Ad: Manage updates with the Download App
ie8 fix

x

Venture firm picks up Transmeta chip patents

Updated at 10:45 p.m. PST with additional information about Intellectual Ventures

Intellectual Ventures has acquired the patent portfolio of Transmeta, an erstwhile supplier of low-power Intel-compatible x86 processors.

Intellectual Venture Funding, an affiliate of Intellectual Ventures, has picked up 140 U.S. patents and additional pending patent applications owned by Transmeta, which was acquired by privately held Novafora in November of last year.

The Transmeta technology will be used "through two distinct routes," according to an Intellectual Ventures' statement. Novafora will improve its own proprietary designs by using some of the technologies invented by Transmeta. And … Read more

CNET Live - Episode 87

Ben Heckendorn, famous for modding game consoles into laptop form factors, joins us from deep in the heart of his garage in Wisconsin. Get a glimpse of what he's working on now.

Watch the show on CNET TV.

Things we crave:

Fast Finger Keyboard has keys in alphabetical order.

Cheap 802.11n access point turns your old router into an N router. First Look:

Air Mouse 1.5

Download of the week:

Cocktail

Onyx

Insider Secret:

Dual boot Windows 7 beta

Your calls:

Fabio from Brazil wanted to know a good basic setup for podcasting. I use an Alesis … Read more

eMachines budget desktop airs some stank

Do not attempt to adjust your monitor: yes, the eMachines you see to the left of this copy is just as boring as it appears. It's a budget system that costs $380, so we're not expecting world-class design, but eMachines doesn't even make it pretty on the inside. There's ample room for expansion, but the core components aren't blowing up skirts:

2.1GHz AMD Athlon Dual Core Processor 4050e 3GB 800MHz DDR2 SDRAM 128MB shared NVIDIA GeForce 6150SE integrated graphics chip 320GB, 7,200 rpm hard drive dual-layer DVD burner Windows Vista Home Premium SP1 (… Read more

Analyst: New iMacs could be around the corner

At least one analyst thinks Apple has new iMacs on tap but is mulling whether to include two cores or four.

Shaw Wu of Kaufman Brothers put out a research note Monday saying his latest run through Apple's supply-chain vendors indicates that new iMacs will be out sometime before March, or at most before June. It's been awhile since Apple tweaked the iMac in any substantial way, dating back to September 2007.

The changes this time around would mostly be under the hood: Wu believes Apple is debating whether to use Intel's dual-core processors or newer quad-core … Read more

Adobe tests support for Nikon's top-end D3X

Adobe Systems on Friday issued near-final release candidate versions of Lightroom 2.3 and the Camera Raw 5.3 Photoshop plug-in, software that can support Nikon's new top-end, $8,000, 24.5-megapixel D3X camera and Olympus' mid-range, $1,299, 12.3-megapixel E-30.

According to the release notes, the new Lightroom version also fixes a few bugs: a memory leak that could crash the software while people were making local editing adjustments to photos, a processing error handling smaller sRAW photos from the Canon 5D Mark II, a slideshow glitch, and problems uploading and burning files to discs.

Lightroom is designed for editing, labeling, and cataloging photos--in particular, the flexible but non-standard raw files from higher-end cameras. Adobe Camera Raw is used to handle raw files in the more general-purpose Photoshop software, letting people convert them into JPEG, TIF, or other more portable formats. … Read more

Are today's Macs related to the Mac Daddy?

What is a Macintosh?

After 25 years on the market, it's a good question, since someone with no knowledge of computers looking at, say, today's MacBook Pro, would not necessarily know that it evolved from 1984's original 128K Mac.

But evolve it did, and on the 25th anniversary of the release of that original machine (which is this Saturday), one might indeed wonder what hereditary DNA, if any, today's Macs retain from their much more humble ancestors.

The answer is some, but not that much, at least not when it comes to specific identifiable hardware features, … Read more

Why I can't get enough of Windows 7

Anyone who reads The Digital Home knows that I have issues with Windows Vista. I think it's a sub-par operating system with too many quirks and far too many flaws to make it worth using. I only use Vista when I have to.

So I entered into the world of Windows 7 with some trepidation. Would it be the bloated mess that Vista is? Or would it bring me back to the golden days of Windows and whisk me away from the clutches of Apple? I didn't know.

But after using the beta (a term I use lightly, since this so-called beta is better than anything Microsoft ever shipped as Vista "Gold"), I can say with the utmost certainty that Windows 7 isn't only the best operating system I've used in the past decade, it might be my favorite of all time. And as a person with four Macs staring me in the face as I write this, that's something I never thought I'd say.

But I should note that so far, all we've seen from Microsoft is this beta. The company has a proven track record of promising, and even offering, features in betas that never seem to make their way to the finished product. Yes, I'm looking at you, Vista.

Regardless, the Windows 7 beta provided me with an unparalleled experience. From install to surfing the Web, it's fantastic.… Read more

DivX 7: H.264 w00tage and Blu-ray p0wnage

We'll admit it, we've got a soft spot for DivX. The much-used video codec started as a hack of Microsoft's proprietary MPEG-4 codec, and was born out of frustration with Microsoft's video-playback lameness. DivX quickly became an important ingredient of Internet video, but in an HD era, something with a little more power is needed. Oh look, here's DivX 7. Just the ticket.

Although the origins of DivX are as a codec, the future is likely to be very different, and revolves around device certification. For example, you might notice that virtually every DVD player … Read more

PlayStation 3 moves one step closer to becoming self-aware

So it looks like the PlayStation 3 is about a couple years away from becoming self-aware, taking over the world, and making us all its human slaves--if a few of us aren't already.

Sony announced that the v2.60 firmware update for the PS3, released Wednesday, will include many enhancements to the system's media capabilities.

The key feature, according to Sony, is the new photo gallery app, which allows your digital pictures to be organized by criteria including the camera used; event date and time; colors in the photos; and the number, ages, or facial expressions of the … Read more