General Gaming Article |
- Hard Drive Shortage Could Hurt Cloud Computing
- Gigabyte Plans to Join the UEFI Party With a Twist on Upcoming X79 Boards
- Google Claims It Isn’t a Monopoly; They Just “Got Lucky”
- AOL Still Has 3.5 Million Dialup Subscribers
| Hard Drive Shortage Could Hurt Cloud Computing Posted: 06 Nov 2011 10:43 AM PST
"You really can't grow and expand the Internet without the expansion of storage hard drives," explained John Monroe, research vice president at Gartner. "There are an awful a lot of ramifying impacts that are being incompletely considered here." Google and Facebook are noted by Monroe as examples of companies that consume an immense amount of data, and the cost of storing it could become exponentially more expensive in the coming months. It is estimated by analysts that hard drive manufacturers will ship 50 million fewer drives than usual over the next two quarters, and Seagate has suggested it might be even higher. "By the first quarter of next year, all worldwide inventories of hard drives will be sucked dry," Monroe warned. "This is a crisis of escalating dimension for many I.T. revenue streams." Monroe said that the impact from the flooding are yet to be felt across the industry. You could argue that PC makers should transition more aggressively to SSD's for storage, even though these prices will likely also spike due to increased demand, but datacenters don't have that luxury. Backup plants in the Philippines, Malaysia, and China won't be much help either. Almost every facility surveyed is already operating at 90% capacity or more. |
| Gigabyte Plans to Join the UEFI Party With a Twist on Upcoming X79 Boards Posted: 06 Nov 2011 09:58 AM PST
The company has released a short 3 minute video showing off its new glasses free 3D Bios, demonstrated on a board equipped 3D power. This description suggests the marketing folks over at Gigabyte are still alive and well, just in case you were worried. Silly made up buzzwords aside, the concepts shown are somewhat interesting, and we certainly can't fault them for not being original. Users for example can hover over components on the board to learn more about them, and even left click to access specific configuration settings for the highlighted component. To expand on this a bit, clicking on the SATA ports would allow you to configure a RAID setup, while clicking on the CPU brings up overclocking options. The UEFI shown will debut on its upcoming X79 boards using Intel's Patsburg chipset, and is expected to release within the next few months. Gigabyte will also to offer a "non-3D" version of the UEFI it is calling "advanced mode", which it claims will be more suitable for power users. From the looks of it most power users could probably make do with the 3D interface alone, but we have always been big fans of choice. Gigabyte may be late to the party, but based on the video, it's an impressive first showing. |
| Google Claims It Isn’t a Monopoly; They Just “Got Lucky” Posted: 06 Nov 2011 09:10 AM PST
Google's ex-CEO turned executive chairman, Eric Schmidt, was on Capital Hill recently to defend his company against anti-competitive allegations, and the details are finally beginning to trickle out. We wouldn't begin to consider ourselves qualified to pass judgment on the charges, though we can say that some of the statements made in his company's defense might be a bit of a stretch. When asked to explain why Google should not be characterized as a monopoly despite its "overwhelmingly dominate" position, Schmidt claims they were blessed with "good luck". "I am confident that Google competes vigorously with a broad range of companies that go well beyond just Microsoft's Bing and Yahoo, and that Google has none of the characteristics that I associate with market power." He went on to claim that in just two years, Bing has reached the size of Google in 2007. The partial transcript reveals similar responses with regards to Android, search engine optimizations, and the controversy surrounding the possible misuse of content from Yelp. The theme Schmidt seems to be establishing is a resounding "not guilty". Opponents seemed content to hear him out, but when given the opportunity to respond they seemed pretty unconvinced. "Unfortunately, Eric Schmidt's answers avoid answering the key questions while continuing to deny facts that are becoming obvious to early everyone else," American Consumer Institute president Steve Pociask said in a statement. Schmidt's "responses today are in keeping with Google's 'trust us' attitude and disdain for anyone who dares question Google's motives and practices," said Ben Hammer, a spokesman for the FairSearch.org coalition Google has always claimed that competition is just one mouse click away, and though that may be true, you could also make the argument that the barrier to entry from a technical stand point is at an all-time high. To beat Google the competition not only needs to be twice as good as the established brand, but it needs to hit a moving target. Google has literally thousands of engineers working to improve the service, some of the brightest minds of our time, and an almost bottomless pit of resources to pump into R&D. Investigators have a difficult task ahead of them, and the stakes are high. Where do you fall on the issue? |
| AOL Still Has 3.5 Million Dialup Subscribers Posted: 06 Nov 2011 08:15 AM PST
Want another amazing statistic? According to AOL the average paid tenure of its subscribers is up to a whopping 10.6 years. This would suggest that the company's remaining subscribers are either fiercely loyal, or many simply haven't checked their credit card statements recently. Either way it's a strong reminder that our governments need to work harder to provide proper broadband to all at reasonable prices.
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The impact of flooding in Thailand on PC inventories going into the holiday has been widely reported, but an obvious connection we've been missing has been raised by the New York Times, and it's an important one. According to 
Gigabyte lead the initial charge with early support for boot drivers bigger than 2.2TB, but while others worked on fixing this with UEFI implementations, they instead kept plugging away on the bios. The company claimed to be using a "HybridEFI", but let's be clear here. HybridEFI is a marketing term; it actually has nothing to do with EFI as we know it. When asked about the obvious oversight, Gigabyte claimed they wanted to do it right, and we finally have a chance to 
The supply of AOL 
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