General Gaming Article |
- Old School Monday: Make Multimedia Manifestos!
- Spotify Has 1.4 Million US Users, 175,000 Paid Subscribers
- Do You Use Your Real Name Online?
- Linksys E4200 Review
- Netgear WNDR4000 Review
- Chrome Web App of the Week: Radio
- Seagate Offering Free Data Recovery Service With New GoFlex Turbo External HDD
- The Khronos Group Unveils New OpenGL 4.2 Standard
- New M-Disc Technology Promises Permanent Data Retention
- EVGA Unveils Z68 Motherboard Series
| Old School Monday: Make Multimedia Manifestos! Posted: 08 Aug 2011 04:04 PM PDT In this age of feature films shot on camcorders and chart-busting albums recorded in home studios, it's easy to forget there was a time when you couldn't use a basic personal computer to mount even amateur-quality audio or video productions without investing in pricey upgrades. What's even funnier is that what passes for a professionally produced video these days doesn't involve half the preparation and planning we urged readers to perform in this story. Our lighting recommendations—key light, back light, fill light—are still valid for a polished shoot, but when's the last time you criticized a great YouTube video for having poor production values? Cheese is the watchword these days; the thicker, the better. Recognize the cover boy for today's Old School Monday? That's right, it's Valve's VP of Marketing, the lovely and talented Doug Lombardi! Travel back 15 years in Mr. Peabody's WABAC machine and you'll find Mr. Lombardi toiling as a news editor at boot magazine, the ancestor to the Maximum PC you know and love today. Doug's shorn his curly locks since becoming a titan of the gaming industry—he wore it shoulder length when we first hired him.
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| Spotify Has 1.4 Million US Users, 175,000 Paid Subscribers Posted: 08 Aug 2011 02:30 PM PDT
The music labels that Spotify partners with are quite interested in the conversions rate, that is, the proportion of free users that upgrade to the paid plans. Based on these leaked numbers, the current conversion rate is at 12.5%. Not bad, but lower than the service's 15% conversion rate in Europe. A possible reason for the lag is that the current US free offering is a little less restricting, for the time being at least. Another notable number is that Spotify's entire European user base is just 1.6 million. We imagine that when Spotify opens for all comers in the US, their numbers could balloon. This streaming music thing might work out yet. |
| Do You Use Your Real Name Online? Posted: 08 Aug 2011 01:34 PM PDT Anonymity on the web has been called both a blessing and a curse. Online alter-egos allow people an unprecedented freedom to communicate their deepest hopes or explore alternate activities or pastimes without risk to their real lives or reputations. It can also empower our worst human proclivities, setting loose trolls, scams and, in some cases, serious criminal activity. Either way, it has been a fundamental facet of online life since the Internet's inception. And that rankles some of the technorati, people like Randi Zuckerberg. Mark's sister and marketing director of Facebook, she took aim at the topic in a social media panel discussion hosted by Marie Claire: "I think anonymity on the Internet has to go away. People behave a lot better when they have their real names down. … I think people hide behind anonymity and they feel like they can say whatever they want behind closed doors." It's true that accountability is lacking in a virtual universe where anyone can hide behind a fake name. We live in an age marked by story after story about social lodging sites being used by unchecked criminals to rob homes, children being targeted by online assailants, and hacker groups covertly breaching multinationals' security (and laying users' data bare to the world). The incidences certainly seem to be mounting. And the arbiters of today's internet culture have had enough. It's becoming increasingly clear that a war is being waged to unmask the web. You know something's going on when boutique industries start cropping up, pinpointing potential cashola. Sites like Tru.ly and Trufina are offering online identity checks for transactions and Social Intelligence has grabbed a lot of headlines for its social media background checks. (Before you think anyone with the slightest bit of tech-savvy could easily skirt this, you may be interested in seeing what happened when a Gizmodo editor went through the check recently. Long story short: He failed.)
Speaking of social networks, Facebook is infamously militant about people using real names, and now so is Google+. (In the case of the latter, however, it might be a "damned if you do, damned if you don't" scenario: Just ask Facebook's Product Director Blake Ross. He'd signed up using his real name, but still just got booted out for his trouble.) The adult industry's another example. They are extremely concerned about this issue, since it would obviously cripple them if users' real identities were attached to their activities. Now, what adults do in the (pseudo-) privacy of their homes may be up to them, but, say lawmakers, think of the children! And so they passed a bill called Protecting Children From Internet Pornographers Act of 2011. This piece of legislation is controversial, not because it protects kids — who in their right mind would argue against that? — but because, if it passes into law, it would require Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to track identity, billing and network data on customers for at least 18 months. And that would cover all people, not just the low-lifes who dig child porn. This is why the ACLU and others are fighting this bill. It's not a matter of anonymity, but of privacy. This isn't a simple black-and-white, right-or-wrong scenario. There are as many arguments to keep anonymity as there are to banish it — and some of them have pretty chilling factors. I'm talking about political dissidents, battered women in hiding, and existing (or even potential) stalking victims, as well as others whose survival depends on remaining under the radar. This has even inspired a grassroots movement to preserve people's right to use pseudonyms online.
I'd love to say that this is a far-fetched scenario, but it's actually not. In fact, it's pretty easy and already possible now. So what could stripping away anonymity even more do? Maybe the better question is, even if everyone's on board with total transparency, would it really be all it's cracked up to be in the end? After all, using her real name didn't stop London Eley from trying to hire a hitman on Facebook. Or Jason Valdez. Aided by loved ones informing him of police movements, he described his police standoff from a motel room on the site. And looking at less-dramatic cases like Blake Ross's, you've got to wonder if it will just wind up causing more trouble than it solves. Where do you stand on this? Do you use aliases or fake names with your online accounts? Or are you unconcerned about it and use your real name? And would you be okay with it if a blanket mandate became the norm, with all account services enforcing real-name authentication or other transparency policies? Tell us whether or not you agree with Ms. Zuckerberg that "anonymity on the Internet has to go away."
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| Posted: 08 Aug 2011 12:21 PM PDT We weren't impressed with the last Linksys-branded router that passed through Maximum Lab North. The dual-band Linksys E3000 (in reality, a rebadged Linksys WRT610N) delivered humdrum performance and lacked a number of important features we expect to find in a high-end router. The E4200 fares better, but we're still scratching our heads over some of Linksys's decisions. The first thing you'll notice about the E4200 is its minimalist industrial design. Plug in its inline power supply (no wall wart!) and you'll find that it's almost devoid of front-panel idiot lights: There are no LEDs to indicate an Internet connection, which of its radios are operating, or even which of its ports are in use. The only thing that glows on the front panel is Cisco's logo. There are port-activity LEDs on the back of the router, but even these can be turned off via the router's web interface.
Cisco's Linksys E4200 looks pretty, but we value function over form. We like that. In fact, we liked the entire low-profile design—at least until we tried to plug in our Ethernet cables. That's when we discovered that the top of the router's housing blocked the vinyl hoods covering our cables' RJ45 connectors. We had no problem fitting cables outfitted with bare connectors, but that's pretty lame. Also lame: providing a USB port that doesn't deliver enough power to spin up a 2.5-inch USB hard drive (we tested it with a 500GB Verbatim Clon drive). Oh well, at least the router supports NTSF drives (the E3000 didn't). Linksys claims the E4200 is capable of a "maximum speed up to 300 + 450 Mb/s." Translation: The E4200 supports two spatial streams (with 150Mb/s of bandwidth each) on its 2.4GHz radio, and three spatial streams (also with 150Mb/s of bandwidth each) on its 5GHz radio. But as we found with the E3000, the E4200 comes from the factory with both radios broadcasting the very same SSID. And while Cisco has made a number of important improvements to its Cisco Connect software (which can turn any USB thumb drive into a wireless client configuration tool), the utility still doesn't inform you which radio it's connecting the client to. Unlike the E3000, however, you can easily access the E4200's web interface and change the SSIDs, as well as other critical aspects of the router's configuration. In addition to assigning discrete SSIDs to each radio, we also enabled channel bonding on the 2.4GHz radio (an admittedly neighbor-unfriendly move, but we wanted to see what it was capable of; besides, we don't have any neighbors). Channel bonding on the 5GHz radio was enabled at the factory. We used Trendnet's new TEW-684UB wireless client adapter to benchmark both the Linksys and Netgear routers. This is the first USB adapter to feature three transmit and three receive antennas. Without that third antenna, the client can receive only two spatial streams. As you can see from our benchmark charts, the E4200 trounced Netgear's WNDR4000 on both the 2.4- and 5GHz bands at almost every test location. Indeed, the router delivered the fastest performance at 5GHz of any router we've tested. So why aren't we awarding the E4200 a higher score? Three reasons: We shouldn't have to jump through hoops to enable the router to perform at its best, the router should provide enough power to its USB port to support any 2.5-inch hard drive, and we shouldn't be limited to using hoodless Ethernet cables. $160 (street), www.cisco.com Editor's Note, August 8, 2011: Cisco released a firmware update that added IPv6 and support for USB printers after we finished testing this router. The spec chart has been updated to reflect this information, but it doesn't impact our numerical verdict. |
| Posted: 08 Aug 2011 12:20 PM PDT Netgear has developed a bad habit of branding its new routers with two different model numbers. Take the WNDR4000—or is it the N750? Both names are printed on the box, and the router itself is labeled "N750 Wireless Dual Band Gigabit Router WNDR4000." Did someone sleep through Marketing 101, or is this a shameless ploy to mislead uneducated buyers as to the router's capabilities? We ask because Netgear's website proclaims "Up to 750 Mbps—maximum combined speed." The dual-band chipset inside the WNDR4000/N750, you see, delivers theoretical maximum throughput of 300Mb/s on the 2.4GHz band and 450Mb/s on the 5GHz band. Add 300 to 450 and you get—that's right—750! There's no way to bond the two bit-streams to deliver 750Mb/s of throughput, of course, but don't let that get in the way of a juicy brand name.
Netgear's WNDR4000 looks very much like the older WNDR3700; too bad it doesn't perform like it. Bad branding decisions aren't the WNDR4000's only problem. This router beat our previous champion—Netgear's WNDR3700—on the 5GHz band at two locations, but it significantly underperformed on the 2.4GHz band. What's more, the Linksys E4200 absolutely crushed both of Netgear's routers in most of our test locations in both throughput and range and on both frequencies. Physically, the WNDR4000 looks almost identical to the aging WNDR3700. The front has the usual status LEDs, and you'll find a ubiquitous four-port gigabit switch, a USB 2.0 port, and a power switch in back. Unlike the Linksys, the Netgear had no problem powering our hard drive so that we could share its contents on the network. But like the Linksys, you can't use this port to share a printer on the network. Netgear hasn't made any significant changes to its browser-based user interface either. The router arrived with channel bonding on its 2.4GHz radio disabled. We turned it on for our benchmarks, but Trendnet's TEW-684UB wireless client adapter indicated a link speed of just 145Mb/s. When we contacted Netgear about this, the company suggested that interference from a nearby wireless network might be forcing the router to turn off channel bonding on its own (this is a requirement for gaining Wi-Fi Alliance certification); but as we mentioned earlier, our test environment is devoid of other wireless networks. Besides that, neither the WNDR3700 nor the Linksys router had a problem. Maybe a firmware update will fix what ails the WNDR4000 (we used version 1.0.0.64). Until that happens, there's very little to recommend this router over the older WNDR3700. $150 (street), www.netgear.com |
| Chrome Web App of the Week: Radio Posted: 08 Aug 2011 11:57 AM PDT
Users of DoubleTime's Radio Chrome web app, may not be able to pick each and every song they listen to, but that doesn't mean they don't have any musical options available to them. The application offers up some of the most popular radio stations in the world, with new channels being added on a regular basis. For individuals traveling or working abroad, Radio is a dream come true: expatriates can listen to streaming news, music, and sports coverage from a wide variety of countries around the world in multiple languages, making it a great way to stay up to date with happens at home.
Best of all, if your favorite radio station isn't currently featured in the application, Radio's developers are open to request--just like a DJ. Be sure to check back every week for another edition of Maximum PC's Chrome Web App of the Week. |
| Seagate Offering Free Data Recovery Service With New GoFlex Turbo External HDD Posted: 08 Aug 2011 11:25 AM PDT
The plan's only good for one recovery attempt, but hey, that's a lot better than you'll get with most HDDs, and third-party data recovery can cost an arm and a leg. And heads up, foreign Max PC readers: the offer's only good in the U.S. Sorry to burst your bubble. Aside from the SafetyNet service, the 7200 RPM GoFlex Turbo also sports USB 3.0 ports, so you'll be able to load it up quickly. Firewire and eSATA connections are available with the purchase of an additional adapter. Two models are up for grabs: the 500GB version will set you back $120, while its bigger 750GB cousin costs a cool $140. |
| The Khronos Group Unveils New OpenGL 4.2 Standard Posted: 08 Aug 2011 10:56 AM PDT
Want some hard details about the new features? The press release provides a quick bullet list:
It only gets more technical from there, folks. If you're the kind of person who enjoys wading through a swamp of tech specs, you can check out the entire OpenGL 4.2 standard for yourself at the Khronos website. Nvidia's already rolled out OpenGL 4.2-compatible drivers to coincide with the announcement, and AMD plans on introducing 4.2 beta drivers of their own today. |
| New M-Disc Technology Promises Permanent Data Retention Posted: 08 Aug 2011 10:27 AM PDT
They're called M-Discs and they're being brought to market a start-up company called Millenniata, Computerworld reports. M-Discs ditch the traditional reflective layer found in standard physical media discs and instead etch the information directly into the body of the multi-layered disc itself, which is made of an undisclosed stone-like substance. Millenniata says that any device that can read a DVD can read an M-Disc – the only special equipment necessary in the whole process is an M-Disc burner. That's cool in and of itself, but Millenniata also claims that M-Discs are darned near impervious to damage. They told Computerworld you can toss an M-Disc in liquid nitrogen, then dump boiling water all over it, and nary a byte of data will be damaged. A DoD study found no data loss after subjecting the M-Disc to grueling conditions -- a claim no other disc can make. Although LG's supplying the initial round of M-Disc burners, Millenniata's CEO says that any DVD hardware manufacturer can make the jump to M-Disc by installing a firmware upgrade on their machines. The M-Disc's staying power comes at the cost of burn speed, however; you can only write to them at a 4x rate. At that speed, it's almost a good thing that M-Discs will only be able to match standard DVD capacities of 4.7GB when they hit the shelves in October for $3 a pop. Millenniata puts their money where their mouth is by offering a lifetime warranty for the discs. Image credit: troveas.com |
| EVGA Unveils Z68 Motherboard Series Posted: 08 Aug 2011 09:46 AM PDT
The FTW model is EVGA's flagship Z68 board and is available with or without an EVGauge unit that slides into an available 5.25-inch drive bay. It displays CPU temps and gives users an easy way to adjust voltages without mucking around in the BIOS. Other features include four DDR3 slots with support for up to 16GB of memory, three PCI-E x16/x8 slots, a pair of PCI-E x8 slots, two PCI-E x1 slots, eight SATA 3Gb/s ports, two SATA 6Gbps ports, RAID 0/1/0+1/5/ and JBOD support, HD audio, ten USB 2.0 ports, four USB 3.0 ports, FireWire, and other goodies packed onto an EATX form factor board. There's also the EVGA Z68 SLI and SLI Micro boards, which you can learn more about here. Image Credit: EVGA |
Music streaming service Spotify launched in the US just a few weeks ago, and a source has let it slip that the company already has 1.4 million US users. Also of great importance, 
This can be disconcerting for the general public as well. Already, our homes, cars, phones, IP addresses and other location or identifying data is being imaged or tracked. Consider this scenario: You're on the street and someone takes a liking to you. They snap your picture, and using that, conduct a facial recognition-search with it (which is actually 
Do you remember rock n' roll radio? If not, we won't take it personally. After all, with services like Spotify, Rdio, Slacker and Turntable.fm to choose our tunes from, computer and smartphone users have never been more spoiled for choice when it comes to music. Commercial-free music is available to anyone that wants it, provided they're willing to do the work of setting up an account and picking the tunes they want to listen to. For those of us that prefer to sit back and let someone else do the aural heavy lifting for us, and consider radio to still be an important part of our daily lives, there's 
When we woke up this morning, we had no idea that the security of backup data would be the trend of the day, but here we are anyways (and to be fair, we don't think so clearly in the morning). We've already told you about the 
Maximum PC's blunt no-BS review policy may lead some folks to believe that we're a bunch of hardassed curmudgeons, but actually, we're big softies sometimes. We love cuddling up with a nice, warm graphics card, for example (assuming the proper cooling systems are in place, of course). And everyone enjoys a good open-source project. OpenGL combines the best of both worlds; awesome graphics backed by open-source standards. Today, the Khronos Group, the nonprofit organization in charge of OpenGL, gave the platform a boost with the release of the OpenGL 4.2 standard.
More and more folks are turning to cloud services like Dropbox to store their oh-so-precious private data, but when it comes to truly valuable info, it's still a good idea to keep a physical backup disc around in case those virtual services crap out on you. Then again, CDs and DVDs scratch waaaaay too easily and have limited shelf lives. If you've ever been screwed by a big gouge across an important backup disc, you might want to check out the new optical media that's hitting the market soon. Supposedly, it lasts forever, and the Department of Defense vouches for its resiliency.
Building a socket 1155 system? If so, EVGA is making a pitch for its recently announced Z68 motherboard series. The hardware maker is taking aim at enthusiasts who live to overclock, especially with the company's Z68 FTW board, which comes loaded with OC-friendly features like EVGA Vdroop control, one-touch overclocking, 12-phase PWM, voltage read points, onboard clear CMOS, power, and reset buttons, and more.| 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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