ComputerInsanity

Habey’s no stranger to the diminutive PC arena, but the latest from the company just might be the one you’ve been scouting. If you’ve been scouting a mini PC that’s dead-silent, that is. The BIS-6620 is described as “an ultra-compact fanless and noiseless PC platform based on the Intel Atom Z510 processor,” measuring just 4.5- x 4.5- x 1.5-inches and offering up GMA 500 graphics, 1080p hardware decoding, a single DDR2 SODIMM memory slot, room for a 1.8-inch (iPod classic-sized), a few USB 2.0 sockets, integrated SD / CF card readers, gigabit Ethernet port, an optional WiFi module and your choice of OS (Windows XP Embedded, Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7 or Linux). There’s a fair chance this could double as a simplistic media player in your cramped studio apartment, and at just $299.99 at NewEgg, you won’t be shattering the bank in the process.

Facebook appears to have made a third acquisition — this one smaller than its two previous buys. What’s more, Facebook has shut down the company’s service immediately.

Octazen is a Malaysian company comprising two employees. It provides scripts to import a user’s contacts into a website upon sign up, reports Gigaom.

Why would Facebook acquire the makers of an address book importer? It appears to be a talent buy, with Facebook employing the team and shutting down their service (aka acq-hire-sition). Liz Gannes quotes Facebook’s Larry Yu explaining:

This is part of our ongoing effort to add experienced, accomplished technical talent to help drive the company forward in its efforts to be the central way for people to connect and share information.

A statement on the Octazen site reads:

The Octazen team wanted to let you, our valued customers, know that the company recently received an offer to acquire most of the company’s assets and to employ those assets in a different direction. After carefully evaluating this offer, our team believes this is a wonderful opportunity of which we must take advantage.

As a result, effective immediately, Octazen will no longer accept new service contracts or renew existing service contracts, and will enter a transition period to wind down operations.

Facebook’s previous two acquisitions — Parakey (a web operating system) and FriendFeed (FriendFeed) (social aggregation and search) — both added excellent engineers to the Facebook team at the cost of the original services. While FriendFeed still exists, it’s barely used and the site’s features have largely been merged into Facebook, to the disappointment of loyal FriendFeed users.

Our British readers will already be painfully familiar with the comical propensity that government officials (even spies!) have for losing sensitive data while on the move. It might be an idea, therefore, to give your forgetful local representative a break with one of these new Corsair USB drives. The Padlock 2 features OS-agnostic password protection via the keypad you see above plus 256-bit encryption of the data stored on the flash inside. So even if someone is tenacious enough to pry the case open, he’ll have a hard time getting anything useful out of it. Oh, and don’t worry about forgetting the passcode, there’s a procedure for wiping the drive clean and generating a new one. 8GB units are available immediately, and we’ve spotted them online priced at £46 in the UK and $59 in the good old US of A.

Corsair

When malware writers fail to generate clean, reliable code, just who can you trust? On the heels of many Windows XP 32-bit users facing blue screen of death errors and unwanted reboots, Microsoft is now confirming that there’s a little bit of malicious code sitting at the root of it all. A rootkit, to be specific, one called Alureon that compromises the atapi.sys file and others. This rootkit makes a system call via an address that, after the update, no longer corresponds to the particular call Alureon is trying to make. This is apparently the cause of the BSODs, not the update itself, and so those suffering from similar issues can resolve them by simply replacing corrupted system files via the recovery console.

Slashdot

Microsoft Malware Protection Center

Have you ever wondered how many oranges it would take to charge just a single Apple? Name games aside, we have to hand it to Imperial Leisure, the company that executed a new iPhone-centered advertisement aimed at raising awareness for Jaffa oranges. We won’t spoil the whole thing for you, but we will say that you’ll be far hungrier after watching than you are right now.

Thanks to the oh-so-revealing pages of the FCC, we already knew that ASUS had yet another multitouch-enabled Eee PC in the works, but there’s just nothing quite like the satisfaction of seeing an official portal launched to celebrate the reality of being. The Eee PC T101MT is a swivel-screen netvertible that packs a 10.1-inch resistive multitouch display (1,024 x 600), Windows 7, up to 2GB of DDR2 memory, Bluetooth 2.1+EDR, 802.11b/g/n WiFi, a 160GB or 320GB hard drive, 0.3 megapixel webcam and a 6.5 hour battery. You’ll also get a VGA output, a trio of USB 2.0 sockets, Ethernet audio in / out, an SD / SDHC / SDXC card reader (nice!) 500GB of internet-accessible ASUS WebStorage and your choice of white or black. Per usual, there’s nary of a mention of a price or release date just yet.

Google’s always tiptoed around directly providing internet access to consumers with things like free airport WiFi and the free WiFi network it runs in Mountain View, but today the company announced that it’s getting in the game for real with the launch of a fiber-based ISP service that’ll offer 1Gbps speeds at “competitive prices” to select markets. The idea is to provide next-gen access to between 50,000 and 500,000 people and basically see what happens — and, as you’d expect, the new network will be a poster child for Google’s pro-net-neutrality efforts. Sounds good to us, but we’ve all got a ways to go before Eric Schmidt comes over with the lightpipe — Google’s just now asking for “interested communities” to apply, and launch markets will be announced later this year.

P.S.- Remember when Google bought all that fiber back in like 2005 and sparked all those rumors of a “GoogleNet”? It’s probably unrelated, but at least there’s a name to kick around.

Google, Application page

Since launching in late 2007, Hulu has done one one thing very well: it lets you watch your favorite TV shows and movies from your computer, free of charge. But aside from improving the user experience with assorted niceties like smart thumbnails, improved navigation, and social features, the site hasn’t really done anything extreme to expand its functionality. That changes today.

One of my only long standing gripes with Hulu was that it could never really replace the TV watching experience simply because you had to sit in front of your computer to control it. Boxee was the perfect solution to this, as it allowed you to control Hulu via remote through a very snazzy media center interface. But Hulu has repeatedly killed that functionality, largely at the behest of its major network investors.

Now Hulu is releasing its own desktop application, allowing you to browse through the site’s content using your computer’s remote control (both the Windows Media Center remote and the Apple Remote are compatible). Both applications are native too, so you won’t have to deal with any quirkiness from Adobe AIR.

Hulu has posted an intro video for the Desktop application, which you can watch below. The app itself doesn’t seem to be live yet (oddly enough, the URL for the application that’s shown in the video is located on the company’s QA server, which requires a password).

Zune HD Video Hands On from Gizmodo on Vimeo.

LED-backlit LCDs are where TV’s future and present meet—they’re the best LCDs you’ve ever seen, but they’re not as stunning as OLED displays, which will one day dominate all. They’re not cheap, but they’re not ludicrous either. Most importantly, they’re actually here.

I’ll CC You in the FL
With LCDs, it’s all about the backlighting. This defines contrast, brightness and other performance metrics. When you watch plasma TVs, OLED TVs or even old tube TVs, there’s light emanating from each pixel like it was a teeny tiny bulb. Not so with LCD—when you watch traditional LCD TV, you’re basically staring at one big lightbulb with a gel screen in front of it.

The typical old-school LCD backlighting tech is CCFL—a cold cathode fluorescent lamp—which is an array of the same kind of lights that make people’s lives miserable in offices around the world. The reason they aren’t the greatest as backlights for TV watching is that they light up the whole damn display. Because LCD is just a massive screen of tiny doors that open and close, light inevitably leaks through the closed doors, when they’re trying to show black, resulting in more of a glowy charcoal. Check out this shot from Home Theater mag to see what I mean:

LEDs (light emitting diodes) are different from say, an old school incandescent bulb, which heats up a filament to generate light, in that they’re electroluminescent—electricity passes through a semiconductor and the movement of the electrons just lights it up. Instead of having one lightbulb in the bottom of the screen, shining up through all of the LCD pixels, you can have arrays of LEDs that shine through smaller portions of the LCD screen, leaving other portions in the dark, so to speak.

OLED—”organic light emitting diode”—is slightly different. Since the electroluminescent component is organic and not a chip, each point of light can be much tinier. That’s why an LED TV still needs the LCD screen in front: there’s no way to have a single LED per pixel unless the screen is huge, and mounted to the side of a building in Times Square. OLEDs don’t: HD OLED displays are made up of red, green and blue dots, no LCD panel required.

LED Is As LED Does
So, Samsung’s term “LED TV” is more accurately—and more commonly—described as an LED-backlit LCD. But not all LED displays are created equal.

There are two major kinds of LED backlighting: Edge-lit and local dimming. Edge-lit displays are what they sound like—the LEDs are arranged in strips running along all four edges of the TV, like you can see in this gut shot from Cnet. A light guide directs the glowyness toward the center of the screen. The advantage of edge-lit displays is that they can get incredibly thin, are 40 percent more power-efficient than regular LCDs and are a bit cheaper than local-dimming TVs. But because they’re still shooting light indiscriminately across the LCD panel, they can’t pull off the black levels that a local dimming backlight setup can.

LED backlighting of the local dimming variety is how you build the best LCD TV in the world. It’s called local dimming, as you probably guessed, because there are a bunch of LED bulbs—hundreds in the Sony XBR8—arranged in a grid behind the screen. They can all be dark or brightly lit, or they can turn off individually or in clusters, making for the actual Dark Knight, rather than the Grayish Knight you’d see on many cheaper CCFL LCDs. Sets with local dimming are pricier than edge-lit—the Samsung’s local-dimming 46-incher started at $3,500, versus $2800 for one of their edge-lit models. They are thicker too.

What Color Is Your LED?
The color of the LEDs matters too, separating the best LED-backlit LCDs from the the merely great. Most LED sets just use white bulbs. The reason Sony’s XBR8 started out at $5,000—as much as Pioneer’s king-of-TVs Kuro—is because it uses tri-color LEDs in an RGB array. In each cluster, there are two green bulbs next to one red and one blue (greens aren’t as bright). The result is high contrast plus super clean, incredibly accurate color.

LED displays are getting cheaper, more quickly than originally expected, so we could see them go mainstream sooner. You already see the lower-end edge-lit LED tech used in mainstream stuff—MacBook Pro and Dell’s Mini 9 to name a couple. Which is a good thing, since the prophesied ascendancy of OLED in 2009 completely failed to happen. So we’ll have to make do with LED in the meantime. Just be sure to find out what kind when you’re buying.