General Gaming Article |
- Google+ Now Allows You To Share Circles
- Android Market Share Rises to 43%, iPhone Holds Steady at 28%
- Spotify Now Requires Facebook Log In for New Users
- The Star Trek PC: To Boldly Go Where No PC Has Gone Before
- Asus Matrix GTX 580 Platinum Review
- Acer and Asus Aiming to Ship 200,000 Ultrabooks a Month in Q4
- Chrome Web App of the Week: Quick Note
- Is Google to Blame for High Priced Honeycomb Tablets?
- CEOs' Golden Parachutes Have Cost HP $80m Since 2005
- Netflix and DreamWorks Sign Multi-Year Pact, Kung Fu Panda Coming in...2013?
| Google+ Now Allows You To Share Circles Posted: 26 Sep 2011 03:01 PM PDT
To share a Circle, just click on the Circle in question and choose Share. This will pull up the familiar composition field where you can choose who to share it with. Anyone that you've deemed fit to see the post will be able to see and add the people in the Circle, but not the name of it (that's always private). The Circle can be shared with any of your Circles, or made public (where's Xzibit?).This is a one-time post, so no one else will see future modifications to the shared Circle unless you share it again. As usual, the feature is rolling out gradually, so get those Circles in shape. Will you take advantage of this? Any Circles you want to share? | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Android Market Share Rises to 43%, iPhone Holds Steady at 28% Posted: 26 Sep 2011 02:40 PM PDT
The introduction of RIM's new BB OS7 phones in August seems to have made little difference as the Canadian company's share dropped a point to 18%. Microsoft is sitting down around 6 points, but no notable device have been launched recently. Redmond is hoping that the new Windows Phone 7 Mango update will spur adoption. In just the month of August, 56% of new smartphone purchases were Android-based devices. With over half of users expected to have a smartphone by the end of the year, Google is in a good position, but the iPhone 5 will give Android a run for its money. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Spotify Now Requires Facebook Log In for New Users Posted: 26 Sep 2011 02:25 PM PDT
New users that hit the Spotify sign up page are now confronted by a message informing them they must either sign in with Facebook, or create a Facebook account. A Spotify employee posted to a heated Get Satisfaction thread today to expand on the new policy. Yes, new users have to sign in with Facebook, and that's just the way it is. Existing users are currently unaffected, but no one has to actively use Facebook features in Spotify. With over 800 million users, most new Spotify sign-ups will already have a Facebook account. But with the frequent security concerns, we have to question the wisdom of forcing people to use Facebook. Would this make you less likely to checkout the free Spotify service? | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| The Star Trek PC: To Boldly Go Where No PC Has Gone Before Posted: 26 Sep 2011 01:31 PM PDT To Boldly Go Where No PC Has Gone Before
Every year, Maximum PC does outreach at the annual nerdathon known as Comic-Con. For the 2011 convention, we wanted to make a big splash by combining two subjects dear to our hearts: Star Trek and PCs. But just how do you do that? We decided to enlist the aid of MaximumPC.com columnist and former Star Trek writer David Gerrold, creator of the beloved episode "The Trouble with Tribbles." Gerrold's vision of the ultimate PC served as the foundation for our Comic-Con creation. Crafting such a PC wasn't something we could do entirely in-house, though, so we tasked legendary Star Trek designer Michael Okuda with creating a blueprint for the custom case, and we had MNPCTech.com fabricate a machine worthy of representing the best TV series of all time. Read on to learn how it all came together. Getting the Insides RightTHE MAN WHO BROUGHT US THE TRIBBLE IS ALSO A COMPUTER ENTHUSIAST MaximumPC.com columnist David Gerrold has written more than 50 books, won the coveted Hugo and Nebula awards for science fiction writing, and penned scripts for The Twilight Zone, Sliders, and Babylon 5. Despite his extensive portfolio, David will likely always be remembered as the man who invented the tribble with his script for the original series episode "The Trouble with Tribbles." Given his association with Maximum PC, it stands to reason that David doesn't need just a typewriter on steroids—he wants a badass rig.
For processor and chipset, David requested Intel's Sandy Bridge 3.4GHz Core i7-2600K using an LGA1155 motherboard. Although David initially seemed like a good candidate for Intel's six-core Core i7-990X, he decided that the better upgrade path of LGA1155 and comparable performance in apps that aren't optimized for six cores was worth the trade-off. This gives him a machine that's compatible with Intel's Ivy Bridge CPUs when they're available early next year. By using a Sandy Bridge part and a Z68 motherboard, David also gets access to Intel's superior native SATA 6Gb/s interface—something the aging LGA1366 platform sorely lacks. David's storage needs were also particular. "I want to run Windows 7 (Professional or Ultimate) as fast as possible. A 240GB SSD looks like the sweet spot to me, but my experience with hard drives is that they fill up fast. I want the largest and fastest SSD that's cost-effective. This is one place where bleeding edge, bragging rights, and overall usefulness are congruent," David said. "Inboard, I want two 3TB hard drives for data storage. I have more than 2TB of music in my collection and another 1TB of video files I'm editing. I'm tired of having them scattered across four or five smaller drives. With the hot-swappable drive bays, I can pop in a 3TB drive and back up/clone each of the inboard drives." To fit those requirements, we grabbed a pair of the same 3TB Seagate 7,200rpm hard drives that we used in this year's Dream Machine (September 2011 issue), along with a 240GB OCZ Vertex 3 SSD. RAM was also an important factor. "Ninety percent of what I do is research, so it's not unusual for me to have over 100 tabs open in Chrome. At the same time, i might be puttering around in Photoshop with six or eight large multilayered files. And I have several Excel spreadsheets I need to refer to during the day, at least three Filemaker Pro databases, and multiple files open in Word. My current machine is a 2.66GHz Core i7-920 with 9GB of RAM, but more than once, this machine has stuttered, hesitated, or simply frozen for a bit while it accessed the page-file on the hard drive," David said. "Obviously, 9GB of RAM is not enough and I suspect I could fill up 12GB just as easily. Ideally, I'd shoot for at least 16GB of the fastest RAM I could find—more if possible. There's no such thing as too much RAM. My ideal is to max out the motherboard." For the LGA1155 platform, the max today is 16GB, simply because no one (at press time) was producing 8GB DIMMs that aren't registered. Elsewhere in the rig, we opted to install a single GeForce GTX 580 instead of a GTX 590 (for thermal reasons), and a Sound Blaster X-Fi Fatal1ty Titanium to run David's 5.1 audio system. But what about the case? "So when I accepted this challenge/invitation, I said that this dream machine ought to look like it belongs on the Enterprise. It should evoke that same sense of simple but futuristic design, like the classic tricorder. For me, the original series is the real Star Trek. That's the starship I grew up on." Conceiving the Star Trek Look and FeelLEGENDARY GRAPHIC DESIGNER MICHAEL OKUDA CREATED A CASE THAT'S 'TRICORDER CHIC' Once we nailed down our hardware, we needed a proper enclosure for David's Star Trek-themed PC. We decided to mod a stock case to fit our needs, and we tapped graphic designer Michael Okuda to conceive it. Okuda wore many hats during his tenure with Star Trek, including lead graphic designer and technical consultant to the staff, but he's probably best known for his work creating the LCARS computer interface on Star Trek: The Next Generation. After accepting the task, Okuda said he started roughing out a few different designs, which he ultimately trashed because they started looking like big Star Trek toys.
"At a certain point, I thought 'this isn't doing Star Trek a service,'" Okuda said. Okuda never worked on the original series, but it's always held a special place in his heart. He grew up watching the show and admired the "genius" designs of Star Trek's original art director Matt Jefferies. Taking inspiration from the original tricorder, Okuda decided to apply a similar look and feel to the PC. That didn't mean just plastering Trek artifacts on the case, though. "There's elegance to what Jefferies did. He didn't cram every surface with details. There are accents and nice, smooth things to offset the busier areas. That gave his work a wonderful sense of functionality that I'm hoping comes across in the tricorder chic case." With his extensive production work on the Star Trek movies and all of the Star Trek sequel series, Okuda is all too familiar with the constraints of budgets and deadlines. That meant some design ideas had to go out the airlock. On top of the case, for instance, Okuda wanted to embed two functional touch screens that used Star Trek GUIs from the original show. But those fell by the wayside for practical reasons, as someone would have had to write the custom interface software from scratch. The original design also didn't anticipate the cooling needs of a modern PC, so a newer design featured a mesh grill in front. Since the PC was intended to showcase David Gerrold's most famous work for Star Trek, we requested that a tribble-bearing compartment be added. "I think the final vision does capture the spirit of Matt's original design. I hope it's something that David can look at and say it's a throwback to something that he's proud of." Taking It From Blueprint to BuildMNPCTECH.COM, CREATORS OF THE WEB SERIES MOD MEN, SEEMED LIKE THE PERFECT CHOICE FOR TURNING OKUDA'S DESIGN INTO A FUNCTIONAL ENCLOSURE To pull together David Gerrold's dream specs and Michael Okuda's enclosure design, Maximum PC turned to a professional mod shop. Bill Owen and his team at MNPCTech.com have been producing some of the coolest PC mods in their Minneapolis, Minnesota shop for more than 10 years. MNPCTech can do it all: mill it, paint it, design it—you name it. Some of the shop's mods are out-of-this-world impressive, but the Star Trek-themed PC presented particular challenges for the guys. "Given the short time frame we had in which to make two identical cases for Comic-Con, my biggest concern was making sure everything fit perfectly the first time, since there was no time to order material if we goofed," Owen said. Why two? We needed one to grace David Gerrold's man cave and the other to give away at Comic-Con. So they had to be functional and exactly the same, too. To fit our time and budget constraints, MNPCTech decided to mod an existing case—a LanCool PC-K58—rather than fashion an entire enclosure from scratch. The two cases took more than 150 hours to build, including the 3D modeling of the 25 individual parts used in each build. Our photo montage represents just a fraction of the work that went into the case.  The massive H-frame that went into the case's front bezel was milled out of a solid 1.5-inch billet of 6061 aluminum. That makes the case a beast. Empty, it weighs 70 pounds.  The side bezel was also constructed out of a billet of 6061 aluminum. In fact, Owen said they had never used so much aluminum in a PC mod before.  The smoked side windows were custom cut out of 1/8-inch-thick opaque red acrylic and 1/8-inch-thick gray cast acrylic. These were layered with the aluminum and the factory side panel.  The front grill was made with Modders' Mesh, which is 22-gauge perforated steel, and an Enterprise assignment patch was attached to the front. The mesh is functional—and retro, too.  The stock LanCool PC-K58's feet were removed in favor of beefier and cooler-looking machined case feet. The feet weren't custom made for this build, but are standard mod accessories.  With the sides and front attached, the Star Trek-themed PC starts to take shape. This shot also gives you an idea of how much work and aluminum went into just one of the computers.  To class up the LanCool's internals, Owen integrated a Lian-Li toolless PCI holder into the design. The matte black slot covers were jazzed up by painting them a glossy red.  David requested a media reader in the machine, so a SilverStone FP34S was integrated into the case. It's mounted in the aluminum and placed at an angle.  An aluminum compartment was milled out to house miniature tribbles for Comic-Con, but it can obviously be used to store PC detritus instead.  Like most of the case, chunks of aluminum were cut out and hand-sculpted or filed to create most of the latches and starship assignment patches.  The front panel sports a Bulgin orange-dot vandal-resistant power switch and a Sentey fan controller. The original plan of dual video screens got shelved for budgetary and deadline issues.  A silhouette of the iconic USS Enterprise, NCC-1701—no bloody A, B, C, D, or E—was cut into aluminum, painted black, and layered over additional aluminum. Yes, there is a deflector dish, too.  When on, the Yate Loon fan gives a nice blue accent to the Enterprise assignment patches, which, in the 2250s, were specific to particular starships and not used fleetwide, as they would be decades later.  Two MB877Sk-B Icy Docks get the storage job done. Both are active-cooled and don't require the use of a tray to hold the hard drive.  The final touch: David Gerrold's signature was digitized and cut into an aluminum plate that was added to the front of the machine. Behold: The Tricorder Chic PC!BEAMED STRAIGHT FROM THE 23RD CENTURY, THIS BABY IS FAST, FUNCTIONAL, AND RETRO-FUTURISTIC
Specifications
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| Asus Matrix GTX 580 Platinum Review Posted: 26 Sep 2011 12:33 PM PDT The ultimate GTX 580 is one big muthahThe Asus Matrix GTX 580 Platinum is quiet, fast, and really, really easy to overclock. It's also massive. How massive? When we got the box, we thought Asus had shipped us a motherboard by mistake because the box was so large. The size of the pacage is a clue to the size of the card itself. Asus builds a variant of its DirectCU II dual-fan technology onto the GTX 580, resulting in a card that's fully three expansion slots wide. If you ever plan on running two of these in SLI mode, you'll have to pick your motherboard carefully.
It's not just about the cooling, though. To get chips that will clock up, Asus cherry-picks the GPUs that get built onto the Platinum version of the Matrix GTX 580 (the company also sells a lower-clocked version). This card also requires two PCIe 8-pin power connectors—one more than the standard GTX 580. However, it's worth nothing that at the card's 816MHz core clock—not quite 6 percent above the stock 772MHz—this is one quiet GTX 580. With the case cover on, we could barely hear the fans spin up under full load. Even when we overclocked the card to 906MHz (more on that in a bit), the fan noise was quite low. The Matrix card offers some cool amenities. First, it's got manual transmission—there are buttons on the side of the card that allow you to manually adjust the voltage on the fly. There's another, larger button that runs the cooling fans at full speed when pressed. At full speed, the fans do get pretty loud, so use this sparingly, and only with extreme overclocks. One last button allows you to completely reset the card to its factory defaults (816MHz core, 1002MHz memory) if you've gone overboard with your overclocking attempts.
As with most high-end GPUs, the Matrix GTX 580 Platinum ships with overclocking software. The Asus GPU Tweak is one of the easiest such tools we've used. In its default state, the voltage and clock speeds are locked, so if you increase GPU core clocks, the voltage increases to maintain proper current. You decouple these if you want maximum manual control. As an experiment, we pumped up the core clock to 906MHz and memory clock to 1,015MHz. The core voltage went up from 1050mv to 1113mv. It doesn't seem like much, but it's worth noting that the system power draw under our full-load test increased from 369W to 420W. That's why Asus ships this puppy with two 8-pin power connectors. Asus claims that it's hit more than 1GHz on a GTX 580 just using the Matrix 580's air cooling. Note that you can actually burn the new settings into the BIOS, but the safe-mode button will rewrite them if you get into trouble.
We tested performance at the default 816MHz core/1,002MHz memory and the 906MHz core/1,015 memory clock speed settings. The result was an eye opener. Now, 906MHz is more than 17 percent higher than Nvidia's reference clock speed. The card was completely, utterly stable at those speeds—and pretty quiet, as well. And as the numbers show, we saw fairly substantial performance gains in many of our benchmarks. The Matrix GTX 580 Platinum does cost more than your average GTX 580, coming in at roughly $530 versus about $480 for an EVGA GTX 580 SC. But for your $50, you get lower noise, great performance, and impressive overclockability—if you're willing to lose one more expansion slot in the process. $535, www.asus.com | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Acer and Asus Aiming to Ship 200,000 Ultrabooks a Month in Q4 Posted: 26 Sep 2011 12:11 PM PDT
DigiTimes is hearing from upstream component makers that Acer and Asus are both targeting the IT market. This makes sense given that these are the folks who will most likely be able to justify spending $900 to over a grand on a thin and light notebook loaded with high end technologies and long battery life. Lenovo and Toshiba are also gearing up to mass produce Ultrabook models by the end of the year, and so is HP, which is currently trying to figure out what to do with its Personal Systems Group. Dell is one of the few holdouts that hasn't yet shown a willingness to jump on the Ultrabook bandwagon. Image Credit: Acer | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Chrome Web App of the Week: Quick Note Posted: 26 Sep 2011 11:48 AM PDT
Quick Note's interface will feel like an old friend to anyone that's every used the iPad's Notepad interface to jot down and retain data. Designed for use within Chrome, Diigo has provided users with an easy to navigate two-paned interface: One pane to take notes in, another pane to create, search for and select notes from. Nothing could be simpler. After installing the application, users are invited to create a Diigo account or use their Google credentials to log into the company's servers. Doing so allows users to sync their Quick Note files to any machine rocking Google's Chrome browser such as Android phones or even an iPad.
In addition to text input, Quick Note also allows for the drag-and-drop addition of images to any note file, making it a great option for individuals that want to take their note taking to the clouds without the complexity or deep feature set of a service such as Evernote. What's more, Diigo has mentioned that they have plans to integrate Quick Note with a number of online services, giving this already great web app a very bright future indeed. Be sure to check back every Monday for another edition of Maximum PC's Chrome Web App of the Week.
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| Is Google to Blame for High Priced Honeycomb Tablets? Posted: 26 Sep 2011 11:26 AM PDT
News and rumor site Fudzilla is convinced it is. As far as Fudzilla is concerned, Android "is not even close to being an open source" operating system because of the way Google controls it. The site talked to a "few sources" who all say Google favors bigger players with Honeycomb. Companies like Samsung, Sony, Lenovo, Asus, and Acer don't have any trouble licensing Honeycomb, but smaller outfits are only allowed to play with Android 2.2 or lower, Fudzilla claims to have confirmed with multiple sources. That's only part of the supposed problem. According to Fudzilla, Google is also in control pricing and doesn't allow hardware makers to sell Honeycomb tablets below a specific price point. This is the real reason why Honeycomb is reserved for premium slates, Fudzilla says. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| CEOs' Golden Parachutes Have Cost HP $80m Since 2005 Posted: 26 Sep 2011 11:26 AM PDT
Robert McGarvey at Internet Evolution started his calculations – which are based off of figures reported by major news organizations – with the firing of Carly Fiorina in 2005. After the stock market yawned about the Compaq merger, Fiorina got the boot. Tally up her severance, pension, stock options and more, and Fiorina walked off with around $42 million – not too shabby. Her replacement, Mark Hurd, walked off with $12.2 mil after a scandalicious end to his four year tenure, and it would have been even more if he hadn't quickly landed a job at Oracle. Then there's Leo; Apotheker reportedly was handed a $25.2 million severance package along with his pink slip, despite only lasting 11 months on the job. Add those totals up, and you'll see that HP has paid out a reported $79.4 million in severance packages to CEOs over the past six years. That's not even counting the big money paid out for ho-hum (at best) acquisitions like Compaq and Palm. Those kinds of numbers caused Forbes contributor Eric Jackson to recently lash out, and not at the departed CEOs: "Leo Apotheker is the worst CEO hire in the last decade," Jackson wrote "… However, never forget who hired Leo 11 months ago: the board of directors. These guys are a bunch of clowns, surpassed in incompetence only by Yahoo!'s board." Oomph! So what do you think, Maximum PC readers? Can Meg Whitman be HP's savior, or will she end up riding yet another golden parachute out of the company's headquarters? | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Netflix and DreamWorks Sign Multi-Year Pact, Kung Fu Panda Coming in...2013? Posted: 26 Sep 2011 10:54 AM PDT
While all that sounds awesome, the deal doesn't go into effect until 2013. Yes, the same 2013 that's more than a year away, and not the one where we come back and say, 'Oops, that was a typo -- we meant to say 2012!' That puts a damper on things, does it not? In any event, starting in 2013, new DreamWorks Animation flicks will be available for Netflix subscribers to watch instantly. Meanwhile, popular movies like Kung Fu Panda, Madagascar 2, Chicken Run, Antz, and others will stream through Netflix and be made available "over time." |
Google Plus' big killer feature from the start has been that it lets users organize their friends and acquaintances into Circles to control what is shared, and with whom. But creating all these curated groups seemed a little like a half baked feature seeing as you couldn't let anyone else in on that perfectly organized group. Well, 
Google's Android platform continued to capture more of the smartphone market in August, reaching a 
Spotify has been pulling in new users by the boatload since it appeared in America a few months ago. The announcement last week that the music streaming service was being integrated with Facebook will likely serve to swell its ranks even more. But users that decided to jump on the bandwagon now that Spotify is open to all have suddenly found that they must 
Don't point the finger at Acer or Asus if Intel's Ultrabook initiative fails to gain traction. These are the same two companies largely responsible for popularizing netbooks a few years ago, and now the two are turning their attention to the Ultrabook category. Both companies will look to ship 200,000 Ultrabooks a month in the fourth quarter.
Cloud-based services such as
Unless you catch one on sale, you're not walking home with a new Android 3.x (Honeycomb) tablet for less than $400 from a reputable vendor (give or take a few bucks). Most of them run $500 and up. Ever wonder why that is? Back when the iPad was the only game in town, the assumption was that Android tablets would bring affordable slates to the masses. We're starting to see that with pre-Honeycomb tablets, but slates running Google's latest and greatest mobile OS still command a premium. Is that by design?
With the economy in the crapper, a lot of folks are buckling down, tightening their belts and saving money any way possible. Not HP. No, we're not talking about the company's $10.3 billion acquisition of Autonomy; that's chump change compared to the cash HP's shelled out in severance packages to ousted revolving-door CEOs the past few years. One website counted up the dollars and cents and came up with an astonishing figure: those golden parachutes cost HP around $80 million since 2005.
Netflix is in desperate need of positive PR, and that's exactly what the streaming service is getting after | You are subscribed to email updates from Maximum PC - All Articles To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now. | Email delivery powered by Google |
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