Cranking out news for the geeks, music buffs and gossip junkies, my way. -Greg

This is awesome, a great step in high tech! Now if they could just make wrist watch model! -Greg

Tue Aug 4, 2009 2:54PM EDT

What’s the fun in squinting at snapshots on a two-inch LCD? Instead, try projecting your latest stills and video clips onto the nearest wall, courtesy of Nikon’s latest (but pricey) compact camera.

Announced today and set for release in September for a hefty $429, the 12.1-megapixel Coolpix S1000pj looks like your typical compact digicam, complete with a 28mm wide-angle lens, flash, and a 2.7-inch LCD in back.

But the Nikon has a cool trick up its sleeves: a tiny, built-in projector capable of throwing a 40-inch image onto any nearby surface, good for showing off individual snapshots, slideshows, or even clips you’ve captured with the S1000pj’s video recorder.

Expect VGA resolution from the Coolpix’s pico projector, according to Nikon, as well as an hour of battery life. Also in the box: a projector stand, as well as a remote that controls the projector or acts as a shutter release.

Nikon also promises that the S1000pj won’t shirk its usual imaging duties, packing in 5x optical/4x digital zoom, image stabilization, “face-priority” auto focus, and a “best shot selector” mode that takes a burst of shots and picks the one with the sharpest focus.

Overall? Pretty cool, despite the stiff price tag. Indeed, I hope we see a lot more of these itty, bitty projectors in cameras and cell phones in the future—and as pico projectors become more and more common (as I hope they do), we can expect prices to fall accordingly.

There was not a single doubt in my mind, that when The Pirate Bay announced it would be selling out and going legit, that a clone, if not several, would take its place in minutes. Even better Btarena.net has already stepped up and begun rebuilding The Pirate Bay. They took one of the greatest torrents around, an entire db copy of The Pirate Bay, and put it together. Now, they still have a few bugs, like the search engine, to work out, but I’m happy to say, “I’m HAPPY”. When torrentspy.com went to the dumps back in the day in took a little while before anything came close to it’s size and “quality?” should I say, was touched. Then came The Pirate Bay, which is obviously the best so far. Now it seems they became large enough to sell themselves and make a buck, good for them. Funny thing is once its bought and becomes “legit” its going to crash and burn. HAHA, do you really think that its going to continue getting hit as much as it does now when you have to pay? Yeah, right, I’m sure I won’t be alone when I say good bye to the Bay after telling me I have to pay and head on over to the quickest replacement. Currently in the lead would be, Btarena.net. Thanks guys! -Greg

By Kevin Parrish, published on August 20, 2009 at 7:31 PM
Source: Tom’s Guide US

A Pirate Bay clone website launched using the torrented Pirate Bay database.

Recently we reported that a special torrent was available that contained a copy of the entire Pirate Bay database, including most of the torrents that were available on the site. According to Mashable, the inevitable finally happened, as someone has launched a fully functional clone of The Pirate Bay right here using the downloaded database.

While the site reveals that the search function doesn’t work for the moment, it claims to index 873,671 torrents. Previous Pirate Bay visitors will also notice that the overall appearance isn’t a spitting image of the original classic, and many of the functions are still missing. But torrent seekers can still browse and download as if nothing ever happened. New torrents will be tracked via tracker.btarena.org.

But as Mashable points out, while one torrent-tracking website can be knocked out of business, another will come along and take its place. Perhaps government officials and copyright advocates will see that piracy of this nature will not end unless the entire Internet is knocked offline.

Now I remember the first time I heard about a use for the “whitespaces” when the annoucement of end analog TV as we know it came about. The use was geared more towards using it for wireless internet service providers. This was followed by who should get it, who should decide who gets to use it, what regulations should be put in place, so on and so on. So, leave it to Microsoft to decide to take matters in their own hands and create another similar use. I would have to say though getting miles of range out of my wireless router, easily creating a strong and solid Wi-Fi hotspot for my home, entire neighborhood and surrounding neighborhoods?  Sounds great to me, and with the support of DOCSIS 3.0, which brings the possibilty of  over 150 Mbit/s to my home, a good firewall with IP throttling, I could become a small townships ISP  <insert big evil grin here>

You can browse for miles and miles and miles.

While most of us are still tinkering with our home networks, perhaps slowly upgrading our machines and equipment to 802.11n draft hardware, researchers at Microsoft and HarvardUniversity are exploring a new type of Wi-Fi thinking.

Instead of operating at the same (or near) frequency range of existing Wi-Fi signals, Microsoft has been testing the transmission of signals over “whitespaces,” which is part of the radio spectrum that was formerly used by analog television stations.

Microsoft has published a paper that explains networking over UHF white spaces and how it differs from conventional Wi-Fi in spatial variation, temporal variation, and fragmentation of the UHF spectrum.

Dubbed “WhiteFi,” the researchers explain that the method “incorporates a new adaptive spectrum assignment algorithm to handle spectrum variation and fragmentation, and proposes a low overhead protocol to handle temporal variation.

Using a technique called SIFT, which the researchers say “reduces the time to detect transmissions in variable channel width systems by analyzing raw signals in the time domain.”

Basically, should this technology prove viable, we could be measuring Wi-Fi signal range in miles rather than in feet. You can read the paper here (PDF) or more technical summary of it at Dailywireless.

Source : Tom’s Hardware US

Thanks Bill Gates, for sticking it to your US consumers. Your doing so well giving the people more reasons to hate you and Microsoft.  So now the question is, do I get it from the UK, or do I just wait for the glorious “coders” of the world to put up a “patched” version of 7 on a torrent somewhere.. -Greg

Windows 7 going on the cheap in the United Kingdom.

Zoom

Those living in the UK are used to looking at the prices of goods around the rest of the world before letting out a sigh and accepting that things just cost more in Great Britain. But it seems that those very same consumers will be getting a break with Windows 7 – which at present time will be selling for nearly half of what U.S. consumers pay.

CNet spotted the online prices for Windows 7 preorders, which run £65 for the full version of Windows 7 Home Premium. Converted to US$107, which compares favourably to the US$200. In fact, the £65 is even below the U.S. cost of the upgrade, which will run for US$120. Check it out on Amazon.co.uk.

Now that there doesn’t look to be a separate SKU for a browserless version of Windows 7, a product key could be a product key wherever it’s activated. Could there be an opportunity for arbitrage?

Source : Tom’s Hardware US