At the Las Vegas trade show, LG introduced its GGW-H10N combo drive, which supports Blu-Ray and HD DVD formats.

It can playback Blu-ray, DVD and HD DVD media, along with 4x recording and even rewriting of Blu-ray Discs. Sounds great, but with a $1200 price tag, I’ll be waiting until it’s a bit older before I upgrade.

See specs and pix and CDRinfo.

Is this woman a glitch in the Matrix?  Of course not …….

Google announced Street View a couple weeks back.  It’s a cool/creepy "time-suck" that has lots of people talking, including privacy watchdog groups.  Here are some cool links regarding the new street-level service that’s integrated with Google Maps:

Funny stuff caught in Street View

A reflection of the van Google used to take Street View pics in S.F.

CNET review of the service

Google’s announcement promised/warned Street View would be expanded to more areas "soon."  It currently serves the Bay Area, New York city, Las Vegas, Denver and Miami.

Now we can stalk perfect strangers, not just facebook friends! If you’ve google mapped anything lately you may have noticed a new feature on the webpage known as “Street View”. It’s a function that lets people actually see a 360 degree high-res view as if they were standing at that location. The option is currently limited to San Francisco, Las Vegas, Denver, Miami, and New York but it already appears to be brewing up quite a bit of controversy.

Some ‘street views’ show a man picking his nose, others of people entering strip clubs, college students sunbathing, going about their daily routines. Many say that this pushes the boundaries of privacy. Others argue that negative images, such as the one of protesters outside an abortion clinic in Florida, may create safety issues for the general public.

Google has already instated measures that allow people to request the removal of an image. But is that too little? Where will they draw the line between what is legal to do and what is right to do? In the meantime while they figure it out, I’m looking forward to taking a photo tour of NYC.

No, the laptop industry hasn’t bypassed the idea of quad-core laptops in favor of octo-core machines, since NextComputing’s 8-core flextops are machines you wouldn’t want anywhere near your lap. Based as they are around the Intel Xeon 5300 processor, the NextDimension Pro and Evo can take advantage of the relatively low power requirements of 100W for two quad-core CPUs (down from 160 Watts for its power hungrier desktop equivalent). For a sense of just how expandable the NextDimension machines are, consider that they can hold up to twelve 160GB 2.5-inch 7200RPM hard disk drives. They also manage to pack in four PCI / PCI-e slots in the Evo model, and Firewire, Gigabit Ethernet, and support for 24GB of memory through four DMA channels on both models. These 20-pound desktop machines with a handle will be shown off at Interop Las Vegas later this month, but beyond that we’re not sure when or for how much you’ll be able to lug one away.