Geek With Laptop

Could new gaming service kill the game console?

Jac — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 15:00:55 +0000

As from June 17th this year, a new online gaming service will allow users to play popular games over the Internet.

At the moment, dedicated gamers have to pay out a small fortune for a gaming console such as an Xbox or PlayStation and then purchase the necessary software to play the games.

OnLive does away with the need for a console as the games are held in the cloud so to speak and are streamed directly to a user’s computer or other device.

“OnLive breaks the console cycle. We don’t need new hardware devices” said Onlive’s founder Steve Perlman.

Got to admit that’s a big plus. Basically by doing away with the need for hardware that needs to be upgraded every few years, more people will be able to afford to play for a start.

“We want to take your dollars from hardware and let you spend it on software. We are a new platform and we’re building a network and infrastructure to last for the next 30 years of gaming, not the next five years” The Company’s chief operating officer Mike GcGarvey told reporters

OnLive says it has come up with a new way of compressing videos which enables communication over broadband in real time.

Games will work on a PC, a TV, or a Mac and even on relatively low powered devices. Great!

Just think if you use a laptop you will be able to play games such as Assassin’s Creed, Borderlands or Prince of Persia sitting in a café, on the train or in an airport lounge, anywhere you can get a Wi-Fi connection.

But will it kill off the game console?

Somehow I don’t think so. Firstly, the company’s servers would have to be able to cope with masses of users without there ever being any interruption to the streaming and that’s not going to be easy.

Another thing is users would also have to have a decent and fast broadband connection in order to get the right kind of quality which is unlikely to match the gaming experience offered by the Xbox or the PlayStation.

Still, it’s on the right track.

The OnLive service will only be available in the US to start with for a monthly subscription fee of $14.95 which will then allow you to buy or rent games online. There’s no mention yet of availability for anywhere else.

Copyright © 1999-2010 Geek With Laptop. The GeekWithLaptop.com RSS Feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this material in your news aggregator, the site you are looking at is guilty of copyright infringement. Please contact legal {at} geekwithlaptop {dot} com so we can take legal action immediately.More Information:

Geek With Laptop Weekly Roundup 12.03.2010

Jac — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 12:06:36 +0000

The weekly roundup of the web’s best tech news includes- Review of Seagate 2TB Barracuda XT SATA6 Desktop Hard Drive ST32000641AS, Review of Two USB 3.0 34mm Expresscards, Review of USB 3.0 GIGABYTE Ultra Durable 3 PCI Express Card GA-USB3.0, Acer to launch super thin frameless notebook, Verizon Expects Release of First 4G Handsets for Mid-2011 and an End to Unlimited Data Plans, Recycled Steel Optimus Prime Transformer is Popular With the Ladies, Portable Wikipedia Device and Droid Cell Phone.

Review of Seagate 2TB Barracuda XT SATA6 Desktop Hard Drive ST32000641AS

The majority of PC users out there have regular mechanical hard drives in their computers, it’s going to be a long time before SSDs replace them. Hard drive companies like Seagate know this and they’re not going to stop improving the technology, with the introduction of the new SATA 3 interface we’re starting to see hard drives to go with it. The first company out the door with one was Seagate, and it’s a big one coming in at 2 Terabytes in size called the Barracuda XT, and that’s what I’ve got for review today.

Controversial .xxx domain to be reconsidered

Jac — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 15:10:42 +0000

Everyone knows that the Internet contains sites with dodgy and explicit content, they are scattered all over the net.

There can’t be many surfers who haven’t inadvertently stumbled upon a porn site without actually trying to?

This being the case it would make a lot of sense to have a domain set aside specifically for sex sites, such as .xxx for example, then everyone would know exactly where to look

As long as nine years ago that was exactly what was proposed to Icann (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) and then in 2005 they finally approved the .xxx domain.

However, only two years later they overturned their decision after a storm of protests by some conservative moralists in the US and we were back to square one.

Now, that decision to block it has been considered unfair by an independent review body so Icann are about to look at the proposal for .xxx once again on the 12th March.

“If the contract is signed, we could be selling names by the end of the year” Stuart Lawley, chairman of ICM Registry told the BBC.

It’s the ICM registry which put forward the plans for .xxx and it is they who would sell the domain names under .xxx.

It’s not all done and dusted yet though, there’s a chance that Icann will reject the proposal again but they aren’t likely to do it without first giving it a lot of thought.

Surely though, if there’s a domain set aside for people who are looking for sex sites it will reduce the risk of coming across such sites accidentally.

I mean you would know where to look if you wanted it so it would limit the number of users trawling the internet looking for porn as they would go directly to .xxx.

This would then lessen the amount of traffic to sex sites under regular domains which would maybe encourage them to move their business to .xxx. Everyone’s happy.

Incidentally, the domain name sex.com is about to go up for auction on the 18th March with a starting price of $1 million. The last time it was up for sale it went for a whopping $14 million, and all for what amounts to three simple letters.

Yes, sex is big business and it is here to stay regardless of whether anyone thinks it’s moral or not so why not create a home for it under .xxx.

What do others think?

Charles Thacker gets the prestigious Turing Award

Jac — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 23:05:19 +0000

It’s not often that a hardware expert gets the Turing Award, in fact it has only happened once before, but this year it goes to computer scientist Charles Thacker.

Thacker is currently a researcher with Microsoft but his portfolio extends back to the 1970’s.

He has been accredited with helping to design and build what we now consider to be the first ever modern personal computer. Whilst with Xerox his work led to the development of Alto, which had a screen, and a graphical user interface.

He was the co inventor of the Ethernet technology which is still widely used for networking computers today.

Thacker was involved in developing the early prototypes of desktop work stations and the tablet PC and has 29 patents in computer and networking systems under his belt.

The Turing award is named after Alan M Turing the British Mathematician and is funded by Intel and Google. This “Nobel prize in computing” is awarded to those who have made outstanding contributions to the field of computer science.

“Google is pleased to join in honouring Charles Thacker for his far-reaching role in the birth of one of the most important technologies in the 20th century,” said Alfred Spector, Vice President of Research and Special Initiatives at Google Inc.

“His contributions made possible the style of computing that we enjoy today, and we are proud to be a sponsor of the ACM Turing Award to encourage continued research in computer science, and the related technologies that depend on its continued advancement.”

Past recipients of the award have included Douglas Engelbert in 1997 for future interactive technologies and inventions (computer mouse), Alan Kay in 2003 for ideas the root of object orientated programming languages and Vinton Cerf and Robert Kahn in 2004 for Internetworking.

Thacker will receive a $250,000 prize and will attend a special banquet in June but he said he would probably donate the money to the University of California, Berkeley.

On hearing the news “I was flabbergasted” said Thacker in an interview.

“I frankly never expected to get the award, because it wasn’t given to people like me. Most of the people who have gotten the Turing award in the past few years are software people or theoreticians. There are scant few people who have actually built some hardware.”

It’s well deserved Mr Thacker.

2011 will see biggest hard drive change in decades!

Jac — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 15:00:26 +0000

There hasn’t been a great deal of news about it so far but soon our hard drives will never be the same again.

At the moment, our hard disc drives are formatted into 512 byte size blocks and have been that way for years but as from the first quarter of next year hard drive suppliers will start shipping hard drives with 4 K disc sizes.

All hard drive suppliers have agreed to adopt the 4 K size by the end of January next year through the International Disk Drive Equipment and Materials Association (IDEMA).

IDEMA has set up BigSector dot org which is a “consortium of leading storage industry software and hardware companies formed to provide the industry with guidance and support for implementing larger physical sector sizes” says the site.

“Disk drives with larger physical sectors allow enhanced data protection and correction algorithms, which provide increased data reliability.

“Larger physical sectors also enable greater format efficiencies, thereby freeing up space for additional user data. These improvements will result in better user experiences” BigSector explains.

Basically the larger size means we will be able to have bigger hard drives that are more secure, more efficient and more reliable.

Although 512 bytes has been perfectly ok up till now, this size is no longer appropriate when hard drives can hold so much more data than they could before.

“The technology has changed but that fundamental building block of formatting has not” said David Burks, a product marketing manager for storage firm Seagate reported the BBC.

Ok so the larger size sounds great and yes there will be a few teething problems, there always are with new technology. However, one in particular is how the larger hard drive sizes might affect Windows XP users.

Windows XP was released before it was decided to up the block size of hard drives to 4 K so technically isn’t “4 K aware” whereas Windows Vista, Windows 7, X Tiger, Snow Leopard and the Linux kernel released after September 2009 are all 4 K compliant according to the BBC report.

“All other things being equal you will have a noticeable hard drive reduction in performance” said Mr Burks who reckoned it could slow it down by as much as 10 percent.

Those who are building their own computers or swapping a hard drive for one with the new format are apparently the users who are most likely to experience problems.

Britain wants to mandate microchips for man’s best friend

Jayson — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 20:30:31 +0000

Not content with wiring garbage bins to monitor how much waste British families produce, now officials in the U.K. want have another plan that has privacy advocates’ knickers in a twist: They want to force dog owners to microchip their pets and buy insurance in an effort to crack down on canine aggression.

Britain has nearly 8 million dogs. Weapons are tightly controlled in the U.K., which seems to have a problem with dogs trained to inflict harms on people to make up for it.

Making dog owners buy insurance will sanction all of them — even those who are law-abiding citizens — while criminals will continue to do what they do and simply ignore the law.

“But I don’t think it will actually happen,” Big Brother Watch’s Alex Deane wrote on the privacy advocacy group’s website. “You can tax us to high heaven, you can authorise bullying policemen to push us from pillar to post – people in this country just take it. But any man who messes with the great British pet is a fool – they simply won’t manage to enforce this one.”

As for the microchips — a standard method of tracking beloved pets when the become lost — theier compulsory use has the potential to lead to bigger problems than occasional dog attacks.

“While the question of how to reduce the number of stray dogs on Britain’s streets is pressing, this solution is yet another example of the state’s desire to accrue ever more information on its citizens (and their pets),” wrote Big Brother Watch’s Dylan Sharpe. “Databases, such as the one proposed, give countless people in local authorities easy access to very personal data; which is in itself often far more dangerous than the initial problem.”

Windows Mobile 7 makes a clean break

Jac — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 15:00:55 +0000

Microsoft is making a clean break with their new Windows 7 operating system for mobile phones to such an extent that current applications will not work. Is this level of incompatibility a good thing?

Charlie Kindel who is a member of Microsoft’s Windows 7 development team says it is in order to allow the new operating system, which is due out later this year, to be as user friendly as possible.
.
“For us, the cost of going from good to great is a clean break from the past” said Kindel.

“It’s different from what we’ve done in the phone space before and it’s different from other phones” he says.

It’s an ambitious but risky move on Microsoft’s part but then again I suppose if they want to stand out from the crowd and compete on a serious level in the increasingly popular SmartPhone world they have to do something different, which they have, they started from scratch.

“Different is often good. Especially when it’s different for good reasons” said Kindel.

“Windows Phone 7 Series is different because we reset everything we were doing to focus on end user experience. This extends directly to the developer platform.”

“If you are a Silverlight or XNA developer today you’re gonna be really happy” says Kindel.

That may be so but talking about developers, current 6.5 developers will surely be wondering whether they should ditch 6.5 and start developing for Windows Mobile 7 instead.

Microsoft has said they won’t be abandoning Windows Mobile 6.5 and it will remain in their portfolio (who knows for how long) but with a shiny new operating system supposedly just around the corner Windows 6.5 might be considered just a tad outdated will it not?

Anyway, when the new operating system does arrive later this year forget about backwards compatibility there are some real treats in store for users.

Microsoft are planning to offer games that can be played across multiple devices which means you could start your game on your Xbox and then when you have to go out you could continue your game on your Windows Mobile.

Not only that but if you take your laptop with you then you could play it on that too. What we’re talking about here is one single game that can be played on three different systems, on the Xbox, on Windows and on Windows Mobile.

Now that is cool!

Shut up and talk! Technology that enables silent conversations

Jac — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 23:05:08 +0000

Sounds completely crazy but researchers at an electronics show have been demonstrating technology that will allow you to hold silent conversations on your mobile phone. Really!

The implications of it are pretty cool especially if you are like many others who are fed up of being forced to listen to other people’s mobile phone conversations when out and about.

If you’ve ever had to endure a bus, train or plane trip next to someone who is incessantly chatting on their phone you’ll know what an absolute nightmare it can be.

The idea for the new technology came when Professor Tanja Shultz of the Karsruhe Institute of Technology had to endure such a journey on public transport.

“I was taking the train and the person sitting next to me was constantly chatting and I thought ‘I need to change this’” the professor told BBC News. “We call it silent communication.”

Sounds blissful!

The technology works by measuring the electrical signals produced by our muscles when we talk, a technique known as electromyography.

The beauty of it is we don’t have to actually utter the words audibly for the technology to pick up these signals and use them to produce synthesised speech on another phone.

Basically all you have to do is silently mouth what you want to say and the person you are ‘talking’ to on the other end of the phone gets to hear your words. Ok so it’s not quite the same as hearing your voice but who cares.

A prototype of the technology was recently on display at the CeBIT electronics show in Germany and involved placing a number of electrodes on a user’s face in order to capture the signals.

These signals were then recorded, amplified, transmitted to a laptop via Bluetooth where software then ‘translated’ them into text which was then spoken by a speech synthesiser.

You just knew it wouldn’t be as simple and straightforward as lip reading didn’t you?

It’s still early days but the technology does have massive implications for the future, not just for cutting out annoying chit chat on the train but as Professor Shultz pointed out, for people who have lost their voice through illness or accidents, or for translating foreign languages.

“You could speak in your mother tongue and the text could be translated into another language” she said. “The person that you are communicating with would then hear the synthesised voice in the other language.”

Sounds great!

Londoners – your garbage may be watching you

Jayson — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 17:24:53 +0000

The British government has placed millions of microchips in garbage bins to monitor the volume of waste, leading a privacy advocacy group to say it stinks.

Most of the devices have yet to be activated — as sure sign of their inevitable unpopularity, the group Big Brother Watch says.

The Associated Press recently interviewed its director Dylan Sharpe, who said: “They are waiting for the political climate to change before they start using them” — a reference to possible fines in the future for families that throw away large amounts of trash.

Local government frames it instead as a tool to reward households that reduce waste.

The chips are plugged into the British information grid, which includes widespread closed-circuit cameras and an extensive DNA database. It’s a controversial but effective system for tracking people’s movements that proponents say is vital to counterterrorism efforts, and detractors decry as Orwellian and a “nanny state.”

Blippy brags your credit card purchases for you

Jayson — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 16:54:05 +0000

If you’ve got it, flaunt it.

That’s the philosophy behind Blippy, a Silicon Valley company that lets you automatically share your credit card purchases with the online world. It’s a lot like posting status updates or photos to Facebook, only potentially more revealing about your personal financial resources. You can even sign in using your Facebook or Twitter accounts.

The service also works with online stores like iTunes, Amazon, Netflix, StubHub and GoDaddy. If you sign up, your purchases are displayed — with product images, where applicable — in a constant stream on the Blippy.com homepage.

Blippy was the subject of a monologue recently by Comedy Central TV personality Stephen Colbert. It’s just part of a trend of information overload that has included the geo-social networking service Foursquare, which lets users “check in” and earn points as they visit various locations and was recently shown to be a potential lure for home robbery by the Dutch website PleaseRobMe.

It’s tough to imagine the few people still living off plastic wanting to share their credit card history with the world, so I see this becoming more of a way to catalog their song downloads, movie rentals and concert attendance.

What do you think? Is this too much information — or in this plugged-in world, is there even such a thing as too much information?