General Gaming Article

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• Comic-Con 2011 Videos: Check Out Toys, Collectibles, And The Star Trek PC!
• Old School Monday: World Wide War
• Netflix Expected to Acquire Streaming Rights to DreamWorks Animation Catalog
• Google Street View Cars Captured Locations of Phones and PCs
• Comic-Con 2011 Gallery: 57 Photos From Day Three!
• Test Your PC Skills: Geek Quiz 2011
• Prey-Enabled Devices Offer A Glimpse Into The Lives Of Second-Hand Electronics
• Chrome Web App of the Week: Autodesk Homestyler
• Virgin Media Tests "World's Fastest Cable Broadband" In London
• Creative Programmer Whips Up A Web Browser For Graphing Calculators

Comic-Con 2011 Videos: Check Out Toys, Collectibles, And The Star Trek PC! Posted: 25 Jul 2011 04:47 PM PDT Future Studios rolled with us on our annual voyage to San Diegos nerd mecca, and they kept their cameras rolling. Check out the two videos below; one features a montage of toys and collectibles, and the other features our stellar Star Trek PC. Enjoy!

Old School Monday: World Wide War Posted: 25 Jul 2011 04:16 PM PDT In this week's blast from the internet past, we take a look at the 1996 perspective on online gaming. Anyone who's read a few of our Old School Monday features knows that we haven't always been right in our predictions, but this one was right on the mark when it predicted that the internet was the future of multiplayer gaming.  Anyone paying attention in 1996 could have told you that internet gaming was a big deal for shooters and sims like Quake and Mechwarrior, of course, but we went a step further and called out the likes of the then-unreleased Meridian 59 and Ultima Online--titles that would pave the way for the entirety of massively multiplayer gaming. And no, we can't explain why all those people are playing Quake with gamepads. Let's just chalk it up to it being the nineties and move on.

Netflix Expected to Acquire Streaming Rights to DreamWorks Animation Catalog Posted: 25 Jul 2011 02:46 PM PDT We know that a lot of you are mighty sore about the recent hike in Netflix rates, but according to sources, they're putting that money to use. Netflix has reportedly worked out a deal with DreamWorks Animation to get the studio's films on the Internet company's streaming service.  Interestingly, DreamWorks currently has a distribution deal with HBO that is not set to expire until 2014. It is rumored that HBO is willing to end that deal two years early. HBO has apparently already acquired the content deals necessary to replace the two animated features they got per year from DreamWorks. This means that the DreamWorks catalog of movies could show up on Netfix in just a few months. Netflix and DreamWorks are not talking, but that's no great surprise at this point. Netflix is about to announce quarterly profits today. Expect this to be one of many new streaming deals announced as Netflix continues to shift away from discs.

Google Street View Cars Captured Locations of Phones and PCs Posted: 25 Jul 2011 02:30 PM PDT Google certainly does not need anymore bad publicity for its Street View product after lat year's Wi-Fi data scandal. But, here we have the French data protection authority Commission Nationale de l'Informatique et des Libertés (CNIL) claiming that Google's Street View cars slurped up the MAC addresses of mobile devices and laptops. The MAC address is a unique number given to every IEEE certified network interface device. It is essentially a unique identifier that is very hard to change. CNIL says that their investigation shows that Google's Wi-Fi sniffing cars were grabbing these numbers in addition to the MAC addresses from routers, like the were supposed to. By having to GPS coordinates associated with a MAC address, devices can estimate their location based on nearby MAC addresses. The offending data was posted to Google's location web interface. Most experts feel that the inclusion of mobile devices and computers was just an accident. Since these devices move around quite a bit, their MACs are not very useful for location determination. But this new wrinkle has once again led to demands for an opt-out method for Google location tracking.  The MAC IDs should not pose any real privacy problems for individuals. The number is tied to a computer, not the person using it. No one can know where someone has been from this data unless they already have the MAC address.

Comic-Con 2011 Gallery: 57 Photos From Day Three! Posted: 25 Jul 2011 01:25 PM PDT Exhausted but undeterred, we hit the show floor of Comic-Con 2011 hard on our final day, raffling away our coveted Star Trek PC, and, as always, keeping a vigilant eye out for awesome costumes. Click through the images below!

Test Your PC Skills: Geek Quiz 2011 Posted: 25 Jul 2011 12:26 PM PDT Are you a PC know-it-all or a newb? It's time to find out! Within the span of a generation, one new technology radically changed society, propelling many folks into the realm of the well-connected and well-educated. It was expensive, especially at first, but economies of scale soon brought this technological advance into the homes of millions instead of just an elite few. That's right: We're talking about the book. The Internet has largely replaced the book as a tool for democratizing access to information, but one thing remains true: knowledge is power. And you'd better have some significant knowledge at your disposal if you hope to fare well on the 11th annual Geek Quiz. We've collected 55 questions from the easy to the mind-burning to test your knowledge of technology more advanced than deadtreeware. If you've been zoned out, it's OK, but you'd better hit the books. Go ahead. We'll wait. The Geek Quiz will still be here, mercilessly taunting you until you give it a go. The Moment of Truth IF YOU'RE NOT AS SMART AS YOU THOUGHT YOU WERE, THERE'S ALWAYS NEXT YEAR 0-14 CORRECT: Either you need to invest in Computing for Dummies, or you're a dog who has found your master's copy of Maximum PC on the floor. In which case, we greet you. Woof. Woof. 15-30 CORRECT: Your knowledge of PC tech and history might not be the stuff of legend, but you still know more than 90 percent of your peers. The dumb 90 percent. 31-45 CORRECT: Truly you are wise in the ways of the Force. We can't help but feel that if you went outside a little less often, you'd have done better on this quiz. 46-55 CORRECT: You've absorbed everything we've been teaching you and more. Heck, you could probably write next year's Geek Quiz by yourself. Which is good, because we need a vacation.

Prey-Enabled Devices Offer A Glimpse Into The Lives Of Second-Hand Electronics Posted: 25 Jul 2011 11:23 AM PDT When a sticky-fingered thief pilfers your laptop, you rarely get a chance to track him down – unless you use Prey, that is. We've already covered how to use the GPS-enabled, screenshot-sending program to recover your notebook in just that circumstance, but creative researchers at MIT have started using Prey for a more humane effort. They've begun installing the software on second-hand electronics sent to developing countries in Indonesia, South Asia and Africa to help charities put a face to people who are helped by the donations. The guys and gals at MIT's Senseable City Lab came up with the project, which is dubbed Backtalk, CNET reports. They installed Prey on second-hand netbooks and smartphones, then disseminated them with the help of nonprofit organizations. Every 20 minutes, Prey records the GPS location of the device and snaps a shot with the device's camera, letting the MIT gang know exactly where the donation ended up – and see the face of the person benefiting from it. Take a chill pill, privacy advocates; we already hear you grumbling. The Backtalk program only tracks devices after the new owners agree to it, and stickers explaining the program are affixed to the case of all affected electronics. The stickers are written in the tongue of the person receiving the device. They're showcased on the screenshot above. The Museum of Modern Art in New York plans on showcasing screenshots from the program in an exhibit that opened yesterday.

Chrome Web App of the Week: Autodesk Homestyler Posted: 25 Jul 2011 11:02 AM PDT Updating the look of a single room or your entire home can be an exciting and stressful affair. Exciting because taking the time and spending the coin to pick out new furniture, paint or otherwise tinker with your home can breathe new life into a stale living space. Stressful because, let's face it, sometimes the vision of how a room should look that we see in our head just doesn't work out the way we planned when we get down to putting it all together in the real world. Fortunately, Autodesk Homestyler is here to help you iron the kinks out of your home styling faux pas. Autodesk Homestyler allows users to create, decorate and redefine their apartment, house, or any other space with drag and drop simplicity. Room sizes, wall lengths and angles can all be tweaked with nothing more than a few clicks of a mouse.  Once the size and shape of your space is up to snuff, Homestyler makes it easy to try out decorating options, furniture arrangements, and various floor and wall palettes. Once you have your space's colors and layout down pat, the web app allows you to kick your design into 3D to give you a bit of perspective of how your creation will look should you ever decide to bring it into meatspace. If you happen to create a design that you'd like to follow through on, it can be saved for later (saving requires you sign up for a free user account), printed, exported as an image file or sent to a number of social networks. Be sure to check back every Monday for another edition of Maximum PC's Chrome Web App of the Week.

Virgin Media Tests "World's Fastest Cable Broadband" In London Posted: 25 Jul 2011 10:50 AM PDT Remember everybody's favorite pair of deliberately acting turtles, the Slowskis? Comcast used the commercials to poke fun at the slower speeds of Verizon's DSL service back when the cable company was trying to break into the broadband provider scene. Well, the tables have turned; even Comcast's 20Mbps speeds end up looking more tortoise than hare when compared to Virgin Media's blazing new 1.5Gbps down/150Mbps up connection. The company already offers 100Mbps speeds to half the UK population, Daily Tech reports; the Gb-shattering thresh hold is currently in trial stages only. The service is being offered to a small area of London known as "Silicon Roundabout," centered around Old Street. Virgin Media achieved the speeds using DOCSIS 3.0 technology, which the company calls a "future-proofed platform with theoretically near infinite capacity." Virgin Media touts the 1.5Gbps service as the fastest cable-based Internet in the world. So how'd they do it? "These superfast speeds are possible because of the £13 billion of private investment made by Virgin Media which means that every cable home is connected to a state-of-the-art fibre optic network by a high-grade coaxial line," the company's press release boasts. In June, Comcast proved that they could achieve speeds of 1Gbps at the annual Cable Show in Chicago. Prepare to hit your bandwidth cap in a couple of hours!

Creative Programmer Whips Up A Web Browser For Graphing Calculators Posted: 25 Jul 2011 10:22 AM PDT Those graphing calculators that you're issued in high school geometry class are capable of crunching some serious numbers, but if you're anything like us, you spent more time playing hacked versions of Zelda and Tetris on the things than solving quadratic equations. If you're more of a Web-head than a gaming guru, a new hack plops a browser on your Texas Instruments graphing calculator and lets you surf the Web when you should be working – assuming you don't mind the lack of newfangled features like images, that is. The creator of the Gossamer Web browser is an PhD student named Christopher Mitchell, whom TechCrunch calls "the world's most prolific graphing calculator programmer." Compatible with the TI-83+ through TI-84+SE calculators, Mitchell says in a YouTube demonstration that Gossamer accesses websites via the "Mobile CALCnet Networking Protocol." "I first created a Python web clipping application employing Lynx that runs on the globalCALCnet metahub, then a calculator-side client named Gossamer. Gossamer can already request, receive, display, and scroll pages, maintain a page viewing history, and allow the user to click on links to visit pages," Mitchell explains on a forum post introducing the project. The browser also includes an input box for entering URLs, although that feature wasn't available at launch. It ain't pretty, but it gets the job done. If the idea of graphing calc hacks intrigues you, be sure to check out the rest of Mitchell's website – there's plenty of calculator-modifying goodness to be found.

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