(Credit: CNET/Screenshot by Bonnie Cha)Another week comes to a close, and surely you missed some stuff. Here’s a sample of some of our favorite things from Crave from the last five days.
• Palm throws down with Apple. After last week’s iTunes update cut off the …
Filed under: Storage
OCZ’s Colossus SSD comes out of its shell originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 25 Jul 2009 07:26:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Ever get a sinking feeling in your stomach, like it’s November 2008 all over again? Yes, just like when Sony Pictures blocked its films from Netflix on Demand for a then-fresh New Xbox Experience update, so too are the early adopters of the new Xbox Live Dashboard update seeing select films excluded from the joys of its group sharing “Movie Parties” mode. Our BFFs at Joystiq have done some preliminary testing on the issue, and it seems the common link is that all guilty videos hail from the Starz Play catalog. In other words, you can all but forget about watching Pineapple Express synchronized with your Xbox 360-toting friends and family thousands of miles away — for now at least. With any luck, like the previous issue with Sony Pictures, this problem will eventually fix itself, and with any luck, it’ll be smooth sailing by the time the Xbox Live Dashboard update is officially pushed out to the masses on August 11th. Video proof of the misdemeanor can be seen after the break.
Continue reading Xbox 360’s new Netflix Movie Parties disabled for Starz Play titles?
Filed under: Gaming, Home Entertainment
Xbox 360’s new Netflix Movie Parties disabled for Starz Play titles? originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 25 Jul 2009 04:54:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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[Via Engadget Spanish]
Continue reading ASUS O!Play HDP-R1 media player gets the hands-on treatment
Filed under: Home Entertainment
ASUS O!Play HDP-R1 media player gets the hands-on treatment originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 25 Jul 2009 02:27:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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This article was written on August 07, 2007 by CyberNet.
Ever since a leaked copy of AOL’s Active Virus Shield software for Vista hit the web, I had been waiting for AOL’s official announcement. Well, now I know why AOL never released a new Vista-compatible version of their Kaspersky-powered antivirus software…they were instead preparing for the switch to McAfee!
The screenshot above was taken from the current Active Virus Shield website which kindly explains that Active Virus Shield is no longer available, and has instead been replaced with a special McAfee suite. It does include virus protection, spyware protection, and a firewall, but come on…it’s McAfee! They are just as bad as Norton when it comes to dragging down the performance of your computer. AOL does try to make it sound great by saying:
Buy this protection yourself, and you could spend as much as $39.99, but with an aol.com email address, you can receive this comprehensive set of safety tools free.
Yep, they even require you to get an AOL.com email address in order to use the software. Where’s the humanity? 
Kaspersky, and therefore Active Virus Shield, always ranked highly on the antivirus tests which made the now deceased app even more appealing. It didn’t do quite as good on the retrospective/heuristic testing, but I didn’t expect a free program to be the best in every area. This is one freeware program that I will truly miss.
I haven’t tried the new one myself because, well, I’m not exactly McAfee’s #1 fan. I’ve known people who had paid for their software before, and they always end up complaining a month or two down the road that their computer is horrendously slow. I always give my condolences to them for having purchased the software, and immediately install Avast (or sometimes AVG). I’ve yet to see someone complain that their computer is extremely slow after doing that.
So if you’re up for it, you can get the new AOL McAfee Security Center at no monetary cost, but don’t be surprised if you have to forfeit a good chunk of your system’s resources. Current Active Virus Shield users (those that have it downloaded and activated with a key they received) can continue to use the program, but future sign-ups are no longer allowed.
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MSI’s seductive X-Slim lineup first dropped jaws back at CeBIT, and it’s been tempting PC addicts ever since hitting the market a few months back. Many have argued that the X-Slim family looks just a bit too much like that other ultraslim lappie over there, but we’d say these are distinct enough to walk their own path. Catering to a wide range of potential customers, MSI has actually issued quite a few of these machines, from the X320 to the X340 to the X600. If you’ve been fortunate enough to pick one of these up for yourself, how has the user experience been? Is it as much a looker in person as you thought it’d be? Are you satisfied with performance? Anything missing for the price? Go on and get heard, won’t you?
Filed under: Laptops
How would you change MSI’s X-Slim ultraportable line? originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 25 Jul 2009 00:23:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
In September, an adaptation of Robert Venditti’s Top Shelf graphic novel The Surrogates will hit the big screens starring Bruce Willis and Ving Rhames. The book is a sci-fi thriller about future technologies. Venditti explains it thusly, “The basic idea is a that a Surrogate is a representation of yourself that you send out into the world. You do it virtually, so you experience everything it does. You’re controlling all of its movements and getting all of its sensory data in real time.”
The idea was born out of an examination of the social implications of sites social networking and online gaming. “That started out with me looking at online culture,” explains Venditti. “People have crazy personas of themselves through gaming and chatting. At some point you have to surrender that persona to go to work or whatever. My idea was to take it out of the machine and put it into the world.”
The technologies in The Surrogates are entirely a figment of Venditti’s imagination, of course, but since writing the book seven years ago, something odd has started happening–the science fiction of The Surrogates is beginning to become a reality. “It was something I made up,” Venditti tells me, “but since writing that in 2002, I’ve heard news stories like one about a professor who lives in Japan, but he doesn’t want to have to commute to work because the traffic is really bad, so he actually has an android version of himself in the classroom, so he teaches class by remotely linking from home.”
Smells like a sequel to me.
It wouldn’t be a proper PCMag interview with out the obligatory “what tech are you packing?” question. Seriously, it’s written into our contracts. Seated across from me on a couch in Adam Savage’s San Diego hotel suite, I pose the question to him and his cohort Jamie Hyneman, having gotten it on good faith that one MythBuster is a Mac and the other rocks the Windows.
“Which one would you guess?” asks Hyneman.
“Well,” I answer, eyeballing Hyneman’s button-down/beret combo and Savage’s Donnie Darko t-shirt, “if the commercials are any indication…”
“Jamie’s Hodgeman and I’m Justin Long,” laughs Savage. “Absolutely. I’ve had PowerBooks and MacBooks since 1993. I’m a dedicated Mac users. I’ve got an article coming out in Mac Life next month.”
“The primary need that I have for the PC version is CADD and other kinds of programs, explains Hyneman. “Both platforms bug me, though…I’m partial more to a Linux-based platform myself.”
“They’re still both Model-A Fords,” adds Savage.
Looking to enjoy all those fancy augmented reality apps on your iPhone, like for finding nearby stores or subway stops? Apparently what’s standing in your way from enjoying a life more akin to “gargoyles” from Snow Crash is Apple’s next update to its touchscreen devices, OS 3.1, and according to Nearest Tube developer Acrossair, that’ll be arriving sometime in September. Something we heard whispered at the time of the beta 2 release. We wouldn’t be surprised to see that release window fluctuate, but if that’s our estimate, there’s still plenty of time for someone to prep an AR zombie shooter.
[Thanks, Peter S]
Filed under: Cellphones
iPhone’s augmented reality apps coming with September OS 3.1 launch? originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 24 Jul 2009 21:32:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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“It’s like an omelet, everyone finds their own way to do it,” Adam Savage answers. It’s not quite the response I was expecting. I was thinking something more along the lines of ‘study hard and stay in school,’ when asking the MythBusters star how one goes about breaking into the special effects game.
Judging from Savage and co-host Jamie Hyneman’s extremely different resumes, however, the whole egg analogy seems spot on. “I wanted to work in special effects since I was 11 and Star Wars came out,” Savage tells me, seated across from me in his San Diego hotel suite. “I tried in several different ways in several different situations where the pay was really crappy and people were real jerks, and ended up forgetting about it until Jamie called me and working with people I liked, doing things that I enjoyed changed it.”
Jamie’s resume, on the other hand, reads like a plot summary of Factotum, having worked as a diving instructor in the Caribbean, lived on a farm, been employed as a cook, done construction, and even owning a pet store.
“In my case it I’ve done a lot of different things and at one point I sat down to decide what it was that I actually wanted,” he tells me. “By then I realized that it was actually possible to earn a living doing something that was fun. I learned that routines are not fun. I started looking around, and there aren’t that many vocations that meet that criteria. Special effects was one. I started methodically getting my foot in the door by cleaning the shop. I quickly rose to the top and had my own shop.”
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