LIVEdigitally

Thankfully the good old U.S. of A. has yet to impose those nasty 3-hour caps on gameplay, but from the look of this announcement, it wouldn’t really matter anyway, considering the fact that we’re talking about actual EXERCISE here. That’s right, kiddies…er, ladies and gents: everyone’s favorite floor-stomping videogame is coming to a 24-hour Fitness near you! Move aside, consoles, PCs, cell phones and iPods.

Konami, the company behind DDR, will be partnering with the U.S. fitness chain to encourage gamers to exercise. I’m giving this one the thumbs up: you’ll finally be able to get your game on aside grunting muscle heads and cardio freaks. 24-hour Fitness will apparently be adding the units to some of their kids clubs (not sure if this means some sort of lame fenced-in kiddie area or a type of club with facilities for kids – my fingers are crossed for the latter).

In addition to the installation of DDR systems in the clubs, 30-day passes to 24-hour Fitness will be included in packages of DDR Extreme 2 for the PS2 and Xbox.

You know the guy on the bench press ain’t got nuthin on you, so get out there and impress him with your button-stomping skillz, yo!

Saw this on the SlingCommunity site:

[...] we officially launched the PAL beta application process this morning. The link to apply is online here. We will only take applications for the next 2 weeks, so please sign up soon!

Also, just so you know, we take our beta programs very seriously, and they aren’t for the faint of heart. We have a very limited supply of PAL units, so we’re looking for the best testers out there! You don’t need to be the most technically savvy person, you just need to commit to giving us great feedback! [...]

I know we’ve had a lot of Slingbox owners and fans come through this site – I highly recommend giving it a try if you are in a country with PAL TV services…

Introduction

The optical drive of choice for a computer today is clearly a DVD writer. After all, it can handle reading and writing duties for both your CD’s and DVD’s with one drive. In the end, a DVD writer can be purchased for only a few more bucks than a CD writer, making the choice a real “no brainer.”

Not all users want to open their computer up to upgrade their drive. Some desktop users may not feel comfortable opening up their computer case to swap drives. Notebook optical drives are notoriously difficult to upgrade. Power users may have a desire for a second drive to complement their existing drive. Families or offices with multiple computers may find it more cost efficient to share one DVD drive among a few computers. For any of these scenarios, an external drive is well worth considering.

In the past, I have had a less than thrilling experience with external optical drives. My first optical drive was an external CD writer. However, this was using a parallel port connection which really didn’t have nearly enough bandwidth. Let’s see how a USB 2.0 connection can really speed things up, and how this drive performs.

Samsung is an electronics company based in South Korea. They have been making optical drives for some time now. Their drives are jointly developed with Toshiba. Samsung is a member of the DVD Forum, developers of the “minus” standard. Often, even with writers that handle both “families” of discs, they’re more adept at the standard that the company originally supported. We’ll see if that hold true for the Samsung WriteMaster as well.

The Samsung WriteMaster is tested using our standardized protocol for optical drives. Nero’s CD Speed benchmarks the writing performance. The discs written will be scanned in a LiteOn 852S drive at 4x for DVD’s, and a LiteOn 52246S drive for the CD’s. They will also be tested for playback in two set top DVD players (a Sharp and a Sony). The media used is from the same batches of our other drive reviews, and scanned on the same drive, allowing a direct comparison of writing quality.

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