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Dell surprised many people with its announcement at CES that the next Alienware machine to join the company’s hardcore gaming line-up would be a tiny 11-incher that had more in common with a netbook than a traditional gaming PC, the Alienware M11x.

But despite its diminutive dimensions, the M11x crams rather a lot into its tiny chassis. It packs an Intel SU7300 Core 2 Duo processor, 2GB of RAM, a switchable 1GB Nvidia GeForce GT335M graphics card which can be turned on and off at whim, an 11.6-inch TFT display running at 1366 x 768 resolution, and a 250GB hard drive.

The Alienware M11x, with over 6.5 hours of battery life and weighing less than 4.5 lbs. will start at an amazing $799! Leave it to the folks at Alienware to enable truly mobile performance gaming at an affordable price.

Bryan Brooks won’t be back as sparring partner of Manny Pacquiao after being beaten up by the world’s pound-for-pound king in his first day of sparring session for his world title fight against Joshua Clottey, trainer Freddie Roach said he doesn’t see Brooks returning for more sessions with the Filipino at the Wild Card gym in Los Angeles.

“I don’t think I’m going to bring him (Brooks) back. He got hurt a few times. Manny was too much for him,” said Roach.

Brooks once served as sparring partner of reigning World Boxing Association (WBA) welterweight champion Shane Mosley, but has a lackluster career as a pro with a 0-6 record.

The former light-middleweight, however, was obviously a bit bigger than Pacquiao and has a solid built just like Clottey.

Although up against a non-quality fighter, Roach said it’s a good way for Pacquiao to start and get his rhythm in training camp.

Pacquiao said the first week of training has been so far so good.

“Training is good. Right now, I have pretty good movement. I am throwing good combinations and will definitely be ready on March 13,” he said.

The Filipino will be staking his World Boxing Organization (WBO) 147-pound belt in the 12-round fight to be held at the Cowboys Stadium in Arlington, Texas.

Clottey (35-3, with 20 KOs) is coming in as a last-minute replacement following the aborted super-fight between Pacquiao and unbeaten Floyd Mayweather Jr.

But Pacquiao said he’s definitely not looking past the 32-year-old challenger from Ghana.

“Clottey is tough. He can punch and he’s definitely very strong,” said the General Santos City native. -

Almost sixty years after his death, Mohandas K. Gandhi’s ashes have been scattered off the coast of South Africa, where he faced racial discrimination and developed most of his philosophies.

An early morning service Saturday in a port in Durban on the 62nd anniversary of Gandhi’s death included the laying of flowers and candles on the water’s surface.

Gandhi, known as the Mahatma or “great soul,” was shot and killed by a Hindu tyrant in 1948 in New Delhi. His ashes were divided, kept in steel urns and sent across India and afar for memorial services.

It was not strange for some of the ashes to have been preserved instead of scattered as intended.

South Africa’s state broadcaster, SABC, reported the fraction of Gandhi’s ashes in South Africa was brought to the country by a kin friend.

Gandhi first came to South Africa to serve as a lawyer but there he joined the fight for human rights before returning to India at age 46 to drive for independence from Britain.
In 1997, ashes that had been stored in a bank vault in northern India were immersed at the holy spot where India’s Ganges and Yamuna rivers meet.
In 2007, some of Gandhi’s ashes were sent to a Gandhi museum in Mumbai by an Indian businessman whose father, a friend of Gandhi, had saved them but were scattered in the sea off Mumbai in 2008.

NEW YORK (AFP)—An oil painting once erroneously believed to have been by Leonardo da Vinci sold for a much better than expected $1.5 million at auction Thursday.

“La Belle Ferronniere” — real painter unknown — went under the hammer at Sotheby’s in New York for $1.538 million, far above pre-auction estimates of $300,000-$500,000, although nowhere near the going price for a true da Vinci.

The painting was listed as by “a follower” of the Italian genius.

The oil painting, depicting a richly dressed woman looking out over her left side, was wrongly identified in 1929, provoking a scandalous art world court case.

In 1993 a da Vinci specialist ruled that the painting was executed in the mid-17th century — more than a century after da Vinci died.

WASHINGTON (AFP) – Osama bin Laden’s foray into climate change has sparked a lively guessing game on Twitter as to what subject the Al-Qaeda chief may choose to address on his next tape.

“Bin Laden will carefully explain all the plot holes in Avatar,” predicted Twitter user @larrymadill.

@IPDave said the Al-Qaeda leader would pronounce the 3-D effects in the film “great” but would complain about “too much naked blue skin!”

Another Twitter user, @jeff13164, expects Bin Laden will tell the world “he can’t wait to get his hands on an iPad.”

@Neal_Dewing said Bin Laden is likely to complain though that the latest creation from Apple is just “a giant iPhone that doesn’t make calls!”

The Twitter messages about the next tape from the Al-Qaeda leader can be consulted on the micro-blogging platform at #nextOBLtape.

Bin Laden, in a message aired on Al-Jazeera television, lectured the United States and other industrial nations on climate change saying they are “responsible for the crisis of global warming.”

Bin Laden has a $50 million bounty on his head and has been in hiding since claiming responsibility for the September 11 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington which left some 3,000 people dead.

He is widely believed to be holed up along the remote mountainous border between Pakistan and Afghanistan.

ROME – The legend of Leonardo da Vinci is shrouded in mystery: How did he die? Are the remains buried in a French chateau really those of the Renaissance master? Was the “Mona Lisa” a self-portrait in disguise?

Those are the questions that necessitate a group of Italian scientists who believes that the key to solving those puzzles lies with the remains — and they say they are seeking permission from French authorities to dig up the body to conduct carbon and DNA testing.

If the skull is intact, the scientists can go to the heart of a question that has fascinated scholars and the public for centuries: the identity of the “Mona Lisa.” Recreating a virtual and then physical reconstruction of Leonardo’s face, they can compare it with the smiling face in the painting, experts involved in the project told The Associated Press.

“We don’t know what we’ll find if the tomb is opened, we could even just find grains and dust,” says Giorgio Gruppioni, an anthropologist who is participating in the project. “But if the remains are well kept, they are a biological archive that registers events in a person’s life, and sometimes in their death.”

The leader of the group, Silvano Vinceti, told that he plans to press his case with the French officials in charge of the purported burial site at Amboise Castle early next week.

In France, exhumation requires a long legal procedure, and precedent suggests it’s likely to take even longer when it involves a person of great note such as Leonardo.

Jean-Louis Sureau, director of the medieval-era castle located in France’s Loire Valley, said that once a formal request is made, a commission of experts would be set up. Any such request would then be discussed with the French Ministry of Culture, Sureau said.

From Associated Press

Imagine being able to page through websites, write an email, flick through photos, or watch a movie. All on a big, beautiful, Multi-Touch screen, with just the touch of a finger!

Apple has confirmed that it will be launching the Wi-Fi enabled version of the iPad in the UK in March although has failed to set a price for the new tablet outside of the US.

See and touch your email in ways you never could before. In landscape, you get a split-screen view showing both an opened email and the messages in your inbox. To see the opened email by itself, turn iPad to portrait, and the email automatically rotates and fills the screen. No matter which orientation you use, you can scroll through your mail, compose a new email using the large, onscreen keyboard, or delete messages with nothing more than a tap and a flick.

The large Multi-Touch screen on iPad lets you see web pages as they were meant to be seen — one page at a time, with vibrant color and sharp text. So whether you’re looking at a page in portrait or landscape, you can see everything at a size that’s actually readable.

The large, high-resolution screen makes iPad perfect for watching any kind of video: from HD movies and TV shows to podcasts and music videos. Switch between widescreen and full screen with a double-tap. The YouTube app organizes videos so they’re easy to see and navigate. To watch one, just tap it. When you’re watching in landscape, the video automatically plays in full screen.

With the iPod app, all your music is literally at your fingertips. Browse by album, song, artist, or genre with a simple flick.

iPad has a 9.7-inch, LED-backlit IPS display with a remarkably precise Multi-Touch screen. And yet, at just 1.5 pounds and 0.5 inches thin, it’s easy to carry and use anywhere.

Right now, iPad can run almost 140,000 of the apps on the App Store. It can even run the apps you’ve already downloaded for your iPhone or iPod touch.

With pricing starting from $499 for the 16GB version and moving up through to to $599 for the 32GB model and then $699 for the 64GB in the US, at today’s exchange rates that would equal £309, £371 and £432 it the same prices carried over to Great Britain.

Do you have memory gap? Or often forget important matters so you always miss many things? Why don’t you try this Boogie Board, It can be used to jot down ideas and significant things in technological way.

The Boogie Board from Improv Electronics uses “Reflex LCD” technology which is a pressure sensitive, flexible plastic which, believe it or not, requires zero power to write on it, but does require power for the erase feature.

The erasing uses the power of a small watch battery, and it is good enough for 50,000 erasing cycles. Maybe it’s like an Etch a Sketch when you shake it, but you just push a button.

Just so you know, the Boogie Board has an included stylus, but there is nothing special about the stylus. In fact, any instrument, such as a fingernail, that can exude pressure on the board is good to make a mark on the Reflex LCD board. The user can make wide or thin marks on the board, just like writing with a pencil.

It costs only $29.97 at the Improv Electronics site.

The grass always looks

greener from a distance.

Kids always seem to want to be older. Many single people of marrying age wish to have the stability of marriage. And a whole lot of married people wish they could have the freedom of being single again. Some couples can’t wait to have kids-other would give anything to recapture some of the old carefree lifestyle. There must be something hard-wired into people that cause them to look ahead, to desire something other than their present lives or situations as the ones they would really like to be in.

We’ve all heard the adage, “The grass is always greener on the other side.” Many of us spend such a great amount of time craning our heads toward our neighbor’s “grass,” that we don’t tend or even see the beauty of our own yards (so to speak). If we’re not giving attention to our own yards, then their beauty might just fade. What would happen if we decided to try to find contentment right where we are- in our present situations? What if we gave as much attention to tending the present as we do wishing for something different? Get out the lawnmower and try it.

Not that I speak in respect of want:

for I have learned, in whatsoever state I am,

therewith to be content.

PHILIPPIANS 4:11 KJV

From Coffee Break Devotions: Cappuccino

Jan. 20, 2010- Per-Arne Mikalsen, a photographer, has taken an “object” on his photograph that couldn’t be identified while he was photographing a vast aurora erupting over the northern Norwegian town of Andenes.

Although Mikalsen had taken several images at the same location, just one photo showed a mysterious green parachute-like object hanging with the main aurora. (This time, it appears that the Russian military was not involved in the making of this strange shape in the sky.)

Because solar activity is on the increase, aurora spotters have many opportunities to see the Northern Lights. On this particular night the aurora was intense, stretching toward the southern latitudes of Norway.

At first it seemed easy to dismiss the object as a lens flare or a spot on the camera lens, but after further study it became clear that the answer wasn’t that simple. Mikalsen have been familiar to aurorae of all shapes and sizes, but he’d never before seen a structure like this hanging in the sky.

“I have been working the Andøya Rocket Range for 25 years (the 20 last years in the management) and I have become more and more fascinated by the aurora,” Mikalsen told Discovery News. “Photography is a hobby for me.”

So what could it be? In correspondence with Truls Lynne Hansen, lead scientist at the Tromsø Geophysical Observatory, he doubts that the mystery object can be explained by a technical fault.

“Usually such aberrations appear when there is a small and intense source of light in the field of view, or at least so close that the light from it hits the lens,” according to Hansen.

“Additionally the color of the ‘phenomenon’ is the same as the color in the aurora, the auroral green line from atomic oxygen,” Hansen continued, “so the ‘phenomenon’ is either a genuine auroral feature or a reflection of auroral light somewhere in space.”

The structured shape of the phenomenon, plus its distance from any light sources, seems to indicate that this isn’t an equipment problem. There is also no known aurora that could do this naturally. So that leaves the “reflection from space” argument. So, what else in space that could possibly reflect the green light being emitted by the aurora?

“I agree with Pal Brekke, Senior Advisor at the Norwegian Space Centre, that a reflection from a satellite is a candidate,” said Hansen. “It reminds of the so-called ‘Iridium flares’ — reflections of sunlight from the regularly shaped Iridium satellites.”

Satellite flares are well known by astronomers. As a satellite passes overhead, the conditions may be right for the spacecraft’s solar panels or antennae to reflect sunlight down to the ground. The result is a short-lived burst of light, known as a “flare.”

via: news.discovery.com