Bad news, folks. We totally missed it in the wake of poor battery life specs, but Nintendo's new DSi will completely ditch support for GBA titles. That not only means no more playing GBA backups (they only loaded from the now extinct GBA slot), but even if you were to load some sort of GBA emulation through the DS slot, chances are that the DS's processor wouldn't be fast enough to handle it (integrated GBA hardware processed these games before). Also, no GBA slot means that the lightly supported but excellent DS rumble pack and similar accessories are dead too. I can't speak for everyone here, but the DSi is becoming a bigger disappointment by the second. [Kotaku]

Bad news, folks. We totally missed it in the wake of poor battery life specs, but Nintendo's new DSi will completely ditch support for GBA titles. That not only means no more playing GBA backups (they only loaded from the now extinct GBA slot), but even if you were to load some sort of GBA emulation through the DS slot, chances are that the DS's processor wouldn't be fast enough to handle it (integrated GBA hardware processed these games before). Also, no GBA slot means that the lightly supported but excellent DS rumble pack and similar accessories are dead too. I can't speak for everyone here, but the DSi is becoming a bigger disappointment by the second. [Kotaku]

This is the most hardass mouse I've ever seen. It's a mouse stuffed inside of an actual grenade shell. Sure, it's a crappy Targus mouse lurking underneath its rippled casing. And you know it's goddamn uncomfortable. But that's part of the point.

When your pasty, sweaty hand is gripping this instrument of death turned into a cuddly gadget, enduring the minor misery in your lower arm caused its frankly horrifying ergonomics, you'll feel like a badass. You totally won't be, but for that brief second, it's not like anyone could tell you any differently. Except for you know, Rambo, who would punch your heart out. [Modding.ru via technabob]

Today the US Copyright Royalty Board is going to decide if they agree to increase music royalty payments as requested by the National Music Publishers Association, and for some reason the British are panicking over the idea that the Apple iTunes Music Store will shut down because of this. The reason for their hysteria is a Board at the Library of Congress deposition by iTunes vice president Eddy Cue:

If (iTunes) was forced to absorb any increase in the... royalty rate, the result would be to significantly increase the likelihood of the store operating at a financial loss - which is no alternative at all. Apple has repeatedly made it clear that it is in this business to make money, and most likely would not continue to operate [iTunes] if it were no longer possible to do so profitably.

As a result of this, the limey yellow press and the BBC are talking about music apocalypse today, Nostradamus style, as if they were one of those crazy potheads who keep writing to us about how the Large Hadron Collider is going to assplode and take the reality fabric with it.

Well, here's a note to all those who are trying to spin this for their own benefit, saying that Apple is "holding its customers to ransom by threatening to shut down its iTunes music download site": Not only there's no ransom because Apple's protected material keeps working even while the store is not but, quite simple, it's just not going to happen. [BBC News and Daily Mail]

Today the US Copyright Royalty Board is going to decide if they agree to increase music royalty payments as requested by the National Music Publishers Association, and for some reason the British are panicking over the idea that the Apple iTunes Music Store will shut down because of this. The reason for their hysteria is a Board at the Library of Congress deposition by iTunes vice president Eddy Cue in 2007:

If (iTunes) was forced to absorb any increase in the... royalty rate, the result would be to significantly increase the likelihood of the store operating at a financial loss - which is no alternative at all. Apple has repeatedly made it clear that it is in this business to make money, and most likely would not continue to operate [iTunes] if it were no longer possible to do so profitably.

As a result of this, the limey yellow press and the BBC are talking about music apocalypse today, Nostradamus style, as if they were one of those crazy potheads who keep writing to us about how the Large Hadron Collider is going to assplode and take the reality fabric with it.

Well, here's a note to all those who are trying to spin this for their own benefit, saying that Apple is "holding its customers to ransom by threatening to shut down its iTunes music download site": Not only there's no ransom because Apple's protected material keeps working even while the store is not but, quite simple, it's just not going to happen. [BBC News and Daily Mail]

Sony's latest JS1 all-in-one is really a nice looking machine, but it's packing a lot of interesting tech as well. Packing a 20.1" 1680x1050 display, the Core2Duo system holds 3GB of memory and 500GB of storage. Audio plays through Dolby-based virtual surround sound and Sony’s integrated Sound Reality chip can record, edit and play back SA-CD music. You remember super audio CDs, right? The only slight disappointment was that the system has no optional Blu-ray integration, which would have been media overkill in the best way. No word on pricing or availability. Full specs:

VGN-JS1E/S
- Processor: Intel® Core™ 2 Duo Processor E7200
- OS: Genuine Windows Vista® Home Premium
- Memory: 3072MB (2048MB+1024MB)
- HDD: 500GB
- Others: WLAN 802.11b/g/Draft n & Camera
- Screen: 20.1” X-black LCD with multiple lamp technology, WSXGA+ (1680x1050)
- Optical: DVD±RW/±R DL/RAM
- Graphics: Intel® Graphics Media Accelerator X4500HD

VAIO JS1-Series

The VAIO JS1-Series all-in-one PC seems to offer buyers the impossible: it has a large, high-resolution screen, yet it takes up less desk space than most notebooks. It achieves this apparent contradiction by virtue of its sleek and stylish design. The compact keyboard can be slotted underneath the main unit when not in use, leaving only a modest footprint on the desk. Even when the keyboard is out, the JS1-Series takes up remarkably little room.

Despite its modest space requirements, the JS1’s main unit incorporates a generously sized 20.1-inch screen complete with multiple lamp technology for exceptional brightness. The display runs at 1680 x 1050 resolution, delivering a huge Windows workspace as well as an imposing widescreen presence when a movie is playing.

All this makes the VAIO JS1 an excellent choice for anyone wanting a rather special home PC. It looks good in almost any room, takes up surprisingly little space and offers an adventurous design a long way away from the standard desktop box. Internally there’s raw power for audio-visual applications thanks to the Intel Core™ 2 Duo processor, plus a performance-enhancing 3GB of memory and a roomy 500GB hard disk providing plenty of space for music, pictures and video.

While the large screen is ideal for photo editing, the JS1 also scores well when it comes to the audio side of things. Movie soundtracks are enhanced by Dolby Home Theatre® technology which creates an impressive virtual surround sound effect, and audiophiles can take advantage of the special features offered by Sony’s Sound Reality signal processor chip built into the system.

This can handle Super Audio CD (SA-CD), allowing the JS1 to record, edit and play music at SA-CD quality, and even upgrade older recordings to the new standard.

Sound Reality can up-convert conventional CD-quality music into uncompressed Direct Stream Digital (DSD) format. Using the pre-installed SonicStage Mastering Studio software, the DSD signal can be re-mastered into 5.1 Super Audio CD, revitalising the original.

As with the VAIO NS1-Series, JS1 comes with VAIO Movie Story and VAIO Music box for easy, largely automated slideshow and playlist creation. The software package also includes the popular and highly regarded Adobe® Photoshop® Elements 6 for powerful but easy to use photo editing tools plus Adobe Premiere® Elements 4 for video editing.

To round things off the VAIO JS1 has an integrated Motion Eye webcam, making it perfect for video chat or blogging. With its versatility, eye-catching design and big screen, the JS1-Series is the perfect blend of form and function.

“Sony” is a registered trademark of Sony Corporation. All other trademarks are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners.

The fine gents over at Kotaku have listed all of the DS Lite and newly announced DSi specs in a one-on-one showdown. We see all of the expected small upgrades—the screens are a tiny bit bigger, the case ever so slightly longer and thinner. But the big surprise? Battery life bites it big time.

On low brightness, the DS Lite was rated at 15-19 hours of life. The DSi gets only 9-14 in the same conditions. That's a loss of 5-6 hours. Higher brightnesses show less battery loss for the DSi, ranging from 1-5 hours less on "high brightness" and stabilizing to a 1-2 hour reduction on "highest brightness."

But a major selling point of the DS was its ridiculously great battery. And the only explanation we could maybe reason is that the DSi could be brighter than the DS Lite, meaning that each of these tiers is actually brighter than advertised in side-by-side comparison. Well, that, or Nintendo figured out how to build DSs even cheaper and let the battery suffer as a consequence.

One thing's for sure. The slight reduction in case size alone is not enough to justify these new battery ratings. [Kotaku and Photo]

The Gadget: Western Digital's ShareSpace Storage is a steely, cubular vault of NAS with fast Gigabit ethernet that brings enterprise-level centralized storage down to the small business and deathcore nerd space, with 2TB or 4TB capacities in multiple RAID configurations out of the box.

The Price: $699 for 2TB, $999 for 4TB (tested)

Verdict It's a cubular vault of 4TB of basically enterprise-class networked storage that sits on your desk and feels like it could stop a round from the world's deadliest carbine—what's not to like?

It's basically impossible to test actual drive reliability in the short span of review time (though everyone has their own opinion about which companies they love or loathe), so really what it comes down to here is ease of installation—which WD is touting heavily, so you won't need an IT geek—and features.

Western Digital's software walks you through most of the setup, though I still had to manually map the network drives in Vista, and Bonjour didn't automatically pick it up on my roommate's Mac. More frustrating is that despite having a gigabit router and using gigabit cables, I did not see gigabit speeds out of the box—or at all, with transfer speeds hovering around 10.5MB/s writing and 12MB/s pulling data. The default RAID5 configuration in the 4TB model (which balances redundancy against eating whole hard drives, leaving you with 2.66TB actually free) is noted for its relatively poor write performance compared to RAID1, and you'd be better off performance-wise with the latter if you're planning on doing a lot of write-intensive stuff, but that still doesn't explain the gap here.

It also comes with their automatic backup and remote access programs, Anywhere Backup and Mionet, though they annoyingly only give you three licenses for the latter, so if you've got four computers you want to continuously back up, you'll have to get another license. But whatever, the best feature is the built-in iTunes music server, which worked flawlessly. Dump a whole bunch of music into the shared music folder and it automatically shows up as a networked source in iTunes and showed up like magic on my PC and roommate's Mac.

Another (small) aggravation is that it's not hot swappable, so if you want to pop out one of the drives and maybe drop in a 1.5TB drive, you have to power the whole thing down. But I can almost forgive that since three USB ports let you plug other external drives into the box to expand storage even further.

While it's definitely overkill for average home usage, if you're that serious about centralized storage (like if you're if prosumer photographer) or you know, actually running a small business, despite its handful of flaws, if you've got the cash, it's definitely worth looking at. [Western Digital]

The Gadget: Western Digital's ShareSpace Storage is a steely, cubular vault of NAS with fast Gigabit ethernet that brings enterprise-level centralized storage down to the small business and deathcore nerd space, with 2TB or 4TB capacities in multiple RAID configurations out of the box.

The Price: $699 for 2TB, $999 for 4TB (tested)

Verdict It's a cubular vault of 4TB of basically enterprise-class networked storage that sits on your desk and feels like it could stop a round from the world's deadliest carbine—what's not to like?

It's basically impossible to test actual drive reliability in the short span of review time (though everyone has their own opinion about which companies they love or loathe), so really what it comes down to here is ease of installation—which WD is touting heavily, so you won't need an IT geek—and features.

Western Digital's software walks you through most of the setup, though I still had to manually map the network drives in Vista, and Bonjour didn't automatically pick it up on my roommate's Mac. More frustrating is that despite having a gigabit router and using gigabit cables, I did not see gigabit speeds out of the box—or at all, with transfer speeds hovering around 10.5MB/s writing and 12MB/s pulling data. The default RAID5 configuration in the 4TB model (which balances redundancy against eating whole hard drives, leaving you with 2.66TB actually free) is noted for its relatively poor write performance compared to RAID1, and you'd be better off performance-wise with the latter if you're planning on doing a lot of write-intensive stuff, but that still doesn't explain the gap here.

It also comes with their automatic backup and remote access programs, Anywhere Backup and Mionet, though they annoyingly only give you three licenses for the latter, so if you've got four computers you want to continuously back up, you'll have to get another license. But whatever, the best feature is the built-in iTunes music server, which worked flawlessly. Dump a whole bunch of music into the shared music folder and it automatically shows up as a networked source in iTunes and showed up like magic on my PC and roommate's Mac.

Another (small) aggravation is that it's not hot swappable, so if you want to pop out one of the drives and maybe drop in a 1.5TB drive, you have to power the whole thing down. But I can almost forgive that since three USB ports let you plug other external drives into the box to expand storage even further.

While it's definitely overkill for average home usage, if you're that serious about centralized storage (like if you're if prosumer photographer) or you know, actually running a small business, despite its handful of flaws, if you've got the cash, it's definitely worth looking at. [Western Digital]

Overheard in MI6 4th-floor martini lounge: "Man, it used to be fun heading down to Q's lab. Shit blowing up all the time, everyone just grinning and shaking their head knowingly (oh, James) when I accidentally incinerated prototype after expensive and high-time-investment prototype. Now? Dude's just going to down to the high street shops and slapping some logos on. Look at this laptop—it's garden variety Z-series: 13.3 inches, Core 2 Duo, 128GB SSD, 4GB RAM, 3G connection, Blu-ray. And he's billing M £3,000 ($5,300) for it. Same for my phone. I mean, they're nice and all, but WTF?" [Gadget Review, T3]