General Gaming Article |
- Intel Creates $300 Million Fund To Help Spur Ultrabook Development
- New Panasonic Toughbook S10 Will Take Whatever You Can Dish Out, For a Price
- Hulu Coming to Japan this Year
- Windows Phone 7 App of the Week: ORB
- New, Powered-Up USB Spec In Development
- Mozilla's MemShrink Program Brings Big Memory Savings To Firefox 7
- OCZ Agility 3 240GB Review
- Tweets Haven't Replaced Emails (Yet)
- Acer Notebook Aspires for MacBook Air-like Proportions
- Microsoft Squashes 20-Year-Old 'Ping of Death' Bug
| Intel Creates $300 Million Fund To Help Spur Ultrabook Development Posted: 10 Aug 2011 07:32 PM PDT
The goal of the Intel Capital Ultrabook Fund is "to invest in companies building hardware and software technologies focused on enhancing how people interact with Ultrabooks such as through sensors and touch, achieving all day usage through longer battery life, enabling innovative physical designs and improved storage capacity." Basically, the fund's there to help companies that are making Ultrabooks leaner, meaner and better continue to make Ultrabooks leaner, meaner and better, inspiring further generations of Ultrabook improvements. Intel's hoping to kick-start Ultrabook adoption not only with the influx of cash, but also by implementing a three-phase development plan for the products. The company's second generation Core processors have already spurred the creation of the ultra-thin Ultrabook, which should be on the shelves by year end. Next year's Ivy Bridge processors should bring, amongst other things, improved power efficiency and visual performance to the table. Expect to see the second generation Ultrabooks ship by summer 2012. The final step in Intel's plan lies with its 2013 "Haswell" lineup. Intel says Haswell products "are expected to reduce power consumption to half of the 'thermal design point' for today's microprocessors." We've already talked about Ultrabooks quite a bit here on MaximumPC.com – feel free to dig in and do some learnin'. |
| New Panasonic Toughbook S10 Will Take Whatever You Can Dish Out, For a Price Posted: 10 Aug 2011 02:39 PM PDT
The S10 packs a new Sandy Bridge CPU, specifically the Core i5-2520M. Users will also be treated to the usual menu of goodies like 4GB of RAM, HDMI-out, USB 3.0, and a 320GB shock-proof HDD. The battery is also supposed to last up to 12.5 hours, or so they claim. The thing that makes the Toughbook so tough is the Magnesium alloy casing. The S10 can take more than 220 pounds of pressure on the lid while closed. it is also sealed to prevent spills form frying your computer. This 12.1-inch machine isn't going to come cheap, though. The Toughbook S10 will be going for $2449 at retail next month. |
| Hulu Coming to Japan this Year Posted: 10 Aug 2011 02:22 PM PDT
Early details indicate that users in the land of the rising sun will not have access to a free limited version of the service like American users have enjoyed. Instead, it will be a Hulu Plus-only situation. The service will be available on computers, phones, TVs, and tablets. This move shows that Hulu is preferring to avoid expanding into markets that Netflix is also venturing into. Netflix is concentrating on Latin America and Europe. Perhaps Hulu is less confident in the licensing deals they will get overseas. Interested media consumers can sign up at Hulu.jp for updates on the rollout. |
| Windows Phone 7 App of the Week: ORB Posted: 10 Aug 2011 11:41 AM PDT Every once in a while you will come across a game that is simple, yet has all the ingredients to be a completely addicting diversion. Such games are perfect for mobile platforms because they don't require an unreasonable amount of horsepower, nor are the controls typically over the top or difficult to master. ORB by PalladiumPower is a vertically scrolling game that has you dodging obstacles by maneuvering your orb through the map. The game is controlled by tilting your device forward to increase speed, backward to slow down, and sideways to steer. Various obstacles throughout the course will require you to speed up and slow down, and keeping yourself on the right track becomes increasingly difficult as you progress.
Easily one of the best indie games on the Windows Phone 7 platform, Orb complements the intuitive gameplay with killer graphics and a soundtrack that wouldn't be out of place on a title created by a much larger gaming studio. Your personal bests can be compared against the world using the high scores functionality, and your personal statistics can be tracked as well.
Orb is available in both the $1.29 version and a fully-functional free (ad supported) version. Be sure to check back next week for another Windows Phone 7 App of the Week! |
| New, Powered-Up USB Spec In Development Posted: 10 Aug 2011 11:29 AM PDT
We know, plenty of devices can already be charged via a USB connection – we've seen those coffee warming devices on ThinkGeek, too. The new specification being developed by the group will be able to deliver up to 100 watts of power, though – enough to charge larger items like external HDDs. The USB 3.0 Promoter Group outlines several key features of the upcoming spec in its press release:
"Charging the battery of a notebook PC, or simply powering that notebook PC while actively using the USB data connection, would be possible," Brad Saunders, USB 3.0 Promoter Group Chairman, explains. "Conceivably, a notebook PC could rely solely on a USB connection for its source of power." Don't expect your PC to power your laptop anytime soon, though; the new specification isn't even expected to head into the peer review stage until later this year. The Promoter Group hopes to start implementation of the standard early 2012. |
| Mozilla's MemShrink Program Brings Big Memory Savings To Firefox 7 Posted: 10 Aug 2011 10:50 AM PDT
"Firefox 7 uses less memory than Firefox 6 (and 5 and 4): often 20% to 30% less, and sometimes as much as 50% less," Mozilla developer Nicholas Nethercote wrote on his blog. "In particular, Firefox 7′s memory usage will stay steady if you leave it running overnight, and it will free up more memory when you close many tabs." That's great news for Firefox and the MemShrink project, which is less than two months old. Nethercote claims that the changes make the upcoming Firefox 7 both faster and less crash-prone. He (and a few others) have run the browser through all kinds of memory benchmark tests – check out the post for yourself if you're interested in the nitty-gritty hard details. |
| Posted: 10 Aug 2011 10:25 AM PDT OCZ already ships two drives with the blazing-fast SF-2281 controller—the Vertex 3 and the firmware-tweaked Max IOPS Vertex 3. So, why a third? Like its predecessors the Agility and Agility 2, the Agility 3 is OCZ's "mainstream" SSD for this generation. So what distinguishes it from the Vertex 3, and is there any reason to buy it? Like other 240GB SandForce drives, the Agility 3 uses 256GB of NAND, with 16GB devoted to overprovisioning. Unlike the Vertex 3 and OWC's Mercury Extreme Pro, which use synchronous NAND for their storage, the Agility 3 uses asynchronous, which is slower.
The good news is that the Agility's use of cheaper NAND only becomes a problem in a few situations, most of which are unlikely to impact home users. The slowdown is only apparent in tests that read and write large amounts of incompressible data to disk, like AS SSD and CrystalDiskMark. Since a large part of SandForce's speed advantage is its compression algorithm, the slower NAND in the Agility 3 can't keep up, and the Agility 3 clocked in around 210MB/s reads and 240MB/s writes in those tests. In tests that more closely mirror most real-world scenarios—such as PCMark Vantage and PCMark 11, Premiere Pro, and IOmeter—the Agility 3 performs nearly as well as SF-2281 drives that use synchronous NAND. Unless you often write a lot of incompressible data to disk, you're not likely to notice much speed difference if you opt for the Agility 3, and you'll save some scratch—a 240GB Agility 3 was about $65 cheaper than the same size Vertex 3 as of press time. $475, www.ocztechnology.com |
| Tweets Haven't Replaced Emails (Yet) Posted: 10 Aug 2011 10:19 AM PDT So how do you spend your typical day on the Internet? If you spend most of your time trying out new Chrome extensions, trolling forums or debating the pros and cons of one computer chassis over another, congratulations; you've taking the Maximum PC ethos to heart. Even so, you're probably forgetting just how often you shoot off emails or sift through Google search results. A new report says that those two activities are still the most popular time-sucks online. Shocker, huh?
According to Pew Internet, 92 percent of Internet users do each of those two activities, which leads us to wonder how eight percent of the population gets by without Google. Those 92 percent figures average out to roughly 70 percent of all adult Americans. Email is the more frequently used of the two; 61 percent of online adults check their inbox on an average day, compared to 59 percent who conduct Internet searches. The real trendsetter is social media use; only 11 percent of all online adults used Myspace and its clones back in 2004. Pew reports that number's skyrocketed up to 65 percent as of May 2011. Surprised? Not us. We get Tweets from our grandmother all the time. Image credit: Pew Internet |
| Acer Notebook Aspires for MacBook Air-like Proportions Posted: 10 Aug 2011 08:54 AM PDT
Renders of Acer's upcoming Aspire 3951 notebook popped up on the Web over at a Vietnamese website (Sohoa) and picked up by Electronista, and it's immediately apparent where Acer's inspiration is coming from. The company's 13.3-inch notebook bears a strong resemblance to Apple's ultrathin MacBook Air, except that the bulk of the ports have been shuttled to the back, a design cue that takes a page from Dell's Adamo. System specs are mostly unknown at this point, but rumor has it the Aspire 3951 will ship with a 250GB or 500GB hard drive, as well as a 160GB SSD option. It will have a Core i processor of some sort, and based on the renders, a multi-card reader and HDMI port. Look for the 3951 to ship by the end of the year. Image Credit: sohoa |
| Microsoft Squashes 20-Year-Old 'Ping of Death' Bug Posted: 10 Aug 2011 08:28 AM PDT
Officially, CVE-2011-1871 describes "A denial of service vulnerability [that] exists in the Windows TCP/IP stack that is caused when the TCP/IP stack improperly handles a sequence of specially crafted ICMP messages. An attacker who successfully exploited this vulnerability could cause the target system to stop responding and automatically restart." It was dubbed Ping of Death because hackers up to no good would ping target PCs with enlarged packets too big for the computer system to handle, causing the PC to lock up or a Blue Screen of Death (remember those?). You can view a YouTube video demonstrating the Ping of Death being used to being down a Windows 95 PC here (NSFW - language). The latest round of Patch Tuesday updates address 22 vulnerabilities total, rolled up into 13 security updates. One of the bigger ones -- MS11-057 -- deals with Internet Explorer 9, patching seven security holes, some of which could be exploited by drive-by-downloads. |
Tablets will be the death of the computer! Just ask the armchair pundits spouting their visions of PC doom over the Web on a daily basis. Here at Maximum PC, we're a little skeptical of that view – how do you shove a 
Panasonic isn't the biggest name in laptops these days, except if you are planning on dropping, splashing, or otherwise abusing the daylights out of your machine. In that case, the Toughbook series is right up your alley. And the newest member of the Toughbook family,
Hulu's international plans have been the subject of much speculation in recent months as Netflix begins its worldwide expansion. The video streaming service had finally made its first move. Hulu will be available to Japanese users 
If you're looking solely at transfer rates, the USB 3.0 specification – with its 5Gbps speeds – may be plenty fast, but it already can't push the same amount of raw data as, say, Thunderbolt. New specifications coming down the pipeline, like 
Spending time with Firefox is a lot like spending time with your lovable young nieces; usually, everything goes swell and you walk away feeling good, a content smile plastered across your face. But sometimes, they do something so overwhelmingly stupid that you can't help but shake your head and wonder about their future. You may not be able to convince your niece that shoving crap inside electrical sockets is a dumb idea, but Mozilla's tackling its horrifyingly bad memory issues head-on with the MemShrink initiative – and one developer's already reporting outstanding results.
Thin and light notebooks inevitably draw comparisons to Apple's MacBook Air, and you can probably expect a lot more of that once Ultrabooks emerge, at least at first. Part of the reason probably has to do with there not being a ton of pancaked proportioned notebooks. Intel aims to change the mobile landscape with its Ultrabook concept, and it looks as though Acer is itching to get started.
Perhaps motivated by Duke Nukem Forever shipping after a decade-and-a-half of development and delays, Microsoft decided to finally patch a vulnerability dating back to the 1990s. Included in yesterday's Patch Tuesday bulletin bonanza is a little nugget listed as CVE-2011-1871, which according to ComputerWorld.com is a fix for the dreaded 'Ping of Death,' or at least it was dreaded some two decades ago.| 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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