With the so-called “Amazon Tax” taking effect in New York state on Sunday, Overstock.com filed suit Friday against New York, joining Amazon.com, which filed a similar lawsuit in early May.Overstock.com, which is based only in Utah, has no operations in New York, and sells exclusively through the internet, views the new law as unconstitutional under both New York and federal constitutional provisions, including due process clauses under both constitutions and the commerce clause of the U.S. Constitution as well.

North Oaks, Minn. is a small town of 4,500 residents. According to its web site, its residential roads are all privately-owned, and because of this unique situation it has requested that Google take down all Street View images of its roads.”It’s not the hoity-toity folks trying to figure out how to keep the world away,” said Mayor Thomas Watson. “They really didn’t have any authorization to go on private property.”Since the introduction of Google Maps’ Street View last spring, the feature has caused controversy

Diamond Multimedia introduced today in collaboration with SmoothCreations the Intel Quadcore 9770 Notebook Broodling PC gaming system. This is one sweet looking notebook that is hand painted & custom built for each customer that buys one. It also happens to be the fist notebook to use an Intel Core 2 Extreme QX9770 'Yorkfield' 3.2GHz processor! Very impressive stuff for those looking for power on the go!

The Smooth Creations Broodling Notebook is powered by an Intel Extreme Edition 9770 Quadcore 4GB of GSkill Dual Channel DDR2 memory. Driving the graphics is a Diamond Mobile Viper Radeon HD3850 — A single 500GB Western Digital Caviar SE16 hard drive and Lite-On 20X DVD+/-RW drive round out the peripherals. SmoothCreations worked with Diamond & Epower engineers to ensure the motherboard had been designed with the utmost in over clocking capabilities, and attention cooling on the cpu and epower was part of the development to ensure a robust external power supply design was capable of supplying the notebook with the needed power. The distinctive artwork designs are the labor of love from of the artists at Smooth Creations.

Pictures of AMDs upcoming ATI Radeon HD 4850 graphics card were leaked this weekend as one lucky editor got some face time with the new graphics card while at meetings before the show. They say a picture is worth a thousand words, so here you go!

So here it is – it could be mistaken for the Radeon HD 3850, except for the larger fan, although nothing much else has changed on the surface. It's still red and single slot with a six-pin PCI-Express power connector. We scrounged for some light to get a side on die shot but it just wasn't happening. From the looks of it though, it's not all that huge and to keep it under the ~130W envelope the heatsink can stand, we still expect the same TSMC 55nm process. According to the rumours we've been hearing, both the Radeon HD 4850 and the higher-end Radeon HD 4870 will feature 480 stream processors in a similar arrangement to the R600 generation (i.e. 96 five-way shader processors). The Radeon HD 4850 is rumoured to use GDDR3 memory, while AMD has already announced that the high-end Radeon HD 4870 will utilise the all-new GDDR5 memory.

The crew over at bit-tech are over in Taiwan for Computex and have already spotted some great stuff. The talked MSI into letting them take snap some pictures of Intels upcoming Tylersberg X58 Express chipset, which is whatthe new Nehalem processor will run on.

They were also able to take some motherboard pictures with the the new triple-channel memory DIMM slots along with the LGA1366 CPU socket.

First, the CPU and its new socket: while the roadmaps say the high-end Nehalem to be launched in Q4 will have up to eight cores, the one MSI had in its office was just a quad-core but with eight threads. The socket is still LGA, but instead of the 775 used on current boards, this one now features 1366 pins and is slightly rectangular not Pentium Pro rectangular, but simply a stretched out square. The back of the socket now has a metal backplate to brace itself and Im afraid youll be buying a new heatsink too because the socket fittings have changed since LGA775. In fact, the whole area that needs to be exclusively for Intel CPU use is now apparently over twice the volume of that compared to LGA775 giving motherboard manufacturers even less space to shoehorn in additional components.

Smaller, low-cost PCs are likely to be at the top of the shopping list for technology buyers gathering in Taipei this week for the world's second largest computer fair, as an economic slowdown in the United States forces consumers to cut back on spending. Shoppers are feeling the pinch from rocketing fuel costs and rising prices, and in the United States the subprime crisis has left lenders less willing to hand over credit, leaving some consumers reluctant to buy new expensive personal computers and gadget heavy mobile phones.

Asustek Computer, which makes the runaway success Eee PC, will display new, wider-screen models that allow users to do everything from storing video clips in shock-proof flash memory and surfing the Web in coffee shops. Acer Inc, Taiwan's most famous PC brand, will also test the water by introducing similar low-cost PCs as it expand into fast-growing emerging markets, including China and India.

The Plantronics Discovery 925 Bluetooth earpiece is your essential conversation piece, blending an elegantly simple VFrame design with crisp sound quality and lightweight, couture comfort. The effortless set up, AudioIQ noise control technology and carrying case with rechargeable battery let you stay in touch and in style while you’re in motion. Is the five hours of talk time and AudioIQ noise control technology enough to impress our staff? Read on to find out!

Video:XFX GeForce 9600GT XXX Alpha Dog Edition @ TweaktownPalit 9600 Geforce GSO Sonic Review @ TechwareLabsSoyo Graphite Series 22″ LCD HDTV (SYTPT2238AB) @ 3DGameManASUS EAH3850 X2 1GB Dual GPU Video Card Review @ ThinkComputers.orgMotherboards and Chipsets:ASUS P5Q Motherboards @ TechARPECS A780GM-A Black Series AMD 780G Motherboard Review @ Bigbruin.comASRock A780FullDisplayPort @ PhoronixProcessors:AMD Phenom versus Athlon X2: Something Old, Something New… @ PC PerspectiveMemory and Storage:Thermaltake

Customizing your rig or morphing it into a different form factor has become passe. Or so says Google Trends. We checked out a graph of searches on “case mods” over the last four years and found that lookups on the term dropped precipitously for no apparent reason.Here’s the indisputable visual evidence:  Why did the interest in case modding slow down? It’s hard to pinpoint, but perhaps the hobby of tinkerers and creative minds has returned to the underground. What do you think? Are case mods

Intel continues to drive their 45nm process technology down through a larger cross-section of their Core 2 lineup, not only on the desktop side of their offering but also with their mobile CPUs.   If you recall, recently we put Dell’s XPS M1730 gaming notebook through its paces and came away impressed.  At the time, the new Dell gaming dream machine came equipped with an Intel Core 2 Extreme X7900 CPU, built on a 65nm fab process, that clocked in at 2.8GHz with 4MB of L2 cache.  So,