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National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation reminded us that it’s not a good idea to let your pets hang around dangling cords, especially those carrying an electric current. Cats and dogs tend to chew on such things and, well, the results aren’t pretty. Here’s another tip: keep your pets away from power strips.

I had to learn this one the freakishly hard way when, earlier this morning, my cat Shizzle, who I may rename to Chev Chelios, decided to lay down next to my Belkin power strip. That usually wouldn’t be cause for concern, except that he used it as a… [Read More...]

If you’ve somehow managed to avoid the avalanche of controversy pouring down on Medal of Honor, here’s the gist: you can play as Taliban in the game’s multiplayer. Not “the insurgents.” Not “the guys who look suspiciously like Taliban but totally aren’t, no really.” Nope. This time around, Medal of Honor’s ripping its inspiration straight from the headlines. That, however, didn’t fly with GameStop’s stores in military bases.

According to a memo received by Kotaku, the decision to pull the game was made “out of respect for our past and present men and women in uniform.”

… [Read More...]

Maybe we should put out a tablet — we could call it the MaxiPad — because at this point, it seems like we’re the only ones who have yet to announce an upcoming slate. All the cool kids are doing it, which now includes Hannspree.

Come November, Hannspree promises to launch a 10.1-inch multi-touch slate with a capacitive screen sporting a 1024×600 resolution. It will come armed with Nvidia’s Tegra 2 SoC with a pair of ARM Cortex-A9 cores clocked at 1GHz.

Like so many other upcoming tablets, this particularly one will run on Google’s Android 2.2 platform with native… [Read More...]

Valve’s track record with “surprises” is a bit dodgy – for every one Alien Swarm, there’s a Portal 2 on PS3 – but it’s still hard not to get a little giddy when Valve’s Gabe Newell starts throwing around the S-word.

“I can guarantee you people are going to be surprised at stuff we do. That isn’t going to stop any time soon. I’m just laughing because… people will be shocked again,” Valve boss Gabe Newell told PC Gamer.

“We have three pretty big surprises in the next 12 months at least.”

Shocked, sure, but will we also… [Read More...]

Online auction site eBay is slated to ditch Google Checkout as a payment option by next July. At that time, the only online payment method available to users will be eBay’s own PayPal service. An eBay spokesperson claimed the move is intended “to give eBay buyers a consistent, speedy checkout experience and to ensure support for fast-growing sales via mobile platforms.” 

If you ask us, this has more to do with eBay owning PayPal than user experience. Google Checkout has had trouble finding widespread usage. Amazon does not support Checkout, so the loss of eBay will hit the service hard.… [Read More...]

We don’t mean to laugh at your suffering, Final Fantasy XIV fans, but we have to admit that we find this whole situation pretty amusing. See, Square’s slammed the brakes on its FFXIV open beta test, which was scheduled to begin on August 31.

“FINAL FANTASY XIV Open Beta Test, which is scheduled to begin at 19:00 (PDT) on Aug. 31, 2010, will be postponed due to a confirmation of critical bugs. New schedule will be released at a later date,” the developer wrote on FFXIV’s official site.

So then, why are we conjuring up our hardest Gigglaga… [Read More...]

Last week, a joint experiment of the RIPE NCC (Reseaux IP Europeens Network Coordination Centre) and Duke University researchers had to be stopped abruptly after nearly 1 percent of the internet went out of kilter in its wake. As part of their experiment, the researchers used RIPE NCC’s systems to distribute experimental BGP (Border Gateway Protocol) data – routers use it to make efficient data routing decisions.

Although the experimental BGP data relayed by RIPE NCC’s Routing Information Service (RIS) was “correct and complied to all standards,” it nonetheless destabilized 3,500 prefixes, or announced blocks of Internet Protocol addresses… [Read More...]

These days, it seems like every videogame and its Atari 2600 grandmother is getting a movie tie-in. But hey, games are awesome and so are movies, so where’s the problem? Well, see, as it turns out, game movies are not awesome. Not in the slightest. So, is it Game Over for gaming’s star on the Hollywood walk of fame? Not necessarily, says Valve’s Gabe Newell. We just need to change up our approach, is all.

“Where we got into this direction was after Half-Life 1 had shipped. There was a whole bunch of meetings with people from Hollywood. Directors… [Read More...]

Google has been quietly dabbling in streaming movie rentals since the beginning of this year. YouTube’s repertoire of rentable movies continues to grow at a steady pace, but the service commands little attention. That is likely to change in the next few months as big G plans to add streaming movie rentals from major film studios to its catalog, according to a Financial Times report that cites several sources familiar with ongoing negotiations between Google and the movie studios.

The plan is to launch the streaming movie rental service, or more accurately its expanded avatar, in the US first,… [Read More...]

According to Bensen Lin, vice president and general manager of Garmin-Asus, his company will launch its Android-based Nuvifone A10 smartphone in Taiwan on September 10. Those who want to get a jump on other buyers can put in their pre-order now.

Android’s Froyo build (Android 2.2) isn’t in the cards for the Nuvifone A10, at least not initially, and will instead ship with Android 2.1. It will also come with a 3.2-inch HVGA touchscreen display, 512MB of RAM, a 5MP camera, Qualcomm 7227 processor clocked at 600MHz, Bluetooth/Wi-Fi, and other odds and ends. As with previous Garmin-Asus phones, the A10… [Read More...]

Zotac has always had an impressive lineup of barebones Atom based Nettops, but even with the added power of the Ion 2 chipset behind it, 1080p streaming in flash could be hit or miss making them difficult to recommend for anything other than basic standard definition streaming. In response to the critical review the follow up Zboxes are now shipping with optional dual core Intel CULV processors giving them the extra kick needed to make it an extremely powerful HTPC. The appeal of the Zotac Zbox from an enthusiast standpoint is that they come without RAM, Hard Drives, or… [Read More...]

Around a couple of weeks back, Oracle brought a patent infringement action against Google for infringing its “Java-related intellectual property.” The search giant immediately retorted by saying that the lawsuit was without merit, and even went as far as labeling it an attack on both Google and the open-source Java community. It has once again made it clear that there is absolutely no love lost between the two companies.

Google has decided to give this year’s JavaOne conference a miss owing to the lawsuit against it. “We wish that we could, but Oracle’s recent lawsuit against Google and open… [Read More...]

For those of you who cut your tech teeth on the Commodore 64 of yeasteryear, you’ll soon have a chance to reunite with the wildly popular PC that refuses to fade from memory. That’s because Commodore USA this week announced a full line of new Commodore branded all-in-one (AIO) keyboard computers, including the PC64, an Intel Atom-powered replica of the original C64.

There won’t be any typing out of Load”*”,8,1 commands or Epyx Fast Load cartridges to fumble around with. The PC64 is a nettop in disguise, and a fairly potent one at that (at least as far as… [Read More...]

Most computer users have probably found themselves at the wrong end of a malware-infected USB flash drive at least once. In fact, as US Deputy Defense Secretary William J. Lynn III recently revealed, even the mighty US military has firsthand experience of the damage a rogue USB flash drive can cause. Their ubiquity has made portable storage devices the ideal carriers for computer worms. But how popular exactly are they among malware authors? Panda Security’s research arm PandaLabs claims to possess the answer.

The security company estimates that a quarter of all new worms use portable storage devices to… [Read More...]

OpenDNS, which offers a free, ad-supported DNS (Domain Name System) resolution service to your ISP’s DNS servers, announced it experienced record growth last week, which the company partially attributes to a “rave New York Times review.”

“OpenDNS is firing on all cylinders, and while we’re enjoying our momentum and growth, we’re certainly not resting on our laurels. All departments within the company are focused on both growing our user base and making OpenDNS an even better solution than it is today,” said David Ulevitch, OpenDSN CEO.

According to OpenDNS, its week-over-week account creation was up 150 percent. Thursday, August 18th,… [Read More...]

Never say never… winter. After a lawsuit from Turbine seemed to have put it down for the count, Cryptic’s rumored Neverwinter Nights follow-up has finally gone official. Based off what little has been said about the game, it appears to be an MMO, but with a potentially game-changing twist – literally. See, as with previous Neverwinter titles, there’s a heavy emphasis on world-creation.

Using a “user-friendly content generation system, tentatively codenamed Forge,” you’ll be able to become the dungeon master of your own quests and storylines. Sure, the majority of Forge quests will probably resemble forgeries of WoW’s… [Read More...]

IBM recently revealed some details of its new 5.2GHz microprocessor chip, but consumers shouldn’t bother saving their pennies to get one. The z196, which will be at the heart of the company’s new Z-series mainframes, will be an enterprise-only product. Even if you could convince them to sell you a mainframe, it would likely break the bank at around $1 million.

The z196 is using the CISC instructions set and packs 1.4 billion transistors onto a 512 square mm die. The z196 will have 64 Kbyte L1 instruction cache, 128-Kbyte L1 data cache, and 1.5-Mbyte L2 cache on each core.… [Read More...]

ARM may be comfortably placed in the mobile chip market, but the company is unwilling to rest on its laurels. In recent times, ARM has time and again underlined its interest in the server market. The company hopes to make a dent in the low-power server market with a new chip design that features both virtualization and large physical address support. The next generation of its Cortex-A processor, the Eagle, will be the first to utilize the two key instruction-set extensions that the UK-based chip designer announced at the Hot Chips conference today.

“It’s the natural progression of the… [Read More...]