Smaller than the Premier model, the Antec Veris Basic is a simple way to convert any PC into a media center.

PNY, in a weirdly-timed move, has released a special edition 2gb USB memory key with the movie “Ghostbusters” installed on it.

It is available now for £29.99. SCREECH… whoa, wait… What?

£29.99! That’s an extremely high premium over a normal 2gb USB drive. A quick jaunt around Argos shows that most are in the £14.99 range.

Our recommendation? Go the the local grocer and find a copy of Ghostbusters in a discount bin for £4.99.

Don’t get me wrong, Ghostbusters is a great film - one of this authors’ all-time favorites in fact… But there is no way I’d pay £15 for it, unless it was the definitive, remastered, collector’s edition hi-def Blu Ray version of it. As we understand it, this is a 480p, highly DRM’ed, highly compressed version that will play on PCs/laptops only (we’re thinking probably Windows Media) and must have the key inserted to play.

Scoring a solid “meh” from Icrontic, we’ll take the pass. Find another gatekeeper.

(Ed note: Ah, the cost of licensing. What am I going to do with this key now?)

I’ve had a project kicking around in the back of my mind for a few years now. It recently came up again and I decided to really move on this.

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NVIDIA skeptical of Larrabee

As Intel beavers away on bringing their discrete GPU to market, NVIDIA has chalked the Larrabee up to wishful thinking. John Mottram, chief architect for GT200-series core admitted that Intel is “not a stupid company” but remains skeptical of the performance of the final product.

“They’ve put a lot of people behind this, so clearly they believe it’s viable. But the products on our roadmap are competitive to this thing as they’ve painted it. And the reality is going to fall short of the optimistic way they’ve painted it. As [blogger and CPU architect] Peter Glaskowsky said, the ‘large’ Larrabee in 2010 will have roughly the same performance as a 2006 GPU from Nvidia or ATI.”

Mottram also went on to admit that NVIDIA had to work to catch up with the technology of ATi’s famed 4000-series Radeons. While NVIDIA has held the single-GPU speed crown until the recent release of the Radeon 4870 X2, the stunningly-high prices of the 200-series have kept them from gaining a foothold with consumers.

Blackberry Bold launched in Canada

Our friendly igloo-dwellers to the north are the first in the world to get their hands on the retail version of the long-awaited Blackberry Bold. Canadian mobile carrier Rogers released the beauty this weekend. Engadget has delivered a snazzy unboxing video while Americans await the September release from AT&T.

RAMBUS debuts terabyte-speed ICs

Last year RAMBUS announced that it would be pursuing an initiative to deliver terabyte-level bandwidth for memory. Dubbed the Terabyte Bandwidth Initiative (TBI), RAMBUS hoped it could develop new memory technologies that would crush the 100GBps bandwidths we can achieve today in idealized applications like GDDR.

RAMBUS appears to have done it with the announcement of 1TBps on-chip/off-chip bandwidths. While the products are obviously in testing phases, the company hopes to commercialize their technologies and bring crazy-fast speeds to the masses.

Recent speculation about a chip change in Apple’s product line has been rife since July 21, when CFO Peter Oppenheimer said to expect a dip in profits from a “product transition”. However, Apple has flatly denied a move away from Intel CPUs or chipsets, which was most peoples’ first guess.

Cringley thinks the news is related to a year-old story about Apple adding a H.264 chip that both decodes and encodes. Cringley explains:

The last I heard NHK was claiming the chip could compress a 1080p video and audio stream into four megabits per second, down from the 20 megabits normally required. If we assume Apple will apply the same kind of wink-wink, nudge-nudge transcoding to 1080p that they’ve already applied to 720p in the Apple TV, then it is within reason to expect they’ll claim to distribute 1080p over iTunes in two megabits per second.

The theory goes that Apple is moving to corner the HD market in its iTunes store a full year before other companies can develop a competing technology. This comes on the heels of not-so-recent news that Apple has taken the #1 spot in music distribution in the US, finally surpassing Wal-Mart. It’s possible they’re on track to do the same with HD video content.

Blu-ray? Isn’t that how they used to do HD back when we used optical media?

Chris Brogan gives us a list of 50 extremely useful web apps, summarizes their cost (many are free), categorizes them, and gives links. A handy little list.

Blu-ray only has three region codes. Here’s how to get discs from overseas.

I’m going to start by saying this: this is a fantastic time to be a photographer, particularly in the digital realm. Prices are plummeting, choices are skyrocketing, accessories are multiplying, sensors are growing, details are sharpening, knowledge is spreading, and it’s all happening at a breakneck pace that can make keeping up with things a little difficult at times. Whether you want to go small with a pocket point and shooter, mid-range with a so-called “prosumer” P&S, entry-level DSLR (digital single lens reflex), or full-fledged full-frame monstrosities, you’ve got choices heaped upon options all vying to take your money.

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In a very bizarre twist of fate, the new Qosmio G55 laptop harnesses the power of Sony’s lauded Cell CPU to handle multimedia tasks. Such tasks include signal upconversion (primarily 1080i upscaling), multimedia transcoding and gestural control.

Toshiba is billing the Cell chip has the “Quad Core HD” processor, which is a disarming marketing convention that conceals the irony of Toshiba’s newest laptop rolling onto the market containing a prized piece of Sony kit.

It is the Cell CPU which finds itself as the heart and soul of the Playstation 3, Sony’s first thrust in the HD-DVD/Blu-Ray duel which only recently came to a disappointing conclusion. In the wake of HD-DVD’s death, for which Toshiba was the inventor and financier, Toshiba rallied its troops and shifted its focus to 1080p upscaling.

The new plan of attack for Toshiba is to chip away at Blu-Ray’s rise to preeminence by providing a comparable experience at a fraction of the cost via 1080 upscaling. They have supposed that improvements in the technology can make it an extremely viable competitor, and win a new round in the war by delivering 1080p for 480p prices.

Therefore it comes as something of a surprise for an instrumental piece of the Playstation 3, which helped end HD, to be harnessed in Toshiba’s first steps to fight Sony again.

Pandora.org

Apple unveiled the Pandora Music application for the iPhone and iPod Touch during the unveiling of the iTunes App store today. Previously, Pandora had only been available on Sprint models. This marks the first move to an OS X-based mobile platform and a first for them working with AT&T.

Heres the run-down of what Pandora has to offer:

• The user can book mark songs or artists, or even purchase the current song from iTunes.
• Pandora is 100 percent free! Free, that is, for now. in the future they may add audio clips of advertisements.
• With the iPhone and iTouch you will be able to stream music over the 3G network or Wi-Fi. If you’re a first-gen owner then you can stream over Wi-Fi or the Edge network.
• The audio quality streams at 64Kbs stereo .mp3. The audio quality my be retooled once Pandora’s tech team has some time to adjust to iPhones new hardware.

If Pandora can manage to keep the advertisements out of the music and step up the quality of audio, this may turn out to be a must have application for the iPhone and iTouch.

Thanks to Scott “jokerz4fun” Osborne for the news!

Macrovision sponsored a recent Consumer Home Piracy market research survey (.pdf) in the US and UK, and guess what they discovered? People copy movies and TV shows! Big surprise…

Benchmark Reviews has broken down the survey’s info and made a nice story out of it with some interesting findings. Roughly 1/3 of computer users admitted to copying pre-recorded movies and TV shows at least once in a 6-month period. The usual suspects are guys aged 18-24.

The only real difference between US and UK pirates is the UK crew is prone to copying more TV shows. Fancy that!

High Dynamic Range Photography

You’ve likely seen them lately, if you visit photography sites of any kind – the so-called “HDR” photographs that have been making their way onto the net. Maybe you like them, maybe you think the effect is overused, or maybe you don’t know what HDR means. If you don’t like them, this article won’t be for you, but for the rest of us, I hope to explain a little more about these HDR shots and how to create them yourself.

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I have never seen anything like this: web version of Keynote (Apple’s slideshow app). About.

Remember the raid on Pirate Bay? Turns out the lead police officer was employed by Warner Bros. AT THE SAME TIME.

MediaDefender initiated a DoS attack against Revision3.