20 Awesome Architectural & Graphic Optical Illusions [PICS]

This selection of architectural optical illusions showcases 20 more very public ways to fool the eye, please the mind and satisfy the soul.

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20 Most Popular Top 10 Lists of 2008 from Lifehacker

Almost two years in, our weekly listicle, the Lifehacker Top 10, still proves to be one of the most popular posts on-site. Since our top-10-making bot is off this weekend, take a gander at 20 of the most popular Top 10's that have published in 2008 so far.

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10 Top iPhone Video Apps

Top 10 iPhone Video Apps that will let you discover videos like never before. Share it with your friends.

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Xbox360 now outselling PS3 2:1 per week!

In what must be one of the biggest comebacks of all time - Microsoft's Xbox360 console, in the wake of worldwide price cuts and big software releases such as Fable II and Gears of War 2, is now selling around twice as fast as HD competitor PS3 (which was winning the battle earlier in the year). Seems PS3 is in need of a price cut to fight back

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101 things we've learned from videogames

The wisdom of our favorite pastime, applied to real life

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Top 10 Videogame Flops

In an industry as hit-driven and hype-driven as videogames, disasters take on epic qualities that make it hard not to feel a hint of schadenfreude in the wake of failure.

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Running Windows Programs On Ubuntu 8.10 With CrossOver Linux

This guide shows how you can use CrossOver Linux Pro 7.1.0 to run Windows applications on Ubuntu 8.10. CrossOver is based on Wine. It is not available for free, but maybe you are one of the lucky guys that grabbed a CrossOver copy for free a few days ago; otherwise you can install a 30-day trial version to test it.

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Orange: Our Customers Can Now Access The Pirate Bay

A week ago today, customers of the ISP Orange across the UK and France found that they could no longer access The Pirate Bay. Many of them fired off emails to the service provider, worried that Orange was censoring their access to the Internet. Now, a week later, Orange have answered officially.

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Netbooks vs notebooks: which should you buy?

Does a netbook really have enough power to be relied upon as your sole computer?

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RealTime Application Interface for Linux

RTOS stands for Real Time Operating System. An embedded system is a combination of hardware and software integration, accomplished for a specific function.

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The world’s fastest computers are Linux computers

When it comes to sheer, blinding speed you can't beat supercomputers, and, once more, the fastest of the fast in the Top 500 Supercomputers, are Linux computers.

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24 Beautiful and Creative Website Headers (PICS)

Beautiful and creative website header designs from all over the world.

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Pentagon Shoots $22 Million into Guided Bullet Tech

Darpa, the Defense Department's far-out research arm, announced a pair of contracts yesterday, to start designing a super, .50-caliber sniper rifle that fires guided bullets. Lockheed Martin recieved $12.3 million for the "EXACTO" (EXtreme ACcuracy Tasked Ordnance) project, while Teledyne Scientific & Imaging, LLC got another $9.5 million.

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Atari Cancels Anti-Piracy Witch-Hunt

After Atari received some bad press recently for mistakenly accusing an elderly couple of pirating one of its games, the company has now stopped the anti-piracy campaign in question.

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Crack, In Flash Game Form

Welcome to addiction! This game Auditorium is something i found today and became addicted to in less than 3 min. Enjoy!

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The 12 Lamest Fatalities

There was a time when performing a fatality was an awesome reward where you further humiliated your defeated opponent by savagely mutilating them. But sometimes fatalities are just flat out lame. Here are our picks for the worst of the worst that span from the original Mortal Kombat to Ultra Vortek.

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The Coolest and Weirdest Doom Mods Ever [Videos]

With a passion for user-generated content even way back in 1993, iD's John Carmack deliberately designed Doom to be easily editable for players meaning that with a bit of knowledge, anyone could learn the basics of making their own game powered by Doom's tech.

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The Convergence of Film and Gaming [PIC]

Games will become an form of entertainment that is more immersive and perhaps even more pervasive than movies. The film industry will adapt to this by converging towards gaming standards and practices. At least this is what a prediction of the future will look like..

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Grand Theft Auto IV PC to support 32 players in multiplayer

We've been waiting for a while to hear about the new multiplayer features that Rockstar Games has been promoting for the upcoming PC port of Grand Theft Auto IV. Today, via last minute previews with certain game media outlets, we finally found out that the PC version will support 32 players in the game's various online multiplayer modes.

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Creative and Unusual Bike Designs (PICS)

Collection of creative and unusual bicycle designs from around the world.

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Keyboard for Blondes. Clue: It's Pink

That headline isn't a cynical, ill thought-out slur on the fairer haired members of humanity. I'd never do that -- after all, some of my best friends are blonde. The Keyboard for Blondes is, in fact the real name of...

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Mozilla slips an extra beta into Firefox schedule

Mozilla is to add a third beta to the development schedule for Firefox 3.1. The move will enable the company to get a better handle on remaining bugs and give several new features, including a faster JavaScript engine and a private browsing mode, more testing time, the company's browser director said yesterday.

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Why you can't trust 'friends' on Facebook

If you're on Facebook, you've no doubt got a bunch of friends. And if you're like most Facebook users, you're certain those friends are exactly who they say they are. And you might be right. Or you could be wrong. They could be scammers posing as your friends. How hard is that, exactly? It turns out to be hideously easy to do.

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Mac uTorrent beta is finally here!

The mac version of uTorrent is officially here.

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Electronic Frontier Foundation Doesn't Like Apple's Attitude

Who knows why many open source users are also Macintosh users, but I've noticed a correlation there for years. Maybe it's because open source, like the Mac, rings of rebellion against the status quo. Nevertheless, if you think the love always flows in two directions, check out this post...

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The Pirate Bay Celebrates 5th Anniversary

In the fall of 2003, a group of friends from Sweden decided to launch a BitTorrent tracker named ‘The Pirate Bay’. Today, roughly 5 years after this historic day, the founders of the site are celebrities in Sweden, and rockstars on the Internet.

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Top 14 Strange and Scary Military Technologies

Liquid armour, sonic bandages, rail guns and more

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German traffic lights powered by Linux and real-time Java

A major European vendor of city-wide traffic management systems is porting its flagship traffic light controller to Linux and real-time Java.

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Facebook awarded $873 million in suit against spammer

On Facebook, the spam you get from friends is bad enough, but tolerable. The really bad stuff is actual spam, which more and more people are being subject to. On Friday, judge Jeremy Fogel in San Jose, California, awarded Facebook $873 million in damages against Adam Guerbuez and Atlantis Blue Capital under the CAN-SPAM act.

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ZzzPhone Is Second Google Android Cellphone Ever

According to CrunchGear's John Biggs, the second-ever Android cellphone doesn't come from Motorola, Nokia or Sony Ericsson. The Zzzphone is a full-QWERTY keyboard Chinese slider which apparently runs the Android operating system,

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Student Writes to Steve Jobs, Gets Free Final Cut Studio 2

Sometimes Xmas comes earlier and when you less expect it: A Greenwich High School student wrote a letter directly to Mr. Jobs himself asking politely for an student discount on Final Cut Studio 2. Two weeks later, he got way more than he wanted, shipped directly from Cupertino.

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Apple Slapped With Patent Suit Over iPhone’s Browser

A month after being granted U.S. patent No. 7,441,196, a company in Los Angeles called EMG Technology is suing Apple for the way ...

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10 Spammers We Love to Hate

It seems the bulk e-mail industry has more kings than a pinochle deck. But who is really the king of kings? The following 10 spammers are all heavyweight contenders for the crown. Half of them have done time or are still guests of the federal government. Two are dead. Most of the rest have been fined millions by the FTC and/or private companies.

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First Jaunty Jackalope (Ubuntu 9.04) alpha hops into view

Ubuntu 9.04 alpha 1 is now available for download. New packages have been merged in from Debian and work is progressing on the ARM port. Plans are also beginning to coalesce for a Mono 2.0 transition.

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Sam's Club Lets You Swap Out Red Ringed Xbox Hassle Free

Virg's Xbox360 got the dread Red Ring of Death. He bought it in Feb '07, and it started failing this Nov '08. He figured it would be months before he would get it back and expected to have to pay somewhere. Much to his surprise, Sam's Club let him swap it out for a new one for free.

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Top 10 Games on the Nintendo Wii

Its no secret that our favorite seventh gen console here at Old-Wizard.com is the Wii. As a matter of fact, you’d have to go back to 1995 when the PS1 was first released to find the last time that my favorite console wasn’t made by Nintendo. Of course its often claimed by people who don’t agree with us about the Wii that while it is innovative, it

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The Best Undiscovered Playstation 2 (PS2) Games

If you’ve played all the blockbuster games on the PS2 (or PS3) already and need to dig into the lesser-known-but-equally-exciting games, this is the guide for you. I’ve had long discussions with many experienced PS2 owners in order to determine a list of all the best PS2 games that most people haven’t played (or possibly even heard of).

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Moto RAZR Stops Bullet, Saves Man's Life

This may be the first good news Motorola's had in a long while: A feller named RJ Richard down in the New Orleans suburb of St.

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Is That Photo 'Shopped'...?

Error Level Analyser allows you to quickly check any image to determine if it might be photoshopped or altered. Simple, Quick, Free, and Effective.

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50 Free Photoshop Brush Sets for Modern Design Trends

In this collection, you’ll find over 50 free Photoshop brush sets for current design trends and styles such as vintage, retro, grunge, hand-drawn, swirls, and nature-inspired.

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Sam's Club Lets You Swap Out Red Ringed Xbox Hassle Free

Virg's Xbox360 got the dread Red Ring of Death. He bought it in Feb '07, and it started failing this Nov '08. He figured it would be months before he would get it back and expected to have to pay somewhere. Much to his surprise, Sam's Club let him swap it out for a new one for free.

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Video Game "O Faces" Captured with RED Camera

British photographer Robbie Cooper used stills from the video taken by his RED camera to show that look of total concentration achieved by kids as they play some particularly absorbing video games, including Grand Theft Auto IV and Call of Duty 4.

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The 50 Fastest Guitarists of All Time

From Les Paul to Paul Gilbert, Johnny Winter to Johnny Hiland, and Paco De Lucia to Al Di Meola, fleet-fingered guitarists have made their mark in every genre throughout the modern history of the guitar. Simply put... this crew is blazing fast.

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Wine 1.1.9 Released

Th What's new in this release: * A large number of regression test fixes. * Performance improvements in memory management. * Improved POP3 support in inetcomm. * Initial implementation of the XInput DLL.

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How Obama Helped Digg Fix Bugs

Digg DBA "driver" describes the issues that Election Night 08 caused behind the scenes at digg.com.

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IBM to build brain-like computers

IBM has announced it will lead a US government-funded collaboration to make electronic circuits that mimic brains.

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The Perfect Desktop - Ubuntu Studio 8.10

This tutorial shows how you can set up an Ubuntu Studio 8.10 desktop that is a full-fledged replacement for a Windows desktop, i.e. that has all the software that people need to do the things they do on their Windows desktops. The advantages are : you get a secure system without DRM restrictions that works even on old hardware,& above all it's free

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In a fit of irony, iPhone pirating app gets pirated

The Hackulous pirating site is dedicated to cracking and distributing iPhone applications without paying any money to their developers. In what can only be described as hilarious irony, a beta version of that application was itself pirated and released before it could enter a full open-source distribution.

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10 adverts that would actually work in games [PICS]

Pretty much every gamer thinks that in-game advertising is a load of old cock. As if constantly being blitzed in the real world by demands to buy more stuff wasn't enough, the brazen pimping of products is now a well established business in the realms of the virtual citizen. Here's a list of 10 in-game adverts that we think would actually work.

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Will IE6 screw Microsoft?

There's an interesting thought: Lots of browser market share is still stuck in IE6, according to this article about 8%. Total IE6 share is 24%. What if Mozilla can pick that up over time and Microsoft can't? Is it just me or does this look like IE6 (well, and a bad IE8) could screw Microsoft???

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30 Awesome Photoshop Text Effects Tutorials

Take a look at this new roundup of 30 Awesome Photoshop Text Effects Tutorials.

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Teenagers learn important skills online

Parents may disapprove of the amount of time their teenagers spend online but they are actually learning important social and technical skills, according to a study released on Thursday.

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Google shutting down 'Lively'

Once thought to be its answer to virtual worlds like Second Life, Google's Lively launched this summer to much fanfare.

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PlayStation 3 Costs 5x As Much to Operate as the Wii

According to a new Natural Resources Defense Council analysis of the energy consumption of popular video game consoles, the Playstation 3 uses the most energy. More than 40% of American households have at least one video game console, and a staggering 50% of users leave them on all the time, even when not actively playing a game.

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Wrath of the Lich King sells 2.8 million in 24 hours

Making it the fastest-selling PC game of all time. Unbelievable.

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Zero Punctuation: Fallout 3

Fallout 3 review on Zero Punctuation via The Escapist

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Ars reviews Left 4 Dead

Valve seems dedicated to the cause of multiplayer gaming on the PC. Sure, you can get Left 4 Dead on the 360, and I'm sure many people will enjoy it, but the best way to play this game is with a mouse and a keyboard, headphones on, screaming at your team mates that you're surrounded and need back up.

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Ars reviews Left 4 Dead

Valve seems dedicated to the cause of multiplayer gaming on the PC. Sure, you can get Left 4 Dead on the 360, and I'm sure many people will enjoy it, but the best way to play this game is with a mouse and a keyboard, headphones on, screaming at your team mates that you're surrounded and need back up.

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Mozilla To Lose It's Non-Profit Status

Today, the (for-now) non-profit Mozilla Foundation released its financial statements for 2007 (embedded below). Revenues for the organization behind the open-source Firefox browser were up 12 percent to $75 million, with search-related royalties from Google accounting for 88 percent of the total, or $66 million.

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Why Facebook?

Why did Facebook survive when its competitor Hi5 did not? A more secure site, pretty much free of spammers. Now that Facebook has branched out, it needs to make sure it doesn't go the way of MySpace.

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If Twitter Charges, Users Would Pay: Survey

Would you pay to use Twitter? An unscientific survey conducted today found that about 50% of users would pay $5 per month or more for the service. Another survey found that a quarter of users would pay to remove ads if the service started putting them in feeds. How about you?

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Guns N' Roses album to debut on MySpace

If you have been waiting patiently for 17 years to hear the new Guns N' Roses album, your wait is mere hours from being over--and you can hear it legally before it goes on sale next week.

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5 predictions from 1968 that were dead-on & 5 that were nuts

40 years ago, science fiction writer James R. Berry predicted what the future would look like on November 18th, 2008 — today. He made some impressive guesses. He also made a few understandable missteps. Explore an amazing retro future that was wild, but isn't as far off as you would think.

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The Minority Report Computer Is Real

Prepare to be amazed. A group of visionaries has created a real-world, working version of the big-screen gestural interface that nerds everywhere drooled over in the 2002 Tom Cruise film.

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15 Helpful In-Browser Web Development Tools

In this article, we explore some of the most popular and useful in-browser Web development tools.

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Developer Gets Rich With iPhone game: Earns $250K in 2 Mths!

A former ATM software designer for a large bank, Demeter created "Trism" in his spare time and pitched it to Apple last spring. Priced at $5, "Trism" earned Demeter $250,000 in profits the first two months. "I did the game myself, basically. I had a buddy of mine who actually came up with the name 'Trism.' I paid him a couple of grand."

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Google Hosts 10 Million Historic Time-Life Photos

Google announced today that they're now hosting around 10 million photos from the LIFE photo archives on Google Image search. You can search the photos—which range from the 1750s to present day—directly from the LIFE photo archive start page.

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TiVo Delivers Domino's...Is there anything TiVo can't do?

Late last night, broadband-connected TiVo Series2/3/HD owners may have stumbled upon the new Domino’s widget. While we first caught wind of this in regards to the Austrailian TiVo service, US TiVo subscribers are first to tap into Domino’s online ordering system - requesting pizza from the comfort of their couch.

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Why Apple Will Never Permit Adobe Flash on the iPhone

Although Adobe says it is working on a version of its popular Flash player for the iPhone, Apple is unlikely ever to permit it to appear in the handset's App Store, no matter how much customers want it.

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Five Gadget Which Were Killed by The Cellphone

Calling a cellphone a mere phone seems a little silly these days. The little pocket wonders now do so much they are really handheld computers. With extras. The process of mashing one or more gadgets together in the same box used to be called convergence, but that approach quietly died as the mobile phone ate up any and every rival device.

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Why Apple is great at interfaces when others are not

Did anyone at Microsoft think of pleasure when designing Vista's awful UAC? Did anyone at Virgin (well, NTL really) think of pleasure when designing the clunky interface of the V+ box compared to the elegant simplicity of Sky+? Did anyone at anywhere think about pleasure when designing old mobile phone interfaces?

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Amazon launches OLPC 'Give 1 Get 1' laptop drive

The One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) association launched its Give 1 Get 1 program for a second time, allowing people to buy one of their iconic green mini-laptops and donate one to a child in the developing world at the same time for just US$399.

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Deleting your digital past -- for good

Can you erase your tracks online? We tried to get a few bad mentions off the Net forever. Here's how we did.

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Five essential Xmas gifts for Apple iPhone lovers

Stuck for Christmas presents? Your iPhone-loving friends will love these

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USB 3.0 ready !!!

That did not take long to update (just 8 years). USB will get an update to 5 Gbps.

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Asus to Launch World's 'Fastest' Smartphone

Asus is calling its new P565 smartphone the "fastest business PDA phone in the world."

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7 lessons Windows 7 can learn from OS X

Windows 7 will run faster than Vista, and it's breaking new ground with support for multi-touch displays, but we can think of seven more simple things that Windows 7 needs to address.

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Top 10 Video Game Cliches

Clichés are found in everything from music to movies to anything where creativity finds a home. This is no different with the video game medium which mimics past ideas to no end. Why tamper with a formula for success? Repetition has been the basis of our great civilization, and so it comes as no surprise that there are numerous clichés in the video

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Victory in Vomit: The Sickening Secret of Mirror's Edge

I've played plenty of FPSs that required me to navigate ridiculous, zero-G boss lairs that were suspended over improbable heights, and none of those ever made me feel nauseated. Why does this game get its hooks into my brain so effectively? I think it's because Mirror's Edge is the first game to hack your proprioception...I think

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Call of Duty: World at War - Review

Does Call of Duty: World at War prove the critics wrong and show that Treyarch can do just as great a job with the franchise as Infinity Ward, or is it just another World War II game that does nothing to make its mark? Read on for the official review ...

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Google SketchUp 7 Released

SketchUp is software you can use to build 3D models of anything: your house, killer robots, furniture, trees, abstract art — anything. Architects and engineers use it to design buildings and other structures. Woodworkers use it to plan their projects. And lots of people use it to figure out where to put their furniture.

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Adobe answers cries for 64-bit Flash on Linux

Starting to answer the clamorous demand from open-source fans, Adobe Systems plans to release an alpha version of its Flash Player technology on Monday for those using 64-bit Linux software.

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Armado: 3D Platforming Comes to the iPhone

Gaming on the iPhone and iPod touch comes in many forms, but a lot of genres still lack representation on the mobile platform. Cross one more off that list as Tricky Software, Inc. introduces Armado, a 3D platformer for Apple’s handheld devices.Tricky Software is a new development studio staffed by former EA employees.

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Apple's iPhone Gaming Giant of future Takes Aim at Nintendo

Could Apple's iPhone be the mobile gaming giant of the future, The iPhone Takes Aim at Nintendo, Sony +.....

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10 Top Social News Sites Ranked by Design

Digg, Reddit, Mixx, Slashdot, and so on. They are all great social news and media websites, but how do they rank in terms of how easy they are on the eyes?

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AMD Releases New FireStream Accelerator

AMD today announced the new AMD FireStream 9270 compute accelerator. It has a typical board power requirement of only 160 watts, yet provides over 1.2 teraFLOPS of single-point precision performance -- the most available in a single-GPU solution today -- and over 240 gigaFLOPS of double-point precision performance.

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Intel Core i7 CPUs reappear on NewEgg

Remember those Core i7 processors that showed up -- ever so briefly -- on NewEgg a few days ago, only to promptly disappear, leaving us to ponder what we'd done wrong? Well, even though they're not slated to officially hit shelves until November 17th, we've heard from a slew of vigilant tipsters (hipsters?) that they're back.

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14 Hilariously Revised Wonders of the World

When most people go to a landmark or tourist attraction, they take home a little something to remind them of their trip. Michael Hughes prefers to re-do the attraction - inverting it in his own unique way and reversing the roll of the reminder and that which one is normally reminded of.

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Customize Your Own Killer "Enigma" Desktop

Customizing your Windows desktop to get a similar "Enigma" effect on your own system.

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How to avoid a Linux-migration disaster

With the economy uncertain and Microsoft Vista failing to gain overwhelming acceptance, many IT departments are considering a migration to Linux.

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Take this Linux: Windows Boot Sequence Visualized

A response to the cool Linux boot sequence visualization.

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USB 3.0 to Deliver a Tenfold Speed Increase

Tighten your seat belts. Data transfer is going into overdrive as the ubiquitous Universal Serial Bus, better known as USB, prepares to make a tenfold jump in speed and it will most likely mean the death of the competing standard known as FireWire.

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Microsoft e-mails show 'Vista Capable' changes helped Intel

Pressured by Intel, Microsoft relaxed the rules for a crucial Windows Vista marketing program -- a move that let the chip maker sell older graphics chip sets that were incapable of meeting the original requirements, internal e-mails released under class-action lawsuit show.

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The Pirate Bay Sees Traffic and Peers Surge

Only a few days before the largest BitTorrent tracker will celebrate its 5th anniversary, the Pirate Bay reached a new milestone. The site now tracks 25 million peers, which is more than the entire populations of Sweden, Norway, Finland, Iceland and Denmark combined.

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Useful Tools to Bring Power to the RightClick Menu [Windows]

Who doesn’t love a shortcut? Thanks to the guy who programmed in the right click menu, we get to take some of them while working or browsing on the computer. Here at MakeUseOf we have looked at some of the ways to add more power to the right click menu.

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Realistic Names for Videogames [PIC]

Your favorite classic games get renamed.

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101 game facts that will rock your world

Fact: We love facts. And the world of gaming is absolutely littered with astonishing/pointless/obscure trivia to cram into your brain. So, not-so-hot on the trail of last year's tepidly received 101 things you didn't know about games, we bring you another staggering list of game-related info detritus for your consuming pleasure.

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The 25 Best First Levels of All Time

The first levels you see when starting the game!

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The 'Minority Report' computers become reality!

If you've been waiting for that Minority Report-style interface to really come to fruition, you can finally exhale. One of the science advisors from the Steven Spielberg film -- along with a team of other zany visionaries -- has created an honest-to-goodness, real-world implementation of the computer systems seen in the movie.

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Ubuntu’s Intermediate Ibex

When Mark Shuttleworth, the man behind Canonical/Ubuntu, made the comment that Ubuntu should be prettier than Apple OSX in near term I got excited - the man was absolutely right.

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Ubuntu’s Intermediate Ibex

When Mark Shuttleworth, the man behind Canonical/Ubuntu, made the comment that Ubuntu should be prettier than Apple OSX in near term I got excited - the man was absolutely right.

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12 Excellent Free Text Editors for Coders

In this post, you’ll find 20 first-class free text editors that are designed with coders’ needs in mind. Whether you use a Windows, Mac, or Linux machine – you’ll find a few options here that will satisfy your code-authoring needs.

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5 Cool Websites To Procrastinate at Work Like a PRO

Having trouble accessing favorite sites from work? Whether it’s a company firewall blocking Twitter or prying eyes of co-workers here are some excellent tools that can both help you out and keep you look working.

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Indian probe touches down on Moon

India's first unmanned lunar spacecraft, Chandrayaan 1, has placed a probe on the surface of the Moon.

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The 10 Best Video Game Endings

#9 - Contra -- The first time in gaming history where an island blows up, Contra gave the gamer the ending it wanted when playing this apparently unbeatable game (without the code of course). With seconds left, and the island about to detonate, you would see the protagonists fly off of the island in a little 8-bit helicopter just in time.

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Valve Tricked Half Life 2 Hacker Into Fake Job Interview

After the secret source code for its then-unreleased shooter Half Life 2 showed up on BitTorrent in 2003, game maker Valve Software cooked up an elaborate ruse with the FBI targeting the German hacker suspected in the leak, even setting up a fake job interview in an effort to lure him to the U.S. for arrest.

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Electronic Arts debuts fitness video game for Wii

Electronic Arts Inc unveiled its first personal training product on Thursday, tapping into the growing appeal of video games as fitness systems as seen with Nintendo Co Ltd's hit title "Wii Fit" earlier this year.

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How to Make Gears 3 Better than Gears 2

The hype has died down. The critics have answered. Copies sold have numbered in the millions. Has Gears of War 2 lived up to the expectations of its fans? Not an easy question to answer. After all, for every moment of the original Gears faithfully carried over, the needling feeling of some thing more creeps in.

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Better Gmail Updates, Gets Calendar and Reader Integration

All platforms with Firefox: Just uploaded a freshly-baked new version of the Better Gmail 2 Firefox extension, which includes several fixes and new user scripts. First, if you Redesigned skin lovers were bogged down by slowness, that's been fixed. If the Gmail Labs' Agenda gadget just isn't enough for your calendar-in-Gmail needs, now you'll find

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Try Internet Explorer Mobile 6 on your desktop

The Windows Mobile team has publicly released Internet Explorer Mobile 6. There's just one catch: You can't run it on your Windows Mobile phone yet. Instead, the download lets you run Windows Mobile 6.1.4 on your Windows system in an emulator.

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BlackBerry Storm arrives to battle with iPhone

The first touch-screen BlackBerry phone arrives in stores today, beginning a battle with Apple's iPhone for Christmas sales.

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How To Convert Videos for Your iPhone

Here are the best solutions for converting videos online as well as off. Some will convert any video you have on your local computer while others will only convert videos that you find online. In any case, you will wind up with a video file in the correct format for your Apple or other mobile device.

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Zero Punctuation: Fable 2

This week Zero Punctuation reviews Peter Molyneux's latest action rpg adventure, Fable 2.

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Google launches video chat for Gmail

Google is rolling out video and voice capabilities for the chat function that is embedded in the Gmail interface. It's a bare-bones voice and video-conferencing service, but it's simple to install and use and is a very good addition to Gmail.

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Blind NASA Engineer Solves Russian Problem

A U.S. space agency team led by a blind engineer built a system to receive data from a Soyuz spacecraft just days after Russia asked for assistance. Marco Midon, a blind NASA electronics engineer, proposed a mobile system be deployed at a ground site below the Soyuz re-entry path after its separation from the International Space Station.

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7 ways to make your PC look like a Mac

Why wait for Windows 7 though? There are loads of ways you can fiddle with Vista's interface and cheer up the depressing and omnipresent black bars. To show you some of the options out there here are seven tricks for dealing with that most common of Windows' viruses: Mac-envy.

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10 Best Tips for WordPress Optimization

This WordPress optimization guide is a collection of useful tips and tutorials on how to speed up your WordPress site. If you ever experienced slow WP admin panel, “MySQL server has gone away” message, pages taking forever to load or you want to prepare your site for a major increase in traffic (for example Digg fp) this is the guide is for you.

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Overclocked Radeon HD 4870 X2 Shoot-Out

At launch, just about every Radeon HD 4870 X2 available at retail had the exact same features and specifications. But more recently, a few board partners have introduced factory overclocked variants that take the performance of what is already the fastest graphics card available up a notch. And yes, it's good for Crysis!

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The 5 Best -- and 5 Worst -- Apple Laptops of All Time, Ever

From multi-colored handles to slide-in docks and illuminated keyboards, portables Macs have been nothing less than an evolution of ingenuity. Check out this article to learn from Mac's past successes and mistakes.

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Australian ISPs pan government-mandated 'Net filtering plan

As if Australians weren't riled up enough over their government's Internet filtering initiative, the level of discontent has risen amid recent revelations that certain filters will not be optional, as citizens were first led to believe. Criticism is building against Australia's Communications Minister Stephen Conroy, and now Australia's ISPs are jo

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Parallels Desktop 4.0 gets a 50 percent speed boost over 3.0

Don't look now, but Parallels is back with the final release of Parallels Desktop 4.0 today. The release, which we heard a little bit about in September, does indeed now have full support for DirectX 9 and OpenGL 2.0, but that's just the tip of the iceberg.

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Microsoft plans to embrace Apple's App Store format

Microsoft is less interested in adopting WebKit for a future version of Internet Explorer than in its plans to replicate another Apple-driven technology: the direct-to-customer software distribution model pioneered by the App Store.

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Little sister is watching: Ars reviews Mirror's Edge

Mirror's Edge promised to bring something new and exciting to gaming. Ars reviews a game that should be taught in classes about design, but that no one should buy.

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MotorStorm's Target Render "Pissed Us Off A Lot" Says Devs

Here's an interview we conducted with MotorStorm lead designer Nigel Kershaw and creative director Paul Hollywood. The most revealing part of the interview -- which you can watch in the 1UP Show segment above -- comes when Kershaw reveals his frustration at how often the subject of the original E3 target video for MotorStorm comes up in interviews.

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Prince of Persia PC 2008 Requirements

Here are the requirements for the upcoming Prince of Persia game for the PC.

Minimum System Requirements

Supported OS: Windows XP/Windows Vista
Processor: Dual core processor 2.6 GHz Intel Pentium D or AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800+ (Intel Core 2 Duo 2.2 GHz or AMD Athlon 64 X2 4400+ or better recommended)
RAM: 1 GB Windows XP/2 GB Windows Vista
Video Card: 256 MB DirectX 10.0-compliant video card or DirectX 9.0-compliant card with Shader Model 3.0 or higher (see supported list)*
Sound Card: DirectX 9.0 or 10.0-compliant sound card (5.1 sound card recommended)
DirectX Version: DirectX 9.0 or 10.0 libraries (included on disc)
DVD-ROM: DVD-ROM dual-layer drive
Hard Drive Space: 8 GB
Peripherals Supported: Keyboard, mouse, optional controller (Xbox 360 Controller for Windows recommended)
* Supported Video Cards at Time of Release:
ATI RADEON X1600*/1650*-1950/HD 2000/3000 series
NVIDIA GeForce 6800*/7/8/9 series

10 of the Greatest Phrases to Ever Come Out of a Video Game

Below are, in my opinion, the ten greatest phrases to ever come out of a video game character's mouth. I'm sure I'm missing a few here, but that's what comment boards are for. So here they are, the top ten phrases ever. See if you can close your eyes and remember just how they sounded the first time you first heard them. Just don't do it. . .

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13 Beautiful And Open Source E-Commerce Applications

With the 3rd option, there are great open source e-commerce applications that will help you to create a good looking & functioning e-store. And, get support from the community.

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'Bejeweled' Creator Spills Secrets of Addictive Games

8 years ago, Jason Kapalka & a couple of friends devised a puzzle game they called Bejeweled. Since its debut, Bejeweled addicts have frittered away around $300M -& more than 6B hours—on the game and its sequel. We asked Kapalka for his take on some of the most addictive puzzlers ever made and why we can't quit playing them....

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Top 10 Controversial Video Games

From 1976's Death Race to 2008's Silent Hill: Homecoming, the 10 most controversial video games [slideshow]

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Obama Spent $44.5K on In-Game Advertising

For weeks now, Obama has been running in-game ads in games such as Burnout Paradise for the 360 across 10 battleground states. The full campaign started on October 6, runs through November 3, and spans a reported 18 games. According to the Obama campaign's pre-general-election filing with the Federal Election Commission, he spent $44,500 in games.

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Who would you vote for — Mario or Luigi?

"From 'Spore' to 'Second Life,' games give players a political voice." An inside look at the direct relationship between gaming and politics.

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Why Star Wars: The Old Republic is better than another KOTOR

If you’re a fan of MMOs, last week was pretty damn exciting for you. BioWare announced they would be adapting the beloved Star Wars universe, and the equally beloved Knights of the Old Republic franchise, into a massively multiplayer online experience. Disappointed that BioWare went MMO? Here are six reasons to get excited again.

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Zen Sonic The Hedgehog - Just Relax

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The 10 easiest games of all time

What makes a game easy? How about an unlimited amount of lives? How about an unlimited amount of continues after you lost all your lives? How about a seemingly never ending amount of energy? There is something noticeable about all these traits that make a video game easy. All these traits are embodied in most new video games that are released...

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Lame and Bizarre Video Game Endings

Some games have great endings, however some do NOT! Check out this video with lame and bizarre endings.

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What Barack Obama’s Win Means For Gamers

How might the Barack Obama administration affect the video game industry and the games we play? What has Obama already pledged that his administration will do with the video game industry?

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Prison Inmate Sues Blizzard Over World of WarCraft Addiction

What would you do if you were killing time in prison for wire fraud? If you're Johnathan Lee Riches, you apparently spend it filing rambling third-party motions to unrelated court cases.

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How Gears of War 2 Raises the Bar for Military Simulators

Epic Games' Gears of War 2 hits stores today. The Unreal 3 game engine upgrade is part of what makes the new game so great, but it will also contribute to better Army simulations with increased chaos, better AI and improved graphics.

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Fallout 3 ships 4.7 million in first week

Last week's launch of Bethesda Softworks' after-the-bomb role-playing game Fallout 3 was, appropriately enough, explosive. The publisher took a victory lap today by announcing some early statistics for the game. Bethesda said that it shipped roughly 4.7 million copies of Fallout 3 around the world last week.

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The Philosophy of Faith: A Mirror's Edge Interview

An interview with Nick Channon about the upcoming Mirror's Edge!

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The World's First Videogame From 1958

In 1958, Dr. William Higinbotham was working at the Brookhaven National Laboratory on a simulation of bouncing balls and missile trajectories that could predict the paths objects could take. Suddenly, it hit him: why not apply this to tennis?

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