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Microsoft--down but by no means out

The living dead never looked so good.

For several years now Microsoft has been written off by friends and foes alike as a shuffling shadow of its former self, doomed to feed off the profits of past successes while it goes gentle into the good night of irrelevance. And yet Microsoft's profits remain enviable and its outlook far from bleak.

It may be too soon to engrave Microsoft's headstone as Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff recently did.

Microsoft, after all, has a history of making dramatic changes in direction, changes that have saved it more than once from software … Read more

Blackbird: Segregation makes a comeback

I tried to ignore Blackbird, the new African-American-geared Web browser based on open-source Firefox, but I can't. The more I think about it, the more the very idea behind it agitates me.

Ed Young, the CEO of 40A, the company behind Blackbird, argues that the browser "isn't about exclusion, but rather inclusion," but it's hard to guess at who, other than African-Americans, are intended to be included in a service that Ars Technica describes as follows:

For the most part, Blackbird works like Firefox 3 and most other browsers, and Young says that everyone is … Read more

HP brings Voodoo into the consumer PC fold

The world's largest PC maker has decided it doesn't need a separate gaming PC unit anymore. From now on, Voodoo will be just one of Hewlett-Packard's consumer PC brands.

Voodoo founder Rahul Sood said on his personal blog that this was "always" the intention when HP bought Voodoo PC in 2006, and "the plan is now being accelerated, ultimately making it a reality sooner than any of us ever imagined."

Sood repeats that this is a "good thing" for the Voodoo brand, and he's probably right. HP knows how to move PCs, … Read more

HP (finally) updates Blackbird 002

Update: Pricing is live on HP's site. The new Exhiliration Edition starts at $6,600, and that gets you 2GB of 1,600MHz DDR3 RAM, two 160GB 10k hard drives, as well as a separate 1TB drive for storage, along with the other specs previously mentioned. This also appears to be something of a deal, as similar specs from other vendors cost at minimum about $400 more. HP's site says "limited time starting" near the price, which we take to mean the price may go up, not that the hardware is a limited run.

Rather than … Read more

Rahul Sood on Blackbird's long upgrade path

In our recent review of the Dell XPS 730 H2C high-end gaming PC, we said the following to explain why we didn't include HP's competing Blackbird 002 in that review's performance charts.

"The reason is because HP hasn't moved to keep the Blackbird's specs up to date. We loved that system then, but we'd definitely think twice before purchasing one now...Until HP updates the Blackbird's configuration options, we can't take that system seriously as a high-end gaming PC."

As Rahul Sood tells it, it's not an accident that … Read more

Photos: Cracking open the Blackbird gaming PC

Right in time for the Game Developers Conference, News.com is excerpting another TechRepublic feature in which they dive into the guts of a popular piece of equipment. With a $6000 price tag, the Blackbird might not be ubiquitous, but it's certainly an object of intense lust for many gamers.

Don't think any PC's worth that investment? Check out the full gallery at News.com: "Cracking open the HP Blackbird gaming PC"

A lab on fire: Five gaming PCs that torched our benchmarks

Let me start with a disclaimer: I'm a console gamer. Always have been, since my friend down the street in Minneapolis got an Atari 2600 in 1979, and I trumped him a year later with Mattel's Intellivision. (Along with George Plimpton, we found Intellivision's Major League Baseball to be clearly superior to Atari's Home Run baseball. Intellivision baseball, hockey, and skiing were pretty much all I cared about in 1980.) Like Larry King with wives, there's long list of consoles that I traded in for newer models over the years: Intellivision to Intellivision 2, to … Read more

New HP desktops shine

HP announced the first product of its joint design efforts with Voodoo PC this evening. Our review of the HP Blackbird 002 is up, and it achieved the highest rating we've ever awarded a desktop. We'll let the review speak for itself, but we'll only add here that while we wrote about a custom configuration that won't be available until Oct. 1, you can buy a similar, fixed-configuration system today for $5,500 that looks like this:

Overclocked Intel Core 2 Extreme QX6850 (2) Nvidia GeForce 8800 Ultra graphics cards Windows Vista Ultimate 2GB, 800MHz DDR2 … Read more

Alpine IVA-W205: multimedia player, Blackbird nest

The honeymoon of portable and in-dash navigation devices continues here at CES 2007. On Sunday, we brought you news of Eclipse's AVN2210p, and today we had a close-up of Alpine's IVA-W205, which combines with the Blackbird PMD B200 portable GPS unit in a unique way. Instead of requiring drivers to attach the portable unit to the front of the installed cradle, (as per the Eclipse unit), the IVA-W205 actually swallows the portable navigation unit, with the latter slotting in cartridge-like behind the installed unit's fold-up screen. Also new on the PMD B200 is its built-in, Bluetooth, hands-free, … Read more