General Gaming Article |
- Google+ Gets New Features
- Apple Wins Import Ban on HTC Android Phones
- The AT&T/T-Mobile Merger is Dead
- Chrome Web App of the Week: Google Finance
- Steam Holiday Sale Goes Live With An Epic Giveaway And Lumps Of Valuable Coal
- Build It: The Ultimate Windows Home Server
- Online Holiday Shopping Tops $30 Billion in the U.S.
- Windows 8 Mixes Personal Pictures And Custom Gestures For Log In Passwords
- Skype Offers Free Airport Wi-Fi For The Holidays
- Microsoft Pulls "Incomplete" Bulldozer Patch
| Posted: 19 Dec 2011 03:01 PM PST
A change to the stream aims to make it easier to find the content that is most important to the user. When viewing posts from a single Circle, users can use a slider to set the relative importance of that Circle. This changes the prominence of posts from the Circle in the main timeline. If you want to see everything that Circle posts, go for it. Just a little? Also possible. Notifications have been given an overhaul with clearer descriptions, and previews of content. The layout is also much better. Lastly, Google has finally fixed Pages by allowing Page owners to set up to 50 managers for a page. These managers will have a second notification system that clues them into the happenings on that account. Will all this get you on Google+ more? | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Apple Wins Import Ban on HTC Android Phones Posted: 19 Dec 2011 02:41 PM PST
The ruling comes down to U.S. Patent #5,946,647, which as we all know is a low-level system patent that covers the analysis and linking data structures. Disturbingly for Google, this technically leaves all of Android exposed to similar actions, not just HTC. Though, separate cases would need to be filed to ban more devices. Google and HTC may be able to avoid the sales ban if they are able to patch this part of the system. HTC claims to be working on it. The case will go to the president, who has the option to veto the ban. However, the executive branch rarely interferes with these cases. If the ban happens as currently planned, HTC will be able tin import refurbished phones until December of 2013. This story is still developing, so stay tuned. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| The AT&T/T-Mobile Merger is Dead Posted: 19 Dec 2011 02:22 PM PST
"The AT&T and T-Mobile USA combination would have offered an interim solution to this spectrum shortage. In the absence of such steps, customers will be harmed and needed investment will be stifled," AT&T's statement read. AT&T's 4G spectrum licenses are not as extensive as its nearest competitor, Verizon. As a result of killing the merger, AT&T has to pay T-Mobile a whopping $4 billion in cash and other assets. Considering the massive disruption in its business, that might not be enough to really compensate T-Mobile, but we're sure they will be happy to take it. To consider giving away all that cash, AT&T must have seen little hope after the thrashing it got from the FCC. The commission released a scathing report after AT&T withdrew its original merger request, and the DOJ was no fan of AT&T either. The most likely course of action now could be a spectrum sharing deal between the carriers. T-Mobile holds some 1900MHz licenses that are compatible with AT&T devices, and AT&T could reciprocate with some LTE data. Only time will tell if little T-Mobile tries to find another suitor. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Chrome Web App of the Week: Google Finance Posted: 19 Dec 2011 11:56 AM PST
Google Finance provides users with the latest financial news, real-time stock quotes, domestic trend tracking of specific sectors and up-to-the-minute data on what's affecting the stock markets from around the world. For individuals who maintain a personal stock portfolio, Google Finance can provide customized tracking of your investments to see what companies are flying high and which ones are conspiring to put you in the poor house. If you're interesting in investing in a new stock, Google Finance also offers a Stock Screener that illustrates a given stock's market cap, P/E ratio, dividend yield percentage and 52 week price change in all four American exchanges.
While Google Finance won't make you a millionaire, it'll definitely make it easier to keep track of the markets a whole lot easier. Be sure to check back with us every Monday for another edition of Maximum PC's Chrome Web App of the Week.
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| Steam Holiday Sale Goes Live With An Epic Giveaway And Lumps Of Valuable Coal Posted: 19 Dec 2011 11:34 AM PST
How Epic is the Holiday Giveaway? How about "Every single game on Steam, absolutely free" epic? That's what the grand prize winner gets. Fifty first prize winners will nab the top 10 games on their Steam wishlist; 100 second prize winners will nab their top five. Finally, 1,000 coal-holders will be given the Valve Complete Pack. Every lump of coal you have in your possession at the end of the Holiday Sale on January 1st counts as an entry towards the Epic Holiday Giveaway, which is being drawn on January 2nd. You'll also need to have 10 games in your wish list to even be entered in the giveaway. If long odds aren't your thing, you can trade in seven lumps of coal for one of those randomly generated discounts/free games. Reformed Scrooges can gift or trade any items they win from the Great Gift Pile challenges – be it a discount, a free game or a lump of coal – to other Steamers as their hearts desire. Does the combination of deals and possible freebies make you more likely to boot up Steam and get to playing? | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Build It: The Ultimate Windows Home Server Posted: 19 Dec 2011 10:58 AM PST Despite Microsoft's apparent lack of love for Windows Home Server 2011—the company stripped Drive Extender from the final version, and good luck finding a retail Windows Home Server 2011 box in the U.S.—it's still a great server OS for a Windows-heavy home environment. Backups are effortless, streaming is hassle-free, it's easy to administer, and there are tons of add-ins available. Given a choice between buying an off-the-shelf product and building one myself, I'll opt for the build any day. And since you can't get a retail WHS box in the U.S. anyway, I figured what the heck. I pinged Michael Brown, our home network guru, for advice, and together we spec'd out a Home Server Dream Machine, with a real CPU to handle on-the-fly transcoding and all the storage you can eat. No, you can't buy a home server this nice anywhere. But if you like what you see, you can build one, too.
Ingredients
Building the Perfect ServerA home server is a different animal from a standard rig. Since they're designed to run headless, you don't need a monitor, keyboard, or mouse, except for the initial setup. Administration thereafter can be done remotely. You also don't need a discrete videocard. What do you need? A decent CPU and RAM, a boatload of hard drives, and the means to run them. Most off-the-shelf home servers ship with anemic Atom or ARM processors. I don't play that way. Intel's Core i5-2405S offers a quad-core 2.5GHz Sandy Bridge CPU with low power consumption and heat output. Its onboard video is nothing fancy, but good enough for the rare instances I'll need to use it. For my motherboard, I chose Gigabyte's GA-H67-USB3-B3. The H67 chipset lets me use the CPU's onboard graphics when I need to, its Mini-ITX form factor is perfect for a home server, and it's inexpensive. It also has 6Gb/s SATA, which will be useful for the boot drive, and USB 3.0, in case I need to plug in additional external storage. Fractal's Array R2 chassis was an obvious choice for this WHS build. It's beautiful, has a built-in 300W PSU with six SATA power leads, and has a drive tray that can hold up to six 3.5-inch hard drives. The most important part of this build, of course, is the storage. Windows Home Server needs at least 160GB for its install partition, so I picked a 1TB boot drive because they're not much more expensive than smaller-capacity drives. Because this server will hold backups of all my computers, as well as movies, music, and family photos, redundancy is important. Windows Home Server doesn't have native data redundancy or RAID support, so I had to roll my own. HighPoint's RocketRaid 2720SGL is a PCIe RAID card that supports up to eight SATA or SAS drives at 6Gb/s. I'm pairing it with five 3TB Seagate Barracuda XT drives. Assembling the HardwareBuilding the box was the easy part. The Fractal case is roomy and—once you remove the hard drive cage—easy to build into. I just mounted the CPU to the motherboard and installed the stock fan and RAM, then installed the motherboard and I/O shield into the case. The RAID card slots into the motherboard's solitary PCIe connector and fits into one of the case's two PCIe expansion slots. I secured the six hard drives into the hard drive cage with four screws each, then plugged the 1TB boot drive into one of the motherboard's 6Gb/s SATA ports with one of the mobo's included SATA cables, and the five 3TB drives into the HighPoint RAID card via the mini-SAS-to-SATA cable adapters. Since the build doesn't include an optical drive, I had to connect a USB optical drive in order to install Windows Home Server, the motherboard drivers, and the RAID software. If you don't have an optical drive, you can snag one for around $30, or you can use ImgBurn on your PC to create a disk image of your WHS install DVD, and use Microsoft's Windows 7 USB/DVD Download Tool to make a bootable USB drive. Configuring the SoftwareIf you've ever installed Windows 7, you know how to install WHS. Pick your language, select the primary hard drive (remember, we're installing onto the 1TB drive, not the 3TB drives), and go make a pizza or something. In about 20 minutes, the installer will let you know that it can't find a network driver (image below).
Insert the motherboard's driver disc, then open Device Manager and navigate to Other Devices. Right-click the Network Adapter and select Update Driver Software, then "Browse my computer for driver software". Navigate to your optical drive directory, then Network, then RLT8111. Select "include subdirectories." Your driver should install and prompt you to restart. Then the Home Server installer will continue configuring, before asking you to set the system time. Sync the time to the Internet and move on. Installing the RAID CardSoon you'll be presented with a familiar-looking desktop and a prompt to install device driver software for your RAID card. If you don't see the prompt, right-click the RAID card entry in Device Manager. Download the most recent Windows Vista/2008/7 drivers, as well as the WebGUI installer, from bit.ly/qgKOkc, extract the driver, zip to your desktop, and, following the same procedures as above, navigate to the x64 folder and let the device driver install. Reboot.
Extract the WebGUI folder, right-click Setup.exe, and select Run as Administrator (image above). Follow the prompts to install it, then click the WebGUI shortcut on the desktop. Login using the username and password you got during install (default: RAID/hpt). Creating the RAIDNavigate to Manage > Drives, and select Initialize Drives. You should see all five 3TB drives listed (image below, top). Select them all and hit Submit. Then go to Manage > Array, and select Create Array. Select all the drives and hit Submit. Now you have to choose a RAID level (image below, bottom). Since this is home backup, redundancy is important. I opted for RAID 6. RAID 6 is similar to RAID 5, except it uses two parity volumes, so it can tolerate failure of up to two drives without losing data. RAID 5 would have given us 12TB of usable space instead of the 9TB that RAID 6 gave us (out of 15TB total), but I felt the additional redundancy was worth it. Select Foreground initialization, Write Back cache policy, and 64KB block size. Create the maximum size RAID you can.
It's very important that you select the 4K sector size instead of the default 512B; otherwise Windows won't be able to see the whole 9TB array. Click Create. Now go away for about seven hours while the RAID builds. When you come back, verify that the RAID creation was successful, then you can go to the Dashboard. Moving the SharesClick Event Viewer, which should tell you that, hey, you have an unformatted hard disk available! Select "Format the hard disk" (image below) and you'll see the 9TB (well, 8,393GB) array you just created. Format it! Now, here's where it gets a little weird. Because WHS uses the .vhd virtual hard drive format for backing up, you can't actually create a volume larger than 2,040GB. Therefore, your 8,393GB array is now four 2,040GB partitions plus a 223GB partition. That's fine with me, as it provides a convenient way to categorize my shares.
Click "Server Folders and Hard Drives" in the Dashboard. You'll see folders for backups, documents, music, pictures, and video shares. I used the "Move the folder" command to assign each to a different partition, just to be fancy (image below).
Now you have a Windows Home Server! From here, you can connect to your home server from each of your home computers to set up backup and remote administration. Feel free to disconnect your monitor, keyboard, and mouse now, and do the rest of your administration and configuration remotely. Just navigate to http://[your server's name]/Connect from any of your home computers to download the Home Server Connect software. Serving Up AwesomeProperly configured, a Windows Home Server is a joy to own because it hooks in so well to the rest of the Windows ecosystem. It's easy to set up server-side backups of your home computers, designate per-user or HomeGroup read/write access, and configure media streaming options and remote web access, all from within the Dashboard on your PC (image G).
With 9TB of storage, my Windows Home Server offers plenty of space to back up my home computers and serve as the central repository for all my media. Add-ins can offer additional functionality; for tips on good add-ins I like the community site WeGotServed.com. If this Home Server build seems like overkill to you, there are a number of ways to lower the price. If you don't need two-disk redundancy, you can go from RAID 6 to RAID 5; this will let you go from five disks to four while still tolerating single-drive failures. Or you could save $170 by eliminating the RAID card and cables altogether, and just use the SATA ports on the motherboard. You'll be limited to four drives, and you'll lose the hardware RAID options, but Windows Home Server doesn't require RAID, and given the 2TB limit on its virtual volumes, you might prefer independent disks anyway.
Windows Home Server is a lot easier to configure than was FreeNAS 7 the last time I took a look at it. I'll be taking a look at FreeNAS 8.1 when it arrives, but this build has me convinced that the $60 for Windows Home Server 2011 is well worth the price, especially if you have a Windows-centric home. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Online Holiday Shopping Tops $30 Billion in the U.S. Posted: 19 Dec 2011 10:54 AM PST
In the most recent week alone, consumers spent more than $1 billion online on four separate days, with Green Monday (Monday December 12) at $1.13 billion and Free Shipping Day (Friday, December 16) at $1.07 billion the two biggest shopping days of last week. "More than $1 billion in spending on Free Shipping Day put the exclamation point on what will almost certainly be the heaviest week of the online holiday shopping season," said comScore chairman Gian Fulgoni. "Four individual days surpassed $1 billion in spending this week, with Green Monday leading the way at $1.13 billion. While next week may see another strong day or two at the beginning of the week, it's clear that we have now reached the crescendo for this season and that spending will begin to slow as we get closer to Christmas, leaving Cyber Monday as the top ranked shopping day for the second year in a row." It appears that holiday deals, such as discounts and free shipping promotions, were frontloaded during the earlier portion of the holiday season, a decision that paid off big time. "Free shipping is undoubtedly one of the most important incentives for consumers and has become a key driver of online buying activity over the past few years," Fulgoni added. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Windows 8 Mixes Personal Pictures And Custom Gestures For Log In Passwords Posted: 19 Dec 2011 10:51 AM PST We won't delve too far into it again – why beat a dead horse? – but research has proven that most people's passwords suck, plain and simple. Sophisticated geeks may shrug their shoulders and simply laugh at the newbs, but it's in Microsoft's interest to build a secure operating system – hence the whole Secure Boot thing. The company's taking an interesting approach to passwords in the upcoming Windows 8, one that mixes personal pictures and touch/mouse gestures to create a log in experience that Microsoft claims is both faster and more secure than traditional alphanumeric passwords.
It all starts with a picture; any picture stored on your device, in fact. After you select a picture, you then use touch or mouse gestures (depending on which flavor of hardware you're rolling with) to highlight parts of the image with circles, lines and taps. In the example shown above and on the blog post unveiling the scheme, the user circled the Dad's head, tapped the mom's nose and drew a line between the sisters' schnozzes. After being set, that series of gestures – including their drawn-in direction and starting and end points – becomes the new password for your account. (Presumably a traditional alphanumeric version should still be included.) We can already hear you screaming "BUT THE SMUDGES WILL GIVE IT AWAY!" Cool down, cool down. Microsoft says the fact that direction and start/end points counts still make it more secure than a standard PIN code, and program manager Zach Pace even uses a bunch of math to prove it at the end of his blog post. So, what do you think of the new password scheme? Is it novel or stupid? Are you, like me, worried that your sloppy fingers might lock you out of your PC after a night at the pub? | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Skype Offers Free Airport Wi-Fi For The Holidays Posted: 19 Dec 2011 10:17 AM PST
You'll need to have Skype installed on your laptop or the Skype WiFi app installed on your iOS device to claim that free hour, of course, and you'll also need a valid Skype ID. Between December 21st and 27th, you'll find you can use Skype WiFi to log in to the hotspot offered at supported airports. The blog post announcing the freebie suggests you use the time to call your loved ones with Skype, but if you, say, wanted to check out the latest postings on MaximumPC.com, you'll be able to do that to. Intrigued? This page has an interactive map that lets you know which airports are participating. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Microsoft Pulls "Incomplete" Bulldozer Patch Posted: 19 Dec 2011 09:32 AM PST
"AMD and Microsoft are continually working to improve hardware and software for our shared customers. As part of our joint work to optimize the performance of 'Bulldozer' architecture-based AMD processors we collaborating on a scheduler update to the Windows 7 code-base. The code associated with this KB is incomplete and should not be used," Microsoft revised knowledegebase article reads. The patch was intended to address SMT (simultaneously multithreading) support and better harness the power of 8-core processing with AMD's Bulldozer architecture, which is optimized for Windows 8. Turns out two patches are needed. "There are actually two updates needed for AMD Bulldozer CPU architecture," an AMD spokesperson told BrightSideOfNews. "Microsoft posted just the first patch and we do not believe users would benefit in any way from it. The patch was originally scheduled for the first quarter 2012 and then the users will see tangible performance benefits when using Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 operating systems." So if you're an AMD Bulldozer user, sit tight and wait for Microsoft and AMD to square things away in the coming months. |
Google has let loose with a torrent of updates to its Google+ social network in advance of the new year. Among the 
It's been over a year since Apple began its legal battle against Android in general, and HTC in particular. After a long review of the evidence, the International Trade Commission (ITC) has ruled in favor of Apple and 
It's been a long hard climb up the mountain for AT&T as it sought regulatory approval for its $39 billion purchase of T-Mobile USA. Well, it looks like AT&T will never see that mountaintop. The carrier has 
While many of us are busy preparing to toast and dine with our friends and extended families over the next few weeks, some industrious folk are still grinding away, foregoing the joys that the season affords for the sake of squeezing a few additional pennies out of the markets before they close for the holidays. For those who of you who prefer to wash their eggnog down with a bit of work, there's Google Finance, our Chrome Web App of the Week.
PC gaming is awesome. Steam is awesome. Getting free stuff is always awesome. Mix all three and what do you get? This year's Steam Holiday Sale, which kicked off today. In addition to the usual savings, this year's sale includes multiple daily "Great Gift Pile" challenges, which give you a chance to win additional discounts (and maybe even free games) every day. If you don't win, you'll get a lump of coal, instead, which sucks compared to a free game at first glance – but those lumps of coal are the key to the cool things being doled out in the Epic Holiday Giveaway.
Tis the season to spend, spend, and spend some more, and it doesn't look like online shoppers are having any trouble doing that, and then some. According to Internet marketing research company comScore, holiday retail e-commerce spending for the first 46 days of the November to December 2011 season is $30.9 billion to date, up 15 percent compared to the same period one year ago.
Few things matter more than a solid Internet connection when you're a geek on the run. Along those lines, you can find decent Wi-Fi at airports, but you'll pay through the nose to access it – most of the time, that is. Skype's pulling its best Santa Claus impression and gifting fliers (naughty or nice) with an hour of free Wi-Fi at 50 airports across the U.S. during the peak holiday travel season.
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