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- AOC Rolls Out Ultra-Thin 27-inch e2752Vh Monitor at $50 Discount for Limited Time
- John Carmack: Kudos to Valve, but Not Many Linux Users are Willing to Pay for Games
- Lenovo to Launch Lighter ThinkPad Ultrabook Later This Month
- Review: Deponia
- Samsung Accuses Apple of Sour Grapes for Swaying Expert Witnesses
| AOC Rolls Out Ultra-Thin 27-inch e2752Vh Monitor at $50 Discount for Limited Time Posted: 06 Aug 2012 05:01 AM PDT
Resolution tops out at Full HD 1080p (1920x1080), which isn't surprising considering the monitor's $250 price tag. AOC says that's a savings of $50 off the MSRP and will be valid from August 11 through 17 at places like CompUSA, Walmart.com, BestBuy.com, Newegg.com, and Amazon.com, though some are already selling it at the discounted price. Rounding out the feature-set are 5W built-in speakers and input options that include DVI-D and HDMI with HDCP support. It's also VESA 100mm wall mount compliant. More details can be found on the monitor's product page. Follow Paul on Google+, Twitter, and Facebook
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| John Carmack: Kudos to Valve, but Not Many Linux Users are Willing to Pay for Games Posted: 06 Aug 2012 05:01 AM PDT
"Valve announcing Steam Linux support changes things a bit but we have made two forays into the Linux commercial market, most recently with Quake Live client, and that platform just hasn't carried its weight compared to the Mac on there," Carmack said during his keynote at QuakeCon. "It's great that people are enthusiastic about it, but there's just not nearly as many people that are interested in paying for a game on the [Linux] platform and that just seems to be the reality." Carmack wasn't trying to cast a wet blanket over Valve's plans by any means, and he pointed out that one thing working in favor of Linux is that integrated graphics drivers are getting better, albeit they still have their issues. He praised Intel for being "completely supportive of open source graphics drivers efforts, that they have chipset docs out there," and said if he had the time, he'd work on optimizing them himself. You can watch the entire keynote on YouTube (skip ahead to the 45min 26sec mark to hear Carmack's comments on Linux). Follow Paul on Google+, Twitter, and Facebook
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| Lenovo to Launch Lighter ThinkPad Ultrabook Later This Month Posted: 06 Aug 2012 05:01 AM PDT
As the name implies, it's constructed with carbon fiber materials Lenovo claims adds to its structural strength and durability while maintaining the system's purported status as "the lightest 14-inch Ultrabook in the world." It's also fast and responsive, featuring a sub 20-second startup time, Lenovo says. Regarding the Ultrabook category's longterm viability given its inability to thrust the PC segment past a seventh consecutive quarter of flat-to-single-digit growth , Lenovo still feels confident in its decision to dive in. "Overall, the Ultrabook is the right direction. It's the start of the journey, so it's not the destination," said Dilip Bhatia, GM of Lenovo's ThinkPad business, according to PCWorld. "In general you will see notebooks get thinner, get lighter, have the instant on connected capability. So I'm not worried about it." Bhatia also said aggressive pricing will help drive Ultrabook adoption. Be that as it may, Lenovo's ThinkPad X1 Carbon is slated to ship later this month starting at $1,299, making it one of the more expensive Ultrabooks out there. Follow Paul on Google+, Twitter, and Facebook
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| Posted: 05 Aug 2012 11:01 PM PDT LucasArts or Sierra: You could like both, but, more often than not, people tended to prefer one over the other in the golden age of adventure games. Though King’s Quest VI was my introduction to the genre (and the Windows operating system it was bundled with), Maniac Mansion, The Secret of Monkey Island series, and Full Throttle were the games I obsessed over and showed to visiting friends at any opportunity. Daedalic Entertainment began as an interesting experiment but has quickly become one of the most recognizable names in modern adventure games, releasing The Dark Eye: Chains of Satinav nearly a month ago and cult favorite The Whispered World a while before that. Its recent titles dealt with heavy subject matter and dark fantasy worlds that feel closer to Sierra’s flagship series. Yet, Daedalic got its start with silly, colorful games that imitated LucasArts. Deponia is the developer’s return to this style of adventure. Although it doesn’t hold up to LucasArt’s best, Deponia is a reminder of why some of us loved those games so much more than their contemporaries. Deponia (PC) Deponia smells like garbage, because it’s a planet made of garbage. Its citizens have made this supposedly uninhabitable junkyard of a planet into their home. Everyone except Rufus. Deponia to him is nothing more than the planet that his father abandoned him on. Now, he wants to return to his birthplace far away in the sky. Deponia (the game) is a lot of things: It’s an adventure, romance, and comedy all wrapped up into one goofy story. Rufus is a confident dope who bears much in common with Secret of Monkey Island’s Guybrush Threepwood. While his ambitions are a bit less, he possesses a similar wit and cluelessness in any given situation. He describes himself as “a cool version of herpes” but his friends and neighbors on Deponia would leave out the cool part. Though he is sympathetic, it took me some time to become attached to him. The same can be said about the game as a whole.
Deponia has a lot more in common with Secret of Monkey Island than just sharing a similar lead character. Everything from the dialog to the comically-driven puzzles recalls LucasArts’s classic. As a result, Deponia doesn’t feel all that fresh. It doesn’t help that the game has serious problems with pacing and puzzle design in its first act (the lengthiest of the three). Things are slow-going at first. The game soon gives you a lot of ground to cover in a large city hub, but you’ll run into some obtuse puzzles that won’t make much more sense once you stumble upon the solution. The logic behind some puzzles relies too heavily on a comedic mindset rather than that of a sensible human being. LucasArts perfected their craft over the years, learning when to leave comedy out of the picture for playability. Deponia isn’t quite so discerning in its use of comedy nor is its comedic chops quite as cutting. The game prolongs dialog with bad joke after bad joke, at times. I can appreciate the spirit but I expect an adventure game to be more sparing in its humor. When every dialog option with a character doesn’t tell me anything about the game’s plot or characters, I start to become disinterested. I can’t stress enough though that these problems are mostly restricted to the first act. Even the comedy becomes stronger in the following acts -- it’s a very odd thing that makes me wonder what the production process was like behind the game. Rufus’ life becomes complicated once his plans to escape Deponia end up with him becoming responsible for a girl named Goal. He accidentally incapacitates her and decides to find a way to make her regain consciousness, hoping that she’ll help bring him back to his father’s home planet. While Rufus has some depth, he is a self-serving character that is hard to root for until the game’s second half. The main reason the first half sags, however, is that Deponia is kind of a miserable place. Rufus’ neighbors, ex-girlfriend, and even his best friend are all mean to Rufus and not very interesting characters. Despite Deponia being a rather nasty place, it's brought to life through a gorgeous hand-drawn aesthetic that recalls Curse of Monkey Island. The animation is very sub-par, with characters and backgrounds barely moving, but the design and art of the game’s locales are consistently interesting and eye-catching. Though the game is nice to look at, the dull animation is a constant reminder that this is developed by an indie with a modest budget. The same can be said of the English version’s hit-and-miss voice cast -- the game was originally voiced in German but there is no option to change to it. Thankfully Rufus sounds good and there are some quality performances later in the game, but it’s not top-caliber stuff. The grating voice effect on the game’s stormtrooper-esque Organon troopers is another chink in the game’s presentation. Despite a poor beginning and ending, I can’t shake off the warm feeling Deponia left me with. It’s a game with a big heart and some clever puzzles that recall a special time in the history of adventure games. The game lacks the consistency, quality animation, and hilarity of Tim Schafer and Ron Gilbert’s work, but Deponia is a charming and creative adventure that stands above many of its contemporaries. You can deduce the game to being a tribute to the golden years of LucasArts, but isn’t that exactly what so many want right now?  |
| Samsung Accuses Apple of Sour Grapes for Swaying Expert Witnesses Posted: 06 Aug 2012 05:01 AM PDT
Samsung's legal team labeled Apple's actions as "most inappropriate" and is none too happy with the resulting report written by three experts who, after speaking with Apple, changed their minds and determined the Cupertino company's iPhone 4 and 4S models don't run afoul of any of Samsung's 3G patents, MacWorld reports. Samsung asked Justice Annabelle Claire Bennett for permission to cross-examine the witnesses prior to their "hot tub" testimony, which is a term Australian courts use to describe when multiple expert witnesses offer their testimony at the same time. Bennett, however, wasn't as concerned as Samsung and said it's not unusual for experts to change their mind. "The expert report is a piece of evidence but can be challenged in cross examination," Bennett said. The Australian trial has a long way to go yet and is scheduled to run intermittently for another nine months. Follow Paul on Google+, Twitter, and Facebook
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AOC is taking aim at gamers who want a large screen monitor with a low response time and budget friendly price tag by launching its 27-inch e2752Vh LED display. We're always wary of reading too much into rated specs when it comes to monitors, but for what it's worth, the e2752Vh is a thin and light display with a 2ms rated response time (GTG), 20,000,000:1 dynamic contrast ratio, and 300 cd/m2 typical brightness.
Valve is forging ahead with plans to port its Steam distribution platform over to Linux and has even managed to tweak Left 4 Dead 2 to run faster on a 32-bit Ubuntu system than on a Windows 7 machine, but as far as John Carmack is concerned, the real challenge will be getting Linux users to open their wallets. Carmack, as you know, is the founder and technical director of id Software, and also an open source advocate. He's also a realist.
Today marks the 20th anniversary of the ThinkPad brand, which was developed by IBM and then sold to Lenovo in 2005. To celebrate the occasion, Lenovo today announced the release of its 
It's too late to claim things are getting ugly between Samsung and Apple. The question before us now is, how ugly can things get? That depends on which court system you're talking about. Here in the U.S., Apple is peeved at Samsung for leaking rejected evidence to the public, and over in Australia, Samsung is accusing Apple of inappropriately meeting with expert witnesses to change their opinions on things that could affect the outcome of the patent trial.| You are subscribed to email updates from Home To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now. | Email delivery powered by Google |
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