Making like a good social network and copying its competitors more successful aspects, Facebook has taken the liberty of using the @ symbol to tag friends in posts and status updates, a method that was popularized by Twitter.

Currently, while on Twitter you can use the @ symbol to refer to, or directly respond to a friend (ex: Hanging out with the coolest guy ever, @asalisbury). And, exactly as it’s done on Twitter, Facebook will reportedly auto-generate names with you enter part of a friend’s name. Don’t worry though, if the status update is too embarrassing you will be able to untag yourself.

The new feature is available now, so feel free to go give it a whirl.

While Intel’s Atom processor is meant for low-power demand machines, such as netbooks, it’s found a new use with a not-so-likely candidate – a supercomputer.

Silicon Graphics (SGI) has started exhibiting a new concept for a supercomputer that could pack almost 10,000 Intel Atom processors into one rack. SGI is planning to name it the Molecule.

The Molecule could reportedly offer the horsepower and memory bandwidth of more than 750 high-end desktop PCs, and consume only half the power. It would also occupy a meager 1.4 percent of the physical space.

As it stands, the PC gaming industry is estimated to be worth a massive $20 billion today, and it is predicted to enlarge to $34 billion by 2012.

While many have claimed that PC gaming is dying, they don’t take into account the sales of gaming-oriented PCs. According to Ted Pollack, one of the two men behind this robust estimation, “Retail software figures are not an accurate barometer for the health of the PC gaming industry. The retail numbers don’t capture the casual and digitally distributed games, either.”

Pollack goes on to state that PC gamers don’t really buy that many games to begin with. “Enthusiast PC gamers often latch onto one or two games that offer multiplayer options and stick to these titles for years. Hardware is where they spend the big bucks.”

And yes, it is noticeable that a good amount of the sales went to complete PCs, but there’s also a large market of you that buy your own parts. Many of the sales come from upgrade pieces such as improved graphics cards and memory. And for this, we at Maximum PC salute you.

So you’re looking to get your hands on a tiny projector, but that Pico just isn’t small enough? Well, it looks like the folks at Konica Minolta have heeded your call, and are currently in the process of making a projector that’s no bigger than the average thumb dive.

The new projector is reportedly going to be a mere 1.6 inches long, .79 inch wide and a paltry .3 inch thick. What’s more, is the projector will be able to put up a 20-inch XGA color image from a distance of about two feet.

What makes it all possible is the use of laser beams and vibrating mirrors, as opposed to the traditional light bulb and lenses. Sadly though, you’ll have to wait until at least 2010 to pick up one of these bad boys. Konica Minolta is stating that they’ll be on the market in two or three years.

Just last week the RIAA commemorated the signing of an absurd new law in Tennessee that states:

"Each public and private institution of higher education in the state that has student residential computer networks shall:

[...]

[R]easonably attempt to prevent the infringement of copyrighted works over the institution's computer and network resources, if such institution receives fifty (50) or more legally valid notices of infringement as prescribed by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 within the preceding year."

In short, if you’re going to school in Tennessee you’re boned. Since the entertainment industry was unable to get a solid framework for universities in the Higher Education Act passed by Congress just earlier this year, the RIAA has decided to attack universities by using infringement notices.

What’s worse is that the law will cost the fine folks of Tennessee a whopping $9.5 million in new software, hardware and personnel, with an annual cost of $1.5 million for the personnel and maintenance. None of this money will go towards artists or record labels represented by the RIAA.

At a series of press events over the past few days Adobe has unveiled a brand new version of flash aimed directly at smartphones. The new version of Flash is optimized to work with ARM processors (like the one used in the iPhone).

So long as your smartphone has a processor clock speed of at least 200MHz and 16MB of RAM, it should be able to run the new Flash. It’s also mentioned that a “completely capable browser” is required, but given the phones that it’s meant for, there shouldn’t be any issues.

Google’s G1 is expected to get the update soon, among others. Whether it’ll be simply downloaded by the phone itself or updated in-store is yet to be revealed.

While many other smartphone vendors are prominent when it comes to excitement about the possibility of Flash on their phones, Apple isn’t. Steve Jobs has mentioned that Flash “performs too slow to be useful” on the extremely popular iPhone. To many this seems like a match made in heaven, but Apple has politely snubbed that notion.

Ms. Hilton! I must say, it is a pleasure to know that you’re a reader of our fine publication. Today we’ve got a wonderful story just for you, and it’ s all about an exceptional machine that will match perfectly with your comically undersized dog of the week.

China’s very own Eazo is offering a jeweled up PC that will come in many different colors, depending on what your desk is looking. Just make sure that you don’t throw off your feng shui!

The Eazo F20-SE Xing Crystal packs an Intel Core 2 Quad Q9450 processor and a Western Digital Green Power 1 TB HDD for storing all those important documents. So far though, there’s no word on how much memory is installed or what kind of graphics processing is available.

And while you’re looking at just how attractive this PC will look next to the pictures of your family, fifth car, and private jet pull out your wallet. This little beast will run you a fresh $70,000 for the top end model.

It’s an all to common story; boy gets Blu-ray player, boy wants Blu-ray movies, boy doesn’t want to pay full price for said movies so boy goes to China to snag bootlegs – we’ve all been there. But should you find yourself caught in this conundrum wait a moment before you do anything. Those fancy new Blu-ray movies you just got could very well be DVDs.

High-end movie pirates in China are ripping the legitimate Blu-ray movies (which use 1,080 lines of resolution) and then burning them onto writeable DVDs (which only support 720 lines of resolution). The swindlers are reportedly making roughly $7 a pop per movie.

Reports say none of the movies have made their way out of China yet.

While Shuttle’s new XPC SG45H7 might not have many discernable differences from the usual Shuttle system, it’s got a hidden treasure trove of new features hidden underneath that compact chassis.

The XPC SG45H7 only comes in black, but it sports plenty of powerful pieces underneath the hood. For starters, they’re shipping Intel’s G45 Express chipset topped off with your choice of an Intel Core 2 Quad or Core 2 Duo processor. This is mostly thanks to the improved cooling and space provided by the new H7 case, which is slightly bigger than previous Shuttle PCs. It allows for a larger, quieter power supply fan, room for dual-slot graphics and up to four sticks of memory.

This slick little box is available from specialist retailers with prices listed as low as $349. And with this economy, prices that low coupled with hardware that hot is a combination that’s tough to beat.

Cry for Google, Argentina. The truth is, they never left you, but given the current legal battle over search results – they just might.

Dozens of fashion models and public figures, such as sports star Diego Maradona, are currently at war with Google over how search results are handed out. While the question as to whether or not certain search results should be censored if they contain a person’s name is answered, Argentine Judges have handed down orders to temporarily abbreviate search results.

These restraints mean that Google has to censor searches from Argentinean sites that contain the plaintiff’s names. Though, this does not apply to those of us in the United States.

Google has recently joined forces with Yahoo and other human rights groups to create the Global Network Initiative, a foundation for communications technology companies to follow in response to laws in various countries that might conflict with an Internet user’s privacy or freedom of expression. While the interest of this initiative is to provide the fullest Internet experience to everyone around the world, it is likely that they will do everything in their power to comply with local law.

Got a MySpace page? Like watching TV? Want others to know what you like to watch on TV? Then you’re in luck!

MySpace recently launched a widget that you can place directly on your profile page, aptly named, Primetime. Placing this on your page will allow you to provide all of the content from both MySpace and Hulu to the viewers of your glitter inspired profile.

While the widget does provide a snazzy built-in search, it is only available to users in the US. This likely due to licensing, but has a good chance of changing once the paperwork gets filled out (and who knows when that will be). Even still, most of the members of the social networking site won’t have any issues with that, given that 76 million of the 122 million MySpace users worldwide are within the United States.

So go! Enjoy full episodes of Family Guy and The Office! Just make sure that you let all your “friends” join in on the laughs as well.

If you’re wondering whether or not you should bring that personal bottle of hand sanitizer with you to work today, Google has got your back. With their latest tool, the Flu Trends, Google is tracking where flu outbreaks are happening – and doing so weeks before the CDC is.

Google’s Flu Trends follows its users’ searches. Once a search for “flu symptoms” or “muscle aches” is tracked, it’s aggregated to its location and placed on a map. Since the Feds have taken notice, Google has been willingly sharing its information with the Epidemiology and Prevention Brach of the Influenza division of the CDC.

Thanks to the accuracy and speed of the Flu Trends map, lives could actually be saved. The flu still kills many elderly people and those with weak immune systems each year.

Who knows what Google will think of next? But goodness knows their all seeing eye is being put to good use.

At long last, the Dell Mini 12 is available to order for those of us that inhabit North America.

While Dell won’t be shipping out the $549 netbook until December, it wouldn’t be a bad idea to get your order in now if you want to be among the first to get one. Packing a 1.33GHz Atom processor, 1GB of memory and a 40GB hard drive, the Mini is looking to be a solid productivity machine, all factors taken into consideration.

The Mini 12 can upgrade to a 1.6GHz Atom processor and an 80GB hard drive, but you’ll end up spending a notably steep $758 for it.

Major notebook vendors like Dell and Apple are going to have a much easier time delivering those beautiful LED backlit screens in the near future, as the price of LEDs are projected to go down by 50%.

While the amount of notebooks that actually had LED backlighting in them was only 5-6% in the first three quarters of this year, that’s expected to shoot all the way up to 25% during this fourth quarter. Even still, it’s projected that up to 40% of notebooks will have LED backlighting in 2009.

At the current rate, it looks like LED backlighting will be standard sometime real soon. That’s a bright future that we look forward to.

The economy is in pretty rough shape, and it would appear that Alienware has taken notice. Their latest machine is a clear attempt to tap into the market of people that don’t have several grand to drop on frivolous pursuits, or simply put, everyone but Eliot Spitzer.

The Area-51 750i will be built off of an Nvidia nForce 750i SLI motherboard, a Core 2 Duo E8400 and an Nvidia GeForce 9800GT. To compliment the mothership, there’s also 2GB of DDR2 RAM to keep the random accesses as random as possible, and it’ll all come to you on Windows Vista 64-bit.

While the tech specs might not seem incredibly impressive, the price isn’t too bad. And plus, who wouldn’t want that wicked Alienware case?

Understandably, AT&T might not be the name that one thinks of when they consider a comprehensive online video search. But, remaining open minded (as one tends to do in San Francisco), you can’t help but notice how well the telecommunications giant has pulled off their very first video search site, VideoCrawler.

In conjunction with start-up company Divvo, AT&T has managed to launch VideoCrawler, a search that has more than 1,600 online video outlets latched directly into its brain. Sites such as YouTube and MySpace are among the long list of video channels available.

While they don’t offer any services for uploading your own videos, they do have a pretty impressive collection. So go ahead, search for that clip of the dog that never learned how to bark. Chances are might good that you’ll be able to track it down.

No, it won’t teach you Kung Fu. But what it will do is actually provide a pretty suitable 3D printer for the masses.

Mcor’s Matrix has already been released to the UK, and works with some pretty basic technology. Using some time-honored A4 paper and PVA glue to create complex 3D objects, it provides a nice, cheap alternative to current polymer-based options.

While it won’t be able to make your World of Warcraft character into a FigurePrints quality statuette, it will consume far fewer resources. According to Mcor, up to 40 times less. If something like this is down your alley keep your eyes open in Q1 of 2009, when the Matrix is slated to make its US debut.

If watching movies on your iPod’s screen is getting a little old, your woes might be gone before you know it. Optoma is planning to release their ultra-compact DLP Pico Projector on December 1st, just in time for the holidays!

The Pico has been labeled as the world’s smallest and lightest DLP projector, measuring only 51mm x 105mm x 17mm, and weighing a negligible 120g. Optoma is planning to offer the device at Apple Stores for roughly $500.

Zune owners (really?) need not worry, because it’ll work with other media players as well. Packing up to two hours of batter life, and a built-in 0.5-watt speaker, you’ll be able to watch most of Titanic using just the projector. Lucky you!

Hitachi’s latest, the Travelstar 5K500.B mobile hard drive is next in line to offer built-in data encryption. With the increasing popularity of this trend, the big H has also managed to make it relatively easy to encrypt any valuable data you might have laying around. Thanks to a private security key, the user can encrypt and decrypt data as they see fit.

The new drives also include TCG Storage Security, which supports pre-boot authentication, and up to four different data ranges with multiple user and administrative authentication options.

And while the data encryption options are certainly nice, what really ices the cake is the drastically lowered power consumption. Using only 1.4 watts during various read/write processes, the drive will only consume 10% of the power that an average 3.5” 500GB drive does.

The Travelstar is reportedly going to be shipping worldwide in December, with an enterprise focused version designed for applications that run 24x7 shortly after.

Nearly a quarter century ago, a young, pinup version Bill Gates released Microsoft’s first operating system, Windows. While the announcement was made in 1983, and the boxes wouldn’t see store shelves until 1985, Gates’ debut at New York’s Helmsley Palace Hotel was a notably ambitious one.

Gates stated that his fledgling operating system would be powering 90% of IBM’s computers by 1984. This didn’t come true initially (read: missed release date by a year), but it has managed to come to fruition as a number that’s near Windows’ market share today.

While Windows 1 was a short-lived ride, being made obsolete only two years later by Windows 2, it was a great start for Microsoft. Using a brand new graphical interface, it certainly made an impact on computing, as we know it today.