Suffire.com | Geek Stuffs, Technology Related

Killing two marketing birds with one stone, Microsoft’s bundling some of its Zunes with various Gears of War 2 (launching soon!) paraphernalia. Each 120GB Zune will sport a laser-etched “Crimson Omen” and come pre-loaded with 244 pieces of media, including the soundtrack, behind-the-scene videos and concept art. The entire package will cost you $280 and will start shipping on November 7th. Pre-orders on Amazon.com and Walmart.com will begin at 6am EST. Looks like M’soft’s stopped going after babies and chosen to focus on teenage boys instead. [Engadget]

Filed under: Gaming, Portable Audio, Portable Video

Microsoft couldn’t let the gory, highly-anticipated launch of Gears of War 2 (chainsaw duels! Rhhhahaararggg!) pass without bloodying a Zune or three in the process, Halo 3-style. Specifically, Microsoft has laser-etched that pesky little “Crimson Omen” onto a glossy black Zune 120, pre-loaded the device with 244 pieces of “Gears of War” media — the soundtrack, concept art, behind-the-scenes vids and so forth, nothing you won’t be able to find elsewhere — and squeezed it all into some “collectible” Gears packaging, featuring our testosterone-addled protagonist pondering the meaning of life. The whole kit will run you $280, with pre-orders at Walmart.com and Amazon.com (and a whole mess of Canadian shops) starting at 3AM PT / 6AM ET. It’ll start shipping on November 7th. And still can’t sync to your Xbox. Close-ups after the break.

Continue reading Gears of War 2 canvasses special-edition Zune

Permalink | Email this | Comments

The golden boys of New York’s start-up scene are just as flashbulb-driven as the women who dote on them, a new Details mag feature reveals. Mostly they followed Tumblr’s enfant terrible, David Karp, and his heterosexual beard Charles Forman, who pimps “social gaming” at iminlikewithyou but is still better known as last season’s Mr. Julia Allison. There’s a guest appearance by Kevin Rose, which you can just tell is going to get messy. He’s inserted towards the end as the wise old sage, warning these new guys away from male Internet fameballing:

Kevin Rose—”an old, old man,” to quote Cashmore—never planned on going to the Mashable party. “I’m all partied out,” he says. People magazine readers probably wouldn’t know who Rose is, but among the Internet-savvy he’s Brad Pitt. Rose, who dated Julia Allison a few years ago, is remarkably low-key compared with his younger counterparts. Drinking tea out of a mug covered with skulls and crossbones, he perks up when the talk turns to rock climbing (he’s in a group called Geeks Love Climbing). He says he doesn’t know what the term fameballer means. He also says he doesn’t do things like wedge himself into nightclubs to have his picture taken with founder fetishists.

Those would be the women who this sort of scorn is usually reserved for: Julia Allison and her heiress apparents.

The Details profile is predictably overblown, but its core message is clear: There’s a new generation of men in tech who no longer feel it’s enough to just launch a product people want — unless that product is themselves.

Research into invisibility cloaks, which work by bending light around 2D objects, could end up protecting offshore rigs and vulnerable coastlines from water. Scientists at the Fresnel Institute in Marseille, France said that established cloaking principles can be applied to ocean waves, and built a 10cm model to show how carefully placed concentric pillars make objects in the center “invisible” to the sea.

Waves pass along the radial corridors, interacting with the pillars and producing forces that pull the water away from the innermost ring. The water is then pushed out of the cloaking area as if it had not encountered anything at all. The circular formation could be used to protect anything from oil rigs to islands, though very few islands can probably afford the amount of pillars needed to make this effect work. [New Scientist via Dvice]

Filed under: Gaming, Peripherals

Here’s an interesting one. That red / black Xbox 360 controller that was showcased back in July is now available to any ole consumer in the US, Canada, Latin America New Zealand and Asia, and it comes bundled with a Play & Charge Kit and red rechargeable battery for $64.99. For whatever reason, Microsoft’s totally missing a golden opportunity to cash in on the holiday shopping season by reserving the green counterpart as some “promotional item.” C’mon guys, is it really that hard to understand how irresistible a red and green gamepad tandem would be in late December?

[Via IGN]

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

Podcaster, the app that just won’t quit no matter how many times Apple tries to shut it down, is now up for download on Cydia as version 1.1. People who want Podcaster can now get it through the iPhone app black market, though questions about why it was blocked from legitimate channels are still left unanswered. [Thanks Ameet and MN!]

Filed under: Cellphones

Ah yes, the natural progression of a release. First comes the hands-on at the introduction, then comes the leaked user manual, then comes the pre-order fiasco — now, it’s time for those always titillating in the wild shots. The box and handset are nothing out of the ordinary / surprising (respectively), but at least you now know that bona fide unboxing images are just around the bend.

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

Picture this: You’re trying to figure out why your grandmother’s computer is running so slow when she mentions that an error message told her to download a $39.95 “fixer-upper,” and you realize that some rat bastard out there tricked the poor old dame into installing spyware. Doesn’t that make you angry? It’s certainly pissed off Microsoft, who’s filed a lawsuit with Washington state against “scareware” software makers.

The Redmond giant is able to get its lawsuit off the ground because of a recent law update called the Computer Spyware Act, which not only bans illegal spyware, but any other program that misleads people into believing that their computers need to be fixed. The fake error messages sent to Windows users, some of whom have received over 200 a day, fall under that category.

Microsoft’s asking for a fine of up to $2,000 per incident, plus restitution and attorney’s fees. Considering half of the customer support calls it receives are related to spyware crashes, that’s a lot of money. But whether the suit will deter “scareware” purveyors is still up in the air. In 2006, Microsoft filed a similar case against the same people and won… to little effect it seems. [Dailytech]

Filed under: Displays, Home Entertainment

Now that pico projectors are actually headed to end users, we’re seeing a number of companies hop in the fast lane to production. Take Microvision for instance — these guys were taking their sweet time by introducing the PicoP beamer back at CES, and now we’re looking at a freshly revamped version that has already begun shipping to OEMs for “evaluation and end-user testing.” Reportedly, the device shown at CEATEC featured a “thinner, smaller and brighter PicoP engine and several image quality enhancements” over the unit displayed at CES, and it officially boasted a WVGA resolution that could be blown up to 100-inches in size. Unfortunately, we’re still waiting to hear how long it’ll be before this one slips into consumers’ hands, but we’ve a feeling it’ll be sooner rather than later.

[Via AboutProjectors]

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments