Microsoft's Xbox 360 may call itself the only console to stream Netflix, but all that could be changing -- and soon. As Netflix continues to pull in new subscribers (and cash flow) like it's no big deal, the company is apparently looking to spread its wings even further by integrating its wildly popular Watch Instantly feature into "a device already owned by a large number of consumers." Naturally, the most fitting candidates for that would be Sony's PlayStation 3 or Nintendo's Wii, though the company has yet to come forward with anything concrete....Read More »

Sheesh. Just days after Altec Lansing shocked the gaming world with a dedicated stage monitor for Guitar Hero, Rock Band or any other gaming title you'd care to pump through a mini-wedge, Polk Audio has stepped in to do the same. As we witness the beginning of a curious, um, beginning, the HitMaster has stepped things up for anyone else thinking of joining the fray by packing 60 watts of RMS power, a pair of 2.2- x 5.5-inch horns, twin 1-inch tweeters and a booming 6.5-inch subwoofer. The whole cabinet weighs some 13 pounds, and aside from...Read More »

The on-again / off-again love affair between Apple and ZFS seems to be all but over, with a brief but potent message on the Mac OS Forge project site stating the following: "The ZFS project has been discontinued. The mailing list and repository will also be removed shortly." If you'll recall, the implementation of the ZFS file system within Snow Leopard server was so close to happening that Apple actually published it as a feature of the forthcoming OS back in June of 2008. Now, however, all hope has presumably been lost. We'd bother explaining...Read More »

Researchers in Italy and Sweden have spent the last ten years developing what they call the "Smart Hand," a prosthetic hand which enables feeling in its fingertips. The hand -- which was recently wired up to a test patient through a surgical procedure -- has four motors and forty sensors which are linked directly to the brain. In the surgery, the nerve endings of the patient were linked up to receptors in the hand, which allows for feeling in the fingertips of the hand, even though the hand is not really a part of his...Read More »

This one's for the not-so-little guy IBM has trotted out a small stable of new midsize business products aimed at security, compliance, maintenance, and support for IT in organizations with between 100 and 1,000 employees. Big Blue also launched a new mid-tier disk system along with the bunch.…The power of collaboration within unified communications Full published article at: Read More »

Hey, you -- yeah you, the BlackBerry Storm owner over there. You listening? Good. That mythical software update we heard about just last week is obviously the real deal, and a screen grab from Verizon's internal systems has shown up to prove it. We're told that it should go live tomorrow (that's October 25th for those in strange, potentially illegitimate time zones) at 6PM. On the whole, it'll make your Storm act a lot more like the forthcoming Storm2, but specifically you can expect a "faster, more accurate and more natural text input experience, word completion, a...Read More »

Samsung's made some lofty boasts regarding its LTE support before, and here we go with some official documentation of US-bound products care of the FCC. The agency's database lists device A3LSLCU100 (catchy name, eh?) as a pre-production LTE USB modem from the company -- and that's about it. As for the usual fun of looking at over-saturated internal / external photos, good ol' Sammy's got a window of 180 days of confidentiality that started September 24th, so by our count, we've got potentially quite a while before we see something. The best we get now is this...Read More »

We've been led to believe in the past that there'd be a GSM version of Motorola's mighty Sholes for markets outside the US, but this particular version that passed the FCC this week -- ID IHDP56KC5, if you must know -- has us particularly interested. Why? Well, it's packing WCDMA on the 850 and 1900MHz bands, which means it'd work on AT&T, Rogers, and HSPA newcomers Bell and Telus. We've been led to believe, though, that this particular device is destined for Latin America where 850 / 1900 is also used in favor of the 2100MHz spectrum...Read More »

Mountain View wants your exabyte Google’s massively global infrastructure now employs a proprietary system that automatically moves and replicates loads between its mega data centers when traffic and hardware issues arise.… Full published article at: Read More »

In the summer, the Xbox 360 guys huddled us into a London hotel to announce that it had struck up a deal with a major content provider. Having heard rumours for over a year, we were fully expecting the pairing would be with BT Vision. For whatever reason, though, this fledgling partnership never got off the ground, leaving Sky free to jump in. What was announced was that a version of the Sky Player video on demand service was to be injected into the Xbox 360’s Live dashboard, making a selection of sports, movies and entertainment programmes available to anyone...Read More »