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The Seoul based Green designers, Design Hara has extended their ecological ideas to introduce a luxury green HTPC. Based on the environmental driven concept, Design Hara’s green HTPC features a recyclable chassis, handcrafted cypress wood or rose wood side panels and a front cover made from natural sheep leather.

The unit is compatible with Mini-ITX small motherboards, and uses only a third of the energy consumed by desktop computers. It also features HDMI and DVI outputs and has an Intel Core2Duo processor, 4GB of RAM and a 1TB hard drive.

The Spherical Mouse by Jelfin aims to provide a more natural hand position for controlling your computer. The mouse is also covering in a soft and squishy gel to give it even more comfort.

The mouse comes in a variety of colors and plugs into the computer through a USB cord.

Like a hardtop convertible or convection oven that also microwaves, the Lenovo IdeaPad U1 Hybrid Notebook ($1,000; June 2010) combines two ideas to make a single product.

One of the more interesting computers to come out of the 2010 CES, the U1 sports a unique dual processor, dual OS design that allows you to remove the screen and use it as a touchscreen tablet, or simply leave it be and use the computer as a normal laptop.

The fact that it’s good looking helps its chances, as does a spec sheet that includes an 11.6 HD LED screen, Windows 7, built-in 3G wireless, and more.

The Asus NX90Jq looks unlike any laptop we’ve ever seen thanks to technology design company Bang & Olufsen. The NX90Jq features two touchpads located on both sides of the keyboard and an 18.4-inch 1080p LED backlit screen.

Enlighten’s design dissipates heat through the use of aluminum around the power supply and DVD drive and through careful venting of air into, around and out of the main housing. By separating the power supply and DVD out of the main housing, we have been able to avoid a cascading heat effect found in many computer designs.

-Sustainably harvested wood
-Intel quad core CPU
-4 gig RAM
-NVIDIA 8600GTX video card
-1 terabyte hard drive
-DVD burner

Price: $16,000

Enjoy all things Apple in the brand-new store. Check out Apple products and an entire floor dedicated to personal training, technical support, and youth programs—free, hands-on activities for families to learn how to compose songs, produce movies, make photo albums, and more.

Be sure to get there early. If you’re one of the first 2500 visitors, you’ll get a free commemorative T-shirt. They even have sizes for kids.

Where: 1981 Broadway at West 67th Street

When: Saturday, November 14, at 10:00 a.m.

George Walton Lucas, Jr. (born May 14, 1944) is an Academy Award-winning American film producer, screenwriter, director and chairman of Lucasfilm Ltd. He is best known for being the creator of the epic Sci-Fi franchise Star Wars and the archaeologist-adventurer character Indiana Jones. Today, Lucas is one of the American film industry’s most financially successful independent directors/producers, with an estimated net worth of $3.9 billion.

(Play the theme song while you read this post. It’s sure to enhance the experience!)

Lucas was born in Modesto, California, the son of Dorothy Lucas (née Bomberger) and George Lucas, Sr. (1913–1991).[2] His father, nicknamed “Jazzy” for his sultry singing voice, was mainly of British and Swiss-German heritage and his mother, a member of a prominent Modesto family (one of her cousins is the mother of former U.S. Secretary of Agriculture and director of UNICEF Ann Veneman), was mainly of German and Scots-Irish heritage.

His experiences growing up in the sleepy suburb of Modesto and his early passion for cars and motor racing would eventually serve as inspiration for his Oscar-nominated low-budget phenomenon, American Graffiti. Before young Lucas became obsessed with the movie camera, he wanted to be a race car driver, and he spent most of his high school years racing on the underground circuit at fairgrounds and hanging out at garages. However, a near-fatal accident in his souped-up Autobianchi Bianchina on June 12, 1962, just days before his high school graduation, quickly changed his mind. Instead of racing, he attended community college and later got accepted into a junior college to study anthropology. While taking liberal arts courses, he developed a passion for cinematography and camera tricks.

Lucas then transferred to the University of Southern California School of Cinematic Arts. USC was one of the earliest universities to have a school devoted to motion picture film. During the years at USC, George Lucas shared a dorm room with Randal Kleiser. Along with classmates such as Walter Murch, Hal Barwood and John Milius, they became a clique of film students known as the The Dirty Dozen. He also became very good friends with fellow acclaimed student filmmaker Steven Spielberg. Lucas was deeply influenced by the Filmic Expression course taught at the school by filmmaker Lester Novros which concentrated on the non-narrative elements of Film Form like color, light, movement, space, and time. Another huge inspiration was the Yugoslav montagist (and dean of the USC Film Department) Slavko Vorkapich who had been a colleague of Sergei Eisenstein’s before moving to Hollywood to make stunning montage sequences for studio features at MGM, RKO, and Paramount. Vorkapich taught the autonomous nature of the cinematic art form, emphasizing the unique dynamic quality of movement and kinetic energy inherent in motion pictures.

After graduating with a bachelor of fine arts in film in 1967, he tried joining the United States Air Force as an officer, but he was immediately turned down because of his numerous speeding tickets. He was later drafted by the Army for military service in Vietnam, but he was exempt from the draft after medical tests showed he had diabetes, the disease that killed his paternal grandfather. In 1967, Lucas re-enrolled as a USC graduate student in film production. Working as a teaching instructor for a class of U.S. Navy students who were being taught documentary cinematography, Lucas directed the short film Electronic Labyrinth: THX 1138 4EB, which won first prize at the 1967-68 National Student Film Festival, and was later adapted into his first full-length feature film, THX 1138. Lucas was awarded a student scholarship by Warner Brothers to observe and work on the making of a film of his choosing. The film he chose was Finian’s Rainbow (1968) which was being directed by Francis Ford Coppola, who at the time was revered among film school students of the time as a cinema graduate who had “made it” in Hollywood.

Lucas co-founded the studio American Zoetrope with Coppola—whom he met during his internship at Warner Brothers—hoping to create a liberating environment for filmmakers to direct outside the perceived oppressive control of the Hollywood studio system. His first full-length feature film produced by the studio, THX1138, was not a success, but his second was: American Graffiti (1973). He then proposed a new Flash Gordon film adaptation, but the rights were not available. But his new-found wealth and reputation enabled him to develop a story set in space instead. Even so he encountered difficulties getting Star Wars made. It was only because Alan Ladd, Jr. at Fox Studios liked American Graffiti that he forced through a production and distribution deal for the film, which ended up restoring Fox to financial stability after a number of flops.

On a return on investment basis, Star Wars proved to be one of the most successful films of all time. During the filming of Star Wars, Lucas waived his up-front fee as director and negotiated to own the licensing rights—rights which the studio thought were nearly worthless. This decision earned him hundreds of millions of dollars, as he was able to directly profit from all the licensed games, toys, and collectibles created for the franchise.

Lucas developed the American Zoetrope banner to direct Apocalypse Now after completing Star Wars, but work on the former film dragged on, so Coppola took over directing Apocalypse Now, leading to the breakdown of the American Zoetrope partnership. However, the money from Star Wars enabled Lucas to set up his own studio, Lucasfilm, in Marin County in his native Northern California. Skywalker Sound and Industrial Light & Magic, the sound and visual effects subdivisions of Lucasfilm, respectively, have become among the most respected firms in their fields. Lucasfilm Games, later renamed to LucasArts, is particularly well respected in the gaming industry.

The animation studio Pixar was founded as the Graphics Group, one third of the Computer Division of Lucasfilm. Pixar’s early computer graphics research resulted in groundbreaking effects in films such as Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan and Young Sherlock Holmes, and the group was purchased in 1986 by Steve Jobs shortly after he left Apple after a power struggle at Apple Computer. Jobs paid U.S. $5 million to Lucas and put U.S. $5 million as capital into the company. The sale reflected Lucas’ desire to stop the cash flow losses associated with his 7-year research projects associated with new entertainment technology tools, as well as his company’s new focus on creating entertainment products rather than tools. A contributing factor was cash flow difficulties following Lucas’ 1983 divorce concurrent with the sudden dropoff in revenues from Star Wars licenses following the release of Return of the Jedi. (Some twenty years later on January 24, 2006, Disney announced that it had agreed to buy Pixar for approximately $7.4 billion in an all-stock deal.)

Lucas was also influential in the development of industry-standard post-production tools such as the Avid Film and Video nonlinear editor, first developed as the Edit Droid, and also the Sound Droid, which later became the Digidesign Pro Tools sound editing and mixing software.

Lucas and director Steven Spielberg enjoy a friendship that dates to their college years, and that has resulted in collaborations on films including the entire Indiana Jones saga. Lucas has produced a few other films in his career, including the films Howard the Duck and Willow, both of which are considered box office bombs.

On October 3, 1994, Lucas started to write the three Star Wars prequels, and on November 1 that year, he left the day-to-day operations of his filmmaking business and started a sabbatical to finish the prequels.

In 2005 Forbes.com estimated the lifetime revenue generated by the Star Wars franchise at nearly $20 billion.

In 2006 Forbes Magazine estimated Lucas’ personal wealth at US $3.5 billion.

In 2007, Lucas announced that he was developing a live action Star Wars TV series, which would take place between the two trilogies.

In 2009, Lucas has also devoted himself to sharing his insights and stories as a businessman with the global business community at the World Business Forum.

In 1969, Lucas married film editor Marcia Lou Griffin, who went on to win an Academy Award for her editing work on the original (Episode IV) Star Wars film. George and Marcia adopted a daughter, Amanda, in 1981, and divorced in 1984. Lucas has since adopted two more children: Katie, born in 1988, and Jett, born in 1993. All three of his children have appeared in the three Star Wars prequels, as has Lucas himself. Lucas had been in a long relationship with and engaged to singer Linda Ronstadt. He has been dating Mellody Hobson, president of Ariel Investments, since 2007 and she has accompanied him to several events including the 79th Academy Awards ceremony in February 2007, an American Film Institute event in October 2007 and the 2008 Cannes Film Festival held in May. He supported Barack Obama for President in 2008.

Lucas was born and raised in a strongly Methodist family. After inserting religious themes into Star Wars, he would eventually come to identify strongly with the Eastern religious philosophies he studied and incorporated into his movies, which were a major inspiration for “the Force.” Lucas eventually came to state that his religion was “Buddhist Methodist.” Lucas resides in Marin County.