Posted 09/30/2008 at 06:22:27pm
Odds are, we’ve all done it: Clicked that little Digg button on a story we liked or were entertained by or just plain laughed at. But have you ever considered the unbelievable traffic pushing-power you have as a button-masher, even as the smallest cog in the Digg army? To find out exactly how much cold, hard cash your click on a Digg badge is worth, we plugged a bunch of publicly available information into our handy-dandy spreadsheet, and hit the calculate button.
Hit the jump for the complete, site-by-site breakdown and find out what YOUR Digg is worth.

Posted 09/23/2008 at 09:06:36pm
You know it, we know it, the whole damn world knows it: On ever-so-rare occasions, there are technologies that we, the nerd elite, have ever-so-slightly... umm... overhyped. That's right, we said it. Overhyped. It's just that when we're talking with engineers or reading about about some hot new technology, we get so damn excited. So excited! And can you really blame us? I mean, who wouldn't get excited when you hear about CPUs that clock in over 4GHz, or instruction sets that will multiply your CPU's performance? And geez, who wouldn't want to turbocharge his gaming framerate? Hell, we shouldn't be blamed for overhyping, it's those damn engineers fault!
In case you do blame us, hit the jump before you collect your torches and pitchforks, and definitely read our apology to the world before you bring an angry mob to Maximum PC HQ.
Posted 09/23/2008 at 04:51:30pm
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 discs also gave people in the theater a laugh, as did the fact that characters were practically chain-smoking throughout the entire movie. But none of the showing’s pervasive air of yestertech could take away from the fact that War Games remains awesome.
More nostalgia after the jump!
Posted 09/11/2008 at 12:45:30pm
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.
More of our genius plotting after the jump!
Posted 09/10/2008 at 12:15:00pm
We sat down with Microsoft to hear the company’s side of the Vista story. What lessons have been learned following the worst Windows launch in the company’s history? Is Microsoft doing enough to regain PC users’ faith?
Way back in January 2007, after years of hype and anticipation, Microsoft unveiled Windows Vista to a decidedly lukewarm reception by the PC community, IT pros, and tech journalists alike. Instead of a revolutionary next-generation OS that was chock-full of new features, the Windows community got an underwhelming rehash with very little going for it. Oh, and Vista was plagued with performance and incompatibility problems to boot.
Since then, the PC community has taken the idea that Vista is underwhelming and turned it into a mantra. We’ve all heard about Vista’s poor network transfer speeds, low frame rates in games, and driver issues—shoot, we’ve experienced the problems ourselves. But over the last 18 months, Vista has undergone myriad changes, including the release of Service Pack 1, making the OS worth a second look. It’s time we determine once and for all whether we should stick with XP for the next 18 months while we wait for Windows 7. But before we answer that question, let’s review exactly what’s wrong with Windows Vista.
Hit 'Read More' for the rest of this story
Posted 09/10/2008 at 11:01:00am
Earlier this summer, both Nvidia and ATI hosted press events to unveil their new hardware—and the excitement about GPU-based encoding was palpable. We were promised that our videocards would make Photoshop faster and better and our GPUs would encode video 10 times faster than our CPUs. In fact, someone lacking tech savvy would have left these presentations thinking, "Wow, these GPU things can make common computing tasks run insanely fast, and there are a couple of games that work with them too." Of course, as is typical, the truly big promises (like 10x faster video encodes) were off in the future, when the software was "ready."
Well, the software's nearly ready. Elemental's Badaboom uses Nvidia's CUDA interface to do lots of the grunt work of DVD ripping by using the GPU instead of your musty old CPU. I've been in the Lab for the last few days putting this app through the ringer. Our test bed for this challenge is an Intel Q6600 quad core, running at a stock 2.4GHz, with 4GB of memory and a GeForce GTX 280 reference board.










No BS Podcast #81: The Mongolian Barbecue Edition
Posted 10/01/2008 at 12:15:20am
Sorry bout that. Something was wrong with feedburner, so I had to reset it. Should be working with iTunes now.
Microsoft Job Listing Pulls Back the Curtain on Windows Home Server v2 Features
Posted 09/10/2008 at 01:04:14am
I'd like to see streaming support for all the formats that the Xbox 360 understands. Specifically, MP4 support for the Connector interface. Right now, I'm having to disable Windows Media Connect in favor of a more functional UPNP server because connect doesn't know what to do with the MP4 container.
No BS Podcast #79: The Goodbye Dave Edition
Posted 09/05/2008 at 11:05:42pm
It's fixed now, sorry about that.
Downtime Tonight - Completed!
Posted 08/26/2008 at 01:14:47am
And we're done
Gaming Roundup 8/25/08: Freedom from F.E.A.R.
Posted 08/26/2008 at 12:47:05am
I'm sad that L4D is delayed.
Consumers Still Shy on Blu-Ray; Missing Out on Glorious High Definition Cinema
Posted 08/13/2008 at 08:18:21pm
The problem with Blu-ray is price. The players are too expensive, and the movies are much much too expensive. There's no way that people are going to pay $35 for a movie that they watch for two hours, and then probably never look at again. DVD really took off when Amazon and the big box stores started selling discs for $15. When that happens with Blu-ray, it will take off. Until then, DVD is good enough, and the added freedom you get to copy and convert your discs is just icing on the cake.
Gaming Roundup 7/30/08: Jet Set Radioooo!
Posted 07/31/2008 at 01:02:11am
They made some sort of stylesheet tweak the other day, which Firefox knew to reload since the stylesheet changed. IE7 apparently doesn't check as frequently. If you clear your cache, or do a shift or ctrl+ reload (not sure what it is on IE), it will fix the problem. Getting IE7 to stop using cached stylesheets is one of the problems that plagued the browser since like version 5.
Sony Vaio SZ Premium
Posted 07/28/2008 at 06:55:58pm
Yeah, it should have been more clear. It ran the games, but not the benchmarks at the resolutions we test due to the screen's resolution. At the resolutions we normally test, it scored <1fps. Because of the two things, we reported WNRs.
Comic-Con 08: Four Days, Four Hundred Cosplay Photos. Welcome to the Ultimate Geek Gallery.
Posted 07/28/2008 at 04:58:34pm
We send an editor or two down every year to man our booth and hang out with readers who stop by. This year, Norm and Nathan went, and instead of just lounging all day at the booth, they decided to get a couple of stories out of it. The basic idea is that even if you can't make it to Comic-Con, we can give you a little taste of the show.
Gaming Roundup 7/24/08: Tomorrow's Just a Delay Away
Posted 07/25/2008 at 01:14:31pm
Surely you jest.