If there's one thing Guitar Hero and Rock Band taught us, it's that we don't need strings to be a rock star and rip gnarly riffs with the best of them. Sure, they're just video games, but the Misa Digital Guitar is the real deal, and it's just the kind of stringless guitar living room legends have been waiting for.

Consider the Misa a glorified MIDI controller whose sound "is limited only by what you connect it to." There are 144 note buttons for the left hand to sift through, while the right hand rocks out by tapping a touch screen control pad. And of course it's powered by Linux, which means the door has been left wide open for programmers to conjure up some funky modifications.

We can already sense the blood boiling from traditional guitarists who see this as yet another abomination of music, but if it helps any, Misa's designers admit their creation shouldn't be compared to acoustic or electric guitars saddled with strings. After all, "those are different instruments, for different art forms, for different music. This is electronic music."

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Hackers set their sights on cracking a new video game console just as soon as it arrives. Their tenacity can usually bear fruits within months of the console's release unless the machine happens to be the PlayStation 3, which has remained unconquered for more than 3 years.

But finally, a hacker claims to have sneaked past the PS3's supposedly inviolable defenses. The PS3's ramparts may have successfully fended against hackers and the prospect of unsigned code for “3 years, 2 months, 11 days” but it took an eminent hacker just 5 weeks to come up with a hack. The man behind the crack, George Hotz, aka Geohot, has a penchant for hacking impregnable gadgets. A couple of years ago, a 17-year-old Geohot became the first person to jailbreak the iPhone.

Hotz revealed on his blog that he cracked the PS3 using a combination of hardware and software hacks. Although he claims to have gained full read/write access and the power to “make the system do whatever I want,” Geohot is in no hurry to release his hack, which is avowedly quite unstable and  needs some fine-tuning.  "If I posted what I have now, people would get fed up with it," he told El Reg in an interview.

Image Credit: GeoHot

AMD this week released the first of twelve scheduled Catalyst launches this year, the first of which brings the driver suite up to version 10.1.

The new driver package offers a pinch of performance improvements, including up to a 3 percent boost in Left for Dead 2 on ATI Radeon HD 5700 and 5800 series videocards, as well as boosts Crysis framerates by up to 3 percent on ATI Radeon HD 5700 cards and up to 4 percent on 5800 hardware.

There are a bunch of bug fixes, many of them Windows 7 specific, and all of which you can read in the release notes (PDF). But the big news for Linux fans is the introduction of production support for Ubuntu 9.10, otherwise known as Karmic Koala. Available for both x86 and x86_64 distros, the latest Catalyst package resolves a bunch of open-source issues, including:

• X.Org no longer crashes on an Ubuntu 9.10 system, if multiple Xinerama-enabled X.org server generations are executed.
• Switching between virtual desktops no longer breaks the OS.
• Single mode is now shown properly in the "Display Manager Properties" tab of the ATI Catalyst Control Center, instead of multiple modes, if the "big desktop" mode is enabled
• The system no longer crashes if an HDMI monitor is hot-plugged, or if the users toggle between HDMI and LCD.
• Fixed an issue on Ret Hat Enterprise Linux 5.4 32-bit systems, when the "Detect Displays" button was selected in ATI Catalyst Control Center, and an HDMI display was hot-plugged.

ATI's Linux driver supports Red Hat Enterprise, Novel SUSE Enterprise, openSUSE, and Ubuntu.

Windows Driver Download
Windows Release Notes (PDF)
AMD Support Site (Linux Downloads Available)
Linux Release Notes (PDF)
Linux Installer Instructions
My Cat Attacking a Shaver

There are some interesting takes on the future of PCs, and then there’s Warren East’s take on the future of PCs. East is the CEO of ARM, which produces processors for mobile products, which offers good power and low energy consumption. According to East, not only will ARM processors become commonplace in the netbook market, but that the netbook market will come to represent 90 percent of the PC industry.

What’s particularly amazing about East’s projection of the future is that ARM’s processors lack Windows support. It’s going to be a pretty tough transition to ARM processors if they can’t run the dominate operating system for PCs.

Not a problem, says East. Yes, people love their Windows, but, he says, “the trajectory of progress in the Linux world is very, very impressive. I think it’s only a matter of time for ARM to gain market share with or without Microsoft.”  So Linux, which currently has a market share smaller than Apple, is going to topple the Windows behemoth.

That’s not the only option, speculates Slashgear. It might be that the threat of Linux will force Microsoft to change--and rework Windows so it will support non-x86 hardware. Slashgear points to Texas Instruments’ OMAP4, NVIDIA’s Tegra 2, and Qualcomm’s Snapdragon, in addition to ARM, as hints of a non-Intel/AMD future. Microsoft may have to adapt or die.

And ARM has an advantage over the Intel-Microsoft option: it’s cheaper. Because of cost efficiencies, Robert Castellano of Seeking Alpha, predicts ARM processors will have a 55 percent share of the netbook market by 2012.

East may be onto something here. But if it comes to pass, what will gamers be left with? It’s hard to imaging running Crysis, at any frame rate, on a netbook--even one from the future.

Image Credit: ARM