Phoenix Technologies latest product, debuting at this year’s CES in Las Vegas, is called HyperSpace. It’s a slick, compact Linux based platform that circumvents the Windows load time by booting straight from BIOS. It installs alongside Windows, and allows the user to switch between the stripped down but aesthetically pleasing HyperSpace interface — which boasts instant web connectivity — and the hard drive based Windows platform at will.

Think of it as a 3G phone version of your laptop.

The boot time for HyperSpace from total shutdown is comparable to bringing a Windows machine out of sleep mode, which is a few seconds. Because the program boots from BIOS, it doesn’t require a spinning hard drive, which saves on battery power by up to 30 percent, according to Phoenix.

HyperSpace boasts a robust security system administered by Phoenix Technologies, disallowing any downloads not cleared by the Phoenix Technology auditing system. For more advanced users, such electronic handholding might not be ideal, but it comes with the package. Time will tell if it’s a winner, but from early glimpses of the system it appears to be a nice solution for those wanting to save on battery power and circumvent hard drive based apps by living online.

The HyperSpace platform starts at $39 for the basic system which runs on single core processors and $59 for the hybrid option which runs on dual core processors.

“This game is all about the strange and insane world of New Arcadia and the Penny Arcade-style humor to be found in it,” said Hothead CEO Vlad Ceraldi. “With the cool gameplay additions we’ve made, including longer gameplay, completion tracking and difficulty settings; extra Lovecraftian overtones in the world and music; and the perfect time of the year, everything just came together.”

Players who may have missed the first episode can start a new quest, with a completely new character, while returning gamers will be able to use the data from Episode 1. Expected to being gamers anywhere from 6-10 hours of gameplay, Penny Arcade Adventures 2 also features new difficulty settings, bringing bigger, badder enemies to do battle with.

Along with dropping word on the game’s release, developer Hot Head Games released the game’s full list of achievements for the Xbox 360. The game’s 11 achievement, along with one secret achievement are as follows:

- Millionaire – Collect one million dollars in cash (15)

- Moving On Up – Collect the Wealth key (15)

- Arsonist – Burn down the Riverbrook Apartments (15)

- Endgame – Collect a ticket for the World’s Fair (15)

- Can’t Nobody Hold You Down – Defeat the Game’s final Boss (15)

- Steel Cannibal – Spend robot parts to upgrade all weapons (20)

- Lab Assistant - Complete Dr. Stripe’s and Dr. Whimple’s missions (15)

-  Reluctant Hero - At the beginning of the episode, refuse to join Gabe and Tycho 5 times (5)

- The Strength to Rule: Kill enough enemies to earn the XP needed for all party members to reach Level 30 (20)

- POWER SURRRGE! - Block enemy attacks and get one party member’s hit counter up to 40 (25)

- Pack Rat Strikes Back - Only use items to win a fight. No attacks or counter attacks allowed (25)

On November 5, the Open Handset Alliance was created.  This alliance, consisting of 34 hardware, software and telecommunications companies was founded with the collective goal of furthering the standards of mobile technologies.

A few years ago Google acquired Android Inc. and from there they’ve been building a product that is now just a few weeks away from reality.

“Google’s Android platform will launch in the next several weeks. It will be an HTC phone, likely the HTC Dream, and will be launched internationally on the T-Mobile network. A window of between Oct 15 and Nov 30,” says www.veturebeat.com.

According to ZDNet, September 15 is the release date of the phone at $150, which will be, “available to existing T-mobile users,” on that day. A more expensive version of the phone, at $399, will be available sometime in October.

For those of you who don’t know, Android is a program based off of the Linux OS which has the potential to increase the ease of web based applications on the go.  Likewise, this program is free and Google has been offering the tools to create programs for this system for a while now.  At launch, it’s got the potential to knock the iPhone out of your hand due to the ease of development and reliability of its software.

At this time there are no actual specs; nor are there any pictures of a potential model for this, “Gphone,” but considering the proximity of its actual release, they’re bound to come up in the next couple weeks.

CodeWeavers is a Windows emulation tool that lets users run W32 applications in Linux or MAC platforms.

The challenge is that if President Bush can achieve any of their goals before leaving office the company will give away a free copy of their software to anyone who wants one for 24 hours. The goals are:

Reduce the Price of Gas: “Gas costs about $3.79 a gallon in the Twin Cities, (Minn.) a full buck more than this time last year. If the average price here drops below $2.79 per gallon, this goal is met.”

Reduce the Price of Food: “With the rise of fuel prices has come a similar rise in food prices. A gallon of milk is about $5 these days. It was $3.50 a year ago. If the average price of a gallon of milk comes down to $3.50 gallon in the Twin Cities metro, this goal is met.”

Create More Jobs: “We started the year with 138,002,000 people in the U.S. working non-farm jobs. Since then, total non-farm employment has decreased by 366,000. If so much as a single job can be created this calendar year – meaning if employment can be at least 138,002,001, this goal is met.”

Rejuvenate the Housing Market: “Median home values in the Twin Cities have fallen 12 percent year over year – from $233,000 to $205,000. If that median returns to $233,000, this goal is met.”

Bring Osama Bin-Laden to Justice: “Every American would like to see Osama Bin-Laden captured or terminated. We won’t be picky about how President Bush gets him. If it happens, this goal is met.”

CodeWeavers is a virtualization software company with a product similar to VMware, Parallels or Microsoft’s Virtual PC/HyperVisor. It’s based on the open source Wine application for Linux, but CodeWeavers is released for Linux and Mac OSX.

Code Weavers emulates the Win32 API for other systems, not the entire system. This tends to leave them with less compatibility since they may have missed part of the spec, but results in much greater speeds. The speeds of CodeWeavers games or apps tend to be closer to the speeds of the native applications, since they don’t actually emulate the system they basically are writing the windows api’s for other systems.

More information on the details of the challenge can be read at, http://lameduck.codeweavers.com/