Special Offers – Week of November 30th

Good afternoon all, hopefully we find you well this practically arctic afternoon; it’s nice that it’s at least cleared up a little. Anyway, for those of you who read the blog regularly you’ll already be aware, but for anyone new we tend to post our special offers for the week on a Monday afternoon. It gives you guys the most time to consider picking something up while it’s priced down, or to try and persuade the husband/wife that you need a new GPU for work… so it works out best for all concerned.

All that aside, this week we have some nice products knocked down, including a mouse, a GPU and a really excellent Razer gaming mouse mat.

Logitech MX518:

The Logitech MX518 is a solid mouse, with a hand-shaped moulded body boasting an array of buttons (totalling eight). While most will be pushing for laser mice, for all their enhanced accuracy, this is optical, meaning the DPI will be a little lower than most higher end lasers.

Click through to check out our page for the Logitech MX518

Don’t let the fact that it’s optical discourage you though, it boasts a resolution of 1.6k DPI, so it should be more than accurate enough for most of us, bar the more competitive gamers out there. It’s also very well reviewed, which is always nice to be able to say, because our own recommendations will never speak as loudly as those that come straight from people who’ve bought a piece of kit and felt strongly enough about it to come back and put a comment on the page.

Even the review headings are overall lovely, including, “Just bought a second one… and it’s still a winer,” Excellent Mouse,” “Fantastic Mouse,” “Great mouse,” and “What a mouse!” I don’t like to harp on too much, but I do love seeing feedback from customers on an item like this

Logitech’s MX518 is a solid mouse, knocked down by fully 20% this week to €28, which is always nice to be able to say.

Sapphire Radeon HD 5770:

I tend to say this a lot when it comes to special offers on GPUs, but it bears repeating, when it comes to graphics cards, most people are shopping for something specific, or have something in mind. So it doesn’t do too well to keep talking about them endlessly. If you’re at all interested, you should check out our detailed product tab for the card.

Click through to see our page for the Radeon HD5770

Still, there are some bits and pieces that pretty much everyone will want to know about a card they’re looking at, and those are things we can talk about here. Sapphire’s Radeon HD5770 boasts 1GB of GDDR5 RAM and an 850MHz clock speed. It’s also got an output resolution of 2560×1600 and support for DirectX 11, which is likely to be more important to those looking at future-proofing a machine than just casually upgrading. It also supports up to three displays, for those who absolutely must watch everything at once.

The Radeon HD 5770 is a solid card, and down to €138 now, so there’s not much more to say about it.

Razer Destructor:

I’ll be honest, I’ve never had to actually talk about a mouse mat here before, it’s something in which I have a level of interest best classes using terms like “sad.” Razer’s Destructor is actually a lovely mat, it measures 35cm x 28cm, which should be big enough even for those of us who like to use relatively low mouse sensitivities.

Click through to see our page for the Razer Destructor

Aside from everything else, I’m assured that there are still very good reasons to use a decent mouse mat in our modern world or laser and optical mice that track perfectly well on a good old-fashioned desk. Not least of those reasons is the fact that most decent mice will now boast elegant little Teflon feet to help them skid their way around your desk with less friction. The only problem is that you’ll fairly quickly wear down your mouse’s Teflon feet on a lot of desks, so a mat is always good for that.

The other big one is that anyone who moves from place to place or games in friends houses will find that their mouse sensitivity needs to be changed depending on how well the laser/optical sensor picks up the surface. While Roccat’s Kone is excellent for this (saving multiple profiles) it’s also very nice to just be able to just bring your gaming surface of choice with you.

Anyway, for this week the Razer Destructor is down by 15% to the nice, round price of €30.

Bioware Talks up PS3

Well respected game developer Bioware has said that this Christmas, Sony’s PlayStation 3 is to be a “key platform” for games development, indicating that it could be the platform to watch over the winter.

Bioware has, in the past at least, fairly famously outsourced some of its PS3 development to companies with a little more experience in porting or developing games for Sony’s fairly complicated hardware. From now though, it seems that it could well be doing its own work on the PlayStation 3 from now on, at least according to CVG. Of course, the big question this leaves for pretty much every Bioware fan with a PS3 is whether or not we’ll see Mass Effect and its upcoming sequel hit Sony’s console.

Google Readying Chrome for Mac

Google’s Chrome web browser may be very well thought-of indeed when it comes to Windows, but on other platforms its history is a little less to be proud of. Now though, it seems the search giant is readying a Mac version of the browser.

Many Mac users had long since given up on getting an official release of Chrome in the near future, opting instead to just download a string of developer builds of Chromium that, while increasingly stable, often failed to deliver the same functionality as Windows versions of Google Chrome. Now though, Google has decided that it’d like for Mac users to have a beta version by the end of the year. Now though, we have word that the Mac version of Chrome will be missing some features.

Sony Debuts Short Range Wireless

Sony is showing off some new short range wireless technology it calls TransferJet, which supports reasonably high-speed, short range wireless data transfer, ideal for portable devices.

According to Engadget, the whole idea with TransferJet seems to be that it offers an alternative to USB-style connections for data transfer to mobile devices. It might seem relatively simple, but with a theoretical maximum speed of 560Mbps at a range of 3cm there’s no real reason to need something like USB for mobile devices once hardware like TransferJet achieves some solid penetration.

Of course, it’s excellent to see that there’s also some fairly widespread support for Sony’s new attempt to make short-range wireless technology widespread. Brands that we’re interested to see supporting TransferJet include Canon, Nikon, Samsung, Casio, Kodak and Olympus. Admittedly, they’re mostly camera manufacturers for now, but the fact that there are some phone companies in there is fairly interesting.

If only for simple things like transferring contact information and photos, it’s certainly an interesting concept, and in tandem with things like induction-based wireless charging for mobile devices it certainly does make for a very interesting bit of near-future wireless charging and fast data-transfer when it comes to mobile devices.

For now we’re left a little wanting when it comes to details of devices we can expect to see it in, but if you’re at all interested to see what Sony expects to see its short range wireless used for then you’d do well to check out the video over at Engadget, where it shows some genuinely impressive and very simple shots of the devices at work.

The Pirate Bay Gets Tougher

In a genuinely bizarre turn of events, it seems as though renewed attempts to have file sharing haven and practical Mos Eisley of the internet, The Pirate Bay, shut down have pushed the site into a position where it could be impossible to do so.

There’s a very lengthy write-up of the history leading to the most changes to the Pirate Bay’s structure over at TorrentFreak, but the long and short of it is that the fact that the Pirate Bay no longer boasts its own tracker could well have done an awful lot to shake up the cases against the illegal filesharing service. For one, it could well mean that the current cases being fought in Sweden don’t mean quite as much, with the site in question now entirely outside of Sweden.

Repeated attempts to disconnect the Pirate Bay have seen the site move around so much, geographically, that it was eventually carried out of its home country. Those individuals behind the Pirate Bay itself are now quite a bit outside of Sweden’s jurisdiction, with Frederik Neij safely holed up in Thailand while Gottfrid Svartholm is, apparently, spending his time in Cambodia.

Neij was good enough to comment on the current situation of the Pirate Bay last week when he said that,

“I am wondering if Swedish law has the power to issue a prohibition or penalty against a website in another country and my adopted acts in another country with a website that does not exist in Sweden.”

Certainly, it’s an interesting question, but the fact is that there’s an awful lot of money behind the case against the Pirate Bay, and it seems entirely likely that the case will be pursued as far as it possibly can be. Still, the whole thing is very interesting, given the lengths to which the copyright holders involved have gone to in shutting down the whole thing down.

For those interested in reading (an awful lot) more on the topic, the TorrentFreak article on the current state of the Pirate Bay has much more detail.

BBC Refuses iPlayer for Xbox

Microsoft has been trying to gain access to BBC’s fantastically popular iPlayer service for quite a while, but word has come out that the BBC has blocked the company from making it available.

Managing to boast support for the BBC iPlayer would be a major feather in Microsoft’s cap, but for now it seems as though Xbox users are to remain out in the cold when it comes to the web-based video service. The BBC’s refusal to allow the service to hit Microsoft’s Xbox 360 seems, according to The Telegraph, to be wrapped up in the way that Microsoft charges for Xbox Live Gold memberships, which would likely be required to view the service. According to the Telegraph, the BBC explained the whole thing in fairly certain terms, saying,

“Microsoft only wants to offer its users access to platforms it can charge for as this is the model it is pursuing. It wants to ensure that only those paying for Xbox Live Gold accounts can access its additional content services and even then there is usually a charge on top to get access to those.”

While all of this means relatively little to those of us in Ireland, with ways to use BBC’s iPlayer having been fairly quickly locked down, it’s still a fairly interesting point in the Xbox 360’s development.

It’s well worth pointing out that both Sony’s PlayStation 3 and Nintendo’s Wii boast their own iPlayer offerings for free. The BBC has been more than happy to provide access to its content on the basis that users aren’t being charged to access that content… if we take this news in the light of Microsoft’s offer of free Xbox Live Gold membership for European users during the week, rumours that the service is being tested to see just how well a free service could be provided start to look a little more plausible.

For now, there’s no way to know, and it could well all be just wishful thinking, but that’s life.

Twitter to Charge in Japan

Twitter is changing shape dramatically for its Japanese users beginning this coming January, with a move to a subscription model to charge users, depending on the manner in which they use the service.

While the average user won’t be charged to actually write to and update their own Twitter accounts, MediaAsia is reporting that those users looking to follow popular accounts will be charged for the privilege. So-called “premium” accounts will require users to pay to follow them. It’s certainly a monumental shift in the way the whole thing works, but for now we’re just curious to see how well it manages to launch…

Of course, many have been quick to point out that the Twitter model is fairly different for Japanese users, with the official Twitter.co.jp having only launched around a month ago. Moreover, the Japanese version of Twitter is already being billed as a bit of a different animal to the international version; it boasts its own video upload service for one, which makes the whole thing a little different.

Obviously enough, there are different cultural considerations for Twitter in different regions, but if the service manages to catch on in Japan with a for-pay model on premium accounts then we’d be curious to see if that’s something that the micro-blogging business starts to adopt in other regions.

For what it’s worth, we certainly doubt it’ll ever hit on our end; the fact that Twitter is free at the point of use has long been the driving force behind adoption of the service. The idea that people might have to pay to use it sounds as though it could be the fastest way possible to lose half of a service’s userbase, even if it is just to follow so-called “premium accounts.”

Still, if Twitter Japan can do it…

Bing Posts Top Searches of 2009

Microsoft’s rebranded version of its older MSN Live Search search engine, now known as Bing, might well come under a lot of fire for generally just not being Google, but it certainly manages to drum up interest well, this week posting the most popular search terms of 2009.

It might not seem like a huge deal, but certainly the folks at Bing seem quite happy to talk about the searches that defined the engine’s use over the course of this year. Naturally, the results do seem to focus very much on the dead celebrity names, but those popular terms that aren’t celebrity related do highlight what people are using search engines for when they’re not trying to keep up with breaking news.

Dell Releases Chrome OS for Netbooks

Dell has released an image of Google’s recently released early build of its upcoming entry to the operating system market, Chrome OS, that can be mounted from a USB stick. It’s made for use with Dell’s Mini 10 netbooks for now.

If nothing else, it’s interesting to see that this Chrome OS build has been released directly from Dell for the Mini 10v specifically. If you’ve not encountered it before, we ran an article a while back on how to get a Mini 10v to run Apple’s Mac OS X (at least up as far as the first update to Snow Leopard, because after that Apple dropped support for Intel’s Atom mobile processor line). For now though, there are some caveats about using Dell’s Chrome OS build.

Two Jailed over YouTube Rap

Two young men from Massachusetts have been imprisoned for making a threatening rap video about members of the local police department, and then posting that video to YouTube for all the world to see.

In a case where the operative words should likely be “old enough to know better,” the Boston Globe is reporting that the two men imprisoned are aged 24 and 28. Normally, they might be expected to get away with a slap on the wrist, but the whole situation was aggravated a bit by the fact that the two are touting guns in the video, which is dubbed over with various gunshots. At one point, two officer’s are named, with each being followed by a gunshot and a quick snap of a gun…