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Journalists Cover Microsoft, Using Macs

It’s not an easy time for Microsoft — with Steve Ballmer having to field questions about being “buffoons” and an “evil empire”  at the shareholder’s meeting (.doc) — so when they get together “the world’s most influential technology pundits and online writers” (nb: we weren’t invited) for Mobius to discuss super-secret mobile tech you’d think [...]

Guide To Black Friday Apple Bargains: Cheap MacBooks, iPods and Accessories Galore

Here’s a guide for finding the best bargains on Apple-related gear during the infamous Black Friday sales on November 27. We’ve compiled a comprehensive list of gear from leaked photos of sales flyers and descriptions of sales.
The bargains include a 2.26 GHz MacBook + $150 gift card at Best Buy for $999.99 ; a 32GB [...]

Review: Voices Is Today’s Best Thing Ever, Grab It Now While It’s Cheap

New on the App Store is Voices from the clever folk at Tap Tap Tap. You can guess what it does.

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Review: Sony Walkman S540 Series Video MP3 Player

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“Sony’s S Series Walkman,” it chattered, “is a serious challenger to the iPod Nano.” Gosh, really? Perhaps the Cult had better have a look at one, then, despite [...]

Spy Shots of iPod Video — Good, But No Cigar — Photoshop!

Is this the new video iPod?

Is this picture from MacShrine the new video iPod — the one that may be unveiled next Tuesday at Apple’s secret “fun products” event?

One analysis at Flickr pegs the pic as genuine — the reflections on the edges match up, and the light bleeding through the label is hard to fake.

But at MacShrine, most commentators think it’s phony. One says:

“Good way to check authenticity in Photoshop is to remove distracting color information, and make the image B&W. Then adjust the Levels in real-time, this usually highlights copy and paste: luminosity is often a problem for fakers. The horizontal black line at top and bottom of the screen and the two black areas are much darker than any other black in the picture, this points towards fake: i.e. the colour screen in the middle being pasted in.

The light blooms around the bright whites are well done if faked, as are the red and cyan colour illuminating the sticker.”

Another Engadget commentator adds:

“I am 95% sure this is a fake.

The artist mirrored an ipod video to get black around the edges, and cloned the middle. Then overlayed a colorbars photo and painted the diffusion. If you gamma-up, you will see the erasure of the dense blacks in the color bars, revealing the lifted blacks of the ipod video screen. If you gamma-down, the whites crush and reveal weird artifacts. FAKE.

The quality of the handwritting is amature – not the way someone who is fluent in chinese would write it.”

Perhaps this pic from TechEBlog is the real thing? The comment consensus over there though is that it’s a pocket mirror or some such trickery.

Or is this it?

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lkahney

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