General Gaming Article |
- U.S. PC Shipments Down 6% in Q4 2011, Apple Up 21%
- OnLive Shipping with All Google TV Devices
- Comcast Accidentally Admits SOPA Would Make the Net Less Secure
- Future Tense: The Star Trek PC
- Microsoft Issues Hotfix for AMD Bulldozer Processors (No Fooling this Time)
- Windows Phone 7 App of the Week: ARMED
- U.S. Patent Grants Hit Record High, IBM on Top for 19th Straight Year
- Intel Eyes Smartphones As Qualcomm Eyes Notebooks
- How to Customize the Windows 7 File Browser Menu
- Will Sony Really Wait Until 2015 to Release a PlayStation 4 Console?
| U.S. PC Shipments Down 6% in Q4 2011, Apple Up 21% Posted: 11 Jan 2012 03:36 PM PST
Still far in the lead are HP and Dell, which have 23% and 22% of the market respectively. Apple's overall market share is 11%. Lenovo's sales actually grew by 40%, but it sells so few units in America that it did not figure in the top tier of makers. Apple is the only manufacturer in the top five that grew at all. Apple's good fortune can be accounted for partially by its retail store presence, but also by its marketing an brand awareness. The general affluence of the U.S. market is also involved here. Apple did not make the list of top world-wide computer manufacturers. |
| OnLive Shipping with All Google TV Devices Posted: 11 Jan 2012 03:13 PM PST
OnLive is a service that allows users to run serious PC games in the cloud without the need for heavy-duty hardware. The games are rendered in the OnLive servers, then the video is streamed down as control input is passed upstream. Having this service built into Google TV turns each unit into a gaming console. Unfortunately, the service isn't completely ready for prime time on Google TV. The app will only work in spectator mode at first, with an update bringing full gaming capability later on. OnLive says it is working closely with Google to get the service working as intended on the platform. Customers will be able to buy PC games from OnLive on Google TV, but there is also a $10 per-month unlimited plan that includes access to over 100 games. |
| Comcast Accidentally Admits SOPA Would Make the Net Less Secure Posted: 11 Jan 2012 02:56 PM PST
The way Comcast outed itself is a little roundabout. The nation's biggest ISP feels confident enough in DNSSEC that it shut down its internal domain Domain Helper redirect service. Domain Helper would try to redirect users that typed in commonly misspelled addresses to the right website. The important thing here is that Comcast ended support for Domain helper because it says DNS redirects are not supported by DNSSEC. SOPA and PIPA would use DNS redirects to block offending websites. Oops. According to Comcast itself, DNS redirects are indistinguishable from malicious attacks like DNS poisoning. SOPA supporters have been brushing off claims that SOPA-mandated DNS redirects would mean a less secure Internet, but it appears that when not on Capitol Hill, Comcast believes quite the opposite to be true. |
| Future Tense: The Star Trek PC Posted: 11 Jan 2012 02:00 PM PST Last year, the editors of MaximumPC magazine tossed a challenge my way. "David, design your own dream machine." So I wrote a column, specifying what kind of hardware I felt should be inside the box. The result was the Star Trek themed PC, designed by Mike Okuda and built by Bill Owen and the other fine folks at MNPCTECH. But despite the lustworthy appeal of this machine, there's another more important point to make. As much fun as it is to build an impressive dream machine and show it off at Comic-Con, the ultimate goal of any computer has to be functionality, because MaximumPC isn't just about maximum specs or even maximum performance. It's about maximum usability. My personal dream machine was always intended to be a high-powered working environment, but the irony of that goal is that a high-powered working environment can only exist as a subset of a high-powered gaming environment.
What the history of personal computing demonstrates is that gaming is the engine that drives the bleeding edge. Thirty years ago, you bought a 386 machine, with a VGA card and a Sound Blaster, so you could play Wolfenstein 3D and Flight Simulator, and a year later, Doom. Ever since then we've been upgrading motherboards, processors, monitors, graphics cards, sound cards, RAM, hard drives, and mice so we could play Halo and Half-Life and Crysis and Starcraft II with frame rates larger than our underwear size. The hardware manufacturers know this—it's the gamers who are first to snap up the high-end technology so they can have decent frame rates for the newest games. And of course, the gaming companies write ever more sophisticated graphics routines and AI engines, to use up those newly available clock cycles. Many games in development are planned and written with that steady advance of hardware in mind. It's generally expected that more powerful processors will hit in the market in time to provide the necessary hellaflops to run that code—and along the way, every other piece of the technological eco-system has enjoyed the benefits of that evolutionary process. If you can find a picture or a description of the machine you were using ten years ago and compare it with what's on your desk today, you'll see just how far we've come. But back to the Star Trek PC, which represented the state-of-the-art at the moment it was constructed—and held onto that distinction for about twenty minutes, until the next big thing was announced. But state-of-the-art was never the goal here. Computers are like cameras—the most useful one is the one you're actually using. And this one was designed for usability. My son and I made room in the car, drove up to South San Francisco, and arrived at the offices of the magazine on a bright crisp morning. We spent some time chatting with Gordon and Nathan and Alex, and even more time ooh-ing and ahh-ing at the machine's beautiful case. Gordon opened it up so we could see how meticulously assembled the innards were. Then he booted it up to prove it was a real computer and not just a beautiful movie prop. After a lot more ooh-ing and ahh-ing, Gordon found a travel case for it, we loaded it into the car and headed home. For the record, this thing weighs over a hundred pounds. Nobody is going to pick up this box and walk off with it. Not without a forklift. It's all that beautiful machined aluminum. It's not just gorgeous, it's heavy. Aluminum has a tendency to tarnish with time, but I'm making a special effort to keep this case clean and free of scratches. We'll see how it looks in a few years. It's not quiet. It's got a big fan in front and another big fan in back. The flow-through is pretty good. The average temperature inside the box is 75 degrees. Sometimes as low as 69, occasionally as high as 80. I expect summertime temperatures to be higher, of course, but the machine has been installed in a cooler room than was originally planned, so I'm not worried we're going to be running a space-heater here.
The Star Trek PC is too big for the average computer desk and too beautiful to be put on the floor, so I bought a sturdy wheeled stand for it, and while I was shopping, I found a nice glass-topped desk for my monitor and keyboard. This turned out to be an excellent working arrangement, much better than the computer desk I was using for the previous machine. The machine that the Star Trek PC replaces is a Gateway FX-6801, running an i7-920, with 9gb of RAM and a Geforce 260 video card. Not bleeding edge, but certainly at the high end of the sweet spot when I bought it. (I bought it because it matched the specs of the machine I intended to build, but didn't have time—I needed it immediately.) Booting up the Gateway means turning the machine on, going into the kitchen, heating a cup of tea in the microwave for 90 seconds, then wandering back into the office to watch the machine finish setting up the desktop. Approximately a three-minute process—not bad for impulse power, but who wants to go anywhere on impulse power? The Star Trek PC goes to warp eleven. First you turn it on, then it turns you on. It's running an i7-2600K at 3.4ghz. It's got 16gb of RAM and it's running Windows 7 Professional, 64-bit. Ideally, the operating system should be Windows 7 Enterprise edition, just for the pun. That would be a very expensive in-joke, limited to an audience of one, but this Trekkie would certainly appreciate it. The Windows Experience Index is 7.6. The machine boots in less than 30 seconds. In fact, it's actually fun to watch it flash quickly through its startup screens and go almost immediately to those little colored balls that circle around into a glowing Windows logo. A plain vanilla startup without sprinkles is deliciously fast. Of course, the more crap that gets added to Windows' startup routine, the longer it can take to get from there to the actual desktop, but the overall bootup time is still in the realm of "Dude! That's awesome!" (Not all of my friends have English as their first language.) At least once a month, I do check the startup list and eliminate every program that doesn't need to boot with Windows. The rapid bootup time is the smallest part of the daily routine. This box has a 240gb SSD as its C: drive, so access to software and the most frequently used files isn't just near-instantaneous. It is instantaneous. And it does make a difference. The first few days of use, some operations happened so fast I had to double check to see that they'd actually completed.
But it's very easy to get used to instantaneous response—so much so that going back to the older machine for anything feels tedious and painful. (At some point, I'll probably upgrade the Gateway to an SSD and 12gb of RAM. It's a good backup machine, I can use it as a server.) I admit I'm a sloppy user. My worst habit is having lots of tabs open in Chrome. Chrome tends to eat up memory. When I bought the Gateway, I thought 9gb of RAM was plenty. Nope. It turned out that I could slow it down or simply bring it to a shuddering halt by having too many tabs open. The Star Trek PC has 16gb of RAM and I've only been able to slow it down twice in the first four months. So it may be that 16gb of RAM is the current sweet-spot. On a scale of 10, this machine is a 9.4. (I'm taking a half point off because the fans are noticeably loud, but I often wear headphones. Perhaps if they sounded more like a starship idling, they'd be less bothersome. And another tenth of a point off because the SD-card slot is hibernating, I'll have to open it up to fix the cable.) From the beginning, the goal here was to build state-of-the-art usability. That means having the computer be invisible, leaving only the workflow. Rapid access to software and files requires a machine designed for the fastest throughput possible. The Star Trek PC is more than just another pretty face—it's a reliable workhorse. Like the starship it's named after, this Enterprise is big, beautiful, fast, and a joy to operate. It lets me boldly go to work where none of my computers have gone before. What do you think? When you design your dream machine, what would you require for maximum usability?
————— David Gerrold is a Hugo and Nebula award-winning author. He has written more than 50 books, including "The Man Who Folded Himself" and "When HARLIE Was One," as well as hundreds of short stories and articles. His autobiographical story "The Martian Child" was the basis of the 2007 movie starring John Cusack and Amanda Peet. He has also written for television, including episodes of Star Trek, Babylon 5, Twilight Zone, and Land Of The Lost. He is best known for creating tribbles, sleestaks, and Chtorrans. In his spare time, he redesigns his website,www.gerrold.com |
| Microsoft Issues Hotfix for AMD Bulldozer Processors (No Fooling this Time) Posted: 11 Jan 2012 12:55 PM PST
"Currently, the CPU scheduling techniques used by Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 are not optimized for the module architecture of the AMD Opteron 6200 and 4200 Series processors," AMD said in a blog post. "This means that certain multi-threaded workloads will not be optimally distributed between cores, which can result in decreased system performance. "Microsoft has just posted a hotfix for Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 documented in KB2645595 that enlightens the OS kernel to the AMD Opteron 6200 and 4200 Series topology so that the kernel can do a better job of scheduling threads to the processor cores. This patch leverages work that AMD and Microsoft have done cooperatively for future versions of the Windows kernel, and can be applied as desired by users running Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1." The patches also apply to Windows 7, not just Windows Server 2008 R2. According to AMD, after applying the update, your OS will be 'enlightened' to the ways of Opteron 6200 and 4200 Series topology, allowing the kernel to do a better job of scheduling threads to the processor cores. It's not likely to affect legacy applications too much, but could give a boost to workloads that are moderately threaded, such as virtualization, database, or transactional environments, AMD says. Links to patches: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2646060 |
| Windows Phone 7 App of the Week: ARMED Posted: 11 Jan 2012 11:55 AM PST
We're suckers for games around these parts, and smart phone games are no exception. Many of the compelling games for Windows Phone are Xbox Live titles, but certainly not all of them. One game which is a perfect example of what independent developers are capable of is ARMED.
ARMED is a turn-based strategy game for Windows Phone. Unlike many indie games for Windows Phone ARMED features impressive 3D graphics which wouldn't be out of place in an Xbox Live game. New players can learn the basics of the game through the tutorial, which walks you through all of the basics of creating buildings and units. Multiplayer gaming is another feature of ARMED which allows you to compete against other players using the same device or across the internet. ARMED allows you to create a game against an opponent with a similar ranking or a custom game against a previous opponent. Your ranking can be compared to others using the online leader board.
ARMED is available from the Windows Phone Marketplace. The game costs $3.99, but there is a free trial available for those who are a little hesitant to put out their hard earned cash.
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| U.S. Patent Grants Hit Record High, IBM on Top for 19th Straight Year Posted: 11 Jan 2012 11:19 AM PST
According to IFI, the USPTO issued 224,505 utility patents in 2011, up 2 percent over 2010's record breaking total. It's the way the game is played these days, and there's interest from all around the world in securing U.S. patents. "Global companies, and especially Asian ones, are collecting U.S patents at a dizzying pace, and now Asian firms hold eight of the top 10 slots in the 2011 ranking," said Mike Baycroft, CEO, IFI Claims Patent Services. "This isn't to say that U.S. companies have lost their verve for patent production, as their patent portfolios are also growing. It seems that Asian companies have apparently made it a higher priority." IFI says that Asian firms now account for 25, or half, of the top 50 U.S. patent-grant recipients, with U.S. firms nabbing 17 spots on the list. |
| Intel Eyes Smartphones As Qualcomm Eyes Notebooks Posted: 11 Jan 2012 10:57 AM PST
The Verge got a chance to play with the Lenovo K800, the first smartphone that actually runs on an Intel chip. It looks pretty decent, all things considered: the Medfield (Atom) chip is clocked at 1.6 GHz, the 4.5-inch display sports a true 720p resolution, and it can wirelessly sync with HDTVs monitors in up to 720p resolution thanks to the inclusion of Intel's WiDi technology. Meanwhile, Qualcomm is already in talks with manufacturers to bring Snapdragon S4 chips to the ultraportable market, CEO Paul Jacobs said during his keynote address Tuesday. Microsoft's decision to support the ARM architecture in Windows 8 tempted the company over towards the PC side of things, IT World reports, and Jacobs wants to position Qualcomm's chips as a way to bring the "always-on, always-connected promise" of smartphones to conventional computers. Just don't call Snapdragon-powered laptops "Ultrabooks;" Intel owns the right to that name. Image credit: frenchtoastsunday.com |
| How to Customize the Windows 7 File Browser Menu Posted: 11 Jan 2012 10:47 AM PST In Windows 7, browsing for files from within a program can be a bit confusing. Why? Because for some reason, there are two separate menus for exactly that function, and they behave differently. The first sort of menu looks more or less like Explorer.exe (image below). It's got a folder view in the main part of the window, and a navigation pane on the left side that makes it quick to get where you want to go. If you frequently save to or load from a particular location, you can make sure it's always at hand by dragging that location into your Favorites bar. This is the good window.
The second menu is a holdover from pre-Windows 7 days—it's the plain-old Open menu, with a small browser and a wimpy selection of predefined, uncustomizable shortcut icons on the left (image below). It is, unfortunately, still more common in programs (including Adobe's Creative Suite) than the superior, newer menu. Fortunately, you actually can customize the second type of file browser—it just takes some work. There's a way to do it in the system registry, but it's complicated and not necessary. Instead we'll use a free app called PlacesBar Editor.
Step 1: Download PlacesBar EditorPlacesBar Editor is available for free at bit.ly/lqKxW. Simply follow the link to download the app, unzip it, and install it. Once it's installed, go ahead and run the program. The main interface is strangely complicated—despite an unnecessarily large assortment of buttons and icons on the top of the window, there's actually really only one thing we care about: the fields in the Windows tab. Step 2: Customize Your Windows Places BarThe Windows tab lets you directly customize the lineup of five icons that appear in your places bar (image below). For each of the five places, you can click the drop‑down box on the right to select any system folder on your computer, such as My Documents, the Desktop, or My Computer. Most of these locations are already in the places bar, so you'll more likely use the field to the right (which you can enable by clicking the Custom checkbox). Here, you can add any non-system folder by simply entering its complete path in the text field, or clicking the folder icon and browsing for it. You can use any folder on your system, or any network location. We particularly like being able to add our Dropbox folder to our places list, as well as our working folder for screenshots.
Once you've made your changes, you'll have to click the Save button at the top in order to have them take effect. At that point, you can click the Test button to open a sample file browser and make sure everything is in order. Note that when you click Save, all places bar icons are changed to the ones specified. In other words, you can't just use PlacesBar Editor to change a single location and keep the rest the same—you'll have to define a full set of five (or less) that you want to use. If, for whatever reason, you don't care for your new layout, you can click the Default button to get the old locations back. |
| Will Sony Really Wait Until 2015 to Release a PlayStation 4 Console? Posted: 11 Jan 2012 10:40 AM PST
According to BetaNews, Sony took the unusual tactic of using CES to announce what's not coming, and that's the PS4. Sony Chairman Kazuo Hirai said as much during a roundtable discussion with reporters, while also reiterating that the PS3 is on a 10-year lifecycle. Say what? If that's true, there won't be another PlayStation console until 2015, or even later. There's still some room left to extend the PS3's shelf life, especially as Sony continues to issue new models with various sized hard drives, motion controls, and whatever other add-ons might be in the pipeline, but trying to squeeze out three additional years or more might be asking a bit much. Or not. Three years seems like an awfully long time in the world of technology -- and it is -- but every indication up to this point is that the next Xbox model won't ship until 2014. If so, Sony wouldn't be very far behind, and it could always push back the PS4's release if it had to. Do you think we'll see any major console refreshes by Sony or Microsoft before 2015? Image Credit: FunnyJunk.com |
It appears that PCs are just not the hot gift idea they once were. According to 
Google TV had a rough launch last year without a doubt. Although things are starting to look up for Google's living room push with a slew of new devices being announced, and now a 
Comcast announced today that it has finished the rollout of Domain Name System Security Extensions (DNSSEC) across its network. While patting itself on the back, Comcast's blog post went on to essentially admit that a major element of the enforcement plan in SOPA and PIPA is 
As the saying goes, 'If at first you don't succeed, get your stuff together and roll out another hotfix already, it's 2012!' Maybe the saying doesn't go exactly like that, but it should if you're talking about the combination of Microsoft Windows and AMD's Bulldozer line. After 
IBM was awarded 6,180 patents in all of 2011, more than any other company in the world and nearly 1,300 more than Samsung, which was granted the second most patents with 4,894. After that, the Top 50 list compiled by IFI Claims Patent Services starts to drop off with Canon (No. 3) having added 2,821 patents to its portfolio last year, followed by Panasonic (No. 4) with 2,559 and Toshiba (No. 5) with 2,483. IBM has led the pack for 19 years straight, but don't hate the player, hate the game.
They say the grass is always greener on the other side, and a pair of announcements from CES seem to give that old cliché some credence. Qualcomm, a major player in the mobile chip market, wants to break into PCs by stocking thin-and-light Ultrabook-style notebooks with its Snapdragon processor, while Intel's CEO spent part of his keynote address boasting than the company has inked deals with Lenovo and Motorola to power future generations of smartphones with Atom chips. 
For those of you holding your breath waiting for Sony to announce a PlayStation 4 console and hoping good news would come at CES, take a moment to suck in some air and replenish your lungs. There will be no such announcement at the convention in Las Vegas, and it doesn't look like Sony will be unveiling a next generation game console at E3 later this year, either. So when will we see a PS4?| 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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