General Gaming Article |
- Inside The Bags of Maximum PC Editors!
- Evernote Planning IPO
- Google Explains Cause Of Docs Outage
- Hurt Locker P2P Lawsuits Move On To Canada
- HP Unveils All-In-One Printer Capable Of Scanning 3D Objects
- Cool Site of the Week: SeatGeek
- CEO Points The Finger At Intel As Nvidia Withdraws From PC Chips
- Bit.ly Says Web Users Move On To New Things Quickly, Old Links Die Fast
- Motorola Droid Bionic Stripped and Exposed
- Lenovo Chairman Predicts Surpassing Dell By The End Of The Year
| Inside The Bags of Maximum PC Editors! Posted: 09 Sep 2011 03:34 PM PDT At our last meeting, we got to thinking: Would people be interested in seeing what's in our bags on a day-to-day basis? If so, we should take some pictures. If not, well, screw it, we're doing it anyway. Whether you wanted to know or not, here are the contents of all our bags here at Maximum PC. What's your daily load-out consist of? Hit the comments and let us know!
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| Posted: 09 Sep 2011 03:01 PM PDT
Evernote has upwards of 14 million users, 500,000 of which pay $5 per month for premium accounts. Evernote has an app for most mobile platforms, a web interface, and a desktop client. Users can upload plain text, images, and audio to keep their lives in order. The explosion in mobile devices has been a boon for Evernote. Libin says that 70% of users sign up from an Android or iOS device. Revenue has been growing rapidly, up 300% last year, according to Libin. The company, which has just 102 employees, is looking to use a recent $50 million investment to beef up to 400 workers in 2013. Do you think Evernote will have a successful IPO? |
| Google Explains Cause Of Docs Outage Posted: 09 Sep 2011 02:47 PM PDT
The bug that caused this lengthy outage would not have been problematic were it not for the recent changes. Whenever a user changes a document, a server has to be updated. The bug prevented memory from being recycled when this operation was complete. The result was servers that were unable to process new requests. By rolling back the feature change, Google engineers were able to correct the issue. Google is currently looking for similar memory leaks in other products, but Docs should be safe for the time being. It's worth noting that Microsoft's cloud services also went down this week for a few hours. A cautionary tale? |
| Hurt Locker P2P Lawsuits Move On To Canada Posted: 09 Sep 2011 02:31 PM PDT
Back in early 2010, Voltage Pictures, the makers of the Oscar-winning film Hurt Locker, began suing to uncover the people behind thousands of IP addresses. Voltage Pictures contends that these IPs were spotted downloading the film via torrents. In most cases, judges granted the subpoenas and ISPs had to divulge customer details. Instead of suing outright, Voltage had its legal counsel extract settlements from the defendants. Now the same scheme is playing out up north. A court in Montreal gave the thumbs up to Voltage and its legal counsel two weeks ago. Today is the deadline for three Canadian ISPs to hand over the records. It's unclear if the same settlement shakedown is going to happen in Canada, but we have to imagine it will. |
| HP Unveils All-In-One Printer Capable Of Scanning 3D Objects Posted: 09 Sep 2011 11:40 AM PDT
After you plop a 3D object down on the scanning bed and press "Scan," the M275's hinged, camera-packing arm goes into action. According to HP's explanation of the TopShot technology (PDF), the arm takes six pictures from all around the 3D object – three with a flash and three using ambient light. "These separate shots are then automatically combined into one seamless image of exceptional quality," HP says. The technique is supposed to create glare- and shadow-free images. They aren't 3D images, only super-high quality 2D images, so put those red-and-blue glasses down. HP then went and made the thing even more useful by adding printing and copying capabilities. The M275 might not be the most exciting accessory on the planet, but for people who need to take lots of high-quality pictures of 3D objects – businesses, craftsmen, and geeks who painted their entire RPG figure collection, let's say – it could end up being a useful gadget. No word on a release date other than "soon," but expect the all-in-one to set you back $400 smackers. Thanks to TechCrunch for pointing this out! |
| Cool Site of the Week: SeatGeek Posted: 09 Sep 2011 11:15 AM PDT
Aggregating concert, event and sporting tickets from brokers like RazorGator, Ticket City, Empire Tickets, eBay, and StubHub, SeatGeek is the only online ticket resource you'll ever need. If a seat for the show that you want to see is still available, the service will let you know about it. More than this, the site will even help you to choose the perfect seat. By using detailed seating layouts for every venue it sells tickets for, as well as their proprietary Deal Score algorithm, finding the right seats at the right show with the right blend of location and cost has never been easier.
The site even goes so far as to visualize your seats for you, so that you'll always know exactly what you're paying for. Be sure to check back every Friday for another edition of Maximum PC's Cool Site of the Week.
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| CEO Points The Finger At Intel As Nvidia Withdraws From PC Chips Posted: 09 Sep 2011 11:05 AM PDT
"We've been exiting that business for quite a famous reason, because of a dispute with Intel. They preferred that we weren't in that business," Huang said at the Kaufman Brothers Investor Conference this week. "Although it was a large business opportunity for us, staying in it was really impossible considering their displeasure for it." Computerworld reports that the company plans on circling the wagons around the mobile chip and graphics card segments of its business. Nvidia's Tegra line has proven a smash hit with mobile devices, and the new quad-core Kal-El is due to roll into tablets by the end of the year. The company also wants to gain more penetration with its GPUs in the server and supercomputer fields. Nvidia still plans on working with Intel in its quest to develop more powerful graphics solutions for PC users, but has no plans on moving back into computer chipsets whatsoever. "We're going to stay out of the basic PC market, we're not going to compete with Intel," Huang said. |
| Bit.ly Says Web Users Move On To New Things Quickly, Old Links Die Fast Posted: 09 Sep 2011 10:36 AM PDT The Internet hoards are fickle, easily distractible masses – just look at the proliferation of Lolcats and the whole Rickroll phenomenon. We're not passing judgment – who doesn't like a well-played Rickroll? – we're just saying. Turns out, the popular link shortening site bit.ly thinks the same thing, only they have numbers to back it up. That awesome link you posted on Twitter? It'll see most of its clicks in less time than it takes to watch a Peter Jackson movie.
Engadget pointed us to a bit.ly blog post from earlier this week. Yeah, we're late to the party, but we didn't even know bit.ly had a blog, to be honest. The team tracked the click-life of 1,000 popular bit.ly links posted across several of the top social networks. They were looking for the links' "half-life," which bit.ly defined as "the amount of time at which this link will receive half of the clicks it will ever receive after it's reached its peak." The results were startlingly similar; the average link shared on Twitter sees its half-life arrive in just 2.8 hours, while a Facebook link draws eyes for a little while longer, at 3.2 hours. A direct share – i.e. via email or IM – lasts 3.4 hours. On average, a bit.ly links captures the Web's attention for about three hours. One service bucks that figure, however, and maintains link traffic for a full seven hours after posting – more than twice the time of those other guys. If you want a crowd of folks clicking on your links for the longest time possible, you'll want to whip up a YouTube account. |
| Motorola Droid Bionic Stripped and Exposed Posted: 09 Sep 2011 10:12 AM PDT
First things first: In case you're not familiar, the Droid Bionic is Verizon's new flagship smartphone. It packs a 1GHz Texas Instruments dual-core processor, 1GB of RAM, 4.3-inch qHD display, 16GB of internal storage supplemented by an included 16GB microSD card, 8MP rear-facing camera with dual LED flash, front-facing camera (likely 0.3MP) for video calls, Gorilla Glass, Android 2.3 (Gingerbread), and support for Verizon's 4G LTE network. In fact, it's Verizon's only smartphone to offer both a dual-core processor and 4G LTE connectivity. Digging below the spec sheet, iFixIt located the coveted 4G LTE SIM card nestled beneath the microSD card. And while the majority of users won't ever dare tear the Bionic apart, it takes the removal of 11 screws around the perimeter to get inside. Beneath it all sits a "forest of EMI shields." One of the high points in tearing into the Bionic is Motorola evidently did away with the long ribbon cables found in some of its other devices that can make getting inside a bit tricky. Once inside, you'll find several identifying parts, including:
According to iFixIt, it's pretty easy to service the Droid Bionic for a number of reasons, including the limited number of screws and conservative amount of adhesive, which ultimately led to iFixIt rating the device a 9/10 in repairability. Put your own smartphone to sleep and view all the naked Bionic pictures here. Image Credit: iFixIt |
| Lenovo Chairman Predicts Surpassing Dell By The End Of The Year Posted: 09 Sep 2011 10:05 AM PDT
Those are big words, but not quite as outlandish as they may first sound, even if Lenovo doesn't hold a top-five presence in the US. Lenovo's sitting pretty with 12.2 percent of the worldwide market share. Dell's silver-medal finish came courtesy of a 12.9 percent share – a difference of under 1 percent. On top of that, Dell only managed to increase its shipments by 2.8 percent in the second quarter, while pales next to Lenovo's 22.9 percent improvement. |
The next technology darling to head for an initial public offering (IPO) could be the stellar note taking service Evernote, Reuters is reporting. Evernote CEO Phil Libin told Reuter that an 
Google Docs was offline for over an hour on Wednesday afternoon, leading many users to express their frustration with Google's cloud office suite. Google has now 
By now, US torrent users are used to the nagging worry that a copyright holder could seek damages against them. Now these mass lawsuits appear to be making the journey to 
Think that HP's going to throw in the towel now that they've blown up the PC world and announced plans to spin-off or sell their personal computer group? Think again. The company just pulled the curtain off of its new HP TopShot Laserjet Pro M275 – a scanner that can scan 3D images rather than just plain-jane 2D papers. It's not anywhere near as cool as those 3D printers you've seen on YouTube, but still kind of nifty.
There's nothing better than finding out your favorite artist is coming to town on tour. There are few things worse than finding out that tickets for said artist's show were sold out before you ever even heard about it. The same goes for sporting events, and if you must, the touring version of Broadway musicals, both modern and classic. Today's edition of Cool Site of the Week makes it a little harder to overlook who's coming to town and a heck of a lot easier to snag tickets for when they do.
It's not a big secret that Nvidia's has been slowly pulling out of the PC chipset market for a while now: a quick Google search shows results for "Nvidia exit chipset business" as far back as 2008. Some people thought that the company would get back into the swing of things after signing a patent cross-licensing agreement with Intel back in January, ending a long and bitter legal battle. Nope, Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang told a group of investors this week. Nvidia's done with PC chipsets for good, and Intel's the one to blame.
It took a long time for Motorola's much anticipated Droid Bionic smartphone to hit the market, and now that it's finally here, what's left to do but strip it naked and ogle all of its sexy parts? That's exactly what the folks over at iFixIt did, who learned a little bit more about the Droid Bionic in the process.
You don't get a leg up on your competitors by just sitting around (unless you're a lemming, of course). Lenovo's staying plenty active and reaping the dividends. The company slipped past Acer to claim the spot as the world's third-largest PC manufacturer in the second quarter thanks to a ridiculous 22.9 surge in shipments, a rarity in the otherwise sluggish PC market. Now, Lenovo Chairman Liu Chuanzhi is putting his mouth where his money is; he isn't content with the bronze medal and says Lenovo will topple Dell as the second-largest PC manufacturer in all the land by the end of the year.| 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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