Posted 12/15/08 at 12:00:00 PM by The Maximum PC Staff and Paul Lily
Years from now, when future geeks muse over the history of PC tech, what will they remember about 2008? That’s the question we sought to answer when we compiled this comprehensive technology retrospective of the last year. Make no mistake, identifying and sorting the year’s most significant tech events was no easy task. We locked ourselves in a room where we mentally relived the last 12 months, pondering hundreds of items of note and debating the importance of each to find its appropriate rank on our list. Behold the result: our countdown of the 250 items representing the most noteworthy events and product releases that shaped the PC computing landscape in 2008.
It’s hard to imagine a life without Newegg, the second largest online-only retailer in the U.S. But for Canadian computer builders, they had no choice but to find their PC parts elsewhere. That is until Newegg opened its doors north of the border. And no, delivery by Mooseback isn’t a shipping option.
While we were waiting for other Blu-ray manufactures to catch up to LG’s 6x BD-R write speeds, Sony pulls a fast one—literally—and releases the first 8x burner to be sold in the U.S. What does the BWU 300S mean to Blu-ray fans? 22GB BD-R writes in less than 14 minutes! That is, if you’re using the manufacturer recommended Panasonic 6x media.
An Army intelligence report makes the rounds warning that Twitter could be used by terrorist organizations to coordinate militant attacks. The report, which first surfaced on the Federation of the America Scientists website, laid out three separate scenarios in which evil doers might use modern mobile phone applications in conjunction with Twitter to do their evil deeds.
Image Credit: The Inquisitr
What happens when a band of ex-Google employees set out to make a better search than their former employer? The end result is Cuil, which is pronounced ‘cool’ but is anything but. Not only did the startup stumble out of the gates to heavy criticism over its search results, but Cuil’s Product VP Louis Monier bailed on the company just a month after its launch amid “philosophical differences.”
Yahoo launches a quirky marketing campaign encouraging surfers to ‘Start Wearing Purple.’ Why purple? Apparently that’s Yahoo’s official color, never mind that the logo has long been colored red. As part of the grassroots effort, the company creates a website centered on all things purple, including a purple-themed gift shop.
Our favorite budget case is a virtual carbon copy of the Antec Nine Hundred, only $50 cheaper. Some might deride NZXT for a lack of imagination, but we say, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. We loved the Nine Hundred and we well appreciate a similar model at a lower price point.
Microsoft had hoped its Zune player would usurp Apple’s iPod from the media player throne, and while things didn’t work out that way, Microsoft did manage to make its Zune a more compelling alternative with its 3.0 software update. The biggest change came in adding WiFi support so that users could wirelessly download and stream songs from any hotspot. Several other enhancements added to Zune’s appeal, but in the end, Apple still ruled the roost in 2008.
Sure, the old Knight Rider show is cornier than Iowa, and we won’t even talk about what David Hasselhoff has done with his career since then, but who among us hasn’t dreamed of driving around in a 1982 Trans Am with KITT? Mio made that dream semi-possible when it released its Knight Rider GPS, complete with flashing ride lights and actor William Daniels, the original voice of KITT, giving personalized driving directions. Vintage Trans Am not included.
Image Credit: Radio Shack
You may not have even known Windows 3.11 was still alive and kicking, but the ancient OS found renewed life as an embedded platform in low-power platforms, such as cash registers, train schedule displays, ticketing systems, and other simple devices. But after 18 years, Microsoft officially stops issuing licenses for the OS that originally debuted n May 1990.
Michael Donnelly found himself in shark infested waters after a Vivendi attorney and private investigator visited his home. The visit served as a final warning for Donnelly to stop selling his Glider program, claiming it infringes on the company’s EULA. The Glider application enabls users to automate certain functions, and in the FAQ section, Donnelly freely owns up to the fact that “Glider is against theTerms of Service provided by Blizzard for World of Warcraft.”
Nvidia brought supercomputing to the desktop when it launched its GPU-based Tesla personal supercomputer, a beast of a machine the company claimed could offer up to 250 times the performance of a standard workstation. Three to four Nvidia Tesla C1060 computing processors, each one made up of 240 streaming processor cores and 4GB of 800MHz GDDR3 memory, came configured in every Tesla supercomputer. That kind of power didn’t come cheap and potential buyers could expect to drop 10 large on a rig.
If money talks, then the world can certainly hear Verizon now. Verizon spent roughly $28.1 billion acquiring rival Alltel, which turned Verizon into the nation’s largest cellular telephone provider. The deal knocked AT&T down to No.2, with Sprint sliding into the No. 3 spot. The deal also culminated rumors dating back to 2005 speculating the two companies were considering a merger.
Microsoft VP Ted Kummert, perhaps now better known as pumpkinhead, promised to dye his hair orange if his engineering team could wrap up SQL Server 2008 by the company’s deadline. The release was delayed from its initial target, but the developers ultimately came through, and Kummert made good on his promise.
Assassin’s Creed was the first title to support the new DX 10.1 API, and some benchmarks showed up to a 20 percent performance improvement when using a current generation ATI-based videocard, the only ones to support DX 10.1. A patch later removed DX 10.1 from the game, leading some to wonder if politics were at play. Conspiracy theorists were quick to point out that the game was part of Nvidia’s The Way It’s Meant To Be Played program. Coincidence?
Whether or not you consider professional gaming to be a real sport, the practice shares some similarities with those that are. Not all of those similarities are anything to be proud of. Australian site GamePlayer wrote an article identifying commonly abused substances gamers have been using to get an edge, including marijuana, amphetamines, Ritalin, and more. Kind of makes you wonder what someone means when they say they achieved a ‘high score.’
Most would agree that Apple’s iPhone is still the best touch-screen phone on the market, but it’s no longer the only viable option. With the release of T-Mobile’s G1 Android phone, handset maker HTC poses a legitimate threat to the Apple Empire in the mobile phone sector. In addition to the G1, HTC in 2008 sported an impressive lineup of touch-screen phones, including the Windows Mobile-based Touch HD.
The High Air Flow case is Cooler Master’s magnum opus. It takes everything that was great about previous CM cases like the Cosmos and mixes them into a glorious best-of. Big fans on the top, front, and side keep air moving, there’s plenty of room for a second PSU or water-cooling reservoir, and the toolless design is always appreciated.
Whether you were in diapers the first time WarGames played in movie theaters or are old enough to remember going to see it back in 1983, everyone got a chance to see Matthew Broderick play the part of a hacker on the big screen in 2008. To celebrate the War Games’ 25th anniversary and to build hype for a straight-to-DVD sequel, MGM brought the memorable flick back for a single encore showing in select theaters.
Turns out you don’t need a gun to hold an entire city hostage, you just need access to the city government’s fiber optic network. Terry Childs, a city tech employee, was accused of modifying the city’s municipal network and then refusing to hand over the passwords after being arrested. Even the mayor’s email was affected from Childs’ alleged shenanigans.
After two days of competition in Hong Kong, two contestants from China emerged as Champions of AOCC 2008. The Chinese duo – Xu Gang and Susie – beat out 38 other contestants representing 19 countries by taking the top spot in all 3 categories of the competition. Runners up, in order from 1st to 4th, included Sweden, Portugul, Singapore, and Finland.
Yung-Hsun Lin might have a hard time getting his former employer to write him a letter of recommendation. That’s because Lin, a systems administrator fearful he was about to be laid off, dropped a logic bomb on company computers designed to take them out. His unsuccessful attempt translated into a 30-month prison sentence, the longest that has ever been handed out for computer sabotage.
Rep. Edward Markey (D-Mass.) fights back against deep-packet technologies, which have been used on the web to track what sites users visit so that companies can deliver targeted ads. The practice raises privacy concerns, for which Markey says an opt-in rule should be mandatory. On the flip-side, Robert Kykes, CEO of NebuAd, countered that a web-wide opt-in program would harm the internet, which receives half of its funding through advertising.
Image Credit: Boston Globe, Dina Rudick
Maybe the next generation of game consoles and other living room equipment will allow us to beam high definition content to our HDTVs without all the cable clutter. That type of future became very possible when the WirelessHD 1.0 specification was ratified. WirelessHD 1.0 taps into the unlicensed 60GHz frequencies to transmit HD signals, while also providing a standard for manufacturers to follow.
Image Credit: TomsHardware
In 2008 alone, nine states put laws in the books taxing digital downloads, bringing the running total to 17 states in all, plus the District of Columbia. At stake is a $130 billion untaxed digital market pushed by popular services like Steam and iTunes. Several other states begin examining their own laws, signaling that the free ride may soon be over.
Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang stayed busy during his year and a half tenure as the search company’s CEO, and during that time he staved off a $44.6 billion acquisition offer from Microsoft and watched as Yahoo’s stock price tumbled down. Despite the financial failures, the decision to step down was said to be mutual.
Image Credit: Flickr jdlasica
Those in need of a clever sounding URL got a whole new selection of top-level domains to choose from when GoDaddy started selling .Me domains. GoDaddy wasn’t fully prepared to deal with the demand during the initial open registration, and as a result, several people who registered for Aweso.me at the same time had their orders go through, but only one got to keep it. The rest got an Aweso.me refund.
The best part about Intel’s Dunnington-based server CPUs isn’t that they contain six cores, but that the chips are monolithic so that all cores are on a single die. No previous Xeon chip can make that same claim, nor can they touch the Dunnington in performance, which Intel claims is improved by 50 percent.
The promise of Cell processing on the PC takes a step forward when both Thomson and Leadtek announce plans to release a SpursEngine add-in card. Toshiba’s SpursEngine technology, which is based on the Cell processor technology found in the PS3, allows users to encode or decode HD video using hardware-based MPEG2 and H.264 codecs, as well as upscale standard-definition video HD on the fly.
The best thing about Nvidia releasing its 9xxx GeForce videocards is that it drove the price down on the company’s 8-series parts. The update might have been more dramatic if Nvidia didn’t already refresh part of its 8-series lineup with the G92 core, which ultimately resulted in the 9800GTX being little more than a glorified G92-based 8800GTS.
The Linksys WRT600N is the first 802.11n draft 2.0 router we’ve tested that can operate on both the 2.4GHz and 5GHz frequency bands simultaneously. It's also the most expensive router we've tested, but it's impressive performance and feature set justifies its cost.
Reading like a tabloid rag, the federal indictment brought against Broadcom co-founder Henry T. Nicholas III contained accusations of sex, drugs, but no rock and roll. Nicholas III pled not guilty to all charges, which in total have the potential to carry a 370-year prison sentence. The 18-page indictment accuses Nicholas III of everything from stock-option backdating to slipping ecstasy into drinks he served to business associates.
No, not like that, not in a literal sense anyway. Whereas 3DRealms weaved together an intriguing storyline, awesome action sequences complete with Bullet Time, and a deeply disturbed character, the Max Payne movie failed to capture any of the elements that made the game such a hit. Despite the negative reviews, Max Payne topped the box office chart and pulled in $18 million during its opening weekend.
Why do we like the Radeon 4850? It’s easy. This family of boards uses the same GPU that powers the Radeon 4870 HD and 4870 X2 boards. By pairing lower-clocked versions of that speed demon with slower (and less expensive) GDDR3 memory, ATI built a $150 performance champ that is perfectly paired with a 22-inch panel. The icing on the cake is the chips impressive overclockabilty. We like what we see!
Despite the hype surrounding solid-state drives, with few exceptions the technology remains overpriced, undersized, and surprisingly slow. Intel’s X-25M thrashes the competition, but it’s Micron’s demo of a supercharged SSD that gets everyone excited about flash-based drives again. The company posts a low-quality YouTube video showing a prototype model hitting 800 MB/s, which wipes the floor with any consumer storage device yet available.
Everybody knows what goes on at Pirate Bay, and that can pose a problem for the P2P site when certain prying eyes start poking around. So in response to the European Union heading toward a DMCA-like copyright enforcement, the Pirate Bay responds by outlining a plan to encrypt the entire internet. The “Transparent end-to-end encryption for the internets” (IPETEE) would, in theory, prevent ISPs from identifying and throttling P2P traffic.
It seems that everything Google touches turns to gold, so maybe the search giant has a shot at stealing the virtual show from Second Life when it entices users to use its Lively service instead. Google’s grand plan was for users to create a massive distributed virtual world, which all starts with creating an avatar.
Not everything Google touches turns to gold, especially when those things are bug ridden clients trying to compete with the online social world known as Second Life. Such is the case with Google’s Lively experiment, a project Google ultimately gave up on just 6 months after it was introduced. When we asked readers what they thought of Lively’s impending demise, poster AndyYankee17 summed it up best by responding “never heard of it.”
The OLPC missed its mark at offering a laptop for $100 or less, but it also didn’t come with XP, preventing some would-be buyers from making a purchase order. That changes when OLPC partners with Microsoft to include a modified version of XP, and it only adds $10 to the cost.
Mother always said you can’t grow up to be a professional gamer, and it gets harder to prove her wrong when the Cyberathlete Professional League closes down. The Dallas, Texas-based organization stayed busy during its 10.5-year tenure, hosting over 60 international tournaments and handing out over $3 million in prizes.
What was supposed to be just routine maintenance to purge unused email accounts turned into anything but routine for thousands of Charter subscribers who found that their active email addy had been decimated. To make matters worse, Charter said it couldn’t retrieve any messages or attachments that may have been sitting in the in-box when the glitch occurred. Affected customers were offered a $50 credit for the mistake.
The book on Napster adds yet another chapter as Best Buy acquires the subscription music service for $121 million. The move is meant to compete with Apple’s iTunes service, something Napster was never able to do on its own. Best Buy’s ambitious plans to expand the service have yet to materialize.
If Intel can build massive branding around a “platform” that is really just a CPU, chipset and Wi-Fi chip chip, AMD can too. Well sorta. While Intel forces PC builders to take all three in order to qualify for “Centrino 2,” AMD is only requiring the CPU and chipset and is letting vendors pick from a qualified list of third-party wireless vendors for the last component.
Most research involving cell phone use centers around whether or not we’re putting ourselves at risk for brain cancer. But if you’re a male, researchers at the Cleveland Clinic warned that cell phones might also cause harmful effects to your gonads. The study found more free radicals in semen that had been placed 2.5cm away from an 850 MHz cell phone in talk mode for 1 hour, giving a whole new meaning to the term phone sex.
IBM has always had a soft spot for Linux, and in 2008, the company lays out plans to help companies move away from Microsoft and into open-source software. The plan includes partnering with several Linux vendors to bundle its middleware on more Linux systems, and to help them do that, IBM reconfigured its Lotus Foundations software to make it both easier and cheaper to install on Linux-based computers.
Most 5-year-olds ask to go to Chuck E. Cheese for their birthday, but such a simple celebration wouldn’t do for Second Life. To commemorate the occasion, developer Linden Labs held a two-week long Virtual World Fair, which took place from June 23 to July 7, 2008. Linden closed off the event to its mature-themed sub-communities, who went on to plan celebrations of their own, birthday suit and all.
Image Credit: Flickr Miyaoka Hitchcock
If your favorite online portals are saying your passwords are too weak, consider changing them to the nearly 13-million digit long prime number discovered by a UCLA computer running the GIMPS distributed computing software. The prime number, 243,112,609-1, marks only the 45th Mersenne prime ever discovered, which is a prime that can take the form of 2n-1.
Netscape didn’t develop rabies like Old Yeller did, but like the lovable dog, it had to be put down by the hands of its owner. After almost 14 years of service, the browser died an honorable death, receiving one final update before AOL recommended its users switch to Firefox. At its height in 1995, Netscape claimed over 80 percent of the browser market share.
SanDisk soared to the top of the SDHC capacity chart by releasing a 32GB model, while also claiming the speed crown with maximum read and write rates of 15 MB/s and 10 MB/s respectively. Days later, Panasonic came out with a 32GB SDHC of its own and upped the speed ante with maximum data transfer rates up to 20 MB/s.
Making a pitch for quantity over quality, Apple’s iTunes Store boasts over 5 billion songs sold by June of 2008, most of which came saddled with DRM. Other digital download stores pick up the slack by offering a smorgasbord of DRM-free music, but Apple never appears to be in a rush to follow suit. Such is the luxury the company can afford to make when it claims over 70 percent of online digital music sales.
We know we shouldn’t be surprised by anything hackers do – after all, they have no qualms about stealing your personal data and selling it to the highest bidder. But targeting epilepsy patients with a flashing computer animation designed to cause seizures marked a new low for cybercriminals. Kudos to the Epilepsy Forum staff, who responded quickly to the attacks.
Image Credit: Coolest-gadgets.com
Chances are, if you own a DSLR camera, you use CompactFlash to store your photos. And if you shoot a lot of pictures in RAW, you might be running out of space. Pretec made the practice of filling up a CF card no easy task when it released a 100GB CF card, the largest capacity to date.
While most of us would have a hard time justifying the purchase of a $3,500 panel—particularly in these trying economic times—that does little to alleviate our desire for this 24-inch LCD monitor that’s capable of displaying one billion colors. And though marketed to people in graphic design and photography, who’s to say blasting zombies isn’t a color critical task.
Spam has become such a ubiquitous part of computing that it’s easy to assume the practice has been around forever. And it nearly has been. The first spam message was sent back in 1978 by a marketer at DEC (Digital Equipment Company) to about 400 people before the practice even had a name. Thanks for opening that can of worms, asshat.
We liked Microsoft’s Windows Home Server software from the git-go, right up until the point that users began suffering data corruption and file loss. More than just teething pains, the problems were rooted at a very low level. Fortunately, Microsoft fixed these core problems—and added needed features like support for 64-bit clients and integrated server backup software—with the first service pack for the nascent OS, dubbed Power Pack 1.
Dallas Mavericks owner and one-time avid blogger Mark Cuban made his fortune on the internet, so it came as a bit of surprise when the outspoken billionaire declared the internet dead. And he didn’t stop there. Cuban said “the internet’s for old people,” though 5 minutes on Runescape would have anyone signing a different tune. Maybe Cuban was just having a bad day, like the ones he suffers each year when the Mavericks exit the playoffs empty-handed.
It’s one thing to raise fees, but many felt Ebay crossed the line when it revamped its feedback system. In order to encourage buyers to leave accurate feedback without fear of retaliation, the online auction side made it so that sellers can only leave positive feedback, even if the buyer ends up being a rotten non-paying bidder. Sellers staged a weeklong boycott in response, which did nothing to change Ebay’s mind.
As far as we know, hell never froze over (perhaps Justin Long will send us a postcard when he gets there), so we can’t explain what cosmic forces brought Art Lebedev’s Optimus Maximus OLED keyboard out of vaporware status and transformed it into a shipping a product. At almost $1,600, it’s expensive, but it exists. We still can’t say the same for Duke Nukem Forever.
A PC is a sum of all parts, and the trick to wringing out better performance is to reduce or eliminate bottlenecks. With dual- and quad-core chips now the norm, memory chips struggle to keep pace. Cryptographer Joseph Ashwood set out to tackle the problem by developing multi-core memory. According to Ashwood, his architecture, which “borrows extensively from today’s modern multi-core CPUs,” can muster 16GB/s.
According to the bean counters at Jon Peddie Research, not only is PC gaming not dead, but it isn’t even on life support. On the contrary, the research firm declared the PC gaming hardware market to be worth $20 billion. Furthermore, JPR estimates the market will nearly double to $34 billion by 2012. Take that, you cocky console gamers.
Quite frankly, we’re surprised it took Google as long as it did to target with Flash games. The company’s foray into Flash can be viewed as confirmation that the potential for heavy ad dollars are at stake, and its AdSense for Games program isn’t without competition. But Google’s solution offers a fair bit of flexibility, allowing beta users to implement video, image, and text ads within an online game.
Michael Phelps may have earned himself a spot in the record books, but it was Microsoft who also scored a major victory in Beijing. Despite Adobe Flash’s wide userbase, Microsoft managed to sweet talk NBC into using its competing Silverlight technology to stream Olympic coverage, and with it all the gold that comes from the deal.
We’re waiting for the moment when Johnathan Wendel joins forces with Microsoft to create Vista: Fatal1ty Edition or Windows 7 Fatal1ty. In the meantime, you can find the gamer tag on just about every component available, including OCZ RAM. Before the year was through, OCZ also added a line of Fatal1ty-branded power supplies.
One part E.T. and two parts weird, Novo’s Minoru makes its debut as the world’s first 3D webcam. The two-eyed gadget creates a stereoscopic image so that viewers can see you in three dimensions, provided you can convince them to don a pair or red and blue 3D glasses. If not, 2D still works, but where’s the fun in that?
We typically associate Biostar with the bargain bin, but it might be time to take another look. Using a Biostar TPower I45 motherboard, renowned overclocker ‘Youngpro’ set a new frontside bus record by reaching 725MHz. That same board has been spotted in other overclocking competitions, including a stint in Belgian when another enthusiast became the first to pump the FSB to 645MHz on air-cooling.
It can be full-time job keeping up with changing technology (and for us, it is!), and it doesn’t help matters that Nvidia’s popular GeForce line is plagued with a confusing naming scheme. Model numbers are only part of the battle, and consumers must also grasp the differences between a GS, GSO, GT, GTS, GTX, and so on. And that doesn’t take into account core modifications, like the one that exists between the 320MB and 640MB versions of the 8800GTS. Nvidia promised to simplify its lineup, only to add yet another tag, the GTX+.
Quite frankly, the first-generation GeForce GTX 260 was over-gimped. Figuring out how much functionality can safely be cut from a higher-end GPU to make a mid-range product is a tricky balance. Cut too much, and you suffer anemic performance. Don’t cut enough, and there’s no reason to buy a spendy high-end card. While the initial run of GeForce GTX 260s (with a mere 192 shader cores) couldn’t hack it, the versions with just 24 more shader processors (that’s where the board gets its name) are just right.
Hitachi was the first hard drive manufacturer to reach the 1TB milestone, and the company is already off to the races towards 5TB. A year earlier, Hitachi said that 4TB could be attainable by 2011, but later revised its prediction and said it would release a 5TB 3.5-inch hard drive in 2010. And according to Hitachi, if you run two of them in tandem, you’ll have the equivalent storage capacity of half a human brain.
AMD’s stream processing technology isn’t new, but it’s always been more of an afterthought. The same can’t be said in 2008, and AMD showed renewed focus with its new ATI Stream brand, which is a compilation of several previous technologies. Updated drivers unlock the new ATI Stream acceleration capabilities built into several ATI videocards, and to add icing on the cake, AMD offers its ATI Avivo Video Converter as a free download.
Before digital cameras marched into the mainstream market, you could either wait for your film to be developed by some nosy 1-hr photo lab employee who would keep a copy for himself, or placate your desire for instant gratification with Polaroid’s instant film. Closing yet another chapter on our younger days, Polaroid put the kibosh on instant film and closed down the last of its instant film factories.
Image Credit: Flickr Patrick Haney
Polaroid may be discontinuing production of their iconic instant film, but they’re not leaving the market totally vacant. This June saw the release of PoGo, a pocket-sized printer which promised instant, adhesive-backed photos straight from our cameras and phones. The device was marred by lousy battery life and Bluetooth connectivity issues, but was still fun enough that we’re looking forward to future versions.
Remember you used to have to manually upload your photos to your web site? Feh. With Eye-Fi’s lineup of Wi-Fi integrated SD cards, just snap the shot, leave the camera on and it’ll upload those adorable pictures of your kids, pets. Or for the more geeky, your World of Warcraft figurines or other “man dolls.”
Ageia’s standalone PhysX card never did quite catch on, but physics processing did. Just months after Intel spent $110 million to acquire Havok, Nvidia answered back by picking up Ageia, a deal rumored to have been worth $150 million. The asking price drove AMD out of the running, who also showed interest before Nvidia stepped in.
On August 16th, 1993, Elvis fans mourned the 16th anniversary of his passing. It was also on this day that Debian was born, and by the age of 15, the GNU/Linux distribution has gone on to influence some of the most popular distros, including Ubuntu. And here’s an interesting tidbit – Debian got its name by combining founder Ian Murdock’s first name with his then girlfriend (now wife) Deborah (Deb+ian).
Hopping over to Newegg and sorting videocards by price is supposed to simplify the process of picking out a bang/buck videocard, but Nvidia ruins the experience when it decides to enforce Manufacturer Advertised Pricing. With MAP, vendors aren’t allowed to display prices below a set minimum, forcing shoppers to add the item to their cart to see the true selling price. Why is this akin to sitting on nails? Because it’s a pain in the ass.
Higher bandwidth and lower power consumption sounds like a win-win proposition, and it’s these two characteristics that GDDR5 brings to the table. Memory maker Qimonda gets busy churning out the new chips, most of which end up in AMD’s hands for use in the company’s HD 4870 and HD 4870X2 videocards. Later in the year, Hynix introduces an even more power efficient GDDR5 memory, requiring just 1.35V compared to 1.5V.
While we’ve often threatened to obliterate enemies with just our mind, it was never before possible until OCZ unveiled its Neural Impulse Actuator. Once strapped to the noggin, the futuristic looking device can then translate electrical biosignals allowing you to control the on-screen action through the power of thought and various reactionary movements, such as clenching your jaw and different facial expressions. Don’t use while constipated.
Before Barack Obama went on the defeat John McCain in the 2008 Presidential election, he first reached out to connected voters by announcing he would text message his choice for VP running mate before making a formal announcement. According to Nielsen Mobile, 2.9 million subscribers signed up to receive the text.
EliteTorrents, at one time a popular portal for finding pre-release movies, drew the ire of the MPAA, who took the admins to court. Of the three administrators, only Daniel Dove pleaded ‘not guilty,’ and as one might imagine the Department of Justice had little trouble winning a jury conviction for copyright infringement. Dove, no longer a free bird, was sentenced to 18 months in prison, which is more than either of his cohorts but less than the 10 years he could have received.
It takes a big man to admit that he’s wrong, but that’s just what notorious Apple-hater Gordon Mah Ung did this year, when he served our first review of an Apple laptop right beside a tasty serving of crow. Said Gordon, “the MacBook Pro is a surprisingly satisfying machine”.
Between tuition, books, and kegs, college students don’t often have loads of extra cash lying around to buy things like, oh, developer and design tools to write software applications. And nor do they have to, as Microsoft launched its DreamSpark initiative, offering college and high school kids all around the world free access to technology tools. With them, budding developers can build web pages, create Xbox 360 videogames, and engage in other geeky time killers for those dateless Friday nights.
There, that’s it. We said it. The new, trimmed-down E3, while glorious and wonderful for anyone actually working the show, sucks for everyone else. Along with the thronging crowds, clamoring for a glimpse of Wil Wright’s latest and the breathy news coverage of the latest family-friendly musical rhythm game, the games industry also left behind a lot of the fun and excitement around games. Put another way: more people waited in line to play the Wii in 2006 than attended E3 in 2008. We’re glad “old” E3 is coming back, even if our voices and feet aren’t.
The online music industry has always been a touchy one, but the RIAA and internet radio came a step closer to ending online royalty disputes. An agreement called a “breakthrough that will facilitate new ways to offer music to consumers online,” between songwriters, music publishers, record labels and digital music websites concluded a seven year dispute over mechanical royalties and limited music downloads. Unfortunately, sites such as Pandora and Live365 remain in a high-stakes standoff with SoundExchange, the company in charge of collecting the fees for artists and record companies.
AMD set out to prove it has game by launching a new marketing program called AMD GAME! In a similar vein to Microsoft’s Vista Capable campaign, AMD’s strategy is to certify and label affordable PCs that meet set criteria the company determines can play the latest games. AMD compares the concept to the simplicity of buying a console.
We’ve heard of viruses and other malware being inadvertently included on media coming from trusted sources, but imagine the surprise that would come from firing up a recovery DVD and finding software cracks and confidential documents. The SNAFU belongs to Asus, who shipped the dirty recovery DVDs to several notebook customers. Makes you wonder just what’s going on behind over there.
Enthusiasts have mixed feelings when it comes to VIA chipsets. On one hand, the company regularly churned out high performance chipsets well before overclocking became a mainstream hobby. But many remember VIA most for its buggy platforms that often led to an inevitable revision (KT266 to KT266A, for example). Memories are all enthusiasts have left after 2008, as VIA bowed out of the motherboard chipset business to focus on x86 processors. Farewell or good riddance?
There’s an entire underground economy that thrives on stolen data, such as bank account information, credit card details, and other personal information. And at one point, a stolen credit card might have sold for $100 or more on the web, but in 2008, that same card would only fetch $10. The reason? Hackers have gotten too good at what they do resulting in an oversupply of stolen data.
Blu-ray adoption got off to a very slow start—in part because of the competing HD DVD standard, but also because of the format’s initially sloooooow burn times and the exorbitant cost of both hardware and media. But with LG’s GBW-H20L burner, Blu-ray’s prospects begin to improve. Not only does the drive distinguish itself with 6x BD-R burn times, making it possible to write 22GB of data to a disc in around 20 minutes, but its $280 price is nearly half that of the competition.
Originally applied for in 2005, in 2008 Microsoft was a granted U.S. patent number 7,415,666 which, among the rhetoric, gives an example whereby “a user is viewing a page starting in a viewing area from the middle of that page and ending at the bottom, a Page Down command will cause the next page to be show.” All tallied, Microsoft owns some 10,000 patents, including the scrollable mouse wheel and double clicking.
PC game sales have gotten a bad rap and it’s no wonder so many are quick to read PC gaming’s eulogy. But what those numbers don’t’ tell you is what amount is being made off of digital sales and how much subscription based gaming brings in. With the long overdue introduction of subscription based tracking, the NPD takes a step in the right direction into providing an accurate snapshot of the PC gaming industry.
Want to boost investor confidence? Tell them your company’s going to open a can of whoop ass on the competition. We don’t know if it will work, but that didn’t stop Nvida CEO Jen-Hsun Huang from using those exact words during one of the company’s financial analyst meetings. In fact, the outspoken CEO is rarely without candid comments, including dismissing Intel’s integrated graphics as “a joke.”
It wasn’t the ability to bludgeon prostitutes to death and take back money for services rendered that caused the biggest uproar. No, it was the not-so-graphic digitized sex scenes only unlockable by downloading a ‘Hot Coffee’ mod that got Take Two in deep doo-doo. But when the dust settled, the class action lawsuit only netted up to $35 per offended gamer, or $5 for those with no disc or receipt. Less than 2,700 gamers participated in the settlement.
Not many standalone boutique OEMs are left standing, as many have either shuttered their doors or been gobbled up by mainstay OEMs. And such is the case with Voodoo PC, now an HP acquisition. For awhile, HP kept the Voodoo line separate, but later decided it made more sense to merge its specialty PC division with its consumer Compaq and HP lines.
Sure, a 16-layer 400GB Blu-ray disc sounds groovy on paper, but how far in the future would we have to travel to find a Blu-ray player capable or recognizing the thing? Apparently, not very far. Just five months after Pioneer announced it had developed the disc, the company showed one off at the IT Month Fair in Taipei, and the word is it will work with current BD decks. Bitchin’!
In October, Nikon released the D90, the latest in its line of solid, entry-level DSLRs. What most distinguished the D90 from its predecessor the D80—and indeed from every other DSLR in the field—was its ability to capture 24 fps, 720p video. While video capture may seem gimmicky in a DSLR, the D9 posted some fairly impressive results, and we’ll be surprised if we don’t start seeing this feature in more DSLRs soon.
Last.fm had been talking about bringing together a business model that would compensate independent artists who aren’t signed with a music label, and the social music service made good on that promise in July. Last.fm’s Artist Royalty Program made it possible for artists and labels to start accruing royalties provided their music was played enough (i.e., didn’t suck).
Life is series of tradeoffs, but one that always seemed unnecessary was forgoing that second display when in SLI mode. Thankfully, Nvidia finally got its act together and in November released new Forceware 180.48 drivers, the first non-beta driver to enable SLI multi-monitor support. The drivers also marked the first time that end users could bring SLI and Intel together without any funky hacks.
It didn’t matter how many times WoW players casted a level 40 spell of Hacker Protection on their accounts, they still ran the risk of logging in only to find that their loot is gone. To help ensure that such an unpleasant scenario can never take place, Blizzard started selling an authenticator dongle, which generates a unique one-time password every time gamers log in.
You know how Mac users like to talk about how secure their platform is compared to your crash-prone Windows rig? Next time it happens, simply remind them that during CanSecWest’s annual Pwn2Own challenge, not only wax Mac OS X the first to fall, but it only took hacker Charlie Miller two minutes to make the MacBook Air his ____ (insert naughty word). It took two days to the same to Vista, and only Linux walked away unscathed.
Like virtually every other netbook we’ve seen, it’s about 3 pounds, 8.9” screen, and runs Windows XP on a 1.6GHz Atom processor with 1GB of RAM. Its specs are nearly identical to the MSI Wind and Lenovo S10, but it’s slightly smaller and much cheaper. With a roomy 160GB hard drive, it’s the best first-gen netbook value around.
We’ll never know why some links have to be so long as to take up multiple lines, but nor have we cared much thanks to TinyURL. The only problem is that remembering the random characters at the end of the shortened link never made any sense. TinyURL addressed that problem by giving users the ability to customize the shortened URLs, so that www.tinyurl.com/58dr8q can be more easily remembered as www.tinyurl.com/ForSpiderMonkey.
If Google were a guy, the chicks would totally dig him. Not only is he famous, filthy rich, and good at what he does, but he also wants to help you change the world. The idea behind the 10 to the 100 project was to get ordinary people to submit extraordinary ideas that would change the world. The best ideas will eventually be whittled down to five, among which Google will divvy up a $10 million contribution. What a guy!
Are you using Skype to keep in touch with friends, family, and maybe even a few random strangers? Of course you are, because Skype is available on just about every gadget out there, including Sony’s PSP. Long after Vonage’s ‘woo-hoo’ commercials fade from memory, users will be making phone calls and sending IMs through Skype whether at home or on the go, and maybe even one day will you be able to officially do so on your iPhone.
It’s not because they’re incapable, but because California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger helped pass a bill banning the practice. Get caught texting while driving in the sunshine state and you’ll be hit with a $20 fine. Do it again and that number more than doubles to $50, the same for each subsequent infraction. Curiously enough, the state had already passed a ban making it illegal to hold a cell phone and drive at the same time, but you could still text, assuming you could levitate objects with your mind.
Is it truly necessary for game publishers to require that their games can only be played while the CD/DVD remains in the drive? According Stardock and Gas Powered Games, not only is it unnecessary, but it’s a violation of No. 10 in The Gamer’s Bill of Rights. The two devised the list in hopes of garnering enough industry support to eventually create a consortium, which would actually uphold the standards instead of just talk about them.
Electronic Arts' infatuation with rival video game maker Take-Two Interactive have been anything but secret, nor has Take-Two's rejection. In late February, Take-Two publicly rejected EA's unsolicited takeover bid worth roughly $2 billion, a move Take-Two accused of being "opportunistic" with Grand Theft Auto IV nearing release. Not taking the rejection well, EA threatened with a hostile takeover in the following months, but has since backed down.
The best ideas in the world can go down in flames without support from key backers – just ask Toshiba about its HD-DVD platform. And so OpenID had to be thrilled to find out Microsoft, Google, Verisign, and IBM were all hopping on board as partners. Board nominations and other housekeeping duties are still taking place, but at this point, it’s hard to imagine a future without OpenID in it.
Forget any talks of overage fees or other measures intended to curb the use of file-sharing applications. In a chat with the FCC, the telco disclosed its stance against allowing its wireless broadband customers from doing anything that “may cause extreme network capacity issues,” while also making sure to specifically point out P2P. Use it and lose it.
OCZ’s Do-It-Yourself Gaming Notebook Program serves as another reminder of how far the company has come. What started off as an enthusiast memory company has grown into a multi-faced operation with products running the gamut from peripherals, power supplies, cooling solutions, and so much more. It seems only logical that DIY notebooks would end up in OCZ’s radar – there’s not much left for the company to conquer.
Before you kids got your overclocking groove on with your shiny DFI and Gigabyte motherboards that became all the rage, Abit stood out as a premier producer of enthusiast level motherboards catering to both AMD and Intel. Sadly, the company who brought us such gems as the NF7-S2 and IC7-Max3 let it be known that it would not produce any more motherboards after 2008. Drat.
The year of the netbook can also be described as the year of the Atom processor. Nearly every mini-notebook on the market sports Intel’s Atom CPU inside, but the release of VIA’s Nano chip threatens to shake things up. Benchmarks show lots of promise for the new chip, as does the company’s plan to release a dual-core variant in 2010.
While on the topic of records, Wikipedia made history by publishing a book with about 90,000 authors, qualifying as the most credited individual authors ever. Credits alone account for 27 pages in “The One-Volume Wikipedia Encyclopedia,” which is a compilation of 25,000 of the most popular articles on German Wikipedia.
Look at Microsoft’s Internet Explorer over there, thinking it’s so cool with its 70 percent market share. But can it boast a Guinness World Record? Mozilla’s Firefox can, following a pre-launch campaign implorering surfers to download Firefox 3 on the day of its release. Firefox fans responded, helping the open source browser break the record for most downloads in a 24 hour period by registering over 8 million downloads.
Geek fight! Only this one had nothing to do with stolen pocket protectors. Instead, Apple took exception to the Miami-based OEM selling Mac clones running OS X and hit the company with a lawsuit. Psystar fired back with a lawsuit of its own claiming Apple’s Max OS X EULA runs afoul of U.S. monopoly laws. Ultimately the two parties agreed to have the cased move to “Alternate Dispute Resolution” and avoid setting a legal precedent.
Don’t bite the hand that feeds you, even if that hand is knowingly churning out faulty Xbox 360 consoles. That’s the lesson Robert Delaware learned, who was terminated by Microsoft from his position as a contract game tester after speaking to VentureBeat without permission. Delaware, who has no regrets about his decision, was the only named Microsoft worker who contributed to the piece detailing the Xbox 360’s well publicized failure rate.
We can think of better ways to describe a fanboy than “a boy who is an enthusiastic devotee (as of comics or movies),” which was just one of a handful of geek terms Merriam-Webster added to its collegiate dictionary. Other notable entries include ‘Malware,’ ‘Netroots,’ and ‘Webinar.’ Sadly, Merriam-Webster still hasn’t updated its definition for ‘tea bag.’
We're not the biggest Apple fans, but we can't deny that the iPhone 3G was one of 2008's most significant product releases. Hell, even our Online Editor waited in line for one.
Taking porn away from the internet would be like, well, taking porn away from the internet. The concept might have trouble registering in the mind, but not for Kevin Martin, FCC Chairman and advocate of a free internet devoid of any lewd content. Martin’s plan? Auction off the AWS-3 spectrum to any company willing to provide nationwide wireless broadband free of charge and free of two of anythings doing anything with a single cup.
The PCI served us well but we can finally let go with the arrival of Creative Lab’s PCI-Express-based X-Fi Titanium Fatal1ty Edition card. It doesn’t hurt the Titanium that it finally brings Dolby Digital Live support too.
Linux and Mac users have long used Wine (formerly WINE, or Wine Is Not an Emulator) to run Windows applications on non-Windows environments, but always in beta form. That all changed when, 15 years later, the application finally went gold and reached 1.0 status. The gold release brought about several bug fixes, including improved Skype support, but it didn’t taste any different.
Without evidence, there’s no case, right? Wrong! In Atlantic v Howell, defendant Jeffrey Howell found out the hard way that you can’t make your legal woes go away by simply disposing of the evidence. Not only did Howell delete his shared folder, but he used a file shredder to make the data virtually unrecoverable, ultimately earning himself a $40,000 guilty verdict.
Not only are reports of an Atom shortage a thing of the past, but Intel takes it ultra low-processor technology to the next level and starts shipping a dual-core variant. Essentially two Atom 230 processors on a single board, Intel’s two-core Atom 330 stays clocked at 1.6GHz per core. But unlike its single-core brethren, Intel relegates the Atom 330 only to nettops, leaving netbooks stuck in a single-core world.
Even the Energizer bunny hopped up on Viagra would have a tough time lasting as long as HP’s EliteBook 6930p, the first notebook ever to claim a 24-hour battery life. To make the milestone possible, certain configuration options are mandatory, such as an optional Intel 80GB SSD drive and an LED display. Configured properly, the notebook could outlast a trip from Newark Liberty International Airport to Singapore Changi Airport, the world’s longest scheduled commercial airline flight.
With all the problems Nvidia faced with failing GPUs and falling stock, the graphics chip maker was badly in need of a major win, and it got exactly that with its 9400M GPU. Apple, fully aware of Nvidia’s past problems, chose Nvidia to supply graphics chores for its refreshed MacBooks rather than continue a longstanding relationship with Intel.
At last count, there were approximately 6.7 billion people puttering around the planet. Shift the roll call to the number of computers in use around the world and for the first time, that number passes the 1 billion mark, according to research firm Gartner. And while that number is good for emerging markets, it’s not as rosy for the environment as an estimated 180 million PCs are replaced by year’s end, 35 million of which ultimately end up in landfills.
Most notebooks have no way of letting the end-user upgrade its graphics solution, leaving mobile gamers in a tough predicament – dial down the settings, or start over with a new notebook? At least, that’s how it used to be. Asus’ ROG XG Station proved a game changer as being the world’s first external graphics dock with an Express Card connector. Not only does the device allow for easy PCI-E VGA upgrades, but it also comes with four USB 2.0 ports and Dolby Technology through its headphone-out port. That’s rad!
Radiohead might have garnered the most media attention over its pay-what-you-want experiment, but they’re not the only band to give away digital downloads. Rock group Marillion made its new album available as a free download with a pop-up box imploring listeners to share their email address. Coldplay Nine Inch Nails, and several others have also experimented with various forms of free music, so that pirates are no longer the only ones sticking it to the record labels.
The HTX3 specification triples the performance of the original HTX 1.0 spec by pushing 5.2 GT/s (20.8 GT/s on a 16-bit link) while also remaining backward compatible, but there’s more to salivate over than just a speed bump. The new connector offers a direct, low-latency route to the CPU that, in theory at least, could replace the PCI-E bus and link GPUs directly to the CPU.
With AMD’s recent failure to compete in the high-end enthusiast sector, the company needed a strong competitor for the midrange market. The X3 was designed to look good against Intel’s dual core chips, while undercutting the pricier 4-core processors. The tri-core processor did pretty well for itself in the lab, but competitive price cuts from Intel kept it from blockbuster status.
The use of LED backlighting in notebooks sees a significant surge in 2008, and that’s only the beginning. Dell announces plans to transition its entire notebook lineup to LED backlighting by 2010, which it says will add up to a combined customer savings of $20 million, and Apple believes it can make the transition even sooner. On your mark, get set, go!
As a follow up to their internet classic "Get Perpendicular" video, Hitachi releases the "Tera Era" cartoon to celebrate their first three-platter terrabyte drives. The catchy tune, adorable animation, and Schoolhouse Rock throwback makes this a win in our book. Say goodbye to the Gigabyte/Terabyte is outta sight!
We love the G1 for its intuitive interface, bright screen, and myriad apps—that there’s finally a mobile phone that can go toe-to-toe with what’s in the pockets of our Apple-lovin’ coworkers only sweetens the deal. And though were impressed with the G1, we’re particularly excited about what the device represents, the promise of a host of Android-powered devices available on all the major carriers.
Yeah, we know what we did there. But what Playboy did was save itself an estimated $12 million a year by ditching its DVD business in favor of digital distribution. The decision was made in an attempt to return the company to profitably, which also entailed job cuts and identifying other money saving endeavors, such as using lighter magazine paper. Tissue would work well, don’t you think?
If you don’t think you don’t need a quad core in your notebook, go encode that movie on a single-core Atom CPU and then come back and tell us processing power in a notebook doesn’t matter. It does and only those who want to pad out their billable hours by using slower computers would choose a single-core or dual-core over a quad-core notebook today.
We can’t help but imagine some poor sap sitting at his desk counting every unique URL in existence. Unfortunately, such a task is just not feasible, but we do trust Google’s computers to give us a reasonable estimate, which tells us that by July, 2008, the web was home to over 1 trillion unique web addresses. Put into perspective, that’s 149 URLs for every man, woman, and child on the entire planet.
Customers have long complained over Creative’s crummy soundcard drivers, leading many to cozy up to the competition, such as Asus’ Xonar line. But according to Creative, the only problem with that (well, one of the problems) is customers are being cheated out of advertised EAX support. Creative communications VP Phil O’Shaughnessy accused Asus of essentially misleading its customers, claiming “the new Asus drivers are falsely reporting EAX 5 capabilities.” Oh schnapp!
Prior to Vista, most people viewed Linux as a complicated niche OS ill-suited for mainstream use. But that all changed in 2008 and it doesn’t even matter if Vista’s underwhelming reception is to blame, or if strides in streamlining the interface in Linux played a bigger role. The end result is that for the first time, consumers could walk into Best Buy and pick up a boxed copy of Ubuntu (a free download) for $20.
David Kernell, a 20-year-old student at the University of Tennessee and the son of state Rep. Mike Kernell, D-Memphis, makes headlines for allegedly gaining unauthorized access into Sarah Palin’s Yahoo-based email account. The stunt, which included posting screenshots of the account, changing the password, and posting the password so that others could access her email, could ultimately result in a maximum 5-year prison sentence and $250,000 fine.
System builders rejoice at paying a fraction of what 2GB and 4GB kits used to cost, but the mood is decidedly less celebratory among DRAM manufacturers. Memory makers exhaust all the usual tricks, such as cutting production and scaling back the workforce, and even make a plea for a government bailout. None of it worked and A-DATA chairman Simon Chen declared 2008 the worst year for DRAM in the past 15 years.
The well intentioned competition fostered by Stanford’s quest to find cures to common diseases kicked into high gear when the Folding@Home distributed computing project tapped into GPUs to fold proteins. But nobody took bigger advantage of the new capability than Overclock.net forum member nitteo, who promptly built a F@H farm consisting of 16 motherboards and 51 8800-series GPUs. Failed hardware and a hurricane are temporary roadblocks, but at full tilt, it’s estimated nitteo’s farm pulls in between 225K-250K points per day.
Following AMD’s forfeiture of the performance crown to Intel, high level execs seemed to be jumping ship left and right. The mass exodus culminated with Hector Ruiz stepping down as CEO after holding onto the title for 6 years. Looking to right the ship, Dirk Meyer jumped into the role and eventually ended up breaking AMD into separate design and manufacturing firms in an attempt to right what’s become a rickety ship.
The fact that Edward Davidson sent out so many spam messages that he became known as the spam king is enough to indict him into the scumbag hall of fame, but it’s his later antics that perhaps makes him the worst spammer of all time. While serving a 21-month sentence in a minimum security prison for tax evasion and falsifying computer records, Davidson, with the help of his wife, escaped jail only to kill his wife and three-year-old daughter before taking his own life.
Apparently lasers aren’t just good for driving your cat bonkers as it tries to catch the uncatchable varmint, but they’re also capable of transferring data through the air much faster than any commercial wireless systems. Even more impressive, engineers at Battelle, a research and development firm in Columbus, OH, demonstrated a 20 gigabit capability using off-the-shelf telecommunication components. Here’s your wet blanket - a shipping product small enough to make the technology feasible remains out of grasp for years to come. Sorry!
Despite all the hoopla surrounding Nvidia’s well publicized problems with its previous mobile GPUs, the graphics chip maker found a suitor in Apple for its new GeForce 9400M. And compared to the integrated GMA X3100 graphics the 9400M was chosen to replace, Apple’s refreshed MacBook line is, according to Steve Jobs, up to five times as fast in the graphics department. Meanwhile, advances in discrete GPUs make it hard to get too excited over any integrated solution.
It’s hard not to channel Paul Hogan and say “that’s not a mobile workstation” when some Mac head pulls out his Mac Book Pro. “Now, that’s a mobile workstation,” you say as you drop your Lenovo W700 ThinkPad on the table. With its Core 2 Quad, 1GB frame buffer graphics card, built-in color calibrator, high color gamut screen and integrated Wacom tablet, the W700 makes all other mobile workstations kneel before it.
For a long time, notebooks have been the red-headed stepchild of the storage industry. How else do you explain desktop drives exploding to 1TB and beyond while laptop drives shipped at only a fraction of that capacity? Props go out to Samsung, who brought mobile storage halfway up to par with the first ever 2.5-inch 500GB hard drive, putting 1TB within reach for anyone willing to run a dual-drive array.
In a 3-2 vote, the Federal Communication Commission concluded that Comcast violated the rules of net neutrality by monitoring and selectively blocking P2P traffic. Comcast was mandated to immediately cease any packet shaping initiatives and to publically disclose the full extent of its traffic blocking policies.
Call it the modern day David versus Goliath if you will, but Tanya Andersen, a mere mortal, found herself staring face to face with the RIAA, who had already sued 20,000 people before her for copyright infringement. But in this instance, the RIAA dropped its case when it realized it Andersen wasn’t pirating music. A federal judge ordered the RIAA to pay Andersen $108,000 in legal fees for its gaffe.
Dr. Evil would be proud of Biswamohan Pani, the low-level ex-Intel employee who managed to make off with $1 billion worth of information before his final official day with the chip maker on June 11. But wait, it gets even better. As it turns out, Pani had obtained employment with rival AMD, for which he was to start on June 2. The case has yet to go to trial, and of course Pani maintains he’s innocent.
The saying ‘size matters’ takes on a whole different meaning in the chip industry, as manufacturers race to see who can produce the smallest unit. This becomes even more important in the mobile market where smaller chips translate into lower power consumption and often times less heat. Intel, having already re-asserted its dominance on the desktop, also becomes the first to unveil mobile chips built on a 45nm manufacturing process. Wave it proudly, Intel!
The money for developing open-source software has to come from somewhere, and in the case of Mozilla, that somewhere is Google. By 2006, Mozilla had milked Google for roughly $57 million in exchange for making Google the default search engine. Set to expire in 2008, the two agreed to extend their relationship another three years.
Paying for games is so passé. Quake Live and Battlefield Heroes (both still in beta) prove that free games are worth your time. Now we wait to see if revenue from in-game advertising and micro-transactions will be enough for publishers to keep these freebies alive.
In a horrible, low-power, all-in-one computing future not too unlike Mad Max, someone will come across an Asus Striker II Extreme and proclaim it as the last of the nForce interceptors. Fast and boldly different than the 790i reference design pursuit specials, the Striker II Extreme will likely mark the zenith of Nvidia’s chipsets.
An estimated 240,000+ Kindle sales can’t be ignored, and so Amazon doesn’t and makes plans to release a follow-up version. While Amazon remains tight-lipped on sales figures, at least one analyst values the Kindle as a $1 billion business for Amazon. And while on the topic of speculation, supposedly leaked photos of the second generation Kindle shows it to be slightly larger than the original.
Lackluster demand forces Wal-Mart to end its four month, 600-store trial run of selling $199 Linux-based Evermax computers on store shelves (online sales remain). A spokesperson for the chain concludes “This really wasn’t what our customers were looking for,” but that could more of a reflection of the Evermax system than Linux itself. Nevertheless, the decision is a blow to open-source advocates in a time when frustrated Vista users are more willing than ever to consider a Linux alternative.
Immersion computing went mainstream with the release of Hardcore Reactor PC. Perhaps the coolest custom PC we’ve ever seen (and we’ve seen a lot) the Reactor relies on 4.5 gallons of oil to keep all of its components cool. Of course, we guess that mainstream depends on your checking account but with its base configuration weighing in at $4,500, the Reactor PC is still truly an amazing work of art.
The open-source productivity suite steps up its game by implementing filters for Microsoft’s XML format, allowing for easy importing of Office 2007’s .docx files. In addition, OpenOffice 3.0 boasts native compatibility with the Mac OS X platform eliminating the need for X11. The update proved so popular that eager users crashed OpenOffice.org’s website on the day of its release. Later in the year, an independent study found OpenOffice to be five times more popular than Google Docs.
DP isn’t just for the professionals anymore. Intel’s insane, over the top Skulltrail platform gave consumers (well those with the initials BG or WB) the ability to have their very own dual-proc, eight-core monster. Even better, Intel even swallowed its pride and integrated two Nvidia nForce 100 chips so the board could run quad SLI or quad Crossfire.
Following a week-long meeting in Paris, ICANN, the internet’s nonprofit overseer, loosens its grip on generic top level domain names. At the time of the vote, only 21 gTLDs existed to serve 1.5 billion internet users. The real winners are big corporations, who are not only capable of funding the roughly $185,000 per applicant fee, but also might have a legitimate need for a custom TLD.
In a sit-down with us at E3, Carmack admitted he doesn’t see a need for either DirectX 10 or 11 given the maturity of the DirectX 9 API and prominence of compatible hardware. Steam survey numbers appear to back his claim, as do the lack of must-have DX 10 titles. In Carmack’s mind, after DX 9, Microsoft’s focus turned to churning out new DX APIs to keep the department alive as opposed to implementing clearly needed features.
Rivals ATI and Nvidia both release Hybrid graphics solutions enabling users to combine integrated graphics with discrete graphics cards. The odd coupling of low and high end GPU solutions turns in mixed performance results, but the real upshot is in power savings, particularly in mobile PCs. By only tapping into the more powerful graphics solution as the need arises, the net result is extended battery life for notebooks, and a feel-good conscious on the desktop knowing you’re not wasting electricity.
Kodak comes up with a new flagship CCD sensor capable of 51.6 million square pixels, promptly giving every other digital camera on the market megapixel envy. According to Kodak, the 50.1MP sensor would allow you to crop objects no bigger than a notebook in an image that covers a width of 1.5 miles. That is, if you can afford the $40,000 price tag.
Microsoft’s scintillating Surface technology makes its retail debut in select AT&T stores and steals the show from the mobile devices they’re intended to help sell. The 30-inch tabletop invites interaction not only with human hands, but also with devices. Raising the bar in cellular shopping, consumers can drag ringtones onto a mobile phone resting on the Surface, view interactive coverage maps, compare features of multiple devices placed side by side, and more.
Starting with the GeForce 8 series, Nvidia puts its CUDA compiler to work by enabling PhysX support and bundling a bevy of CUDA-based programs in a pair of Power Packs. Not many games punch into the PhysX API, which largely limits its appeal to ‘gee-whiz’ tech demos, but CUDA carves a path for developers to tap into Nvidia’s GPUs for non-gaming tasks such as Folding@Home and video encoding.
Giving Rambus a much needed legal win, a jury rules that Rambus did not commit fraud or engage in anti-competitive means when obtaining its patents for memory technology. The ruling comes as bad news to Hynix, Micron, and Nanya, all targets of Rambus’ suing spree. Rambus, whose RDRAM standard has all but died out, contends that it patented the SDRAM technology long before it became a standardized technology.
Gogo provides passengers with the ability to take their forum disputes to the skies by incorporating wireless internet access on select flights. The new service uses the Aircell Network and supports any laptop with 801.11 a/b/g wireless capability, as well as a handful of handheld devices, such as Apple’s iPhone. Airlines that join or plan to join the WiFi mile high club include Delta, American Airlines, United, Air Canada, and Virgin American.
Attacking the stereotype perpetuated in Apple ads head on, Microsoft fires back with a series of “I’m a PC” ads depicting real-life users from all walks of life. Celebrities not named Justin Long get in on the action too, such as basketball star Tony Parker and TV actress Eva Longoria, but most of the ‘actors’ are regular people armed with a webcam and look nothing like John Hodgeman.
With Rich Internet Applications gaining ground, Adobe’s AIR sets the stage for a long-term showdown with Microsoft’s Silverlight despite each one’s different approach. Both technologies seek to redefine desktop applications and vie for supremacy, but unlike Silverlight, which is more comparable to Adobe’s Flash, AIR is a runtime and not a browser plugin. AIR takes flight by being able to run web applications as desktop apps across operating systems, something Silverlight can’t do.
Most know Richard Garriott as the creator of Ultima, but on October 13, 2008, Garriott, aka Lord British, leaves behind videogames for new adventures in outer space. The $30 million 10-day flight ticket allows Garriott to follow in his father’s footsteps, who in 1973 spent two months aboard Skylab. Space becomes the new playground for wealthy tech gurus, and Google co-founder Sergey Brin books a flight to space scheduled for 2011.
Following the Phenom debut, which failed to take back the performance crown from Intel, AMD found itself in the familiar position of battling for the bang/buck crowd. Part of the problem had to do with releasing Phenom at relatively low clockspeeds rather than burst out of the gates with a 3+GHz chip, but even still, clock for clock Intel’s superior Core 2 architecture notched another victory in its belt at AMD’s expense.
Piracy continues to plague PC sales, but during an interview, Crytek CEO Cevat Yerli puts a number on the problem claiming there are 15 to 20 PC games pirated for every 1 that is sold. Even more disturbing, Yerli suggests that the days of PC-exclusive titles may be numbered if the perceived situation doesn’t improve, starting with Crytek.
Will Wright’s magnum opus arrives in stores, making demi-gods of gamers everywhere. Most critics deem the game worth the wait, but its gameplay merits are overshadowed by EA's unintelligently designed DRM.
In what can only be construed as a sign of the times, Amazon unveils its TextBuyIt service enabling shoppers to make purchases via text messaging. Suddenly, brick-and-mortar bargain hunters have the means to quickly compare in-store prices with Amazon’s online sales simply by texting the item’s name, description, or UPC or ISNB number, and then place an order if Amazon’s price is cheaper.
Gmail, while still and perhaps forever in beta form, receives several new features to its web mail service. Implementing emoticons ranks as one of the more obvious additions, but thinking outside the box, Google also adds a Mail Goggles feature, which tasks angry writers with answering a series of math questions before sending off that emotionally charged email. And who doesn’t delight in the ability to construct canned responses?
The concept of cloud computing draws increased interest from heavy hitters in the tech industry, including IBM, who invests $300 million upgrading its infrastructure to offer cloud-based services. The sky-high investment covers 13 data centers worldwide aimed at serving customers in the event a disaster disrupts IBM’s networks. But IBM isn’t the only one with its head in the clouds; Dell goes so far as to try (unsuccessfully) to trademark the term Cloud Computing.
A decently-fast, stupid-huge 7,200rpm hard drive for under $200? Sign us up! The 1.5TB Barracuda, though not quite as fast as terabyte drives from Western Digital and Samsung, still performs decently, and crams 375GB each onto four platters. We’ve had scattered reports of performance issues with these drives, but we haven’t experienced any, and Seagate pledges a fix via firmware update. Wait for the update, then pick one up—for $180 on the street, you get a lot of storage with decent speeds. And we call that a win.
The answer to the question of what happens if you release DVD copying software capable of copying DVDs without circumventing the CSS encryption is you go to court anyway. Not only does the RealDVD software rip exact copies, but it even adds an additional DRM layer. But the problem, in the MPAA’s eyes, is that users still have the ability to rip rented movies, prompting MPAA executive VP to nickname the program “StealDVD.”
If there can be a tech equivalent of a self-procliamed martyr, TorrentSpy would be it as the powers that be shut down the site rather than comply with a court order to log user data. At the time of its demise, TorrentSpy was engaged in a legal battle with the MPAA, who accused the site of facilitating copyright infringement. The MPAA was ultimately awarded a $110 million default judgment, a fine that will likely never be paid.
Much to the dismay of the RIAA and MPAA, The Pirate Bay’s explosive growth leads to over ten million peers managing one million torrents. But those numbers only served as a precursor of things to come. By the end of the year, the number of peers more than doubles to 22 million, prompting the torrent site to seek recognition in the Guinness Book of World Records.
Our favorite CPU air cooler eschew the high-rise trend and still outperforms the competition. Modern performance CPU coolers have been getting wider and taller—6” by 5” cooling arrays are, sadly, not uncommon. The ThermalTake DuOrb spreads its fans and fins horizontally, making for a more restrained-looking rig without compromising performance. However, its horizontal sprawl does potentially block RAM and PCI-E expansion slots, so install those first to prevent conflicts.
This year Apple got into the bundled crapware racket by foisting first Safari and then MobileMe on unsuspecting Windows users using their Apple Software Update utility, which is included with iTunes. Bundled crapware remains lame, whether it’s Apple, Google, or Ask doing it.
Intel’s long awaited Centrino 2 platform lands on laptops bringing with it several improvements in both performance and power management. Chief among the hardware upgrades is Intel’s Mobile 45 Express chipset, which beefs up the frontside bus to 1066MHz and accommodates both DDR2 and DDR3 RAM, the first mobile platform ever to do so.
XP owners are able to download the OS’s third Service Pack, but not before a compatibility issue forces Microsoft to temporarily pull SP3 from the web. More trouble follows as some HP laptops with AMD processors enter into an endless reboot loop. Still others complain of no longer being able to remotely access their XP boxes following the update. The initial glitches are eventually worked out, putting staunch Vista holdouts once again at ease.
The death of PC gaming continues to be exaggerated, but should the threat become imminent, the PC Gaming Alliance will be there to do nothing about it. Several big names encompass the non-profit organization designed to promote PC gaming and stave off the console invasion, but its powers are limited. Following the release of LucasArts console-only Force Unleashed, PCGA’s president Randy Stud tees off on LucasArts, and afterwards Force Unleashed remains a console-only title.
Daniel Kawakami’s modified X-Fi and Audigy drivers, which fixed several issues in Vista, are heralded by all except Creative who publicly chastises the programmer in a letter on the company’s forum. The letter, which accuses Daniel_K of essentially “stealing” from Creative, never specifically states what part of Daniel’s drivers cross the line, saying only that no one besides Creative has the right to decide what features can and cannot be developed for each specific soundcard.
Even without the ability to shoot HD video, Canon’s new DSLR kicks all kinds of ass, starting with a full-frame 21.1 megapixel 14-bit CMOS sensor. But with the video capability, Canon sends a message to Nikon’s D90 that ‘yea, we can do that too.’ The 5D MKII can also do continuous shooting at 3.9 frames per second and touts a 3-inch LCD screen with quadruple the pixels found on the EOS 5D’s 2.5-inch screen.
With no 10K RPM challengers in sight, Western Digital pummels its own flagship Raptor line by launching the Velociraptor, a speed successor surrounded by a black heatsink. Not only does the 2.5-inch design shrink make room for the sleek looking heatsink, but it also allows Western Digital to pack 300GB on just two 150GB platters. The end result is a new benchmark king.
The Freezone Elite thermo-electric CPU cooler strikes a mostly-elegant balance between cooling power and size. The Elite rocks six thermoelectric coolers to keep your CPU crispy, and delivers the best cooling you’ll see short of its (much) bigger brother, the CoolIt Boreas. Plus, it’s fully controllable from within your OS, and at its quietest setting still outperforms stock air coolers. Best of all, it’ll actually fit in your case. We can overlook a somewhat tricky installation for a size/performance ratio this good.
With an aggressive round of price cuts, price no longer becomes a prohibiting factor when shopping for a four-core chip based on Intel’s Core 2 architecture. The newfound bang-for-buck lineup also puts a stamp on Intel’s change in philosophy, who in years past (think Netburst) demanded a premium for slower silicon than what AMD had to offer. Equally important, sub-$200 quad-core chips put the onus on developers to catch up with the hardware.
Late to the party, sure, but after waiting nearly two years, Creative throws Vista owners a bone with X-Fi drivers re-establishing Dolby Digital and DTS decoding. DVD Audio playback, which also worked under XP but found itself neutered in Vista, is also restored, but it’s the decoding features that had Vista owners feeling most miffed. Even worse, Creative orders now infamous modder Daniel_K to stop producing and distributing his homebrew drivers, which, among other things, ‘fixed’ Vista support.
Not surprisingly, free speech doesn’t apply to using fake email addresses to sell scam products, but what is surprising is the close 4-3 vote in denying spammer Jeremy Jaynes’ appeal. Jaynes, who was convicted in 2005 on three Virginia Computer Crimes Ace code violations, is currently serving a combined 9 year sentence and goes down in history as the first to receive a US felony conviction for spamming.
A rash of ruptured telecommunications cables in the Mediterranean Sea turn out to be caused by abandoned anchors dragged by inclement weather. Prior to solving the mystery, the cuts had scaremongers screaming sabotage in what some thought could be a terrorist plot to cut off communication from the Middle East. Two ships – one belonging to a Korean company and one to an Iraqi company – are ultimately detained and fined for the damages.
How big a deal was Intel’s X25-M? At the company’s big developer conference, the buzz was not about the Core i7, but about the X25-M. And why not? This notebook-sized 80GB drive essentially gives you RAID 0 performance in one drive.
Apparently Vista’s problem really is one of perception, or so Microsoft tried to prove by disguising it as a new OS called Mojave and then demoing it to 140 people with no prior Vista experience. On average, the unsuspecting test subjects scored Mojave an 8.5 out of 10 versus a pre-demo score of 4.4 for Vista. Many have likened Microsoft’s experiment to the tech equivalent of a blind taste test.
Intel’s biggest competitor for the Core i7 doesn’t come from AMD, it’s the wildly successful 45nm-based Penryn family of CPUs. These dual and quad parts have been powering the world’s fastest CPUs at 4GHz for months and months. With prices of the 45nm Core 2 chips and rich infrastructure, even the might Core i7 will have a hard time convincing people to break down what they have when it’s already so damned fast and efficient.
There aren’t that many game-changers in the operating system world, but this year while both Apple and Microsoft were struggling with their operating systems, the open-source wunderkinds at Ubuntu released the best version of Ubuntu yet, Hardy Heron. Well done guys!
Energy efficiency moves to the forefront of the IT industry igniting a mass movement among manufactures on everything from green hard drives to green wireless routers. Helping to set the tone, Dell declares it achieved its goal of going carbon neutral. Even LCD panel makers transition towards more eco-friendly displays as mercury-free LED backlighting start to supplant cold cathode fluorescent bulbs (CCFLs) en masse.
In the “why the frak didn’t someone do this earlier” department, Adobe’s Photoshop CS4 now supports using the GPU to enable smooth as butter zooms and rotates for photo editing. Previously, rotating or zooming apps in the preeminent photo editor was like a throwback to choppy 1995. That’s not all, Premiere Pro CS4 and After Effects CS4 are also increasing their use of the GPU engines for display effects too.
Having already dodged a bullet in the Y2K scare, the human race once again cheats death when physicists switch on the LHC without destroying the universe. The $10 billion particle accelerator proved doomsayers wrong on September 10, 2008 as proton beams traversed the collider’s 17-mile circular underground tunnel. Or did it? Because of a mechanical failure, tests with the LHC will not resume until 2009 when physicists plan to have proton beams collide.
As Li Ning, one of China’s sporting greats, dangled in mid-air preparing to light the torch, behind him onlookers caught a glimpse of an Olympic-sized blue screen of death. The SNAFU occurred inside the Bird’s Nest as computer-controlled theatrical equipment apparently suffered a fatal error and displayed the familiar looking blue screen much to the amusement of both tech bloggers and Linux fans.
Skirting the line between healthy competition and unfair business practices finally catches up to Microsoft when EU regulators levy the largest fine ever imposed on an individual company. Combined with existing fines, Microsoft’s tally comes to about $2.5 billion in the EU. While it didn’t come right away, it didn’t take long for Microsoft to file an appeal in a “constructive effort to seek clarity from the court.”
The ultimate fruit of ATI’s R700 GPU is the Radeon 4870 X2, which packs two R700s on a single board with a whopping 2GB of GDDR5 memory. The feeds mean nothing if the speeds don’t stack up though, and this is the fastest videocard we’ve ever tested.
Looking to shake things up in what has traditionally been a stale two-man fight between Microsoft and Mozilla, Google bursts into the browser scene with Chrome. Built from the ground up, Chrome boasts several intriguing features, including its ability to run each tab as a separate process. The lack of extension support remains the biggest criticism, an area Google says it will address in a later release.
Lenovo’s X300 weighs in at just over three pounds, but that doesn’t mean it’s a compromised design. With a 1.2GHz Core 2 Duo, this is the ultimate road warrior rig for anyone who values substance over style.
According to the latest Nielsen Online statistics, Twitter’s year-on-year growth reaches 343 percent making it the fastest growing social-networking site. And it’s not just teeny-boppers using Twitter in place of SMS text-messaging who make up the majority either. As published on Time.com, 35-to-44-year-olds account for Twitter’s largest microblogging demographic at over 25 percent. It also didn’t hurt Twitter’s growth that 2008 was a hotly contested election year, giving users lots to talk Twitter about.
A class action lawsuit accuses rival graphics chip makers AMD and Nvidia of conspiring to fix prices of each company’s GPUs and videocards. At the heart of the case sits potentially damning evidence in the form of several email exchanges between AMD’s and Nvidia’s top brass. Rather than face a long, drawn out court battle, a settlement agreement is reached for $1.7 million, and a month later, the Department of Justice officially closes its investigation into the charges.
Microsoft’s Office Live Workspace boasts hundreds of thousands of registered users by the time the software giant opens the beta up to the public. That number hits the one million milestone later in the year, solidifying the service as a legitimate contender to Google Docs and Zoho, all three of which compete in the cloud.
Using an infrared TV-B-Gone remote, a Gizmodo cameraman plays a practical joke on CES exhibitors by turning off several flat-screen displays. Reactions to the stunt range from those who find it funny, to misguided fear that CES will no longer welcome bloggers from any site. But instead of a widespread ban, the Consumer Electronics Association identifies Richard Blakeley as the culprit and bans him from any future CES events for his shenanigans.
Apple caves to software developers and lets users purchase third-party apps with this major update. Since the firmware's release, over 10,000 applications have been created for the App Store, including these 101 essential programs.
The tech community is shocked to learn that U.S. border agents have been granted the power to detain documents and electronic devices for an unspecified time frame. Suddenly, crossing the border with a laptop becomes a risky affair as complaints surface of devices never being returned, or returned months after the fact. Equally frightening, U.S. Senator Russ Feingold voices concern that customs agents could use its power for racial profiling in targeting specific groups.
During a speech at a Hungarian University, the animated CEO was forced to take cover behind a desk to avoid being hit by a barrage of eggs. The lone protestor, wearing a shirt with “Microsoft = Corruption” written on it, is escorted out amid confused laughter. Ballmer takes the incident in stride calling it a “friendly disruption,” which it was compared to the time a prankster beamed Bill Gates in the face with a cream pie at point blank range.
DeviceVM’s Splashtop instant-on software finds its way onto several notebooks, allowing users to hop online within seconds instead of waiting for Windows to load. The embedded Linux-based pre-boot environment gets its biggest push from Asus, who rebrands the technology as Express Gate and is found on both desktop motherboards and notebook solutions. In addition to online activities, Splashtop also comes with a music player and photo manager.
The Florida Supreme Court says ‘game over’ to former lawyer Jack Thompson following a recommendation by Judge Dava Tunis. Earlier in the year, Tunis found Thompson guilty of 27 out of 31 disciplinary issues brought against him, some of which allegedly occurred during his controversial vendettas against violent videogames, including the Grand Theft Auto Series. So while the debate on whether or not violent videogames leads to real-life violence wages on, the world learns that violent games can lead to disbarment.
Essentially a dumbed-down version of Intel’s more powerful desktop chips, the company’s Atom processor is every bit as significant and helps low-power PCs explode in popularity. Intel correctly surmises a growing market for netbooks and nettops, and demand is so high that manufacturers begin to worry about an Atom chip shortage. Those concerns are quickly put to rest as Intel ramps up production before later releasing a dual-core Atom.
In an aggressive campaign to attract new customers, Netflix makes its streaming service compatible with several devices, including Microsoft’s Xbox 360 console. But gamers aren’t the only beneficiaries of Netflix’s newfound determination to invade living rooms. The streaming service finds its way onto select Blu-ray players from LG and Samsung, as well as being made available through TiVo. Along with Roku’s set-top box, Netflix subscribers suddenly have a wealth of streaming options to choose from.
Speaking at an RSA Conference in San Francisco, Microsoft’s David Cross tells listeners that Vista’s UAC was designed to annoy users. Cross went on to explain that the decision was made in order to encourage developers to write more secure code that would trigger less prompts. Nevertheless, the confession comes as little consolation to power users who have made it a habit to automatically disable UAC on newly installed systems.
We’ve been sick of the hard partition between CrossFire and SLI motherboards for some time but X58 finally fixes that. Without its own Core i7 chipset, Nvidia will “certify” motherboards to run multi-GPU SLI configurations. The upshot is that we’re no longer forced to have our multi-GPU setup dictate our motherboard choice.
In an open letter, Steve Ballmer threatens Yahoo with a hostile takeover if it doesn’t accept Microsoft’s unsolicited bid, but Microsoft’s interest fades over time. The initial proposal would have netted Yahoo shareholders $31 a share, valuing the deal at $44.6 billion. Instead, Yahoo CEO Jerry Wang deftly dodges all attempts at a takeover, including an eventual joint-bid between Microsoft and billionaire investor Carl Icahn that would have sent Yahoo’s search business to Microsoft.
Jerry Seinfeld and Bill Gates star in Microsoft’s first round of long overdue ads aimed at debunking boring PC stereotypes (and promoting delicious churros). But rather than take potshots at Apple or touting Vista over Mac OS X, Microsoft instead attempts to “engage consumers” through an ongoing campaign that has Gates doing the Robot and Seinfeld showering in his shoes.
Originally announced in late 2007, the transaction that would create Activision Blizzard finalizes in July, 2008 for just shy of $19 billion. Separately, the two entities were responsible for a number of high profile gaming hits, including World of Warcraft, StarCraft, Call of Duty, Guitar Hero, Tony Hawk, and several others. Together, the high-profile merger propels the new company commonly referred to as ActiBlizzard past Electronic Arts as the largest game publisher.
SuperSpeed will deliver 5Gb/s data transfers when it goes live next year. Intel released the Extensible Host Controller Interface to hardware partners in August, and finally announced completion of the spec in November. Expect to see the first USB 3.0 devices to arrive in late 2009.
As sure we predicted last year, suddenly everyone’s bitching and moaning about DDR3 seems pretty silly don’t it? The heir to the RAM throne should also to benefit from a perfect storm of Core i7’s tri-channel config, reasonable prices and AMD’s DDR3 Phenoms this year. In other words, stow your whining and just let those DDR2 modules will ya already?
Despite repeated attempts to kill off Windows XP, strong customer feedback convinces Microsoft to issue a stay of execution until 2010. Officially, the decision was made to accommodate low-cost PCs with “limited hardware capabilities,” but that doesn’t stop some pre-built system buyers from taking advantage of a Vista downgrade option in order to have XP installed on more capable machines.
Gamers get their geek on with Gateway’s P-7811FX notebook, a sub-$1500 powerhouse that pummels the competition. Usually corners have to be cut at that price range, but Gateway somehow manages to cram a 2.2GHz Core 2 Duo Mobile P8400 CPU on a 1066MHz frontside bus, 4GB of DDR3 RAM, and a GeForce 9800M GTS with a 512MB GDDR frame buffer into a 17-inch notebook for considerably less than what most mobile gaming PCs run at the time.
For raw, single-GPU performance, you just can’t beat Nvidia’s GT200 GPU, which powers the GeForce GTX 260 and 280 cards. The GT200 is among the largest silicon chips we’ve ever seen using a 65nm process. The only problem with the GPU is that it’s a touch power-hungry. Put two GTX 280 boards in a system, and you need a beefy power supply.
Valve’s vision of the zombie apocalypse redefines the cooperative multiplayer experience. Never before has teamwork and communication been so important in a multiplayer shooter, not has success in a campaign ever been so rewarding. The zombies are fast, fearless, and frightening -- and it's even more fun to join their ranks. This game haunts our dreams in a good way.
Electronic Arts saddles Will Wright’s Spore with a modified version of SecuROM, sparking a backlash from angry gamers. Thousands of Amazon user “reviews” slam the game with a 1-star rating, but the attack gets even more aggressive as some gamers encourage pirating the game via BitTorrent. EA ultimately loosens the allowable installs from 3 to 5 machines, but by then, lawsuits have already been filed.
T-Mobile and handset-maker HTC partner up to release the first mobile phone built around Google’s Android platform. Though not without its shortcomings, T-Mobile’s G1 signifies a legitimate alternative to Apple’s iPhone complete with a slide-out QWERTY keyboard. Following the release, Google quickly makes good on its promise and releases Android’s source code.
Ending a long-held licensing embargo in which consumers were the ultimate losers, Nvidia finally lets its SLI technology be used on Intel boards. Nvidia also backs down on its insistence that mobo makers provide SLI by way of a chip, paving the way for native SLI support. Following the announcement, Asus, Evga, MSI, Gigabyte, and DFI prepare SLI-compatible X58 motherboards for Intel’s Core i7 launch.
A shareholder hits Nvidia with a class action lawsuit over faulty notebook GPUs the graphics chip maker admits suffer from an “abnormal failure rate.” It’s never made clear exactly how widespread the problem really is, only that Nvidia took a one-time charge of $200 million to cover associated warranty and repair costs. Nvidia later scores a big win with Apple, who decides to use the company’s 9400M GPU in its refreshed MacBook line.
Seagate’s 1.5TB hard drive not only offers the most storage space of any desktop drive on the planet, but also qualifies as the largest capacity increase ever. And with an areal density of 375GB per each of its four platters, Seagate’s monster-sized drive offers monster-sized performance to boot, making a strong case for both power users and HTPC buffs alike.
Tough times call for drastic measures, and for AMD, that means splitting into two companies so that one can focus entirely on chip design while the other takes on the more expensive role of manufacturing. Two Abu Dhabi investment firms promise to invest at least $6 billion in the new companies to build a new chip factory and upgrade existing ones. AMD’s chief executive Dirk Meyer summed it up best when he referred to the split as “the biggest announcement in our history.”
After suffering from an abdominal aneurysm and other health problems for several years, Dungeons & Dragons co-creator Gary Gygax leaves the real world behind on March 4, 2008. Gygax, who was 69 years old at the time of his passing, is survived by his wife, Gail Gygax, six children, and a legion of fans who spent many late nights acquiring XP and loot among the company of friends.
Details regarding Microsoft’s next OS, Windows 7, pour out of Redmond revealing everything from what changes Vista owners should expect to how MS came up with the name. According to Microsoft’s fuzzy math, the newest OS will represent the 7th iteration of Windows, hence the name. During a public demo in late October, Microsoft handed out pre-beta builds of Windows 7 to PDC attendees while announcing plans to release a full beta in early 2009.
Historians still debate how the art of Rickrolling came to be, but in 2008, the goofy prank managed to annoy millions of Americans, including New York Mets fans forced to listen to “Never Gonna Give You Up” after various web communities voted to have the 1987 hit single played at Shea Stadium. The online contest was intended to let fans vote for the team’s traditional eighth-inning song, but instead served as the high point the hoax. NBC effectively ruined the phenonenom when the rickrolled all of America during the Thanksgiving Macy's Day Parade.
Despite Microsoft’s public ballyhooing over Vista’s inflated sales numbers, consumers viewed the OS as crash prone, a perception the software giant blamed on buggy Nvidia drivers. The blame-game came to light when a judge ordered unsealed a 158-page collection of confidential Microsoft emails. According to Microsoft’s data, almost 29 percent of Vista’s early crashes were attributable to Nvidia, suggesting that initial complaints of wonky Nvidia Vista drivers weren’t without merit.
A jury finds Jammie Thomas guilty of copyright infringement and orders her to pay $222,000 in associated penalties before the case is later declared a mistrial. On September 24, 2008, U.S. District Judge Michael Davis overturns the original judgment, saying he misguided jurors by indicating that making copyrighted songs available for sharing constitutes infringement. As expected, the RIAA fired back with an appeal, and the tech world continues to watch how the first file sharing case ever to go to trial plays out.
After Radiohead’s recording contract with EMI came to an end, the band released its next album, In Rainbows, as a digital download giving customers the ability to set their own price. The move ranked #59 in Fortune Magazine’s list of 101 Dumbest Moments in Business, but that was before Radiohead went public with its sales figures. The band still managed to sell 1.75 million physical albums and surpassed 17 million plays on last.fm. Take that, naysayers!
Verizon Wireless posts the winning bid for the coveted 22MHz band of spectrum known as the ‘C-block’ in the FCC’s 700MHz auction. Verizon’s $4.7 billion bid was enough to beat out Google, who both showed interest in the spectrum and pushed for open-access provisions. All tallied, Verizon spent $9.36 billion for the C-block plus 102 licenses, which it plans to use to deploy a high-speed 4G Long Term Evolution (LTE) network by 2010.
Met with skepticism before its public launch, Hulu’s joint founders – NBC Universal and News Corp – get the last laugh as the online video service becomes an instant hit. It’s tough to ignore a site serving up more than 140 million streams ranging from popular TV shows and full length movies to news and sports games, and innovate features like giving a thumbs up or thumbs down rating for commercials continues to draw several million unique visitors each month.
At just 52 years old, Bill Gates completes his transition into semi-retirement trading in his daily responsibilities for a cozy position as company chairman. Former Microsoft CTO Ray Ozzie takes over as Chief Software Architect, while Gates commits to spending more time focusing on philanthropy work through the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and learning how to live on just $50+ billion.
Comcast made internet waves by imposing a 250GB bandwidth cap on its broadband customers, followed suit by AT&T experimenting with various limits based on the service level. AT&T’s lowest service plan caps bandwidth at just 20GB with a $1 per GB penalty for going over, but regardless of the size, the majority of outspoken consumers vehemently oppose bandwidth caps of any kind despite being designed to stem the minority of bandwidth hogs.
No one anticipated that the high definition format war would end as abruptly as it did, but as more and more studios jumped aboard the Blu-ray bandwagon, Toshiba was left with no choice but to abandon the HD-DVD format. Even with the format dispute settled, consumers continue to cling to standard DVDs and upconverting DVD players. High Blu-ray player pricing, an increased focus on digital downloads, and less disposable income to invest in HDTVs have all contributed to Blu-ray’s lukewarm response.
Mere months before celebrating Firefox’s fourth birthday, Mozilla launches version 3.0 of its open-source browser and celebrates a record number of downloads instead. Just over 8 million downloads in a 24-hour period was enough to set a new Guinness World Record, but that’s not all the new browser accomplished. In the ongoing war with Microsoft and its Internet Explorer browser, Firefox increased its market share to 20 percent, representing a 329 percent growth rate since its inception.
Technically, Asus didn’t create the term netbook, but it might as well have, as the company’s Eee PC has become the face of the fad. The surprising success of these subnotebooks spurned widespread competition from nearly every OEM imaginable, including Aspire and MSI, who have turned what was once a one man show into a three-way cage match. Still, no other company’s netbook enjoys the same brand recognition as Asus’ Eee PC.
The price per gigabyte takes a nose dive to the point where the world’s first 1.5TB hard drive debuts at just $190, and we’re not talking about gimped drives with lethargic spindle speeds and neutered cache. A 1TB 7200RPM with 32MB of cache routinely streets for just $109, and sometimes dips just below the $100 mark. At roughly a dime per gigabyte, the Tera Era enters full swing, making the recycle bin nearly obsolete.
Vista users fed up with slow file transfers and lackluster performance celebrate the OS’s first Service Pack and its many fixes. Much more than just a series of security plugs, SP1 offers speed gains in everything from browsing network file shares to manipulating zipped files, and so much more. Even the Photo screensaver is snappier. For the first time since its release, Vista isn’t all that bad.
After suffering through years of music tethered to annoying DRM schemes, consumers (and the voice of reason) finally win out as DRM-free downloads become the norm and not the exception. DRM hasn’t been completely obliterated, but it has become clear that the days of restricted music are at an end when Sony BMG, the last major holdout, embraces MP3s free of shackles, just as God intended them to be.
As prices for NAND memory continue to fall, storage manufacturers seize the situation by moving solid state drives from a high-priced niche category to an affordable storage alternative. Surprisingly, it’s OCZ and Super Talent that led the initial charge with low-price offerings. The price-to-performance ratio still keeps SSDs from supplanting hard drives by and large, but SSDs have found a home in low-power netbooks and notebooks.
It’s rare that we heap hearty praise on a chip that’s actually slower than the competition, but ATI’s R700, which powers the Radeon 4000 series, deserves accolades for focusing on efficiency first, then performance. By stepping back from the power-consumption brink, ATI delivers a lust-worthy GPU that kicks ass in single- and multi-GPU configurations, without requiring a crazy 1400W PSU.
Core i7. Born from a weekend fling between a Core 2 Quad and an Athlon 64, Intel’s Core i7 inherits the best attributes of its parents to become the most badass CPU on the planet. With an on-die memory controller, chip-to-chip interconnect, tri-channel DDR3, individual core Turbo mode, instructions to aid super computing tasks, and Hyper-Threading, the Core i7 instantly makes all previous desktop CPUs obsolete and girlie-men all at once.
© 2009 Future US, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Links:
[1] http://www.maximumpc.com/user/author1
[2] http://www.riaa.com/newsitem.php?news_month_filter=&news_year_filter=&resultpage=&id=C9C68054-D272-0D33-6EDB-DF08022C7E3A
[3] http://www.maximumpc.com/article/news/ten_lies_i_told_passersby_while_waiting_line_for_iphone
[4] http://www.maclife.com/article/feature/maclifes_top_101_app_store_apps_2008
[5] http://www.maximumpc.com/article/features/50_skills_every_real_geek_should_have
[6] http://www.maximumpc.com/article/features/core_i7_disected_and_benchmarked_everything_you_need_know_about_intels_nextgen_cpu
[7] http://www.maximumpc.com/article/features/ati_nvidia_youre_obsolete
[8] http://www.maximumpc.com/article/features/25_most_popular_windows_tips
[9] http://www.maximumpc.com/article/features/25_best_opensource_or_freeware_alternatives_you_need_to_download
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