General Gaming Article |
- Humble Indie Bundle Returns with Warm Tidings, Cold Games
- Toshiba Doubles Size of All-in-One Lineup with DX735
- Toshiba Chooses AMD E300 APU for Its Satellite L735D Kids’ PC
- Android Ice Cream Sandwich Demoed on Video?
- Xoom LTE 4G Upgrade Starting September 29th
- Future Tense: Bottom Ten Windows Annoyances
- Cooler Master CM Storm Trooper Loves to LAN Party
- Intel's Next Generation Atom Processors Detailed
- Intel Carves Itself A Bigger Slice Of Market Pie
- Microsoft Announces Web-Based Marketplace for Windows Phone
| Humble Indie Bundle Returns with Warm Tidings, Cold Games Posted: 28 Sep 2011 10:33 PM PDT
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| Toshiba Doubles Size of All-in-One Lineup with DX735 Posted: 28 Sep 2011 09:39 PM PDT
The DX735, which will be available exclusively from Best Buy beginning October 2, has a base price of $956.99. Toshiba wants you to factor in the DX735's utility as a complete "home media hub" and not just as a PC when looking at the price. "Our All-in-One systems blend the best of Toshiba's PC and visual product expertise for families and students looking to enjoy TV, watch DVDs and play games," said Carl Pinto, vice president of product development, Toshiba America Information Systems, Inc., Digital Products Division. Let's turn our attention to DX735 the PC. It boasts a 2nd Generation Intel i5/i7 processor, 1TB of hard drive storage, 4GB of RAM, four USB 2.0 ports, two USB 3.0 ports, a DVD SuperMulti Drive and one HDMI-in port. On the entertainment front, it features "Onkyo stereo speakers professionally tuned by experts at Waves and feature Waves MaxxAudio sound." It also packs a technology Toshiba likes to call Sleep & Music, which makes it possible for the user to use the AIO's Onkyo speakers even when the machine is off. But that's not all as the DX735 has one more trick up its sleeve in the form of "Resolution+ video upconversion technology that breathes new life into standard-def video and DVDs." |
| Toshiba Chooses AMD E300 APU for Its Satellite L735D Kids’ PC Posted: 28 Sep 2011 04:59 PM PDT
To ensure that kids get to appreciate the E300's integrated Radeon HD 6310 graphics core, Toshiba is going to ship the L735D with LEGO Harry Potter: The Video Game pre-installed. Besides the game, the laptop will also come with the KidZui browser for kids. The new laptop has a starting price of $497.99 and will be available beginning October 2. |
| Android Ice Cream Sandwich Demoed on Video? Posted: 28 Sep 2011 02:59 PM PDT
The camera gets a disproportionate amount of screen time, and it's totally redesigned. Likewise, the notification pane, multitasking interface, lock screen, and launcher are different. The menus have taken on the holographic look of Honeycomb as well. There is also an interesting shortcut icon that opens a list of Google apps. For some reason, the user did not open the browser at all in the video. The build of the software, IRK48 indicate that this software is probably a few weeks out of date. The number in Android builds is usually the day of the quarter it was finalized. It is possible this is just a serious ROM made to look like ICS, but the detail is all there. What do you think? Check out the video here. |
| Xoom LTE 4G Upgrade Starting September 29th Posted: 28 Sep 2011 02:34 PM PDT
Owners of the device will be able to go to a special Verizon site and sign up for the upgrade offer. The slate will need to be packed up and sent off to Verizon for up to six business days, but it will come back rocking super-fast LTE data. The entire process is free of charge to current Xoom owners. For those that are still interested in the Honeycomb tablet, Verizon expects to have the device in stores with LTE built-in as soon as October 13. It will still cost $499 on a new 2-year contract. |
| Future Tense: Bottom Ten Windows Annoyances Posted: 28 Sep 2011 02:30 PM PDT All the other articles list the top ten Windows Annoyances. I'm going to list the bottom ten. These are things that work, but they're sloppy. Maybe the programmers thought good enough was good enough. It isn't. Maybe the programmers forgot to stress-test their work. They should have. Maybe they didn't think about the actual work environment where their software would be running. Oops. And perhaps, some of these behaviors are my fault—things that are particular to my machine, quirks that have developed over time as the detritus of heavy use piles up like scree at the bottom of a cliff. Whatever the case, they're still annoying.
1) Microsoft Security Essentials is designed to protect the Windows environment against malware. For the most part, it does a terrific job. But it's also designed to shut itself off if you're running an unregistered copy of Windows. I have legal copies of Windows on all of my machines. But from time to time, I'll get a warning on my desktop machine that MSE has shut itself off and I need to validate my copy of Windows. The validation process works, but MSE refuses to turn itself back on. The only way to restore MSE is to reboot. And no, the system isn't infected with some particularly pernicious bit of code. I've run six or seven different malware checkers, dug into the registry, done a Hijack This, monitored what's happening in the System folders, watched all the running processes, checked Msconfig and Startup, done all the tweaks I could find on the web, and uninstalled and reinstalled. No joy. As near as I can tell, MSE is punking itself when I'm running a batch file that backs up my files. It seems to me that MSE shouldn't have to phone home every time it wets its diaper. And if it does have to phone home, it should listen when mommy says, "You're a good boy and yes, that's a legal copy of Windows. Turn yourself back on." 2) Windows Explorer will show me all the drives on my system. If I single-click on a single drive, I select it. If I double-click on that same drive, two folder windows open. The same thing happens if I right-click and select open. I don't want to open two folder windows, only one. There must be a setting somewhere to fix this—I've found several, but they haven't worked. Go figure. 3) There are a lot of good media players available, but I like Windows Media Player for several reasons, most important being that I don't have to worry about upgrading it to keep up with Windows. I also have a vast music collection—enough to fill a 3TB drive. Windows Media Player not only plays my music, it also functions as a database, making it easy to categorize, sort, and find tracks, albums, artists, genres, etc. That said, there are two things Windows Media Player doesn't do. First of all, WMP doesn't always get its album art assigned to the right album. Sometimes—usually when it boots up—it gets confused which cover art belongs with which disc. Arthur Fiedler does not belong on the cover of Carol King's Tapestry. Beatallica's art does not belong on Mahler's 2nd. Second, it can't count above 2500. I have ripped over 3500 albums in the past ten years, but no matter how many are on the hard drive, WMP tells me there are only 2500. It can find all the albums, it just can't count them. 4) This one isn't entirely Windows' fault, but it is an annoyance. It varies, depending on which browser you use. In Chrome, you can open new tabs without leaving the page you're on. In Chrome and IE9, you can open a saved session. This is a welcome convenience. But sometimes, one of those tabs will have a video or an advertisement that starts running automatically. I might be listening to music, I might be on a Skype call, I might be working on an audio file. I don't want a commercial running in the background—especially one I can't find unless I click through the entire session I just opened. I blame advertisers for this problem, and I know I could fix part of it by installing an ad-blocker. But that would work only on the ads, not on the audio/video content on that page. It's this simple. I want audio files to wait for me to tell it, "Okay, I'm ready to listen to you now." 5) Windows Explorer has a whole list of things that it will display in the details view, but that list doesn't include Folder Size or Folder Children. It doesn't include MD5 or CRC checksums either. These would be great time savers. There's an add-on for XP that showed Folder Size and Folder Children columns, but it's incompatible with Win7. And it seems obvious that the Windows' Indexing function could do MD5 and/or CRC checksums during idle time. It would be a great help in finding duplicates. Speaking of which—why doesn't Windows include a duplicate file finder? 6) The single most annoying annoyance? Applications that suddenly pop up and steal the focus. I don't want any app stealing the focus unless it's telling me that the flames have reached my office door. I can be in the middle of speed-typing an email and suddenly a box pops up in front of everything else—and if it's asking a question, then whatever is already in the keystroke queue answers the pop-up before I can even read the question, and the next thing I know my system is doing something I did not want it to do—like shutting itself down! I don't mind warnings popping up in the corner. I don't mind questions. I do mind when they get in front of what I am doing, especially when it interrupts something critical. I want apps to wait politely. The apps are supposed to work for me—not the other way around. 7) Windows Word stores its configuration information in a file called normal.dot. As long as normal.dot is invisible, I don't care. But there are just too many circumstances where I cannot close a file or exit Word without normal.dot asking me whether I want to save its changes. And if I say no, it's still not happy. Sometimes it's a lot of work just to exit Word. Hello, normal.dot? Here's your answer: I don't care. Do whatever it is you want to do. I have templates that I use for everything, letters, stories, articles, email, etc. I don't need you, normal.dot. Go away. Leave me alone. Just let me exit Word without you demanding my attention, okay? Don't take it personally, normal.dot, just piss off. (I know there's a setting to turn this off. I can't find it.) 8) I use both Chrome and IE9. Chrome is a memory hog and a cycle hog. If you open too many tabs in Chrome, the system slows down. That's Google's problem. IE9 is better behaved on some websites, but…not always. I use Bing as my home page for IE9 and it's got an annoying little hesitation that Google doesn't have. If I open IE9 and start typing a search request, Bing drops the first few letters or even the whole request because even though it shows that it's ready, it really isn't. It hasn't finished booting up and it doesn't bother to check what's in the keystroke queue. That's just bad programming. In fact, this problem sometimes shows up elsewhere in IE9 as well. Pfeh. Come on, Redmond? You want me to use Bing? You want me to use IE9? I will. I like the pretty pictures—but get your act together. Who needs that half-second hesitation before they can start typing? (And yes, I am a speed-typist, I do notice things like this.) 9) Windows 7 deleted the Delete button in Windows Explorer. This means I either have to right-click and select from a menu to delete a file or a group of files, or I have to drag it to the Recycle Bin, or I have to take my hand off the mouse and hit the Delete key. Either way, it's still an extra move. 10) Suppose I change my mind about deleting a file. I open the Recycle Bin folder. I need to see the contents of the file. Recycle Bin won't show it to me. If it's a photo, there's a tiny little thumbnail in the lower left corner, but that's about it. Why can't the Recycle Bin let me peek at what I've deleted so I can second guess myself more easily? 11) Bonus Annoyance: Windows updates itself once a week, patching vulnerabilities and security holes. I have no problem with that. I think it's a valuable feature. What I do object to is that every Tuesday, I start getting pop-up boxes asking me to reboot my computer. I can postpone it four hours at a time, but it just keeps coming back. It's a focus-stealing pop-up, too (See #6, above). More than once it has grabbed a keystroke from the queue and started shutting down my system. Hey, Microsoft? How about just popping up a reminder, without stealing the focus and demanding an immediate answer? The idea is that the computer should serve the user. All of these annoyances are things that don't. What do you think? What are some of the behaviors of Windows that annoy you?
————— 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 |
| Cooler Master CM Storm Trooper Loves to LAN Party Posted: 28 Sep 2011 01:34 PM PDT
Don't worry if you have trouble walking straight after a full night of gaming, Cooler Master designed the CM Storm Trooper with a damage-resistant rubberized coating. You probably should be careful not to fall down a flight of stairs, but bumping into a wall or pedestrian shouldn't scuff up the case. There are some other tricks up the CM Storm Trooper's sleeve. It's the first full-tower case with two 90 degrees rotatable 4-in-3 HDD modules (it supports up to 14 hard drives in all), there are removable dust filters on the top and bottom intakes, there's an external 2.5-inch HDD/SSD dock, a built-in fan controller, and a hidden tool box "for storing private goods." The CM Storm Trooper will be available on October 4th for $190 MSRP. Product Page (with photo gallery) Image Credit: Cooler Master |
| Intel's Next Generation Atom Processors Detailed Posted: 28 Sep 2011 01:12 PM PDT
That's entirely up to Intel. Atom, after all, is just a brand, one in which it was rumored Intel would drop. Intel shrugged off the rumors as crazy talk and said it would stick with the Atom brand, and we now have a few details to share regarding the chip maker's upcoming 32nm Cedarview-M mobile Atom parts. According to news and rumor site Fudzilla, Intel's soon-to-be-released N2600 and N2800 processors will blow the current N455 and N475 46nm Pineview-M chips out of the water. The N2600 is a dual-core processor clocked at 1.6GHz and containing 1MB of L2 cache. It will support DDR3-800 memory and sport Intel IGP 3600 graphics clocked at 400MHz. The N455, meanwhile, is a single-core processor clocked at 1.6GHz and with 512KB of L2 cache. Also worth noting is that the N2600 has a 3.5W TDP, compared to the N455's 6.5W TDP. The N2800 is also a dual-core part, this one clocked at 1.86GHz. It too has 1MB of L2 cache but supports DDR3-1066 memory. Its IGP 3650 graphics is clocked at 640MHz. For the sake of comparison, the N475 is clocked at 1.83GHz with half the cache. Both processors feature a 6.5W TDP. No word on exactly when these will be released, however Fudzilla says the N2600 will sell to retailers for $42 in 1,000-unit trays and the N2800 for $47. |
| Intel Carves Itself A Bigger Slice Of Market Pie Posted: 28 Sep 2011 11:38 AM PDT
The research firm IHS iSuppli took a look at global microprocessor sales over the past year – from the second quarter of 2010 to the second quarter of 2011 – and found that Intel's lead had grown by 1.1 percent, to 81.8 percent of the total market revenue. That includes all microprocessors, not just PC chips. iSuppli says two major factors boosted Intel's lead; a second quarter surge in overall PC shipments combined with Intel's decision to "aggressively increase production" of the Sandy Bridge line. That 1.1 percent seems to have been taken directly out of AMD's pocket, however. That company saw a corresponding 1.1 percent decline in revenue, although its 0.3 percent increase in revenue between the first and second quarters of 2011 tops Intel's 0.7 percent loss. iSuppli chalks AMD's increase up to strong shipments of its Fusion line. |
| Microsoft Announces Web-Based Marketplace for Windows Phone Posted: 28 Sep 2011 11:13 AM PDT In conjunction with the launch of Windows Phone 7.5 Microsoft has updated windowsphone.com. The new site includes a web-based Marketplace for Windows Phone. The new Marketplace allows you to browse and purchase apps from any PC without the need for software. As an additional benefit, the Marketplace provides a history of your app purchases, giving you an easy way to find apps that you've used in the past.
More than just another app store, the new windowsphone.com also acts as a central point for many of the services that integrate into the phone. Images and documents synched to SkyDrive, as well as your XBox Live avatar and gamer score are prominently displayed in the 'My Phone' area of the site. Microsoft even provides the ability to track your phone's location and gives you the option to ring, lock, or erase your phone in the unfortunate case that your device is lost or stolen. The new features on windowsphone.com are freely available for all Windows Phone devices, not just those which have received the 7.5 update. |
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