General Gaming Article |
- 8 Must-Install Apps From the Windows 8 Store
- Lenovo Recalls Over 50K AIO PCs Due To Risk Of Fire Hazard
- Holey Optochip Capable Of 1Tbps Data Transfer Rates, Batman!
- Core i7-3770K Ivy Bridge Chip Gets Benchmarked
- All Your .COM Domains Are Belong to U.S., Government Says
- Apple's iPad A5X Graphics Claim Raises Eyebrows at Nvidia
- Pentium Class Ivy Bridge Chip to Sell for $86
- comScore: Android, iOS Increase Mobile Market Share
- Toshiba Announces Qosmio X870 Gaming Laptop for 2Q12
- 30,000 Wordpress Sites Infected to Redirect to Fake AV Sites
| 8 Must-Install Apps From the Windows 8 Store Posted: 08 Mar 2012 04:02 PM PST Whether you love it or hate it, you've installed Microsoft's Windows 8 Consumer Preview to give it a whirl and see which side – light or dark – you fall into. While we'd normally use this space to feature all the various third-party apps you should install on your brand-new operating system to make it more useful, more awesome, and more beautiful, it only makes sense that we instead turn our Eye of Sauron to Metro. Specifically, programs you can pick up right now, within Microsoft's store, that install directly into Windows 8 like apps onto a smartphone. With the caveat that many of these apps are still in a preview phase themselves, here are our top picks for must-have Windows 8 Metro apps! Try saying that three times fast. 1. Cut the Rope
I had never heard of Cut the Rope until a friend whipped out her smartphone just a week or so ago and showed me what was up. As is the case with most apps or games, the name completely gives away what you're going to be doing. In Cut the Rope – which has a strikingly similarity to Angry Birds, just replace "catapult physics" with rope-cutting – your goal is to capture stars with a piece of candy. The candy dangles from a rope (or many ropes), and how and where you cut it affects its height and ability to sway into other objects (like stars. Or a frog's mouth). Got it? You'll figure it out; trust us. And you won't stop playing, either. Cut all the ropes! 2. Evernote
If you haven't heard of Evernote, do this: Grab a yellow sticky note pad, write yourself a little memo to install it on all of the devices you own, and then sticky that note on your monitor. Wait. Don't do that. Because Evernote is designed to be the digital archive of your various "notes to self" – as well as any other documents, images, and other such attachments that you want to keep tabs on. The Windows 8 app (in preview) only accepts text notes right now, but it does synchronize these with any other device you've installed Evernote on. And you can still view other elements (like pictures) that you've placed into notes using other devices; you just can't put them there yourself on Windows 8. 3. Cookbook
Now this is what we're talking about. Cookbook is a perfectly designed application for Windows 8's Metro UI. Like a finely seasoned dish, Cookbook delivers just enough useful information (recipes and cooking instructions) without seeming sparse. It displays adequate illustrations of the food you're trying to make without turning the app into one giant picture and caption combination after another. In other words, the app is a mouthwatering mix of graphics and information. Our only qualm is a big one: No search. While Cookbook make it easy to browse through different, categorized galleries of potential edibles depending on what you're interested in frying up, you can't just straight-up search for "Sloppy Joe" or "five-alarm chili," for example. Hopefully a big fat tie-in to Windows 8's type-anything-in-Metro search tool makes its way to this app – otherwise, it's just a tad under-flavored. 4. News Republic
Like many apps gracing the Consumer Preview of Windows 8, News Republic shows a lot of promise, but it's not quite up to the standards that one can enjoy within other apps on, say, one's tablet PC – in other words, it's no Pulse or Flipboard. But as a fairly nondescript news reader, News Republic performs well. Adding new topics you want to follow is as easy as searching for them using Metro's app-contextual search. And once you have your favorites set up, you need merely click into each category to see what the news of the hour happens to be. Too bad there's no way to integrate News Republic with your lock screen. Or, for that matter, a way to see a single, up-to-the-minute feed of all of your favorite categories at once. 5. SigFig
Although we're slightly annoyed that we have to first register for an account to use this stock market-watching application, it makes complete sense once you see the power of SigFig in action. Connect up your brokerage account to the app and you'll get easy access to your portfolio via Windows' Metro UI – and more importantly, statistics and graphics related to your portfolio's performance. From quick snapshots of your investments' daily gains and losses to an easy-to-understand tracker that compares the value of your holdings against the rise and fall of the Dow Jones over various time periods, this app is a nice cross between Bing and an absurdly complicated investment tool for the desktop trader. While we'd love to also be able to research potential purchases via the app – or even make these sells and buys within the app itself – SigFig doesn't disappoint when it comes to presenting key financial information in a digestible (and pretty) fashion. 6. Grantophone
Sorry, Windows 8 desktop or laptop users, but we had to at least throw one bone in this brief app roundup for your touchscreen-happy counterparts. There are around 85,000 different apps on the various Smartphone markets that help you to make funny sounds with your device (a rough approximation). Not the sounds of cows mooing or people sneezing, we should note – rather, synthesized sounds that, if combined together, could get you one step closer to recreating your favorite Daft Punk jam. We love the sheer number of settings you can play around with in Grantophone. To list them all out would take the rest of this article's space (and hack off the three of you who don't care about making fun jams with your touch-sensitive system). And, truly, it defeats the app's experimental ambitions. We're not sure how or why this happens, but it's actually kind of fun to tweak the app's settings – like the volume of the various octaves you're creating above your sounds, to the raw shape of the waveform that gets created, to the amount of noise or vibrato present in your notes. With 12 notes split across four octaves in a giant grid, you'll be tapping away a new dubstep version of Ode to Joy before you know it. 7. Pirates Love Daises
Don't let the name throw you. Every platform needs a tower defense game, and Windows 8's Consumer Preview is no exception. Since you know exactly what's in store the minute we said "Tower Defense game," we will instead use the rest of this paragraph to describe just when you might get sick of the genre for the 35th time in your gaming life. First off, it's great to see that the game comes with three different modes – Normal, Sudden Death, and Epic, which helps cater to all different Tower Defense experience levels. Little is more boring than a Tower Defense game that's just that: One normal mode of defending, repeated until you throw whatever device you're using against the wall. While we love the premise – Tower Defense pirates – the presentation of Pirate Love Daises caters more toward the genre newbie than those who have unlocked every Defense Grid achievement there is. Your "towers," or pirates, just stand and plant to attack anything traveling along a predestined path. There aren't any special options to pick from (no pirate-themed ion cannon-like device to blast invaders once per map), no economy to speak of (since when did pirates care about interest?), and no health concerns you need worry about related to your invulnerable pirates – nor any way to see the health of the creatures you're fighting, we note. Pirates Love Daises is still a fun respite from, say, solitaire. It's not the greatest Tower Defense game you'll play, but it does have its enjoyable, swashbuckling moments. Like all Tower Defense games, you'll have no choice but to continue playing once you've started to build up your mighty pirate defenses. 8. Slapdash Podcasts
Maybe we're getting ahead of ourselves when we assume that people listen to podcasts on their desktop or laptop PCs instead of, say, a portable music player of their choosing. But just in case we're dead wrong on this one, Slapdash Podcasts is to audio broadcasts as the aforementioned News Republic is to articles. We enjoy the graphics-heavy treatment that Slapdash Podcasts brings to Windows 8, as it makes browsing for new shows both fun and easy. And we're especially grateful that the app comes with such a comprehensive library of potential podcasts to browse through. You can pull up any podcast (new or archived) to listen to on a one-time basis or, if you feel yourself getting hooked, you can also subscribe to the 'cast directly within the app itself. Your subscribed-to podcasts take up prime location on Slapdash's main screen. However, the app doesn't automatically download new episodes on your behalf, nor does it come with finer controls to allow you to hide or otherwise mark up podcast episodes you've already listened to. Slapdash Podcasts might not be for power podcast users, but it's still a pretty good app for tuning into your favorite shows within Windows 8's Metro UI. |
| Lenovo Recalls Over 50K AIO PCs Due To Risk Of Fire Hazard Posted: 08 Mar 2012 10:55 AM PST
Only certain batches of the M70z and M90z are affected, however. Check the bottom of the PC for a label with a date code and serial number: if your date code falls between 1001 to 1012, 1101 to 1112, 001 to 012, or 101 to 112 then there is a chance it could catch fire. If you're affected, stop using the PC, unplug the power cord, and either call Lenovo at (855)248-2194 or visit the web page Lenovo created for the recall. Fortunately, there have been no injuries and only a couple of fire/smoke incidents reported in the U.S., but it's definitely better to be safe than covered in burns. |
| Holey Optochip Capable Of 1Tbps Data Transfer Rates, Batman! Posted: 08 Mar 2012 10:29 AM PST Punching a hole through your TV isn't generally regarded as a wise move, but as it turns out, punching holes -- 48 of them, to be exact -- through standard 90nm silicon CMOS chips is a decent first step towards superfast supercomputing. Sound crazy? Apparently, it isn't. Today, IBM announced it did just that with the awesomely named "Holey Optochip," a prototype optical chip that can transfer data at a blistering fast 1 terabit (1 trillion bits) per second rates.
Optical data transmission uses pulses of light to send information faster and more efficiently than the standard old "electrons via wire" method. Are you starting to see where the holes come in? They let light through to the 24/24 split of optical receiver/transmitter channels on the opposite side of the chip. Here are the technical details, right from the lion's (aka IBM's) mouth: A single 90-nanometer IBM CMOS transceiver IC with 24 receiver and 24 transmitter circuits becomes a Holey Optochip with the fabrication of forty-eight through-silicon holes, or "optical vias" – one for each transmitter and receiver channel. Simple post-processing on completed CMOS wafers with all devices and standard wiring levels results in an entire wafer populated with Holey Optochips. The transceiver chip measures only 5.2 mm x 5.8 mm. Twenty-four channel, industry-standard 850-nm VCSEL (vertical cavity surface emitting laser) and photodiode arrays are directly flip-chip soldered to the Optochip. This direct packaging produces high-performance, chip-scale optical engines. The Holey Optochips are designed for direct coupling to a standard 48-channel multimode fiber array through an efficient microlens optical system that can be assembled with conventional high-volume packaging tools. So that's a lot of technicalese: what kind of real world benefits does the Holey Optochip bring? IBM says that the parallel optical transceiver can transfer the equivalent of 500 HD movies each and every second with its 1Tbps data rate. (Of course, that's just in-chip speed; other system components would slow that down.) As if that wasn't cool enough, IBM used industry standard parts to ensure an easy economy of scale when the chip hits manufacturing, and the Holey Octochip is Green to boot -- using only 5W of power. Or, as IBM puts it, "the power consumed by a 100W light bulb could power 20 transceivers." High-speed optical chips are typically used in supercomputing and data center operations. You can check out the IBM press release for more information, and the company will be explaining more about the chip today at the Optical Fiber Communication Conference in Los Angeles. |
| Core i7-3770K Ivy Bridge Chip Gets Benchmarked Posted: 08 Mar 2012 10:16 AM PST
Anand's not telling how he got his hands on the chip, but he does say that the preview "was not sanctioned or supported by Intel in any way." He delves deep into tech specs in his 18 page (p)review, but here's the Cliffs Notes version: the CPU gains are a modest 5 to 15 percent, but Intel's integrated HD 4000 graphics boast a big 20 to 50 percent increase over current Sandy Bridge graphics in a series of gaming benchmarks. The chip plays virtually any game -- even Metro 2033 -- well at low resolutions and graphics settings, but Ivy Bridge even manages to rock over 50fps at 1680x1050 in Crysis:Warhead. The integrated graphics in AMD's A8-series Llano APU still outshined Ivy Bridge in all of Anand's tests, however, and that margin will undoubtedly only increase once the new Trinity chips come around. The power savings were also fairly significant. Thoughts? Based on Anand's initial numbers, Ivy Bridge seems like a big step forward for notebooks and other mobile devices, but will a slight CPU bump, a big GPU bump and some power savings sway you into upgrading your desktop PC? (Which, if you're graphically inclined, probably already has a discrete graphics card installed.) One thing's almost for certain: discrete low end cards may go the way of the Dodo if AMD and Trinity keep stepping up their integrated GPU game. |
| All Your .COM Domains Are Belong to U.S., Government Says Posted: 08 Mar 2012 07:17 AM PST
How is this possible? According to a rather interesting report in Wired, Uncle Sam has done this "hundreds of times" and it's because the companies that administer these websites are based in the U.S., so says Nicole Navas, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement spokeswoman. According to Navas, the U.S. government typically serves court-ordered seizures on VeriSign, an American company based in Reston, Virginia that operates two of the Internet's thirteen root nameservers and is the authoritative registrar for .com, .net, .cc, .tv, and .name. The U.S. government can also seize any .org domain, which are all managed by the Public Interest Registry, also based in Virginia. Even foreign websites registered with a VeriSign subcontractor aren't safe from seizure. Bodog.com, for example, was registered with a Canadian registrar subcontracted by VeriSign, and that was enough for U.S. authorities to take control of the site without any help from Canadian officials. If you read only one article today, this one should be it. Give it a once over and then tell us what you think about it in the comments section below. |
| Apple's iPad A5X Graphics Claim Raises Eyebrows at Nvidia Posted: 08 Mar 2012 06:52 AM PST
It very well might be the case that the A5X processor is as awesome as Apple says it is, but a bar graph devoid of benchmarks, footnotes, or disclaimers doesn't have Nvidia convinced. "We don't have the benchmark information," Nvidia spokesman Ken Brown told ZDNet. "We have to understand what the application was that was used: Was it one or a variety of applications? What drivers were used? There are so many issues to get into with benchmarks." Whether or not Apple provides any benchmarks to back up its 4X performance claim remains to be seen, but with a launch just over a week away, you can bet Nvidia (and tech sites) will do it for them. Brown said we'll have a clearer picture of things when the new iPad gets benchmarked. "For now, Apple has a really generic statement," Brown said. Apple's A5X processor has two processing cores, same as the A5 found in the iPad 2, but four graphics cores to help drive the new iPad's 2048x1536 display and for 3D gaming. |
| Pentium Class Ivy Bridge Chip to Sell for $86 Posted: 08 Mar 2012 06:24 AM PST
Intel will treat budget shoppers to Ivy Bridge by introducing a new member to its Pentium family based on its upcoming architecture, according to Fudzilla. Slated for release in the second quarter of 2012, the upcoming Pentium G870 will boast a 3.1GHz clockspeed and presumably have two processing cores and two threads. At $86, it will be the cheapest 22nm Ivy Bridge chip Intel sells. The Pentium G870 will replace the G860, a 3GHz dual-core chip based on Intel's 32nm Sandy Bridge architecture. |
| comScore: Android, iOS Increase Mobile Market Share Posted: 08 Mar 2012 06:03 AM PST
According to comScore, Google's Android platform still dominates the smartphone landscape as it inches closer to claiming half of all mobile subscribers living in the U.S. Android's market share jumped from 46.3 percent in October 2011 to 48.6 percent in January 2012, while Apple's iOS platform moved forward 1.4 percentage points to 29.5 percent during the same period. The remaining three major players each lost market share with RIM taking the biggest hit, dropping from 17.2 percent to 15.2 percent, which is still well in front of the bottom three. Microsoft's share dropped a single percentage point to 4.4 percent in January 2012, and Symbian slid to 1.5 percent, down a tenth of a percentage point, according to comScore's data. An interesting side note to all this is that smartphone users are starting to get the hang of their devices. comScore breaks down mobile content usage by category -- sending text messages, using downloaded apps, using the browser, accessing social networking sites or blogs, playing games, and listening to music -- and in each case, the percentage of mobile subscribers in the U.S. engaging in the activity went up by at least 2.8 percentage points. |
| Toshiba Announces Qosmio X870 Gaming Laptop for 2Q12 Posted: 08 Mar 2012 05:32 AM PST
The X870 is a desktop replacement model with a massive 17.3-inch Full HD LED 3D display. Scheduled to ship in the second quarter of 2012, the X870 will deliver "turbo-charged" multimedia performance. That "next level performance" will come from the latest Intel processors (read: Ivy Bridge) and next-generation NVIDIA graphics. It is further known to have a 2TB HDD (or hybrid SSD), DVD SuperMulti drive (Blu-ray optional), 4x USB 3.0 including 2x Sleep-and-Charge USB, HDMI, RGB, Gigabit Ethernet, Bluetooth 4.0, Wi-Fi, HD camera, and Harman Kardon stereo speakers. It also features Toshiba's Resolution+ video upscaling technology and has the capability to convert 2D content into 3D. Even though these details are a bit vague, they are all we have at this stage. But we'll update you as and when more details emerge. |
| 30,000 Wordpress Sites Infected to Redirect to Fake AV Sites Posted: 07 Mar 2012 09:17 PM PST
The security firm has warned about "a new wave of mass-injections of a well-known rogue antivirus campaign that we've been following in Security Labs for months." According to the firm, no less than 30,000 Wordpress-based unique sites have been compromised and injected with malicious code as part of this fake antivirus campaign. Placed at the bottom of the compromised page, the injected code simply redirects users to rogue antivirus sites so that they can be fooled into downloading and installing a Trojan from there. "After a three-level redirection chain, victims land on a fake AV site. In this example, the first chain is the ".rr.nu", and the landing site is the ".de.lv" top-level domain, but the landing site keeps changing," the company said in a blog post. "The rogue AV site appears to perform a scan on the computer and scares the user by displaying fake malware detections of various kinds of Trojans. The page looks like a Windows Explorer window with a "Windows Security Alert" dialogue box in it. The fake scanning process looks like a normal Windows application, however, it is only a pop-up window within the browser. The fake antivirus then prompts visitors to download and run their "antivirus tool" to remove the supposedly found Trojans. The executable is itself the Trojan." It's worth noting that over 85 percent of the compromised sites are based in the States. However, only about 50 percent of all visitors to these sites are said to be from the U.S., with the rest being spread far and wide. |
If you own a Lenovo ThinkCentre All-In-One computer, you've got a best of times/worst of times dichotomy going on right now: on the plus side, the touchscreen-optimized Windows 8 Consumer Preview probably feels great with the ThinkCentre's multitouch display. On the negative side, there's a chance your PC can catch on fire. Today, Lenovo and the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission announced a voluntary recall of over 50,000 Lenovo ThinkCentre M70z and M90z AIOs after determining that a power supply defect can cause the systems to overheat and burst into flame.
Yeah, yeah, the iPad is here, and a lot of the rumors about it were right. Yadda yadda yadda. Let's start talking about something really exciting: the upcoming launch of Intel's Ivy Bridge. Unfortunately, most (
Do you own a .com domain? If so, the U.S. government can seize it at any time. The same applies to .net, org. .biz, and other top-level domains (TLDs), and it doesn't matter where you live. You could reside half way around the world. You could be hiding out in Vanuatu, an island nation in the South Pacific ocean that you probably never heard of, and the U.S. government could still take control of your .com website.
If you caught any of the coverage of Apple's iPad launch event yesterday -- and you couldn't have missed it unless you boycotted Facebook, Twitter, Google+, tech sites, and the Internet in general -- then you would have seen the Cupertino company puff out its chest as it talked about the new iPad's A5X processor, a mighty chip with supposedly four times the graphics performance of Nvidia's Tegra 3 processor. There's only one problem with that: Apple's scrumptious claim was served up without a side of benchmarks.
Sub-$100 computer processors are the kind of gravy we like to scoop up and spread on a low-cost PC, secondary system, NAS box, home theater PC, or any other application that doesn't requires a beefy CPU to get the job done. If you feel the same way, you'll be happy to know that at least one of Intel's desktop Ivy Bridge processors can be yours for less than a Benjamin.
The latest data from market research firm comScore underscores the old adage 'The rich get richer and the poor get poorer.' In terms of mobile market share, Google and Apple are the two fat cats living high on the hog, while Microsoft, Research In Motion, and Symbian fight over the leftover scraps, and there were less to go around in January 2012.
Toshiba UK has announced a new gaming notebook called the 
Fake antivirus is by no means a recent phenomenon. In fact, it has been around for ages, with the | 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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