General Gaming Article |
- BREAKING NEWS: Steve Jobs Resigns, Tim Cook New Apple CEO
- Google Finally Adds Sharing to +1 Button
- How to Buy a Hard Drive: An Essential Guide
- The Game Boy: It's The End of the World As We Know It, And I'm Feeling... Bored
- Windows Phone 7 App of the Week: Thumba Photo Editor
- StarCraft + Bar = BarCraft
- LG's LSM-100 Mouse Scanner Is A Mouse And A Scanner
- Samsung Isn't Interested In HP's PC Business
- Acer Posts First Quarterly Loss Ever, Faces Tough Road Ahead
- ECS Builds an All-in-One You Can Upgrade (Including Motherboard)
| BREAKING NEWS: Steve Jobs Resigns, Tim Cook New Apple CEO Posted: 24 Aug 2011 03:52 PM PDT
There's currently no information about the reason behind the resignation, although it's not hard to imagine that Jobs' recent health issues might be a factor. Here is the text of Jobs' letter of resignation to board of directors:
To the Apple Board of Directors and the Apple Community: I have always said if there ever came a day when I could no longer meet my duties and expectations as Apple''s CEO, I would be the first to let you know. Unfortunately, that day has come. I hereby resign as CEO of Apple. I would like to serve, if the Board sees fit, as Chairman of the Board, director and Apple employee. As far as my successor goes, I strongly recommend that we execute our succession plan and name Tim Cook as CEO of Apple. I believe Apple''s brightest and most innovative days are ahead of it. And I look forward to watching and contributing to its success in a new role. I have made some of the best friends of my life at Apple, and I thank you all for the many years of being able to work alongside you. Steve |
| Google Finally Adds Sharing to +1 Button Posted: 24 Aug 2011 02:46 PM PDT
Should you decide to click a +1 button, there will be a new option to post your selection directly to Google+. The button will offer a pop-up where you can add a comment and select circles just like on the Google+ site. This content is dropped into the stream like any other post. Google's other addition is called +1 Snippets. When you do share from the +1 button as described above, Google automatically includes a snippet that contains a link, image, and text snippet from the site. This is a tool that publishers can customize for each domain. The new features are rolling out over the next week or so. If you want to get a look now, check out the Google+ Platform Preview group. |
| How to Buy a Hard Drive: An Essential Guide Posted: 24 Aug 2011 01:54 PM PDT Do you need gigabytes or performance? Laptop upgrades or a screaming new gaming PC? We walk you through what you need to know to pick the right storage solution for your PC.Storage. Always needed, often overlooked. Often lost in the buzz surrounding the latest DirectX 11 GPUs and hexacore CPUs is the ability to actually store and retrieve your stuff. Your applications, games, photographs, digital music and everything else lives on your hard drive. But that boring old rotating magnetic disk just doesn't seem exciting or high tech – even though the technology in a hard drive is actually pretty incredible. One technology that has made storage a little sexier is SSDs – solid state drives based on flash memory technology. But SSDs aren't a perfect solution, as we'll see shortly. We'll cover the gamut of storage options for your OS and apps to help you better understand what storage solution is best for your needs. (Note that we're not going to talk about optical storage, which really is secondary these days.) We'll first touch briefly on technology and jargon, then look at several different scenarios, and try to focus on what storage options might be appropriate and cost effective. But first, let's talk tech. We'll first briefly discuss hard drives, then take a quick look at SSDs. Good Old Fashioned Hard DrivesHard drives consist of small platters coated with magnetically sensitive material. These platters are designed to be stacked up to five high, and run at spin rates up to 15,000RPM. Some high end desktop hard drives max out at 10,000RPM, but most performance hard drives for desktop PCs run at 7,200RPM. The 15K RPM drives are mostly used in servers.
One of the key aspects of hard drives is areal density – how many bits you can cram onto a square inch. Despite the relative maturity of the technology, hard drive makers continue to improve on areal density. Seagate and Samsung have both announced hard drives that will ship in late 2011 that offer one terabyte per platter, or 625 gigabits per square inch. Magnetic heads, mounted on arms that are moved with an electric motor called an actuator is how the data gets written to and read from the disc. Head technology is as critical as areal density, because the heads have to be extremely sensitive to read individual bits when there are 625 billion of them in a square inch of disk space. There are several key aspects to hard drive performance:
One thing that doesn't really affect hard drive performance these days is the interface. Even 10,000RPM drives can't fully saturate a 3gbps SATA I port. Seagate has suggested that the data coming off the 64MB cache of their latest second generation SATA 6gbps drive can saturate the bust, but this would be with brief bursts at best, and with no practical effect on performance.
Western Digital and Seagate also make a line of "green" (low power consumption) drives. The WD GreenPower drives typically spin at 5,400RPM, while Seagate's Barracuda Green drives usually run at 5,900RPM. Note that power usage while actually under heavy load isn't that much lower, but these drives also typically offer sophisticated sleep modes which use very little power at idle. This type of technology is gradually being migrated to higher performance drives as well. SSD TechSolid State Drives are still in their infancy as a technology. Products continue to evolve, and performance increases over time. This is particularly true of random write performance. First generation SSDs were hobbled by extremely slow random write times – often much slower than old fashioned rotating platters. That's changed with newer generation of controllers, better garbage collection (which reorganizes the data to minimize the number of small, empty blocks) and trim command support with modern operating systems, in which the OS tells the SSD which blocks of data are considered deleted. The cost per bit of SSDs is much higher than hard drives, and given the limitations of the manufacturing processes, the cost per bit will remain high, albeit declining gradually. Currently, 25nm flash memory parts are pretty much the order of the day, with 20nm on the near horizon. As Anand Shimpi noted in a recent article, the costs of flash chips prevent prices from getting lower. And the cutthroat competition means products get shipped that aren't fully baked. Still, we've been using an SSD RAID array in our primary system for both everyday use and gaming, and it would be tough to go back. The incredibly short boot times and fast application loading are seductive, and the thought of waiting for stuff to load is painful. Most users can't afford large capacity SSDs or SSD RAID arrays, so modest size drives are pretty much the rule of the day. That's one reason you see so many 120GB drives – it's right in the sweet spot for pricing. As with hard drives, there are a number of factors that drive performance:
Before you get too mired in all the details of controllers and flash memory types, remember that any good, current generation SSD will offer performance that's nothing short of amazing, if you're coming from a rotating platter drive. After using your PC with your shiny new SSD installed, you'll find yourself expecting PCs to be that responsive – and wondering why that shiny new laptop your spouse just bought seems so damned slow. Hint: it's not the CPU or memory.
The other important consideration to weigh when thinking about SSDs is capacity. As noted, the sweet spot right now is 120GB drives, which range in price from $170 to $300 for drives built in standard, 2.5-inch form factors. Newer 240GB drives cost well north of $300 to over $500. Want a 500GB SSD? Be prepared to shell out nearly $800 or more. So consider your budget and applications before taking the expensive step to SSDs. We'll discuss some scenarios shortly. Now that we have some basic understanding of hard drives and SSDs, let's look at a few typical user scenarios.
The Basic Office PCThis might also be called the shared living room PC. It's usually light on performance, often with integrated graphics. The applications aren't demanding, either – office apps and internet browsing are the mainstays, with some occasional digital photo or media transcoding. The entire price of the system might be under $500.
This is the perfect PC for one of those low power green hard drives. If you're upgrading an existing, older system, cloning the boot drive to a 1TB Western Digital GreenPower or Seagate Barracuda Green will improve responsiveness and substantially increase capacity. The Laptop UpgradeYour laptop is several years old, but you can't really justify refreshing the entire unit just yet. If the HDD in the laptop is 250GB or less, definitely consider replacing it with a 120GB SSD. Sure, you'll give up some capacity, but you'll gain some immediate benefits:
If you really need capacity in your laptop – you travel a lot with your camera, for example, and are frequently copying and editing photos – get a high capacity, 7,200RPM drive, like Western Digital's Scorpio Black 750GB drive. An interesting alternative would be Seagate's 500GB Momentus XT Hybrid, which combines a 4GB flash memory cache with a 7,200 RPM hard drive. Performance is somewhat better than a standard hard drive, though the gains aren't nearly what they would be with a true SSD. A Digital Media StudioYou edit a lot of photos – particularly raw DSLR photos. Or you shoot video and need a fast system with lots of capacity to edit your digital movies. You need both capacity and performance, because waiting around for large media files to load is painful. But what you get depends on your budget. There's also the issue of data security – backups are critical, but we won't discuss those here.
Unless you're filthy rich, you won't build an all SSD digital media editing system – capacity is often king here. If you are filthy rich, it may be worth exploring dedicated hardware RAID cards and RAID 10 arrays or something similar. Killer Gaming RigGames really benefit from the speed of SSDs – but games take up a vast amount of space. If all you can afford is a modest gaming system – under $1,000 – SSDs are probably out of the picture. Or are they? For under a hundred bucks, you can pick up a 60GB SSD. But don't use it as a boot drive. Instead, build your gaming system using a motherboard with an Intel Z68 chipset and use the small SSD as a cache for a larger (1TB or so) hard drive. (Intel brands this as "Smart Response Technology.") You'll see substantially improved storage throughput. All you need to do is first install Windows on the rotating media drive (making sure that RAID mode is enabled in the system BIOS), then add the SSD and configure it as a cache in the RAID BIOS or through Intel's software utilities. Intel's Z68 chipset plus Smart Response adds a whole new wrinkle to modestly priced systems, and may be a bigger speed improvement with minimal cost than buying a faster CPU – though for a gaming rig, we'd choose a faster graphics card and sacrifice the SSD if we were on a really tight budget. Right now, Smart Response is only on the Z68, so AMD users or gamers running Intel X58 triple channel rigs don't have that option.
If you have a generous budget for a gaming system, a 250GB drive will handle your main apps plus a number of games; you can still add a second drive for other types of data, if you need it. And if you happen to have a lot of spare cash on hand, a second 250GB SSD in RAID 0 mode is actually more affordable than a single 500GB SSD in today's market. Everyone's storage needs differ, but it used to be simpler: find a hard drive with the right combination of price, capacity and speed for your needs. Today, though, SSDs have upended the equation, and the right mix for your own need may be the right mix of SSD and HDD. What that combination is depends on your needs, budget and technical inclination. |
| The Game Boy: It's The End of the World As We Know It, And I'm Feeling... Bored Posted: 24 Aug 2011 01:04 PM PDT
What happened to you, The Apocalypse? You used to be so fresh and fun. You'd tear everything I knew and loved to pieces and rearrange it into some hideous tapestry of my greatest fears, and I'd be like "Oh, you. You're such a prankster." Or you'd spew zombies into all kinds of zany places (The mall! The circus! Outer space!), and I'd beat them to death while screaming and crying. We had such good times. Now, though, it's old hat. Your abandoned landscapes – once ripe with the pungent odor of adventure – have grown gray and same-y. I used to mow down your menagerie of mutants, robots, and zombies with all the glee of a Hollywood director at a Beloved (And Infinitely Ruinable) Childhood Memories convention, but now each one is just another bump in the road. We've grown apart, is what I'm saying. But that doesn't mean we can't have a horrifying, dystopic future together. A couple recent games have given me hope that this whole "fiery end to all normal life" thing isn't just a passing fad. It all started with a recent oft-repeated quote from id Software's Tim Willits. Addressing the issue of precisely why fans won't mind RAGE's vehicle-heavy shift away from id's typical fare, he said, "I think that they will find that it's a refreshing change from anything we've done in the past, and honestly I think that people have modern combat fatigue." Which is certainly a valid point. Pay attention to comment threads involving his game, though, and you'll unearth a second ticking time bomb nearly as large as the first. "It looks just like Borderlands!" Commenters clamor. "It's so generic! Why not just say it's a Fallout spin-off and be done with it?" In truth, they're going a bit overboard. From what I've seen, RAGE's world isn't just some crummy carbon copy. It does, however, adhere to a fairly specific set of tropes, and gamers seem to be suffering from "You've seen one Wasteland, you've seen 'em all" syndrome as a result. Willits, then, can go on about modern combat fatigue all he wants. If he doesn't watch it, though, post-apocalypse fatigue is going to creep up behind him and plant a live grenade in his pocket. Fortunately, apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic games don't have to go down this road. Developers are poking and prodding the bear trap that is misplaced priorities, but they haven't stepped in it yet. See, if you ask me, apocalypse-focused titles aren't about the setting. I can take or leave your sprawling sea of sand and ill-advised punk hairdoos. Yes, Mad Max was great and all, but there's only so much you can do with flat, nuked-to-nothingness landscapes and towns constructed from rusty sheet metal and some particularly determined pieces of string before players start to seek out greener pastures. So, if the setting's not the main attraction, then what is? Well, if you ask me, it's a certain vibe – this feeling of separation from a world that once was mixed with a bitter longing for that which you'll never see again. So basically, it's a fantasy of freedom from the daily grind of work and toil – a sweeping and immediate change to the rules of day-to-day life – but with a hint of "you don't know what you've got 'til it's gone" mixed in. Old versus new. Your boring 9-to-5 versus a bitchin' car-battery-powered electro sword that kills between five and nine zombies in a single swing. Old, however, is comfortable and safe. A brave new world full of terrifying new creatures, though? Not so much.
That brings us to two very encouraging recent titles: indie ultra-hit Bastion and console cult smash Enslaved. Both games take place under apocalyptic circumstances, but put incredibly novel spins on what's quickly become an aging formula. Most obviously, you won't see a sun-soaked desert that's actually bigger than the sun in either game. Instead, Enslaved imagines a world ruined by man and reclaimed by nature. Bastion, meanwhile, revels in sense-engulfing otherworldliness – spiriting players away with psychadelic visuals, mood-setting music, and a Morgan Freeman-esque narrator who reacts to everything you do. In both cases, these settings are new and strange – maybe even a bit frightening. But that's the point. After all, where's the fun in an apocalypse fantasy if you're just going from one tedious, well-trodden routine to another? It goes deeper than a mere surface level nip-and-tuck, though. Both Bastion and Enslaved put their own spins on the delicate post-apocalyptic relationship between old and new. In Bastion, a mysterious "Calamity" has reduced the world to rubble and its people to ash, but the titular Bastion can put the whole thing together again, good as new. That solution's simplicity, however, quickly goes out the window when – without spoiling too much – the game starts planting seeds of doubt in your mind. Do you even want to go back? Should you? Who are you doing any of this for? Enslaved, meanwhile, wages the old-vs-new tug-of-war in ways both big and small. For instance, in one of the game's first environments, an otherwise pristinely green forest gives way to one particularly iconic relic: a US flag. Up to that point, Enslaved felt more like a fantasy story than anything else. That one frayed scrap of cloth, though, forged a powerful link back to reality. "Yes," it essentially said, "this used to be your world. This used to be your home." The rest of the game, then, sees main characters Monkey and Trip struggling to move forward in a society that's still clinging to the past. That, in turn, transforms the game's gorgeous nature scenery into something of a bittersweet pill. After all, the earth's already moved on. The only thing that seems out of place here? People. For both games, that's just the tip of a tremendously inventive iceberg. Ultimately, the apocalypse at its best isn't a setting; it's an ideal. It's a push-and-pull between old and new that – depending on how it's portrayed – leads to curiosity or reflection or fear or even a few laughs. By its very nature, it charts new territory and sucks us into new worlds. Treading water for too long, then, leads to some very obvious wrinkles – as evidenced by people's reactions to games like RAGE. There's so much potential here, though. It'd be an incredible shame to see it go to waste. So then, The Apocalypse, are you ready to give this relationship another go? Because I think I'm falling in love with you all over again. |
| Windows Phone 7 App of the Week: Thumba Photo Editor Posted: 24 Aug 2011 11:59 AM PDT
The advent of digital photography did amazing things for the photography community. The convenience a digital camera offers over a film camera renders file nearly obsolete. Additionally, the advancements of tools like Photoshop and the increased availability of those tools has introduced an entire generation to photo editing. Smart phones and their included cameras have contributed toward a new revolution which promises to have just as large an impact on life, social media. Thumba Photo Editor for Windows Phone 7 combines all of these benefits into a single tool which will let you get the most out of your phone's camera.
Typically if you want to take a picture and share it with your friends while on the go you wouldn't have the opportunity to tweak the colors or add image effects, but Thumba Photo Editor provides a wide range of image editing tools that allow you to do just that. Simple color correction, cropping or rotating, or even fun and artistic effects are all capabilities offered within Thumba. Once your image is tweaked to perfection Thumba allows you to save your image or share it via Facebook, flickr or Twitter.
Thumba Photo Editor can be found at the Windows Phone Marketplace for $0.99. A free trial version of Thumba is also available from the Marketplace.
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| Posted: 24 Aug 2011 11:05 AM PDT With football season still a couple of weeks out, the NBA mired in a lockout situation, and TV viewers ignoring any baseball game that isn't part of the World Series, sports bar owners have been kind of at a loss about how to fill their seats. Enter Barcraft. Earlier this year, some enterprising bar owners began tuning their TVs to cyber games – like StarCraft II tournaments – and gamers who once wouldn't be caught dead in a pub have started pouring in in droves.
The sudden appearance of a horde of pale, Zerg-cheering gamers may confuse traditional bar goers, the Wall Street Journal reports, but bar owners are loving the additional income. Not only does the extra money help pad out the owner's pockets, but the events are luring a previously untapped segment of the population into pub seats – and gamers used to watching cyber tourneys alone on their PCs are falling in love with Barcraft. "This feels like the World Cup," software engineer Justin Ng told the WSJ at a recent Barcraft event. "You experience the energy and screams of everyone around you when a player makes an amazing play." Credit for the Barcraft movement falls at the feet of Hyung Chung, the owner of Chao Bistro in Seattle. At patron Glen Bowers' suggestion, Chung turned off the Mariners baseball games that Chao customers were ignoring and tuned in to Starcraft. Barcraft was born and has since spread to establishments throughout the country. Check out some pics from a SF Barcraft in an imagur album put together by an attendee named TremendO. If Barcraft sounds like your cup of tea (or pint of beer), be sure to check out teamliquid.net or similar websites to see if one's coming up in your area. |
| LG's LSM-100 Mouse Scanner Is A Mouse And A Scanner Posted: 24 Aug 2011 10:28 AM PDT So little desk space, so many peripheral devices. All the extra hardware that comes with a PC – think printers, routers and racing wheels – can threaten to overwhelm and consume even the largest of executive-sized desks. But, hey, things are slowly getting better; the fax machine went the way of the dodo (at least in home offices) with the rise of scanners, and now, you might be able to toss the scanner in the trash too, thanks to LG's new LSM-100 mouse scanner. You'll be able to save the image in PNG, JPEG, TIFF, BMP, PDF, XLS and DOC formats. Plus, the LSM-100 sports Optical Character Recognition technology, so any documents you scan in are fully editable in the DOC-supporting text editor of your choice. The mouse can scan in images up to A3 size, or 11.69 × 16.54 inches. You can check out the LSM-100 at LG's booth at the IFA conference in Berlin. If you can't afford an international trip, feel free to check out the promo video above, which Engadget kindly pointed out to us. LG's press release didn't offer up any pricing or release info. |
| Samsung Isn't Interested In HP's PC Business Posted: 24 Aug 2011 09:59 AM PDT
"Samsung Electronics said Wednesday that it has no intention of taking over Hewlett-Packard's personal computer business," MarketWatch reported earlier today. So that's that, it appears – Samsung's declaration to MarketWatch didn't contain any of the standard "We're keeping our options open and always evaluating possibilities" type of PR disclaimers that typically accompany statements like this. Which company out there do you think will end up with HP's market-leading PC line? Does anybody want it after the HP PR debacle? Share your thoughts in the comments. Image credit: bestdamncreativewritingblog.com |
| Acer Posts First Quarterly Loss Ever, Faces Tough Road Ahead Posted: 24 Aug 2011 09:44 AM PDT
Tough times have fallen on Acer ever since it parted ways with former CEO Gianfranco Lanci, though the slide started before he left. Lanci jumped ship after the board of directors essentially pushed him overboard as they wanted to steer Acer's ship more towards mobile waters. But Apple's hugely popular iPad has been a double whammy, eating up much of the mobile market share Acer so desperately wants, and cutting into lower end PC and notebook sales. Chairman J.T. Wang described the second quarter to investors as a "correction period," and noted that it would be "impossible" to break even by the end of the year, according to Reuters. On the bright side, Acer is still the world's second larger PC maker, second only to HP, which plans to spin off its PC business. |
| ECS Builds an All-in-One You Can Upgrade (Including Motherboard) Posted: 24 Aug 2011 07:50 AM PDT The big caveat with buying an all-in-one (AIO) system is that most of the time, what you see is what you get. They're not like desktop towers, where you can crack open the side panel and rip out hardware left and right. But the new G11 AIO from Elitegroup Computer Systems (ECS) is different in that it caters to the do-it-yourself (DIY) crowd with a removable back panel that grants access to the motherboard and other components. At work here is Intel's AIO PC standard, which ECS chose to follow for its first entry into AIO territory. The G11 is built around the mini ITX form factor and sports a motherboard based on Intel's H61 express chipset, a Sandy Bridge processor (Pentium or Core i3/i5/i7), up to 16GB of dual-channel DDR3-1333 memory, support for a single 3.5-inch SATA hard drive, slim optical drive, several USB 2.0 ports, HDMI, GbE LAN, 2.5W speakers, 1.3MP webcam, 802.11n Wi-Fi via PCI-E mini card, and a 21.5-inch LED panel with a 1920x1080 resolution. Check out the embedded YouTube video above to see how it easy it is to stick your hands in the G11 and muck around, something you might have to do on Day 1. ECS didn't reveal price information (or a release date), and it isn't clear if the G11 will ship with all the necessary components to get up and running, or just the motherboard and power supply. Either way, this looks very cool. |
Well here's some big news late on a Wednesday afternoon: 
You would have expected when the Google +1 button and Google+ launched, that they would have tight integration. Yeah, not so much. The +1 button was mostly used to improve Google search results, but Google has announced a 
Nothing gets the rumor mill a-churnin' like the top PC supplier around announcing that it's selling off its PC business. Ever since HP made the earth-shaking declaration that it was looking to spin off or sell the Personal Systems Group – i.e., the PC division – portion of its business, the web's been wondering: who would buy it? Yesterday, 
Hewlett Packard isn't the only major PC maker facing an uncertain future. Acer today | You are subscribed to email updates from Maximum PC - All Articles To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now. | Email delivery powered by Google |
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