General Gaming Article

General Gaming Article

Social Analyzer App "ThinkUp" Hits Version 1.0

Posted: 15 Nov 2011 03:01 PM PST

thinkupThere's no denying that social media has changed the way a lot of people conduct business and relationships. Although, organizing all that valuable data is a major pain. Software developer and former Lifehacker Gina Trapani has been working to change that with ThinkUp, a server-based app that assembles, archives, and analyzes your social life. ThinkUp shed its beta label today as it hit 1.0.

ThinkUp can be used to aggregate data from Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. Once that data is stored safely on a ThinkUp server, it can be parsed in various ways with easy searching, and data visualization charts. It can even read geocodes attached to postings and can show them on a map. Users can take any conversation, or bit of data and embed it on a website or blog.

In the future, ThinkUp will become more extensible with support for plug-ins, and hopefully easier set up. The new version can also be run on Amazon EC2. ThinkUp is free and open source, so take a look if the tweets are overwhelming you.

A Kindle Fire Meets Its End At The Hands of iFixit

Posted: 15 Nov 2011 02:47 PM PST

kindle fireThe Kindle Fire is likely to be a hot item this holiday season, but you don't want to take yours apart just to see how it works. Luckily, iFixit has a Kindle Fire that was destined for such a fate. They report that the Fire is quite easy to take apart, not unlike the very similar BlackBerry PlayBook. 

So iFixit has sorted out who makes what in the Kindle Fire, which will soon let them assemble a definitive parts list and build price. There is the Texas Instruments SoC at the heart, along with Samsung RAM, and an LG screen in the Fire. A big plus for repairability is the easily removable screen which is not glued to the glass as it is in many other devices.

Unsurprisingly, a large portion of the innards are taken up by a battery packing 4400mAh. The main board is at the bottom of the device, and the casing comes apart in tow solid pieces with a little prying. Check out iFixit, which is still updating with additional pics of the teardown. 

Facebook Feed Getting Too Adult? It's Not Just You

Posted: 15 Nov 2011 02:29 PM PST

fbIt's not uncommon to see a free iPad scam pop up in your Facebook feed, but the latest apparent hack is a little more about shock than profit. An as yet unknown attack appears to be flooding some users' feeds with images of gore and pornography. Facebook has acknowledged an increase in reports of such content, and is investigating.

Early indications from Facebook engineers point to a coordinated attack of unknown origin using cross-site scripting (XSS). Many Facebook threats spread through the use of click-bait and faked links that then hijack an account. The primary purpose for these attacks is financial gain, but this time the attackers seem to just be riling people up.

Anonymous has been put forth as a possible perpetrator, but the hacktivist groups usually takes responsibility for its shenanigans. Users that have been compromised can find a tutorial to fix the situation here. Anyone seen anything untoward in a Facebook feed lately?

Is Your SATA Cable Slowing Down Your Data Transfers? Max PC Investigates

Posted: 15 Nov 2011 01:04 PM PST

Is your SATA cable slowing you down? Maximum PC investigates

We had a recent incident in our lab where SATA 6Gb/s performance inexplicably dropped going from one motherboard to the next. In theory, both boards should have offered the same performance on the SATA 6Gb/s port as both used the same south bridge chip in the board and the same SSD. When we couldn't diagnose it as drivers or a mis-configured benchmark run, we decided to swap out the SATA cable for a "real" SATA 6Gb/s cable. Like magic, the performance went back to what we expected.

This got us wondering if there is actually a need to run "real" SATA 6GB/s cables with high performance SSDs. The official word from the SATA International Organization is no, not at all. The SATA I/O lays it out in its FAQ: "Question: Does SATA 6Gb/s require different connectors and cables to support the higher transfer speed? Answer: The same cables and connectors used for current SATA 1.5 and SATA 3.0 Gb/s implementations can be used to connect SATA 6Gb/s devices, although SATA-IO recommends quality components be selected to ensure data integrity and robust operation at the faster SATA 6Gb/s transfer rate. Keeping the existing SATA connector form factor enables SATA 6Gb/s to be designed into the same cost-conscious hardware architectures while minimizing infrastructure changes."

If you think about it, that's a pretty amazing feat. SATA 150 on motherboards dates back to at least 2002. It's almost like asking a cable that you bought for USB in 1997 to handle the throughput of USB 3.0. Hell, even Parallel ATA went through several revisions including those much coveted 80-conductor cables. Over its lifetime.

To put SATA to the test, we grabbed a fistful of cables including two that date back to the early days of SATA. How do we know they're that old? While the cables aren't dated, we pulled them out of vintage motherboard boxes that have been moldering in our lab. One was an Intel 875P board, the other an nForce 2 board. The rest were culled from the floor, cabinets and various places that SATA cables end up. One cable was an expensive Adaptec SATA cable that came with a RAID card, another a cheapo 36-inch (just short of the maximum length of 3.3 feet while another tested was a tiny pig-tail SATA cable with a run length of about 5-inches.  For a final fun test, we decided to use several SATA cable extenders to join several 36-inch SATA cables together—in effect creating a 9-foot SATA cable that we literally stretched across the room.

To conduct our test, we used an Asus motherboard with Intel's latest peripheral controller hub and its blisteringly fast SATA 6Gb/s performance. The drive we tapped was a 240GB OWC Mercury Extreme Pro SSD. The Mercury Extreme Pro uses a Sandforce 2nd gen controller and is among the fastest SSDs for sale today. To measure the performance we used CrystalDiskMark 3.0.1 and ran the benchmarks' sequential read and write score three times. All of the cables were plugged into the same SATA port.

The Verdict

Let's first say that when we started this, we were absolutely sure we'd see a difference. Afterall, moving to an authentic SATA 6Gb/s cable cleared up our problems the first time right? Wrong. As we worked our way through the first few cables, we began to realize that the SATA I/O did its work when it first put together the Serial ATA spec for cables. There is virtually no difference between a brand-new SATA 6Gb/s marked cable made this year and one produced nearly eight years ago as far as performance goes. Expensive cable, cheap cable; long cable, short cable—none of it seemingly made a real difference. If anything, the minor variances in performance can be attributed to variances in the benchmark or the SSD.

During our testing, we also tested out a couple of often not recommended practices: bending your SATA cable at right angles. Many motherboard vendors recommend against putting right-angles into the cables during system builds so we took a cable and put about 15 right-angle kinks in it: no difference. We also took a 36-inch cable and tightly wrapped around a hot PSU cable: no difference.

What about joining two 36-inch cables end-to-end using male-to-male connectors? That's about 30-inches outside the SATA spec for cable length: No. Frakking. Difference.  The only thing that stopped SATA dead in its tracks was running three 36-inch SATA cables end-to-end using cable No. 3, No. 4 and No 11. That's nine feet of cables kids. Don't try this at home!

Since we didn't want to just bunch it up on the desk, we stretched it across the lab and then used a remote PSU to run the OWC Mercury Extreme Pro drive. Surprisingly, we saw roughly 250MB/s read speeds but write speeds, where we suspect the controller and protocol are a little more stringent plunged down to 25MB/s. The benchmark ultimately failed due to read and write errors to the device. It didn't always fail, but we wouldn't entrust our data to it.

So what does this tell us? The SATA cable is an incredibly robust cable. It's the cockroach or AK of computer cables. That's not bad and we certainly wish all computer cables performed that way. We've certainly had our share of wonky USB support thanks to really borderline USB cables.

But what about our original motherboard test where switching cables fixed it? Looking at our data now, we suspect the more likely culprit was a bad cable, a dirty connector or a connector that wasn't seated. It's a reminder that a single instance isn't enough to create a trend. Our hats off to the SATA I/O for a pretty damned robust cable spec.

Benchmarks
Read (MB/s) Write (MB/s)
Cable No. 1 508 224
Cable No. 2 507 222
Cable No. 3 508 225
Cable No. 4 505 230
Cable No. 5 509 222
Cable No. 6 506 222
Cable No. 7 506 224
Cable No. 8 506 224
Cable No. 9 505 223
Cable No. 10 509 233
Cable No. 11 508 223
Cable No. 12 509 224
72-inch SATA cable conversion 510 223
108-inch SATA cable conversion Fail Fail

Our tests were performed with a 240GB OWC Mercury Pro SSD on an Intel SATA 6Gb/s controller.

No BS Podcast #181: Turning The Heat Up To 11

Posted: 15 Nov 2011 12:40 PM PST

If you'll recall, we lost 20 minutes of the last No BS Podcast to the Macbook Pro in the podcast recording studio. For this week's episode, it ate a mere 10 minutes of the rant. So thank you, Macbook, for screwing us somewhat less than you did last time. But don't fret--even without those 10 minutes, you're getting a solid hour of news and discussion about ultrabooks, Battlefield 3, the most high-tech thermostat ever, and more.

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.

 

Android App of the Week – DoubleTwist Player

Posted: 15 Nov 2011 11:21 AM PST

Despite Android's majority market share, Android lags behind both iOS and Windows Phone when it comes to its music ecosystem and stock apps. The flip side of this coin are the third-party developers who can create music apps that take advantage of the openness of the Android platform. One of the best third-party music apps for Android is the freshly updated DoubleTwist.

Many mobile developers struggle to find the balance between offering a usable interface for a small touch screen and providing enough features to contend with the competition. DoubleTwist does an admirable job providing the most popular functions on the surface of the app without overwhelming the user, but still letting power users access all of the features and tools they desire.

With the latest update (1.6.1), DoubleTwist improves with a redesigned home screen and offers quick access to your favorite artists, albums, songs, and playlists. The "playing" screen now displays album art, and allows you to swipe to the left or right to switch tracks.

 

Premium upgrades for DoubleTwist provide additional functionality at a cost. AirSync lets you wirelessly synchronize music from your PC to your Android, and will also stream your media to an Xbox, PS3, or Apple TV. The Music Lover upgrade adds a graphic equalizer, letting you fine-tune your sound to your listening preferences.

Get DoubleTwist Player from the Android Market as a free download. Upgrades are available as in-app downloads for $4.99 each, or as a bundle for $8.99.

 

Fast Forward: Underclocking to Save Energy

Posted: 15 Nov 2011 11:08 AM PST

Not many of us could convince our bosses that we're most efficient when working slowly. But then, we aren't microprocessors. For decades, researchers have known that processors achieve peak energy efficiency when their transistors operate at very low voltages near the threshold between their on and off states. Unfortunately, the circuits also become unstable at those low voltages. Nevertheless, Intel is trying to apply that research to future products.

The technology is called near-threshold voltage (NTV) computing. In effect, it's extreme underclocking. PC users are more familiar with overclocking—cranking up the processor's clock frequency and/or voltage to squeeze out more performance. Although overclocking works, it consumes more power—a small price to pay when we're hungry for speed.

However, the price isn't always small. Big data centers are sometimes limited by the electrical grid's local capacity, and their cooling often gobbles more power than the servers do. At the other end of the spectrum, mobile devices must save energy to lengthen battery life and to keep from becoming too hot to handle.

Today's processors can't operate much below 1.0V. Intel has an experimental x86 processor (Claremont) rumored to work at 0.6–0.7V. Although that difference may seem tiny, it's actually huge. Intel says the chip remains fully active (not in sleep mode) while sipping less than 10 milliwatts—low enough to run on a small solar cell.

The sacrifice is raw performance. Clock speed drops dramatically, but power efficiency (performance per watt) is five times higher. When more performance is needed, boosting the voltage drives the processor to its full clock speed.

Future processors could run some or all CPU cores at NTV levels most of the time. Stabilizing the circuits requires fine-tuning, though. With its own fabs, Intel has a potential advantage over competitors that outsource manufacturing to independent foundries.

Microsoft Tweaks Windows Update's Automatic Restarts In Windows 8

Posted: 15 Nov 2011 10:53 AM PST

One of the minor annoyances of computer usage is needing to restart your computer. Yeah, it doesn't take too long – especially if you have a speedy SSD drive – but it's still downtime that interrupts your previously scheduled Skyrim time. Microsoft has been working to reduce the number of restarts required to run a computer, buy hey, they still need to happen every now and again. Windows 8 will make some changes to the Windows Update and automatic restart process to make restarts as infrequent and unobtrusive as possible.

Unless a critical update is pushed out, your Windows 8 PC will only restart once per month, on Patch Tuesday. "With this improvement, it does not matter when updates that require restarts are released in a month, since these restarts will wait till the security release," Microsoft's Farzana Rahman writes on the Building Windows 8 blog.

Once the security update is downloaded, Windows 8 will prompt you to install the updates and restart your PC for three days, using a message on the login screen. "You will no longer see any pop-up notifications or dialogs about pending restarts," Rahman writes, so you won't have to worry about a prompt interrupting you in the midst of a streaming movie – or an important business presentation.

If you haven't told the computer to restart by the end of those three days, Windows 8 will restart your computer automatically. If you have any "critical applications" open, it won't automatically restart until the next time you log in, at which point a 15 minute countdown timer will be displayed and you'll  be warned to save your data before time runs out. You won't be able to postponethe restart the way you can on current Windows 7 and Vista.

So, Maximum PC readers, will you miss the ability to delay restarts in Windows 8 (beyond the three days, that is), or does the lack of in-use prompts make up for it?

Kingston Launches HyperX Genesis Memory Kits for Sandy Bridge-E

Posted: 15 Nov 2011 10:41 AM PST

Assuming you decide to build a new PC around Intel's Sandy Bridge-E platform or upgrade your existing rig to X79, one thing you won't have to worry about is finding quad-channel memory kits. Plenty of memory makers have stepped to the plate with four and eight DIMM kits, including Kingston, which launched a range of quad-channel HyperX Genesis DDR3 kits in 8GB, 16GB, and 32GB capacities.

There are ten new kits in all, starting with an 8GB package of DDR3-1333 memory for $65, and going all the way up to a 32GB kit of DDR3-1600 for $218. The most expensive memory kit is actually a 16GB package of DDR3-2133 RAM that's priced at $318.

"Our latest HyperX offerings are specifically made to maximize performance in Intel's new Core i7 3960X or 3930K processors with quad-channel memory support," said Mark Tekunoff, senior technology manager, Kingston. "HyperX Genesis for the X79 platform will scale new overclocking heights for extreme gamers, benchmarkers, content creators and enthusiasts."

More pricing information and details available here.

Image Credit: Kingston

Netflix Redesigns Streaming App for Android, iPad Overhaul Coming Soon

Posted: 15 Nov 2011 10:24 AM PST

Netflix today rolled out a fully redesigned version of its streaming application for tablets on all Android tablets, including the Kindle Fire and Nook Tablet. According to Netflix, the layout is "much more immersive" with a greater focus on titles in the company's catalog. Netflix also managed to squeeze twice as many movies and TV shows into the interface as before.

"Also, we've taken greater advantage of the tablet's unique features, inviting you to swipe through rows of titles featuring larger artwork," Netflix said in a blog post.

What about iPad users? Netflix said a version for iPad will be available "in the coming weeks," but didn't provide a release date.

Image Credit: Netflix
Posted by Shri Krishna

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