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Everybody always talks about the price of inkjet cartridges, but nobody ever does anything about it — or do they?

With more and more businesses relying on inkjet printers for their hard-copy needs, and more and more photos produced using computer printouts instead of traditional photochemical paper, the high cost of brand-name ink affects an ever-larger audience.

Some people are doing something about the price of ink — but you need to know both the ups and the downs of the alternatives.

Read the rest of the article at Datamation.

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Congrats are in order again for AMD for its U.S. retail store sales. It’s cool to see AMD smack the giant around a bit, but Intel’s overall market share is still bigger, mostly due to its partnership with Dell.

Advanced Micro Devices sold more chips than industry giant Intel in U.S. retail stores in October, according to a report released Tuesday by market researcher Current Analysis.

Desktop computers and notebooks with AMD chips accounted for 49.8 percent of PCs sold in domestic stores for the month, compared with Intel’s 48.5 percent of the market, according to the Current Analysis report.

“AMD did the unthinkable by surpassing Intel in October. Continuing to hold this lead in the holiday season would be a colossal win for the company,” Matt Sargent, Current Analysis research director, said in a statement.

Last month, AMD’s slice of the U.S. retail store pie reached 67.7 percent for desktops, up from 52 percent in September. And its share of the notebook market in that category rose to 31.5 percent in October from 26.2 percent in September.

Read the rest of the story at Cnet.

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This will definitely thrill some ATI fans out there. A new driver will be needed but no master card! Cool!

A new ATI advisory is out, and it looks like ATI fans are in for an interesting surprise; X1300 and X1600 won’t need a master card. We confirmed this with a few AIBs over the last few hours, but it appears that ATI will release a new driver soon that enables Crossfire over the PCIe bus on Radeon X1300 and X1600 video cards - eliminating the need for dedicated master cards.

Low end NVIDIA cards can already run in SLI mode with out any additional support. Even on high end cards, the SLI bridge can be removed with a performance hit. These bridge-less, cable-less Radeons will represent the purest vision of a multi-GPU configuration. Rather than purchase a BBA (Built By ATI) master card, any AIB or BBA Radeon X1600 will work together in Crossfire mode. AIB partners could not confirm as to whether separate graphic card families would also work together in Crossfire mode.

Radeon X850 and X1800 will still require a master card to enable Crossfire. Radeon X1300 video cards are already filling the channel here and there, but Radeon X1600 is still not expected to hit channel shelves until December.

Source: AnandTech

Wouldn’t that be interesting to see Jack Thompson lose his license!? Maybe the guy could spend some time getting a grip on reality.

Anti-videogame campaigner Jack Thompson has appeared in court to defend his right to practice law in Alabama, following accusations that he violated legal ethics ahead of a civil case against companies involved in creating and selling Grand Theft Auto.

Thompson is representing the families of two police officers and a dispatcher who were murdered by 18 year old Devin Moore in June 2003. In a lawsuit filed against Sony, Take-Two, Rockstar, Wal-Mart and GameStop, Thompson claims that Grand Theft Auto trained Moore to become a killer.

But now law firm Blank Rome has filed a motion to have Thompson taken off the case and to have his legal license revoked. The firm alleges that Thompson has attacked and threatened their lawyers in dozens of press releases which also accused Blank Rome of conspiracy.

Check out the rest of the story at GameIndustry.biz.

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The famously controversial and annoyingly trendy Abercrombie and Fitch just moved up the getting banned ladder. The clothing chain has been boycotted plenty, but this time the ban has had a sex change and is being labeled a “girlcott.” I’m all for wordplay so I’m glad the boycotting girl group … err … girlcotters decided to get clever. Check it…

With a few words on their T-shirts, Abercrombie & Fitch lets young women send a message: “Who needs a brain when you have these?”

A group of female high school students have a message for A&F: Stop degrading us.

The Allegheny County (Pa.) Girls have started a boycott–or girlcott, as they’re calling it–of the retailer. The campaign, conceived three weeks ago during the group’s monthly meeting, went national Tuesday morning on NBC’s “Today” show.

“We’re telling [girls] to think about the fact that they’re being degraded,” Emma Blackman-Mathis, the 16-year-old co-chair of the group, told RedEye on Tuesday. “We’re all going to come together in this one effort to fight this message that we’re getting from pop culture.”

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From AnandTech:

Socket M2, the 940 pin DDR2-ready Athlon 64 Socket, will launch a little bit later than we originally expected with mass production just starting in late April. However, even though the launch has been slightly delayed from the original March timeframe, there is still good news for those on DDR1; Socket 939 will stick around well into Q1′07 on the performance desktop - and well beyond that for Sempron. In fact, AMD’s latest roadmap goes all the way to Q2′07 with Socket 939 Sempron.

AMD has resisted DDR2 for a while, but it’s definitely coming next year. Not to worry though, DDR1 will be around for at least a couple more years.

Check out the full story to get more info and see a release table for the 940-pin M2 socket.

Gotta love the RIAA and MPAA. I understand protecting content, but no one likes sue happy people no matter who they are or what their cause is.

Source: Yahoo News

MILWAUKEE - A 67-year-old man who says he doesn’t even like watching movies has been sued by the film industry for copyright infringement after a grandson of his downloaded four movies on their home computer.

The Motion Picture Association of America filed a federal lawsuit Tuesday against Fred Lawrence of Racine, seeking as much as $600,000 in damages for downloading four movies over the Internet file-sharing service iMesh.

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I pre-orded the Star Wars III: Revenge of the Sith DVD from Amazon last week, and it arrived today! Hurray for priority shipping!

Not sure if the wifey is ready to watch it again, but I am! I like watching Yoda kick butt, and getting to see the the wookies in action is a treat as well.

Probably going to have to wait until the weekend, but this will get watched soon.

Don’t focus just on having fun and making it a happy one though. You need to do your part to make it a safe one for everyone.

I heard on the news last week that Halloween is the second deadliest holiday (after the 4th of July) for drunk driving accidents. I had no idea this was the case. I would have guessed New Year’s was ahead of both of those.

So, keep an eye out for stupidity and don’t let people who were drinking drive until they are totally sober. Take them keys away if you have to. Remember: It’s not just to protect them; it’s to protect everyone, including every child, mother, father, grandma and so on who might be out that night.

Take care, be smart, be safe.

According to milliondolloarhomepage creator Alex Tew, his Million Dollar Home Page idea has been copied, emulated, borrowed and tweaked or downright stolen by over 500 copycats for their own websites. Now, I knew there were quite a few copycats, but I would not have guessed 500. That goes to show you how uncreative people are I guess. Latch on to someone else’s good idea and hope to ride his coat tails. Let’s hear it in Alex’s own words from his blog…

Just a quick weekend update. Apparently there’s nearly 500 copycat sites, which is quite a lot more than the 350 I mentioned earlier this week. I’m sure there are more popping up all the time. It’s almost getting silly now!

Some people were wondering if I thought this site is a long-term business that will run like a regular company. Of course this site is NOT a long-term business - it is a one-off ‘business event’ - a fun idea and an opportunity to be part of ‘internet history’. I naively thought this went without saying, but apparently not. There is no long-term business concept here; it’s a unique idea that will only work once. I really hope we’ve cleared that up now!

Don’t worry, Alex. Some of us know better. We know that this would really have to take an amazing twist to become anything long term. But, hey, who even needs long term when you might have a cold $1 million by Christmas this year!? If milliondollarhomepage keeps up the pace it has set in its first two months, then that’s just what would happen.

In other words, Alex reached $500k exactly two months after starting his site, and he’d hit $1 million in just four total months! Man, envy is just not a good enough word here… Best of luck to you, mate! And if you need a US business partner, let me know!