Yesterday we stopped by the A-DATA headquarters here in Taipei and one of the new products we were shown was their upcoming S501 SATA-III solid state disk drive.

If you are on the ball, you may remember Chris previewed this drive with some exclusive benchmarks back in June during Computex Taipei and he was completely blown away by the numbers he was able to produce on the show floor. Under ATTO Disk Benchmark, maximum read speeds hit around 408MB/s and maximum write speeds around 220MB/s.

Those results are nothing to be sneezed at though - they are really impressive. Fast forward several months and A-DATA is getting close to actually releasing and selling the S501 and boy, I can tell you they have been working hard on boosting the performance of their first SATA-III SSD to insane levels. We were shown a drive running the latest (and we are told stable and near shipping) firmware that will be displayed during CES in Las Vegas next month that was able to hit a totally amazing 460MB/s on the read and 325MB/s on the write.

Space X has successfully launched a large capsule into Earth's orbit today, with this success it makes them the first private corporation to reach this milestone.

Elon Musk made a fortune by co-founding PayPal and lives the kind of life Tony Stark (aka Iron Man) but, in real life. He's a billionaire who is also the founder of Space X. He is also the co-founder of Tesla Motors and has spent $400 million of his own fortune to advance Space X to it's current point in time.

From here, the plan is cheap space ferrying. The rocket will have capabilities to transport 6000 kg with a return cargo capacity of 3000 kg. The average cost per flight will be under $5360 USD/kg. The previous cheapest option was Russia's Rockot [a converted ICBM] which delivered cargo for $7297 USD/kg (and was reportedly subsidized by the Russian Navy).

The European Commission has issued a fine to AU Optronics, Samsung, LG, Chimei InnoLux, Chunghwa Picture Tubes and HannStar Display after the companies held so called "Crystal meetings" between 2001 and 2006. The fine? €648.925 million ($857.49 million).

The goal of these meetings was for the 6 companies to agree on product range pricing and the minimum prices of LCD's, with the intent of the agreement to boost their own profits. All 6 companies knew it was illegal and tried to cover it up.

Samsung was the one who reported the price fixing and was thus granted immunity (kinda like Survivor) they held that torch and were not allowed to be eliminated. Each company was fined a different amount, the breakdown of this is €215 million ($284.10 million) for LG, €116.8 million ($154.34 million) for AU Optronics, €300 million ($396.42 million) for Chimei InnoLux, €9.025 million ($11.93 million) for Chunghwa Picture Tubes, and €8.1 million ($10.70 million) for HannStar Display.

Crucial have just added Thermal Sensors to their Ballistix line of memory - the memory comes in two-flavors. The first being the DDR3-1866MHz capable, available in 2GB and 4GB dual-channel kits, with triple-channel 6GB kits also available.

Secondly, they have the DDR3-2133MHz available in 2GB and 4GB dual-channel kits. The new memory incorporates a new thermally improved design and a built-in thermal sensor. The new kits are also compatible with Crucial's recently announced Crutial Ballistix Active Cooling Fan.

For more info, hit up their datasheet.

Sitting down? Hopefully you are because this news is a little shocking - Intel has teamed up with AMD, yes... teamed up. They've also joined up with Dell, Lenovo, Samsung and LG to phase out the VGA and LVDS display connectors by 2015.

HDMI and DisplayPort will be pushed up to default connections (which is being pushed now). AMD has said that it will discontinue VGA and LVDS outputs from most of it's products by 2013 following this by a complete stop by 2015.

Intel has also said that HDMI is being increasingly adopted by PC's for easy connection to consumer electronics and TV's while DisplayPort is expected to become the single PC display output for monitors, projectors and embedded flat panels.

Almost all of the SSDs on the market today are packed inside small 2.5" cases. That is all fine and good if you are building up a mobile machine or a SFF rig, but if you want more performance out of a desktop PC with lots of open 3.5" bays, 2.5" SSDs are not ideal. RunCore has launched a new and very awesome SSD that uses a 3.5" form factor. The reason for the 3.5" size is more space for storage.

The new SSD packs in a full terabyte of storage capacity. RunCore says that the small 2.5" SSD simply is too small to put in enough flash storage for all the storage that your average user needs on a desktop. I can attest that tiny 60GB or smaller SSDs are more trouble than they are worth for many computer enthusiasts.

The massive 1TB SSD uses the SATA III 6Gb port for connectivity and is blazing fast. The SSD promises performance of over 500MB/s. The large number of flash chips inside the SSD are divided in two groups. That means that inside the single enclosure is a pair of SSDs and each has its own Sandforce 1200 controller. The dual SSDs inside mean that you can switch the SSD to RAID support for data mirroring. The read performance of each SSD is 285MB/s and write is 275MB/s. Pricing and availability are unknown, but this thing will be crazy expensive. I expect it to be well into the thousand dollar range or higher.

We all know that the Intel Sandy Bridge processors are on the horizon and with the parts will come the need for a new mainboard if you plan to upgrade. NVIDIA has issued a press release today that notes most major mainboard makers have licensed its SLI technology to put into their Sandy Bridge boards. The companies include Intel, ASUS, Gigabyte, MSI, and EVGA.

The SLI tech is licensed to use on the SLI-certified P67 mainboards. "The combined processing prowess of Sandy Bridge and NVIDIA SLI technology will provide consumers with the building blocks for the ultimate gaming PC platform," said Joel Christensen, General Manager of Intel Client Board Division at Intel Corporation. "Both NVIDIA and Intel continue to share a combined passion for furthering the PC as the definitive platform for gaming, and this combination will surely be attractive to anyone building or purchasing a brand new PC in 2011."

Some of the boards will also support 3-way SLI. Naturally the SLI supporting boards will work with any NVIDIA GPUs include the new GTX 580 and GTX 570 boards. That leak about the dual GPU high-end video card a while back would be great in SLI with one of the new processors and mainboards.

Growing up everyone I knew had one of the Polaroid instant cameras. My parents have photo albums of my youth that are packed with photos that came shooting out of the font of one of those instant cameras. My grandmother was always walking around shooting photos with the camera. The sound will forever be associated with Christmas for me and my cousins and I would fight over who got to shake the pic until it developed.

I was among the many who were disappointed when the cameras were discontinued. If you have fond memories of the camera, you can get a very limited edition run of refurbished units right now that work and everything. The cameras come from Photojojo and have been polished to look and work just as if they were new.

My mom had one of those rainbow ones when I was a kid and later bought the block one with the pop up flash. If you have these old cameras sitting around, you could make some serious Christmas cash. Photojojo is selling the 660 Sun for $200 and it comes with a pack of film too. When you need more film, you can get new packs of film for $20 to $23 with eight exposures.

Tron was the coolest film ever when I was a kid and the movie is still really cool. I spent many a Saturday in the arcade in the mall playing the Tron video game when I was a kid. I loved the light cycle game and the one where the face was inside all the swirling tiles you had to destroy. I recall there were several different games you could play on the arcade game, but I forget what the others were now. Disney Interactive Studios has announced a new Tron: Evolution video game to go with the flick launching this month.

The game is on every game console and on Windows as well. Not surprisingly considering it's based on what will be one of the biggest flicks of the year, the title is offered in a few versions for other game systems. On the Xbox 360 and PS3, it will sell for $59.99, which is the typical price of a new game. The Wii Version is $49.99 and is called Tron: Evolution - Battle Grids. The DS and PSP versions are $39.99 and the Windows game is $29.99.

The most awesome version of the game will be on the Xbox and PS3 with a Collector's Edition of the game for $129.99. In addition to the game the collector's also get an illuminated light cycle, protective case, and vouchers for free tickets to the flick. I totally want that collector's edition of the game.

The Apple iPad is selling in droves and is taking a bunch of sales away from the computer market. The wild popularity of the tablet has meant that for a while it was very hard to find. Now that production has ramped up the iPad is easy to find in all sorts of locations. The tablet is selling very well and as Apple fans are apt to do, new rumors are already swirling about the next installment of the iPad dubbed the iPad 2.

According to the rumor, the iPad 2 will be landing at the end of February of 2011. The rumor also claims that Foxconn will have in the area of 400,000 to 600,000 iPad 2 units ready to ship at that time. To add a rumor within a rumor the source cited by Redmond Pie claims that the iPad 2 was supposed to land in January, but firmware testing has pushed the launch to February.

The iPad 2 is expected to get some of the cool new features of the iPhone 4 like a front facing camera for FaceTime, a new Retina display, and a gyroscope. That display is the only thing that will make me want to upgrade to a newer iPad. The retina display on my iPhone 4 is so much better than the screen on my 3GS was. Other rumors about the next iPad suggest that Qualcomm is providing the baseband chips for the device.

Sharkoon reminds me a lot of Brando with all sorts of USB offerings. Rather than weird USB gadgets, Sharkoon tends to concentrate on making some really cool docking station that connect to your Pc via USB and allow you to use your old desktop and laptop hard drives as external storage. The docking stations are a great way to be able to use your old HDDs without having to buy up a bunch of external enclosures.

Sharkoon has announced a redesign of its QuickPort HDD docking station called the SATA QuickPort XT. The redesign offers the dock for the first time with black or white colors and you can get the thing in USB 3.0 as well. The drive also gains a cool backup feature that can backup your machine with the touch of a button.

The single click backup feature is software driven and included on a CD and must be installed to a Windows XP, Vista or 7 computers. The front of the docking station has a LED that glows when the drive is active. The dock ships with a power supply and has an on/off switch as well. The are now five versions of docking station with a USB2.0/eSATA version, USB 3.0 kit that also includes a USB 3.0 host card that fits into a PCIe slot.

If you are a fan of AMD CPUs, today is a good day for you. The new high-end CPU from AMD launched today and all the reviews have landed. The CPU is called the AMD Phenom II X6 1100T and the thing is a beast. The new processor is a 6-core unit that has the same TDP as the previous high-end part of 125W. However, the new 1100T processor has a 100MHz faster clock speed at 3.3GHz with Turbo Frequency of up to 3.7GHz.

If you are the sort of geek that likes to buy the CPU being replaced at a lower price, the former king X6 1090T is still being sold at about £200 (about $315). The price of the new processor is about £225 (about $354). The new 1100T is multiplier unlocked as all of the AMD Black Edition parts have historically been.

If you are hot for one of the new AMD parts, check out the reviews of the new processor around the web at the links below:

Our lovely and friendly GIGABYTE Tech Support forum admin Lsdmeasap has been at it again and has managed to achieve something pretty special.

Using a set of Mushkin Radioactive DDR3-2000 3 x 2GB memory modules and a GIGABYTE GA-P55A-UD6 motherboard, he has been able to push the RAM well above spec and hit the mighty 3000MHz DDR zone. Actually, the exact speed he was able to reach was 3025.80MHz at timings of a pretty decent 9-12-9-31 considering the extreme memory speed.

Using a RAM cooling block that is usually designed for water cooling, Lsdmeasap instead used some dry ice and sent the memory down to a chilly minus 41 degrees Celsius. You can see the results and all the pictures over at this forum thread. Nice work again Lsdmeasap!

Continuing with the constant gusher of Google news today brings us Google Maps for Mobile 5. It was previewed by Andy Rubin once again on the stage of D: Dive Into Mobile - previewed on the prototype Motorola Honeycomb tablet !

The biggest change of Google Maps for Mobile 5 is the dynamic map drawing - vectors instead of flat images that scale much better and will show the buildings fleshed out for over 100 cities.

More additions include the ability to use two fingers to tilt and rotate around the map (in addition to pinch-to-zoom), storage of the vectors are much smaller than the current images which leads to offline caching. Maps will now be kept on a file of the locations that you go to and search the most often - from there it'll be able to reroute while offline in Navigation.

NVIDIA has lost their Quadro and Tesla manager to AMD. The story of Rob MacDonald begins with how he began with taking over NVIDIA's UK graphics sales operation in 2002 and shortly after was given control of graphic card sales into the Nordic region (Sweden, Denmark, Finland and Norway).

Rob was then promoted into Quadro sales and he has been expanding in that role ever since. Why is this news significant you ask? Professional products are the cash cow of the graphics industry...

Rob was 'the man' for NVIDIA as he controlled key accounts across UK, France, Spain, Portugal, South Africa, Norway, Finland, Sweden, Denmark, India and the Middle East countries. That's all you say? Well, the guy would know exactly which customers purchase what and where demand is and also, is not.

I would bet that there are many people out there that want the fastest mobile internet as possible. If you are like me in a smaller city, you may have a hard time just getting a decent 3G signal in your area. If you are lucky enough to live in one of the large cities Verizon is offering its new LTE service to you can get some seriously fast speeds.

Verizon has announced that its LTE network launched yesterday in several cities in the US. The service costs $50 monthly for 5GB of data and 10GB is $80 monthly with $10 per GB over the limits. The carrier also has a couple new modems that will work on the new 4G networks and work on 3G networks as well for about $100.

The new network is ready to use in the following cities:

The best part about the iPhone and the iPad is the huge number of apps for all different uses on the App Store. You can find things to make work better along with games and apps for just about anything else. We already know that Apple is planning an App Store for Mac users but when the announcement of the store was made, there was no indication given on how long it would take.

According to AppleTell an inside source has told the publication that Apple is targeting December 13 for the launch of the Mac App Store. The source claims that Jobs and crew had told devs to have software ready to go as early as today, but that launch is not going to happen today is seems. Apple is still mum on an official launch date.

However, the sources say Steve Jobs is pushing hard for a launch before Christmas and Apple is said to be ahead of its schedule. The publication claims that Jobs had wanted the store live before now. There is no word on why that didn't happen. This is firmly in rumor land at this point so take it all with a grain of salt. I am sure Apple wants the store up in time for Christmas giving.

I can tell you from experience that it can be very hard to find time to get to the gym for some exercise. My gym is only about a mile from the house and some weeks I am just too busy to make it. If you have no desire to go to a gym, but you need to keep yourself in tiptop shape for all those hard-core COD gaming sessions, we have the perfect office chair for you.

The chair is called the GymyGym and the thing is billed as the world's first ergonomic exercise chair. The chair comes in several colors and appears to have stretch exercise bands to hold you up. The chair has a couple elastic resistance bands that have handles on it and you can grab them and get your workout in.

This is a cool concept actually that will let you take an exercise break throughout the day and may help you lose some weight. I wonder how comfortable the chair is, it seems like it would feel like sitting in a lawn chair all the time. You can pick one up for $599 with free shipping or you can pay $299 up front and then three more payments of $133.

The first year I went to CES years ago, I saw a geek running around the halls wearing a backpack stuffed with batteries and recording gear all to support the camera mounted to a hat he wore so he could post video of him actually moving around the show floor. I saw the dude leaning against things resting a lot, the rig had to weigh 30 pounds or so. Today you can do the same thing with the wearable Looxcie camcorder that supports Bluetooth.

This week Looxcie has announced that its camera is now supporting the iPhone 3GS and the iPhone 4G smartphones. The only caveat to supporting the camcorder on the Apple device is that you have to be running iOS 4.2 or higher. There is a Looxcie device on Amazon for sale now that is Made for iPhone certified.

The Looxcie iPhone app can be downloaded on the app store. Perhaps the best news is that the new model supports both the iPhone and Android devices in one model. There was some confusion before with older version of the cameras that only supported Android or the iPhone, not both. Early adopters won't like that their version only supports one platform.

Finally! Australian gamers might soon find themselves unshackled by the current limitation of the MA15+ rating for video games, whilst movies can hold an R18+ classification, games in Australia are limited to an MA15+ classification.

Even if you're 18 or 118 you cannot buy an R18+ game in Australia as they do not currently have an R18+ classification for video games, but this is hopefully... all set to change.

The federal Government has backed a new adults-only rating for video games which could lead to an R18+ classification. Home Affairs and Justice Minister Brendan O'Connor announced on Sunday that the Government will push forward with plans to introduce the change this week.