IT News HeadLines (Tech Report) 12/08/2010

Rumor: HP's webOS slate will be out in early 2011
HP seems to have hit kind of a rough patch, with both CEO Mark Hurd and Palm Pre designer Peter Skillman departing over the span of a few days. If we're to believe the folks at Engadget, though, that webOS slate everyone's been talking about hasn't been canned yet; in...
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Self-encrypting Toshiba hard drives can erase themselves
Hard drives with on-the-fly encryption have been available for quite some time now. Even SSDs are getting in on the action; SandForce's SF-1000-series flash controller encrypts drive contents by default. Toshiba has now added a new twist to the concept by allowing self-encrypting drives effectively to erase...
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Poll: What's your ideal laptop size?
When I bought my first laptop more than a decade ago, there were only a few sizes from which to choose: big, bigger, and huge. Well, maybe the selection wasn't quite that bad, but it pales in comparison to what's available today. Netbooks cover the 9-12" slice of...
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Guild Wars 2 Manifesto promises to reinvent the MMORPG
If you haven't been following the Guild Wars 2 developers' blog, you should be, because the folks there are saying an awful lot of things that make an awful lot of sense about how role-playing games could be improved. They're not just talking about it, of course: they're...
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Test your PC's mettle with the Mafia II demo
Last month, Mafia II publisher 2K games released some surprisingly stiff system requirements for the upcoming open-world shooter. If you want to enable all the in-game eye candy and physics effects, you're going to need a pretty powerful PC. The full game isn't set to arrive until...
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SuperSpeed USB 3.0 added to Zotac Mini ITX board
Zotac's first Mini ITX spin on the H55 Express chipset won a TR Recommended award when we reviewed the board back in April. At the time, we lamented the lack of USB 3.0 connectivity—something that Gigabyte's H55-based Mini ITX board now includes. It seems Zotac has...
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