Supreme Commander

You may remember the lovable yet rascally ioDrive PCIe card from Fusion which we told you about back in the sun-drenched, salad days of September. Well, we’ve gotten a few more details on the “SAN in the palm of your hand,” and we thought we’d share. As you’ll recall, the card is meant to deliver very high, sustained read / write speeds, allowing the ioDrive to perform “nearly a thousand times faster than any existing disk drive.” Well, the good folks at Fusion have now given the system a price — the card starts at $2,400 — and offered up some fresh info, like that the ioDrive is NAND flash-based, will support multiple terabytes of virtual memory, and has access rates on par with DRAM. Which is real fast. Hit the link for a lot more info, and don’t be afraid to peruse the company’s .pdf data sheet.

The homebrew scene hasn’t gotten a whole lot accomplished with this latest round of home consoles — which isn’t surprising given the difficulty of the task and lack of incentives to succeed. Especially with the PS3 shipping with Linux compatibility, the Wii boasting VLC, and the 360 being such a chore to hack and keep hacked, there’s really not much of a point. The Wii was compromised pretty early on to be able to play burned discs and GameCube homebrew such as Linux, but until now Nintendo has managed to isolate Wii hardware such as the extra horsepower of the console and wireless connectivity from hackers. But the walls are coming down. Some hackers from Germany have just showed off their fully hacked Wii at the 24th Annual Chaos Communication Congress. Nothing fancy is running yet, all they’ve achieved so far is a proof of concept that they’ve bypassed the Wii’s protection with some encryption codes they swiped from the Wii’s memory. Apparently a bootable Linux DVD is on the way, and we can’t wait to see what homebrew coders manage to pull off with that Wiimote pointed where it belongs.

[Via WiiNintendo]

You know it’s close to Macworld when even the New York Times is slinging rumors with the best of ‘em, and the Gray Lady is reporting today that Apple has deals in place with several studios for iTunes rentals — not just Fox, like we’d been hearing. Of course, it wouldn’t be an Apple rumor unless it somehow managed to make something as mundane as renting a movie sound like a super-classified state secret, and the NYT says that while it got the info from people “familiar with the negotiations,” they weren’t “authorized” to name the companies involved. We’d obviously expect Disney to have an interest, since Steve’s on the board — but as with all these rumors, only time will tell.

Look, the LCD monitor market is hot. How hot, you ask? Well let’s just say that panel manufacturer Chunghwa Picture Tubes (or CPT) has decided to circumvent the battle for ultimate supremacy in the 19-inch market by creating a totally new size of monitor: an 18.4-inch widescreen display. The new size will feature a 16:9 aspect ratio, 1366 x 768 resolution, a contrast ratio of 1000:1, and a response time of 5ms. The benefit of the slightly smaller size is that the cost to consumers will be lower than its 19-inch brethren, thereby giving CPT a cleaner shot a some market share. The first company to bite on the new size is Acer, which will be using the new panels in a Quanta-made laptop set to hit Europe in the second half of 2008.

We’ve seen a number of large-capacity SSDs, but 64GB seems like the current sweet spot, and A-Data’s aiming to fill it out with a quartet of new 1.8-inch and 2.5-inch PATA and SATA drives. That’s pretty much it on the outside — it is just a big flash drive, after all — but don’t worry, there’s plenty of sexy once you actually get an SSD inside your machine.

[Via PC Launches]

Intel seems like it’s going to be making a bigger push at gamers with the launch of Penryn, and HotHardware managed to score some deets on the company’s upcoming “Skulltrail” platform, which is built-around server-class hardware reconfigured for gaming. The new mobo pictured here supports dual quad-core Penryn Xeon processors, SLI graphics, and four PCI Express x16 slots, as well as two standard PCI slots. You’re also looking at a whopping six internal SATA ports, dual eSATA ports, six USB ports, a lone FireWire port, and Gigabit Ethernet. That’s quite a foundation for a gaming rig — let’s just hope pricing is at least pretend reasonable, eh?

Ready for another go on the Nikon rumor carousel? Apparently, the mythical D60 could be next in line to replace the D40x (pictured), but of course, all of this should be taken with a copious amount of salt for the time being. Based on rumors suggesting that the D60 is coming next Spring (by the same fellow who called the D3, purportedly), combined with reports that the D40x is at the end of its own rope, we’re left to believe that Nikon may be swapping the latter out and replacing it with the prior. Hit the links below for the beginning of what’s sure to be a long road to denial / confirmation.

[Via Photography Bay]
Read - End of D40x production?
Read - D60 on the horizon?

This one’s definitely not for anyone concerned with warranties and whatnot, but those looking to expand their Eee PC’s wireless capabilities without resorting any unsightly adapters may want to check out the latest how-to from jkmobile, which gives you the rundown on adding internal 3G HSDPA to the diminutive laptop. That, as you might have guessed, involves a fair bit of slicing and soldering, not to mention disassembling a standard 3G HSDPA modem (a ZadaCOM 3G+ HSDPA, in this case). The process is apparently further eased if you have just the right Eee PC model, as the 8G’s 8GB SSD drive takes up too much room, and the earlier 4G models require some additional cutting to squeeze the modem in. Hit up the read link below for pics of the whole process and a video of the hack in action.

[Thanks, C.K. Sample]