Type: 15.4 TFT active matrix Max Resolution: 1920 x 1200 ( WUXGA )
• Graphics Processor / Vendor: Intel Graphics Media Accelerator X3100
• Video Memory: Dynamic Video Memory Technology 4.0 Max Allocated RAM Size: 256 MB
  High Definition Audio | Multimedia Functionality

• Input Devices: Input device type | Keyboard, Touchpad | Keyboard localization and layout | Modem | Fax / modem
• Wireless NIC: Intel PRO/Wireless 3945ABG
• Data link protocol: Ethernet, IEEE 802.11a, IEEE 802.11b, IEEE 802.11g, Fast Ethernet, Gigabit Ethernet
• Networking standards: IEEE 802.11a, IEEE 802.11b, IEEE 802.11g

Expansion Slots Total (Free) | 2 ( 0 ) x Memory, 1 ( 1 ) x PC Card - Type I/II, 1 ( 1 ) x ExpressCard/54

• Interfaces: 1 x Display / video - S-video output, 1 x Display / video - VGA - 15 pin HD D-Sub (HD-15), 1 x Audio - Line-out/headphones - Mini-phone stereo 3.5 mm, 4 x Hi-Speed USB - 4 pin USB Type A, 1 x Serial - RS-232 - 9 pin D-Sub (DB-9), 1 x IEEE 1394 (FireWire), 1 x Modem - Phone line - RJ-11, 1 x Network - Ethernet 10Base-T/100Base-TX/1000Base-T - RJ-45, 1 x Docking / port replicator

• Battery: 6-cell Lithium ion Battery capacity: 53 Wh

• OS Provided: Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition, SP2, with media

• Software: Cyberlink PowerDVD, Drivers & Utilities, McAfee SecurityCenter (15 months subscription)

“This YouTube thing might be catching on.” Two years or so after that dawned on most people, Adobe has caught on, adding an upload-to-YouTube feature to its consumer video editor, Premiere Elements 4. But despite that and an overhauled interface, I wasn’t as thrilled with this update as I have been with past versions.

Enter your YouTube user name and password, and Elements saves it for future use. It outputs your movie directly to YouTube’s preferred Flash format, so you save time by skipping the step of outputting to some other format first. However, you can’t change any settings, and the quality wasn’t so hot. For now, it’s only YouTube, though Adobe says other sites could be added in the future.

Adobe calls Elements’ updated interface “decluttered,” and it certainly has fewer buttons and sliders. But it felt dumbed down to me: Some useful things are hidden or simply gone. For example, Elements 3’s interface let you move panes around the app and put them wherever you wanted, even on a second monitor. Elements 4 lets you resize panes, but you can’t move them. And it lacks graphical elements to delineate tracks in a timeline–I had to hover my cursor near where lines used to be and try to make the resizing icon appear.

The Media bin now has a Project sub-bin and an Organizer sub-bin; if you preview a clip in the Project window, you’ll see Elements’ familiar trim window, with rudimentary playback controls such as fast-forward, fast-reverse, and a “scrubber” to go to a certain point in a clip so you can evaluate it. But if you preview clips in the Organizer window, you’ll see it in a tiny window that has no controls; you can’t tell how long a clip is, and you can’t fast-forward to see whether material at the end is useful. And while the size of text in menus and other elements is much more consistent than in previous versions, it’s also pretty small, often uncomfortably so, and raising several settings didn’t help.

Premiere Elements has an audio mixer pulled from Premiere Pro; it lets you adjust audio levels as your timeline’s playing. That’s very useful for making sure your soundtrack doesn’t drown out voices in your captured video. A new image stabilizer works with moderate success; it automatically zooms and crops to smooth movement. A new feature detects beats and music and automatically matches scene changes to the beat; with a series of still images, I had to futz with the settings to get a pace I liked, but it provides you with a good starting point, and you can adjust further in the timeline.

In the past, a common criticism of Premiere Elements has been that it’s too complicated for novice users. That may have been true, but some compromises the new version makes to appeal to newbies will frustrate existing users.

source: PC World

The Microsoft operating system is improved by the soon-to-arrive service pack, but Windows Vista still is missing some features we’d like to see.

At the risk of sounding obvious, the MacBook Air is incredibly light and tiny. Its looks owe a lot to the MacBook Pro and previous silver Mac laptop models, but its curved edges and tapered shape are unlike anything we’ve seen on a Mac laptop in a long time, if ever. Someone sitting next to me just likened it to a really big iPod nano, and that’s not far off.

Because of the product’s curves, there aren’t flat spots on the side for ports, as there are on existing Mac laptops. On the left side, near the back, is a slightly recessed space on the MacBook Air’s underside with a MagSafe power connector. As a result, the MacBook Air comes with a different power brick, a smaller 45-watt brick than the one the MacBook uses. And the adapter’s tip is different, a right-angled silver shape that’s designed to nestle snug against the MacBook Air’s side. If Apple had used the current MagSafe adapter, it simply wouldn’t fit—that adapter sticks straight out, an orientation that would prevent you from setting the MacBook Air down on a desk.

On the MacBook Air’s right side is a drop-down door with three ports. (It’s not a door that you flip open to expose the ports—you actually pull the door down, and the three ports come down from within the computer. There’s a standard speaker/headphone minijack, a USB 2.0 port, and a micro-DVI port. Yes, IT people, this means you will need to carry around yet another spare set of Mac laptop display adapters—mini DVI for MacBooks, DVI for MacBook Pros, and micro DVI for MacBook airs.

The best news I got about the MacBook Air was its video-out prowess. It seems to have the same skills as the MacBook, namely that it will drive a 23-inch Apple display as a secondary display. For someone like me, that’s a key feature—speaking as a guy who uses his MacBook at work hooked up to a 23-inch display, robust video-out features are important.

The good news is, MacBook Air ships with two video adapters in the box, one for VGA, one for DVI. An optional $19 S-Video adapter is also available. And for those who simply must have Ethernet connectivity, Apple will sell a $29 USB Ethernet adapter.

There’s no optical drive in the MacBook air, and David Moody, Apple vice president of worldwide Mac product marketing expressed to us the ambivalence that Apple seems to have about the current state of the computer optical drive: “Some people will need [an optical drive] Others… maybe.” If you want a MacBook Air but are afraid that you’re going to run into a situation where you simply must have an optical drive, Apple will sell you an external $99 USB SuperDrive, nicely color-matched, specifically for the MacBook Air.

For basic optical drive needs, though, Apple’s new Remote Disc software will let the MacBook Air take control of the optical drive on a Mac or PC. The laptop comes with software you can install on Macs or PCs, enabling the feature. Then when you click on Remote Disc in the Finder’s sidebar, you’ll see a list of all the computers on your local Bonjour network that have Remote Disc installed. Click on a computer and one of two things will happen—either you’ll just take control of the drive, or (optionally) the user of the other computer will be prompted to allow you to take control.When we tried the feature out, it worked seamlessly. We double-clicked on a remote PC across the room, and after about five seconds I could hear its optical drive quietly begin to whir. Within another few seconds, the Microsoft Office 2008 install disc appeared in the Finder on the MacBook Air, just as if we had inserted that disc in the MacBook Air’s nonexistent optical drive.

Open the magnetic latch of the MacBook Air and peer inside, and you’ll get a sight that looks a lot like a miniature combination of the MacBook and the MacBook Pro. There’s aluminum everywhere, with the exception of the black backlit keyboard and the 13.3-inch display. That display, at 1,280-by-800 pixels, is the same size as the one on the MacBook. It’s backlit via LEDs, which Apple says give the display full brightness the moment they turn on, as opposed to other backlights that take a while to brighten to full intensity.

As far as I can tell, the MacBook Air’s keyboard is identical to the one on the MacBook, complete with square keycaps and the same solid feeling when typing.

Aside from Remote Disc, the other big new software addition with the MacBook Air is the modifications to the Keyboard and Mouse preference pane to support the new multi-touch enabled trackpad. In our demo, we saw the gestures at work in both iPhoto and Safari, though presumably these are features that third-party developers will be able to add to their applications as well. In Safari, we saw the iPhone’s pinch gesture adapted to allow you to size the text in your browser window up and down. You can also swipe with three fingers to use the browser’s forward and back buttons.

It’s quite a mind-bender to see full QuickTime movies in the System Preferences pane, but that’s the interface Apple has chosen to get across the various gestures the trackpad supports. The more prosaic side of the preference pane collects the gestures by finger: one-finger actions (tap, drag, drag lock), two-finger actions (click, scroll, pinch, rotate, zoom), and one three-finger action (swipe).

Finally, it’s worth mentioning that the MacBook Air’s tiny .16-inch thin front side still has room for two pieces of actual hardware: an infrared receiver and the ubiquitous pulsating sleep light.

source: MacWorld

Everex launched an ultra-mobile PC featuring the latest open source operating system from gOS at the 2008 Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas.

Measuring nine inches in length and weighing two pounds, the Everex CloudBook features a 1.2GHz VIA C7-M ULV mobile processor and averages five hours of battery life on a 4-cell, lithium-ion battery. The CloudBook also features 30GB of internal storage, DVI output, 4-in-1 card reader and a 1.3-megapixel webcam.

Available January 25, the computer will be available at Walmart.com for US$399

source: DigiTimes

The new Mac Pros run on dual Intel Quad-Core Xeon CPUs and a system architecture with “up to twice the performance of its predecessor.”

Apple has introduced its fastest-ever professional Macs, introducing re-vamped versions of the Mac Pro and Xserve.Available immediately, the new Mac Pro’s offer eight processor cores and a new system architecture that the company claims offers “up to twice the performance of its predecessor”. The new professional desktop Macs use two of Intel’s brand-new 45-nanometer Quad-Core Xeon processors running at up to 3.2GHz.These new Macs also offer much-improved graphics and up to 4TB of internal storage for creative professionals, with listed price starting at just £1,749 (including VAT).”The new Mac Pro is the fastest Mac we’ve ever made,” said Phil Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of worldwide product marketing. “With 3.2GHz 8-core Xeon processing, a 1,600MHz front side bus and 800MHz memory, the new Mac Pro uses the fastest Intel Xeon architecture on the market.”The new Mac Pro features the latest Quad-Core Intel Xeon 5400 series processors based on state-of-the-art 45nm Intel Core microarchitecture running up to 3.2GHz, each with 12MB of L2 cache per processor. These systems host a new high-bandwidth hardware architecture, dual-independent 1,600MHz front side buses and up to a whopping 32GB of 800MHz DDR2 ECC FB-DIMM memory. All told, Apple promises the new Mac Pro’s achieves a 61 per cent increase in memory throughput.

Graphics processing power has been optimized by Apple’s choice to deploy the ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT graphics card with 256MB of video memory. The Mac Pro also includes a new PCI Express 2.0 graphics slot that delivers up to double the bandwidth compared to the previous generation, and supports the latest generation of graphics cards from NVIDIA, such as the GeForce 8800 GT with 512MB of video memory, or Quadro FX 5600 with 1.5GB of video memory and a 3D stereo port for stereo-in-a-window applications.

With an eye to the needs of the most advanced video, 3D and scientific markets, these new Macs can support up to four graphics cards, meaning they can drive up to eight 30in displays at once.

Expandability options include four internal hard drive bays with direct-attach, cable-free installation of four 1TB Serial ATA hard drives, (4TB in total of internal storage) and support for two SuperDrives.

As an option, users can select 15,000rpm SAS drives that can deliver up to 250MB/s of RAID 5 disk I/O performance. Combined with SATA or SAS drives, using an optional Mac Pro RAID card offers excellent data protection and disk I/O performance on the Mac Pro. These Macs are equipped with five USB 2.0, two FireWire 400, two FireWire 800, optical and analogue audio in and out, dual Gigabit Ethernet ports and a headphone jack. Naturally, all new Mac Pro’s ship with Apple’s latest Leopard OS and the Apple Keyboard. The standard 8-core Mac Pro costs $2,799 and features:

• two 2.8 GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon processors with dual-independent 1,600MHz front side buses;
• 2GB of 800MHz DDR2 ECC fully-buffered DIMM memory, expandable up to 32GB;
• ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT with 256MB of GDDR3 memory;
• 320GB Serial ATA 3Gb/s hard drive running at 7,200rpm;
• 16X SuperDrive with double-layer support (DVD+/-R DL/DVD+/-RW/CD-RW);
• two PCI Express 2.0 slots and two PCI Express slots;
• Bluetooth 2.0+EDR; Apple Keyboard and Mighty Mouse.

In addition to the standard configuration, the Mac Pro offers numerous build-to-order options including: one 2.8GHz, two 3.0GHz, or two 3.2GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon processors; up to 32GB of 800MHz DDR2 fully-buffered ECC memory; up to four 1TB Serial ATA hard drives running at 7,200rpm or up to four 300GB SAS drives running at 15,000rpm; Mac Pro RAID card; up to two 16x SuperDrives with double-layer support; NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT or NVIDIA Quadro FX 5600 graphics cards; AirPort Extreme 802.11n; Apple USB Modem; Apple wireless Aluminum Keyboard; Apple wireless Mighty Mouse; and Mac OS X Server Leopard.

source: PC World

Mozilla’s new Firefox browser beta offers a glimpse of coming attractions, but is not yet suited for everyday browsing.

The first beta release of the much-anticipated Firefox 3 Web browser offers some nice enhancements over the previous version, such as additional security and new tools for storing and accessing bookmarks and browsing history, but it doesn’t differ much from Firefox 2 in looks or functionality.Most of the changes expected in version 3 (due for final release in early 2008), such as stability and performance enhancements for the Gecko 1.9 rendering engine, will be under the hood and weren’t apparent in the beta we tested. Most of the work for the new Places feature, which stores bookmarks and history in a database instead of in regular HTML files, is likewise invisible.

A few nice, though not earth-shattering, additions do reveal themselves. A new star icon next to the site URL allows for quickly adding new bookmarks; click it once to add a bookmark to the default folder or twice to choose the destination. You can also add tags to your bookmarks and then view them by those tags, or easily create bookmark backups that you can copy to other computers.

Mozilla is also working on a number of security enhancements, which again were not all available in this beta. I was able to test a revamp of the saved-password feature, which lets you postpone saving site credentials until after you’ve successfully logged in. The final release will block known malicious sites that attempt to install Trojan horses or other malware (the blacklist of such sites isn’t yet in place). Overall the extra security should help make for safer browsing, but none of the upgrades will prove a major deterrent for malware pushers.

Other updates include a new downloads manager that allows for resuming downloads after browser restarts, a full-page zoom, and security and usage improvements for handling browser add-ons. Be sure to see the full list of changes in Firefox 3.

If you’re interested in trying out version 3’s new features, keep in mind that this beta release has known bugs. You can’t log in to Yahoo Mail’s slick new interface, for instance, though you can read Yahoo Mail via the old interface. Also, many popular add-ons, including Foxmarks (for bookmark syncing) and SiteAdvisor (for Web surfing security), don’t yet work with the new Firefox. You can install and uninstall Beta 1 alongside Firefox 2, and in our tests the old version–including­ bookmarks, add-ons, and settings–was unharmed.

This beta, because of its bugs, is not well suited for everyday browsing. Using it, however, makes clear that the final Firefox 3 will include some nice extras but won’t push the boundaries for browser upgrades.

–Erik Larkin

source: PC World

The good: Upgraded CPU for the same price; same great design; built-in Webcam and remote control; adds 802.11n support.

The bad: Cutting-edge features are absent, including Intel’s new Santa Rosa platform and LED-backlit displays.

The bottom line: Apple’s rightfully popular 13-inch MacBook gets a decent incremental upgrade, but we’re still looking forward to the next version.

Specs: Processor: Core 2 Duo 2.16GHz, 1GB RAM, 160GB HDD, SuperDrive, black, Weight: 5.1 lbs

source: CNet

Amid all the rhetoric about whose network is the most “open,” some cool hardware is getting shuffled under the rug. And that’s a shame, because the new LG Voyager is probably the best handset that Verizon’s ever offered.

If it’s not targeted squarely at the iPhone, I don’t know what is. At first glance, the two handsets look a lot alike. You’ll find a big (2.8 inches diagonally), touch-sensitive LCD front and center, complete with a “touch here” unlocking mechanism, not unlike the iPhone. A single hardware button is used, again, as a “home” function, though you’ll find send and end buttons on the Voyager as well. All the rest of the phone functions are accessed via the touchscreen.

But the Voyager has a secret weapon: It flips open, clamshell style, to reveal a spacious (and excellent) QWERTY keyboard and a landscape display, also 2.8 inches diagonally. The interior keyboard isn’t touch-sensitive, but it would be difficult to use it with a fingertip anyway, as it’s set back and at an angle, not unlike the AT&T Tilt. You can do anything you want on either screen (a fingertip keypad pops up on the exterior display when you need it), and you can swap between them on the fly.

What can you do with the Voyager? What can’t you do? It’s got a fairly good web browser that’s plenty fast; unlike the iPhone, the Voyager has a 3G radio inside, so it’s as zippy as it gets on a cell phone. No, you don’t always get picture-perfect pages like you do with the iPhone, but the rendering is way better, at least, than Mobile IE. There’s room for improvement: Scrolling around a busy screen really bogs down the handset, for example.

There’s a 2-megapixel webcam and email, of course, but there’s also integrated GPS (subscription fees are extra), complete with voice-assisted instructions. Plus, you get all of Verizon’s usual VCast music and TV features. Video quality is impressive… and don’t miss the cute, retractable antenna! A microSD card slot lets you add as many tunes as you want. iPhone can’t touch Voyager on these features.

For a 3G phone, battery life isn’t bad: 4 hours, 40 minutes of talk time in my tests. And call quality is outstanding, as good as any cell phone I’ve tested.

What’s missing? The Voyager lacks the absolute stunning looks of the iPhone, but it’s still handsome. Imagine LG’s prior clamshell phones like the enV but on a diet. There’s oddly no Wi-Fi on the Voyager, either, though the faster cell network at least makes up for some of that.

All this will set you back $300, or $100 less than the iPhone, with the same two-year contract (though you can add data or not, your choice). Whether it’s all worth it is up to you, but I’ll say that if I was shopping for a new Verizon handset today, this is definitely the one I’d snag. No question.

source: Yahoo! Tech

Is this new video service from NBC/Universal and Fox a preview of how we’ll get our online TV shows and movies in the near future?

Big Hollywood studios take a somewhat scattered approach to distributing their video online, using a combination of their own Web sites, sites they’ve invested in (like Movielink), and popular third-party storefronts like iTunes.

But analysts say studios eventually want to sell video directly to consumers, either from their own sites or in small joint ventures with other studios.

That ’s why the October debut of Hulu, a web video joint venture between NBC/Universal (owned by GTE) and Fox (owned by News Corp.), is a notable date in TV and movies’ transition to the Web. Portals like Hulu may eventually be the places where we go online to buy mainstream TV and movies.

Using Hulu’s “private” beta with permission, I watched a good deal of the free service over the course of a weekend. I found Hulu’s content selection impressive, the video quality at least passable, the site design elegant and simple, and the navigation and community features mainly useful.

Hulu’s only sour note is the rather harsh restrictions that its Old Guard studio owners place on when and where and for how long you can watch the videos

Impressive Content

Contrary to the hype leading up to Hulu’s coming out, the site is not designed to be a “YouTube killer”. Hulu’s main draw is current, prime time TV shows like Heroes, House, Scrubs, and The Simpsons. Hulu also features some old TV series episodes (Kojak, Night Gallery), and a few old movies (The Blues Brothers, The Breakfast Club), plus some clips (like Saturday Night Live bits), movie trailers, and a few viral videos thrown in for good measure.

Video Quality: Not Bad

I watched Hulu on a Gateway home computer connected to the Internet using a 1.5 Mbps AT&T DSL line. The quality of Hulu’s video isn’t perfect, but I found it quite watchable, despite some slight pixilation and a few hiccups in the audio and video.

When I moved the navigation slider to a future point in the program, however, I saw a considerable amount of stopping and starting as the stream buffered. These things are, of course, more noticeable when you switch into full-screen mode, and any such service is only as good as the broadband pipe it comes in on.

Still, Hulu is among the best attempts I’ve seen yet at streaming video at high quality over the public Internet.

Navigation and Community Tools

Hulu’s designers appear to have done their homework, assembling a sort of “greatest hits” of navigation and community tools in the interface. The Embed tool spits out the HTML you’ll need to host Hulu video at your site or blog. The “Details” button gives you information on the show you’re watching, such as its episode number and original air date.

The designers may have borrowed the “Lower Lights” feature from Stage 6, which dims every pixel on your monitor except those within the video window. Hulu does feature one tool I hadn’t seen elsewhere: Within Hulu’s video share tool, you can use a simple slider tool to chop out a clip from a show and enclose it with a note to a friend.

source: Mark Sullivan, PC World

The good: Excellent photo quality for the price; generally fast performance; no frills but well-chosen snapshot feature set.

The bad: USB port and charger connector under battery cover; limited focal range for macro shooting.

The bottom line: A surprisingly nice budget ultracompact, the no-frills Pentax Optio S10 delivers excellent photo quality and decent performance for relatively little cash.

Specs: Digital camera type: Ultracompact; Resolution: 10 megapixels; Optical zoom: 3 x

source: CNet

BenQ has added another new member to its Joybook product line, the Joybook R43,

the features are:

-14.1-inch UltraVivid widescreen display

-the latest Intel Core 2 Duo processor

-Windows Vista

-Wi-Fi connectivity

-brand new lid design.

The Joybook R43 is designed to capture the spirit of a great metropolis, said BenQ. The Joybook R43 features a deep black lid accented by a unique ornamental band. The unique ornamental band was imprinted with Laminar Film technology to outline the skyline of a great metropolis in pop art style.

source: DigiTimes

Stop the presses: Everything you’ve heard about Crysis is true. It’s a first-person shooter game that features a massive Lost-like island to explore, revealing it in naturally occurring areas that can take several minutes to sprint through and hours to fully experience.

Crysis simulates that island and its tropical ecology by employing visual technology so sophisticated that bullets fired through sun-streaked foliage cause leaves to shiver, while massive explosions thousands of meters away can produce clouds of dust that settle gradually over jungle canopies like smog.

Remarkably, everything in Crysis is interactive, from coffee cups and barrels to destructible shacks to the trunks of felled trees, which you can pick up and wield.

Your opponents, organized around the island in organic detachments, are not only tactically devious but work together with uncanny efficiency. And even without a gun, you’re a lethal weapon, kitted out with special nanotechnology that lets you hit, run, and jump like a superhero. Developer Crytek promised something that would “move the shooter genre forward substantially,” and with Crysis, it is firing on all cylinders.

Crytek has also produced something of a flawed masterpiece. Your enemies are smart, but only to the extent that they play better hide-and-seek. Rules that apply to you are occasionally broken by the creators to ramp up a challenge, violating the game’s internal logic and creating some of the most unnecessarily irritating moments in the story. And at the eleventh hour, the game’s much-touted sense of openness gives way to a design that narrows as you advance, culminating in a final battle where someone barks orders at you like a drill sergeant reading a grocery list.

That is not to say Crysis isn’t exceptional, and often extraordinary. But appreciating what it offers–an unconventional “emergent” adventure in an unspeakably beautiful setting–depends primarily on how you choose to engage it.

source: PC World

As expected, Flickr has retooled its photo printing abilities to make it easier to print batches of photos.

The new print ability is now available in the Organizr tool, which already was available to help users group photos into sets, change viewing permissions, add tags, and otherwise manage their photos. Flickr’s Eric Costello announced the Flickr printing move on Yahoo’s blog Wednesday.

I loathed Flickr printing in the past, and the new option worked much more smoothly for me. I suspect I’m not alone here in my dislike–Flickr this year got a major influx of new members when Yahoo started closing down its Yahoo Photos service in favor of its faster-growing Flickr site, and the older site was more geared toward old-school photo site tasks such as printing. Indeed, Yahoo steered printing-oriented Yahoo Photos members away from Flickr when presenting migration options.

Previously, a user had to choose individual photos manually to print from each photo’s Web page, although one print partner, Qoop, offered a more streamlined approach. Now, the Organizr’s new “order prints” option lets a user select a group of photos to print, quickly choose from a variety of photo sizes, and add them to the shopping cart.

Also, opening the contents of a set presents the same option if you’ve already sorted photos into a batch.

The interface also includes tabs for sending the prints to Flickr’s print partners, Qoop and Moo, which offer more elaborate options such as books, mugs, greeting cards, and miniature business cards.

source: CNet