Gaming 29 - The Post-Pub Podcast

Gaming 29 - The Post-Pub Podcast

Posted on 17th Jul 2011 at 08:23 by Podcast with 14 comments

Custom PC veteran Phil Hartup and PC Pro's Mike Jennings join Joe and Paul for a late-night, post-pint rant. This episode of the podcast, perhaps because it's sponsored by alcohol, stumbles along with vague coherency through topics such as BioShock Infinite and Just Cause 2.

Mass Effect 2 is obligatorily drawn into the discussion too, as is tradition.

Boozy fumes aren't enough to stop us tackling the thorny issues, however - Phil explains why he expects Battlefield 3 will be a shoddy console port, while Joe shoots down the defence that 64-player multiplayer is something to be proud of.

*hic*


On top of that, Phil brings us a report on how APB: Reloaded is faring after being brought back from the dead, while Joe orates further on his favourite topic of the moment; Frozen Synapse.

As always, we've also got our weekly competition, which this time gives you a chance to win yourself a copy of Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood on the PC and Raving Rabbids on the Nintendo 3DS. You can also find out who won the last competition and bagged themselves a Roccat Vire Gaming Headset.

As ever, the bit-tech hardware podcast features music by Brad Sucks, and was recorded on Shure microphones. You can download the podcast direct, listen in-browser or subscribe through iTunes using the links below. Also, be sure to let us know your thoughts about the discussion in the forums.

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Smashing the Cubicles

The quick expansion of social and mobile technologies is creating a widely distributed workforce. To better suit employees who come into offices more sporadically, some companies and design firms are testing radically new?and more efficient?configurations for physical offices, and betting that improved technology will make the experiment more successful than similar ones in the 1990s.

A project at the headquarters of Cisco Systems in San Jose, California, for example, overthrows decades-old conventions about office space. Called Connected Workplace, it replaces individual cubicles with open clusters of wheeled desks that belong to groups, not individuals; personal belongings are largely confined to lockers.

There are no PCs at the desks, because the employees who use the space use mobile technologies, including the Cius tablet, which Cisco recently began selling to businesses. Rick Hutley, a Cisco vice president, chooses his desk according to which colleagues are present and what's on the day's agenda. Then he docks his Cius to a port on the desk that includes a phone handset.  The tablet handles voice and video calls whether it's docked or mobile, and it can be used to share documents at meetings.

It can also be plugged into a monitor and keyboard to be used like a full PC. "You can walk around with your entire world with you in this device," Hutley says. "My laptop would often stay on my desk, but the tablet never does." If he needs to make a private voice or video call, he can step into one of the rooms at the edges of the cluster.

Employees can also participate in the company's corporate social network, Quad, which is accessible on the Web or through the iPhone, iPad, or Cius. People can post meeting requests, give status updates on projects, and quickly get in touch via instant messages, voice calls, or e-mail.

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A Guiding Light for Silicon Photonics

A new way of controlling the path that light takes as it passes through silicon could help overcome one of the big obstacles to making an optical, rather than electronic, computer circuit. Researchers at Caltech and the University of California, San Diego, have taken a step toward a device that prevents light signals from reflecting back and causing errors in optical circuits.

Chips that compute with light instead of electrons promise to be not only faster, but also less expensive and more energy-efficient than their conventional counterparts. But to be made economically, many believe, photonic chips must be made from silicon, using equipment already being used to build electronic microchips.

Researchers have made many of the necessary elements for a silicon photonic circuit already, including superfast modulators for encoding information onto beams of light, and detectors to read these beams.

But the way light travels through silicon remains a big problem. Light doesn't just go in one direction?it bounces around and even reflects backward, which is disastrous in a circuit. If an optical device were designed to receive two inputs and a third input reflected back in, that would cause an error. As a circuit became more complex, error-causing reflections would overwhelm it.

The Caltech and UCSD researchers have developed a silicon waveguide that causes light to behave differently depending on the direction it's traveling. The researchers, led by Caltech electrical engineering professor Axel Scherer, created a waveguide out of a long, narrow strip of silicon about 800 nanometers wide, with metal spots along the sides like bumpers. Light travels freely in one direction down the waveguide, but is bent as it travels in the opposite direction.

"This is an important breakthrough in a field where we really need a few," says Marin Solja?i?, a physics professor at MIT. Solja?i? was not involved with the work. The lack of this kind of component, he says, has been "the single biggest obstacle to the large-scale integration of optics at a similar scale to electronics."

Physicists have been wrestling with the unruly behavior of light in silicon for a long time. The new design is the result of years of theoretical work by the California researchers, as well as Solja?i?, Shanhui Fan at Stanford University, and others. Previously, researchers had only been able to get light to behave this way in magnetic materials that cannot be incorporated into silicon circuitry, says Michelle Povinelli, assistant professor of electrical engineering at the University of Southern California.

Solja?i? says the new waveguide is particularly significant because it was fabricated using methods used by the semiconductor industry. "This is a very important step toward large-scale optics integration," he says.

Caltech researcher Liang Feng says the team is now working on engineering a full isolator?a component that only lets light travel in one direction, instead of just bending it as it tries to travel the wrong way. He says the current work "is just the first step."

"Now it's about engineering around this fundamental discovery," says Keren Bergman, professor of electrical engineering at Columbia University. Bergman was not involved with the work.

Even after that engineering is finished, Bergman says, there's a big looming problem for silicon photonics: there's no good way to make the light sources that are needed for silicon optical processors. Solja?i? adds that a full optical computer will also need optical memory, which hasn't been made, either. However, the current work overcomes the "biggest uncertainty" that had been troubling engineers, he says. "Now, with this work, I'm feeling much better."

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Report: Eclipse the most open, Android the least open

Vision Mobile has published a new 45-page report titled "Measuring the true openness of open source projects from Android to WebKit" (PDF, via Ars Technica). In it, the company showcases eight mobile open source projects, and rates them on a scale of openness.

The group set out to researched and investigated for six months. Eclipse was found to be the highest, while Android was ranked the lowest:

The organization says it wants to help educate the industry about open source. Specifically, it found that one important aspect has been neglected: how to measure openness.

Openness goes beyond the licenses that determine the rights to use, copy, and modify code. It includes governance over the platform, which dictates the right to gain visibility, to influence, and to create derivatives (spin-offs, applications, or devices). Vision Mobile believes it is governance, not a license, which makes the difference between an open and a closed project.

The company quantified governance by introducing the Open Governance Index, a measure of open source project openness. The Index comprises thirteen metrics across the four areas of governance:

  1. Access: availability of the latest source code, developer support mechanisms, public roadmap, and transparency of decision-making.
  2. Development: the ability of developers to influence the content and direction of the project.
  3. Derivatives: the ability for developers to create and distribute derivatives of the source code in the form of spin-off projects, handsets, or applications.
  4. Community: a community structure that does not discriminate between developers.

The report goes into a lot of detail describing the Open Governance Index and the eight projects that were scrutinized. I'd like to see how the ratings will change the next time around and as the projects in question continue to grow.

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Source: http://www.techspot.com/news/44975-report-eclipse-the-most-open-android-the-least-open.html

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Nokia Siemens to cut almost 22% of jobs from Motorola purchase

Nokia Siemens Networks, a joint venture between Nokia of Finland and Siemens of Germany, has begun cutting 1,500 jobs from Motorola's wireless-network equipment division, which it acquired for $1.2 billion in July 2010. Just over a year later, one in five employees from the acquisition are being laid off: given that the group had 6,900 employees, the losses represent a whopping 21.7 percent reduction.

The cuts affect staff working in the GSM and WiMAX technology divisions in several countries including the US and Britain. The sad news was first reported by Reuters.

The original deal was meant to propel the joint venture to become the third wireless infrastructure vendor stateside and the top foreign wireless vendor in Japan. While that's still the goal, it is coming at quite a high price. Nokia Siemens has struggled for profitability amid tight spending by operators and tough competition from rivals Huawei and Ericsson.

This isn't the first time the company is making cuts. Back in November 2009, Nokia Siemens announced that it would lay off a significant portion of its global workforce: between 7 and 9 percent of its 64,000 workers at the time, for a total elimination of 4,500 to 5,700 jobs.

This development is not too surprising given that Motorola wanted to get rid of the division so badly. Furthermore, there's always redundancy and restructuring when such a large company acquires so many employees. Still, job cuts are always a sad event and our condolences go out to the families affected.

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Source: http://www.techspot.com/news/44968-nokia-siemens-to-cut-almost-22-of-jobs-from-motorola-purchase.html

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Is There Still a Need for Water-Cooling?

For me, water-cooling began out of necessity. I water-cooled my first PC nearly ten years ago, when, living in a house with a flat roof, my bedroom got incredibly hot in the summer months. I was already hooked on overclocking at the time and strove to save money by buying cheap, but very overclockable hardware. Unfortunately, the combination of the house's architecture and high system temperatures meant that my PC was intolerably noisy and unstable.

Infuriated, I made the move to water-cooling - not a particularly easy one as there were few guides and even fewer off-the-shelf components back then, which resulted in regular trips to the local DIY store to search for parts. I initially water-cooled my CPU, and my overheating and noise issues were solved instantly - my PC went from a hot, noisy box to a cool and quiet machine of wonder. I had more overclocking headroom than before too.

Every one of my main rigs since then has also seen me spend entire weekends building and leak-testing. In fact, the last three PCs I've built have had a water-cooled CPU and GPU, as well as the various hotspots on the motherboard too. However, a lot of today's hardware simply doesn't need water-cooling as urgently as its equivalent back in the day. People still want water-cooling, but it seems to be a desire that's separate from the need to actually cool the hardware.

Even as far back as the release Intel's first mainstream quad-core CPUs, such as the Core 2 Quad Q6600, air coolers were quickly becoming potent enough for newcomers to question the significant outlay involved with water-cooling. The new heatpipe-clad tower coolers were becoming more efficient at every step, and there's usually an air cooler that will enable you to push all but the hottest running CPUs to the max, albeit with additional noise.

However, with Intel's LGA1155 CPUs, we've seen time and time again that air coolers such as Thermaltake's Frio and BeQuiet Dark Rock Advanced are more than able to provide just as much overclocking headroom as a decent water-cooling kit, and with similar noise levels too. Our current LGA1155 thermal test kit is a case in question - we've overclocked our Core i7-2600K to a lofty 4.6GHz, and both the aforementioned coolers handled this overclock admirably.


Graphics cards are a slightly different matter, however, as we've found just as much reason to water-cool the current graphics cards such as the GeForce GTX 590 3GB as any previous generation. In fact, even mid-range graphics cards such as the GTX 560 Ti 1GB get quite warm and noisy under load, and many third party coolers haven't been able to tame them significantly.

Motherboards are a bit of mixed bag, though. I'd go as far as saying that I've had far fewer failures and stability issues since I've been water-cooling the motherboard in my PCs - the hot-running chipset on LGA1366 motherboards, for example, is almost certainly the reason for quite a few dead systems in our lab, as well as other problems I've read about in various forums.


However, water-cooling your motherboard is an expensive business - full cover blocks can retail for over £100, and most LGA1155 motherboards simply don't require shedloads of voltage either. With Intel and AMD's next-generation high-end CPUs on the horizon, it will be interesting to see how future families of motherboards fare on a day to day basis - will LGA2011 be another hot-running LGA1366 for example?

Aside from noise reduction, where water-cooling still has the edge in a few key areas, there is one other reason to invest in water-cooling. It looks fantastic. There's a reason why we award points to cases that look good, and why modding projects are so popular. Lots of us want to have a cool-looking PC and are willing to spend money achieving that goal. Thankfully, the water-cooling industry has taken notice and strived to meet the demand for a diverse and flexible range of hardware.

You only have to look at websites such as Aquatuning, Chilled PC and FrozenCPU to see the huge the range of components on offer these days, which makes it very easy to make a unique water-cooled PC. In addition, the huge range of gear is appealing to those who want to go one step further than just bolting a load of off-the-shelf parts together, and instead want to either mod their PC or even build it from scratch.

Even if the next generation of hardware doesn't notably benefit from water-cooling, there's always a small gap between air cooling and extreme cooling, and there will still be a huge market for it, for the simple reason that it's cool.

What do you think the future has in store for water-cooling? Have you been put off for any reason, or do you swear by it? Let us know in the forums.

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Reports of Flash's Death Have Been Greatly Exaggerated

On Monday, Adobe announced Edge, software for developing interactive content and animations using the open Web standard HTML5. Since this standard competes directly with Adobe's Flash, which can also be used to create multimedia content but requires a browser plug-in, some see this as a sign that Flash's days are numbered.

But Adobe is far from abandoning Flash, and by offering tools for developing with HTML5, it could help maintain its position in Web development. Edge also highlights some of the things that Flash can do, but HTML5 still can't.

In many ways, Edge mimics Adobe's existing development tools for Flash. It offeres the same method of editing animations as Flash development tools do, making it easier to compose and edit animations. In its current beta version, however, animation is about all Edge does, whereas Flash can be used to create interactive content, and video as well.

Ironically, Adobe's release of an HTML5 tool illustrates Flash's ease of use. HTML5's support for video and audio is still inferior to Flash's, and HTML5 is nowhere near being able to support the kind of games widely available in Flash, says Al Hilwa, director of application development software research at industry analyst IDC. "Designers are finicky, so there's going to be a subsegment of Flash developers who will hang on until HTML5 evolves until it's where Flash is today," he says.

Adobe's commitment to HTML5 has surprised many people. The company has pushed hard to promote Flash in the face of resistance, most notably from Apple, which doesn't allow Flash on either the iPhone or the iPad. Yet conversations with outside developers, and with Adobe itself, reveal a counternarrative: Adobe doesn't make money on Flash; it makes money on the tools for developing Flash content. The company has long been opportunistic about jumping to whatever platform developers favor.

"Adobe can't dictate what technology people use," says Devin Fernandez, product manager of Adobe's Web Pro group. "But we know that what we can do is optimize our tooling for whatever people want to use."

When it comes to jumping to whatever technology is hottest, "I'd say they have a great track record in that regard," says Martijn Laarman, senior developer at Dutch Web development studio Poort80. Flash began life as FutureSplash, which was created to compete with Macromedia's Shockwave plug-in. Macromedia later acquired FutureSplash, dumped Shockwave, and was itself acquired by Adobe.

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Gaming 29 - The Post-Pub Podcast

Gaming 29 - The Post-Pub Podcast

Posted on 17th Jul 2011 at 08:23 by Podcast with 14 comments

Custom PC veteran Phil Hartup and PC Pro's Mike Jennings join Joe and Paul for a late-night, post-pint rant. This episode of the podcast, perhaps because it's sponsored by alcohol, stumbles along with vague coherency through topics such as BioShock Infinite and Just Cause 2.

Mass Effect 2 is obligatorily drawn into the discussion too, as is tradition.

Boozy fumes aren't enough to stop us tackling the thorny issues, however - Phil explains why he expects Battlefield 3 will be a shoddy console port, while Joe shoots down the defence that 64-player multiplayer is something to be proud of.

*hic*


On top of that, Phil brings us a report on how APB: Reloaded is faring after being brought back from the dead, while Joe orates further on his favourite topic of the moment; Frozen Synapse.

As always, we've also got our weekly competition, which this time gives you a chance to win yourself a copy of Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood on the PC and Raving Rabbids on the Nintendo 3DS. You can also find out who won the last competition and bagged themselves a Roccat Vire Gaming Headset.

As ever, the bit-tech hardware podcast features music by Brad Sucks, and was recorded on Shure microphones. You can download the podcast direct, listen in-browser or subscribe through iTunes using the links below. Also, be sure to let us know your thoughts about the discussion in the forums.

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Tiny, Cloud-Powered Desktops

When smart phones first took off, many software companies figured people might want to view files on the small screens, but few thought anyone would use them for  creating, editing, and commenting on documents, spreadsheets, and presentations. "We were proven wrong," says Raju Vegesna of Zoho, a company that offers online office tools.

Businesses are demanding things like spreadsheet and document editing tools that work anywhere, on any device. In response, large and small companies are now providing cloud-based office productivity applications for smart phones and tablets.

It takes creativity to make them work. Web-based word processors such as Google Docs weren't naturally able to process touch-screen input. Google had to rework Docs to give the ability to edit from certain devices, such as those running recent versions of Android. Zoho is building apps for mobile devices to bridge that gap for its products, enabling those programs to interpret users' touchscreen "clicks." Meanwhile, IBM is testing software that can break up large spreadsheets into portions for different users, making them less unwieldy to update and edit on tablets.

Cloud-based office software has been around for several years, making shared editing easier because multiple users need only keep track of one file. But the cloud is even more important when people are working on mobile devices, which are switched or replaced far more often than are desk-bound PCs.

The cloud is the natural central storage site not only for the data but for the productivity applications themselves, says Rick Treitman, entrepreneur in residence at Adobe and director of product marketing for its Acrobat.com cloud-based office applications. Zoho's Vegesna notes that users expect custom apps tailored to the iPhone, the Android tablet, or whatever device they're working on.

Scott Johnston, group product manager for Google Docs and Sites, says that while the interfaces will look different on phones, tablets, and PCs, "I suspect we're going full-featured on every device." He believes that workers will eventually use tablets in place of laptops and demand productivity software that works just as well on them. Potential advances in touch-screen technology?such as ways to give users more tactile feedback?could also accelerate demand for such apps.

While Google, for example, offers primarily cloud-based apps with light offline capabilities, Microsoft recently launched a cloud-based version of its Office productivity software called Office 365, betting that users will see advantages in full-featured offline software that also allows for accessibility in the cloud. Microsoft reasons that people want more features than most cloud apps offer, and to be able to work when network access is unavailable.

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Reports of Flash's Death Have Been Greatly Exaggerated

On Monday, Adobe announced Edge, software for developing interactive content and animations using the open Web standard HTML5. Since this standard competes directly with Adobe's Flash, which can also be used to create multimedia content but requires a browser plug-in, some see this as a sign that Flash's days are numbered.

But Adobe is far from abandoning Flash, and by offering tools for developing with HTML5, it could help maintain its position in Web development. Edge also highlights some of the things that Flash can do, but HTML5 still can't.

In many ways, Edge mimics Adobe's existing development tools for Flash. It offeres the same method of editing animations as Flash development tools do, making it easier to compose and edit animations. In its current beta version, however, animation is about all Edge does, whereas Flash can be used to create interactive content, and video as well.

Ironically, Adobe's release of an HTML5 tool illustrates Flash's ease of use. HTML5's support for video and audio is still inferior to Flash's, and HTML5 is nowhere near being able to support the kind of games widely available in Flash, says Al Hilwa, director of application development software research at industry analyst IDC. "Designers are finicky, so there's going to be a subsegment of Flash developers who will hang on until HTML5 evolves until it's where Flash is today," he says.

Adobe's commitment to HTML5 has surprised many people. The company has pushed hard to promote Flash in the face of resistance, most notably from Apple, which doesn't allow Flash on either the iPhone or the iPad. Yet conversations with outside developers, and with Adobe itself, reveal a counternarrative: Adobe doesn't make money on Flash; it makes money on the tools for developing Flash content. The company has long been opportunistic about jumping to whatever platform developers favor.

"Adobe can't dictate what technology people use," says Devin Fernandez, product manager of Adobe's Web Pro group. "But we know that what we can do is optimize our tooling for whatever people want to use."

When it comes to jumping to whatever technology is hottest, "I'd say they have a great track record in that regard," says Martijn Laarman, senior developer at Dutch Web development studio Poort80. Flash began life as FutureSplash, which was created to compete with Macromedia's Shockwave plug-in. Macromedia later acquired FutureSplash, dumped Shockwave, and was itself acquired by Adobe.

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