Lenovo has posted an order page for the IdeaPad S10 mini-notebook. For $429 you can get a laptop with a 10.2 inch display, 512MB of RAM, an 80GB HDD, a 3 cell battery, and a 1.6GHz Intel Atom CPU. And as one Engadget reader points out, you can apparently knock 15% off the price with the coupon code USPIDEAPAD15.

While you can add software and hardware (like a wireless router) to your order, there does not seem to be an option to upgrade the RAM, get a 6 cell battery, or change the hard drive to an SSD. Perhaps these options will be available later. Oh, and if you want a red or white unit, you’ll have to pay an extra $10. The $429 price only applies to the black model.

At its most basic level the HYDRA Engine is an attempt to build a completely GPU-independent graphics scaling technology - imagine having NVIDIA graphics cards from the GeForce 6600 to the GTX 280 working together with little to no software overhead with nearly linear performance scaling. HYDRA uses both software and hardware designed by Lucid to improve gaming performance seamlessly to the application and graphics cards themselves and uses dedicated hardware logic to balance graphics information between the CPU and GPUs.

Why does Lucid feel the traditional methods that NVIDIA and AMD/ATI have been implementing are not up to the challenge? The two primary multi-GPU rendering modes that both companies use are split frame rendering and alternate frame rendering. Lucid challenges that both have significant pitfalls that their HYDRA Engine technology can correct. For split frame rendering the down side is the need for all GPUs to replicate ALL the texture and geometry data and thus memory bandwidth and geometry shader limitations of a single GPU remain. For alternate frame rendering the drawback is latency introduced by alternating frames between X GPUs and latency required for inter-frame dependency resolution.

At this time, it is unknown whether HP will be using the Nano processors for upcoming notebooks or netbooks. However, regarding the recent rumors of a second version of HP's small-sized netbooks, the Nano CPUs, provided by VIA could actually land in one of HP's upcoming Mini Note PC models.
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According to VIA's comments, a first-tier notebook vendor is expected to roll out a new Nano-powered portable computer system sometime in October this year. Regarding the C7-M processor that is featured on HP's 2133 Mini-Note PC, it looks like a total of 500.000 have already been shipped from VIA to the American system vendor. This is an indication of HP's expectations for this year as far as its netbook business goes.

Does the success of GTA IV goes to show that you don’t need to make games for ‘casual’ audiences in order to reach the mass-market?

"The division doesn’t make sense to us; good games will usually sell and be popular, bad games will struggle – of any type or genre or style. But we still believe big, high impact games will help the industry evolve and further surpass the movie industry as the next mass-market story telling medium.
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"We always tried to make games that anyone could pick up and play. They may, over time, reveal a lot of structural and mechanical complexity, but the first mission of more or less any Rockstar game is very easy and engaging for a reason – because new people playing the game have to be gently led into the world of 3D action games, or open world racing games or whatever. This is the way we try to cater for a mass market ­– but we are focused on making digital worlds that are fun to explore and interlaced with rich narratives, that even the most casual player can become a part of, if they want to."

I am a huge fan of comic strips. The comics section is the first place I go when reading the daily newspaper. (Newspapers, how quaint!) My kids love the comics, too. They wait in (almost) silent anticipation for me to move along to the Sports Section, so that they can get their sticky little hands on the page.

We here at GeekDad are dedicated to providing examples of geeky things that geeky parents can do and share with their kids. This is not one of those times. Well, at least not with the little ones!

Webcomics began springing up like kudzu almost as soon as Al Gore finished inventing the interwebs. Some were good, some were bad, many were indecipherable. However good, bad or fugly they were though, they all had one thing in common: a complete lack of censorship. In the spirit of Bad Dad Month, I have compiled a list of 10 of my favorite geeky webcomics, most of which I will not be sharing with my children until they are well into their teenage years. Let's face it, much of geek-related humor out there tends to have more of an adult/bizarre/sophomoric streak than your typical Sunday Comics page. It can also be hi-friggin'-larious. Tired of Garfield? Tired of Garfield Minus Garfield? Check out the comics on this list and feel free to recommend your own choices in the comments section.

WARNING: All of the comics on this list include adult themes, adult language, adult situations and/or violence. Whee!

Windows is like a real-time strategy game. You can do everything with the mouse, but you'll be so much better at it if you learn the keyboard shortcuts.

We all know the basic keyboard shortcut for Windows. It's often referred to as the three-fingered-salute, and it's supposed to have some sort of positive effect when a program hangs. It's the combination of CTRL+ALT+DEL, and it rarely does anything useful.

Invoke it when all is well, however, and it gives you a bunch of options. In Vista, it lets you start the Task Manager, lock the computer, log off, change a password, and more. In fact, some people think the three-fingered-salute is the only way to call up the Task Manager, but that's not the case; just hold CTRL+SHIFT+ESC and, lo and behold—the task manager appears.

In surfing forums around the Web, I'm surprised by how many people aren't hip to the sheer number of Windows keyboard shortcuts that let you accomplish common tasks and perform basic windows manipulation without grabbing the ever-present mouse. So surprised, in fact, that I now present a primer on the most useful Windows keyboard shortcuts.

NVIDIA IS IN DEEP trouble over the defective parts problem, and from what we're being told, this is only the tip of the iceberg. NV still insists on stonewalling and spinning because the cost of owning up to the problem could very well sink the company.

If you haven't been following the story, the short version, up till now, is that all G84 and G86 chips are bad. Nvidia is blaming everyone under the sun, but denying they have any hand in the failures. While this may sound plausible, technical analyses by people intimately involved in the requisite semiconductor technologies tell The INQ that it is a bunch of bull: NV simply screwed up. Badly. If it was a problem with the suppliers, NV would not be paying out more than the chip cost, much less gagging OEMs: it would simply be passed along.

First came the Chechens, then ethnic Georgians, and then maverick journalists. But now Russia's cracking down on a different social group, a demographic they see threatening the very future of their country. These rebels have pierced lips, ridiculous haircuts and too much eyeshadow. They're barbarians in bowler hats, leather jackets and torn-up tights. Yes, emo has come to Russia — and its leaders want no part of it.

Last month the State Duma held a hearing on "Government Strategy in the Sphere of Spiritual and Ethical Education", a piece of legislation aimed at curbing "dangerous teen trends". There, without a clue in the world, social conservatives lumped "emos" together with skinheads, pushing for heavy regulation of emo websites and the banning of emo and goth fashion from schools and government buildings.

Previously one of the best chipset makers for enthusiasts looking for high performance on a budget, VIA has told Custom PC that it now sees no future in making chipsets for third parties such as Intel and AMD.

Speaking to Custom PC, VIA’s vice president of corporate marketing in Taiwan, Richard Brown, explained that: ‘One of the main reasons we originally moved into the x86 processor business was because we believed that ultimately the third party chipset market would disappear, and we would need to have the capability to provide a complete platform.’

‘That has indeed come to pass,’ said Brown. He also added that ‘Intel provides the vast majority of chipsets for its processors and, following its purchase of ATI, AMD is also moving very quickly in the same direction.’

Scientists near Geneva are weeks away from switching on the Large Hadron Collider, a particle accelerator that promises to change our understanding of the universe forever. A Reddit user, however, has considered the far reaching implications of this device, and fears that a real-life resonance cascade, as seen in the events of Half-Life, could occur, leading to Headcrab incidents the world over.

Upon learning that the Cern lab would be recreating the ill-fated Black Mesa project, Mad_Gouki thought it’d be prudent to send them a red crowbar for the pending alien invasion. Chris knows a few fellow physicists working at the lab, so we’ll do our best to get this in the right hands. Let’s hope they have someone there named Gordon Freeman who knows what to do with it…

f you're a fan of the current crop of Batman movies (you probably are) then you either love or hate the new Batmobile, affectionately known as the Tumbler. If you're in the love camp, then you can now find out everything you'd want to know about the four prop cars they built for the films, including what engine they have and how they were constructed. The in-depth guide is even broken down into categories like the history of the project to how the makers modeled the shape...

Braid is an absolutely brilliant game and quite possibly a work of genius. I don't like it one bit.

First, a disclaimer: I haven't finished Braid, and I have no intention of doing so. I ambled through to the end of the fifth world, and along the way, I grabbed some of the puzzle pieces you need to finish the game. I've gone back and worked through a few more of the puzzle pieces, and I've talked to others about the solutions to even more. Perhaps most importantly, I've heard developer Jonathan Blow give a talk in which he explained the ending, which is one of the most brilliant computer game endings I've ever seen. I guess you could say I've experienced most of Braid's content, just not the way Braid intended.

I want to like Braid. I really do. I envy the people who like it. Partly because I think people who like Braid enough to finish it are pretty smart (this isn't necessarily true of people who finished Portal, a similarly brilliant and economic work of genius, but one that so leads its players by the nose that any retard can finish it and think he's pretty smart and then go online to make "the cake is a lie" references).

There's one boss that stands above all others in Final Fantasy XI. Pandemonium Warden. Never seen it myself (never even played FFXI myself), but I'm assured he's a tough cookie. So tough, in fact, that when the guild BeyondTheLimitation tried to take him on the other day, they ran into some problems. Namely, that it was taking hours to defeat just a single form of a monster that had already changed form 20 times. In the end, the guild had to call it quits, because after 18 hours of combat members of the party started throwing up and passing out from exhaustion. 18 hours? We get it Square, tough bosses are tough, but 18+ hours of combat isn't fun.

I'm reserving any real conclusions for the 4870 X2 until I can benchmark it with retail drivers. There were just too many weird results here to make any concrete proclamations. I will say this: the card has a boatload of potential and if the only thing that stands between this card being great and it being the very best is some software to download then it will be the gamer's choice, or at least dream card, instantly.

The sounds were coming from the basement: a rapid, staccato clicking of plastic against plastic, hundreds of times a minute, too quick and orderly to be described as a rattle and too rhythmic to be considered noise.

In the downstairs den of his family’s home, Chris Chike was sitting in an easy chair with a toy guitar across his lap. While his eyes were trained on a big-screen television inches away, his hands were frantically working the bruised plastic instrument held together with masking tape. His left hand was tapping manically at five colored buttons on the guitar’s neck, while his right hand made graceful leaps between the neck and a large black button on the guitar’s body, where a real musician would be strumming at strings.

His movements were precisely choreographed to the action on his television set, where color-coded musical notes stampeded down the neck of a simulated guitar in time to a relentlessly bombastic heavy-metal ballad called “Through the Fire and Flames.� Some 1,191 notes would whiz by before Chris missed a single one.

Raon Digital (http://www.raondigital.com) unveiled the world's first mini notebook 'EVERUN NOTE' equipped with dual CPU(AMD Turion) in Korea market.

Weighing 742g, the EVERUN NOTE features a 7-inch LCD screen with 1,024*600 resolution, 1.3M webcam, Bluetooth connectivity, and electronic dictionary function. Running on Windows XP Home Edition, it can has various storage space ranging from 12GB SSD to 80GB HDD.

The EVERUN NOTE is expected to be available in early September in Korea as well as North America.

With all the hacks going on this weekend at DefCon, the world's largest annual hacker convention, perhaps the most embarrassingly easy to crack was Medeco's high-security locks. According to a group of security researchers, all you need to get into an Medeco M3 lock, used in sensitive facilities such as the White House and the Pentagon, is a low-res image of someone's key and a credit card.

The researchers took a photograph of a Medeco key, printed the image onto a label and used the label as a cut-out guide for reshaping the plastic of the credit card. Voila; State secrets here we come! Any credit card plastic could be used to create a simulated key, they said.

We have to preface this post with a disclaimer: The Nissan ECO Pedal is not here to take away all the fun from driving, nor is it here to be your nanny. It's not a vast left-wing conspiracy on behalf of Nissan's Swedish division to force drivers to slow down and vote in favor of universal health insurance. Nobody -- not Al Gore, not Hugo Chavez, not the United Nations -- is telling you how to drive your Nissan. The ECO Pedal is merely an option that may appear on some new Nissan cars and trucks. Even if you purchase a car with this option, it will come with an on/off switch. Should you purchase one of these cars, you will not be expelled from the local chapter of X-Terra Owners for Ron Paul. You may, in fact, find yourself driving a little more fuel efficiently.

One of the topics discussed at our roundtable with Sony at E3 (besides their dislike for paying for features and their 20/20 hindsight as to what went wrong with the PS3's development) was piracy. Piracy was half the reason SCEA's Jack Tretton gave to why the PSP is not living up to its promise as a powerhouse portable console, with the other half being the straight-shooting admission that PSP owners didn't want to pay for ports of PS2 games. So what can you loyal fans do when developers aren't putting out the type of content worth playing? Homebrew, the magical world of quasi-legal third-party PSP software including web apps, radio apps, Super Nintendo/NES emulators and ripped PS1 games. I'm going to show you how to get your PSP to do all this and more.

Capcom's going out of its way to make sure its deliciously stale Mega Man 9 offers a true 8-bit experience, bugs and all. The company's Hironobu Takeshita recently told Gamasutra that the download will have the look and feel of a NES-era release, and that things such as sprite flicker have even been included as a -- thankfully optional -- feature.