The ExeMode CDR-300 mini stereo system is a cheap boombox from Japanese company KFE with a single redeeming quality: you put in a CD and it turns its cuts into MP3 or WMA files, slamming them down onto an SD card or USB key.

Unfortunately, for some reason the ExeMode can’t handle SD cards that hold over 1GB. That sucks, but perhaps the most remarkable aspect of his box is its price, quoted at $60. We abandoned CDs long ago, but if you haven’t, this might be a convenient way to quickly snag some of those songs on a flash card.

Intel on February 12 announced that its researchers have developed the world’s first programmable processor to deliver Teraflop (one trillion calculations per second) performance from a single, 80-core chip. The chip is a product of Intel’s Tera-scale computing research, with technical details of the Teraflops research chip set to be presented at the annual Integrated Solid State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) this week in San Francisco.

The shiny, new Windows Vista beckons, and an upgrade is mighty tempting. But before you take the plunge, be aware that you may end up forking out a lot more money than just the cost of an operating system upgrade. If you’re upgrading to Windows Vista, the first cash outlay you likely face is buying more RAM for your PC and 1GB of RAM for as low as a little over $100, while 2GB will run you $180 and up. Vista is graphics-hungry. If you want to run its Aero environment, you’ll need a good graphics card with support for DirectX 9 graphics with a WDDM driver, a minimum of 128MB of graphics memory, and what’s called Pixel Shader 2.0 and 32 bits per pixel. You can get a graphics card that meets these specs for as low as about $60. If you want better performance, of course, you can pay more, in the $100 to $150 range. Vista installs only via DVD and these you can get a reasonable one for as low as about $30 to $40. You should have a hard drive with at least a 40GB capacity hard drive with 15GB of free disk space and can get more for $70 or $80 with a 250GB capacity. Hidden costs can finally total up steep being the bottom line!

SANTA MONICA, Calif. and CUPERTINO, Calif., Feb. 12 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ — Lionsgate and Apple(R) today announced that movies from Lionsgate will be available for purchase and download on the iTunes(R) Store (www.itunes.com) starting today. iTunes customers will be able to purchase blockbuster Lionsgate films like “Terminator 2,” “LA Story,” “Basic Instinct,” “The Blair Witch Project” and “Dirty Dancing” and more than 150 titles coming to iTunes this month. The iTunes Store has become the world’s most popular online movie store, with a catalog of over 400 titles.

Those of you expecting to cozy up in front of your TV with a bucket of popcorn and your iTunes library at the end of this month will have to wait a little longer. Think Secret is reporting that the AppleTV ship date has been bumped from Feb. 20 to the beginning of March. No reason’s given for the delay, but if any speculation’s ever accurate, it’s speculation about a delay.

You can soon expect to pick up a free song of your choice from iTunes with every concert ticket you buy at Ticketmaster. No gimmicks, no catches. Buy a concert ticket, get any track you want, gratis.

The other side of the promotion extends a program where last year, for example, pre-orders of Stadium Arcadium from iTunes got RHCP fans early access to tickets. By pre-ordering “select digital albums,” you’ll get a crack at that artist’s tickets before the rest of the non-iTunes-using barbarians do. No word yet on which artists are participating, though…

Samsung plans to trick you into buying its new Bordeaux line of LCD HDTVs by appealing to your vanity. The 32 and 40-inch LCD TVs don’t look all that different from last year’s LCDs, but when the bezel is coated in shiny black plastic with blue hints it’s very hard to say no.

As for stats, if you really want to trust machine translation, then we see a 10,000:1 contrast ratio and a 178-degree viewing angle. There also appears to be a USB 2.0 port, used to connect things like thumb drives filled with memorable digital photos. Don’t forget the standard HDMI ports (or you can man up a buy an AV receiver). Bordeaux 2007 looks to be unleashed in April.

According to figures released by Nielsen VideoScan to Home Media Magazine, Blu-ray movies are quickly gaining ground on HD DVD. The sales numbers show that Blu-ray Discs have been outselling HD DVDs by a strong margin thus far in 2007.

During the first week of 2007, sales of Blu-ray more than doubled that of HD DVDs, with the latter making up only 46.14 percent of sales compared to the former. Blu-ray pulled even further ahead the next week, leaving HD DVD behind at only 38.36 percent of Blu-ray’s numbers. To clarify, that means that, from January 1 to January 14, for every 100 Blu-ray Discs that were sold, only 38.36 HD DVDs were sold – meaning that Blu-ray has been outselling HD DVD by nearly a three to one margin.

Many of us have a reason to give thanks to Bill Gates, whether it be for the PowerPoint presentation that got us our last promotion, the Word spell checker that helped us avoid an embarrassing double entendre in our thesis paper, or the ol’ Xbox 360 that has drained our productivity, consumed all of our free time, and driven our sweethearts into the arms of other men. But Romanian president Traian Basescu has a bigger reason than most to owe the Microsoft founder a debt of gratitude: he claims that rampant software piracy in the Eastern European nation was the single biggest factor in developing a healthy IT industry. Yes, believe it or not, a head-of-state actually stood up in public — at a press conference to celebrate the launch of a Microsoft global technical center — and told Gates face-to-face how illegal copies of Windows “helped the young generation discover computers…set off the development of the IT industry…[and] helped Romanians improve their creative capacity…” Indeed, nearly 70% of all software used in Romania today is pirated, according to some experts (pirates even peddle their wares to legitimate businesses, reportedly), despite the anti-piracy legislation passed some ten years ago. Amusingly, Basescu justified his countrymen’s ridiculous levels of IP theft by claiming that “it was an investment in Romania’s friendship with Microsoft and Bill Gates.” Being the experienced political that he is, Gates chose to keep his mouth shut instead of using the president’s provocative comments to launch into an anti-piracy tirade — though we’re sure that the world’s richest man had to practically bite off his own tongue to do so. Still, after the press shindig — while the two men were in private enjoying some traditional placenta pie plăcintă — Gates reportedly dropped the Mr. Niceguy facade, stared Basescu coldly in the eyes, and uttered a single word: “Viodentia?”