Can you tell we're pumped about Minecraft-themed Legos? We've been anxiously following their development, breathlessly reporting when the petition to create the set passed the needed 10,000 signature mark -- and when the project got the official green light. Lego and Mojang must be pumped about the Minecraft Micro World, too; in less than a month, the set has flown through the design process and is headed to the production line. In fact, Lego started selling preorders for the set yesterday.
Oh man, is it March 6th yet? BioWare teased us with a taste of old friends on Valentine's Day -- Krogans and Turians and Reapers, oh my! -- but the official launch of Mass Effect 3 is still weeks away. At least we'll have some cool ME3 peripherals to gaze at between now and then, thanks to the newly unveiled Mass Effect 3 gear lineup by the folks over at Razer. They do more than just look pretty, too: Razer promises each piece of hardware will unlock an "exclusive in-game bonus."
They say two heads are better than one, but in processors with integrated graphics -- think Intel's Sandy Bridge or AMD's APUs -- the GPU and CPU actually do very little communicating. For the most part, the GPU does its thing while the CPU knocks about on something else. There has to be something better! And as it turns out, there is: a group of researchers from North Carolina State University recently coaxed CPUs and GPUs on integrated processors into helping each other out, and they report a performance boost of over 20 percent as a result.
Look! Up in the sky! It's a bird! It's a plane! It's… no, really, it's a person! That's what people in New York city have been screaming over the past few weeks as numerous folks saw, well, people flying over the skyline. What the heck? Could Superman be real? Nope -- you're just being sold to again! The flying people are actually nifty flying people-shaped aircraft designed by the Thinkmodo ad agency to spread the viral word about Chronicle, an upcoming 20th Century Fox film in which -- you guessed it -- people fly.
It doesn't take a genius to figure out why Mojang struck gold with Minecraft: it's basically a grown-up version of Legos, only with virtual blocks instead of real ones. And zombies. Prepare for the line between children's toys and grown-up games to get even blurrier in the coming months. After a petition for a Minecraft-themed Lego set garnered over 10,000 e-signatures, Lego considered the prospect in an official review. As of yesterday, Minecraft Legos are officially a go.
One of the major problems with covering all of the news flowing out of CES is that inevitably, something nifty gets missed. This year, we were so busy reporting on Ultrabooks and AMD chips that we totally glossed over what may be the most awesome survival tool of all time; a Swiss Army knife with a whopping 1TB hard drive built in. Whether you need to pry open a can of beans, file your nails, or transfer over 220 million pages of text, this bad boy's got you covered.
Computers are getting smaller. Processors are getting smaller. Why shouldn’t hard drives get smaller, too? Don’t worry – IBM’s working on it. Late last week, the company announced that its researchers had “successfully demonstrated the ability to store information in as few as 12 magnetic atoms.” In comparison, it takes close to a million atoms for current HDDs to store a bit. Apparently, being dense is a good thing!
Microsoft may be pushing touchscreen control as the wave of the future with Windows 8’s tiled Metro interface, but Tobii Technology thinks just swiping and pointing your way around an operating system is so, like, 2011. Tobii says its novel new "Tobii Gaze" control scheme, which mixes eye-tracking technology with a touchpad and is being shown off at CES next week, delivers superior control compared to both mice and touchscreens. Big words indeed!
Few computer-related acts bring the full Maximum PC ethos to bear as much as extreme overclocking. Damn the torpedoes; give ‘er MOAR POWER! and so on. Fridays are always slow news days, and the Friday between Christmas and New Year’s seems to be doubly so, so why not take advantage of the lull and shine on a spotlight on a pair of overclocking feats that showed up on the radar over the past couple of days?
If Japan ever decides to ditch the “Rising Sun” bit, “Land of the Awesome Vending Machines” would be an apt second slogan. A multitude of useful, weird and wacky vending machines litter the landscapes of the country’s major cities, offering up goodies ranging from exotic drinks to delicious noodles and heck, even space gold and hotel rooms (as shown by Tom Edwards in his 24 hour vending machine survival stint in the heart of Tokyo). Now, those ubiquitous Japanese vending machines are getting even more useful, as one company plans on rolling out units that double as free Wi-Fi hotspots in 2012.
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