General Gaming Article

General Gaming Article

Official ChevronWP7 Windows Phone Unlock Tool Is Live

Posted: 04 Nov 2011 02:55 PM PDT

wp7You may recall that shortly after its launch, Microsoft's Windows Phone 7 was hacked by the Chevron team, allowing users to install homebrew apps without a pricey developer account. Microsoft asked the devs to pull it down as the tool interfered with updating devices, but promised to work with the developers to officially support unlocking. Well, the day has finally arrived. Official Windows Phone unlocking is available for a nominal fee, and users won't even have to void warranties to do it.

To get started, Windows Phone users will need to log in with a Windows Live ID on the ChevronWP7 site. Once in, it's just a one time $9 fee for unlimited unlocks on a single handset. That's just a fraction of Microsoft's $99 yearly developer fee. When the device is registered, it goes into a queue to be unlocked. 

It's taken some time, but we're happy to see that Microsoft lived up to its promise to work with the Chevron team. Homebrew development can lead to new apps for the platform's official store, and increased excitement around the platform. Any Windows Phone users out there that are planning to use the ChevronWP7 unlock?

Google May Break Ties With US Chamber Of Commerce Over SOPA

Posted: 04 Nov 2011 02:39 PM PDT

googleSources close to Google claim that the search giant is mulling the possibility of breaking ties with the US Chamber of Commerce. The issues stem from the Chamber's strong support for the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), and Google's staunch opposition to it. SOPA and the E-PARASITE provisions from the US House would essentially saddle Google and other tech firms online with the task of policing web sites for copyright-infringing behavior. 

The Chamber of Commerce is consistently seen as one of the most powerful lobbying groups in Washington, but Google, and even the Consumer Electronics Association (CEA) itself are getting uncomfortable with the political direction of the Chamber. If Google and the CEA pulled out, the Chamber wouldn't just lose the dues paid to it, but the prestige of being tied into technology's biggest players.

Yahoo left the Chamber recently, and insiders say it was due to the same issue Google is now facing. Many tech firms have come out strongly against SOPA, but the Chamber supports it as a way to protect intellectual property. The fact that it would more or less break the internet seems of little concern. 

Copyright Holders Seek To Block Pirate Bay In UK

Posted: 04 Nov 2011 02:24 PM PDT

tpbBT, the UK's leading telecom was recently ordered by the High Court to block access to the Usenet site Newzbin2, and it appears that copyright holders are trying to capitalize on that victory. BT was recently approached by a group consisting of music labels and movie studios and asked to voluntarily block The Pirate Bay, the torrent site that just won't die. Should they refuse, BT was promised a court battle not unlike the one they just wnet through.

At this point, BT is refusing to block the site on the industry's say so. The customary court order will be obtained, but it will likely be contested in court. That's when things can get drawn-out and messy, though. "The Pirate Bay is no more than a huge scam on the global creative sector. It defrauds musicians and other creators of their wages, and it destroys UK jobs," BPI chief Geoff Taylor said.

The Pirate Bay is fond of laughing off these attempts to block it as "free advertising." Even if an ISP starts a DNS blockade of the site, as has happened in other countries, users find ways around it. Do you think The Pirate Bay will ever be taken down?

Cool Site of the Week: Get Drunk Not Fat

Posted: 04 Nov 2011 01:54 PM PDT

GDNFHalloween brings candy. Thanksgiving provides a bounty of rich foods. Taking heavy turkey laden meals, tables full of sugary treats and throwing them both in a blender with a big helping of eggnog, Christmas seems determined to ensure that any of those new pairs of pants waiting for you under the tree won't have a prayer of fitting you by the time Boxing Day rolls around. Is there anyway to stop the pudgy festive madness? You bet: it's called Get Drunk Not Fat, and it's our cool site of the week.

 Get Drunk Not Fat is a powerful tool in the war to control our waistlines while simultaneously destroying our livers. Offering up easy to read information on the alcohol  to calorie ratio of a staggeringly large number of adult-oriented beverages, the website is a great way to see how your favorite drinks could be affecting your diet. Beverages are organized by their alcohol content, with data on each drink also including the number of calories per serving, and where the beverage's data was culled from. If you're not in the mood to scroll, Get Drunk Not Fat's database is searchable, making it easy to find the information you're looking for.

If you can't find the drink you're looking for, the site even offers a booze submission form, to make sure that future drinkers never have to go without valuable tipple information ever again.

Be sure to check in every Friday for another edition of Maximum PC's Cool Site of the Week. 

 

 

No BS Podcast #180: Sabotage!

Posted: 04 Nov 2011 12:16 PM PDT

Is it that time already? Gordon, Alex, and Nathan gather in our once-again-functional podcasting studio to discuss HP, LSI buying SandForce, Battlefield 3, Diablo III, and more! All this, plus suggestions from the peanut gallery and more in Episode 180 of the No BS Podcast! Unfortunately, the MacBook in the podcasting studio cut off the last 20 minutes of the podcast for unknown reasons, so we don't have a rant. Rest assured that this will become fodder for next week's rant.

Computer trouble? Star Trek argument? Need advice? Just need to get something off your chest? A secret to share? Email us at maximumpcpodcast@gmail.com or call our 24-hour No BS Podcast hotline at 877.404.1337 x1337--operators are not standing by.

 

OCZ Plans On Offering Low Cost TLC Solid State Drives Just In Time For The HDD Shortage

Posted: 04 Nov 2011 11:42 AM PDT

Just when all seems bleak on the storage front, a possible savior has emerged: OCZ. No, the company doesn't have plans to open an HDD facility in a dry location and start pumping out traditional drives. Instead, the solid-state-focused OCZ plans on rolling out a new, cheaper type of SSD early in 2012, in exactly the same time period that experts think traditional HDD reserves will be drying up.

OCZ told attendees of the Needham 5th Annual HDD & Memory Conference that the company plans on shipping triple-level-cell (TLC) NAND SSD drives in the first quarter of next year, Storage Review reports. That would make it the first TLC-based SSD product to hit the streets. Current SSDs use multi-level-cell (MLC) NAND. There are pluses and minuses to TLC NAND as it exists currently; it is approximately 30 percent cheaper than MLC NAND – which could make it an attractive alternative during the upcoming HDD dry spell – but current TLC SSDs could have shelf lives as low as four years, making it a temporary Band-aid at best. OCZ hopes to offset that negative down the line with the second generation of its SSD-life-enhancing Indilinx nDurance technology, which is expected to become available fall of next year.

Image credit: StorageReview.com

Qualcomm SVP Says Company May Expand To PCs And Laptops

Posted: 04 Nov 2011 11:18 AM PDT

When NFL quarterbacks win the Super Bowl, they take a break and drag their families down to Disney World (at least if you believe the post-game commercials). Well, mobile chip-maker Qualcomm just nailed the business version of the game winning touchdown, posting a year-over-year revenue of nearly $15 billion. So what is it doing next? The company wants to go somewhere new, too, but it isn't a pleasure trip – Qualcomm wants to head to tablets, PCs and notebooks.

So says Fudzilla, who spoke to Enrico Salvatori, a Qualcomm senior VP and head of Qualcomm CDMA Technologies Europe. Salvatori told Fudzilla that in the short term, the company wants to increase its presence in the tablet market; the company has over Snapdragon-powered 30 slates in development currently and has plans to make their chips compatible with both Android and Windows 8. Longer term goals include moving in on Intel's territory – i.e. laptops and PCs. With the present focus on thin, power-efficient notebooks, Qualcomm might just find itself welcomed with open arms by laptop manufacturers.

What do you folks think? Does Qualcomm have the capabilities to crack into the Intel- and AMD-dominated world of traditional computers?

Head to Head: Bigfoot Killer Wireless-N 1102 vs. Intel Centrino Ultimate-N 6300

Posted: 04 Nov 2011 10:48 AM PDT

Out-of-whack price/performance ratios snuffed our enthusiasm for earlier Bigfoot Networks Killer NIC products. Would that be the case with the company's first wireless NIC, too? To find out, we tested two otherwise-identical CyberPower X6-9300 gaming notebooks: one with Bigfoot's new Killer Wireless-N 1102, and the other with Intel's Centrino Ultimate-N 6300. The Intel part supports three 150Mb/s streams while the Atheros AR9382-based Bigfoot part supports two streams.

 

Round 1: TCP Throughput

Bigfoot tells us it has optimized the software for latency-intolerant applications: multiplayer games, VoIP, video streaming, and so on. The trade-off, a company spokesperson said, is slightly lower TCP performance, which is used for email, web browsing, and other apps where packets can be reassembled out of order.

But our Jperf tests didn't reveal a yawning performance gap: Intel's part was 11 to 19 percent faster on the 2.4GHz band, with the bigger difference occuring at a longer distance (with the client on our outdoor patio). Bigfoot's part, on the other had, delivered slightly faster performance when operating on the 5GHz frequency band, although the delta wasn't nearly as wide (just 5 percent). Intel's part was negligibly faster on the 5GHz band when the client was on the patio.

Winner: Centrino Ultimate-N 6300

Round 2: UDP Throughput

Applications that can't tolerate latency—online games, VoIP, audio and video streaming apps, and similar programs—utilize UDP (User Datagram Protocol). UDP operates on the assumption that it's better to drop packets than to wait for them, and that the application will handle any necessary error correction.

When we configured Netperf to send 1,024-byt packets using UDP, we saw only negligible differences in throughput: Intel was 1 percent faster on the 2.4GHz band, and Bigfoot was 5 percent faster on the 5GHz band. But when we increased packet sizes to 1,472 bytes (the maximum size that will fit within an Ethernet frame, assuming a 20-byte IP header and an eight-byte UDP header), Bigfoot's part delivered UDP throughput eight to 10 times faster than Intel's.

Winner: Bigfoot Killer Wireless-N

Round 3: Latency

We used the Bigfoot-developed GaNE (Gaming Network Efficiency) benchmark for this test. We're naturally suspicious of vendor-developed benchmakrs, but Bigfoot is opening its source code so we'll give it the benefit of the doubt here. GaNE measures the latency between two PCs on the same local network by sending a 100-byte packet over the network every 50 milliseconds (a scenario typical of online games).

The Killer Wireless-N 1102 absolutely crushed Intel's NIC on this benchmark, delivering average ping times of just 1.2ms on the 2.4GHz band, compared to 7.3ms for Intel's adapter. We saw similar results on the 5GHz band, with Bigfoot's card delivering average pings of 1.1ms compared to the Intel card's 10.9ms.

Winner: Bigfoot Killer Wireless-N

Round 4: Real-World File Transfer

For this test, we timed how long it took for each notebook to copy a 2GB file over the wireless network to a third computer hardwired to the router. We repeated the test three times on each notebook on each frequency and averaged the results. We expected these results to be relatively similar to the more synthetic Jperf test, but Bigfoot's card proved to be slightly faster than Intel's card on the 2.4GHz band—and it was significantly faster than Intel's card on the 5GHz band.

Winner: Bigfoot Killer Wireless-N

And the Winner Is…

It's actually a double win for Bigfoot's Killer Wireless-N 1102. The adapater scored resounding wins in three of four categories, and it's significantly less expensive than Intel's part—at least in CyberPower's configurations. You can't buy the part at retail, and Bigfoot can't dictate how much OEMs charge their customers, but CyberPower charges $15 to upgrade to Bigfoot's part, versus $26 for an upgrade to Intel's Centrino Ultimate-N 6300.

Benchmarks
Killer Wireless-N 1103
(2.4GHz)		 Intel Centrino Ultimate-N 6300
(2.4GHz)		 Killer Wireless-N 1103
(5GHz)		 Intel Centrino Ultimate-N 6300
(5GHz)
JPerf TCP, Kitchen (Mb/s) 79.8 88.5 147.0 140.0
JPerf TCP, Patio (Mb/s) 49.6 59.0 44.4 44.9
NetPerf UDP (1,024-byte packets), Kitchen (Mb/s)

102.1

 103.2 163.4 155.5
NetPerf UDP (1,472-byte packets), Kitchen (Mb/s) 29.0 3.3 36.3 3.4
2GB File Transfer (sec) 179.0 187.3  139.0 188.7

Best scores are bolded. We used a Linksys E4200 router for these benchmarks, which supports two spatial streams on its 2.4GHz radio, and three spatial streams on its 5GHz radio. In the Kitchen test, the router and client are 20 feet apart and separated by one interior wall. In the Patio test, the router and client are 38 feet apart and separated by one interior and one exterior wall.

Report: HDD Shortages Could Lead To PC Shortages This Holiday Season

Posted: 04 Nov 2011 10:35 AM PDT

The major hard disk drive manufacturers have already admitted that the massive flooding in Thailand will put a severe crimp in HDD prices and availability for the foreseeable future. (A lot of major HDD factories reside in Thailand, you see.) In fact, HDD prices have already begun to climb at many major online retailers. But could the fallout be even more widespread? A new report says that the lack of HDDs could cause as overall PC shortage this holiday season, as OEMs who plow through their existing HDD inventory won't be able to replace the components.

Asus has already owned up to the fact that they only have enough HDDs on hand to meet production demands until the end of November; now, The Register is reporting that honchos at Sony and Acer have confirmed that they, too, expect there to be shortages and difficulties across the board heading into the rest of the year. An anonymous distribution source told the publication that some manufacturers "could have a 20 per cent to 30 per cent volume shortfall in the consumer space."

The New York Times reports that HDD issues could have a major effect on cloud storage services such as the ones offered by Amazon, Apple and Google, as well. "By the first quarter of next year, all worldwide inventories of hard drives will be sucked dry," James Monroe, research VP at Gartner, told the publication. "This is a crisis of escalating dimension for many I.T. revenue streams." The Times says that websites that store lots of data, such as Facebook, may also be hurt by the HDD shortage. Interestingly, this article says that PC shortages shouldn't hit consumers until next year.

Things aren't going to get brighter anytime soon, either; Q1 of 2012 is expected to be even rougher than Q4 of this year. On the plus side, maybe we'll start to see more adoption of speedy SSDs in the mainstream market. Any comments?

Qualcomm "Very Pleased" with $15 Billion in Revenue

Posted: 04 Nov 2011 09:09 AM PDT

Qualcomm came out ahead of what analysts had expected for the mobile chip maker's fourth fiscal quarter ended September 25, 2011. The San Diego-based company saw its revenues jump 14 percent sequentially to $4.12 billion in its fourth fiscal quarter, and 39 percent year-over-year with revenues of $14.96 billion. As the smartphone market continues to grow, Qualcomm keeps on reaping the rewards.

"I am very pleased with our performance this year as we delivered record revenues, earnings and MSM chipset shipments, driven by the popularity of smartphones, continued adoption of 3G technologies, particularly in emerging regions, and our industry-leading patent portfolio," said Dr. Paul E. Jacobs (PDF), chairman and CEO of Qualcomm. "The breadth and depth of our chipset roadmap, extensive licensing program and diverse set of global partnerships position us well for strong revenue and earnings growth in fiscal 2012. We are excited about the upcoming commercial launch of our groundbreaking Snapdragon multimode LTE solution and continue to invest in and execute on our strategic priorities to drive profitable growth."

According to BusinessWeek, even though Qualcomm performed better than outsiders were expecting, internally, Qualcomm was expecting slightly higher numbers.

Going forward, Qualcomm will try to push its popular Snapdragon architecture into more segments behond smartphones, including tablets based on Microsoft's Windows operating system.
Posted by Shri Krishna

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