Tech Olive

A company known as Tsera (I haven’t heard of them either) has decided that they think they own a patent that numerous large companies are misusing. The patent, officially called “Methods and apparatus for controlling a portable electronic device using a touchpad,” is apparently being used by companies like Apple, LG, Coby, iRiver, Microsoft and Philips. A total of 23 companies are being sued by Tsera. This lawsuit will most likely be thrown out in a blink of an eye, but we’ll see. Hit up the link below to check out the official court filing.

[link]

Image Credit: kl-Ga

For those of you not aware of this,  last year renowned photographer and author Scott Kelby started Scott Kelby’s Worldwide Photo Walk and has gained massive popularity. It’s basically a competition to see who can bring back the most amazing photos from just a simple walk around your city (over 900 cities worldwide contributed!), but it’s more about the community of photographers and retaining photography as what it is — art.

Since the event just happened yesterday, there won’t be many updates for a few more hours, but within the next few days sites like Flickr.com and Photobucket.com will become overflowed with images from this event. If you missed it, don’t worry! There will always be next year and besides, there doesn’t need to be any event to go out and get some quality alone time with just you and your camera.

Image Credit: Rui M. Leal

Surprisingly, few people know that Windows XP was designed with a 30 second boot as one of the main features (but not in Vista — weird). That was way back when we had 128 MB of RAM and single core CPUs. So shouldn’t computers nowadays with 4 GB of RAM and quad core CPUs boot in a matter of seconds? Well, the problem is we also have many more programs start up when Windows does and the sector on our disk where the boot is stored gets fragmented overtime, but here are a couple of tricks to speed up your boot.

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So, I officially need to buy an iPhone now. It seems a small team of coders, given three weeks, have created a single-level testing ground in the Unity engine. What’s so special about that single level? It is an unofficial port of the amazing game Portal. Yes, with working portals. But, unfortunately, no Companion Cube or cake to be seen. Now, there’s still some speculation as to the genuine and legitimate nature of the demonstration, so don’t get too excited. But, enough talk, follow the break for the video.

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Normally, we at the Olive don’t bother with news regarding stuff outside the USA, unless it also impacts us. This time, we’ll make an exception for our UK brethren. Official news has just released announcing that CoD: Modern Warfare 2 Prestige Edition will not only be priced at a colossal £119.99 (converted to USD, that’s $45 more than the US price), but also the Prestige Edition will be sold exclusively through HMV. So, unless you’re ordering from the USA and having it drop-shipped, don’t bother shopping anywhere else.

Microsoft has just announced all the details of the next Xbox Live update. Engadget has the complete list of new features coming to Xbox Live later this summer.

[Engadget - Xbox Live Update]

After all the rumors and expectations, it is finally confirmed that Resident Evil 5 is not only coming to the PC, but an official release date has also been announced. Releasing September 15th in North America and the 18th in Europe, the PC version will feature new character costumes, a new “mercenaries” mode and the inclusion of 3D graphics, thanks to NVIDIA’s GeForce 3D Vision.

On Tuesday, Red Octane confirmed their new drum set controller for Guitar Hero 5 (slated for Sep. 1). We must say it looks a hell of a lot better than the previous version and it will probably be much cheaper than Logitech’s rendition, which will cost you $230.

No word yet on pricing or specs.

via [Red Octane]

Treyarch has confirmed that CoD: World at War‘s PC 1.5 patch will include Map Pack 2. The update is planned to release July 17th, this week. Follow the break for a list of changes.

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Yes, I Jakob Griffith, am not the photography expert of Tech Olive. However, I still hold my own against Steve and Lucas and know a couple of tricks to make your photography pop out against the rest. One fascination of mine is High Dynamic Range photography, also known as HDR for short. The best way to explain it is if you’re in a very dimly-lit room with a single window, you can either take a picture with high exposure settings and get the room to show up nice and bright or use low exposure settings and get the window and whatever is outside to show up nice and bright. HDR photography gives you the ability to combine the two and get an equally brilliant shot of the room and outside in one picture.

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