Fan of the original, amazingly atmospheric Dead Space? Well, you're in luck! Dead Space 2 is set for release early next year and a demo for the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 is due out on December 21!

Unfortunately, no PC demo will be released. EA and Visceral have been kind enough to get their scares in before Christmas for the consoles with Dead Space 2 making it's debut on the Xbox Live Marketplace worldwide on December 21 with a PlayStation Network release the same day but for North America only. European PS3 owners will have to wait an extra day.

The Dead Space 2 demo starts off with Isaac discovering the Church of Unitology, trying out some new weapons such as the Javelin gun and also trying on a suit equipped with boot jets that give Isaac 360 degree in Zero-G - sounds pretty good, hey?

I would say that about 99% of all the ultraportables and netbooks on the market lack an optical drive. For some people that might be ok, but if you are business type odds are at some point you will wish you had an optical drive. The lack of an optical drive also means that when you are traveling you can't watch a movie to pass the time. If you need an optical drive for a notebook or netbook that didn't come with one, Lite-On has unveiled one called the eNAU608 that might be perfect.

The optical drive will write to DVDs and CDs and can play recorded media as well. It gets all the power it needs to operate directly from the USB port so no power adapter is needed for the device to function. The drive is very slim as well making it easy to pack away in your luggage or backpack. Despite its small size and USB-powered design, the optical drive supports DVD burning at 8x.

The coolest feature of the optical drive may be the fact that you can customize the top of the drive enclosure with one of the included prints from Lite-On or with your own personal photos. The drive also ships with a simple software program for writing CDs and DVDs. Other features include LightScribe and LabelTag. The optical drive is available right now for $69.99.

The product tie ins for the new Tron: Legacy flick are so widely varied that it's hard to see the tie in with some of the stuff. I have seen some clothing that looks like it was meant for strippers and all manner of toys and video games. We are also seeing audio gear and other electronics surface that tie in with the movie. Monster has unveiled a seriously high-end set of headphones that are the Daft Punk Edition Tron: Legacy headphones.

The headphones are very high-end with a price tag that will make many geeks blush. If you want a set of the headphones, you will need to cough up about $350 to get them. The headphones are on Amazon and at other locations right now and have a cool design that is inspired by costumes worn by Daft Punk in the movie cameo. In addition to the Tron design theme and white color, the headphones also light up like stuff in the Tron world.

The headphones ship with a special surround sound mix of the Daft Punk soundtrack for the flick. The headphones have large over the ear pads for comfort, a removable mic boom for gamers, and noise isolation technology built-in. The headphones also have the Monster ControlTalk cable for making calls using the headphones.

We all know that tablets are going to be huge next year. The things are already selling in droves this year with only a few options on the market for consumers to choose from. The tablet market will swell just as the netbook market did in years past. Intel has offered up a new slide that shows the companies that will be offering up tablets in 2011 using Atom processors.

The slide shows that the tablets will all use Atom processors but will run several different operating systems the OS' will include Windows, Android, and MeeGo. Major makers that will be offering Windows tablets include Lenovo, Dell, Asus, Toshiba, and more. Google Android tablets will be offered by Cisco, Asus, Dell, AT&T, and more. MeeGo units will be the least offered it seems with Acer, WeTab, and a couple small firms offering them.

Intel CEO Paul Otellini said that there will be two Atom flavors for tablets. One will be based on the PC Pine Trial chip and aimed at Windows tablets. The other will be based on Moorestown and while it will have an x86 instruction set, these processors will not be for Windows. This part will be in the Atom and MeeGo tablets.

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.