General Gaming Article

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• The Wheel to the Web: 30 Technologies That Changed Everything
• Fusion Garage Drops Pre-Order Price of Grid 10 Tablet by $200
• Mobile Web Usage to Surpass Wired by 2015, Says IDC
• Spotify, iHeartRadio Move In On Pandora's Recommendation Territory
• Thermaltake's High WattageToughpower XT PSUs Could Power a Small City
• Razer Hydra Review
• MSI R6950 Twin Frozr III Power Edition Review
• Broadcom to Acquire NetLogic Microsystems for $3.7 Billion
• HTC Considers Purchasing An Operating System
• Amazon Considering a Netflix-Like E-Book Subscription Service

The Wheel to the Web: 30 Technologies That Changed Everything Posted: 12 Sep 2011 03:24 PM PDT The path of human progress is paved with tiny innovations. While most technological progress has been barely perceptible throughout the history of human invention, a handful of breakthroughs have radically changed the way humans live in the world. Here are 30 of the most life-changing technologies of all time. Proto-Technologies Before humans began building ships, space shuttles, and iPads, the path to technological awesomeness was paved with simple discoveries and groundbreaking advances that we scarcely recognize as technology today. Yet, without these early technical achievements, none of our current gizmos and gadgets could exist at all. These fundamental breakthroughs gave humanity dominion over all the earth. The Wheel About 6,000 years ago, some guys in Mesopotamia had a really good idea: What if we made two things—maybe somewhat circular—stuck a pole in the middle of them, and used this new thing to move heavy stuff? That awesome thought gave birth to the wheel, which caught on fast throughout the Middle East, and appears to have also turned up in Central Europe around the same time. Before long, people were hitching wagons to domesticated animals and rolling all over the place. As the quintessential simple machine, the wheel has become so fundamental to our understanding of the world, it's almost hard to believe it had to be invented. Yet without the insight of those Sumerian and proto-Polish inventors, we'd all be hoofing it right now. The Lever First documented by Archimedes about 2,300 years ago, the lever undoubtedly predates recorded history—but its simplicity only adds to the wonder of its effects. Consisting of a pivot point, the fulcrum, and a stick of some kind, this two-part machine can amplify any force applied to its end proportionally to the distance between the fulcrum and the end. In short, stick the lever under something, put the fulcrum close by, and apply torque on the other end. The longer the stick, the less effort you'll need to move the thing. We can only imagine how stoked the first discoverer of this tool must've been. The Inclined Plane Arguably not a technology in its own right, the inclined plane is one of the six classical simple machines. Most people recognize it as a ramp, and its most obvious use is in moving heavy things up or down its inclined surface. But the application of this simple concept goes well beyond rolling wheels up ramps and/or sliding crates down hillsides. Image Credit: Activity Resources It's also the underlying technology behind the blade and, more cleverly, scissors, which are able to cut through thick material not just by virtue of sharp edges, but also through the opposing force of two inclined planes coming together at a single point. The Pulley Bringing the rotation of the wheel together with the torque force of the lever, pulleys change the direction of force while giving the user a mechanical advantage. The result: You can do a ton of work with relatively little effort. Pulleys made the age of sail possible by giving mere mortal humans a way to move giant sheets of canvas in heavy wind. Pulleys are also the central driving mechanisms of bicycles. Needle and Thread Another proto-technology that contributed to human survival—but seldom gets much attention from technophiles—is the sewing needle. Coupled with some kind of thread, this vastly underrated invention allowed prehistoric humans to stitch together multiple materials into clothing for weather protection, tents to use as dwellings, and bags to use as vessels. Without a needle and thread, our ancestors would have had little chance of survival in extreme climates. And to this day, the Inuit people produce amazingly weatherproof garments using bone needles and thread made from the sinew of animal tissue. Consider that the next time you're pulling on your khakis. Screw Behold, the simple screw. Composed of an inclined plane wrapped around a cylinder or shaft, it delivers the same mechanical advantage as a ramp in a more compact form, which makes it great for penetrating dense objects and fastening things together. Look around your house and you'll find screws everywhere—and not just holding your gadgets together, but also in the lids of your jars and the blades of your ceiling fan. Airplane and helicopter propellers are just specialized screws, too. Without this simple tool, we would all be, well, screwed. Boats Little of modern civilization would have been possible without seafaring, so we should count ourselves lucky that some insightful prehistoric person had the wherewithal to hop on a floating log and use it to navigate local waterways. The earliest examples of boats consist of hollowed-out logs dating back some 10,000 years, but it's likely that the basic technology goes back much further. Even in ancient Mesopotamia, boats enabled trade between distant cities. Today, they bring most of our tech gadgets to us from across the Pacific Ocean. If you love your iPad, thank a sea captain. The Hinge Like opening doors? Thank the inventor of the hinge. While it's unclear where hinges first originated, early examples date back 3,600 years to simple pivot hinges carved out of stone. By inserting a pole between two indented stones, builders could erect heavy doors capable of opening and closing easily. But now they're everywhere. Just trying finding an electronics gadget that doesn't have some kind of hinge somewhere in its chassis or internal construction. Just try. The Arch Little of modern architecture would be possible without the arch. This simple curved structure allows a builder to span an opening while supporting a tremendous amount of weight, making it possible to build tall, sturdy structures out of relatively weak materials. The genius of the arch lies in the cooperation of all of its parts in distributing the tensile stresses of whatever rests against it. The structure of the material dissipates stress around the span, rather than directly onto it. Without this innovation, there'd be few stone buildings more than two stories tall, and large dams and suspension bridges wouldn't exist at all. Meta-Technologies Some of the most life-changing technological advancements in human history were not discrete technologies in their own right, but sweeping concepts that fundamentally changed the way people thought about and interacted with the physical world. These meta-technologies often combined multiple existing technologies in powerful new ways, and sometimes created whole new categories of technological and scientific understanding. Stone Crafting The earliest examples of human tools date from 2.5 million years ago, when homo erectus began selecting sharp and oddly shaped rocks for specific tasks. From these humble beginnings, humans learned to select rocks based on their physical properties and chip them carefully into novel shapes—usually for the purpose of ripping some unwitting creature to pieces. Image Credit: Lithic Casting In relatively short order, prehistoric stone crafters gave us scrapers, axes, knives, needles, and spears. If any single advance made humans the greatest bad-asses of the entire animal kingdom, it was our habit of honing rocks into astoundingly effective weapons. Electricity Human beings didn't invent electromagnetism, but putting it to use has paid off spectacularly. Just 170 years after Michael Faraday created the first electric generator, nearly everything in the modern home demands some kind of electric charge. Powered Mechanics Bicycles and ox carts are great, but human and animal power can only get you so far. Fortunately, in the third century BCE, some guys in Greece discovered that a flowing stream could turn a paddled wheel. They built themselves some water wheels and put them to work milling grain—giving humans a chance to rest while machines did the work. Eventually, Heron of Alexandria applied this idea to wind, too. But things didn't get really cool until the discovery of steam power, and later combustion engines, which forever changed the way people got around. Controlled Fire Before human beings had any concept of technology, they marveled helplessly at the forces of nature. Then, around 400,000 to 800,000 years ago, early humans got their hands on fire and figured out how to make it, control it, and put it to good use. Equipped with this fundamental technology, people suddenly had the capacity to keep themselves warm in cold environments, cook their food for safe consumption, and light their world in the darkness of night. It also kept insects and predators away. Since then, we've been burning anything and everything, from wood to fossil fuels, and the practice has taken us to beyond the limits of Earth's gravity. Integrated Circuits If we were asked to credit the Information Age to just a single technological achievement, we would have to choose the microchip. More profound than any single invention, integrated circuits are really a compound innovation, bringing together a variety of complex circuit designs, any one of which would constitute a profound technology in its own right. Image Credit: Intel Thanks to this creation—now made possible by etching an intricate pattern of conductive and nonconductive elements on a semiconductor substrate—modern computers take up pocket space, rather than warehouse space. Artificial Intelligence The Grand Poobah of all innovations is artificial intelligence. We humans may be little more than clever apes, but we've already begun to build machines that can slice through complex problems more effectively than we can. As artificial intelligence continues to evolve, some futurists—most notably the unconventional inventor and businessman Ray Kurzweil—believe we may be on the verge of a technological revolution wherein computers begin to design their own progeny... and even develop self-awareness. If that event—known as the singularity—does come to pass, humans could become second-class citizens in the intellectual community (or else merge with machine intelligence to become bio-mechanical). In the meantime, AI software plays games with us, runs our washing machines, gives us driving directions, and flies our airplanes while our pilots relax. Image Credit: NASA Discrete Technologies Proto-technologies—like fire and simple machines—laid the groundwork for a broad spectrum of human inventions. Meta-technologies—like the integrated circuit—have given us an occasional thrust forward in innovation. But some of the most phenomenal tech breakthroughs of the modern age have also been some of the smallest. Here are 16 individual technologies that have changed the course of the human engineering... and the way we live our daily lives. Glue Some of the most fantastic gadgets and objects we depend on today wouldn't be possible without good glue. Early humans used birch bark tar and other natural substances to join stone tips to their spears. Animal bones and milk casein have served people well over the years, too. In the modern era, adhesives have grown increasingly sophisticated, from the insanely strong bonds of synthetic superadhesives like cyanoacrylate (aka, Super Glue, which began its career as a transparent plastic for use in gun sights and also serves as a medical adhesive for holding body parts in place) to the enigmatically restickable Post-it adhesive developed by 3M. Open up any gadget you own, and you'll likely find a dozen distinct adhesives chosen for their unique bonding properties. The Forge The Bronze Age, the Iron Age, and the steel-centric modern era must all pay homage to the dying profession known as blacksmithing. And the great achievement of the first blacksmiths was their central instrument, the forge. The earliest known forges date to Mesopotamia some 6,500 years ago. As forges grew in sophistication—and thanks to the advent of water and wind power to apply air to the burning coal inside—blacksmiths used them to develop increasingly sturdy metals. Image Credit: Jeff Kubina And while most technological advances halted in Europe throughout the Dark Ages, blacksmiths continued to refine their art in the development of increasingly effective weaponry and defenses. While few blacksmiths remain today, industrial forges continue to churn out steel all around the world. Gunpowder Invented in China sometime in the 9th century, early gunpowder is supposed to have been the product of alchemists searching for an elixir of immortality. While that effort obviously failed, this black substance proved especially handy at causing instantaneous mortality. By the 12th century, crude guns and grenades proliferated throughout China. Image Credit: Ytrottier About 100 years later, the technology spread to Europe and the Middle East. Before the end of the 14th century, cannons and rifles emerged as the de facto weapons of the western world, and gave European armies the power to easily overtake the New World. Printing Press Once upon a time, all books were written by hand. With pens. On paper. In 1440, a German goldsmith had the idea to adapt screw presses from the wine industry as a way of printing words on paper. He molded letters and words out of metal and assembled them into blocks of movable type that could be arranged quickly to print a single page of text. Because the blocks of type could be rearranged at any time, a single press could be used to make any number of books. Compared with the leading competitive technology at the time—handwriting—Johannes Gutenberg's printing press was astoundingly efficient. A single printing press could produce 3,600 pages per workday, making books widely available and relatively affordable for the first time in history. This device, more than any other, gave rise to the prevalence of literacy around the world, making modern democracy possible. The Telegraph Data communication was possible 160 years before smartphones and ISPs, thanks to an invention called the telegraph. Composed of a magnet applied to an electric current, the telegraph could send simple signals—beeps, mostly—over long distances. NYU professor Samuel Morse devised the first practical telegraph system, complete with a code that made use of the device's beeps, and the first long-distance telegraph message was transmitted in 1844. By 1851, Western Union was offering telegraph services across the United States, and the system emerged as a standard way of dispatching trains. Long-distance telegraph lines set the course for the later proliferation of the telephone in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Today, the legacy of the telegraph lives on in a number of network communications protocols. Chemical Batteries Strangely, the electric battery was invented in 1800, some 30 years before the first electric generator. But it wasn't until 1836 that the technology became reliable enough for industrial use. Originally developed by Italian physicist Alessandro Volta in the late 18th century, the earliest practical batteries consisted of multiple cells containing saltwater brine between discs of copper and zinc. In time, the single cell batteries we know today emerged as the global standard, with multiple batteries sometimes used in series to produce greater charges. Even as today's mobile devices demonstrate the inherent limitations in electrochemical batteries, none of our phones, laptops, or tablets would be possible without them. Radio Anyone who loves gadgets will generally agree that wireless is better than wired. So it's no wonder the notion of the "wireless telegraph" quickly caught on. Between the discovery of wireless telegraphy in 1878 by British scientist David Edward Hughes and the first radio program broadcast in 1906, the technology evolved rapidly—from sending simple clicks and scratches to transmitting voices and music with surprisingly good fidelity. By 1920, news and entertainment broadcasts became commonplace, while two-way radio became a standard of communication in maritime and military applications. In the 21st century, just about every object contains some kind of transmitter, including most retail products in the developed world, which sport RFID tags for inventory tracking. Air Foil Dirigibles made people airborne as early as the late 18th century, but it wasn't until the advent of heavier-than-air flight that round-the-world trips became a commonplace experience for the hoi polloi. The development of the air foil made modern aircraft possible, and, by 1940, enabled air speeds capable of transporting a person across the Atlantic in just two days. Today, thanks to improvements in wing design and the advent of jet engines, a typical flight from New York to London takes just seven hours. Plastic The phrase "cheap plastic" has developed some pretty negative connotations over the last century, and unfairly so. Thanks to these pliable polymers, we can make just about anything cheaply and in mass quantities. Most gadgets are primarily made from plastic, from the circuit boards to the chassis to much of the other componentry. While early plastics like Bakelite were brittle and easily broken, modern polystyrene and polyvinyl chloride (PVC) can stand up to years of abuse. The great promise of plastic is its potential for recycled uses. However, the technology to recycle the components of small electronics is still underdeveloped, making plastics one of the worst contributing factors to environmental pollution. Motion Detectors When you walk into a room and the lights turn on automatically, it feels a little like magic. More often than not, the technology that makes this magic possible is a radio or infrared sensor connected to the lighting system. Motion detectors have become increasingly sophisticated since they began appearing in commercial applications in the 1970s. Most contemporary systems use a combination of technologies, including radar, sonar, and optical recognition to detect real movement and avoid false positives. As home automation continues to develop, motion sensors will become increasingly sophisticated, likely integrating biometric recognition systems, to automatically adjust conditions in our homes to our personal preferences. Microwave Ovens Few of us salivate over the latest advances in microwave ovens, but nearly all of us drool over the virtually endless supply of instantly available food products that the microwave enabled. If you're in the demographic most likely to read this article (nerds), chances are good that you're consuming some kind of microwaved meal right at this very moment. So put down that Hot Pocket for a moment and give your microwave its just deserts. Computers We hardly need to say it at all, but no other technology deserves a place on these pages more than the modern computer. Originally created for solving large computational problems, early computers took up entire warehouses and performed very little work by our standards. If you have an iPhone in your pocket, you're packing more computing power on your person than could be found in all of NASA during the days of the Apollo program. So, yes, you should feel like a bit of a schmuck if you're just using it to play Angry Birds. Lasers Two words: frickin' laserbeams. Lasers aren't just bitchin' sci-fi plot devices anymore. They do the work of reading and writing data on our storage discs. They serve as ultra-precise knives in delicate surgeries. They cut through metal in industrial factories, and they mark targets for advanced missile systems in the field of war. If you're a hippy with too much time on your hands, you can enjoy a laser light show at your local planetarium. While we're still a long way off from bad-ass laser gun fights in outer space, we can still hold out hope. The Internet In the beginning, the Internet was a highly sophisticated computer network used by defense personnel and researchers for very important work. Then the 1990s came, and a wave of commercial development made the online world accessible to jerks like us. Since then, music has gone digital; movies now stream to your living room; major newspapers are collapsing as citizen journalism takes over; and the wealth of bizarre pornographic options has grown to stagger the imagination. Nicely done, Internet. Nicely done. Charge-Coupled Device The camera is one of the greatest inventions of all time, making it possible for us to instantaneously capture the actual appearance of objects as they are. But it wasn't until the advent of the charge-coupled device (CCD) that imaging technology realized its full potential. With the CCD, cameras evolved from fairly static image-capture devices that required hours of processing to produce a single picture to amazingly powerful extensions of our digital consciousness. Armed with even a fairly weak 1.3-megapixel CCD, your phone has the ability to capture events in real time and share them with the world. The CCD also enables robots to look at the world and interact with it in amazingly complex ways. When we do eventually come face-to-face with our future robot overlords, they'll be looking at us through CCDs. Accelerometers As we stand on the precipice of whatever the next wave of innovation holds, one fairly new technology stands out for its potential to alter the way we interact with our world. The introduction of accelerometers—simple motion detectors—into mobile devices has already drastically changed software interface design. Apple has led the way in coming up with cool (and sometimes lame—shake to shuffle, anyone?) ways of using real-time motion sensing to interact with apps. With only a few years of development applied to the technology, accelerometers have already replaced buttons for a host of control operations on our devices. In time, these little sensors could line our clothing for fully immersive control over virtual environments. This, we think, is a technology to watch.   Five Technologies That Changed…Nothing #1: CueCat In a bid to "revolutionize publishing," a forward-thinking, but ultimately misguided, company called Digital Convergence made an ambitious move in the year 2000: It distributed free barcode scanners to thousands of magazine subscribers and concurrently sold magazine publishers on the prospect of adding barcodes to ads and articles. Like today's QR codes, the barcodes would take users to websites with related content. Image Credit: Tompkinsc Sadly, the scanners—known as CueCats and shaped like little felines—barely worked. They were cheaply made, cumbersome to use, and fraught with enough privacy problems to make most users recoil in fear. Within a year after the initial mass-mailing of CueCats, the product and the company were dead. #2: Virtual Reality During the heady 1990s, as mainstream folks suddenly awoke to a world where words like "cyberspace" and "download" could make any idiot sound plugged in, there was no bigger buzzword than "VR." Plucked from the pages of science fiction, virtual reality promised ordinary dorks the ability to fly, run through impossible landscapes, and engage in 25th-century warfare—as long as they were willing to don a 30-pound helmet, wear insanely cumbersome gloves, and do all their running in a gigantic hamster ball. Far from the fully immersive sensory experience of fiction, real-world VR was a nightmarish, often physically painful experience that did nothing so much as constantly remind the user that he was really just standing around with an enormous set of goggles on his head. To this day, 3D gaming is about as close to VR as people care to get. #3: DRM In 1999, Napster changed the landscape of the music industry by almost instantaneously undercutting the record labels' stranglehold on music distribution. Shortly after Napster crashed and burned under a mountain of legal filings, legitimate businesses—you know, like Apple—began bringing digital music to mainstream consumers, complete with digital rights management (a.k.a. DRM) to prevent Napster-like illegal copying. But DRM has failed to prevent piracy among pirates, and instead just makes it annoying difficult for ordinary users to play the songs they legally purchased on devices of their choosing. Recognizing this, many mainstream digital music resellers have abandoned DRM in favor of open distribution. Sure we suffered a decade of constant frustration, but at least it was all for nothing! #4: Web Portals Long before iGoogle (which no one seems to know about, even though it's a current product from the world's biggest Internet company), there was a glut of search engine and online media companies struggling to stand out in a crowded field of Yahoo wannabes. The key to building a leading online brand, or so the logic went, was to lock users into a web portal—filled with links to news, weather, and customized content—that would become a user's personalized gateway to the online world. Once accomplished, the value of a company like Lycos or AOL could be computed in terms of the number of users who depended on its portals for access to the rest of the web. The obvious flaw in this thinking was that even the dumbest users could figure out how to use a search engine, and almost nobody wanted to be trapped inside a cluttered portal page the moment they logged onto the web. Once Google figured out how to personalize a user's web experience without pushing them to a portal, the concept mostly faded away. #5: WebOS As the smartphone race heated up in 2009, the once-great Palm released WebOS, a mobile OS so revolutionary that it would change the company's fortunes forever—mainly by putting itself out of business. After a quick and ignominious commercial failure, WebOS and Palm merged with HP in 2010. HP finally released its WebOS-based Touchpad tablet in July of 2011, only to kill off not only WebOS, but its entire consumer devices business several weeks later. We're not sure what went wrong, but we're sure the world will be pretty much the same without WebOS.

Fusion Garage Drops Pre-Order Price of Grid 10 Tablet by $200 Posted: 12 Sep 2011 03:21 PM PDT When Fusion Garage announced the Grid 10 tablet at $499, most potential buyers had a little chuckle. In the wake of the TouchPad fire sale and the massive success of the iPad 2, that price seemed far too high. Today Fusion Garage has dropped the price of pre-orders by $200 to a mere $299 for the 10-inch slate. The Grid 10 is going to be running an operating system built on Android, but won't be an official Google device. That means no Market access, and no Google apps. Amazon is still selling pre-orders at the higher price, but we assume this will all get worked out before the device launches; if it launches. Fusion Garage says that the price was always intended to be $299, but due to negotiations with an OEM, they could not advertise the lower price until now. Additionally, the release date has been pushed back to October 1 because of new Adobe Flash certification requirements.

Mobile Web Usage to Surpass Wired by 2015, Says IDC Posted: 12 Sep 2011 03:11 PM PDT Just four short years. That's how long IDC says it's going to take for mobile internet usage to surpass wired use. They base these estimates on the explosion in sales of smartphones and tablets, as well as the new innovation in mobile networks. IDC also suggests that by 2015, web access on PCs is going to begin declining.  This change is expected to come with the inclusion of hundreds of millions of new internet users all over the world. For these people, the mobile web will be the only web they have ever known. "Forget what we have taken for granted on how consumers use the Internet," IDC research vice president Karsten Weide said in a statement. "Soon, more users will access the Web using mobile devices than using PCs, and it's going to make the Internet a very different place." Smartphones are expected to surpass feature phones, enabling a full mobile web experience. This, along with the continued growth of tablets, will lead to the stagnation of the PC market, IDC reports. This change is expected to occur first in Western Europe, Japan, and the US. What do you think the future of web access looks like?

Spotify, iHeartRadio Move In On Pandora's Recommendation Territory Posted: 12 Sep 2011 02:53 PM PDT Pandora's stock has had a lot of ups and downs since the IPO last month, but this has been an especially rough day. All because two announcements are stealing some of Pandora's recommendation engine thunder. User will soon find that both iHeartRadio and Spotify are a lot more like Pandora than they used to be. The first nail in Pandora's coffin is a new partnership between Clear Channel and Echo Nest that will allow iHeartRadio users to build customized radio stations based on a single artist. Eerily like Pandora, right? America's newest music obsession, Spotify is also in on the Pandora killing game with a third-party web app called Echofi. With this solution, you visit a webpage that shoots recommended Spotify URIs into your client. Pandora did this music recommendation thing first, but it doesn't mean they will always own the market. As an investor, you have to be worried when a company's business model can be duplicated so easily. Do you think Pandora is in trouble?

Thermaltake's High WattageToughpower XT PSUs Could Power a Small City Posted: 12 Sep 2011 01:09 PM PDT Thermaltake's new Toughpower XT Platinum and Gold power supplies mean business, at least on paper. These new high-output PSUs come in three wattages -- 1275W, 1375W, and 1475W -- two of which are 80 Plus Gold certified (1275W and 1375W), with the other receiving an 80 Plus Platinum stamp. With well over 1000W and high energy efficiency, Thermaltake is taking aim at hardcore gamers who run multiple videocards and other high-end users. All three models use 100 percent 105C Japanese electrolytic and solid capacitors, as well as several technologies of interest to engineering geeks (and we use that term affectionately), such as full bridge and LLC resonance circuits and an interleaved PFC circuit. All three also sport heavy-gauge 16 AWG cables, multiple PCI-E connectors, and PSU status LEDs. On the all-important +12V rail, the 1275W offers 45A for 12V1 and 65A for 12V2; the 1375W is rated at 50A for 12V1 and 70A for 12V2; and the 1475W is rated at 55A for 12V1 and 75 for 12V2. No word on price or availability. Toughpower XT Platinum 1275W Toughpower XT Gold 1375W Toughpower XT Gold 1475W Image Credit: Thermaltake

Razer Hydra Review Posted: 12 Sep 2011 12:45 PM PDT Traditionally, motion control has been the domain of the consoles. Between the Wii, Xbox Kinect, and the PlayStation Move, the tech has developed a reputation as an arm-wagging, casual experience—emblematic of the overall shift away from the kind of deep, demanding, rewarding gameplay that the PC as a platform is known for. With that in mind, you can imagine that we were a little surprised when we heard that Razer—a company associated with competitive, hardcore gaming—was releasing a motion controller for the PC. Is this the beginning of the end? In a word, no. Whether or not the Hydra is the beginning of anything at all is debatable, but it's definitely not trying to dumb down PC gaming. That glowing whiffle ball is the Hydra's magnetic base station. The controllers must be used within three feet. When you first lay hands on the Hydra, you can tell that this is a motion controller designed for a more serious audience. It includes two "nunchuk"-style handheld controllers, each with an analog thumbstick and seven buttons. That's right, seven buttons. By comparison, the Wii's nunchuk has only two buttons, the PlayStation Move has plenty of buttons, but only a single joystick, and the Kinect—well, don't talk to the Kinect about buttons. The Hydra is, in other words, equipped to play even very complicated games. Each of the controllers is ergonomic and significantly larger than the Wii nunchuk, which they otherwise resemble. They're lightweight—a product of not having any internal batteries, and they have to be used within a 2–3-foot radius of the Hydra's magnetic sensor—a small, glowing orb that connects to your computer with a USB cable. Even if you wanted to test the limits of the Hydra's range, you're constrained by the braided cables that tether the handsets to the sensor. Although we're glad that the Hydra's corded design will dissuade anyone from making yet another motion bowling game for it, we didn't care for the mass of cables it left on our desk. In all, the Hydra's hardware is designed nicely. What's going to make or break it as a successful motion controller is the software support. To get things started on the right foot, Razer enlisted the help of one of PC gaming's most respected developers—Valve. Bundled with every Hydra is a copy of Portal 2, Valve's hit first-person puzzler. The bundled version includes the full game, with support for Hydra motion control, as well as a set of 10 all-new levels specifically designed to take advantage of the peripheral. The added features are a lot of fun and add some extra depth to an already amazing game. With motion control, you can manipulate objects in three dimensions, moving the controller toward or away from your body to do the same in game. You can also rotate portals and stretch certain objects, making for some fun puzzles. Playing Portal 2 with the Hydra is a lot of fun, but for $140, the Hydra had better work with more than just one game. Razer claims support for more than 125 games, but of course this just means that the Hydra has profiles that allow you to play any of those games without having to configure it manually. There's a big difference between a game that can be controlled with the Hydra and one that's meant to be. For single-player shooters, the controller works fairly well. The motion-based aiming is a bit less precise than using the mouse, so we doubt many people will want to go online wielding the Hydra. Any game that is best played using a gamepad can be played using the Hydra (which, if you take out the motion functionality, is just a gamepad split in half) though the button layout isn't nearly as comfortable as a dedicated gamepad. Pointer-heavy excursions like real-time strategy games? Forget about playing those with the Hydra—it just doesn't work. And that's really the problem with the Hydra—for an expensive peripheral, the software support just isn't there. Portal 2 is a great title to launch with, but Razer hasn't done enough to prove that there's going to be a large body of software to support the system in the future. Sure, you can use it to play games that weren't designed for motion control, but that is—by definition—unfulfilling. Unless you're a motion-control aficionado, we recommend that you hold off on the Razer Hydra until more games are released that take advantage of its specific capabilities. $140, www.razerzone.com

MSI R6950 Twin Frozr III Power Edition Review Posted: 12 Sep 2011 12:45 PM PDT Just how far can you overclock the Radeon HD 6950? The Radeon HD 6950 often gets overlooked, because it falls into an in-between netherworld of pricing. Typical cards cost anywhere from $240-$300, but most seem to hover around the $270 mark. This MSI overclocked card, built using the company's Twin Frozr III dual-fan cooler, sits at around $280. So high-end buyers overlook this price category and budget buyers feel like it's a little too much. In doing so, they're overlooking a speedy card. MSI took the Radeon HD 6950 GPU from the relatively staid 800MHz and pushed it to 850MHz. It also added 50MHz to the GDDR5 clock, running the frame buffer at 1,300MHz (versus the 1,250MHz reference). The card's new cooling system offers a switch-based fan profile, which lets you set it to quiet or cooler mode. We ran the card in its quiet mode. The cooler is built using a pair of high-blade-count fans, which seem to be the "in" thing in GPU cooling systems these days. MSI also supplies its Afterburner software, which lets you overclock the card to even higher speesureds if you're inclined. Frozr III's dual fans keep it cool and exceptionally quiet for its class. We've always maintained that increasing only the GPU core clock nets you minimal gains. Boosting both memory and core clocks gives more of a performance lift. The Twin Frozr III dual-fan cooler likly pushes AMD's PowerTune technology limit just a little higher, as well, allowing the GPU to run just a little harder before throttling back. Using our updated suite of benchmarks, we compared the performance of MSI's Twin Frozr III against the XFX Radeon HD 6950, running at clock speeds, and MSI's own GTX 560 Ti Twin Frozr II card, in our standard test system. Overall, MSI's souped-up HD 6950 presents very well, indeed, winning the majority of game tests. Noise and power levels were acceptable, too. In fact, the card is quieter at full load than the XFX HD 6950, which uses the reference single-fan cooling system. Our main concern, though, is still price. The XFX card and MSI's own GTX 560 Ti tend to cost a little less—as much as $20-$30 less, depending on where you shop. And the kicker is that for $30-$40 more, you can score a very-much non-budget Radeon HD 6970 card. That leaves us torn on the R6950 Twin Frozr III. Still, we have to give the card some points for being quieter than a 6970 and within striking distance of that GPU in performance. $280, www.msicomputer.com

Broadcom to Acquire NetLogic Microsystems for $3.7 Billion Posted: 12 Sep 2011 12:41 PM PDT Network chip maker Broadcom announced it has entered into a definitive agreement to purchase NetLogic Microsystems for $50 a share, making the deal worth approximately $3.7 billion and ranking as Broadcom's biggest acquisition to date. NetLogic is a fabless semiconductor company that specializes in high-performance processors for communication and media rich applications. Broadcom's hefty cash investment is intended to beef up the company's infrastructure portfolio and sidestep having to develop its own complimentary chips for tasks like inspecting data packets and checking for security issues, according to The Wall Street Journal. By purchasing NetLogic, Broadcom CEO and President Scott McGregor believes his company effectively doubles its market opportunity. "This transaction delivers on all fronts for Broadcom's shareholders -- strategic fit, leading-edge technology and significant financial upside," said McGregor. "With NetLogic Microsystems, Broadcom is acquiring a leading multi-core embedded processor solution, market leading knowledge-based processors, and unique digital front-end technology for wireless base stations that are key enablers for the next generation infrastructure build-out. Broadcom is now better positioned to meet growing customer demand for integrated, end-to-end communications and processing platforms for network infrastructure." Analysts appear split on the deal. Some believe Broadcom overspent on a company that has mostly reported losses, while others point out that those losses are due to charges attached to past acquisitions, and that NetLogics is otherwise profitable. Image Credit: Broadcom

HTC Considers Purchasing An Operating System Posted: 12 Sep 2011 11:28 AM PDT Ever since HP shocked the world by basically saying they were discontinuing or selling off many of their core businesses, most of the rumors have swirled around the PC division. Will it be spun off? Who would buy it? (Not Samsung.) Aside from the hysteria-inducing TouchPad fire sale, the fate of the webOS team has largely been ignored. Now, a potential buyer has emerged from the shadows: cellphone manufacturer HTC. HTC CEO Cher Wang told the Economic Observer of China that the company is considering jumping into the operating system waters, Focus Taiwan reports, but it's not in any rush. "We have given it thought and we have discussed it internally, but we will not do it on impulse," Wang informed the interviewer. She said HTC's deep knowledge of Android and its HTC Sense interface already made her company's phones distinctive, which is probably why HTC is taking its time and weighing the positives and negatives associated with an in-house OS.  "We can use any OS we want. We are able to make things different from our rivals on the second or third layer of a platform. Our strength lies in understanding an OS, but it does not mean that we have to produce an OS."

Amazon Considering a Netflix-Like E-Book Subscription Service Posted: 12 Sep 2011 10:49 AM PDT While book publishers have been, for the most part, friendly to the idea of e-books – at least since the rise of the Kindle and its ilk – the shift from dead trees to lively pixels still scare many in the industry. Meanwhile, on the TV and movie front, streaming providers like Hulu Plus have been bucking heads with traditional content producers who are fearful of devaluing their content. A new report says Amazon's looking to take all those anxieties and mix them up in one big worry stew by introducing a Netflix-like subscription e-book service to Amazon Prime accounts. Amazon's talking to book publishers about possibilities right now, the Wall Street Journal reports (whew, they've been busy!), but anonymous insiders say that industry executives aren't too thrilled with the idea. They cite the same concerns commonly whipped out by television and movie producers, namely that an "All you can eat" buffet-style subscription could devalue their content. Amazon's reportedly offering pretty hefty fees to any publishers willing to participate in the program.  Amazon already offers some TV shows and movies to Amazon Prime subscribers and it plans on launching an Android-based Kindle tablet later in the year.

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