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Filed under: Household

LEDSAUR Tyrannosaurus Rex desk lamp makes chewing through paperwork less monotonous originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 31 Jul 2009 18:55:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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A pair of computer security researchers have discovered a BIOS vulnerability caused by the Computrace Laptop Lojack software, serving as a rootkit to potentially let malware nest and thrive in an estimated 60% of newish laptops.

The research team of Alfredo Ortega and Anibal Sacco say that when malware infects a system BIOS, it is able to survive multiple attempts to reflash the core software, and extremely difficult to get rid of. Even worse, because Lojack is white listed by virus and malware scanners, any attacks exploiting this vulnerability on a computer will largely go undetected. And for Laptop Lojack to be effective, it must operate like a stealthy rootkit. Unfortunately, it’s installed in the majority of new notebooks from HP, Asus, Dell, Lenovo and Toshiba.

Moral of the story: find a new way to get your stolen laptop back. [ZDnet via Slashdot]

Not surprisingly Melissa Catherine Smith-Means of Alabama (oh…Alabama) was arrested a few months ago for this incident in a Verizon store. Who knew someone would have a camera in a cellphone store?

After being arrested she told the police “My young ‘un loves being dragged around on a leash. It’s how I was brought up.” She was also wearing this shirt. Ok, maybe this last part didn’t happen—but you can picture it can’t you? [LiveLeak via TechEBlog via Gadget Review]

We understand that Sony has a long way to go in making up the losses it’s incurred by selling the PS3 at a loss — even if it was commanding the highest price in the industry the whole while — but if this latest word on manufacturing costs is correct, we’d say Sony has some room to get the console under that dastardly $400 mark. During an overseas call with investors over Sony’s Q1 financials, Nobuyuki Oneda, Sony’s CFO and Executive VP, apparently stated that manufacturing costs for the PS3 are down 70 percent, which is right “on schedule.” While there’s no official cost published by Sony, those in the know estimate the console originally cost around $800 to produce, and should be down to roughly $240 at this point. Maybe a holiday price cut is in the cards? Boy, we sure hope so. Either that, or he’s already spouting off the PS3 Slim’s production cost, which is a win for everybody.

[Via Joystiq]

Filed under: Gaming

PS3 manufacturing costs down 70 percent? Strange, it doesn’t feel that way originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 31 Jul 2009 18:08:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Got a list of things you think need fixin’ on our sites? Well so do we, actually! And we’re looking for a little help with it. Gawker Media is currently seeking a QA Analyst to join our Tech team. Job responsibilities include monitoring site performance, managing bug reporting and resolution, and conducting both manual and automated site testing.

Do those activities sound oddly satisfying to you? If so, please email techjobs@gawker.com with a brief description of yourself and your relevant work experience. This job is located in New York City.

The Eee keyboard, as cool as it is, sure is taking its time, you know, coming out. One especially anxious Russian modder got bored of waiting around, so he just broke down an Eee PC 900 and made his own.

It’s a meticulous, charming mod, complete with woodwork, which is why we can forgive some of the larger omissions, like its lack of a touch display—the most outwardly distinctive feature of the original—and its lone, primitive VGA video output. What is does have is a 900MHz Intel Mobile Celeron processor, a 20GB SSD, 1GB of RAM and Wi-Fi.

It doesn’t look like he kept the battery, which would have been a nice touch, but hey! PC in a keyboard! [Eee-pc.ru via Liliputing]

This week in the App Store it may as well’ve been 1991: We’ve got Lollapalooza! Monkey Island! Novel self-help strategies! Glittery-clothed strippers! And last but not nearly least, everyone’s favorite defunct supermarket tabloid! The Golden Age of culture, people.

Weekly World News: Now is neither the time nor place to get into my deep appreciation of the WWN, and I feel their blurb says enough:

For over 30 years, the Weekly World News has been the World’s ONLY Reliable News Source. The Weekly World News bares the TRUTH about UFOs, aliens, monsters, Elvis’ whereabouts, cryptids, popular celebrities, and the mutant freaks that live among us.

Considering you can get the entire archives of the paper for free on Google Books, it seems dumb that this $1 app only gives you access to covers, though the add-your-own-face feature is pretty neat. Granted, this could have been a content ratings thing, because half of the dead magazine’s columnists were basically insane, or sexist, or some other terrible kind of “ist.” It’s part of the charm! [via Gawker]

Pocket Dancer: A 3D lady will dance a sad little dance while you spin her around with your finger and occasionally change the floor lighting. Fact: There is absolutely no way to use this without looking and feeling like a creep. One dollar!

Booyah Society : Pulling ourselves out of the slime, here’s the high concept app for the week: Booyah Society assigns arbitrary point values to day-to-day achievements, creatings a sort of WoW-ish self-help game, integrates with Twitter and Facebook. Despite how it sounds, it’s not at all pathetic or annoying; I can easily see how someone who already broadcasts their every action on social networks could get hooked on this. Free.

The Secret of Monkey Island: Special Edition: Diehard fans see Monkey Island titles as the zenith of 2D adventure gaming, while most people who grew up in the early 90s just remember them as being pretty fun. I’m guessing only one of those two groups will be willing to drop the full $8 on this, but to be fair to LucasArts, the game translates well to the iPhone and it’s truly massive.

Lollapalooza: Sharing its concept and design with the excellent Coachella app from last year, this free download helps you find your way around the only legendary music festival ever to be ruined by the advent of txt speak.

This Week’s App News on Giz:

• TheXchange: Will This Porn iPhone App Survive the Apple Banhammer?

• iDisk iPhone App Lightning Review: Halfway There

• Soon We’ll Be Able to Search the App Store For More Than Exact Product Names

• Apple’s Chickenshit Approval Process Has Gone Too Far

• EA Bringing Madden, FIFA Franchises to the iPhone

• iPhone Owners Score Free MobileMe iDisk App

• Offender Locator Tracks Sex Offenders on Your iPhone

• iWet T-Shirts: Yet Another iPhone App That Makes Me Shake My Head in Shame

• GV Mobile Google Voice App Available For Free On The iPhone via Cydia

• Nissan Developing iPhone App to Monitor Electric Cars

• Apple Rejects Official Google Voice iPhone App

• Multiplayer Chess iPhone App Is Very Cool, But Probably Won’t Be a Bestseller

• GV Mobile Google Voice iPhone App Getting Booted From App Store for Usual Ridiculous Reasons

• Spotify iPhone App Kills Pandora, Last.FM, Slacker and iTunes in One Shot

• Weirdest Use of Spreadsheets I’ve Ever Heard

• Man, Don’t Choices Suck?

• Passion iPhone App Will Let You ‘See How Good You Are at Sex’

• Resident Evil 4 Brings More Re-Killing Zombies to the iPhone

• Top Three iPhone Apps: Weed, Booze, and Partial Nudity

• Apple Will Let iPhone Apps Augment Our Sad Little Realities in September With OS 3.1

This list is in no way definitive. If you’ve spotted a great app that hit the store this week, give us a heads up or, better yet, your firsthand impressions in the comments. And for even more apps: see our previous weekly roundups here, and check out our Favorite iPhone Apps Directory and our original iPhone App Review Marathon. Have a good weekend everybody.

The newest update to BlackBerry’s App World, version 1.1, launched today, and it’s pretty minor but certainly welcome. Apps can now be adequately sorted by free, paid, and other rubrics, and can be archived onto either internal or external memory.

BlackBerry users have long been frustrated with the requirement that apps be stored on the oft-inadequate internal memory, and the App World 1.1 update sort of fixes that problem by allowing apps to be archived on plentiful SD cards. You still can’t run apps from the external memory, but you can keep them there until you need them.

The other big (and we’re using the word “big” extraordinarily loosely here) update is to sorting methods. Now you can search App World by either paid or free apps, plus other rubrics like popularity, rating, price, developer and more. It’s useful, sure, but also should have come standard in the first release of App World.

In addition, App World is launching in tons of other countries: Ireland, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Austria, Luxembourg, Netherlands, and Portugal. None of this is particularly exciting but it does show the App World’s willingness to creep along into usefulness. [BlackBerry]

Remember the DTV transition? About a month-and-a-half after all TV broadcast stations switched from analog to digital signals, the majority of Americans have now gotten their acts together, according to Nielsen.

About 98.9 percent of U.S. households have now taken action to receive digital signals, putting the number of unprepapred households at 1.1 percent. That is down from 2.5 percent just days before the June 12 transition.

About 229,000 homes in the last two weeks and 1.3 million homes since the week of the June 12 DTV transition have made the effort to get a digital TV, a converter box, or subscribe to cable or satellite TV.

Broken down by race, African-Americans remain the least prepared, with about 2.2 percent of households without service. They are followed by Hispanics at 1.6 percent, Asians at 1.3 percent, and whites at 0.8 percent.

About 2.7 percent of people under 35 have not made the switch, but only 0.4 percent of those over 55 are unprepared.

Onkyo’s Japan-only (for now) dock lacks speakers but makes up for it with optical/coaxial digital audio outputs, regular old composite video output and a USB connection for syncing with iTunes. It’s meant for higher end AV systems. [AVWatch via Engadget]