Hardware Geeks

A New York Woman was robbed of her Mac, and the two idiots that robbed her well weren’t that bright.

The woman’s friend saw her online, notified the women and the women used a second computer and the “Back to My Mac” program to establish a remote connection with her Mac, snap a picture of the thief using the built in camera, and sent it a long to the police.

The police used the photo to arrest 23 year old Edmon Shahikian and 20-year-old Ian Frias. They also recovered $5,000 in stolen electronics. 

Atari’s Alone in the Dark will hit Stores on June 24th, but is already available for pre-order over at GameStop. (You’ll get a free T-Shirt if you Pre-Order). The game will be available for the PS2, Xbox 360, and NIntendo Wii. There will be a Playstation 3 version but the release date for that console hasn’t been announced yet.

From some trailers I have seen the game looks to be pretty intense, and hopefully as fun as GTA. The game kind of reminds me of Resident Evil, it has that scary feel to it. I can’t wait to get my copy!

I’m sure I’m in the majority when I say that I want as few applications on my system as possible, and periodically delete those which I believe have similar functionality to other applications on my computer.

I recently came across a blog post, where someone argued their case about why Quicksilver (QS) is not a useful app. He wrote of Quicksilver (I will refer to this as QS from now on) as purely an application launcher, and considered it redundant since Tiger’s introduction of Spotlight. Here I will ignore this basic launcher feature, and write about other uses of QS, which you may or may not have known about.

A Los Angeles US District Judge has ordered TorentSpy to pay $100 Million for infringing copyrights of thousands of films and TV Shows, and also issued a permanent injunction against the site which shut down back in March.

MPAA CEO Dan Glickman told News.com “The demise of TorrentSpy is a clear victory for the studios and demonstrates that such pirate sites will not be allowed to continue to operate without facing relentless litigation by copyright holders.”

The judge ordered TorrentSpy to pay $30,000 per copyright infringement--for 3,699 films and shows. That works out to be worth $110,970,000.

If you like to download MP3 from various sharing services watch out, McAfee claims that over 360,000 of it’s users that report back to them have downloaded mp3 files in the past 48 hours that contain some form of malware.

In a Blog Posting Yesterday, McAfees Craig Schmugar said, “Detection of a trojan named Downloader-UA.h was added to the McAfee DAT files several days ago.  Since that time more than 360,000 McAfee VirusScan Online users have reported detections, a whopping 32% of those reporting in the past 24 hours alone.”

For Western gamers, when somebody says “MMORPG,” some of the titles that are most likely to spring to mind include Blizzard’s World of Warcraft, NCSoft’s City of Heroes or Square-Enix’s Final Fantasy XI.  What about on the other side of the world, though?  A vast number of Eastern MMORPGs have been pulling in a steady paycheck from a variety of customers, particularly throughout China and Korea.  These games can sport a radically different underlying philosophy from their Western counterparts, and thanks to an article on Danwei, we are allowed a glimpse of what an MMORPG can become when it sanctions and even engages in the very practices that Western MMORPGs are trying very hard to stamp out. It’s a bit of a long read and the English isn’t tip-top, but it’s very interesting and easy to skim, so I recommend you take a few minutes to peruse it.  (Note: RMB refers to the national Chinese currency, not to be confused with RMT, which stands for Real-Money Trading in MMORPGs)

Nine Inch Nails has released a new album online absolutely free.

as a thank you to our fans for your continued support, we are giving away the new nine inch nails album one hundred percent free, exclusively

The album titled “The Slip” is available in various formats all DRM free! You can get your copy of the album here: http://dl.nin.com/theslip/signup

It seems that Microsoft has requested Pegatron Technology to manufacture Blu-ray players for the Xbox 360. This, despite the fact that Microsoft on numerous occasions has downplayed such a possibility. This report comes from Economic Daily News, a Taiwanese newspaper. It goes onto say that Blu-ray enabled console will ship before years end. Of course this isn’t the first time we have heard such a rumor so take it with a grain of salt. Personally I would still consider this a rumor. Wasn’t it Microsoft that said the 360 is about giving the consumer a choice? Why would they suddenly decide to further split their user base by providing yet another SKU. Regardless, it will be interesting to see what happens in the coming months.

Economic Daily News via Kotaku

As you should already know, we are giving away the HP Pavilion HDX (Dragon) Entertainment Notebook PC, and the system we are giving away is the same one we are reviewing.

So we decided to make an unboxing video of this monster to share with you!