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Today, NVIDIA officially announced the GeForce GTX 275 mid-range video card, the latest addition to its performance GPU lineup. With the goal of being the best bang for your buck graphics card on the market, the GTX 275 offers a combination of performance, physics, and GPU computing power for budget conscious consumers. Interested? Check out a few highlights:

* 633 MHz GPU Clock
* 1404 MHz Shader Clock
* 1134 MHz Memory Clock
* 240 Processor Cores
* 80 Texture Processing Units
* 448-bit Memory Interface
* 896 MB GDDR3 memory

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Nokia has some seriously amazing people making their commercials these days; remember the epic “Fourth Screen” commercial? Recently, I found a commercial that’s been airing for the past few months for the N96, and they’re using old footage of martial arts icon Bruce Lee. During the ad, Lee is is playing ping pong with nunchucks (in addition to flashing his image on the phone itself).

Do they want the N96 to seem as legendary, or astonishingly capable as Lee was? Maybe. Is it an awe-inspiring video? Certainly.

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When the credit crunch and the financial turmoil first hit Wall Street, the tech sector remained blissfully untouched by the market weakness. However, as the economy has sunk into a recession and consumer spending slowed, the tech sector has at last been dragged into the muck and the mire.

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Palit releases the first and the only custom designed GeForce® GTX285 1GB and 2GB

Palit Microsystems, leading graphics card manufacturer, announces the first own design GeForce® GTX285 1GB and 2GB. Armed with NVIDIA PhysX® and NVIDIA CUDA® technology, the GeForce® GTX285 series are ready to enable a total new class of physical gaming interaction!

Palit GTX 285 2GB is the first and the only one graphics card available in the market. The Palit GeForce® GTX285 1GB and 2GB feature a core speed of 648MHz and 2.5GHz on its GDDR3 memory with a 512bit interface. It supports the latest NVIDIA PhysX® technology providing real-time physics simulations in leading edge PC and console games. With up to 50% more performance than prior generation GPUs, GeForce® GTX 285’s GPUs tear through complex DirectX® 10 environments and cinematic effects at blazing frame rates in extreme HD resolution!

Palit innovative dual fan cooling system for the GTX 285 series comes with two PWM fans and four heat-pipes to provide high performance and trustworthy cooling solution. Conceived for two GPUs, the two PWM fans are able to provide sufficient air flow to cool GPU on the graphics quietly. The PWM fan created for both fans can adjust the fan speed depending on the GPU’s temperature. Palit’s GeForce® GTX285 also supports NVIDIA CUDA® technology, unlocking the power of the GPU’s processing cores to accelerate the most demanding system tasks (such as video transcoding) to deliver up to 20x the performance over traditional CPUs.

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This bad boy isn’t your daddy’s USB porn drive (but maybe it should be). It’s the real deal for keeping your data safe and secure.

The IronKey USB flash drive is one of the most secure devices I’ve ever worked with, but simultaneously tries to be–and achieves being–among the simplest to interact with in achieving that security. The product, from the eponymous company IronKey, comes in capacities from 1 GB to 8 GB that encrypts data five ways to Sunday while achieving government certification as tamper evident. A secured, anonymized version of Firefox is also onboard. Prices start at $79 including a one-year subscription for anonymous browsing; an 8 GB drive is $299…

For starters, there’s hardware AES encryption on board the sleek metal drive: there’s no software to install on a host computer, and all encryption happens within the drive. This dramatically improves the security profile. Encryption keys are stored only on the drive, and only unlocked when a password you create at the time you initialize the drive is entered. (IronKey lets you back that password up on their secure Web servers with additional layers of authentication in case you forget it; accessing your account requires a digital certificate stored on the IronKey.)

Enter the password incorrectly 10 times, and the hardware fries itself. Likewise, if an IronKey is physically tampered with in an attempt to access the on-board flash memory directly, the hardware wipes memory as well. Their tamper-resistance has led to FIPS 140-2 Level 2 validation by the U.S. and Canadian governments–physical tampering must be evident–and they’re working on Level 3, which requires countermeasures to attempts to disassemble the hardware…

A password manager that’s integrated into Firefox takes the oompf out of keylogging software by using a workaround to enter your Web data, making it possible to use a cafe or Kinko’s PC without worrying about having your details snarfed. IronKey’s version of Firefox also stores no temporary files on the host computer, and uses a secure proxy to tunnel browsing to its anonymized endpoints.

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2 please!

Anyone surprised about this at all? Measure, counter-measure, new measure, new counter-measure, etc,. There is a lot of money spent in what may never be obtainable and plenty of nuisance for consumers who simply want to back up their movies. In the 80s I used to purchase a new album, purchase a blank tape, play the album once and back it to tape then only play the tape until it wore out, broke, got lost, or… got melted on (or to) the car’s dashboard. Then a second playing of the pristine condition album was performed to make another backup for use while the original was safely tucked away.

If you are a parent of a child or teen that you have graciously allowed to have a DVD player in their room you may wish to allow said child or teen to play one of your well cared-for DVDs only to see it returned in a condition much reminiscent of something that was dragged down a dusty rocky road in the old West. A backup would come in handy in this situation. Your DVD player could one day break down and spin your DVD in a strange way that makes it unplayable. The door could accidentally close on your DVD. Of course those that make money on you buying the DVD in the first place want you to buy the same movie over and over and over.

/rant over : )

The press release basically had Slysoft thumbing its nose at Richard Doherty of the Envisioneering Group, who wrote in July 2007 that: “BD+, unlike AACS which suffered a partial hack last year, won’t likely be breached for 10 years.”

Couldn’t the BD+ protection scheme be tightened up with new encryption keys? That might be so, but van Heuen is not worried. He told Ars that “cracking updates will take significantly less time than the basic work we did the last 3 months (which was figuring out how BD+ works, since it is not documented in public).”

If you were holding back on buying Blue-ray titles due to worries that you wouldn’t be able to make your own backups, I suppose your concerns are no longer valid.

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There are more stories every other day about this HD DVD war and “who will win?” I loved 300 but… I knew who was winning and who wasn’t. Reality has to settle in at some point as this stand is nowhere near as sexy or meaningful. OK. OK. I know the Giants recently defied great odds and beat the Patriots (I picked them to win by 3 btw : ) ) but this format “war” is ridiculous at this point, IMHO. Today, there are a couple more giants jumping to Blu-ray over HD-DVD: Best Buy and Netflix. The momentum has been growing for a while now and looks to be too fast to stop.

Best Buy, the largest U.S. consumer electronics chain, said on Monday it will recommend that consumers choose Sony Corp’s Blu-ray high-definition video format.

The decision gives Sony yet another victory in the battle with Toshiba Corp’s HD DVD to be the high-definition DVD format of choice.

Earlier on Monday, online video rental company Netflix Inc (NFLX.O: Quote, Profile, Research) said it would exclusively stock Blu-ray DVDs after some of the world’s biggest movie studios decided in favor of that format.

Best Buy said it believes consumers will benefit from the choice of one HD DVD format.

“Because we believe that Blu-ray is fast emerging as that single format, we have decided to focus on Blu-ray products,” Brian Dunn, Best Buy’s president and chief operating officer, said in a statement.

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Flash drives, or SSD drives, might be the wave of the future, but they’re still much to expensive to really be practical in today’s computers. Even though they save energy and are faster than their platter-based cousins, we just aren’t ready for the switch. They don’t have big enough capacities and their pricetags are astronomical.

Seagate knows that total acceptance of flash-based drives is still a few years off, but that isn’t stopping them from using the tech to improve their current hard drives. Their new hybrid drives are large platter hard drives that have an additional 256MB of flash memory built-in. This helps the computer boot up 25% faster and cut the power consumption of the drives by 50%. Pretty awesome, right? Well, in theory, yes. The problem is, Microsoft’s Vista doesn’t quite know how to handle the new drives despite Microsoft’s claims to the contrary. Until an update gets Vista’s act together, these drives can’t fulfill their true potential. Hopefully everything will be worked out soon and we can look forward to using these drives in the near future.

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