Brandon Dimmel

Last week I reported that Electronic Arts, the largest and most powerful video game publisher in the world, had cancelled plans to open a new studio in lovely downtown Vancouver, British Columbia. Well, it seems EA's problems run much deeper -- in ... fact, the game company recently announced it will lay off a large portion of its workforce. According to reports, EA will eliminate one-tenth of its entire workforce as part of a broad restructuring plan meant to maximize profits and stop the bleeding caused by a dragging economy and slow holiday sales. Although this is not the first word of EA's ... (view more)

ViSplore ViSplore adds Vista's most popular features to the older Windows operating system, XP. Perhaps the most highly regarded feature of Vista is its glass user interface; ViSplore by default uses a Vista glass style skin designed by WindowsX. ... You can also quickly access your desired files with the QuickFind feature, which allows a user to simply begin typing the file or folder they are looking for and ViSplore will highlight it. http://lee-soft.com Unetbootin Unetbootin allows for the installation of various Linux or BSD distributions to a partition or USB drive, so it's no different from ... (view more)

Interested in taking advantage of your that expensive high definition TV by watching movies in the increasingly popular high-def Blu-ray movie format, but still not sure if it's worth buying a player that can't display your massive collection of ... standard DVD discs? An answer may be on the way from Infinity Storage Media, which has released the first hybrid Blu-ray/DVD disc in the Land of the Rising Sun. Although it limped out of the gates in its race against HD-DVD several years ago (primarily because its competitor's hardware offerings were much cheaper), by gobbling up the majority of major ... (view more)

Install Linux On A USB Drive There are so many reasons why having a Linux distribution on a USB drive can come in handy. No matter what OS is on your machine, you can use your USB drive to boot into Linux without effort. From having a rescue OS on ... your key ring to being able to install a new distribution on your Asus Eee PC, a "thumb drive" Linux is extremely useful. This guide will help you get through the process of installing Linux on your USB drive. http://www.ghacks.net Copy Wipe CopyWipe is a utility for copying and/or securely overwriting (wiping/erasing) entire hard drives. CopyWipe ... (view more)

Power User Guide To Google Chrome Become a keyboard shortcut master, take a peek under Chrome's hood, and customize its behavior and skin with some of the best shortcuts, themes, add-ons, and functionality available for this fun and fascinating new ... browser from search giant Google. http://lifehacker.com Exploring Time Exploring Time is a two-hour, prime-time television event that reveals the unseen world of natural change and probes the deep mysteries of time. Each and every day, whether we notice it or not, an endless current of change occurs without pause, flowing relentlessly on the river ... (view more)

Emails written by Virginia Tech gunman Seung-Hui Cho have been released to the media via the school's own newspaper, the Collegiate Times. The messages make up just one part of a the nearly 14,000 documents related to the slayings made available ... last week. It's been a year and a half since the violence at Virginia Tech. A calm has finally settled over the campus, but most students, professors, and staff still struggle to imagine what could have possibly led Cho, the gunman responsible for the deaths of 32 other students, to embark on such a deadly, vicious rampage. The massive store of ... (view more)

Bothunter BotHunter is a passive network monitoring tool designed to recognize the communication patterns of malware-infected computers within your network perimeter. Using an advanced infection-dialog-based event correlation engine (patent ... pending), BotHunter represents the most in-depth network-based malware infection diagnosis system available today. http://www.bothunter.net Cookie Clear Many excellent spyware removers scan through thousands of files, but then only suggest you remove a few cookies. This program removes all cookies, except those you may require in order to log into a forum ... (view more)

According to reports, the Record Industry Association of America, or RIAA, is changing its strategy for prosecuting illegal peer-to-peer downloaders. The group will now work with Internet Service Providers (ISPs) rather than attacking individuals. A ... few years ago, it got very scary for those actively downloading illegal music online. In 2006, the Record Industry Association of America began picking off individuals caught in the act with often devastating results; we all remember the case of Jammie Thomas, the Minnesota single mother found guilty of downloading a handful of songs and ... (view more)

WhoCrashed WhoCrashed allows you to easily find out which drivers were responsible for crashing your computer. WhoCrashed is a comprehensible crash dump analysis tool; whenever a computer running Windows suddenly reboots without displaying any ... notice or blue screen of death, the first thing that is often considered is a hardware failure. In reality, most crashes are caused by malfunctioning device drivers and kernel modules. In case of a kernel error, most computers running Windows do not show a blue screen unless they are configured to do so. Instead these systems suddenly reboot without any ... (view more)

Despite the popularity of Blu-ray players, iPhones, iPods, and games like Rock Band 2 and LittleBigPlanet, the tech industry has not been impervious to the slings and arrows of a declining U.S. economy. According to a recent report, even Black ... Friday tech sales were down this year. Business trackers NPD have released figures for this year's Black Friday score, and results for the technology industry are not good. This year, consumers spent just over $2 billion on electronics at retail outlets, down significantly from last year's $2.21 billion mark. Although the number of sales online seems to ... (view more)