So, you’re in the market for an all-in-one computer with a 24-inch screen, but you’re not looking to splurge on one of those yucky iMacs, huh? Well Dell has got your back, and it comes in the form of the XPS One 24.

The 24-inch beast packs plenty of powerful features, too. Including a gigantic 1920x1080 native resolution on a 16:9 display, 4GB RAM (standard), Intel GMA X4500HD graphics (or an upgraded Nvidia GeForce 9600M GT) and an Intel Core 2 Quad Q8200 processor. Should you feel the need to donate money to some worthwhile causes without actually doing so yourself, there’s a (PRODUCT) RED version available too.

While admittedly the name isn’t the best we’ve ever seen (seriously, say it out loud), it is shaping up to be a very worthwhile media machine. Some upgraded speakers and a built in TV tuner are looking to drive that point home. It’s shipping now, and will run you $1,700 for a base model.

Race fans, fire up your wallets! AMD’s first 45nm chip, the Shanghai quad-core has finally made its appearance at online resellers.

These bad boys aren’t cheap, either. The quad-core 2.7GHz chip will run potential buyers $2,499 over at PC Connection and $2,240 (for the chip without any fan) over at Buy.com. And these prices are pretty standard all the way across the board.

Admittedly, expectations might be low for these chips considering the debacle caused by the massive delays of Barcelona due to the production issues. Still, AMD’s hopes remain high. Shanghai is currently in full production, and supposed to have a 20 percent performance boost over Barcelona. There have also been confirmations from the likes of Sun Microsystems for plans to offer the chip in current x64 platforms that are running Barcelona by as early as Q1 2009.

While these chips do offer surprisingly low power consumption for a quad core chip (only 75 watts) and some burly clock speeds, the prices are pretty difficult to swallow. Although, to be fair, they’re meant for servers… or badasses.

Straight out of the “surprise!” file, Microsoft’s Live search engine is down in usage while Yahoo’s has finally gained some ground. Despite Microsoft’s offering serious perks to the members of Club Internet to use their search engine, they just weren’t able to come through in traffic, as claimed by researcher ComScore Inc.

According to ComScore, Yahoo’s portion of the Internet search engine pie has gone up from 19.6 percent to 20.2 percent. Unfortunately for Microsoft though, their percentage has dropped from an already low 8.9 percent down to 8.5 percent. Not surprisingly, Google took care of 62.9 percent of the searches made, and still has a very demanding lead.

At this rate Microsoft is going to have to cook up some pretty exciting perks to lure users back over to Live. (Try this one out: “Search for a date with Scarlett Johansson.” Thank me later.)

When most people think of Logitech the first thing that comes to mind is hardware. Webcams, mice, keyboards, just about anything that you can consider a peripheral. But all that is about to change thanks to their latest acquisition, SightSpeed, which they hope will take them right into the software game.

So what’s it cost to for a hardware giant, such as Logitech, to get their fingers deep into the software game? As it turns out, only $30 million in cash (the deal is expected to close in early November). The addition of the 25-person company to Logitech’s roster comes with the goal of creating solid video communication software to go along with their extremely popular webcams. Current users of SightSpeed are open to use a free version of their software, or a premium version that costs either $9.95 per month or $99.95 a year.

As of right now there’s no telling if the software of the fancy new acquisition will cost anything to use, or if it’ll be an upgrade on the software bundled with the cameras, but with any luck more details will emerge soon.

For those that don’t know, coding your favorite games isn’t the only thing that John Carmack does well, turns out he’s not half bad at rocket science. He’s proved this most recently at the Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge, which is being held by the X Prize Foundation and sponsored by NASA. The goal of the challenge is to help in the development of a fleet of lunar ferries that could one day carry people and payloads between lunar orbit and the moon’s surface.

The challenge consists of several levels and Carmack’s team, Armadillo Aerospace, has passed the first one. Level one requires that a rocket take off from a launch area, climb to an altitude of 150 feet, hover for 90 seconds and then land safely at a landing pad 150 feet away. They were then required to repeat the flight in reverse within two and a half hours. Their ability to complete this goal before any other team has won them a cool $350,000.

Level two is a bit more difficult. It requires that team double the amount of time hovered, and then land on a simulated lunar surface that’s littered with craters and boulders. Armadillo Aerospace attempted the course, but was unable to complete the task. That means that there’s still $1.65 million up for grabs.

Mr. Carmack, we’re going to have to insist that you keep doing great things, but don’t forget about us!

The masterminds at Puget Systems have decided to make the most of their extremely popular YouTube video, and offer a DIY kit so that the public can create their own mineral oil-cooled PC. Puget is claiming hat they’ve been using the system featured in their video for over a year now with no hardware issues.

Each kit will come fully loaded with an aquarium tank and cover, motherboard tray and IO panel, power/HDD LED’s, a power switch, SSD hard drive mounting bracket and a power cord with an extension to reach the bottom of the tank. That’s the base model, and it’ll run you $312.50. There’s also a higher end version with a radiator aimed at systems that are packing heavier hardware, such as quad-core CPUs, and any video card higher than an 8800GT. That version will run you $375.

So if you’re not worried about voiding the warranty on every component that you submerge in the liquid, head on over to Puget Systems’ site and pick up a aquarium to sink your hardware into. But keep in mind that once you submerge your hardware there will be no going back. According to Puget, “Mineral oil is very difficult, if not impossible to clean from your components once they are submerged.”

Considering that the use of fossil fuels isn’t getting any more efficient, it’s refreshing to see that solar power has been making some very noticeable advances as of late. Currently it runs about 15-20 cents per kWh, but coal power only costing 1.5-2.5 cents per kWh and nuclear being in the similar range, it’s clear that it still has a ways to go.

Thanks to a milestone announced by UNSW’s ARC Photovoltaic Centre of Excellence this week, it looks like that’s on its way down. They revealed the world’s first 25 percent efficient unconcentrated solar silicon cells, only shortly after they were given the previous record with 24.7 percent efficient silicon cells. Unfortunately, they missed out on the other three tenths due to misunderstandings of sunlight’s effect on silicon.

The Centre’s silicon cell is well on its way to the 29 percent mark, which is the theoretical maximum efficiency for a first generation photovoltaic solar cell.  The new research is a huge boost “because our cells push the boundaries of response into the extremities of the spectrum,” according to Dr. Anita Ho-Baillie, head of the Centre’s high efficiency cell research group, “Blue light is absorbed strongly, very close to the cell surface where we go to great pains to make sure it is not wasted. Just the opposite, the red light is only weakly absorbed and we have to use special design features to trap it into the cell.”

Moore’s Law (which states that the maximum number of transistors on a given chip area doubles every one and a half years) has been a driving force in the hardware industry, and that doesn’t look like it’s going to change. Some of the industry’s biggest names are dumping money, time and effort with the goal of extending this, with the goal of pumping out some über hardware.

There are concerns already ahead, with companies like IBM, AMD and Intel all looking to move ahead to 32nm, problems with controlling light at ultra low nanometer resolutions are looming ahead. But, thanks to research from the University of California Berkeley that wall could crumble, and usher in a new generation of ultra-tiny transistors, and even a brand new type of drive that could end up replacing Blu-ray.

UC Berkeley’s Xiang Zhang and David Bogy, both professors of mechanical engineering took a new approach that uses a metal arm similar to that of a record turntable or a hard drive, and utilizes a tiny lens that quite literally flies over the chip wafer. This would allow designs that are being made at 80nm wide to become much smaller. And even still, with the wafer being spun at 12 meters per second, production would be fast. "Utilizing this plasmonic nanolithography, we will be able to make current microprocessors more than 10 times smaller, but far more powerful.  This technology could also lead to ultra-high density disks that can hold 10 to 100 times more data than disks today," said Professor Zhang.

What’s more, the new tech has the potential of being cheaper than what we’ve got now. 45nm technologies are expensive thanks to complex lens and mirror setups required to concentrate the light that’s required to read data. This new method, called photolithography, would only have one costly component, which would be a plasmonic lens. The rest of the components would be run of the mill, and drop costs dramatically.

It’s expected that you’ll be seeing this breakthrough in your very own drives relatively soon. Professor Zhang states, "I expect in three to five years we could see industrial implementation of this technology.  This could be used in microelectronics manufacturing or for optical data storage and provide resolution that is 10 to 20 times higher than current Blu-ray technology."

Straight out of the “not as awesome as it sounds” file, Intel is looking to cool your laptop with the exact same technology that a jet engine does. The issue of burning legs (that’s right, burning legs) has been an issue on the mind of Intel for some time now, and they’re looking to soothe that with their latest breakthrough.

Intel has been focusing on the increasing issue of hot thighs with something called Laminar Flow. Laminar Flow occurs when a fluid or gas/air flows in parallel layers, allowing a non-turbulent way to misdirect hot air away from the surface of a jet engine (or laptop). As demonstrated, this technology allows efficient cooling of temperatures upwards of 1,000 °C.

A demo of this technology was given at this week’s Intel developer forum in Taiwan by Mooly Eden, Intel’s head of Mobile Platforms Group. “We are licensing it to our customers so they can keep making thinner and thinner laptops,” said Eden.

It just so happens that text messaging isn’t the soulless form of communication that we’d all thought. In fact, it’s quite the opposite. Jeffery Hancock of Cornell University has recently run an experiment on using only text messaging as a form of communication to convey feelings, and the results might surprise you.

The study consisted of 44 pairs of participants, all using only text messaging as means of communication for 20 minutes with the goal of finding out as much about their partner as possible. They were also asked to talk about something that was stressing them out. To help promote communication, one member from each pair watched either a scene from Sophie’s Choice (where a mother in Auschwitz is forced to choose which of her two children would be put to death) or a clip that simply involved small talk.

The results came out with astonishingly high accuracy. They showed that every participant was able to accurately convey their partner’s state of mind, mood and felt a real connection with them. Those teamed up with the watchers of Sophie’s Choice were also notably saddened after the chat.

So as it turns out, texting is a very viable form of communication. It allows us more time to formulate an answer to whomever we’re speaking with, and to be more honest with them than they might be over the phone or email.

So you’ve got a heavy chunk of change just burning a hole in your pocket, and you don’t feel that just one monitor is enough for you, huh? Well, the folks at Cinemassive are out to fix that, and they’ve got a price tag to match it.

While in the past there have been imitators, who only hook a measly six monitors together, the new hotness is a very impressive 12 monitors. This display, offered for $12,995 will pack a total screen resolution of 7,860 x 3,600 with a total of 27.6 million pixels. What’s more impressive is that your investment will be well worth it, this bad boy will come along with a 3-year warranty and a very unheard of (especially with a setup like this) zero dead pixel policy.

Should if you have the cash, and live on a street that will allow a fleet of UPS trucks to drive down it, feel free to boast your nerd cred with a monitor that can be seen from space (and hey, if you’re throwing around cash like that, why not buy a nice lunch for us here at Maximum PC?).

That Bill Gates sure is one busy guy! Between working on the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation and putting in a day a week on Microsoft, he’s starting up a brand new venture named bgC3.

bgC3 has been labeled a “think tank” by public documents, and is not planned to be Gates’ next big business. Rather, it’s going to be a means of coordinating his work on his business and philanthropic endeavors. According to federal trademark filings they fall under generic classifications of “scientific and technological services,” “industrial analysis and research,” and “design and development of computer hardware and software.”

The offices (located in Kirkland, WA) are packed to the brim with all the latest goodies that Microsoft offers, according to visitors. Including a Surface tabletop computer and a virtual guestbook application.

The name, as I’m sure some of you might be curious about, has a fun meaning. The “bg” stands for (obviously) Bill Gates, and the “C” stands for “catalyst.” The 3? Well, that’s where things get a bit creative. The number 3 in the name reflects the notion of it being in a third place, separate from Microsoft and the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation. Clever, right?

Evidently, software pirates have been passing up on Microsoft’s latest flagship OS, Vista, in order to get their booty plundering hands on a counterfeit version of XP, according to Bonnie MacNaughton, a senior attorney at Microsoft.

“Historically, counterfeiters tend to focus on the 'n-1' version of software," explained MacNaughton. "Because of the more robust antipiracy and security features in Vista, most sophisticated piracy rings still continue to focus on XP. But that's changing over time.” For the very same reasons, counterfeiters are only copying Office 2003, rather than Office 2007.

Given the current future of Windows XP, and the high possibility of its piracy it’s entirely likely that any copy of XP that you get after January 2009 (with the exception of downgrades available through HP and Dell) is pirated. Because of this, Microsoft is planning on rolling out a brand new ad campaign in early 2009 to remind people of XP’s demise, and this possibility. “We're planning [a campaign] in January or February to make sure our customers know what our rules and policies are about Windows XP," stated MacNaughton, "to make sure they understand what may be illegitimate and what may be legitimate. We want to make sure that the XP they might be getting is genuine.”

Coders, start your engines. The long awaited release of the Android source code has come to an end, thanks to the Android Open Source Project. The announcement, which was made just yesterday, hopes to potentially influence the future of mobile devices as a whole. Pretty ambitious!

“Even if you're not planning to ship a mobile device any time soon, Android has a lot to offer,” writes Dave Bort (are they out of license plates in the gift shop?) on Androiod’s blog, “Interested in working on a speech-recognition library? Looking to do some research on virtual machines? Need an out-of-the-box embedded Linux solution? All of these pieces are available, right now, as part of the Android Open Source Project, along with graphics libraries, media codecs, and some of the best development tools I've ever worked with.” He continues to encourage anyone with a great idea for a new feature to simply add it. Given the nature of the open source project, anyone can influence Android.

Some big ups have to go out to Google on this one, making Andrioid perhaps one of the easiest development tools to acquire. Considering it’s free to license and now the entire source code is available to anyone that wants it, perhaps their dream of world domination is only a few developers away.

I feel like my eyes have just been opened for the very first time. This iTunes store junkie has finally seen the true light when it comes to buying music online, and it comes in the form of Lala.com.

When buying a song on iTunes I find myself searching around the very easy to navigate store, buying music at a reasonably priced 99 cents per song, and downloading a file with attached DRM. I’d always accepted it, it didn’t seem unaccommodating. Now that I’ve had a chance to check out the eminence that is Lala.com, I can’t ever see myself going back to iTunes again. Not to say that iTunes is bad, but Lala is just that good.

Why is Lala good? First of all, they sell MP3’s for 89 cents without any attached DRM (seriously!), or you can buy a streaming only version for just 10 cents (which will go towards the purchase of the full version). Albums themselves come at the price of $7.49, less than both iTunes and the legendary price-slashing Amazon.

Lala also allows you to listen to a song completely before you decide to buy it – and there’s plenty to listen to. Lala offers tunes from the four major record labels and 170,000 independents. New members are also allowed to pick up their first 50 streaming songs for free, no strings attached – no credit card, no nothing.

Say you’re like me, you’re packing a hefty amount of songs on your computer. You’ve purchased some from iTunes with that nasty DRM attached and MP3s that you’ve ripped straight of CDs. What do you do? You use Lala’s safe to use uploader! It scans the music on your computer’s hard drive, identifies the songs you’ve got and tosses them onto your library so that you can listen to them anywhere. Users accustomed with MP3.com’s MyMP3 service will already be familiar with this concept.

I could quite literally go on and on about how great this service really is, but if you use it for even just a little bit you’ll realize its potential on your own. Be sure to drive your browser over to Lala’s web site, and sign up straight away (and keep your eyes glued to your iPhone’s app store, they’ve got an app on the horizon). And remember, cash in those 50 free songs!

Now that you’re playing the waiting game with your fancy new 30” monitor, why not wait for your processor upgrade as well? Price cuts on certain Intel quad-core and dual-core processors are on their way for desktops and servers.

Starting on October 19, 2008 Intel Core 2 Quad Q8200 and Q6600 will be priced at $193 and $183, drops of 14 percent and 5 percent respectively. The only question you’ve got to ask yourself is whether or not you want a chip with two cores and a higher clock or four cores with a lower clock.

The price on the Intel E7300 has gone from an already low $133 to $113, wih the E2220 and the E2200’s following suit dropping to $74 and $64,

At this rate, you’ll be able to build a rig for almost nothing!

Everyone knows that technology is an important part of the world that we live in (well, just about everyone), and that includes the Democratic nominee for President, Barack Obama.

Should Obama be elected President of the United States (please, don’t let the comments turn into partisan bickering!), he lists in his plan for the country the appointment of a Chief Technology Officer. The CTO would primarily be responsible for getting broadband Internet access into more American homes (shockingly, only 23 out of every 100 homes have such access, putting us in 15th place among nations on that particular statistic). They’d also be responsible for advancing green tech, thanks to a $50 billion venture capital fund.

As mundane as the job might sound, there are some pretty big names being thrown around for the position. The likes of Vint Cerf (Google), Steve Ballmer (Microsoft), Jeff Bezos (Amazon) and Ed Felten (Princeton) are all potentials. But who cares what that one thinks, who would you want sitting in the biggest tech seat in America?

Thanks to everybody’s favorite economy, the prices of large-size LCD monitors are on the way down again. After stabilizing for about a month, a lower than expected demand is putting pressure on monitor vendors to drop their prices.

After October prices are expected to drop 5-7%, with that trend continuing in the future. Large financial challenges are expected for the fourth quarter of 2008.

So if you’ve been waiting around to pick up a fancy 30” display, just wait a bit longer and you’ll get the price you’ve always wanted! If you’ve already picked up a 30” display, why not snag another? If you’ve already got three 30” displays, then Al Gore, I’m going to have to ask you to get back to work, sir.

Today the New York Post revealed that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg may be looking to follow MySpace’s lead by offering a digital music store. Not through licensing their own content, mind you, but working through a third party that already has the nasty licensing business worked out.

MySpace’s music service currently works as a proprietary service built from the ground up using source licensing, with all their content hosted directly from MySpace. Whereas Facebook is reportedly looking to work with Rhapsody, iLike, Lala and IMEEM as content providers and licensers.

Supposedly, listening to the music itself will be free, and sold through Amazon. Listening to songs on Facebook would prompt on-screen advertising.

“Facebook is a serious challenger to MySpace,” said Phil Leigh, of Inside Digital Media, “and they would certainly want to do anything that record labels would allow them to do with advertising-supported music.”

So what say you, social networking site user? Would you use a Facebook powered music store? Let us know in the comments.

Radiohead’s tight lips have opened up (gross) to finally tell the world about their pay-as-you-like experiment for selling their latest album, ‘In Rainbows’. Despite CNN’s calling it one of the dumbest moments in business last year (they were looking forward to the follow-up album, ‘In Debt’), the English rockers have earned a well deserved “we told you so” moment.

Earning a considerable amount more than they did on their previous album with nearly 1.75 million physical albums sold and 3 million copies sold total, Radiohead has earned the right to mark this down as a rousing success. It should also be noted that they made more money off of the digital distribution of ‘In Rainbows’ than they did on their previous album, ‘Hail To the Thief’ which only sold somewhere in the low hundred thousands.

Admittedly this isn’t a formula that will work every single time, some credit should be given to the fact that Radiohead is the first high profile band to have done this. But, that doesn’t mean that recognition shouldn’t be given where it’s due. Innovation in an industry such as music is something that’s rare, and it’s always welcome to see bands take moves towards getting their music into people’s ears rather than getting money into their pockets (though, this time it’s a win-win).

Radiohead, keep up the good work. Music industry, take notice.

Should you be interested more in the numbers surrounding Radiohead’s ‘In Rainbows’, hit the jump.