The Movie and Music industry in the US is riding high on a wave of exhilaration lately. After their stunning win over the Pirate Bay (although that might get over-turned) it seems they feel they can do whatever they want.

First they decided to continue suing private individuals after saying they wouldn't, then they buddy up to ISPs and ask them to cut people off from the Internet only on their say (a law that was rejected in the EU).

Now they have sent the President of the United States to talk to Spain and pressure them to change their Anti Piracy Laws. You see in Spain, private non-commercial file sharing is legal. As are non-profit bit-torrent sites. But the MPAA wants that to change and change now. Since they have no sway over the Spanish government they chose to send someone with a little more power.

The Windows 7 team has been hard at work trying to improve performance all the way around. Many have wondered just what would be in store for SSD optimization.

Windows 7 will automatically disable many of the features that are designed for traditional hard drives. These include disk defragmentation, Superfetch, and Readyboost. SSDs with better performance will also boot and application launch prefetching disabled.

There is good news for all of you PSP 3000 owners as the PSP hacking crew has succeeded in taking down this version as well.

The responsible party is the ChickHEN project. According to a certain YouTube video they were successfully able to use a TIFF exploit to get into a HEN (Homebrew Enabler) environment.

This is great news although not quite ready for the man in the street just yet. Stay tuned as I am sure it will be out there soon.

Looks like Point of View is working on their very own ION based mainboard. This in and of itself is not surprising, but the fact that they sandwiched in a PCI-E x16 slot and they also opted for a standard 24-pinn PSU connection.

This means that you could drop in a pretty hefty GPU onto this tiny little board. I am not sure why you would want to do that but it is possible.

The rest of the features are pretty stock, there are slots for two SODIMMs four SATA ports and the usual outputs for audio, LAN, and video.

It has been nearly three years since the AMD/ATI merger that stole the headlines everywhere. Now AMD has announced that the two companies are finally becomming one.

AMD has announced that the company is attempting to streamline the way the two companies create chip architectures as well as defining clearer lines of leadership. While AMD still plans on driving forward with both descrete GPUs and CPUs, the company says it will now be "attacking the market as "one AMD."

It is that time of day again, Apple rumor time. Today we have the new rumor that Apple is going to put 3G into a new product.

The rumor brought to you courtesy of Computerworld and a job listing in the paper tells us that Apple was shopping for people to test out 3G connections along with a slew of other connectivity type such as BlueTooth 2.0, Gigabit Lan; the usual suspects.

Computerworld is convinced that this is a sign of the apocalypse well not really but they do feel it is pretty strong evidence that Apple might br putting 3G into their mobile products.

You know I really do like the way the technical press is spinning things these days.

For example, Inquirer Hack Sylvie Barak grabs a kernel of a story from CNET about the new XP Mode in Windows 7 Business SKUs and how it needs VT or AMD-V to run properly and turns it into a mountain of an issue.

First and foremost to all of the people out there complaining: XP Mode is meant for legacy business applications NOT for consumer usage.

This just came in and it is pretty impressive. PhotoFast recently announced its own PCI-e SSD card named the G-Monster-PROMISE complete with some nice performance numbers on paper. But there was nothing to show this in action.

Just a few minutes ago we received some pictures of the card in action.

They were able to get almost 1000MB/s read and write times on this piece of hardware. The pictures spell it all out.

AMD is holding a new contest and wants to demonstrate the link between gaming and learning. According to AMD, this reinforces AMD Changing the Games commitment to advance youth education through digital games.

The A-ha Moment Video Contest asks contestants to create a video explaining how playing video games reinforced something they first learned elsewhere. They also have the My Dream Assignment Video Contest which urges contestants to submit a video with your idea on what would be a gread game to increase learning.

Blizzard has finally annouced ticket availability and pricing for this year's BlizzCon set to be held on August 21st and 22nd.

Blizzard will be offering tickets for $125 and the first wave of tickets will go on sale May 16. They will be available on the BlizzCon website. For those that don't get tickets before the first set of tickets, a second block will be offered on May 30.