Gadget retailer Ebuyer has launched a Cyber Monday-style sale – the somewhat daft name US retailers give to the gadget-hungry follow-up to Black Friday – offering limited stock of popular products for just £1 each – but sadly neglected to shore up its server farm accordingly.

Announced over the weekend, Ebuyer’s offer sees selected products from its range of PCs, laptops, cameras, components and games reduced to just £1. As you might expect, the deal has proven popular – so popular, in fact, that Ebuyer’s website is out for the count.

Ahead of the offer’s official opening at 11:00 today, the site is unresponsive to external traffic as it encounters a self-imposed Distributed Denial of Service attack in the form of thousands of bargain-hungry consumers hitting the refresh button over and over again.

Thus far, Ebuyer has been unavailable to comment on the outage – likely as its staff race around trying to find extra server capacity from somewhere – but if it doesn’t get things sorted sharpish, it will be left with a horde of disappointed punters to appease.

Ebuyer’s poor showing comes in marked contrast to that of Amazon, which managed to run its entire series of Black Friday ‘Lightning Deals’ last week without a single outage.

Via: Thinq.co.uk

The impending arrival of the latest chapter in the epic RPG series Elder Scrolls, Skyrim has got the whole RPG fan community all excited. The game is purportedly going to be amazingly large and feature a very robust quest system and have eye-popping graphics quality to boot.

Although the bells and whistles of the current generation RPGs are pushing graphics and processing power to the limit, something still has to be said about the old-school RPGs that came out ten to twenty years ago. These RPGs may pale in comparison to RPGs like Skyrim in terms of graphics, but they can stand toe-to-toe with these games not just in gameplay but also in the story, which is an often overlooked aspect when making RPGs nowadays.

Here are some of the best old-school RPGs released. You owe it to yourself to check these games out and play them.

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The original Battlestar Galactica series aired in 1978 starring Richard Hatch as Captain Apollo and Dirk Benedict as Lieutenant Starbuck. The show was short lived but lasted long enough to create a large following that held strong once the series was put into syndication. In 2003, NBC resurrected the series. This time starring William James Olmos as Captain William Adama and Mary McDonnell as President Laura Roslin. The newly revamped Battlestar Galactica fleet picked up where the original series left off with the humans in a never-ending battle with renegade Cylons. Now you can take your love for Battlestar Galactica one step further and partake in the Battlestar Galactica online game.

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If you’ve been shopping around for smart phones lately, then you’ve no doubt heard about Google’s new Ice Cream Sandwich. So, what exactly is this Ice Cream Sandwich, and how in the world does it have anything to do with technology? What’s more, if your smart phone comes equipped with Ice Cream Sandwich, will your hands get sticky every time you take a call?! If this novel technological term, named after a favorite novelty, has you a little confused, then you’re not alone. A lot of people are asking, “What the heck is the Ice Cream Sandwich?” This guide should help clear the air.

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Being the younger generation makes you think that you must know everything about technology. It’s entertaining to make fun of your parents and their lack of technology skills. But realize now that there are a lot more technological inventions to come our way and when they do come, we will be the ones confused while our kids teach us what to do. I think that this confusion is already settling over our generation. I find myself so frustrated sometimes at the technology that exists today.

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The HP Touchpad was doomed to fail from the start. They were overpriced and under-supported. Since they were not making any profits from sales, HP decided to drop support completely for the device and sell them at largely discounted rate. This made TouchPads available at Best Buy for an alarming $99. People flocked to the stores to buy Touchpads because you could save a large amount of cash, and still have a pretty nice tablet to use. Interestingly enough, HP was even initially thought to drop support for all applications that would be built on their platform. People still bought the Touchpads knowing this. This was because of the common consensus that hackers would be able to implement the Android platform on the HP Touchpad – meaning that you would essentially get an Android tablet, for $99. The hackers were able to do this, and on top of that HP hasn’t dropped support for applications or decided to disband WebOS (operating system) that HP Touchpad works with. Could the HP Touchpad really take off? Click more to read the full article.

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HP is finally pulling the plug on selling new units of its TouchPad tablet. Late on Friday, HP sent out emails to people (including folks at Neowin) who had signed up for updates about being able to receive the now discontinued webOS tablet. Unfortunately, those emails, as you can see above, stated that “we are officially out of stock.”

Click here to read the full article at Neowin.net

While everyone was in a tizzy about Amazon’s $199 Kindle Fire price point, the Indian government was busily working to help bring out the $35 Aakash Android tablet. The tablet was developed with similarly good intentions as OLPC’s XO laptop before it — an attempt to get low-cost computing devices into the hands of students. One of the tablets landed in the VentureBeat offices this week. The site spent some hands-on time with the Froyo slate, and mostly liked what it saw, noting that seeming compromises made for price and a speedy release date ultimately benefit the whole of the device. The tablet will start hitting India next month, at the $35 government-subsidized pricepoint (actual retail price is a still mega-cheap $60).

Source: VentureBeat

Imagine a computer that isn’t just designed to “deal” with the heat produced by its components, but one that actually uses that wasted energy to power some of its high-tech internals. That’s the potential of a new discovery out of the Physical and Technical Institute (PTB) of Braunschweig, Germany. Researchers discovered what they’re calling tunnel magneto thermoelectric voltage, essentially that by heating one side of a magnetic tunnel structure (the types of switches found in magnetic RAM and in the heads of hard drives) they can control the flow of electricity across its poles. The switches would still need to be triggered by matching the polarity on either side of the insulator and magnet sandwich, but heating one pole would create an electrical potential and would consume some of the energy that otherwise might get dispersed through a heatsink. We’re still years away from seeing this technology in any functioning products and, honestly, we’re not entirely sure we understand how exactly it would work, but it sounds like just the sort of potential-packing innovation that our (rather toasty) laps desperately need.

Via: ExtremeTech
Source: PTB

Professional photographers know the drill: every few years, Canon or Nikon announces a game-changing DSLR, often prompting top photogs to unload their complete kits and switch to another system in a never-ending attempt to shoot with the best. This time, Canon is first out of the gate, with its flagship EOS-1D X — the latest in a series that dates back to 2001 with the EOS-1D. As you’ve probably noticed, the company’s new top model looks virtually identical to its decade-old ancestor, but is otherwise a far cry from that four megapixel CCD sensor-sporting dinosaur. We’ve been anxiously awaiting an opportunity to check out Canon’s new $6,800 18.1 megapixel full-frame model since first getting word of the beastly camera last week, and just had a chance to go hands-on during the company’s Pro Solutions event in London.

Click here to read Engadget’s full video hands-on of the Canon EOS 1D X