General Gaming Article

General Gaming Article

Microsoft Abandoning Hohm

Posted: 30 Jun 2011 06:46 PM PDT

Companies like Google and Microsoft have wide-ranging interests and are always on the lookout for fresh opportunities. But it's not uncommon for some of their ventures to come unstuck. Microsoft's Hohm energy monitoring tool is a case in point. Redmond has decided to bring the curtain down on Hohm.

"Microsoft is discontinuing the Microsoft Hohm service effective May 31, 2012," the company announced in a blog post. Blaming its decision on "slow overall market adoption of the service", it reassured both of Hohm's two users that the service would continue to function normally in the meantime.

"Microsoft will continue to focus on developing products, solutions and partnership that span a wide spectrum of industries, such as power generation, distribution grids, buildings and transportations systems."

This announcement follows close on the heels of Google's decision to shut down its own energy monitoring service called PowerMeter. Launched just a few months after Hohm's July, 2009 debut, PowerMeter will be shut down on September 16, 2011.

Google+ Demand High, Invites Shut Down Temporarily

Posted: 30 Jun 2011 03:00 PM PDT

gplusGooglers are probably heartily patting each other on the backs up in Mountain View today. After a successful beta launch of Google+, demand for invites to the social networking service has been high. So high in fact, that the invite program had to be cut off late last night.

After a few hours of users sending out unlimited invites, Google needed to give their servers some time to catch up. Google's social chief Vic Gundotra said as much in a Google+post. "We've shut down invite mechanism for the night. Insane demand," he wrote. We don't konw when invites will be back up. There are some loopholes to get invites out, but it's not terribly convenient.

Google+ is packed with features at launch, so some users might be a little confused. Although, many are praising Google's Circles feature that lets you sort contacts and curate the information you let them see. Users of Android phones are also getting some special features like group messaging and auto uploads of images and videos.

Considering the unmitigated disaster that was Google Buzz, this is going well for the Big G. Invites have even been on sale on eBay. Have you used Google+? How is it?

California Passes Online Sales Tax Bill, Amazon Not Pleased

Posted: 30 Jun 2011 02:45 PM PDT

cashRemember yesterday when we told you of the horrible dystopian future California faced as they considered forcing online retailers to collect state sales tax? Well, they're going ahead with it, causing an outcry from Internet retail giants including Amazon and Overstock. The change goes into effect Friday.

In conjunction with the move, the state's tax rate is going down 1-point to 7.75%. The California law takes advantage of the affiliate programs that many sites run where people can get commissions by referring buyers to a site. The law in California now considers those people employees of a sort. In response, Amazon and Overstock have cancelled their affiliate programs in the state. 

By not collecting sales tax up front, online retailers have had quite a price advantage over brick and mortar stores. It looks like that era may be coming to an end, but Amazon isn't going down without a fight. They'll probably pull the affiliate program out of any state they have to. 

Browser Extension of the Week: Evernote Web Clipper

Posted: 30 Jun 2011 02:16 PM PDT

If you follow Maximum PC in print or online, it's no secret that we loves us some Evernote. Why, in the past few days we featured the data collecting wunderkind as our Windows Phone 7 App of the Week. It shouldn't come as any surprise then that given how smitten we are for what Evernote has to offer, we've also decided that Evernote Web Clipper should also be hoisted up on our geeky shoulders and declared our Browser Extension of the Week.

In order to rock Evernote's Web Clipper extension in Chrome or Firefox, you'll need to have either a free or premium Evernote account. It's only fair: It is their extension after all. After installing Web Clipper and signing in, users are given the ability to save content  any website they're visiting with the click of a mouse. How much content you save on a given page is up to you--Just want to clip a single article? Web Clipper can do it up. Need to tuck away the whole page and read it later? Evernote's got you covered there too. If you're feeling indecisive, you can also opt to simply clip the page's URL and stash it away in your Evernote account for future perusal on your PC, Mac or the smartphone platform of your choice.

Thanks to Web Clipper's well thought out interface, once you've decided on what information you want to capture, your new data can easily be categorized, tagged and annotated for later review. Evernote Web Clipper is a must-have extension for current Evernote users or for anyone that wants to collect a staggering amount of web-based information at break-neck speeds.

Be sure to check in with Maximum PC every Thursday for another edition of Browser Extension of the Week.

HP TouchSmart 610 Review

Posted: 30 Jun 2011 01:45 PM PDT

It's clear that HP sees the value in this category. The PC maker's new TouchSmart is sleek, polished, and is the first all-in-one we've ever seen to feature a subwoofer-out jack. HP makes a subtle but valid point here: The truth about these systems is that, regardless of where we set them up—kitchen, living room, garage—we find ourselves frequently using them as music stations, so why not aim for higher audio fidelity? Conveniently, HP has also integrated Monster's (and Dr. Dre's) Beats environment, allowing the TouchSmart 610 to pump out impressive enough sound to make people do a double-take.

HP's Touch Smart is fast, polished, and has a nice screen. It's also the only system of the batch that tilts up and down.

Beats notwithstanding, HP also packs some beef into this system, with a 2.93GHz Core i7-870, a full-size 2GB ATI Radeon HD 5570, 8GB of DDR memory, a 1TB 7,200rpm drive, a Blu-ray player, Wi-Fi, a TV tuner, and two USB 3.0 and two USB 2.0 ports. As far as CPUs go, the Core i7-870 is a little old, but the higher clock enabled it to blaze through our CPU-intensive tasks, beating out MSI's AiW by 20 percent in most tests and almost 50 percent in our Photoshop benchmark. It's not Sandy Bridge, but it's speedy. And, given the use of discrete graphics, Sandy Bridge is not necessary.

Game performance was another story, however, as MSI's 5730 Mobility Radeon part bested the 5570 by a few frames per second in Call of Duty 4. Again, you're not going to wow your friends by turning up the detail on Shogun 2's battle scenes, but you will be able to play through campaign mode without the CPU's turns taking days.

We like the 24-inch screen on the TouchSmart 610. It's not as nice as Sony's, but is still satisfying. We absolutely love the vertical slider on the back of the system, which allowed us to easily recline the screen into multiple positions. It is also wall-mountable. One other nice touch is the new version of its TouchSmart OS layer, which optimizes media chores and other OS functions for touch. As if to underscore the gaming potential of the 610 (and possibly the entire all-in-one category?), HP includes a free touch-enabled copy of the real-time strategy game Ruse.
 
This excellent, professionally crafted system demonstrates that while we're not quite in the position of being able to play power games on all-in-one systems, we're getting close.

$1,790, www.hp.com

Feds Shut Down Popular Online Poker Site

Posted: 30 Jun 2011 10:43 AM PDT

U.S. authorities continue their crusade against the evil and despicable world of...ONLINE POKER! Children are safer today, there are no more marital problems, and world peace is at hand, all because the U.S. Department of Justice pulled the plug on Full Tilt Poker, one of the most popular online poker sites and sponsor to several real life professional poker players, including Phil Ivey, Chris Ferguson, Phil Gordon, and several others.

Actually, this isn't just about U.S. authorities cracking down on online gambling, though that's a big part of it. According to a report in the L.A. Times, the gambling commission on the island of Alderney in the British Channel Islands suspended the licenses of Full Tilt Poker following an investigation prompted by indictments in the U.S. Those indictments charged Full Tilt Poker executives with bank fraud, money laundering, and other crimes.

The U.S. Justice Department maintains that online poker is illegal in North America under several federal and state laws, and has filed a civil suit against Full Tilt Poker and its affiliates seeking at least $3 billion, the Wall Street Journal reports. Full Tilt and other poker sites -- most notably PokerStars -- deny having done anything wrong, saying that U.S. laws covering online gambling are ambiguous. Up until the recent crackdown, Full Tilt and PokerStars controlled the majority of the online poker market worth an estimated $5 billion a year.

Google's Data Liberation Front Delivers Takeout

Posted: 30 Jun 2011 09:42 AM PDT

Google+, or Google Plus, has been a hot talking point ever since it was formally announced earlier this week. All this initial interest in the company's latest social networking effort is not difficult to fathom either. Generally, when something like this is announced a lot of other things tend to take a back seat. That's what happened with Google Takeout, another much awaited service from the Internet giant that was, interestingly enough, announced on the same day as Plus.

Takeout is the first product from Google's Data Liberation Front team, an engineering group tasked with the goal of making "it easier for users to move their data in and out of Google products." That is indeed its raison d'être, even though its name might make it seem like some sort of brutal guerrilla outfit.

"Google Takeout lets you take your data out of multiple Google products in one fell swoop. Moreover, you'll find that all your data is in portable and open formats‚ so it's easy to import to other services quickly," the Data Liberation Outfit said in a blog post.

At launch, Takeout only supports five Google services: Buzz, Contacts and Circles, Picasa, Profile and Stream. But the outfit says support for other products is on the way.

AMD Officially Launches Llano A-Series Desktop APUs

Posted: 30 Jun 2011 09:34 AM PDT

AMD isn't letting a silly little thing like market share ruin its summer. Rather than hide under a rock from failing to make a dent in Intel's stranglehold on the chip market, even after the initial Sandy Bridge snafu, AMD has come out swinging this month with its Llano A-series accelerated processing units (APUs). Earlier this month saw the launch of AMD's mobile Llano chips, and now the Santa Clara chip maker is announcing the availability of two Llano A-series APUs for the desktop.

First up is the A6-3650 APU. This quad-core chip comes clocked at 2.6GHz with 4MB of L2 cache and a 100W TDP. The graphics engine is comprised of a Radeon 6530D with 320 cores, four SIMD units, 16 texture units, and a 443MHz clockspeed. Pricing has been set to $115.

The second and higher performing of the two is the A8-3850, another quad-core part, only this one is clocked at 2.9GHz. It sports the same amount of L2 cache (4MB) and TDP (100W), but boasts a Radeon HD 6550D with 400 cores, five SIMD units, 20 texture units, and a 600MHz clockspeed. This one carries an MSRP of $135.

Both chips are built around AMD's new FM1 socket and support DirectX 11, though neither one supports AMD's Turbo Core. These are the first two of six Llano A-series APUs AMD plans to launch this year, with the rest reportedly having a TDP of 65W, two to four processing cores, and support for Turbo Core 2.0.

Oracle: HP's Itanium Suit is a "Publicity Stunt"

Posted: 30 Jun 2011 09:08 AM PDT

Oracle chose not to mince words when responding to Hewlett Packard's lawsuit over the company's decision to stop developing software for Intel's Itanium platform. As far as Oracle is concerned, HP's suit is nothing more than a "publicity stunt" and is part of a "broader campaign to lay the blame on Oracle for the disruption that will occur when HP's Itanium-based server business inevitably comes to an end," Oracle said in a court filing. Oh snap!

HP's beef with Oracle is that it's decision to stop supporting Itanium violates commitments between the two companies and effectively strong-arms HP customers into using Oracle's hardware.

"The core allegation in this case -- which HP has aggressively sold to the press -- is that HP has a contract with Oracle guaranteeing that Oracle will develop new versions of its flagship database product (and apparently everything else Oracle makes) to run on HP's Itanium systems," Oracle said in its filing. "Such an important contract, if it existed, would obviously be a heavily negotiated, fully documented formal contract, with terms and conditions and payment obligations and all the other characteristics of real-world commercial agreements. But there is no such agreement for porting the Oracle database to Itanium."

Oracle points out that other companies, like Microsoft and Red Hat, have also chosen to discontinue software development for Itanium, and while Oracle will support the platform "for years to come," it's not willing "to pretend that itanium has a future when it does not."

"HP untenably has put itself and thousands of customers out on the end ofa  very long limb because HP, almost alone now, clings to a decades-old microprocessor architecture -- Intel's Itanium chip line -- that has no future," Oracle writes. "Intel has wanted to discontinue Itanium production for years, and HP knows it. The performance advantage over Intel's x86-based microprocessors that once justified Itanium is today effectively gone. But the end of Itanium is a business disaster for HP, which generates a large percentage of its overall profit from Itanium support agreements."

You can read the rest of Oracle's scathing court filing here (PDF).

IBM Announces Phase Change Memory Breakthrough

Posted: 30 Jun 2011 08:40 AM PDT

Engineers at IBM Research in Zurich, Switzerland claim they've come up with a breakthrough in phase change memory (PCM) technology that, for the first time, would allow it to store data for longer periods, potentially paving the way for lower cost solid state chips that are faster and more reliable than today's multi-level cell (MLC) flash memory chips. The trick is in figuring out a solution to a problem called "drift."

PCM is nonvolatile memory technology that stores data in small cells of chalcogenide, a compound used in rewritable optical discs. Chalcogenide changes physical states between crystalline and amorphous when heat is applied, and because it's nonvolatile, it doesn't cough up your data when you flip the power switch like RAM does. The problem with PCM is that the cells randomly drift over time, leading to data corruption.

IBM has figured out a way to sidestep the issue of drift and created PCM chips that can store two bits of data per cell in a 200 k-cell array implemented in a 90nm process technology. By applying an advanced coding technique -- the geeky details of which you can read here -- IBM is able to correct for drift-related errors.

"We apply a voltage pulse based on the deviation from the desired level and then measure the resistance. If the desired level of resistance is not achieved, we apply another voltage pulse and measure again – until we achieve the exact level," said Haris Pozidis, manager of memory and probe technologies at IBM Research Zurich.

In a worst case write latency scenario of about 10 microseconds, IBM says the technology still represents a 100x performance increase over even the most advanced flash memory on the market today.

Image Credit: IBM
Posted by Shri Krishna

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