169. Some Progress Made in Internet Radio Legislation

 The online music industry has always been a touchy one, but the RIAA and internet radio came a step closer to ending online royalty disputes. An agreement called a “breakthrough that will facilitate new ways to offer music to consumers online,” between songwriters, music publishers, record labels and digital music websites concluded a seven year dispute over mechanical royalties and limited music downloads. Unfortunately, sites such as Pandora and Live365 remain in a high-stakes standoff with SoundExchange, the company in charge of collecting the fees for artists and record companies.

 168. AMD Launches AMD GAME! Marketing Initiative

AMD set out to prove it has game by launching a new marketing program called AMD GAME! In a similar vein to Microsoft’s Vista Capable campaign, AMD’s strategy is to certify and label affordable PCs that meet set criteria the company determines can play the latest games.  AMD compares the concept to the simplicity of buying a console.

167. Epic Fail: Asus Includes Software Cracks and Confidential Docs on Recovery DVD

We’ve heard of viruses and other malware being inadvertently included on media coming from trusted sources, but imagine the surprise that would come from firing up a recovery DVD and finding software cracks and confidential documents. The SNAFU belongs to Asus, who shipped the dirty recovery DVDs to several notebook customers. Makes you wonder just what’s going on behind over there.

 166. VIA Vacates the Motherboard Chipset Business

Enthusiasts have mixed feelings when it comes to VIA chipsets. On one hand, the company regularly churned out high performance chipsets well before overclocking became a mainstream hobby. But many remember VIA most for its buggy platforms that often led to an inevitable revision (KT266 to KT266A, for example). Memories are all enthusiasts have left after 2008, as VIA bowed out of the motherboard chipset business to focus on x86 processors. Farewell or good riddance?

165. High Volume of Stolen Bank Data Drives Online Prices Down

There’s an entire underground economy that thrives on stolen data, such as bank account information, credit card details, and other personal information. And at one point, a stolen credit card might have sold for $100 or more on the web, but in 2008, that same card would only fetch $10. The reason? Hackers have gotten too good at what they do resulting in an oversupply of stolen data.

 164. LG 6x Makes Blu-ray Fast, Affordable

Blu-ray adoption got off to a very slow start—in part because of the competing HD DVD standard, but also because of the format’s initially sloooooow burn times and the exorbitant cost of both hardware and media. But with LG’s GBW-H20L burner, Blu-ray’s prospects begin to improve. Not only does the drive distinguish itself with 6x BD-R burn times, making it possible to write 22GB of data to a disc in around 20 minutes, but its $280 price is nearly half that of the competition.

163. Microsoft Manages to Patent Page Up and Page Down Keystrokes

Originally applied for in 2005, in 2008 Microsoft was a granted U.S. patent number 7,415,666 which, among the rhetoric, gives an example whereby “a user is viewing a page starting in a viewing area from the middle of that page and ending at the bottom, a Page Down command will cause the next page to be show.” All tallied, Microsoft owns some 10,000 patents, including the scrollable mouse wheel and double clicking.

162. NPD Starts Tracking Subscription Sales for PC Games

PC game sales have gotten a bad rap and it’s no wonder so many are quick to read PC gaming’s eulogy. But what those numbers don’t’ tell you is what amount is being made off of digital sales and how much subscription based gaming brings in. With the long overdue introduction of subscription based tracking, the NPD takes a step in the right direction into providing an accurate snapshot of the PC gaming industry.

 161. Nvidia CEO Promises to “Open a Can of Whoop Ass”

Want to boost investor confidence? Tell them your company’s going to open a can of whoop ass on the competition. We don’t know if it will work, but that didn’t stop Nvida CEO Jen-Hsun Huang from using those exact words during one of the company’s financial analyst meetings. In fact, the outspoken CEO is rarely without candid comments, including dismissing Intel’s integrated graphics as “a joke.”

160. GTA Hot Coffee Mod Settlement Pays $35 to Offended Gamers

It wasn’t the ability to bludgeon prostitutes to death and take back money for services rendered that caused the biggest uproar. No, it was the not-so-graphic digitized sex scenes only unlockable by downloading a ‘Hot Coffee’ mod that got Take Two in deep doo-doo. But when the dust settled, the class action lawsuit only netted up to $35 per offended gamer, or $5 for those with no disc or receipt. Less than 2,700 gamers participated in the settlement.

159. Voodoo PCs Mingle with HP/Compaq Computers

Not many standalone boutique OEMs are left standing, as many have either shuttered their doors or been gobbled up by mainstay OEMs. And such is the case with Voodoo PC, now an HP acquisition. For awhile, HP kept the Voodoo line separate, but later decided it made more sense to merge its specialty PC division with its consumer Compaq and HP lines.

 158. Pioneer Punches Out First 16-Layer Optical Disc

Sure, a 16-layer 400GB Blu-ray disc sounds groovy on paper, but how far in the future would we have to travel to find a Blu-ray player capable or recognizing the thing? Apparently, not very far. Just five months after Pioneer announced it had developed the disc, the company showed one off at the IT Month Fair in Taipei, and the word is it will work with current BD decks. Bitchin’!

157. Nikon Releases First SLR to Shoot Video

In October, Nikon released the D90, the latest in its line of solid, entry-level DSLRs. What most distinguished the D90 from its predecessor the D80—and indeed from every other DSLR in the field—was its ability to capture 24 fps, 720p video. While video capture may seem gimmicky in a DSLR, the D9 posted some fairly impressive results, and we’ll be surprised if we don’t start seeing this feature in more DSLRs soon.

156. Independent Artists Start Collecting Royalties on Last.fm

Last.fm had been talking about bringing together a business model that would compensate independent artists who aren’t signed with a music label, and the social music service made good on that promise in July. Last.fm’s Artist Royalty Program made it possible for artists and labels to start accruing royalties provided their music was played enough (i.e., didn’t suck).

155. At Long Last, Nvidia Implements Multi-Monitor SLI Support

Life is series of tradeoffs, but one that always seemed unnecessary was forgoing that second display when in SLI mode. Thankfully, Nvidia finally got its act together and in November released new Forceware 180.48 drivers, the first non-beta driver to enable SLI multi-monitor support. The drivers also marked the first time that end users could bring SLI and Intel together without any funky hacks. 

154. Blizzard Sells Authenticator Dongle to World of Warcraft Players

It didn’t matter how many times WoW players casted a level 40 spell of Hacker Protection on their accounts, they still ran the risk of logging in only to find that their loot is gone. To help ensure that such an unpleasant scenario can never take place, Blizzard started selling an authenticator dongle, which generates a unique one-time password every time gamers log in.

153. Mac First to Fall in Pwn2Own Contest

You know how Mac users like to talk about how secure their platform is compared to your crash-prone Windows rig? Next time it happens, simply remind them that during CanSecWest’s annual Pwn2Own challenge, not only wax Mac OS X the first to fall, but it only took hacker Charlie Miller two minutes to make the MacBook Air his ____ (insert naughty word). It took two days to the same to Vista, and only Linux walked away unscathed.

 152. Acer Aspire One

Like virtually every other netbook we’ve seen, it’s about 3 pounds, 8.9” screen, and runs Windows XP on a 1.6GHz Atom processor with 1GB of RAM. Its specs are nearly identical to the MSI Wind and Lenovo S10, but it’s slightly smaller and much cheaper. With a roomy 160GB hard drive, it’s the best first-gen netbook value around.

151. TinyURL Levels Up with Vanity URLs

We’ll never know why some links have to be so long as to take up multiple lines, but nor have we cared much thanks to TinyURL. The only problem is that remembering the random characters at the end of the shortened link never made any sense. TinyURL addressed that problem by giving users the ability to customize the shortened URLs, so that www.tinyurl.com/58dr8q can be more easily remembered as www.tinyurl.com/ForSpiderMonkey.

150. Google Helps You Change the World with 10 to the 100 Project

If Google were a guy, the chicks would totally dig him. Not only is he famous, filthy rich, and good at what he does, but he also wants to help you change the world. The idea behind the 10 to the 100 project was to get ordinary people to submit extraordinary ideas that would change the world. The best ideas will eventually be whittled down to five, among which Google will divvy up a $10 million contribution. What a guy!