Circuit Breaker

If you're serious about rechargeable batteries, and saving money on disposables, this charging kit can't be beat.

(Credit: Amazon)

A battery charger is essential gear for any household with a game console (those controllers burn through AA's like nobody's business), childrens' toys, or anything else battery-powered.

Because, let's face it, you'll pay a lot more in the long haul for disposable batteries than you will for a good charger and some rechargeable batteries.

Of course, a good charger--one with features such as a heat monitor and status LCD--can cost you upward of $70 or more--batteries not included.

Today only, Amazon has the La Crosse BC-9009 AlphaPower Battery Charger for $34.99 shipped. And in addition to the kick-ass charger, you get four AA rechargeables, four AAA's, adapters for C and D cells, and a travel case.

What makes the BC-9009 so special? Start with four independent status displays, one for each of its four slots. They can cycle through stats like charge rate, discharge rate, elapsed time, and total battery capacity.

The charger also includes a heat monitor to prevent overcharging. And buyers certainly seem to like it: nearly 650 reviewers rated it 4.5 stars out of 5 on average.

Looks like a perfect gift for that hard-to-buy-for person (or blogger) in your life. I'm just hoping this doesn't sell out in five minutes like everything else I post these days. Dang holiday season!

Backup deal: It's that time of year when we clear out some space on the ol' iPod to make room for the holiday playlist. If yours is a little, well, played out, Amazon MP3 has Diana Krall's "Christmas Songs" album for just $2.99. It's a digital download, of course, in DRM-free, universally compatible MP3 format. Perfect for cozy nights by the fire.

The world's second-largest PC maker has designs on being the first to offer a Chrome OS Netbook.

Acer Chairman J.T. Wang said in an interview with Digitimes that he's "confident" his company will be first out of the gate with Google's open-source operating system pre-installed.

Chrome OS will be coming to Netbooks next year. Acer says it will be first.

(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET)

The earliest it would be available is mid-2010, according to Digitimes' unnamed sources.

Acer was just one of several hardware makers previously announced to be working with Google on implementing Chrome OS, along with Asus, Hewlett-Packard, Lenovo, and Toshiba. Dell, which hasn't committed to it fully yet, has released an experimental version of Chrome OS based on the source code that will work on the Dell Mini 10v Netbook, though it's not an official product.

Though Wang didn't offer details or specifications for Acer's Chrome OS Netbook, the guys behind Chrome OS have already let on what they're expecting.

At the OS's first public demonstration last month, Google said its vision includes slightly larger keyboards and screens than what's currently available, x86 or ARM processors, solid-state drives, and 802.11(n) Wi-Fi chips.

Psystar's Mac clones are unavailable after Tuesday's settlement with Apple.

(Credit: Screenshot by Erica Ogg/CNET)

As part of Psystar's partial settlement with Apple, all models of the company's Open Computer featuring preinstalled Mac OS have been removed from its Web site.

A quick visit to Psystar.com Wednesday morning reveals all five products the Mac clone maker had been selling since 2008 are suddenly "out of stock." It follows Tuesday's partial settlement, in which the Florida-based Psystar agreed to pay $2.65 million to Apple for copyright infringement, in exchange for Apple dropping the other claims of trademark infringement and unfair competition.

Though Psystar has agreed to a settlement payment amount already, and is done selling Mac OS preinstalled on hardware, it doesn't mean the company is done fighting. Part of the agreement included that Apple will not get paid until "any and all appeals in this matter are concluded or the time for filing any such appeal has lapsed," according to the court documents.

Psystar still intends to appeal to a higher court the November 13 ruling of U.S. District Judge William Alsup, in which he said Psystar violated Apple's copyright and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. It's a process that could stretch on for years.

Until then, if Psystar wants to stay in business, it's going to have to figure out another way of selling hardware and Mac software.

(Credit: Pure Digital)

With many electronics makers looking to replicate the success of the Flip video camera, the company behind it, Cisco, is looking for a new way to stand out.

Since the Flip's debut in 2007, a parade of similar sub-$200 camcorders, from far more established names have followed, including those from Sony, Samsung, Kodak, Creative, Toshiba, and others. Now the Flip folks are mixing it up a bit.

Instead of readying an updated camera for the holidays, the newest product isn't a camera at all, but a tiny, square-ish box that plugs into a TV. Using a small white USB dongle, it can stream your homemade Flip videos stored on your computer to your TV's larger screen, with the ability to sort through videos using an included remote control. The system is called Flipshare TV, and it's available starting Wednesday.

Some 3 million of the pocket-sized flash-based cameras have sold since the Flip's launch in 2007. After establishing the brand, the device's makers Pure Digital sold the company to networking giant Cisco for $590 million.

Jonathan Kaplan, Flip founder and current vice president of Cisco's consumer products group, said earlier this year to expect "networked" Flip cameras, and Flipshare TV is one example of that.

The idea behind Flipshare TV is that you'll be more likely to watch your videos after making them if you can show them to a larger group on a larger screen. Taking home video is great, as Flip's head of marketing Simon Fleming-Wood says, but "the key is the ability is to do fun things with it."... Read more

The day's not yet over, and already there are more Cyber Monday shoppers than last year.

Although information on how much money people are spending and what they're buying Monday won't be available until Tuesday afternoon at the earliest, we know just from traffic to retail Web sites that shoppers are out in force. According to Akamai's Net Usage Index for Retail, which tracks traffic to a representative set of more than 270 global e-commerce sites in real time, that global traffic as of noon Monday is already surging past last year's peak.

Global traffic to retail sites hit 7.79 million visitors per minute at 12 p.m. Pacific; North American traffic came in at 4.17 million. That's already more than 1 million, or 16 percent, more than last year's global traffic peak of 6.71 million visitors per minute at 11:30 a.m. Pacific. And Monday isn't yet over.

The data also shows that people were hitting retail sites earlier this year. Akamai's earliest milestone is 6:30 am Pacific. As of that time Monday, global traffic was at 5.79 million visitors per minute, and North American at 3.19 million visitors per minute. On this day last year by the same time, global traffic was at 4.97 million visitors per minute, while North American traffic had hit just 2.3 million visitors per minute.

Worldwide, that's a 16.5 percent uptick in retail-site surfing, and a more impressive 39 percent jump in visitors to North American retail sites.

Of course, traffic doesn't necessarily translate to sales, and we'll find out in the next few days how it did--or didn't. But so far the data is following the pattern seen for Thanksgiving Day and Black Friday online shopping this year. ComScore reported Sunday that global retail traffic on those days was up 10 percent and 11 percent, respectively.

For the past few years, holiday cheer has been in short supply for electronics retail chains.

Just two years ago, around this same time, we saw the bankruptcy and closure of CompUSA. Last year it was Circuit City spiraling toward extinction right before the crucial holiday shopping period.

Though both brands have been since revived, mainly as online discount destinations, their time as serious competitors with physical stores is over. Looking back, it's clear their demise was brought about by a languishing consumer economy, but also by the unrelenting competition from uber-discounters like Wal-Mart and the convenience of Amazon.com.

Will the discount retailer drive other competitors out of business this holiday?

(Credit: Wal-Mart)

Wal-Mart, a giant among brick-and-mortar and online retailers, has been able to repeatedly deal crushing blows to rivals with its hard-to-beat pricing, particularly at what's seen as a crucial time of year for retailers, between Thanksgiving and Christmas. Though the overall economy is in nowhere near the terrible shape it was a year ago, will Wal-Mart be able to drive even more brick-and-mortar electronics retailers into the ground?

The traditional start of the holiday shopping season is the day after Thanksgiving, known as "Black Friday," when retailers attempt to get into the black on their yearly balance sheets. With fewer brick and mortar retailers that deal solely in electronics this year, Wal-Mart has already begun another sustained attack on pricing this holiday.

Though Walmart.com has about half the number of unique visitors to its site than Amazon during any given month, according to Compete.com, the company hopes its name will continue to attract people pinching pennies while looking for gifts this year.

"Everyone expected that consumers would be going to Wal-Mart in stores or Walmart.com because people migrate to value when the economy gets difficult," Raul Vasquez, CEO of Walmart.com, says. "We've had a higher percentage of people buy products than even a year ago. We do feel very good about the holiday."

With an average of 10 million to 15 million visitors per week to its site during the holiday shopping period, and 10 million on Thanksgiving Day alone, according to internal counts, Walmart.com is taking advantage early. The online destination for the world's largest retailer is specifically ratcheting up the pressure on its electronics competitors, even weeks before Black Friday. For the last few weeks, for example, it's begun offering 97-cent shipping fees on all gadgets except iPods, as well as discounted bundles of what are expected to be the most popular gift items this year: things like the Nintendo Wii--anticipated to be one of the top sellers by retail trend analyst site Retrevo--plus games and two controllers, digital cameras and cases, as well as Netbooks and USB drives.

But Wal-Mart's chief competitors are following suit. Best Buy, Wal-Mart's only real remaining national brick-and-mortar rival in consumer electronics, did better than Circuit City, but still barely survived the bleak holiday period a year ago. Amidst what former CEO Brad Anderson called "the most challenging consumer environment our company has ever faced," Best Buy saw its earnings drop 77 percent and was forced to offer thousands of buyouts.

Though things are looking slightly better this time around, Best Buy is having to slash prices early, too. Starting two Sundays ago, the retailer began offering some deeply discounted flat-screen TV prices. And beginning the day after Thanksgiving, the regular Black Friday bonanza should proceed as usual. Though Black Friday sales can be counted on to pad the quarterly profits, just how much will be an important indicator of the health of brick-and-mortar electronics retail.

Early starts
To take full advantage of consumers' seeming powerlessness to resist great deals, most retailers have looked beyond Black Friday--the day itself--to get people in the door or poking around on their Web sites.

"Black Friday is one of our top sales days," said Walmart.com's Vasquez. "Thanksgiving is a big day, the day after, and then usually one of the Mondays in December...It's a bit of a cage match between those."

Amazon.com, in great financial shape going into this holiday, also looks at the entire month-long period as a potential for big sales.

"The whole week (of Thanksgiving), starting Monday is a really big week," said Amazon spokesman Craig Berman. That's when Amazon started rolling out its most attractive holiday pricing on electronics. Every day this week there will be timed sales, with new items discounted between 10 percent and 60 percent. From hard drives, watches, digital picture frames to notebook PCs, limited numbers of items will be discounted for four-hour periods, or until the stock is gone.

(Credit: Screenshot by David Martin/CNET)

The Monday after Thanksgiving, often called "Cyber Monday," is traditionally a day when e-tailers chop prices and make a big holiday discount push, but Amazon has found it also does well even as Christmas approaches. Thanks to procrastinating gift givers, even on days without a focus on lowered prices, Amazon fares well. "Historically, our busiest days happens in mid-December, close to one week out from the free SuperSaver Shipping deadline," said Berman.

Smartphone shopping
Ultimately, they're all angling for even the slightest edge to get consumers online or in stores, no matter what day it is. One of the ways they're doing that is by embracing a new trend popular with many consumers. This year, almost all major electronics retailers have a mobile applications that enables shopping or doing price comparisons directly from a smartphone.

Amazon has apps for both the iPhone and BlackBerry that are mini versions of the site, allowing shopping, price comparison, order tracking, and more. Best Buy, Target, eBay, and others (see here for a full list) have gotten on the iPhone app bandwagon too with similar mobile sites, though it's not yet clear if they're boosting business. Wal-Mart has an iPhone app too, specifically for gadget shoppers. It lets users take a photo of a wall at home, input how far away the couch is, and the app will recommend what size TV to buy and the manufacturers that sell it.

Walmart.com says it is already seeing results. Without divulging specific numbers, TV sales growth this year has been "in the very high double digits," according to Vasquez. "It's outpacing our site growth."

The new Roku Channel Store now has 13 free content channels.

(Credit: Roku)

Aiming to expand beyond movies and baseball, set-top box maker Roku is adding 10 new content channels ranging from social networking to music and podcasts.

Roku, which makes a small, wireless device that can stream content from the Web direct to any TV screen, is expanding from 3 channels to 13, as expected. Channels for Blip.tv, Facebook Photos, Flickr, FrameChannel, Mediafly, MobileTribe, Motionbox, Pandora, Revision3, and TWiT will join the current lineup of Netflix, Amazon Video On Demand, and, more recently, MLB.TV. All of them will be available in the newly christened Roku Channel Store.... Read more

Dell reported its third-quarter earnings results Thursday, showing a small improvement over the last quarter, but revenue was down 15 percent over the last year, and profits fell 54 percent.

The company reported revenue of $12.9 billion, within analysts' expectations between $12.8 billion and $13.5 billion. Earnings were 17 cents per share, when excluding 6 cents of pretax expenses and amortization. That's 54 percent off the 37 cents Dell recorded a year ago.

Besides its acquisition of Perot Systems last month, there weren't too many positive signs in the recently completed quarter. Shipments were also down 5 percent across its businesses.

Chief Financial Officer Brian Gladden pointed to built-up inventory and weak pre-order demand for Windows 7 machines as something that negatively affected the company's quarterly results.

"We saw some weakness in orders in some of the weeks preceding Windows 7... our inventories were in place and people were waiting to see how the launch went," he said on a conference call with reporters Thursday. "After the (October 22) launch we saw a surge in orders. We believe that affected our October revenue a bit, but we'll ship that through in the fourth quarter."

Gladden did try to point out more positive signs for the company during the quarter, noting, "We significantly improved over the 23 percent (quarterly revenue) decline from earlier this year."

He said Dell has been focusing as much as possible on decreasing its costs and building back its enterprise business. The company was hit particularly hard by the economic downturn of the past year due to its heavy investment in business customers, but things are beginning to look up now, according to Gladden.

"These results are showing some encouraging signs for us, especially in large enterprise and SMB (small and medium businesses)," he said.

Founder and CEO Michael Dell said he expects companies to begin to order new PCs as part of the so-called "refresh" cycle starting early next year.

"With an aging install base ... an accumulation of new technologies with hardware, software, virtualized clients...IT managers know they can't extend these assets forever," Dell said. "I think it will be a refresh that occurs over perhaps 18 months. I can't remember a time when a high percentage of (IT managers) skipped an entire operating system."

Gladden spoke more specifically about two consumer segments. On the just-announced Dell Mini3 smartphone for China and Brazil only:

"Our strategy is a carrier-centric strategy. We've had relationships with China Mobile, where we've sold a lot of 3G-enabled Netbooks." He said that both Brazil and China were large opportunities for Dell, but he avoided a question about whether that phone would be coming to the U.S. or other markets soon.

On Netbooks: They're "one of the more challenging segments in terms of cost position." Gladden said they'll mostly be making deals with carriers going forward. And in general, low-end notebooks are "driving the competitive dynamics right now" in the PC industry because of rapidly dropping prices.

Dell shares were down about 6 percent to $14.93 in after-hours trading.

This post was last updated at 3 p.m. PT with comments from Michael Dell.

The Cray XT5 supercomputer.

(Credit: Image courtesy of the National Center for Computational Sciences, Oak Ridge National Laboratory)

The Cray XT5 supercomputer known as "Jaguar" has finally clawed its way to the title of fastest computer in the world.

Sitting back at No. 2 on the Top500 list of supercomputers for more than a year, Jaguar overtook IBM's "Roadrunner" according to the twice-yearly list that will be unveiled Tuesday at the SC09 Conference in Portland, Ore.

Jaguar beat out the competition by showing it can process 1.75 petaflop/s, or quadrillions of floating point operations per second, according to the Top500 Linpack benchmark. IBM's Roadrunner was pushed back to No. 2 by posting a processing speed of 1.04 petaflop/s, a dip from the 1.105 petaflop/s it reached in a June 2009 test. The slower performance this time around is apparently due to a repartitioning of the system.

Every six months when the Top500 List is released the threshold to grab a place on it gets higher. The slowest supercomputer (No. 500) on November's list posted a speed of 20 teraflop/s, up from the 17.1 teraflop/s of six months ago. In other words, what is the slowest computer this time around would have been No. 336 in June.

Kraken, another Cray XT5 system, jumped up two places from its former No. 5 position by posting a processing performance speed of 832 teraflop/s. IBM's BlueGene/P, from Forschungszentrum Juelich in Germany, came in at No. 4 with 825.5 teraflop/s. At No. 5 is China's Tianhe-1, the highest ranking ever for a Chinese supercomputer.

The top 10, while still dominated by supercomputers housed in the United States, had just one newcomer. That would be Sandia National Laboratories' "Red Sky," a Sun Blade system that posted a Linpack performance of 423 teraflop/s.

Just as the last time the list was released, the Top500 list is made up mostly of Hewlett-Packard and IBM computers. HP accounted for 210 of this year's 500, and IBM 185. In terms of processors in use, Intel still enjoys the lion's share, with 80 percent. The most popular operating system is Linux, with 90 percent of the Top500.

Here's the Top 10:

• Jaguar, Cray, Oak Ridge National Laboratory (1.75 petaflop/s)

• Roadrunner, IBM, Los Alamos National Laboratory (1.04 petaflop/s)

• Kraken XT5, Cray, National Institute for Computational Sciences (832 teraflop/s)

• JUGENE, IBM, Forschungszentrum Juelich (825.5 teraflop/s)

• Tianhe-1, NUDT, National SuperComputer Center in Tianjin (563.1 teraflop/s)

• Pleiades, SGI, NASA Ames Research Center (544.3 teraflop/s)

• BlueGeneL, IBM, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (478.2 teraflop/s)

• BlueGene/P, IBM, Argonne National Laboratory (458.61 teraflop/s)

• Ranger, Sun, Texas Advanced Computing Center (433.20 teraflop/s)

• Red Sky, Sun, Sandia National Laboratories (423.9 teraflop/s)

For the full Top500 List head to the official site.