Humphrey Cheung

It appears that a pair of very successful anti-piracy sniffer dogs have been too successful for Malaysian crime lords. Mob bosses who specialize in distributing pirated DVDs and CDs are offering a reward for anyone who kills "Lucky" and "Flo" two black Labrador retrievers who busted a huge counterfeiting ring on Tuesday.

A rocket funded by PayPal founder Elon Musk roared into space this morning and almost reached orbital velocity. The Falcon 1 rocket completed its five minute 200 mile journey and met "95%" of its objectives, according to Musk's Space Exploration Technologies Corporation.

We all know that flash memory cards can withstand forces that would destroy normal hard drives, but the folks over at e-fotografija decided to review the ATP Pro Max SD card on a whole new level - they nuked it with gamma radiation. One of the editors also works at a local nuclear power plant and subjected the card to several times the safe annual dose of radiation.

California representative Jane Harman has submitted a bill to the House of Representatives that would ban inefficient lightbulbs. HR 1547 would ban all lightbulbs that produce less than 60 lumens per watt by 2012. The bill would also require that even more efficient lightbulbs be used in subsequent years.

There is a new online dating website that promises to only let beautiful people join. The aptly named hotenough.org functions like a regular dating website with pictures and profiles, but members must maintain an 8 out of 10 rating to continue their membership.

The fastest mobile phone texter could win $25,000 in LG's upcoming National Texting Championship. Owners of LG's enV or V handsets can compete in two regional events in Hollywood California or New York for $10,000. The winners of the events will then meet in New York and compete for an additional $15,000 dollars.

It looks like NAND flash makers have finally stopped the financial bleeding. Prices for most NAND flash chips either held steady or rose slightly in March. This is in contrast to recent months where prices dropped by up to 25%, according to DRAMeXchange.

MySpace is getting political with a new section dedicated to president candidates. The "Impact" page can be reached at impact.myspace.com and has profiles, statements and videos about the presidential candidates in the upcoming 2008 United States election.

Most people probably think of China or Russia as the number one source of hacking attempts, but according to Symantec, most online attacks come from the United States. In its Internet Security Threat Report, Symantec says the U.S. accounted for 31 percent of online attacks with China coming in second with 10%. Germany rounded out the top spots with 7%.

In the wake of a new round of anti-piracy lawsuits filed by the RIAA, the organization's leadership is taking its message directly to students and faculty in an Op-Ed piece. The piece, written by Mitch Bainwol, Chairman and CEO of the RIAA, and Cary Sherman, RIAA's president, was published March 15th in the Inside Higher Ed website. In the piece, Bainwol and Sherman detail RIAA's struggles against piracy calling it "massive theft".

CRT televisions and monitors are in the final stages of extinction, according to market research firm iSuppli. In a recent study, iSuppli found that CRT monitor revenues will shrink by a compounded 22% after 2007. Most of this decline is fueled by lower demand and the closing of several CRT factories.

We already have sub-$100 16X speed DVD burners, but 20X burners should be readily available later this year. Major PC makers like HP and Dell are looking into the speedier burners for upcoming models.

Foxconn is branching out more into motherboards and graphics cards markets by showing off several new models at the Cebit trade show in Hannover Germany. Foxconn is known for their component level products, but could see higher profit margins from more integrated solutions. The company is debuting several Windows Vista-compatible motherboards at the show.

The Internet is abuzz with rumors of a massive price cut in Intel's Core 2 Quad processor later this year. According to HKEPC.com, the price of the 2.4 Ghz Core 2 Quad will plunge 70% from its current price of $851 to $266 in the third quarter. Such a massive price drop would make the quad-core chip cost less than what most dual-core chips are selling for now, but are the rumors true? Intel's Public Relations Manager Dan Snyder pretty much gave us the standard corporate answer.

The eagle-eyed folks over at MacRumors spotted an advertisement on Apple's UK store that showed an eight-core Mac Pro desktop. Presumably the Macintosh would use two Intel Quad-core chips. Apple has since removed the ad from the store website.

The Chinese government has approved Intel's plan to build a wafer plant in northern China. The $2.5 billion dollar factory will make around 52,000 12" wafers a month using 90-nanometer technology. Intel has not specified when the plant will be built.

Intel has entered the flash drive business by announcing its Z-U130 flash drive. Using NAND flash technology, the drive will come in 1, 2, 4 and 8 GB sizes and use a USB connector. Intel claims the drive will be speedy and will read at 28 MB/sec and write at 20 MB/sec.

Intel's demonstration of its G965 integrated graphics chip at the Game Developers Conference in San Jose was impressive, but was it a true comparison against AMD's discrete graphics cards? Now AMD is claiming that the test of video playback against the company's ATI discrete X1600 graphics card could have been misconfigured. AMD representatives told TG Daily that their graphics card should have performed much better and offered several explanations.

Taiwan-based industrial PC (IPC) maker Diamond Flower Electric Instrument (DFI) plans to add AMD embedded processors in its product lineup later in the year, according to sources at the company. Aside from Advantech and ICP Electronics, which already include AMD processors in their lineup, DFI also plans to use AMD processors in its IPC products starting from the third quarter of this year with a focus on the Micro ATX platform.

Intel is trying to convince entry-level gamers to accept integrated graphics with a new hardware vertex shader for its G965 graphics chip. At the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, the company showed off some demos of popular first person shooters on the chip and also challenged journalists to pick out the integrated graphics-powered computer against a computer running a discrete card.

A study on storage trends by IDC shows that we are using billions of gigabytes of storage at an increasing rate. The study predicts that there will be a 57% annual growth rate in storage and that the amount of information created will reach 988 exabytes in 2010. For those of you have to look up what an Exabyte is (like I did), it is a one followed by 18 zeros.

Eidos Interactive wants PSP owners to harness their musical powers with its new Traxxpad software. Traxxpad turns Sony's popular handheld game device into a music keyboard, drum machine and sequencer. Users can create, mix and sample tracks on the go and even helps out amateur musicians by tweaking tones to the nearest note.

Are you a CAD or raytracing professional with several thousand dollars to burn? If so then Nvidia has two brand new Quadro cards for you. The new Quadro FX 4600 and 5600 are not only faster than their predecessors, but also have more on-board memory. The 4600 sports 768 MB of GDDR3 memory running at 384-bit bandwidth and 57.6 GB/sec. The 5600 is even more powerful and has 1.5 GB of memory running at 76.8 GB/sec.

According to a recent survey done by Nielsen, 41% of all U.S. households have a video game console which is up from 39.1% in 2005. An even more staggering figure is that 1.6 million people are playing a console at any given minute, according to Nielsen.

Samsung Electronics has announced that it has begun mass producing DRAM modules with 60 nanometer technology. The 1 Gigabit DDR2 modules can reach either 667 or 800 Mbps speeds and will be used in 512 MB, 1 GB and 2 GB memory modules.