Amazon,com will start selling the Xbox 360 Arcade version for only $100 as part of their Gold Box Deal today. ($200 up front, but you receive a $100 gift card for Amazon.com) The deal is only good for 2 hours though, but it is highly likely the deal will sell out way before then. This offers start at 3pm Eastern (12 PM Pacific), so make sure your ready to hit the buy button in order to beat the rush. Walmart is offering a simular deal in store this weekend (instead you get a $100 Walmart.com card.) If you can get the Amazon version, since they have MUCH better deals

The Xbox 360 Arcade doesn’t come with a hard drive, so I recommend using a part of the gift card to purchase on Amazon. A 20 gig can be picked up for about $40 if you look around, and you can use the rest of the money to buy a game or 2 or 3. It’s an excellent deal, and pro bally as good as it will get this Holiday season. (Are we talking about Holiday shopping already!?)

If we were to move to the cloud, every person would need to constantly be connected to the Internet in order get any work done. If there is no connection, people won’t be able to access their work and programs from their home systems or roaming laptops. AT&T can barely keep up with the demand iPhone users have over its data networks. The amount of demand that would come from everyone shifting their work to the cloud would render any network coverage useless at this point. Even rural areas in America don’t have a local Internet service provider they can turn to. These people have to turn to a satellite service provider, which has a horrible upstream and downstream rate, and is heavily capped. Until a fast, reliable connection is available to everyone in the world, not just the people in America, we can’t move everything to the Internet.

Virgin offers broadband speeds up to 50 MBPS for only $50 a month in the UK. Meanwhile families in the US can pay the same price to AT&T for only 6 MBPS, for a connection which can be completely unreliable. (I know from personal experience.)

PC Gamers are also still going to want to play games. While services like OnLive sound promising, we still have no idea if they will work to full expectations. Even the slightest bit of lag can ruin the entire experience. Even the quality and resolution of the game largely depends on the speed of the connection. Services like OnLive will display a game a lower resolution than a game played locally, and in a compressed format. This doesn’t make sense when you consider how far some enthusiasts will push their machines to get top resolutions and frame rates.

There is also the issue of data storage. The recent issues with the T-Mobile Sidekick show how irresponsible companies can be with your data. By no fault of the user, all of the data that was stored on the Sidekick servers was lost, due to irresponsible actions of the server admins. The only person you can trust with your data is yourself. The only way to ensure your data is safe is to maintain it yourself with a local physical backup.

Instead of moving to the cloud, I feel we will instead sync to the cloud. Data will be stored not only in the cloud, but locally, where apps will still run on the desktop. These apps might draw the data from the cloud, and upload any changes made back to the cloud. If a quick edit is needed, it would be possible to use a cloud based program to make quick edits, or run PowerPoint presentations. This way you wouldn’t have to carry data around with you and hook up your laptop to a projector. Local programs would still run faster however. Even Web services like PayPal take a long time to load each page. Trying to use full tool sets on Web programs can become really tiresome after a while.

What are your thoughts? Can we actually make a jump to solely using cloud based services?

Right now VMware Fusion 2 is on sale on Amazon.com for $40, minus a $10 rebate, which brings the final price to $30.

From the beginning of October to the end of November, anyone who has purchased a copy of VMware Fusion 2 can get a free upgrade to VMware Fusion 3. Accordign to the official VMware blog…

- What if I just bought VMware Fusion 2?

Customers who purchase VMware Fusion 2 from October 1, 2009 through end of November qualify for a free downloadable upgrade to VMware Fusion 3. In order to qualify for this free upgrade, customers will need to fill out an online form and provide related proof of purchase. The free upgrade redemption website will be available beginning October 27th at www.vmware.com/fusion. Free upgrades will take up 4 weeks to deliver.

If you already oven a copy of VMware Fusion, you can upgrade to version 3 for $40 instead. According to their official blog…

What does the upgrade cost and when can I get it?

We want to make it inexpensive and simple for users to take advantage of more than 50 new features and enhancements in VMware Fusion 3. Upgrades from previous versions of VMware Fusion to VMware Fusion 3 will cost only $39.99 and will be available starting Tuesday, October 27 from the VMware Online Store.

The latest version, set to be released on Oct. 27, 2009, will now have full support for Snow Leopard, along with full support for the features in Windows 7, including Aero. Along with more than 50 new features and enhancements, VMware Fusion 3 will offer much greater support for graphics-intensive games and applications in Windows. 3D graphics support has now been extended to run OpenGL 2.1 and DirectX 9.0c without rebooting. Thanks to the new 64-bit core engine, speeds and visuals, along with an improved battery life, have also been implemented into the latest version.

VMware Fusion 3 will also support a migration utility, that will allow users to import a real Windows machine over the network.

On their official blog, the VMware team also revealed that Fusion 3 can now run Windows apps side by side Mac apps more effectively than ever. “VMware Fusion has been designed from the beginning to make it easy to run Windows apps like Mac apps. VMware Fusion 3 makes it even better with the “Always On” Applications Menu that banishes the Windows Start menu from your Mac and lets you find and launch Windows apps like Mac apps, even when VMware Fusion is not running. Cycle through open Windows apps with “ command ` ”, quit individual Windows applications with “command q”, and use Dock Exposé with Windows apps. ”

VMware Fusion 3 has a retail price of $79.99 and will be available on Tuesday, Oct. 27. Those upgrading from previous versions of the application can do so at the discounted price of $39.99. Those who bought version 2 from Oct. 1, 2009 through the end of November will qualify for a free downloadable upgrade after filling out an online form and providing proof of purchase.

In order to qualify, all you need to is provide them with your college e-mail address (.edu). An e-mail will instantly be sent to that mailbox with a link to purchase Windows 7 at this fantastic price. If you don’t have a College e-mail address, you can also scan and upload a copy of either your school ID, Course Schedule, or proof of course payment to them. It is currently unknown how long it will take them to review these before confirming or denying your claim

Regarding to the 32bit/64bit option, it appears you have to decide which version you want BEFORE you confirm your purchase. The first thing you are asked in fact is which version you want, and link you to a somewhat helpful FAQ explaining the issues. Once this is decided, is does not appear to be possible to switch back to the other version.

Also, this offer is not for a physical copy of Windows 7, but for a downloadable ISO. According to this site, the ISO will be able to do clean installs once you burn it to a disk.

A few months back, Amazon was offering Windows 7 upgrades for Home Premium and Profession for $49 and $99, respectively. If you’re a student, that offer just got bumped down too $30 for either version. If your like me, you’ll be canceling your pre-order there and jump on this deal instead!

Win741.com

Free never stays free. SONY has begun to release patches to games like Wipeout HD, which will allow advertisers to run ads during loading screens. In order to run a full commercial however, the loading screens have been artificially lengthened to allow the full commercial to play. Loading screens are now twice as long (if not longer) and cannot be skipped while a ‘State Farm’ commercial plays.

To add to the frustrations, some users are complaining that games are crashing more frequently as a result of this patch. So, longer loading times, less reliable games, and commercials.

What’s even more degrading is that the ads don’t show up immediately after you install the patch. It can take up to a week before the ads will start to play. So far only State Farms ads are playing, but more are expected to roll out towards the end of the year.

When the idea of in-game advertising first hit the waves, people were generally open to the idea. Then again, most people only excpected to see something like a Pepsi billboard on the side of a racetrack, or Pepsi machines spread throughout the game, like in Bionic Commando. But soon PS3 games have full commercials playing during loading screens,

Wasn’t the entire point of installing games to the PS3’s hard drive so we could reduce loading times? So much for that idea.

A number of people on Reddit.com are reporting that AT&T has decided to block all access to img . 4chan . org. So far areas in Southern California, Detroit, Austin, Houston, and Beaumont “Those who have contacted AT&T representatives were told that the site is in fact blocked, so this isn’t a technical problem, and all the other 4chan subdomains work fine.”

While 4chan is definitely the s**thole of the internet, an ISP shouldn’t be deciding which sites are appropriate for their audience. The ‘Anonymous’ users are still getting word of this, and have yet to react in any major style. What remains unclear is if 4chan will be the only site blocked, or if other sites will fall onto AT&Ts black list.

What is known, is AT&T is great at pissing off their customers, and they sure chose a great place to start this round. Grab some popcorn, this could get pretty interesting!

(Note: I KNOW it’s /b/, not /B/, but Lockergnome won’t let me fix the titles caps.)

Right now you can download a copy of Windows, and put it on a spare USB drive yourself. Installing from a USB drive is a lot faster compared to a DVD drive, and to some people, can be a lot more convenient. If Microsoft were to build on this, they could make installing a fresh copy of Windows a lot smoother.

Imagine a new feature on ‘USB install drives’ that would give users the ability to customize the installation. You could install it once, and all the settings you pick out fall into an install profile for that machine. You could even add your own programs like to be installed, so everything gets put on at once. Windows could even be given the ability to manage license keys for programs.

CD/DVD drives aren’t used nearly as much as they use to be. A few years ago, there was always some disk in my drive spinning away, either installing something or storing and reading data. Now it’s lucking to run twice a month at the most. USB storage is getting so cheap now that it would make sense to start distributing large software packages on them. (Stuff that reaches multiple gigabytes can still take a while to download.) A drive is still more expensive than a blank disk, but wouldn’t be so sensitive to a little dust or one bloody scratch.

Twitter is nothing more than a fad. Before you know it, the next big “social networking revolution” will launch and everyone will migrate to that one instead. Five years ago MySpace was the big thing. Everyone had a MySpace account, and spent every waking moment on that site, leaving comments on other people’s profiles and uploading pictures of themselves to show off. If you wanted to be found on the Internet, you had a MySpace. Nothing was going replace MySpace, right?

Then FaceBook came along, and everyone said the same thing about that site. Now we’re at the age of the Twitter. Twitter isn’t popular simply because it exists. Twitter is popular for the same reason FaceBook is popular, and for the same reason MySpace was popular. It’s because people are on it contributing their own content. Twitter wouldn’t be interesting if nobody said anything. Before you know it, people will start to get tired of Twitter, because of a limited the tools are, and how unreliable the service is. Eventually another social site will launch and will offer all the tools people want that aren’t part of Twitter.

Twitter makes it easy to follow people, and discover new people and ideas. But that’s about it. Any pictures, movies, stories, blogs, or music you want to share happens outside of Twitter. The revolution in Iran didn’t start because of Twitter. We just found out about it because of Twitter.

Besides, discovering and connecting people around the world didn’t start because of Twitter, it started with the birth of the Internet and the personal computer.

Introducing the Hulu Desktop player! A stand-alone player (that requires flash to be installed… again…) that allows you to watch Hulu shows without launching that pesky browser! The player is geared towards media center users, allowing ‘easy’ navigation via a remote control or keyboard. The player is available on both Windows and OS X.

Hulu has posted a video demonstrating the new program.

The desktop app plays video just like the site itself. We still get to watch the same one single commercial instead, and we still get to watch a clock count down the 30 seconds before we get back to the show.

First impressions? It definitely needs some more work. Right now the entire player is powered by Flash, and it brings along all the bugs with it. The player adds support for remote and keyboard controls, rather sloppily. Trying to rewind or fast forward causes long pauses and very unstable playback for a short bit. The player has aslo crashed twice on me while jumping from one video to another.

As for appearance? Navigation is alright, but the UI is butt ugly. Nothing but gray and solid black as a background, with the exception of the preview pic.

The developers didn’t even bother to edit the right click menu, so right click is basically useless here.