Just in case you haven’t heard, Icrontic is less than 24 hours away from being on a flight out to Las Vegas to cover the 2009 Consumer Electronics Show. After we slap jet lag in the face and party like it’s 1999, we’re gonna hit the strip with a heaping helping of interactive coverage. Here’s how to get involved with the voodoo that we do:

Twitter: Our crack team of G-Men (@Primesuspect, @Buddyjesus, and @Thracks) will be hashtagging all their content with #ICCES09 and #CES2009. Plug #ICCES09 into your favorite search service or client, and you’ll have your finger to the pulse of our coverage.

Icrontic.com: Hey, we’re a tech website. That means our tastiest pictures, briefings and inside scoops will hit our page the minute we can squirrel away for some quality time with a WiFi connection.

Qik: We’re taking AT&T’s 3G network to task when we hit the sands of Sin City! We’ve a BlackBerry Bold armed with Qik to bring you a live taste of the sights and sounds of CES.

AIM: Want a direct line to our team on the ground? Look no further than the IcronticCES account on AOL Instant Messenger. We can’t promise we’ll always be in range of WiFi, but we look forward to answering your questions and requests when we’re able.

There you have it, folks. Four neat ways to keep abreast of everything we’re about to bring you in the coming days. We land at 7 PM local time tomorrow, so stay tuned.

Twitter was a big part of our Macworld keynote address coverage today. Thousands of others were also on Twitter for the same thing; just watching the #macworld and #mwsf09 hashtags on Monitter showed 4+ Tweets per second regarding product announcements and demos. When I finally stopped Tweeting and stepped back to take a look at my friends timeline, I noticed that my Tweets dominated the entire page. This is not normal.

Typically the speed at which I Tweet is still a pittance compared to the rate at which 200+ followed Tweeple can fill the stream. Today, however, friend updates from hours prior are just now appearing in my friend timeline. Other users, like @Admore and @Crazeegeekchick, are also noticing the laggy friend timeline issue.

This leads me to wonder: Did Macworld break Twitter? Is it shoving out a massive cache of updates as quickly as it is able? Are buffered Tweets the solution to the fail whale?

Four announcements were dropped during this year’s somewhat drab keynote address. Check ‘em out:

17″ MacBook Pro

• A 700:1 contrast 1920×1200 LED display with a gloss finish ($50 for matte upgrade) and 60% improved NTSC gamut
• .98″ thick
• 6.6 pounds
• Integrated battery with a promised 7-8 hour battery life
• Intel Core 2 Duo 2.93 GHz Dual Core
• 6MB L2 Cache
• 8GB memory at 1066 MHz DDR3
• GeForce 9400M & 9600 GT
• 320GB HDD standard
• 256GB SSD alternative
• Three USB 2.0
• Firewire
• Mini displayport
• MSRP of $2799

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Live coverage of the 2009 Macworld event, Apple’s last, began at around noon. Keep your eyes here or on Twitter for time-stamped updates straight from the keynote address.

1:37 PM EST: That’s all, folks. Apple’s 2009 keynote address has come to a close. Are you excited by what you saw today? Disappointed? Were you expecting some additional gadgets like the iPhone Nano or the Big McHugelarge iTouch? Sound off in our comments!

We’ll keep the coverage going throughout the day as more details roll in from the show floor.

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Okay, seriously, is it something in the water in that corner of the world? First Australia’s communications minister wants to censor the net, and now anyone in New Zealand simply accused of file sharing is guilty without due process.

TorrentFreak writes about the Copyright Amendment Act’s “Section 92″ set to take effect at the end of February:

However draconian these proposals might appear, they are nothing compared to the proposed ‘Section 92′ of the Copyright Amendment Act in New Zealand. Scheduled for introduction at the end of February 2009, the act assumes that any individual simply accused of sharing copyright works on the Internet, is guilty. The punishment for ‘guilty’ is summary disconnection from the Internet. Understandably, this proposal hasn’t been well received by many outside of the entertainment industries. Indeed, RIANZ, New Zealand’s answer to the RIAA, has been a vocal supporter.

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On the Windows side of things, Google’s Picasa program has received favor for intelligently organizing everyone’s growing glut of digital images. As of today, the Apple-devout can also jump on the bandwagon with Google’s immediate release of Picasa for Mac.

PR noisenoisenoise after the jump. Aren’t you even a little bit interested?

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In just early November, AMD CEO Dirk Meyer announced that AMD had no intention to compete in the Netbook market. Instead, AMD and Meyer reasoned that it would be more lucrative to fill a slice of the market that lay between the ~$500 netbook and the ~$1500 ultra-portable. In that regard, AMD has just recently announced the AMD Athlon Neo processor. The new chip debuts as a part of the Yukon platform which includes an integrated ATI Radeon X1250 or an optional ATI Radeon X3410 discrete GPU.

The newest addition to the AMD family of processors is built on existing 65nm technology, though it’s uncertain as to what CPU the Neo has descended from. Though the new chip doesn’t sip battery life quite as daintily as the Atom, it offers horsepower in exchange; it can smoothly decode 1080p, run Windows Vista, and even take on some moderately intense gaming.

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Sure to raise the ire of Cupertino’s finest, the EFI-X Boot Module allows a PC to run Mac OS X on any hardware without the need for funny hacks.

[The EFI-X module], which connects directly to a PC motherboard’s USB connector, is a complete implementation of the Extensible Firmware Interface specification, which Apple uses as the boot environment for Intel Macs. EFI specifies an interface between operating system and firmware, and the EFI firmware, in turn, communicates with the underlying hardware.

Here, a generic Intel-based PC boots up from the EFI-X module; the EFI-X module then builds a full EFI environment in memory that can boot any operating system that speaks EFI, including Windows Vista x64, Linux, OpenSolaris, HP-UX… and Mac OS X. No hacks, no custom drivers — it just works.

Hardware hackery at its finest! This thing is wacky and awesome, and reminds me that genuinely cool gadgets are still being made.

President elect Barack Obama used the internet as a cornerstone of his campaign. With a tremendously successful presence on Twitter, he proved that it is possible to harness the internet to make a powerful case for change. While the account has been disappointingly dormant since November 5, it recently received an update indicative of a compromised account.

While the original message has since been deleted, the original still stands on Twitter’s search engine, Summize:

HO TEH NOEZ! Hacker terrorists got @BarackObama!

The update was deleted almost as quickly as it was posted; shortly thereafter, Obama’s Twitter page was replaced with a technical error notice displayed after the jump.

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The boys in the lab over at ZDNet gave Windows 7 Beta 1 (build 7000) a spin in 23 productivity tests and it walked away an easy winner.

The bottom line is that the more I use Windows 7 the more I like it. Sure, we’re looking at a beta build here and not the final code, so things could change between now and release (although realistically final code ends up being faster than beta code). Also I still have some nagging issues relating to the interface, and some concerns that the UAC changes will break applications and other code, especially installers, but overall Windows 7 beta 1 is a robust, solid bit of code.

Intel and Adobe have partnered to leverage the Intel Media Processor 3100 CE with an implementation of Flash for DTVs, STBs, and BD Players. PR noisenoisenoise behind the jump.

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Today’s download of the day, WindowsPager, brings four virtual desktops to Windows 2000/XP/Vista. The unassuming little program uses just 5MB of system memory and brings all the Linux nerds to the yard or, you know… Doesn’t.

The significant weight loss for Apple CEO Steve Jobs has made him the target of considerable speculation regarding his health throughout 2008. Now, for the first time, a public letter has been released to inform the public regarding his condition.

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A patent was published on December 25th that was filed by Microsoft, back in June 2007. As is usual with most issues relating to Microsoft, this publication has caused a lot of controversy, with one school of thought slating the patent as the most ridiculous, lame brained idea MS has come up with to date and can only spell the end for them. The other school hails them as visionaries and agree that although the concept will probably not work at this stage, Microsoft is looking far into the future to ensure their survival.

So what’s all the fuss about? The basic idea is to make a computer more affordable to people by cutting out the high end start-up costs associated with buying a new PC. The end user is supplied with a free or highly subsidized PC and pays for that portion of performance or time they actually use. Microsoft is quick to point out that the user may end up paying more for the PC than if they just bought it straight out, but argue that payments can be deferred and they get an extended use or life out of their PC.

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Japan’s largest advertising agency, Dentsu, is teaming up with Nintendo to offer a video distribution service on the Wii console.

Although the two companies haven’t yet worked out the specifics, it seems as if light entertainment and cartoons are under consideration. Some of the content will be available for free. Though this service will initially be available only in Japan early in the new year, it will significantly add to Nintendo’s revenue as it hits 34 million Wiis with a global launch late in 2009.