If you’re curious to find out just how the revamped 80GB Zune’s interface looks like, here’s a video of it (God bless YouTube). It is interesting to note that the text labels at the root menu are so large, even the older folks won’t have any trouble making out the letters. This is greatly helped by the 3.2″ display, while a couple of new items (social and podcasts) are thrown into the menu as well. ‘Social’ will replace ‘community’ when it comes to tune sharing, while ‘podcasts’ explains itself. Navigating requires you to move your thumb in a circular motion or just hold down a direction on the D-pad to scroll up/down. What are your impressions of the new Zune?

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Filed under: Gaming

Go on and file this one away in the rumor drawer, but on the same token, don’t be utterly shocked if Sony looses its 40GB PlayStation 3 on American soil next month. According to The Hollywood Reporter, SCEA “will unveil a $399 40GB PlayStation 3 on US shores,” and moreover, sources were quoting November 2nd as a likely launch date. Currently, we’ve no reason to believe that we Americans would receive anything other than the pared down machine that the Europeans were introduced to last week, but we’ll be sure and keep you posted on any further developments.

[Via PS3Fanboy]

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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!

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Filed under: Gaming

Just in case you missed the tidbit near the end of Sony’s official 40GB PS3 announcement last Friday, the 60GB PlayStation 3 will indeed be no more once European stock runs out. If you’ll recall, Sony already pulled the plug on the 60 gigger here in the US, and now it seems that it will face a similar fate across the pond. According to Nick Sharples, director of corporate communications for Sony in Europe, “anyone who wants to buy a 60GB PS3 for Christmas is not going to have a problem,” so those desperately needing an extra bit of HDD space (and / or backwards compatibility for PS2 titles) should be alright through the end of the year.

[Via IGN, thanks Alan]

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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!

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Filed under: On the Blogs, How To, Spices, Sugar

About a year ago, someone (probably an forgotten food blogger) tipped me off to the fact that you can buy volume lots of vanilla beans on eBay for cheap. I hopped on board that particular bandwagon and bought a ridiculously large number of beans for nearly no money. I shared some with my mom and used fresh vanilla in all my baked goods. I found myself with lots of used, fragrant bean pods and kept tucking them into my sugar jar to scent my sugar with vanilla goodness.

It turns out that Melissa, over at Traveler’s Lunchbox, and I were doing almost the same thing at the same time, including occasionally running into the problem of needing unscented sugar and only having vanilla-fragranced stuff on our shelves. Only she did something much more clever than I did (I hate to admit that many of my used pods landed in the trash). She started tucking her used bean pods into a bottle of light rum, thinking she’d make infused booze for future cocktails. Only the alcohol in the bottle started getting darker, until she realized that she had created her own vanilla extract, just as good (or possibly even better) than the best quality stuff that you can buy in the stores.

You too can make your own vanilla extract. Just take a stroll on over to Melissa’s post and see how she did it. She includes tips and sources for inexpensive beans. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I think I need to go and bake something that requires vanilla, so that I can start my own bottle of extract.

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Filed under: Earnings reports, Google (GOOG), Apple Inc (AAPL), Amazon.com (AMZN), Indices, Market matters, Money and Finance Today, Research in Motion (RIMM), Technical Analysis, Tech for the rest of us, Technology

Since the market’s sell-off in March, large cap stocks have outperformed their small-company peers by a hefty margin.

Among other reasons, investors have favored the shares of companies they deemed less vulnerable to the spreading credit crisis, as well as those that might benefit from strong growth in overseas markets should the U.S. economy falter.

Within the universe of larger companies, one group, in particular, has done noticeably better than others. Large cap technology shares, which includes the likes of Apple Inc. (NASDAQ: AAPL), Amazon.com Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN), Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG), and Research in Motion Ltd. (NASDAQ: RIMM), have had a stellar run, both in absolute terms and relative to other shares.

Since the year began, for example, the Nasdaq 100 index has gained more than 23%, and it has beaten the blue chip-rich S&P 100 index by 13 percentage points.

Recently, however, the ratio of the latter to the former index has approached levels last seen in January 2006. At that time, technology stocks staged a dramatic about-face, losing ground in comparison to other, less volatile shares.

With earnings season approaching and at least some evidence that operating results and the outlook going forward, especially in some consumer-related sectors, may not live up to high expectations, the market-leading technology bellwethers could be poised for at least a short-term relative pullback.

Michael Panzner is a 25-year veteran of the global stock, bond, and currency markets and the author of Financial Armageddon: Protecting Your Future from Four Impending Catastrophes and The New Laws of the Stock Market Jungle.

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Filed under: Peripherals, News

All of us PS3 owners know that our sexy console sports Bluetooth technology — real awesome stuff, being able to attempt to play Warhawk while cooking in the kitchen and the TV is upstairs in a bedroom. Anyway, Red Octane doesn’t seem to think Bluetooth is all it’s cracked up to be. It’s been revealed that the PS3 version of Guitar Hero 3 will force PS3 owners to attach a wireless USB dongle to their consoles instead of using the Bluetooth technology. Well, that might not be true. Red Octane is blaming Sony for this USB device. Let’s investigate!

1UP contacted Red Octane for comment and they replied: “Our products require considerable time for certification and testing to perfect both our software & hardware, so this was the most effective way for us to bring a high quality wireless solution for PS3 this holiday.” Since that didn’t adequately answer why, they pried further, since the Wii uses Bluetooth but won’t require such a crazy USB device. Apparently the Bluetooth technology only works with the Sixaxis and Sony doesn’t have the technology set up to allow third-parties to use it. That’s a little strange sounding.

Sony gave vague answers, using the word consider many, many times: “Many factors were in play regarding the decision to go USB wireless vs Bluetooth for GH3. However, we are considering Bluetooth for future consideration.” Everything else is classified! This is a minor issue, but speculation seems to surround the PS3’s strange de-sync with the Sixaxis. Surely that would be a horrifying situation while strumming your axe, so perhaps Red Octane decided not to risk that problem on the PS3. Who knows. Does anyone really care? Wireless is wireless, right?

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Filed under: Audio/Video, TV

If Regis Philbin and Kelly Ripa aren’t animated/scary enough for you already, just wait for Halloween. This year, the daytime duo is broadcasting the annual ‘Regis and Kelly Halloween Spectacular’ in three dimensions — a nod to ’50s horror flicks that used the gimmick to great affect.

Leading up to the 31st, five million pairs of those red and blue 3-D glasses are being given away at Walgreen’s drug stores around the country. You can also acquire a set via mail (S.A.S.E. required, of course).

Wondering how all of this is going to work? When you’re looking at a 3-D movie — or, in this case, an early-morning banter-fest — you’re actually seeing the same scene shot from two slightly different angles projected on top of each other. This is to simulate the way you see things in three dimensions in real life. Your eyes, which are are two inches apart, take two pictures of everything you look at from two slightly different angles and put them together in the brain. For 3-D movies or TV shows, the glasses use the different colors on each eye to filter out a single angle of the double-projection you’re looking at. One angle goes to one eye, the other goes to your other eye and they’re translated into a single 3-D image by your brain.

There’s no word yet on just what sort of stunts will be a part of the Halloween episode of ‘Live,’ but we expect a lot of zooming in and out and saying “Whoooaa!”

From GeekSugar

Related Links:

• Scented Movies Coming to a Theater Near You
• Worst Airbrushed Celebs of 2007 … So Far
• 3-D Printers Come Home

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Let me start of by saying that I’m a proponent of a lot of the development tools that Microsoft makes. Some might go so far as calling me a Microsoft fanboy in some cases. However, my feelings toward Microsoft technology is far from blind about it’s shortcomings. I’ve spent hours getting my CSS layouts to look right in IE, banged my head against the wall debugging cryptic .NET error messages and have accepted the fact that my Treo needs to be reset at least once a month.

Fortunately, Microsoft has been making some changes lately; not just in their technology, but also in their approach to technology. The longevity of IE6 was a testament to how slow Microsoft moves, but over the last year they’ve started talking about being more agile and getting rid of the 2 year delays and slow release schedules. Some of these new approaches have actually started to show between the MIX conference earlier this year and the reMIX Boston conference held earlier this week. Some of the changes were subtle, some were more significant, but each showed that Microsoft is responding more quickly to developer input.

The first big area that Microsoft changed between the 2 conferences is in how they talk to developers. At Mix, most of the keynotes were essentially just marketing pitches. One of the keynotes even caused most of the audience to get up and walk out when the marketing just became too much. At reMIX, there were some nice positive changes. The opening keynote had less talk about technology and more demos and examples. They even had Miguel di Icaza speak about the Linux version of Silverlight. They replaced the 2nd nightmare keynote from MIX with 2 great keynotes from Molly Holzschlag and Lou Carbone. I left the keynotes feeling inspired not like I was part of a marketing focus group.

The other change was in technology. Silverlight 1.0 was the big announcement for MIX, but fell short to many because it still relied heavily on javascript and had no controls for building forms. At reMIX, there was a lot more talk about Silverlight 1.1 (the .NET enabled follower for 1.0) and about the new control kit that Component One is developing. I was surprised to see that in the period between the 2 conferences, Microsoft not only listened to the feedback from MIX, but actually made some significant actions based on them.

It will be interesting to see if the forward progress continues to move at this pace. In the meantime, I’m working with the pre-releases of Silverlight 1.1 and Visual Studio 2008. If all goes well, I will post some tutorials on the new Silverlight stuff and a quick review/overview of Visual Studio 2008.

This article provided by sitepoint.com.

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The Microsoft Internet Explorer Weblog has announced that the latest update to Internet Explorer 7 will drop the Windows Genuine Advantage (WGA) validation step from the installer. Although the announcement stops just shy of saying it, the real effect of this move is to allow people running pirated versions of Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 to get the IE7 upgrade.

When Microsoft first released IE 7 one year ago next week, they made it a “forced” update for Windows XP, in the hopes that this would help get more people onto the new browser. For Microsoft, this would help get more people onto the more secure IE 7 platform in a hurry. For web developers, this would get more users onto the more standards-compliant IE 7 rendering engine.

How successful has this been? Well, let’s look at the browser stats for sitepoint.com. As you’d expect, there is a high percentage of Firefox users (48%) in the site’s audience, reflecting the number of web developers that use it as their primary browser. Nevertheless, Internet Explorer is still responsible for 43% of the visits to sitepoint.com in the past month.

It turns out, however, that only half of those visits are made by people running Internet Explorer 7. In other words, one in five visits to sitepoint.com is made by someone who uses Internet Explorer 6.0 as his or her primary browser.

What Microsoft seems to be betting on is that a good number of those IE 6 users have not been able to upgrade to IE 7 because they are running pirated copies of Windows (a factor, incidentally, which may also have driven many new users to Firefox).

Other reasons users may have chosen to forego the IE 7 update is that they are subject to corporate IT policies that are slow to adopt upgrades like these, or that they’re running pre-Service Pack 2 versions of Windows XP that don’t support IE 7 (SP2 itself will not install on pirated Windows XP systems).

And of course there are users who simply preferred IE 6’s user interface. As a nod in their direction, Microsoft has made the traditional menu bar visible by default with the latest IE 7 update, addressing one of the most common complaints of first-time IE 7 users.

Do you know a stubborn IE 6 user? Will this latest update get them over the line? In not, what do you think Microsoft would really have to do to get these users onto IE 7?

This article provided by sitepoint.com.

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Filed under: Cellphones, Portable Audio, Portable Video

Hot on the heels of the TIFF exploit released by a splitter group of iPhone/touch hackers, comes the announcement of a 1.1.1 jailbreak from the original front dubbed the iPhone Dev Team. The hack provides jailbreak, activation, and third party apps but only applies to the iPhone and is not meant for iPhones with modified basebands. Just remember, the risk is all yours if decide to rework the holy wares of the Cupertino Messiah. Thing is, if future Apple firmware updates don’t stop you, then the increasingly complex and confusing hacking scene most certainly will.

[Via iPhone Atlas]

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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!

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