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A lot has happened in the last 12 months. At the start of the year, iTunes was still peddling DRM, Yahoo and Microsoft were at bitter odds over the latter’s takeover attempts, Nvidia had the fastest consumer videocard, and the ”cloud” was still a burgeoning concept. Oh, how times have changed. Follow along as we relive and reflect upon some of the most memorable moments, products, and people to impact computer users over the last year.
Air cooling not doing enough for you? Water cooling too complicated? All-in-one liquid-cooling solutions are popping up like daisies, and our favorite is the Corsair H50. Quieter and less complicated than the competitors, it delivers performance surpassing the best air coolers for just a little more moolah. Factor in an easy install and this is a no-brainer.
On August 3, Daniel Goncalves, a 25-year-old computer technician, allegedly hacked an email account, stole login information, and falsified PayPal transaction records in an elaborate scheme to claim ownership of P2P.com, a domain valued at $160,000.
This arrest marks the first for domain theft, which has been difficult to prosecute because of the technical and legal complexities of the domain registrar system. Unfortunately for Goncalves, the owner of P2P.com was a former prosecutor for the Justice Department with a background in Internet payment processing.
You’d have to be crazy to build a 24-drive RAID array. Crazy like a fox, as Samsung showed us when the company strung together 24 SSDs to create 6TB of solid state storage, with a theoretical throughput of 2GB/s. The video of the escapade got more than 2.6 million views, and even though the drives weren’t all technically on the same controller (two RAID controllers along with all of the motherboard’s onboard ports were used), it proved that SSDs are serious business.
AT&T, Sprint, and Verizon subscribers all suffered when vandals lifted a manhole cover, went underground, and slashed up to 10 fiber optic cables. The ensuing outage affected landline (including 911) and cellular networks, as well as Internet access. As a result of the September 11 terrorist attacks, AT&T’s networks were declared National Critical Infrastructures because of their role in national security. AT&T offered up a $100,000 reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the culprits, but no one has been charged.
Hoggworks Studios’ plushy impersonation of the Wall Street Journal’s technology columnist is the best fake tech luminary since Fake Steve Jobs. In a series of web videos, the egomaniacal puppet slurs angry rants about Microsoft and Google while unabashedly praising Apple—often while inebriated.
Twentieth Century Fox got its undergarments in a bunch when an “incomplete and early version” of ‘X-Men Origins: Wolverine’ leaked to the Web a month before it appeared on the big screen. Missing effects didn’t seem to bother the hundreds of thousands of viewers who downloaded the movie in a 24 hour span. But what really pushed Fox over the edge was when 10-year Foxnews.com entertainment columnist Roger Friedman posted a review of the leaked film with rhetoric that seemingly made light of piracy. Friedman was promptly terminated.
Missouri citizen Elizabeth Thrasher took her vendetta too far by posting a fake "Casual Encounters" Craigslist ad for a 17-year-old girl. Because a recent law made cyberbullying a criminal offense, Thrasher was arrested on felony charges.
According to the complaint, Thrasher allegedly posted the 17-year-old girl’s cell phone number, email address, and a photo obtained from her MySpace page. If convicted, Thrasher, who is currently out on bail and forbidden to access the Internet, could receive a $5,000 fine and up to four years in prison.
Through several rounds of funding, two of the fastest-growing social networking hotspots on the web came to be worth nearly $12 billion combined. That’s especially remarkable in Twitter’s case, considering it doesn’t yet have a strong business model for making money. But that doesn’t matter to investors, who see the potential in a service that increased its membership 15-fold from one year ago. And Facebook doesn’t appear to be slowing down in the slightest as it leaves MySpace in the dust.
Google threatened popular Android ROM developer Cyanogen with legal action because he included some proprietary Google apps—like Market, Gmail, and YouTube—in his ROMs. Google was entirely in its legal right to stand firm on the issue, even if popular opinion is that it should have turned the other cheek. For a while, it looked like Google’s stance would put an end to third-party ROMs, but it didn’t take long for Cyanogen to start churning out ROMs without including the closed-source apps.
With a pair of GT200 GPUs, each boasting 896MB of GDDR3 memory, and a sexy black plastic enclosure, the GTX 295 sat atop our high-end GPU recommendation, at least until ATI launched the Radeon HD 5870.
Comments are closed on this article
thematejka
December 28, 2009 at 11:21am
This stuff is all good but maybe one thing needs to be added. I don't know how huge it is yet, but I know of about 100 people in my small town that got hit by some virus that steals your email account. You get the trojan by opening up an email, and it's embeded in a picture or piece of text or something. I got mine from an email that looked like it was from twitter (flawless duplicate), and it said someone is following me. I got suspicious when I saw the person had 0 followers 0 tweets and 0 following. Plus the profile pic was of an almost nude woman. My antivirus didn't even catch it, not until 3 days later when an update finally came out that detected it. I did some online research, and there are piles of these right now. Really devious little trojans. That's worthy of this list I think.
joeyjr
December 28, 2009 at 9:44am
joeyjr
I hope so. But when would it be the best time to do so? I have alot of games, mostly on steam, (Hairy Legs). Some are very old games that I dont even play that I got with the ID pack and older Valve games. most are from the past 5 years.
If you goto the the link below and compair what games are 64 bit compatable or need to run then with combatibility mode from Vista and Windows 7, I found that there is a big difference. Windows 7 is way behind Vista. I am not sure how this works on steam. I know a game like Final Doom runs a DOS emulator and will on Vista 64 bit from steam because it was modified to work.
frewster
December 28, 2009 at 5:34pm
If it works in Vista, then it's almost certainly going to work in 7. I went from Vista 32-bit to 7 64-bit, and I haven't had any compatibility problems. Even the original Half-Life (not the updated Source engine version) works perfectly!
