Doug Aamoth…

It’s all over, folks. Fortune is reporting that the state of New York’s sales tax on goods purchased at Amazon.com starts this Sunday, June 1st. Peter’s already been enraged about it here and here and I’m guessing he’s not going to be too thrilled about this post either. He’s pretty excitable as it is, so hopefully he won’t read this.

The state’s justification, you may remember, is that since Amazon has an affiliate commission program and since some of those affiliates might be based in New York, all sales on Amazon.com that get shipped to anyone in New York should be subject to sales tax. Sounds pretty dumb to me. Scary, too, as I bet other states use this case as precedent to start taxing online sales as well.

Amazon, to its credit, sued the state but it looks like it didn’t help much.

Well, will you look at this — a nice-looking iPhone/iPod Touch dock plus alarm clock with an equally nice-looking price. The iH41B from iHome will be available in July but can be pre-ordered now if you’d like to avoid the rush.

It’ll work with most dock-able iPods (and presumably, the iPhone) but is “specifically designed to take advantage of the iPod Touch’s variable aspect screen.” You can also use other audio devices by plugging them into the device’s line-in jack.

Product Page [ihomeaudio.com] via DVICE

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The ASUS Essentio CS5110, which we’ve covered in fair-to-middling detail, will be offered with an optional Blu-ray burner. Pricing will run between $657 and $1,642, with the Blu-ray equipped version of the PC starting at just over $1,300.

These prices, by the way, are being converted from New Taiwan dollars, so they’re not necessarily set in stone. Still no official launch date and we’re not even sure if we’ll see these things stateside yet, but more details are expected next week at Computex.

Full specs in a previous post here.

via IDG/Yahoo! News

Valve’s wildly popular Steam game downloading service allows you to purchase and download games quickly and easily to any computer running the software. I’ve purchased a handful of games this way and it makes it super easy to move them to a new computer. Games get automatically updated and patched too, which is nice.

Now Valve’s announced Steam Cloud, which “will retain users’ saved games and configuration files indefinitely,” according to Shacknews. This makes moving to a new computer or between multiple computers even easier now, as anyone who’s had to reconfigure their key bindings and whatnot can attest to the tediousness of having to tweak all those settings each time they move the game. You’ll be able to pick up from where you left off, too, with the added game saving functionality.

The new feature will be here sometime in the “near future.”

via SlashGear

What a pleasant, soothing video of a graceful, six-legged stinger-tailed killing machine used for “logging,” whatever that is. All that needs to be done now is to equip these things with front-mounted lasers and let them loose in a big city.

In a non-paranoid world, this machine is a logging prototype made by John Deere in cooperation with Plustech Oy. It’s not new, either, as these videos have been floating around for a few years. I just want to keep everyone vigilant, though.

via Newlaunches

CNET’s UK office got a special hands-on with the forthcoming MSI Wind notebook and they like it so much that they said it “could take the throne from the Asus Eee PC as the best mini laptop on the planet.” The 10-inch screen is apparently better than the one on HP’s Mini-Note 2133, and the overall design aesthetic and keyboard on the Wind is better than the Eee but not quite as nice as the Mini-Note.

One really cool feature is that the CPU can be overclocked by about 20% by hitting Fn + F10, which kicks MSI’s “TurboDrive Engine” into gear. More photos after the jump.

Photo credit: CNET

The MSI Wind will be available here in the US some time in June. More info here.

“The day has finally arrived and the 3K RazorBook 400 is now hitting the US market. We just lowered our MSRP to $299 as part of this exciting announcement. There has been a lot of comparison from bloggers to the Asus eeePC due to its similar 7-inch LCD form factor. The 3K RazorBook 400 is a unique product that was designed as a low-cost ($299) portable Internet appliance, not to replace your home PC or Notebook computer,” said Dan Jacobs, CEO, 3K Computers.

Okay, I won’t compare this to the Eee, then. I will tell you, however, that it’s a small laptop that weighs two pounds, has a 4GB solid-state drive, 7-inch  800×480 display, 400MHz processor, 512MB of RAM, Linux, and a “full-size” keyboard.

Full-size keyboard? Look at the size of that dude’s hand!

Anyhoo, the price is okay — at $299, it probably won’t break the bank. It’s got twice the storage space but half the processor speed of the laptop that must not be named, so keep that in mind. Dimensons for the RazorBook are 8.25″ L x 5.5″ W x 1.25″ H versus Voldemort’s 8.86″ L x 6.30″ W x 1.4″ H, so it’s got a smaller footprint.

Again, no way that’s a full-size keyboard. Boot up time is eight seconds, though, which is nice. It’s available here if you’re interested.

Shaun White Snowboarding will be hitting stores this winter and the Wii version will make use of the Balance Board for a quasi-realistic snowboarding experience.

The game itself looks pretty cool — you’ll need to travel around the world in the hopes of finally meeting up with Shaun in Park City, Utah. One seemingly odd feature is that you’ll need to pick a suitable cameraman before you hit the slopes and, while snowboarding, your cameraman can give you little boosts. The game’s being developed by Ubisoft, so who am I to question the inclusion of camera operators?

IGN Wii via NWFB

VIA’s 64-bit “Isaiah” processor, which we’ve reported here and here, has now been made official, taking on the “Nano” moniker. The chip uses a 65-nanometer process, measures 21mm x 21mm, and uses the same socket as existing VIA C7 processors, which should make things easier on OEMs. It’s being pitched for more mainstream desktop and laptop platforms, squaring off against Intel and AMD.

“In particular, the VIA Nano processor places significant emphasis on high-performance floating-point execution, using a completely new algorithm for floating-point adds that results in the lowest floating-point add latency of any x86 processor. Similarly, the floating-point multiplier has the lowest latency of any x86 processor.

In practical terms, this means the VIA Nano processor provides exceptionally smooth play back of Blu-ray Discâ„¢ and other HD video formats, which can have encrypted media streams of up to 40Mbps, in addition to its robust two-clock FPU multiply and 128 bit data path offering an excellent gaming experience, providing silky smooth rendering of 3D images.”

Clock speeds range from 1.0GHz to 1.8GHz, so it won’t eat into premium offerings from Intel and AMD, but it might be able to take a chunk out of the lower-end stuff.

More info here.