General Gaming Article |
- Best Buy Releases the List of 50 Stores Being Closed Next Month
- Valve’s Mystery Hardware Project Revealed: Wearable Computing
- Seagate CEO Explains Why Flash Won’t Replace Magnetic Hard Drives Anytime Soon
- EVGA Announces Two Signature Series GTX 680’s
| Best Buy Releases the List of 50 Stores Being Closed Next Month Posted: 15 Apr 2012 07:28 PM PDT
Most of the stores on the list have secondary locations nearby, but it still isn't a great sign for the company's future. The vast majority of these closures are expected to be completed by May 12, but some variation is of course possible. It is also unknown if we will see any blowout sales to clear the shelves, or if inventory will simply be shifted to other locations. Best Buy posted a $1.7 billion loss in Q4, and has been struggling with ways to reduce costs ever since. Is this the end of the big-box electronics era? Let us know what you think in the comments below. List of Store Closures
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| Valve’s Mystery Hardware Project Revealed: Wearable Computing Posted: 15 Apr 2012 01:13 PM PDT
The timing of the admission is somewhat coincidental considering how recently Google took the wraps off of Project Glass. Google's project aims to bring heads up displays to the masses, while Valve goals? Nobody knows. My Guess? I'm thinking it's a hat that wires directly into the brain, and stimulates the nerves responsible for micro-transaction impulse control. In the same blog post Abrash describes how he first came to work at Valve, and his background which involves a stint a Microsoft, Intel, and even ID where he coauthored Quake. During his time at Intel, Abrash worked on the now defunct Intel graphics project known as Larrabee. He also includes details on how to contact him if you're interested in the hardware position, and encourages anyone who's got the skills and motivation to shoot him an email. Anyone else have a guess as to what Valve means by Wearable Computing? Let us know in the comments below. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Seagate CEO Explains Why Flash Won’t Replace Magnetic Hard Drives Anytime Soon Posted: 15 Apr 2012 12:28 PM PDT
According to Luczo, the notion that solid state storage will take over is absurd, and smaller capacity SSD drives are doing little more than shifting the burden for archiving elsewhere. That could be an external hard drive, or even a cloud server. In fact, if every flash memory plant in the world were to max out their production capacity, they would barely be able to achieve 25% of the storage shipped by mechanical hard drive vendors last year. That number in case you are interested is in the neighborhood of 400 exabytes. With storage requirements growing by over 40 percent a year, solid state drive makers have their work cut out for them if they ever hope to catch up. SSD's of course also have to find a way to address the problem of long term reliability as capacities increase. Of course we are paraphrasing a bit, so here it is in his own words: "Our industry shipped 100 exabytes of data five years ago, 400 exabytes in 2011, and we'll probably ship a zettabyte sometime between 2015 and 2016. A zettabyte is equal to all the data that's been digitized from 1957 through 2010. Everything, however you want to think of it, cards, tapes, PCs, mainframes, client/server, minicomputers – one zettabyte. And we're going to ship that in one year. So whatever the architecture is, pads, phones, notebooks, ultrabooks, real notebooks, PCs, servers, clouds, one year, a zettabyte – that's all going to be on rotating mass storage." Head on over to Forbes if you want to check out the full seven-page interview. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| EVGA Announces Two Signature Series GTX 680’s Posted: 15 Apr 2012 11:58 AM PDT
The Signature+ card features a 5 phase PWM design, 8-pin and 6-pin PCIe power connections (as opposed to stock models with just a pair of 6-pin plugs), and of course an overclocking bump. EVGA will push the signature+ base clock up by 78 Mhz , and 92 Mhz on the boost clock. The 2GB of on board GDDR5 will also see a 200 Mhz bump by default. Both cards will feature 1536 CUDE Cores, a 256-bit memory interface, and all the other standard features such as PCI-E 3.0, SLI, and 3D vision support. The four display outputs consist of two DVI, one HDMI and a single DisplayPort. We haven't spotted these for sale just yet, however the Signature card will carry an MSRP of $529.99, while the Signature+ costs $549.99. (Image Credit TechPowerUp) | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Best Buy has been in the news quite a bit lately, and while some might argue any publicity is good publicity, I'm not sure even they would defend the latest coverage. First their CEO leaves 
Valve is one of those companies you just can't help but admire. They are consumer first (almost to a fault), and course they also haven't sold themselves to EA and Activision. Anytime they set out to do something ambitious, they gather a lot of media attention. Rumors of a Steam hardware console have been circling for several weeks now, but it turns out their hardware ambitions are much more bizarre. Valve developer Michael Abrash admitted the company is looking to hire hardware designers to help advance a prototype in the field of
Solid state drives don't just "sort of" speed up your boot drive, the difference is literally night and day. Anyone who has spent any amount of time with a machine equipped with one will tell you it's hard to go back to using a mechanical drive, but that doesn't have Seagate worried. 
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