General Gaming Article |
- Notch Announces MineCon, Coming to Las Vegas in November
- Borderlands 2 Officially Announced, Set for Release Next Year
- Skype Moving to VP8 Codec for Video Calls
- Future Tense: The Big Bang Theory
- Puget Systems Serenity Mini Review
- Corsair Rolls Out The Quiet 8GB SE Arctic White Vengeance Low Profile Memory
- HP Launches Pair of Space Saving Compaq Monitors
- IQ Hoax Proves The Rest Of Us Are Just As Dumb As IE Users
- Google+ Tops 25 Million Visitors In Its First Month
- Yahoo Mail Goes Down (for Some), Gmail Users Offer Apathetic Condolences
| Notch Announces MineCon, Coming to Las Vegas in November Posted: 03 Aug 2011 04:46 PM PDT
"For me, MineCon is about celebrating the full release of Minecraft," Notch told PC Gamer. "I'm really looking forward to getting up on stage and pushing the button to upload the final build." "We'll just go back home and keep working on Minecraft directly after MineCon, but it does represent a huge milestone where the game finally leaves beta, something we'd never been able to do without our fans, so it feels natural to celebrate it with them." Notch has picked Mandalay Bay as his venue, and the convention will run from November 18-19. Tickets and details are set to go live next week. Now then, if you'll excuse us, we have to get back to work on our block costume. It's simple, topical, and only 40 percent duct tape. There's a chance we might be mistaken for Solid Snake, but that's a risk we're more-than-willing to take. |
| Borderlands 2 Officially Announced, Set for Release Next Year Posted: 03 Aug 2011 04:08 PM PDT
"Combining invention and evolution, Borderlands 2 features all new characters, skills, environments, enemies, weapons and equipment, which come together in an ambitiously crafted story," said Gearbox's announcement. "Players will reveal secrets, and escalate mysteries of the Borderlands universe as they adventure across the unexplored new areas of Pandora." So basically, it's a videogame sequel. But that's definitely not a bad thing in this case. Borderlands was a noggin-blasting, OCD-sating good time in its own right, but the game's wasteland sort of lived up to its name – and not in a good way. Point is, there was plenty of untapped potential, and Borderlands 2 is shooting to realize it. The game's getting a full reveal at Gamescom next week, and it's set for launch sometime in 2012. To tide you over, though, here's this video of Claptrap dancing. Just remember, folks, he's dancing. He's dancing. |
| Skype Moving to VP8 Codec for Video Calls Posted: 03 Aug 2011 03:06 PM PDT
Google announced WebM back in May of 2010. VP8 is the video portion of that package. It is not widely used as H.264 continues to flood the market. Google hopes that the open WebM can overtake the patent-encumbered H.264 in time. MPEG-LA, the patent pool that licenses H.264, is keen to point out that they are forming a patent pool for WebM, which they claim does infringe patents. This contradictory information has led some companies to hold back on VP8 use. Google claims there is no reason to worry about patent issues with VP8. We have to say Skype lends some credence to that. Microsoft is in the process of acquiring the company, and that gives WebM a little more credibility. |
| Future Tense: The Big Bang Theory Posted: 03 Aug 2011 01:34 PM PDT
I stopped watching sitcoms when Mary Tyler Moore and M*A*S*H went off the air. When half-hour shows turned into rude people taking cheap shots at each other, they stopped being funny. And I stopped watching. Several years ago, I was in Florida for a convention and a shuttle launch. I spent a few days with one of my nephews. One night, all discussion stopped immediately after dinner so we could watch a new sitcom he had become enamored with. Suffering from an untimely attack of good manners, I kept my mouth shut and prepared to suffer through 22 minutes of inanity. Instead, I laughed out loud. The show was The Big Bang Theory, and I immediately recognized it was about me, all of my friends, and most of the readership of MaximumPC. Returning to the left coast, I set the DVR to record every episode. A few months later, I was at Comic-Con, exhausted and hiding behind a large stack of tribbles (www.tribbletoys.com) resting my feet, when I heard a voice asking, "Is David Gerrold here?" Being too tired to deal with fannish questions about anything at that moment, I sunk lower behind the tribbles. Until the voice said, "My name is Bill Prady and I'm a producer on The Big Bang Theory—" —at which point, I came shooting up out of my chair like a whale breaching from fifty fathoms. "Big Bang Theory? That's the best-written show on television!" I must have startled him and several others in the immediate vicinity. But it was the beginning of a genuine friendship—or at least, a very healthy mutual admiration society. See, way back in the B.C. era (Before Computers), I wrote a book about writing for Star Trek. It was a love-letter to a great television show. I was privileged to share a small part of that particular adventure and I wanted to share it. In those days, there were no VCRs or DVDs and I expected the show to be quickly forgotten. Who knew? Right. But I didn't expect the book to sell as well as it did—and I didn't expect that it would end up as a textbook in college classes. I was still a beginner myself. I was just sharing what I was learning.
Uh....no, the other Big Bang Theory. Bill Prady had bought my book as a teenager and (according to him), it opened his eyes to the whole process of how television works, how a story becomes a script becomes an episode. He told me that it was one of the things that inspired him to go into television himself. (And I'm glad he did.) I appreciate good writing. I respect it. I admire it. I am in awe of it, because I know how difficult it can be. Good writing is about surprising the reader with every chapter, every page, every paragraph, even every sentence. Good storytelling is about creating a reality more fun and more compelling than the chair the reader or viewer is sitting in. Good writing is taking the audience on a marvelous journey of adventure, discovery, and emotional involvement. (All of which is why I don't watch a lot of television and I'm skeptical about most movies and favor good novelists like Spider Robinson and Terry Pratchett.) Good writing is why The Big Bang Theory stands out as such a remarkable show. The writing staff of The Big Bang Theory consistently demonstrates a mastery of character and comedy that others would do well to study. Bill Prady invited me to a taping of the show. I had so much fun, I kept coming back—and I started bringing friends. You can hear me on the laugh track. The scene where Penny gives Sheldon an napkin with Leonard Nimoy's autograph—that's me howling so loudly in the background. The show does not use a laugh track. Watching a movie being made is boring. It looks like everybody is mostly standing around and waiting most of the time—because they are. Cameras have to be put in position, props have to be readied, practical effects have to be prepared, costumes and hair and makeup have to be adjusted and tweaked, lights have to be rigged, camera moves have to be rehearsed, and once in a while you even get some actors in place to give a meaningful look, open a cabinet, react to something, and maybe even speak a line of dialog. But a sitcom is produced like a play. Each scene is done straight through from beginning to end with multiple cameras following the action, each from a different angle. Under the guidance of a skilled director (Hi, Mark Cendrowski!) the process looks effortless. He'll shoot a scene twice—once to get it in the camera, once for insurance—and occasionally go back for a pickup from a different angle or because the producers have decided to change a line. More than once, those last-minute tweaks have resulted in hysterical improvements.
In front of the camera, the show has a remarkably talented and very likable cast. My personal favorite is Kaley Cuoco (Penny) because she's so much fun to watch. She can say more with a single facial expression than some performers can say in a whole monolog. Johnny Galecki continues to make the character of Leonard Hofstader the most likable sad-sack on television. Simon Helberg (Howard Wolowitz) demonstrates how to live in a delusional mind-set of chauvinism and questionable fashion-sense without ever being cringe-worthy. Kunal Nayyar (Raj Koothrappali) brings a delicious creepiness to his own sidereal nerdiness. And of course, Emmy-winning Jim Parsons has made Dr. Sheldon Cooper a cultural archetype—kind of like Mr. Spock, but without the pointed ears and the seven-year sex drive. Other great cast members include Carl Ann Susi as the unseen Mrs. Wolowtiz, Melissa Rauch as Bernadette, Howard's girl friend, and Mayim Bialik as Amy Farrah Fowler, Sheldon's friend who is also a girl, but not a girl friend, although…. While most audience members come to watch the show, I also love watching the crew behind the cameras. This production company has the best morale I've seen on any TV series since the original Star Trek. It's not just that everybody here is good at their jobs—it's also that they're having a lot of fun doing their jobs. Mary Quigley does a great job with costumes—each character has his or her own distinctive look. Just looking at what's on the hanger, you know who it's for. Scott L. London manages the props and it's fun to watch the prop team reset the scene before every take. Peter Chakos edits the series and occasionally directs an episode. Asst. Director Anthony Rich seems to be everywhere at once, coordinating all the myriad details of keeping the production on schedule. I like watching Jeannete and Megan handle the clapboard tasks, and Jamie, one of the cameramen, works weekends at the local Apple store genius bar. (Which is why the show occasionally does gags about the genius bar.) There are too many other good people to mention all of them here, look them up on IMDB. Overall, this is a great team, and I think much of the credit has to go to Chuck Lorre, who is long overdue for an Emmy award of his own. A couple years ago, Chuck Lorre was the keynote speaker at the Science Fiction Writers of America Nebula Awards banquet and he gave one of the funniest speeches I've ever heard at any banquet. He said he was honored to be in the same room with so many writers he admired.
But there's another reason for acknowledging The Big Bang Theory. This is a show about geekery and nerdiness carried to the extreme. It is an avalanche of in-jokes—references to comic books, board games, science fiction movies, TV series, computer technology, high-level science and math, and everything else in nerdspace. This is because the writers and producers are geeks and nerds themselves—they are writing from their own experience. That the show has become the number one sitcom in America, even surpassing Chuck Lorre's other big hit (Two And A Half Men) is evidence that geekiness has finally become mainstream. More than that, it has become fashionable. The Big Bang Theory represents a tectonic shift in the cultural landscape. It is a show about intelligent people with intelligent and esoteric interests. At first glance, it seems as if it's ridiculing braininess—but the characters are so well-drawn and so likable and the actors who play those characters are so likable and fun that they have changed the national perception of geeks and nerds. We are real human beings now, with real goals and real feelings. More than that, tech-freaks and sci-fi geeks are becoming the new hip. What do you think? ————— David Gerrold is a Hugo and Nebula award-winning author. He has written more than 50 books, including "The Man Who Folded Himself" and "When HARLIE Was One," as well as hundreds of short stories and articles. His autobiographical story "The Martian Child" was the basis of the 2007 movie starring John Cusack and Amanda Peet. He has also written for television, including episodes of Star Trek, Babylon 5, Twilight Zone, and Land Of The Lost. He is best known for creating tribbles, sleestaks, and Chtorrans. In his spare time, he redesigns his website, www.gerrold.com |
| Puget Systems Serenity Mini Review Posted: 03 Aug 2011 01:28 PM PDT Is it on?As any system builder knows, there's a constant yin-and-yang balancing act between performance and noise. When you crank up performance, you crank up the noise. And as you bring down the acoustics, so goes the performance. That's the delicate line Puget Systems attempts to walk with its Serenity Mini desktop system. For this task, Puget configured the Serenity with a 3.3GHz Intel Core i5-2500K, an Asus P8H67-M EVO motherboard, 8GB of low-profile Kingston DDR3/1333, a Gelid Tranquillo cooler, two Intel 320 Series 80GB SATA 6Gb/s drives, a 2TB WD Caviar Green drive, and a Power Color Radeon HD 5750 videocard. All this is packed into an Antec Mini P180 case. The Antec P series is already tuned for acoustics, but Puget added some additional touches, such as AcoustiPack sheets in various spots, to make the case even quieter.
The Serenity Mini is the quietest performance machine we've ever tested. In performance, the Serenity Mini's numbers are fair. They're not benchmark chart-ripping scores, but they're not bad either. Much of that is thanks to the Core i5-2500K chip. Its stock speed is 3.3GHz but Puget overclocks it to 4.5GHz. This helps the 2500K overcome the overclocked Core i7-920 in our zero-point system in most of our application benchmarks. The Serenity Mini also does reasonably well against the similarly priced CyberPower LAN Party EVO (reviewed in July), which features a stock-clocked 3.4GHz Core i7-2600K. The CyberPower outpaces the overclocked Puget Systems in our Lightroom 2.6 test, but even with its Hyper-Threading, loses to the Serenity Mini in the rest of our benchmarks. When we get to gaming, though, the CyberPower's GeForce GTX 580 shows who is in charge. It's simply a beatdown, putting a passively cooled card up against the fastest single-GPU card available. But let's be honest, the Serenity Mini is not designed primarily as a gaming rig. Yes, a Radeon HD 5750 is certainly capable of some gaming duties at lower resolutions, say, 1680x1050, and even some games at 1920x1080, but it's not a card you'd pick if you're expecting to play Battlefield 3 on a 30-inch panel at 2560x1600. Instead, you want this GPU and this machine for its acoustics. Is the Serenity Mini really that quiet? Yes. The rig is dead silent, which is more of a mind-bender than anything. You expect a system running at 4.5GHz to make some noise, but this is a black hole of silence. We originally thought the CyberPower LAN Party EVO was quiet, but not in comparison to this. You move your head closer and closer to the machine in an effort to hear it until your head is against the case. Even then, you can still barely hear anything. That's quite an achievement. Puget really hit the mark in noise management, but there's still that vexing question: Would a gamer give up the performance? We're not totally sold on that point. If gaming was a factor in the machine's life, we'd pass on the Serenity Mini in favor of something with more graphical heft, such as the aforementioned LAN Party EVO, which, while not as silent, is fast and also quite small. But if you're looking for a deadly quiet machine for your cave, and the primary purpose is either content creation or application use, we don't think you can get a more peaceful machine than the Serenity Mini. $2,565, www.pugetsystems.com |
| Corsair Rolls Out The Quiet 8GB SE Arctic White Vengeance Low Profile Memory Posted: 03 Aug 2011 10:48 AM PDT Corsair's Vengeance LP line of DDR3 memory was made for big builds (with big cooling systems) stuffed into little cases; these low-profile kits clock in at an itty-bitty 1.03 inches, nearly half the height of most of the other memory out there. The newly available Corsair Special Edition Arctic White Vengeance Low Profile memory targets a couple other niches, too. It's still short, but the Low Profile White also runs at a scant 1.35V that Corsair claims makes it perfect for whisper-quiet PCs or builds suffering from low voltage constraints.
Want specs? We got specs. The 8GB kit consists of two "rigorously-screened 4GB DDR3 DRAM modules, guaranteed to operate at 1600MHz with a tested latency of 9-9-9-24," according to the company's press release. You can buy it now on Corsair's website. To coincide with the launch of the memory kit, the company posted an article on its blog in which they whipped together a whisper-quiet custom PC using – you guessed it – the Corsair Special Edition Arctic White Vengeance Low Profile memory, along with a host of other parts (for, you know, everything else). Check it out for an interesting read. |
| HP Launches Pair of Space Saving Compaq Monitors Posted: 03 Aug 2011 10:22 AM PDT
Starting with the smaller of the two, the LE2002x features a 3,000,000:1 dynamic contrast ratio, 170/160-degree viewing angles, 5ms response time, DVI-D and VGA inputs, tilt adjustability, cable management clip, 250 nits brightness level, and a 1600x900 native resolution. The LA2206xc boasts similar specs, but with a Full HD (1920x1080) resolution, 1,000,000:1 contrast ratio, and the aforementioned videoconferencing features. It also comes with two USB ports, USB cable, dual-microphones, and audio jacks. HP tells us the LE2002x and LA2206xc are both available now for $140 and $225, respectively. Image Credit: HP |
| IQ Hoax Proves The Rest Of Us Are Just As Dumb As IE Users Posted: 03 Aug 2011 10:15 AM PDT
BBC News dug a little deeper into the story after it received widespread media attention (including, um, from us), and it turns out that AptiQuant smells a bit fishy. The company's website has been around for less than a month, and the images of employees on the site were pulled from the website for Central Test, a French research company. The names of the employees have been changed, and Central Test doesn't know anything about AptiQuant. No one answered at AptiQuant's contact number when the BBC rang them up. To be honest, we should have seen it coming when the supposed CEO of AptiQuant said "I just want to make it clear that the report released by my company did not suggest that if you use IE that means you have a low IQ, but what it really says is that if you have a low IQ then there are high chances that you use Internet Explorer." Image credit: zgeek.com |
| Google+ Tops 25 Million Visitors In Its First Month Posted: 03 Aug 2011 10:09 AM PDT
The number comes courtesy of comScore, an authority in all things Internet traffic-related. By comparison, Facebook took three years and Twitter took 30 months to reach the big 25 mil (That's visitors, not users, just to be clear). Reuters reports the number's growing by an additional million each and every day, too. The US tops the list with 6 million people having checked out G+, while India is second with 3.6m visitors. The rapid growth may not be a good thing, comScore VP Andrew Lipsman told the LA Times during a conference call. Remember that haters hating thing? Lipsman says that Facebook saw the most stable growth of any of the social media services thanks to its slow start and deliberate pace of expansion – a theory that Google obviously doesn't agree with. By the way, if you're a new adopter, be sure to check out our handy-dandy guides on how to drag your Facebook data over and disable G+'s annoying email notifications. |
| Yahoo Mail Goes Down (for Some), Gmail Users Offer Apathetic Condolences Posted: 03 Aug 2011 09:39 AM PDT
"Some Yahoo services are currently inaccessible to some users in certain locations," Yahoo said in a statement provided to Mashable. "We are working to correct the issue and restore all functionality immediately. We know that this may have caused some inconvenience and we apologize to our users who might be affected." How long the outage has been going on isn't known, though a CNet reader claims Yahoo's been having "severe outage issues for the last 24-hours plus." Based on the Twitter complaints, the email woes don't appear to be region specific. Image Credit: youjustmademylist.com |
BlizzCon, QuakeCon, Genghis Khan – what's next? As with all things, Notch has the answer. Coming soon to a Las Vegas near (or incredibly far away from) you: MineCon. It's a convention! About Minecraft! If you thought your meticulous cosplay of Minecraft's main character was a unique work of human ingenuity, prepare to be severly disappointed.
After dropping enough hints to fill up the original Borderlands' entire gun roster, Gearbox has finally stopped being coy. Borderlands is officially getting a sequel. Will there be more guns? Click past the break for the shocking (read: not shocking) answer!
Skype has announced today that it is preparing to adopt Google's open source 
Hewlett Packard's targeting display hunters short on real estate with a couple of new HP Compaq branded monitors, the LA2206xc and LE2002x. The 21.5-inch LA2206xc is a thin form factor monitor with LED backlight and built-in 720p HD webcam that, along with HP's MyRoom software, is supposed to make videoconferencing a snap. Also an LED monitor, HP says the 20-inch LE2002x sports a small footprint with a slim profile.
While we may question the sanity of anybody still clunking around the Web with the decade-old Internet Explorer 6 – even Microsoft wants that dinosaur to die – we wouldn't go as far as to say that the people who use IE are stupid. That didn't stop AptiQuant Psychometric Consulting from doing it, though. Last week, the group released a report that claimed that IE users had the lowest collective IQ of users of any browser. Stop chuckling, "Like"-clicking Chrome and Firefox fans – it turns out we're the idiots. The whole thing was probably a hoax.
Haters been hating on Google+. Sure, maybe it's just the Goog's attempt to draw advertisee eyeballs from Facebook, and okay, the invite system kinda sucks, and yeah, sometimes it feels like you're talking to yourself in a big, empty room. Those are all perfectly valid complaints. But G+ brings a lot of new things to the table, and despite the naysayers, an unprecedented number of people have been lining up to give the service a whirl. We're only one month in to the Google+ experience and 25 million visitors have already tested the waters.
A glitch in the Matrix (or some other calamity) has some Yahoo email users shaking an angry fist at the god of electronic messages today. Others have found it more therapeutic to voice their frustrations on Twitter in succinct 140-character or less outrages. Those having trouble accessing their Yahoo email account see an error message stating "This webpage is not available," while others have noted "Error 501 (net::ERR_INSECURE_RESPONSE): Unknown Error," along with other messages. Unfortunately, Yahoo isn't much more enlightening on what's going on.| 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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