Just when I was about to open my pocket book and buy a new Sony Vaio TZ notebook, I hear this craptacular news: “The company’s Vaio TZ-series may have irregularly positioned wires and/or a dislodged screw near the computer’s hinge that can cause a short circuit.” Great….Sony now has to recall almost 500,000 laptops. The recall effects 19 Vaio TZ models manufactured between May 2007 and July 2008. In the U.S. the flawed models include the Vaio VGN-TZ100 series, VGN-TZ200 series, VGN-TZ300 series, and VGN-TZ2000 series.

Details after the break:
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Here is a short post:
Wii in stock at Walmart.com right now

Google Chrome Official Download starts today at around 11am. The link for the download is:

gears.google.com/chrome/eula.html?hl=en.

If you want to read up on all the new features/improvements google has to offer, check out their 30 odd page comic book.

http://www.google.com/googlebooks/chrome/index.html#

More Screenshots of Google Chrome:

http://blogoscoped.com/archive/2008-09-02-n72.html

One of the editors at CR got this in their email, and while we are torn between this issue at our office; we thought it would be interesting to see what others thought.

So now I ask anyone willing to answer the question, is piracy theft?
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Even though the US economy is in the pits, that doesn’t mean Japan or Nintendo has to worry. Nintendo has now raised it forecasted profit for the fiscal year by 26 percent, citing exceptionally strong sales of the Wii and DS around the world.

The company expects its net income to jump 59 percent to JPY 410 billion, the equivalent of 3.8 billion USD for the year ending March 31st. Nintendo believes sales of the Wii will grow 42 percent for the year and has reversed previous comments that the DS will see sales drop offs.

“This is a very big, positive surprise,” noted Koichi Takatsuka, a senior fund manager at United Investments. “It looks like Wii and DS are selling well, especially in Europe.”

The news prompted Nintendo’s stock to jump almost 10 percent on the Osaka Securities Exchange.

Mythbusters at NVISION 08 Full Version:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aa3OGgBkRiQ&feature=related

Discussions have been raging at macrumours over the mysterious iPhone girl whose photo was “accidentally” shipped with a UK customer’s new iPhone 3G.

Not sure if this is or is not the ‘norm’ but I just received my brand new iPhone here in the UK and once it had been activated on iTunes I found that the home screen (the screen you can personalise with a photo) already had a photo set against it !!!!

It would appear that someone on the production line was having a bit of fun

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Ever had lags or drops when listening to music? Ever wonder why sometimes your computer lags inexpertly? Well DCP latency may be the cause of the problem.

If any kernel-mode device driver in your Windows system is implemented improperly and causes excessive latencies of Deferred Procedure Calls (DPCs) then probably drop-outs will occur when you use real-time audio or video streaming applications.

The DPC Latency Checker tool determines the maximum DPC latency that occurs on your Windows system and thus enables you to check the real-time capabilities of your computer. DPC Latency Checker works independent of any external hardware. Using this tool may be helpful in the following situations:

• You experience interruptions (drop-outs) in a flow of data processed in real-time, for example an audio stream, video stream or a sequence of measuring data, and you want to find out the reason for this problem.
• You want to verify that your Windows system is configured properly so that it is capable of handling real-time data transfer before you install the corresponding streaming application.
• You want to check if a particular computer system is suitable for streaming applications, for example before you buy this system.

Download Program

Alex Roy reviews Top Secret Audi R8 loaded with a ton of “stealth” features include four GPS units, two radar detectors, police scanner, CB radio, kill switch for all rear lights, high-speed broadband Internet with Wi-Fi running on a tablet PC, power ports, takedown lights, a remote-controlled exhaust bypass valve, and a liquid-cooled infrasonic wave pulse generator.

We did some digging and found out the owner of the R8 is named Andre Betz

Pictured here with holding a trophy:

Microsoft Photosynth

Photosynth is a free application made by Microsoft. What is does is construct 3d environments from a bunch of photos. It was launched yesterday (Wed Aug 21st, 2008). On launch day, they experianced too many hits and went down. From what I have seen so far, it looks interesting.

Photosynth takes a collection of regular photographs and reconstructs them in a 3D environment. It could take Flickr photos of a monument like Notre Dame Cathedral from hundreds of separate accounts and compile them into one, continuous shot of the cathedral and its surroundings.

Users can install Photosynth at photosynth.net. All photos that are added to the site will be public and visible to anyone on the Internet. It is currently only available on Windows-based machines running XP and Vista, and users will have to sign up for a Windows Live ID to access Photosynth.

http://photosynth.net/Default.aspx