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Release Notes: I Am Not, Nor Have I Ever Been, a Fanboy

Will Smith — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 23:00:00 -0500

It all started with a phone call from my mom. While she’s not a regular Maximum PC reader, she read my Windows 7 review online, and called me because she was worried about the, umm, “colorful” comments. I told her not to sweat that feedback—that those folks are fanboys, people who suffer an excess of product-focused enthusiasm.

The conversation got me thinking, though. When I posted my positive review of Win7, I expected a strong response from the fanboy contingent. I expected people to accuse me of being a fanboy (that happened, check), and I expected my critics to attack my opinions (checkerino), expertise (Chekov), and moral turpitude (ditto).

I wasn’t surprised by the Windows XP fanboys, who let me know that their intractable world lacks a place for any new versions of Windows. Also not shocking? That the Apple fanboys are convinced that Snow Leopard is faster, better, and cheaper than Windows 7. And I would have been disappointed if the Linux fanboys didn’t tell me that I’m a dumbass for paying for an inferior, closed-source OS. What I didn’t expect? Well, what I couldn’t prepare myself for was the Windows Vista fanboy.

This revelation prompted further study into the fanboy syndrome. I stopped discriminating, and started engaging them. It turns out that the sources of motivation for the modern fanboy can be as varied as the products that they love. Nonetheless, after much study, I was able to classify fanboys into a few major archetypes:

The Underdog: One of the most common fanboy types, the Underdog throws his weight behind the long-shot. As self-described hopeless romantics, Underdogs shift allegiances with nearly every product cycle.

The Investor: With a strict eye toward preserving the capital expended on any particular product, the Investor frequently reads and argues about reviews of products he already owns, and rarely sees value in upgrading a product that he’s invested his money (and thus, his self-worth) in.

The Contrarian/Non-Conformist: Students of fanboyism commonly confuse these archetypes. They share similarities, but to the trained eye the key difference is simple: Contrarians like products because you dislike them, while Non-Conformists like them because everyone else dislikes them.

The Antiquarian: The Antiquarian’s motto says it all: “If it’s new, it’s overpriced crap.” Antiquarians can frequently be found dumpster-diving behind Fry’s, looking for “perfectly serviceable” parts that are “just” 10 years old.

The Historian: You know that guy with the Commodore 64 ticking along in the corner? He’s the Historian. Odds are, he’s still running a crappy Cyrix CPU, because “Cyrix made bitchin’ x86-compatible CPUs in 1993.” Don’t waste your breath arguing with Historians.

So, where do I fit in? I’m not a fanboy at all. I simply buy whatever is fastest and gives me the functionality I need. Where do you fit in?

Release Notes: On the Cusp of an Augmented Reality Revolution

Will Smith — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 12:35:19 -0500

You may not have heard of it before, but “augmented reality” is coming, and it’s more than just cool tech—it will change the world.

Augmented reality has been a Hollywood staple for the last 30 years—although it’s more commonly associated with robots and cyborgs than people or PC enthusiasts. Put simply, it’s a technology that overlays a real-world scene with relevant contextual information, directly from a computer. In Robocop and Terminator, augmented reality was used by the movie’s eponymous characters to overlay friend or foe info. In Minority Report, it was used to display targeted ads, unique to each individual, as they walked through a city landscape.

More recently in the real world, augmented reality has been used in advertisements, rendering 3D animations attached to 2D surfaces you hold up in front of a webcam. (Check these sites for demos: http://ge.ecomagination.com/smartgrid/ and http://www.psfk.com/2008/12/mini-augmented-reality-advertising-a-reality.html). The Mini-Cooper ad is especially neat, because you can explore a 3D rendering of a car using a 2D ad and your PC. To date, the applications of augmented reality tech have been cool, but not particularly useful.

That’s about to change. Armed with GPS sensors, accelerometers, and compasses, many smartphones—like the iPhone 3GS and Google Android phones—have the hardware required to determine your position and orientation in the world. With that info, your phone will be able to display a HUD, overlaying info from the Internet atop a direct feed from your phone’s camera.

The first of these apps is likely to be acrossair’s Nearest New York Subway app for the iPhone. The videos we’ve seen of the app are amazing—hold the phone parallel to the ground and you see a traditional 2D map of NYC’s subway system, complete with your location. When you hold the phone perpendicular, the camera turns on. As you rotate, it displays icons revealing the direction to and the key info for the nearest subway stations over a live feed from the camera. (To see the video, go to http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ps49T0iJwVg.)

As computing becomes more integrated with our day-to-day life, it becomes easy to envision ever-more-interesting use cases. I’d love a presence app—like Loopt or Google Latitude—that lets me see public profile information of people who share my coordinates in meatspace. Right now, I have no way of knowing that the guy standing next to me on the bus is my college roommate’s brother-in-law. But if my phone played a quick game of Seven Degrees of Kevin Bacon with his Facebook profile, I might end up talking about something more interesting than the Giants’ game on our shared bus ride. In fact, with a large enough social circle, I may never meet another stranger again.

I can’t help but think that that would enrich my life. Isn’t that what technology is for?

Release Notes: Sometimes It's Good to Buy the Extended Warranty

Will Smith — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 20:30:00 -0500

I suffered a loss recently: My trusty, first-generation iPhone’s touch screen gave up the ghost. On a sunny day in early June, it let loose this mortal coil. And, like every other piece of technology I’ve ever owned, the touch screen stopped responding at the worst possible moment—as I was in a cab on my way to the first leg of a two-week trip.

Upon landing in Los Angeles, my first stop was an Apple store, where one of the Apple-proclaimed “geniuses” explained my options. My first choice was to get a replacement phone for a mere $200 (I hadn’t bothered to buy the extended warranty). My other option was simply to pound sand. I took my busted phone and bid the Apple store and its smug “geniuses” farewell, vowing to never buy another iPhone.

Next stop was AT&T to purchase a new, non-iPhone phone. I put my name on the we’ll-help-you-when-we’re-good-and-damn-well-ready list, and started looking at phones. After an hour or so of waiting, I walked out of the building with a new Blackberry Bold and considered my mission accomplished.

Of course, when I returned to my car, it had a parking ticket on it. And, frankly, things went downhill from there. Connecting the Blackberry to my company’s mail server took multiple calls to our IT department, a call to AT&T, and the sacrifice of one chicken. (Well, actually we ate fried chicken for dinner and I dropped a drumstick on the ground by accident, but that still counts.) After more than a year using the iPhone, acclimating to the Blackberry was difficult. I had become accustomed to the convenience of the iPhone. I liked carrying 16GB of music, but I loved having access to thousands of apps in the App Store, so naturally I went searching for replacements. While I found Blackberry apps that connected me to Twitter and Facebook, I didn’t find analogues for other apps I regularly use—the ones that help me manage my expenses, find a good spot to eat, or entertain myself. Hell, the built-in web browser even choked on some pages. While I eventually managed to connect my calendar to the Bold, I mourned the loss of everything else—from Yelp to Flight Control.

After a week of use, it was clear that the Blackberry Bold wasn’t a good fit for me. Yes, it did excel in a few areas—namely, download speeds, mail, instant messaging, and maps—but it still had to go. On the day I returned the Bold, Apple announced a new iPhone and a price cut. And after careful consideration, I swallowed my pride and pre-ordered an iPhone 3GS.

Whether I like the way Apple treats its customers or behaves in general, I can’t argue with good tech. And the iPhone remains one helluva piece of hardware.

Also, this time I bought the extended warranty.

[Editor's Note: This edition of Release Notes was originally published in our September 2009 issue]

Are Celebrity "Tweets" Real? It All Depends on the Meaning of "Real"

Mark Edward Soper — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 13:25:30 -0500

Our own Will Smith uses Twitter to announce new articles and content on Maximum PC, my wife and I use Twitter to keep track of our kids and their friends, and "Britney Spears" uses it to entertain and inform her fans. Why the quote marks? A weekend article in The New York Times reveals what Cnet says "we all sort of knew already" - Twitter is full of ghostwritten entries.

Some of the sports figures, celebrities, and politicians who use ghostwriters on Twitter and other Web 2.0 social network sites include Britney Spears (although her staff is now signing their own entries), 50 Cent, Candidate/President Barack Obama, Kanye West, Ron Paul, and others. However, the Times also gives credit where due to to celebrities who write their own tweets like Shaquille O'Neal and Lance Armstrong (who one-handed a recent tweet about breaking his collarbone).

How do you feel about ghosted entries on Twitter, Facebook, or other social networking sites? Would you be interested in being hired to ghostwrite? Hit Comment yourself (no ghostwritten entries, please) and tell us what you, yourself, really think.

Twitter logo courtesy of Techshout.com.

Will Smith's Terrifying Zombie Transformation

Florence Ion — Sat, 24 Jan 2009 11:00:00 -0600

In our March 2009 issue, we dressed our illustrious Editor-in-Chief up as a one of the ravenous antagonists from our Game of the Year, Valve’s Left 4 Dead.

The transformation from living human to decaying dead took almost two hours, though in the end it made for an amusing, but slightly horrifying, photo shoot. Read on to find out how we managed to turn this famed zombie slayer into one of his victims, or follow along to attempt your own zombie transformation.

It took a variety of ingredients to emulate the undead’s rotting flesh, including Mold Builder Liquid Latex, Vaseline, a roll of toilet paper, fake blood, and glycerin-based make-up pallets from Kryolan.

Secret ingredients: make-up remover, various make-up pallets, Mold Builder latex, and Vaseline.

Before using the liquid latex, our makeup artist, Nick Katich, tested a bit of it on a fresh area of skin to make sure it wouldn’t cause an allergic reaction. Then, he prepared Will's face for zombification by greasing up the eyebrows and hairline with a wax stick and Vaseline, so that the latex could eventually tear off with a bit of ease.

To achieve the scaly texture of undead skin, Nick applied a thin, even layer of Mold Builder to the face and arms, and then strategically applied torn up pieces of tissue paper to the top of the latex. After fifteen minutes of waiting for the latex to dry, Will's skin was covered with a bluish-white base coat, on both the arms and face, to make him look as if he had just risen from his grave.

Will's arm, covered in toilet paper.

Splotching paint on top of dried up tissue.

Next, the latex/paint combo was torn with fingers to imitate flesh-tear, and then separated it with a spatula, using the flat edge so as to not accidentally remove all the tissue. Then, we had to make the rotting flesh look believable. After applying red makeup base on the inside of the tissue paper and the top of the exposed skin, Nick dumped fake blood over those areas, making sure it looked like Will was covered in boils and cuts.

Looks like the revenge of the Black Plague!

The transformation was finalized by dusting gray powder with a blush brush all over Will’s face so as to remove shininess and make him look truly lifeless.

Voila! A zombie editor!

At the end of the photo shoot, Will had a hard time taking off the latex from his arms, so remember to shave before attempting this gory feat.

Would you trust your children with this man?

Nvidia: It’s Time to Kill CUDA

Will Smith — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 14:22:02 -0600

Like many of you, the first real 3D accelerator I owned was a 3dfx Voodoo card. This was way back in 1995. DirectX and Direct3D had yet to be released to the public, and OpenGL was only used for CAD and scientific rendering apps. In those primordial times, if a game developer wanted to harness the awesome rendering power of the Voodoo hardware, he had to write his game with Glide, 3dfx’s own application programming interface (API). This was all before the open standards movement became a powerful force in development circles, and Glide offered 3dfx a major competitive advantage: If a gamer wanted to see all the kick-ass 3D effects that Glide enabled, he had to play the game on 3dfx hardware—lest he suffer Glideless, in a depressing, busted-up world of jaggy, unfiltered textures.

The 3dfx/Glide domination ended when id Software and other game developers started releasing titles that used the OpenGL API, which wasn’t dependent on 3dfx hardware (but worked with 3dfx chips through a Glide translation layer). OpenGL opened the door for other 3D chip companies to build competitive products, and thus ATI, S3, Matrox, and Nvidia entered the fray with hardware of their own.

With every new OpenGL or DirectX game released, Glide slowly transitioned from an advantage to a liability for 3dfx. As competitors like Nvidia embraced new technology and embarked on a period of incredibly rapid improvements, 3dfx remained tied to its Glide past, and, as a result, was slow to embrace new rendering enhancements, such as 32-bit color and antialiasing. Ultimately, this contributed to 3dfx’s demise, and embracing open standards allowed Nvidia and ATI to flourish.

Why are we talking about this today? Because Nvidia stands at a crossroads, with two closed, proprietary APIs that have mainstream potential: the general-purpose computing CUDA API, and the PhysX physics-acceleration API, which sits on top of CUDA. These are both promising technologies, but only owners of Nvidia hardware can harness their power. Meanwhile, there are two emerging open standards that mirror what Nvidia is doing with its proprietary development. One is OpenCL 1.0, and the other is a general-purpose GPU computing API, which Microsoft will include in DirectX 11. There are a relatively small number of consumer applications that use CUDA, PhysX, or OpenCL right now, but the possible applications for the tech are endless—grossly simplified, these APIs let graphics chips perform CPU-like functions. The question Nvidia needs to be asking is simple: Will developers write their general-purpose GPU computing apps using a proprietary API that works on only a subset of PCs—those stuffed with Nvidia hardware—or will they use an open API that will work on every PC on the market?

Nvidia’s path is clear: It needs to stop trying to convince us that closed APIs are good, and instead embrace OpenCL and Microsoft’s yet-to-be-named solution. It needs to port PhysX to run on one of the open APIs, then use PhysX as a platform to advertise the kind of power that Nvidia delivers (with the recipients of all this messaging being ATI diehards and anyone considering the forthcoming Larrabee GPU from Intel).

By focusing on what its always done well—building kick-ass hardware—instead of force-feeding us closed APIs, Nvidia will thrive. As for CUDA? It’s served its purpose, but its time has passed. It’s time to kill CUDA.

Why Does Hollywood Give Nerds a Bad Rap?

Will Smith — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 16:51:30 -0500

I just returned from a special theater screening of War Games—quite possibly the only good film Hollywood has ever produced about computers, computer nerds, or hacker culture. Shockingly, the movie, which was first released in 1983, holds up quite well, despite the use of archaic hardware (acoustic couplers and vocoder boxes), a laughable sentient military supercomputer, and an occasional lapse into typical Hollywood lingo.

The abundance of 8-inch floppy disks also gave people in the theater a laugh, as did the fact that characters were practically chain-smoking throughout the entire movie. Our biggest laugh came when the machine running the projector crashed—it displayed a Windows 2000 Start Menu, sending the nerd collective into hysterics—but none of the showing’s pervasive air of yestertech could take away from the fact that War Games remains awesome. It was well-researched, authentic, and sometimes downright prescient. After all, the main premise of the movie is about people dialing into military networks using modems. Who would have thought that just five years after the movie’s release, the military-focused ARPANET would be opened up to commercial interests, and very soon after that, the Internet as we know it would be born.

After the show, I lingered in the lobby with my fellow sweaty nerds and reminisced about good hacker movies. Well, we tried to, anyway. Aside from The Matrix (which was about a nerd but shares more DNA with Hong Kong martial arts flicks than anything else), there haven’t been any good films that explore the geekiest depths of computing—ever. Think about it for a minute: Hackers was at best laughable, a blatant attempt to capitalize on a legitimate underground phenomenon. Even movies that first appear to add a promising element of nerdom always end up doing something dumb, like tarnishing a tense computer-based drama with idiotic and unusable (but oh so very sexy) 3D interfaces. Yes, I’m talking about the IRIX 3D filesystem featured in Jurassic Park.

Where War Games showed a likeable kid who hacked simply because he wanted a peek at new games, the other movies portray computer nerds as socially inept at best. At worst, they paint computer nerds as dysfunctional, “let the world burn” anarchist types. Over the last 10 years, I’ve met thousands of people who, like me, describe themselves as computer nerds, but I’ve yet to meet a single anarchist hacker. Maybe those guys are all holed up in their moms’ basements, but my hunch is they’re just another fictional stereotype, manufactured by Hollywood to explain anything it fears or doesn’t understand.

I want to see some more good movies about people like me, computer nerds. Have I missed any forgotten classics? Is there anything I need to bump to the top of my Netflix queue? Let me know!

What Microsoft Must Change for Windows 7

Will Smith — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 12:45:30 -0500

By now, we’ve got a pretty good idea of what’s working and what isn’t in Vista. Here are our recommendations for how Microsoft should proceed with Windows 7

Fight Piracy in a New Way

Face it, activation is a failure. For power users who frequently upgrade their PCs, dialing in to reactivate the OS is beyond irritating. Instead, Microsoft must come up with a novel way to punish pirates without annoying its paying customers. (May we suggest displaying massive popup ads in pirate copies of Windows?) For legitimate customers, a realistic home-licensing program—buy one copy at full price, get four more upgrades for $50 to $100 each—would go a long way toward creating goodwill.

Streamline the UAC System

We definitely approve of the spirit behind User Account Control—it’s good to warn users when they’re doing something risky. However, the implementation is so chatty that it trains users to automatically click Approve on any popup they see. This is insanely dangerous behavior that must be fixed in Windows 7.

Add Something Inspirational

Say what you like about Steve Jobs, but he stirs the Apple faithful into a frenzy with his promise of “one more thing.” Apple has done a great job of adding features, applications, and functionality to OS X that inspire its users. Some of that is just marketing mumbo jumbo, but the tight integration and the user-focused design of Apple’s integrated apps impress even the most die-hard PC user.

64-Bit is the New 32-Bit

It’s time. The 64-bit revolution is upon us, and it’s time for Microsoft to lead the charge. The hardware is available and common, and software vendors should have been planning for the 64-bit change for the last five years. Please, Microsoft, make the 64-bit edition of Windows 7 the default install. And while you’re at it, allow users to install the 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Windows on the same machine without buying two licenses. Anything less is just crass.

Create Fewer Versions

We understand that creating many versions of an OS with a few key differentiators can help drive sales at the higher end. But it’s a viciously consumer-unfriendly practice that needs to be stopped. Nothing’s worse than finding out you’ve purchased the wrong software or that because of obscure upgrade paths you’re railroaded into buying an incredibly overpriced version of the OS whose only differentiating factor is that it works with your rig. Actually, one thing is worse: finding out you can’t return that already opened Vista box for a version you can use.

Jettison Backward Compatibility

So many of Vista’s problems are directly tied to backward compatibility, but we have the perfect solution. Instead of building backward compatibility into the OS, ship each copy of Windows with Virtual PC and bare-bones images of Windows XP. Let users run old apps in a virtualized OS, and strip out all the cruft that’s required to make them run natively in Windows 7.

Make Performance Paramount

We expect to take a small performance hit in games anytime we upgrade our operating system. We don’t like it, but we understand that it’s the way things go. What we can’t abide is taking massive performance penalties in basic computing tasks—like transferring files over a network. There’s no wiggle room on this one: Get it right the first time.

Upgrade DirectSound3D

A picture may be worth 1,000 words, but we like good audio too. There’s more than enough blame to pass around between Creative and Microsoft for Vista’s sound woes. At this point, we don’t care who is at fault, we just want a successor to DirectSound 3D in the next version of Windows and DirectX.