Posted 07/21/09 at 05:38:00 PM by Pulkit Chandna

Yahoo has lifted the curtain on its new homepage, which has been rolled out in beta. The homepage has not only received a facelift but also a number of newfangled features, including the ability to keep pace with updates from your favorite websites without leaving Yahoo.

 With social networking websites almost holding internet users captive for long periods of time, the new Yahoo homepage will let users have one eye on the latest from their friends on social networks such as Facebook, MySpace and Twitter. Other notable additions include the ability to customize the homepage using widgets and the introduction of a top ten search list just under the search bar.

But the launch has been far from smooth, as some users still haven’t encountered the option to try the new beta homepage. Yahoo is under considerable pressure from Microsoft’s latest search offering Bing, which is increasingly closing in on Yahoo in the online search market.

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Posted 07/03/09 at 09:12:10 AM by Pulkit Chandna

Doug Freedman, an analyst for Broadpoint AmTech, has revealed to Cnet that early production units of ultra-thin laptops, which are being made out of plastic, are fissuring due to design flaws. He gleaned this information from his discussions with original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) and original design manufacturers (ODMs).

Freedman believes manufacturers will have to ultimately “go with a metal case” to achieve that ultra-thin form factor they are after. However, the use of metal cases will make ultra-thin notebooks costlier.

A reference to Intel’s CULV (Consumer Ultra Low Voltage) technology – meant for ultra-thin notebooks - in Freedman’s report elucidating the design issues prompted Intel to clarify that the “case design issues reported to be found by an ODM, not consumers, in early production units for ultra-thin laptops have nothing to do with Intel processors whatsoever.”

Freedman had said that some manufacturers are more interested in manufacturing 11-inch and 12-inch netbooks with the Atom processor rather than ultra-thin notebooks with Intel’s CULV technology.

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Posted 04/11/09 at 02:52:34 PM by Justin Kerr

To an internet based company, server infrastructure is the secret sauce that can really help a company pull ahead of its competitors. It determines the quality of service its customers will receive, and their cost and efficiency will have a huge impact on the bottom line of the company. To Google this secret was a carefully guarded one, with few outside of the company having any real details. The only thing that we knew for sure is that they were built in house using parts that are generally available to every PC builder. This all changed last week when Google decided to lift the veil of secrecy to a group of IT professionals.

Each server measures about 3.5 inches thick, and is designed in a custom rack for easy stacking. Each unit sports two x86 processors either from Intel or AMD, contains two hard drives (presumably configured as a raid 1), and eight memory slots. These components are mounted on a Gigabyte motherboard, and protected by built in 12-volt battery that also serves as a UPS.

The built in battery was perhaps the biggest secret that was revealed and is a slap in the face to traditional thinking when it comes to large scale battery backup. Typically, server farms employ massive uninterruptable power supplies in the event of a power failure. The biggest problem with this approach according to Chris Malone from Google is the ability to scale it perfectly for the number of servers, and inefficiencies inherent with the technology. “Large UPSs can reach 92 to 95 percent efficiency, meaning that a large amount of power is squandered. The server-mounted batteries do better, Jai said: "We were able to measure our actual usage to greater than 99.9 percent efficiency."

Google’s approach to server infrastructure is defiantly unique, and it’s use of low cost customer grade hardware defiantly helped them survive the early years on razor sharp margins.

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Posted 04/07/09 at 03:30:00 PM by Florence Ion

Over the first seventeen years of the web’s existence, HTML has undergone beaucoup changes. What was once the predominant language of the web now shares the spotlight with a variety of scripting languages, stylesheets, and other types of markup, ranging from Javascript to Cascading Style Sheets. The flexibility of modern scripting languages, separation of content and style have combined to become more like applications than the static web pages we all remember from the early days of the web.

Back in 1995, when HTML first took off with the general public, there were a number of offenders that made the Internet look aesthetically awful. Designers employed atrocious HTML elements, such as the <blink> and <marquee> tags, which only made a show of serious web coders. It’s doubtful that anyone at that time considered blinking and scrolling text fluid web design. 

In the last few years, CSS has taken off with the rise of Web 2.0 and has certainly transformed web design into a much simpler endeavor—gone are the days of having to repeat the same mundane code or navigating a sea of jumbled up HTML in search of that one inconsistency. Things have gotten better since the Nineties and early-2000s, but some web designers are still foolishly living in the past. We’ve decided to update the criteria of HTML elements that are simply outdated and have been replaced by a batch of shinier, better CSS elements. If 1997 was the last time you’ve had a crash course in web design, than read on to learn a few new things about this versatile web world.

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Posted 02/04/09 at 07:14:15 PM by Norman Chan

If you check the list of hot topics on Twitter right now, you’ll fine #TED at the top of the list. That’s because today is the opening day of the annual TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) conference, a prestigious gathering of just over 1000 of the world’s most influential thinkers, entertainers, and futurists. This private event (registration costs $6,000, and that’s only after you’re invited) hosts a series a thought-provoking presentations aimed at stimulating the minds of attendees who are then encouraged to engage in an exchange of ideas throughout the week-long session.

Past speakers include Al Gore, JJ Abrams, and Jeff Bezos, who each gave provocative talks about their passions and innovations. This year’s lineup includes Green Auto Pioneer Shai Agassi, web pioneer Tim Berners-Lee, and one Bill Gates. The public typically has to wait several months before videos of these 18-minute long TED talks get uploaded, but we’ve received special access to the live stream of the main stage. Over the next three days, we’ll be posting recaps of tech-related talks to give you some insight into what goes on in this exclusive and enlightening forum. Keep tabs on our TED coverage by clicking this link!

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Posted 12/08/08 at 01:30:06 PM by Paul Lilly

In case you haven't noticed, multi-core processing has taken hold and the race is on to cram more cores onto a single die. But assuming developers can keep up, at some point, chip manufacturers are going to have address a potential major problem that could make adding more cores a useless endeavor. More specifically, a "memory wall" looms large in the not too distant future that, as Jon Stokes from ArsTechnica puts it, could make more than 16 cores pointless.

The problem stems from memory bandwidth not being able to keep pace with faster processors, whether those speed bumps come from a faster frequency or more cores. Put simply, memory is creating a bottleneck and can't feed the processor fast enough, a problem that has existed for some time. Intel and AMD have been able to mask the problem by adding more cache, but doing so doesn't overcome the memory wall, which  looks poised to really rear its ugly head as more cores are piled on to new chip packages.

"Engineers at Sandia National Laboratories, in New Mexico, have simulated future high-performance computers containing the 8-core, 16‑core, and 32-core microprocessors that chip makers say are the future of the industry," writes Samuel K. Moore at IEEE Spectrum Online. "The results are distressing. Because of limited memory bandwidth and memory-management schemes that are poorly suited to supercomputers, the performance of these machines would level off or even decline with more cores."

Hit the jump to find out what solutions are being proposed.

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Posted 10/03/08 at 04:55:16 PM by Andy Salisbury

With a design so simple it falls under the “I-can’t-believe-no-one-else-thought-of-this-before” category, Sangho Jin of Yanko Design’s hanging hard drive concept is looking to clear up desk clutter, one tiny footprint at a time.

The hanging hard drive, which would mount to your laptop’s screen, provides a nice way to add additional storage to your machine without using valuable desk space. Granted, this simple shift in external HDD placement wouldn’t change any lives, there are definitely plenty of laptop users out there worried about aesthetics (looking at you, Mac users), and to them this will be a welcome change.

“Portable hard drives are not really THAT portable if you have to tote around another peripheral but maybe you should have bought a laptop with a bigger hard drive! OOO Zing! No I didn’t! Yes, yes I did just go there,” writes Yanko Design’s Long Tran on the concept’s page, “Kidding aside, the Hang it On hard drive encloser lets you hang you 2.5” companion off the back of your lappie’s LCD screen. Sure, now your MacBook Air looks like it has a tumor growing off it’s svelt lines but at least you’ll get more than a measily 80GB.”

Well said, Mr. Tran. Well said.

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Posted 07/29/08 at 04:45:20 PM by Norman Chan

Reminder: The T-shirt design contest ends this Friday morning. Submit your entries as soon as possible!

Here is your chance to make a mark on Maximum PC!  We need new t-shirts, and, quite frankly between the magazine re-design, the website revamp and actually making the magazine every month, we’re just tapped out.  That’s where you come in. We're taking submissions for a new t-shirt design, and want you to try your hand at creating one. The design should include the Maximum PC logo, have a maximum of 4 colors, and be created as a vector graphic. Otherwise, we encourage you to be creative and geeky to capture the look and feel of the magazine.

Send us your design for the new Maximum PC t-shirt and you could win a $250 gift card and a few tees to show off your winning art! 

Visit the full contest page for the official rules!

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