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Chrome Now Open for Extension Uploads

Pulkit Chandna — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 18:12:21 -0600

Google is now inviting developers to submit their Chrome extensions to the Chrome Extensions gallery. At the moment, it is only possible to upload extensions to the online repository, currently in limited beta. Google will soon allow two-way traffic in a limited manner, meaning that some beta testers will be allowed to download the extensions that are uploaded in the next few days.

All extensions will have to pass through a fully automated review process, except for those extensions “that include an NPAPI component and all content scripts that affect "file://" URLs.” Extensions beyond the scope of the automated review process will be vetted manually. Developers can supplement their extensions with explanatory text, screenshots and/or YouTube videos.

“During the last few months, our team has been working hard to support extensions in Google Chrome's beta channel. Today, we are getting one step closer to this goal; developers can now upload their extensions to Google Chrome's extension gallery. We are making the upload flow available early to make sure that developers have the time to publish their extensions ahead of our full launch,” programmer Lei Zheng wrote on the Chromium blog.

Foxnews.com Reporter Reviews Wolverine Leak, Gets Sacked

Paul Lilly — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 09:55:06 -0500

In what might might not have the brightest move in hindsight, 10-year Foxnews.com columnist Roger Friedman posted a short review of the pirated flick "X-Men Origins: Wolverine," which will be released in theaters May 1st. Consider that 20th Century Fox is a subsidiary of News Corp, and it shouldn't be too surprising the suits in charge opted to issue Friedman a pink slip.

"Roger Friedman's views in no way reflect the views of News Corporation," News Corp. said in a statement. "We, along with 20th Century Film Corporation, have been a consistent leader in the fight against piracy and have a zero tolerance for any action that encourages and promotes piracy. When we advised Fox News of the facts, they took immediate action, removed the post, and promptly terminated Mr. Friedman."

The statement issued by Fox News wasn't quite as harsh, claiming Friedman and Fox News "mutually agreed to part ways immediately" and wishing Friedman "success in his future endeavors."

It probably didn't help Friedman's case that, in addition to writing about Wolverine, he said he was also able to find the current top 10 movies in theaters, and that "Later tonight I may finally catch up with Paul Rudd in 'I Love You, Man.' It's so much easier than going out in the rain!"

Friedman's article

Did News Corp. and Foxnewx.com overreact, or did Friedman bring this upon himself?

Man Posts Negative Yelp Review, Gets Sued

Paul Lilly — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 09:44:52 -0600

Yelp describes itself as a "fun and easy way to find, review, and talk about what's great (and not so great) in your world." In Christopher Norberg's world, taking advantage of what Yelp has to offer has landed him a lawsuit accusing him of libel.

The San Franciscan was in a car accident in 2006 and sought the services of a local chiropractor. But after a dispute over billing took place, Norberg posted a negative review on Yelp essentially accusing the doctor of being dishonest. Now the 26-year-old custom furniture builder will have to defend his comments in court.

"If Christopher loses then anyone on Yelp who writes a negative review better be careful," said Michael Blacksburt, an attorney representing Norberg. "This strikes at the heart of Yelp's business model and other websites that provide a bulletin board for people to state what they think of businesses in their community."

Not surprisingly, Eric Nordskog, the attorney for chiropractor Steven Biegel, sees the situation differently. According to Nordskog, "Dr. Biegel has no problem with people expressing their views and opinions about his service," but the question is whether or not Norberg posted a false statement as fact.

Should Norbert be held responsible for his review, or is the chiropractor getting too bent out of shape? Hit the jump and tell us what you think.

Cooler Master V8

David Murphy — Thu, 01 Jan 2009 13:40:00 -0600

Cooler Master’s V8 CPU cooler offsets a somewhat time-consuming installation process with near-record-setting performance for an air cooler. The sleek aluminum cooler’s 12cm fan sits between two heatsinks on the device, sparing fingers from the accidental nip of its 800rpm-to-1,800rpm variable fan.

The V8’s installation process is similar to that of most other CPU coolers, but with a few more screws involved. On an Intel platform, you start by attaching two retention plates to the cooler itself. You then remove the motherboard from your case and flip it upside-down, matching the ends of the cooler’s four retention screws with the mobo’s holes. You balance this contraption in your lap while using four large nuts to secure this beast of a device in place. You can also use an included backplane to mount the device, but we found the nut method to be far easier.

The 16-centimeter-tall V8 emits a slight red glow when you power up your machine. You adjust the speeds of the included fan using a knob that you can secure to your PC using an included PCI bracket. At its lowest setting, the cooler easily outperforms a typical Intel stock cooler and comes within a few degrees of our top air cooler, Thermaltake’s DuOrb. Cranking the V8 to its highest setting makes for a bit more noise than the DuOrb but produces only a meager two-degree increase in cooling performance on both our idle and burn tests.

This performance, nevertheless, places the V8 in the top echelon of coolers we have tested—second place, to be exact. The installation process isn’t a picnic, but we’ve experienced worse. All and all, it’s a great addition to a machine—both aesthetically and thermally.

Windows 7's Pre-Beta is "Safe, Solid - Exciting?"

Mark Edward Soper — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 16:28:17 -0600

As a counterpoint to InfoWorld blogger Randall Kennedy's controversial review of the Windows 7 pre-beta , we bring you a contrasting view from The Register's Tim Anderson:

During the press briefing for Windows 7 at Microsoft's Professional Developers Conference (PDC), corporate vice president for Windows product management Mike Nash insisted Microsoft had learned from the Vista experience.

Judging by early Windows 7 code released at PDC, the signs are that it really has....Windows 7 feels more polished than Vista, even in the preview, and performance is good.

Some of the high points Anderson noted include:

A revamped taskbar featuring jump lists and recently opened documents
A customize option for the system tray area
Adjustable UAC options
Better window management
Sidebar's gone, but gadgets remain (now on the desktop)
Libraries, which collect multiple physical locations into a single logical folder for searching
Multi-touch display support (though Anderson says some icons are too small for finger control)
Device Stage control center
Improved Paint, WordPad (both with ribbon UI)
Souped-up Calculator
Windows Media Player's been updated with new codecs and support for DNLA media streaming
BitLocker to Go encryption for removable media drives
Direct Access for easy IPSec access to internal network shares on a Windows Sever 2008 R2 system
Action Center replacement for Security Center

Anderson praises Windows 7 head honcho Steven Sinofsky (senior VP of the Windows and Windows Live Engineering Group) for what he calls "a methodical and disciplined approach" to developing Windows 7. Anderson doubts that there will be "a repeat of the Vista debacle, in terms of slippage, bugs and massive code rewrites."

Have you tried Windows 7 pre-beta? Hit Comment and tell us your favorite features - or features Microsoft still needs to fix.

Thermaltake DuOrb

David Murphy — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 12:33:33 -0500

Zalman’s CNPS9700 has been the Godzilla of coolers and a Best of the Best champion for more than a year. But it’s finally facing its Megalon in Thermaltake’s DuOrb cooler. Unlike the CNPS9700, which has an 11cm fan strapped to the side of its imposing copper and aluminum frame, the DuOrb’s heatsinks are stretched out horizontally. The extra-wide cooler, shaped in a 20-centimeter-wide figure eight, comes with two 8cm blue and red LED fans tucked inside two rings of copper fins.

The design is certainly unique, but we dislike the look of the red-blue fan combination. It’s a slap in the face of case aesthetics. We’d much rather see no LED fans at all than this mismatched lighting pattern.

We’re used to seeing coolers get taller and taller, and there’s a good reason for this—there aren’t any components above your CPU that could get in the way. Thermaltake’s horizontal expansion could prove troublesome for enthusiast builders. Install the cooler one way and you’re blocking (albeit also cooling) your RAM slots. Install it the other way and you might block a PCI Express slot.

But there’s something to be said for this cooler’s girth. The extra pudge and dual-fan design allow the DuOrb to match the CNPS9700 degree for degree in the cooling race. We recorded results within one degree of each other in both our idle and CPU burn tests—and the DuOrb uses less air power to achieve this parity. Since two fans split the cooling workload, the DuOrb runs much more quietly than the CNPS9700.

We’ve installed Zalman’s cooler dozens of times, and we’re still bothered each and every time we have to attach a screw to the device’s retention plate. By contrast, the DuOrb’s installation—which still requires motherboard removal—entails no heaving or straining to mount the cooler overtop our CPU.

While this device certainly trounces the Zalman in noise level and installation, our apprehensions about the cooler’s size keep the DuOrb out of our hall of fame. We don’t mind that the DuOrb will make upgrading our rig more challenging, but not everyone will be so forgiving

Asus Xonar D2X

Gordon Mah Ung — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 20:23:19 -0500

Much hay has been made of the incredible speed advantages PCI Express offers over PCI. Beyond GPUs, however, we haven’t found much worthy of occupying those slots. Asus hopes to change that with its Xonar D2X card—the first soundcard we’ve reviewed that makes use of the PCI Express interface. The D2X is basically a PCI-E version of the Xonar D2 (reviewed April 2008). In our review of the Xonar D2 we lamented the card’s lack of advanced EAX support—EAX 3 and above are proprietary to X-Fi-chipped soundcards, making those cards the obvious choice for gamers who want the best audio quality.

Or maybe not. With the Xonar D2X, Asus has done an end run to get a level of advanced EAX support in the card—but it’s not without controversy. The D2X instructs games that it has EAX 5, and the card’s drivers then shunt the EAX calls into its own effects engine. The results are far from perfect. Using EAX compliance tools, we found that the drivers didn’t support many EAX functions, such as reverb and filtering. Asus even admits to this. But the hack at least gives the card access to some functions that were previously locked up, such as support for additional audio streams in Battlefield 2—one of the handful of EAX games even available.

We’re more troubled by this card’s PCI Express support. Our D2X simply wouldn’t work on two different EVGA 680i SLI motherboards, and users have reported issues with nForce 790i boards as well. Asus tells us the problems are related to a BIOS issue that is being corrected by board vendors. Nvidia confirmed that it is working on a BIOS update that should be out by the time you read this. The D2X worked fine on Intel P35, AMD 790FX, and MSI nForce 750i boards.

The Xonar D2X uses the same audio codecs and offers the same I/O ports and Dolby Digital Live support as the D2. The D2X, however, requires a floppy connector for power.

In game frame rates, the PCI Xonar D2 was slightly faster than the D2X. We surmise this is due to superior drivers for the D2 or the PCI-to-PCI-E bridge chip on the D2X. Either way, the differences are minimal, and frankly, frame rates should no longer be the primary factor in soundcard decisions. Far more important is audio quality and gaming API support. In these areas, the Xonar D2X does well. The audio quality, rated at 118dB, is quite good, with no transient audio ghosts. The Auzentech X-Fi Prelude (reviewed April 2008) edges the D2X in our 24-bit/96KHz audio-file listening test, but honestly, both cards sound great and far exceed onboard audio.

So what would we buy? It depends. The advanced EAX in the Xonar is flawed, but it sorta works. If you want a full EAX 5 card, you have to go X-Fi. But that limits you to PCI, as the PCI-E version of the X-Fi lacks advanced EAX support. That makes the Xonar D2X the most feature-rich PCI-E card today, and that’s not a bad place to be—even if the EAX is faked.

CyberPower Gamer Ultimate SLI Quad

Gordon Mah Ung — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 17:39:51 -0500

For all those readers who have added up the price of the parts in an OEM box and screamed into the night air: “Hell, I can build it cheaper than that!” CyberPower has a retort: Beat this one, sucker! While you might think you’re up to the challenge, we suspect the price-to-performance ratio of the CyberPower Gamer Ultimate SLI Quad is impossible to match—unless you’re using boosted parts. In fact, we’re not sure how CyberPower is making a profit off this stacked and packed rig.

Peep this: The Gamer Ultimate features no less than Intel’s 3.2GHz Core 2 Extreme QX9770 along with a pair of EVGA GeForce 9800 GX2 cards. The CPU itself retails for $1,500, and the pair of GPUs runs about $1,100. Indeed, we added up the retail price of all the Gamer Ultimate’s parts and reached a total of $5,500. The machine sells for just $5,000.

CyberPower pushes the eminently overclockable Intel core up 800MHz to an even 4GHz using Cooler Master’s new ESA-enabled AquaGate Max. To this, CyberPower adds an Asus Striker II Extreme mobo. Based on the nForce 790i Ultra SLI chipset, this board is wicked cool and feature rich—and DDR3 all the way. CyberPower includes 4GB of Corsair Dominator DDR3 DIMMs rated to operate at 1,600MHz data rates.

But not all of the Gamer Ultimate’s parts are top-notch: The main hard drive array hosting the OS isn’t composed of Western Digital’s spanking-new fourth-generation 300GB VelociRaptor drives. We can’t blame CyberPower for this oversight, as the drives are just now trickling out. We can, however, blame the company for a funky hard-drive config. A pair of 150GB Raptors hosts the OS, and CyberPower includes a second pair of 500GB Hitachi 7,200rpm drives in RAID 0 as well. Huh? We put a premium on safety when storing our precious photos and videos—and RAID 0 ain’t safe. The chance of both arrays going bunk is low, but if the board goes south, you’d have to hunt for another Striker II to get your data back. Also controversial is the OS choice: Windows Vista Home Premium 64 bit. For times when driver and app support fail, however, CyberPower also includes Home Premium 32 bit.

The Gamer Ultimate sets new performance records in just about all of our benchmarks and makes the Kentsfield Q6700-based zero-point system we built in December seem antiquated.

Still, there were some issues: The machine occasionally failed to boot. We’re not sure what caused the problem, but it may be related to the soft start button in the Cosmos S case. Only after cycling the power on the PSU would the machine restart. The top USB ports were also nonfunctional. CyberPower said it decided to use the ports for the media reader, which does include USB, so it’s not too horrible a trade-off.

The Gamer Ultimate is a stellar performer, but the real story is its price. You could almost buy this rig and sell off its individual components for a tidy profit.