Hewlett-Packard, these days better known for printers than innovation, has announced a breakthrough in chip manufacturing. The new process allows for eight times more gates to be put on each chip while simultaneously cutting power consumption. The nanotechnology also allows for higher fault tolerance and even possible reprogramming of chips even after the parts are installed in consumer electronics.

HP Labs researchers, Greg Snider and Stan Williams, published the news in published in Nanotechnology, a journal of the British Institute of Physics.

The advance allows more field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) to be packed into a chip. FPGAs are similar to regular logic gates except they can also handle more complex operations. For those of you that didn’t have a computer architecture class, logic gates are the basic building blocks of a computer’s …

Joost is a new global broadband television service co-founded by Niklas Zennstram and Janus Friis of former Skype fame. Joost combines TV and broadband Internet with the promise that you can watch TV unfettered of the schedules and restrictions that come with traditional television.

Formerly known under the code name “The Venice Project”, Joost fills a critical gap in the online video entertainment market. According to Joost, the video catalog will contain the biggest and best shows from the TV studios, including specialized programs created by professionals and enthusiasts.

Joost engineers have attempted to make the service behave similarly to TV by including the concept of programs, channels, and advertisements (of course). Keeping with the Television paradigm, Joost will consist of channels containing playlists of videos. You can flip between channels, or use the program guide to choose …

The long awaited World of Warcraft expansion “The Burning Crusade” hits store shelves today. What can fans expect? Two more races, a new profession, a new continent, new mounts and a load of other stuff. Not to mention the fact that a player can now achieve level 70.

They can also expect long queue times and server crashes if history is any indication. With 8 million subscribers already online world wide, the infrastructure may be a little strained.

Blizzard originally delayed the expansion in October in order to further refine the content.

The game is on sale for $39.99 US nationwide. There is a collector’s edition available for for $69.99. The collector’s edition contains the game on CD and DVD, a coffee table book (won’t your wife be impressed?), an …

NTT DoCoMo in Japan recently unveiled ten new mobile phones to the market which will be available for purchase in February. Of the 10 new designs, two stood out a little more from the rest due to some design innovations… and smells.

The D800iDS which was made by Mitsubishi Electric is a clam shell style mobile phone with a shape not much different from many other similar products, but it has one distinct difference – no keypad. Instead of the traditional design of having a screen in the top portion and a keypad in the bottom, the D800iDS has a touch screen where the keypad would be. A number pad can be displayed in the touch screen to dial calls, or a user can simply draw the numbers with their finger or a stylus and the phone will recognize …

A new service from Netflix will allow subscribers to immediately watch movies and television series on their personal computers.

Subscribers will continue to receive DVDs by mail according to their current plan, but subscribers will soon have the added option of instantly watching about 1,000 movies and TV series on their PCs. The new feature will be made available in subscribers’ monthly membership plans at no additional cost.

The Netflix service features a real-time playback technology which drastically cuts down on the time to begin playing to as little as 10 to 15 seconds. The service requires the one-time installation of a browser applet. The applet allows movies to be paused or immediately jumped to any point in the movie.

Bandwidth requirements are kept to a minimum of one megabit per second. With more bandwidth you will be able to …

Google and Yahoo! continue to erode U.S. Web Search market share from the competition according to a December 2006 analysis from comScore Networks.

In December 2006, Google increased its share of Web Search by capturing 47.4 percent of the U.S. market. This marks a gain of 0.4 share points from November and continues Google’s impressive run of gaining share in 16 of the last 17 months. Yahoo! continued to maintain its second place ranking by growing 0.3 share points and capturing 28.5 percent of U.S. searches.

Some of the competitive Search entities didn’t fare so well, suffering from falling market share. Microsoft slid 0.5 percent to 10.5 percent, while Ask Network’s share dipped 0.1 percent to 5.4 percent and Time Warner Network dropped 0.2 shares to 4.9 percent.

The study also reported that Americans conducted …

A California woman who participated in a radio station contest to see who could drink the most water without using the bathroom, died of water intoxication. Jennifer Lea Strange was discovered dead in her home in Sacramento at about 2 pm on January 12th. Strange had participated in the radio station competition earlier in the day. The winner of the competition was to receive a Nintendo Wii.

The contest started at 9 am at 107.9 KDND “The End.” The “Morning Rave” morning show had a contest called “Hold Your Wee for a Wii.” Each contestant had to drink an 8 ounce water bottle every 15 minutes. After the first contestant dropped out each remaining contestant had to drink a larger quantity of water. Many of the contestants …

SlipperyBrick originally brought you the story of the dual format DVD player that was the symbol of unity, happiness and sunny flower filled meadows in A/V land. Unfortunately, real life is not always so rosy.

It appears that the LB HB100 hybrid may be in trouble because it will not receive certification from the DVD Forum. That’s because the BH100 doesn’t really support HD DVD. Sure it will play the movie straight through if you put an HD DVD in the player, but you won’t be able to access the menu system.

The HD DVD menu system is called iHD. For those uber-geeks out there, iHD was developed by Microsoft and Toshiba for HD DVD. iHD is built on open standards like ECMAScript (JavaScript) and XML. …

T-Mobile along with Research In Motion (RIM) unveiled a new “Pearl White” BlackBerry Pearl mobile phone yesterday that will be available through T-Mobile.

The white BlackBerry Pearl builds on the already-successful BlackBerry Pearl that comes in piano black and could very likely be jumping on the trend created by Apple with the iPod and recently released iPhone products.

“The BlackBerry Pearl has proven that it’s possible to provide a full-featured handset at an attractive price point with an uncompromising user experience and an extremely small, light and stylish design,” said Mark Guibert, Vice President, Corporate Marketing, Research In Motion. “We are delighted by the immediate success of the BlackBerry Pearl in the market and we are pleased to build on this momentum with the addition of another stunning color and finish.”

I think Guibert sums it …

Jobs has stated in a couple articles this week, one from the New York Times and one from MSNBC, that Apple will be restricting third party applications for OS X on the iPhone, unlike the open OS X platform for the Mac.

Jobs describes the iPhone operating system to be more inline with the iPod, and less like the Mac or mobile computer, stating that the risk of loading custom built applications onto the iPhone could cause the phone to just not work, or even bring down the Cingular network.

“You don’t want your phone to be an open platform,” meaning that anyone can write applications for it, says Jobs in an interview with MSNBC. “You need it to work when you need it to work. Cingular doesn’t want to see their West Coast network go …

The PlayStation 2 and the Xbox 360 had a pretty good year with game sales. This news comes on the heals of PlayStation 2′s surprising sales showing.

Of course Madden topped the charts as usual. Of some surprise is the number of Super Mario Bros. games sold for the Nintendo DS. The Super Mario franchise continues to shine and Mario apparently ages very well. Another interesting sales figure is for the Brain Age title. Not a game so much as a series of brain teasers and mental exercises developed by Japanese neuro-scientist Ryuta Kawashima, the title’s strong showing gives us evidence that video games do make you smarter!

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The gaming industry did well in 2006, however the real king of the consoles may surprise you. You know that the Wii beat the PlayStation 3. You also know that the Xbox 360 beat the Wii. But who beat the Xbox 360? The PlayStation 2.

Yes, the best selling console of 2006 appears to be the six year old PlayStation 2. Why did a ancient (in gaming terms) console outsell all the brand new rigs? It’s probably the availability of excellent games and the often overlooked economics aspect.

Sony has an incredible lead in game sales. Four of the top 10 games sold in December were for the PlayStation 2, including the number two game, Guitar Hero, which sold over 800,000 copies. The PlayStation 2 also had the number one …

Blizzard Entertainment, the publisher of World of Warcraft and the upcoming Burning Crusade has launched a flash based mini site for the game. The site features some small games, some movies detailing the game play and a lot of explanations for the new features in the game.

Each mini game that you win allows you to collect another jewel into your inventory. If you win each mini game you can unlock hidden content and downloads on the site.

The movies feature the new races,the Draenei and the Blood Elves, in action. The games let you test your skills in a variety of ways.

Various screens in the flash site explain the features of the game. The Burning Crusade features a new profession called Jewelcrafting that let’s a player turn raw stones, which are …

Earlier this week Slippery Brick reported on the XO laptop and the One Laptop per Child (OLPC) organization, stating reports that the company planned on making the XO laptop commercially available for as little as $100 USD. According to Nicholas Negroponte, founder of the OLPC, making the XO laptops available to the public is not in the plans for this year, but may be in the future.

This doesn’t necessarily mean that you couldn’t buy one on Ebay from a kid in Uruguay for under $100, but it does mean that OLPC is not planning on selling you one, at least not any time real soon.

“Contrary to recent reports, One Laptop per Child is not planning a consumer version of its current XO laptop, designed for …

In a repeat of the famous Betamax versus VHS, it appears that the adult film industry has chosen HD DVD over Blu-ray as their publishing medium of choice.

VHS eventually won over Betamax because the adult industry preferred it. In the late 70′s and early 80′s many video rental stores popped up around the country and they rented out mostly adult films in the VHS format. This sealed the fate of Betamax. It is thought that adult films is the main reason that the VCR gained ground in the first place.

Blu-ray was the adult industries preferred standard as of last year but recent trends have changed the minds of some studios. One factor is that there are many more HD DVD players in the form of Xbox 360′s already in …