General Gaming Article |
- HighPoint Goes Crazy with 20Gbps USB 3.0 PCI Express RocketU Card
- Movie Rental Service Zediva Shut Down by Courts
- Disco-Tech: DJs, PCs and the Battle for the Beat
- Asus Officially Unveils F1A75-I Deluxe Mini-ITX Mobo
- NSA Recruiters Drooling In Anticipation Of DEFCON
- German Scientists Create 800Mbps Wireless Network Using LEDs
- Earth is Round (Aristotle), but Global Chip Sales are Flat (IDC)
- Toshiba Crams 1TB of HDD Storage into a Notebook Friendly 9.5mm Frame
- Optical Drives Inch Closer to Obsolescence, Ultrabook Prepares Eulogy
- Verizon Rolls Out Its First Netbook with 4G LTE Baked In
| HighPoint Goes Crazy with 20Gbps USB 3.0 PCI Express RocketU Card Posted: 02 Aug 2011 03:19 PM PDT
"Conventional USB 3.0 HBA's impose a performance bottleneck on multi-drive configurations, limiting transfer rates to 5Gb/s. Such controllers limit the potential of today's high-speed SSD's and external RAID enclosures," HighPoint explains. "HighPoint has capitalized on recent advances in USB 3.0 connectivity, and has made 5Gb/s per-port performance a reality. No longer limited to the convenience of plug-and-play, USB 3.0 has emerged as a truly viable option for today's high-speed SSD and hard drives." Taking aim beyond the general home consumer crowd and targeting professionals, high-performance PCs, and workstations, the RocketU 1144A is best utilized for high-speed external USB 3.0 SSDs and RAID setups that can benefit from this type of multi-port performance. Best of all, it costs less than a C-note with an MSRP of $89. HighPoint's RocketU 1144A is available now. We're working on getting our hands on one for testing, so keep your eyes peeled for a future impression. Image Credit: HighPoint |
| Movie Rental Service Zediva Shut Down by Courts Posted: 02 Aug 2011 02:32 PM PDT
Zediva cleverly billed itself as a DVD rental service. The twist was that users would "rent" a DVD and DVD player in the Zediva facility. The video from their rental would be streamed via the Internet. Customers would control the DVD player via the Internet as well. Zediva said it was no different than "a DVD player with a really long cable attached." Zediva says it will continue to fight, but without a viable business model to feed the lawyers, they probably don't stand much of a chance against the MPAA's legions. The judge also seemed to shoot down Zediva's legal arguments. He said simply that Zediva "transmits performances", and that is against the statutes. The site is currently up in case you want to infringe some copyrights. |
| Disco-Tech: DJs, PCs and the Battle for the Beat Posted: 02 Aug 2011 12:53 PM PDT
Since Ray Newbie first starting spinning disks for the masses via a spark-gap transmitter back in 1909, there's been no shortage of innovation in the area of audio hardware development. By the time that Walter Winchell coined the term 'Disk Jockey' in 1935, people around the world were snatching both live and recorded music out of the air in dance halls, at work and in their homes.
1947 marked the opening of the world's first dance club—Whiskey à Go-Go—that played nothing but pre-recorded music, and by 1955 DJ Bob Casey had brought the two turntable system for doling continuous tunes to the United States, rocking the socks off of the nation's grateful teenyboppers. Since then, to the casual observer not much has changed. For decades, vinyl remained the king of dance clubs around the world, surviving even in the face of emerging formats such as audio cassettes, with artists like DJ Kool Herc unleashing a new way of mixing and manipulating tunes on the world's music lovers and giving birth to Hip-Hop.
Six years later, Technics released their iconic SL-1200 MK2 turntable, a venerable piece of hardware that many DJs continue to use and covet to this day. As glorious as the analog era was, it was only a matter of time before digital hardware and media started edging their way into the club and radio scene. By the early nineties, the growing popularity of CDs began to put a serious hurt on the sales of other physical formats, and the introduction of the MP3 file format near the end of the millennium began to put a serious amount of hurt on the production of other formats of recorded music. Despite this, vinyl, while not as readily available as it once was, was still heavily favored by working Disc Jockeys for the amount of control over the music that the media offered. Back in the day, Clinton Walford loved him some CDs, and for the longest time, the Victoria Canada-based DJ wouldn't be seen dead at a gig without his collection in tow.
"I used to have a couple of large suitcases of very, very organized CDs," Said Walford. "Blindfolded, I could put my hand into the case, pick out the CD that I wanted and then go ahead play what I was after. As great as that was, it was still too heavy." With the number of regular gigs that Walford has on his dance card, weight matters. When we sat down to talk with this past June, he was juggling a regular turn on the air with a local radio station, two nights a week at a pair of local night clubs as well as weddings, private parties and anything else that gets sent his way - which in a city with a lion's share of tourists, a growing youth demographic including a ton of party-crazed college and university students, can be a lot. Add to this the occasional gig spinning as the opening act for groups like Men Without Hats on their last cross-country tour, and you can see why he'd rather not lug around more than he has to. Fortunately, while the introduction of the MP3 file format was busy gleefully decimating the record industry's profits at the turn of the millennium, it also, albeit less notably, considerably reduced the weight your average working DJ was forced to lug around from gig to gig. With their inherent portability and capacity to store thousands of songs on a single hard drive, many Disc Jockeys, Walford included, found the temptation to move their music collections on to a laptop simply too much to resist. While a laptop might be ideally suited for the task of storing and playing music, a standard keyboard and trackpad offer precious little in the area of control when compared against traditional DJing hardware such as physical turntables and mixers. Not surprisingly, a niche market of software and hardware controllers cropped up almost overnight to meet the needs of laptop loving DJs.
One of the first, most innovative, of these controllers to market was Final Scratch—a software and hardware control solution that allows DJs to play back and tinker with digital audio by manhandling computer-connected turntables. Other developers followed down the trail blazed by the makers of Final Scratch, with titles such as Torq, FruitLoops (now known as FL Studio), Mixxx and Deckadance. Typically, with DJ solutions like these, audio is cranked out by the DJ's computer, leaving the turntables to be used as a controller for tasks such as beat matching, scratching and beat juggling.
All of this is made possible through the use of special vinyl records that - instead of music - contain a series of time codes that can be read by the turntable's stylus, routed through an external Analog to Digital Converter or ADC. An ADC may take the form of a USB audio interface box or Audio Stream Input/Output (ASIO) sound card. No matter what ADC a user opts to go with, the device is used to send along the control vinyl's time code information to the laptop's corresponding DJ software, which in turn takes that information, translating the signal sent from the turntable into data that can be used to control the laptop's on board audio. In other words, whatever a DJ does to speed, slow, scratch or otherwise meddle with the speed and play of his control vinyl will be reflected in the audio of the track he's playing. While there is a delay—typically measuring well under 30 milliseconds—between what's happening on the turntable and what the computer is able to register, it is so minute that the action the DJ takes with his turntables and what the computer feeds out are for all intents and purposes, simultaneous. The audio is then fired out a Digital to Analog Converter (DAC) to populate the speakers and ears of the venue and audience the DJ is spinning for. According to Walford, in recent years an Auckland, New Zealand based company called Serato has moved to the head of the pack when it comes to digital DJ tools and related hardware. Founded in 1998 Serato first made the scene with a time-stretching and pitch-shifting plugin for Pro Tools called Pitch n' Time.
In 2004, the company released their flagship product, Scratch Live: a free-to-download software package that, when paired with a DJ's turntables of choice, control vinyl and a ADC to rock the house very much in the manner described above. With the addition of a video plug-in, Scratch Live even makes it possible to control the action on screen via their system's control vinyl, taking their live show to a whole new level. Unlike many other vinyl emulation software packages, Scratch Live is platform agnostic, with Serato offering a version of the software to both Windows and OS X users. While elsewhere in the tech world, this type of cross-platform interoperability might result in a fanboy flame war of epic proportions, Walford tells us that when it comes to Disk Jockeys, there's not a whole lot of bickering going on. For individuals who make their living spinning music for the masses, stability and reliability rules. "Up until a couple of years ago," explains Walford, "I relied on PC laptops prior to switching to a MacBook Pro. My previous laptop was a Toshiba Satellite running Windows XP, and it was OK. I was able to run video on it with the Scratch Live, but it was really choppy and janky. It didn't crash, but it was kind of borderline iffy. Before that I had a Compaq Presario. The funny thing is that I bought it as a floor model, and it turned out to be more reliable than the Toshiba. Something was just more solid about the components. I still own it and I still keep it as a back up, just in case." So why the switch over to using hardware produced by that company? Walford explains. "I never really used Mac much until I got my MacBook. I was always a Windows user, but I had always feared a crash or something happening. Not because of the software I was using but because of the operating system." Walford explains that his fears finally took root in reality: "On a number of occasions, I had the Blue Screen of Death show up while I tried to unplug a video cable while video was running. The computer thinks too hard and then you're down. I've had my MacBook Pro for just under two years—a year and a half now— and first of all, it's never crashed. Scratch Live has, but that wasn't my fault, it was their updates; a file problem. After the update, no problem. So yeah, reliability is the number one reason for my switching. Also, video: When you buy a MacBook Pro versus any run-of-the-mill Windows laptop, the video quality is superior, especially the output. So, if you're DJing videos the way they are now, especially if you're using MP4 files with an average 720x480 DVD quality to display the output is just as clear as can be."
No matter whether he's using hardware powered by Redmond or Cupertino, Walford says that one of the best ways he's found to keep his gear up, running and dependable is to strip out anything his show doesn't require. Where most users might be content in stripping out the bloatware that comes part in parcel with most new rigs these days, Walford, who has less than five pieces of software installed on his MacBook, suggests taking your software tear-down a step further by removing anything from a computer destined for use in a club that doesn't have a use related to your show. He goes on to point out that as an added bonus for shedding unneeded software from a system, users gain more space for their music collection by default, thus fending off the need for additional external storage solution for a little while longer. As the price of flash memory drops and more tablet computing solutions are brought to market on an almost daily basis, the ante is once again being upped in the area of portability once again. While there a growing range of Disk Jockey specific applications are already available to Android, iOS and Windows tablet users, it's hard to say when, or even if, a paradigm shift will occur that will bring such svelte hardware into mainstream use at clubs, weddings and concerts around the world. |
| Asus Officially Unveils F1A75-I Deluxe Mini-ITX Mobo Posted: 02 Aug 2011 12:00 PM PDT
The mini-ITX-based FM1 mobo is built around AMD's A75 fusion controller hub chipset, making it perfect for use with AMD's new APUs. It includes DIP2 with DIGI+ VRM, built-in Wi-Fi, UEFI BIOS, a PCIe X16 slot and dual DIMM slots capable of rocking 16GB DDR3 1866 memory. But the big thing about this little mobo is its connection options. The F1A75-I Deluxe rocks ports for HDMI 1.4a, DVI-D, DisplayPort, PS/2, 5.1-channel surround-enabled optical S/PDIF, Ethernet and Bluetooth connections, along with two USB 3.0 and four USB 2.0 ports and four 6Gbps SATA3 ports (although only one is external). The F1A75-I Deluxe packs in plenty of other stuff, too – you can check out the press release and the full spec list at Hexus if you're interested. Pricing and availability? Your guess is as good as ours. Asus didn't go into details. With options like those, don't expect it to be cheap. Other mobos in the line offer different configurations. |
| NSA Recruiters Drooling In Anticipation Of DEFCON Posted: 02 Aug 2011 10:45 AM PDT
Seeing government agents trying to awkwardly fit in at DEFCON is nothing new, but this year the NSA's heading to Vegas with big recruiting numbers to fill. Reuters reports the agency's looking to hire 1,500 new employees – most of them cyber geniuses – by the end of September, then another 1,500 by the following September. They want to put a dent in that number and identify hot up-and-coming hackers at DEFCON. "Today it's cyber warriors that we're looking for, not rocket scientists," Richard George, the technical director of the NSA's Information Assurance Directorate, told Reuters. He explained there a big upsides to working for the NSA, but there's also a downside that could turn attention-seeking lulz-alikes away from the agency: ""We have a wonderful atmosphere, we have great people and we have the hardest problems on Earth. And we need help, the country needs help... You're not going to make yourself famous working here, that's the downside. You can be internally famous, but you can't be externally famous." The usual mish-mosh of other government agencies will be there as well, including the DOD, NASA, and the CIA. If you're a white hat hacker looking for generous health care benefits, you better bring your game face to DEFCON 19 at the Rio Hotel and Casino between August 4th and 7th. Why not bring your kids while you're at it? |
| German Scientists Create 800Mbps Wireless Network Using LEDs Posted: 02 Aug 2011 10:19 AM PDT
The scientists managed to create a wireless network capable of 800Mbps speed using the same red, blue, green and white LEDs that you can find in things like Christmas lights. Using white LEDs only resulted in 100Mbps speeds. They placed the LEDs on the roof and achieved 10 sq. meters of data coverage by rapidly blinking the lights on and off. Receivers can pick up the signal as long as they're in the coverage area. The network can even stream HD-quality videos with no lag or loss in quality. "For VLC (visible light communication) the sources of light – in this case, white-light LEDs – provide lighting for the room at the same time they transfer information," Dr. Anagnostis Paraskevopoulos explained in the facility's press release. "With the aid of a special component, the modulator, we turn the LEDs off and on in very rapid succession and transfer the information as ones and zeros. The modulation of the light is imperceptible to the human eye. A simple photo diode on the laptop acts as a receiver. The diode catches the light, electronics decode the information and translate it into electrical impulses, meaning the language of the computer." It sounds like magic, but it suffers from one big technical drawback: whenever something comes between the LEDs and the receiver, the signal loses considerable strength. The institute says the technology would come in handy in places that require fast data transfer rates, but don't want to install new cabling and can't receive radio signals – hospitals and airplanes, for example. |
| Earth is Round (Aristotle), but Global Chip Sales are Flat (IDC) Posted: 02 Aug 2011 09:31 AM PDT
In terms of revenue, the PC processor market market collected $9.49 billion. That's down 4 percent compared to the first quarter, but up 5.4 percent compared to 2Q10. The market did, however, benefit from an extra week of sales. "The first quarter of 2011 was better than most first quarters due to the extra calendar week," said Shane Rau, director of Semiconductors: Personal Computing research at IDC. "So the sequential comparison isn't surprising. If we took off that extra week, the performance between the two quarters probably would've seen a seen a slight sequential uptick from 1Q to 2Q." IDC pegs Intel's overall market share of the global processor market at 79.3 percent, a loss of 1.5 percent from one quarter ago. Meanwhile, AMD gained 1.5 percent and is now sitting at 20.4 percent, IDC says. Those numbers are pretty close to recent figures from Mercury Research, which had Intel's share of the x86 space at 79.9 percent and AMD's at 19.4 percent. |
| Toshiba Crams 1TB of HDD Storage into a Notebook Friendly 9.5mm Frame Posted: 02 Aug 2011 09:02 AM PDT
Toshiba's pitching the MQ01ABD series at high-end notebook users and even desktop PCs, mobile workstations, consoles, DVR set-top boxes, external storage solutions, and other applications that require large amounts of storage. In other words, Toshiba thinks it's the ideal drive for pretty much everyone, form factor be damned (many cases will require an adapter if you plan on picking this over a 3.5-inch desktop drive). Sadly, the drive spins at just 5400RPM and carries 8MB of cache, which are two more reasons why you shouldn't plop this into a high-end desktop PC, or even a performance oriented notebook. Other features include a SATA 3Gbps interface, 12ms average seek time, and low acoustics (24dB or less in seek mode, 19dB or less when idle). Toshiba will begin mass producing the MQ01ABD series later this month. No details on price. Image Credit: Toshiba via BusinessWire |
| Optical Drives Inch Closer to Obsolescence, Ultrabook Prepares Eulogy Posted: 02 Aug 2011 08:44 AM PDT
According to news and rumor site Digitimes, ODD makers admit to facing an uncertain future, particularly as Intel pushes its Ultrabook concept. To maintain an ultrathin and light profile, and to cut costs, Intel's Ultrabook specification won't require an optical drive. ODD vendor Lite-On has seen the writing on the wall and says there's little chance of its shipments showing a 20-30 percent sequential growth in the third quarter of 2011 as previously predicted, though the company's gaming ODDs and slim-type ODDs are still performing well. Still, Lite-On's working an alternative solution for Ultrabooks, one that it isn't willing to talk about just yet (external storage, perhaps?). DigiTimes Research believes that slim ODDs will keep the market alive, while half-height ODDs face an already saturated desktop market and will likely see reduced shipments each quarter. Ultimately, ODDs could end up hanging out with floppy drives reminiscing about the good ol' days. Side note: Award yourself 500 geek points if you recognize the thumbnail pic. |
| Verizon Rolls Out Its First Netbook with 4G LTE Baked In Posted: 02 Aug 2011 07:48 AM PDT
Compaq's Mini CQ10-688nr sports a 10.1-inch WSVGA LED display (1024x600), Intel Atom N455 processor (1.66GHz), 1GB of DDR3 memory, 250GB hard drive, VGA webcam, 802.11b/g/n Wi-Fi, multi-format card reader, and Windows 7 Home Starter 32-bit. Verizon's 4G LTE network provides download speeds of 5Mbps to 12Mbps and upload speeds of 2Mbps to 5Mbps, provided you're in a 4G coverage area. Customers will have to commit to a 2-year service agreement with one of three Mobile Broadband plans, including $30/month for 2GB, $50/month for 5GB, or $80/month for 10GB. The Compaq Mini CQ10-688nr will be available on August 4 for $450 (on contract). Image Credit: Verizon |
Storage solutions and HBA (Host Bus Adapter) specialist HighPoint Technologies just let us know about its new RocketU 1144A, which is a four-port USB 3.0 add-in card. That in and of itself isn't terribly exciting, but it just so happens that this particular model is the industry's first/only four-port PCI Express Gen 2 x4, 20Gbps USB 3.0 SuperSpeed HBA. That's right, this thing packs four dedicated USB 3.0 ports, each one capable of a full 5Gbps for 20Gbps total.
Well, it was fun while it lasted. Zediva, a video rental service that tried an end run around copyright law, has been ordered 
The Computex trade show in Taiwan never disappoints – major manufacturers show up in full force for the event, dragging hot new gear and gargantuan announcements behind them. For Asus, the PadFone garnered the most attention, but they were also showing off other pieces of cool new tech – like the F1A75-I Deluxe motherboard. Even though Computex was months ago, the F1A75-1 only became official yesterday, as Asus issued a press release announcing the F1A75 line, including the F1A75-I Deluxe, the itty-bitty motherboard with big-time connection options.
Can you access protected networks without breaking a sweat? Does just thinking about security exploits get you hot and bothered? Are "spoofing" and "packet sniffing" part of your regular vocabulary? If you answered "Yes" to those questions, and you can prove your hacking prowess at the upcoming DEFCON convention, you may just wind up getting a job offer (and a pension plan) from government agencies like the NSA.
If you listen to environmentalists and home building experts, the future of lighting lies in LEDs (Sorry to break it to you, CFL bulbs). But could LEDs also hold the key to the future of wireless home networking? Yeah, it sounds weird, but scientists at the Fraunhofer Institute for Telecommunications in Berlin got the bright idea to try and create a WLAN using nothing more than standard LED bulbs and "a few additional components." And you know what? It worked, and it worked well.
The Flat Earth Society has it all wrong, it's not the third rock from the Sun that is flat, but microprocessor chip sales. That's the conclusion reached by the International Data Corporation (IDC), a market research firm tasked with figuring such things out. According to IDC, worldwide PC processor shipments in the second quarter of 2011 dipped 2.9 percent compared to the first quarter and were downright flat compared to the same quarter one year ago, rising a measly 0.6 percent.
Toshiba this week 
Years ago a single- or double-speed CD-ROM drive without burning capabilities would set you back several hundred dollars. And today? A twenty-dollar bill buys you a high-speed DVD burner. Even Blu-ray drives aren't all that expensive anymore. Are optical drives on their way out? With ubiquitous broadband, streaming media, cloud storage, and digital downloads taking over, that could very well be the case, and it's already happening in the mobile world.
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