ASUS has quietly slipped out a new pro-oriented notebook in admist the more home-focused designs of CES. The 12.5-inch B23E has a relatively sleek magnesium alloy chassis. Although 1.1 inches thick and 3.4 pounds, it's intended as a true complete replacement with a DVD burner, up to 750GB of storage, and as much as 8GB of RAM.
Dell in an unusual evening launch revealed its first non-education PC aimed at kids. A Nickelodeon Edition of the Inspiron Mini 10v will have a "slime" color scheme both on the lid and palm rest as well as a custom, Stardock-designed Windows XP skin with colors and icons themed around the TV network's shows. It also gets multiple links to special web portals on Nickelodeon's website and an updating desktop widget.
A development team at the University of Washington recently unveiled Adeona – named after the Roman goddess of safe returns – Open Source security software that parallels functionality of paid services such as LoJack. The dev team claims that the software is privacy-preserving, in that no one other than the owner of the device can track a stolen computer through Adeona. Users are merely required to install Adeona, and do not have to rely on a third-party service to track the device.
