Apple's latest gizmo; the Macbook Air is said to be the "the world's thinnest notebook", 0.16" at its thinnest and 0.76" at its thickest.

Steve Jobs managed to impress everyone by introducing the notebook at the MacWorld Show held earlier this week, sliding the ultrathin notebook out of a regular office envelope. Jobs focused on the new and innovative technology incorporated into the notebook, saying many times that Apple has heard the end-user and he feels that Apple has delivered something that the customer will love.

With CES now wrapped up and the announcement that Warner have decided to go Blu-ray exclusive, all eyes were on sales figures for the coming week. Well, the numbers are in over at High Def Digest and it looks good for supporters of the Blu side.

While the Blu team has not only been able to achieve 85% of HD sales last week, they also managed to keep the competition HD-DVD out of the top 10. The top title last week came in the form of the newly released "3:10 to Yuma", a Blu-ray exclusive while "The Kingdom" was the number one selling HD-DVD managing only 10% of what Blu-ray's number one title achieved.

Over the last week we've covered just about every angle of GIGABYTE's new DES technology, so we thought we'd give you one last DES related story; a quick report from the press conference. Although it was all in Chinese, we acquired an English version of the presentation that we'll do a brief summary of for you.

It all started with a quick speech and presentation by GIGABYTE's Senior VP, Richard Ma. He was talking a little bit about what GIGABYTE is trying to do to help the environment and DES is one step towards that, as the company is expecting to ship no less than one million DES enabled motherboards this year alone. That could result in a rather large overall power saving if all those users take advantage of DES, although the current range of boards is somewhat limited but expect to see DES on just about every single motherboard from GIGABYTE by the end of the year.

A quick heads up for users of the popular FPS counter software Fraps; a program used for benchmarking, capturing screens and recording gameplay video in real-time. There is a new version out this week which includes the following fixes and enhancements :-

* Added 64-bit Fraps FPS1 codec

* Added support for resolutions up to 2560x1600 on single core CPUs

Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Inc, in his keynotes speech at Macworld 2008 said that Leopard, the proprietary Mac OS X has sold 5 million copies in the last three months.

Leopard is definitely on target to be the most successful Mac OS X Operating system software ever. Already 20% of all Mac owners have taken the step to upgrade to Leopard and this statistic is seen as a milestone whereby others can only dream of. Microsoft could take a few pages out of Apples book and firstly show in a detailed way how Vista improves one's life over XP, and secondly they could show how it speeds things up (Not bloody likely).

The spies have been hard at work this morning. Word has it that the dual-GPU ATI 3870 X2 based graphics card is now on order from overseas manufacturers. We've been able to get an idea of what the pricing should be in the land down under and probably a fair idea of what it should show up as in the states too.

We should see the card pop up for around $500 USD. This translates with today's current exchange rate to around $568 AUD before GST. With 10% GST wacked on top of that we really should see the 3870 X2 show up for around the low $600 mark.

The only reason we should see the price go up a lot more than that is due to price gouging a new product. Word is that limited stock will be available but there's no denying that video card sales aren't like they used to be in Australia, so if most manufacturers have stock then getting one come launch day shouldn't be too much of an issue.

The Serial ATA International Organization (SATA-IO) has today announced its new "Power Over eSATA" initiative. This new specification provides a solid steady form of power to eSATA devices without the need for a seperate power cord to the system which has been required by the majority of standard eSATA devices to date.

If only they could have done it right the first time and made this a standard to begin with; but as they say, better late than never.

Serial ATA International Organization (SATA-IO), the consortium dedicated to sustaining the quality, integrity and dissemination of SATA technology, today announced its Power Over eSATA initiative. SATA-IO has begun work on a new specification that will provide power to external SATA (eSATA) devices without the need for a separate power connection. Led by the organization?s Cable and Connector group, the specification is targeted for completion in the second half of 2008.

Thermaltake is constantly innovating to get its message across to its gamer fan base. One of the steps it has taken recently is to introduce videos onto the Youtube platform so that the ever demanding gaming audience can get glimpses of the latest technology before it hits the shelves, or even before the products are reviewed. This unique and forward thinking strategy is making the already steep competition between the big chassis and cooler manufacturers a one horse race.

Undoubtedly Thermaltake is almost the only brand name "in the game" with stalwarts like Zalman and Cooler Master having to re-invent themselves just to keep up. It used to be that Zalman would not budge from its predefined strategy, since its name is already synonymous with solid, reliable, quiet systems. Cooler Master on the other hand are more aligned with mainstream offerings, catering for businesses, System integrators and such like, with only a few of their products geared for gaming. Thermaltake is the only company that has consistently targeted the mainstream and high-end gamer, they consistently focus on lots of flash and plenty of features that keep the gamers coming back for more.

Equivalent to two 24" monitors stuck together side by side, the new DLP prototype monitor from Alienware displayed recently at CES is bound to take gaming and design to new heights. With bigger and better graphics cards going into high-end computers, it seems only natural that the hardware that graphics cards display on should also stretch to new heights.

What makes this monitor special is firstly the response times which are 0.02ms, definitely a major step up from normal LCD monitors. In addition the light source is LED, and the gamma is supposedly 170% greater than anything else available on the market right now.

CES organizers have banned at least one staff member of the Gizmondo website from being able to attend future CES events and they're also considering taking action against the website and its owner as well.

During several press conferences and exhibits at least one staff member would use a universal infrared device to shut off flat screen TVs at random, sometimes several times over during the same conference to really baffle the presenters.

Some would be quick to agree on the actions CES are taking against this sort of disruptive behaviour, others may argue that it's all in good humour and they simply need to lighten up.