Hardware 16 - The RAM Raiders
Posted on 9th Dec 2010 at 14:19 by Podcast with 29 comments
Posted on 9th Dec 2010 at 14:19 by Podcast with 29 comments
Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/bit-tech/blog/~3/z6JCfUyYq-s/
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Posted on 1st Dec 2010 at 13:36 by Podcast with 5 comments
As you may have guessed from the title, we use this podcast as an opportunity to look back at our favourite games of the year. You can tell us your favourite titles of 2010 in our official, reader-voted awards - but this is where we give our personal opinions!
So, what are our favourites? Well, Joe and Harry wax hyperbolic about Mass Effect 2 while Paul highlights Neptune's Pride as his game of the year. Meanwhile, Chris spends his time explaining why Gran Turismo 5 wouldn't be his game of choice.
We also announce the winner of last episode's competition to send in an amusing screenshot and announce a new competition along the same lines. As you can see from the winning screenshot above, it doesn't take much to make us chuckle here in the bit-tech offices, so get your entries in to podcast@custompc.co.uk for your chance to win a bag of swag.
While you're at it you could drop us a gaming or hardware related question. We're going to make much more of an effort to answer the steady stream of queries that make their way into the podcast@custompc.co.uk in-box in future episodes.
The bit-tech games 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 - be sure to let us know your thoughts in the forums.
Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/bit-tech/blog/~3/XR5Aoys5tm4/
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Posted on 11th Dec 2010 at 12:24 by Joe Martin with 3 comments
Virtua School is a text-based game which casts you as a kid starting his first day of school, forced to deal with the usual array of problems ? girls, bullies, exams and extra-curricular activities. Using multiple choice options you weave your way through these scenarios, with a single playthrough lasting around ten minutes.
What I like most about Virtua School though is the random events which are woven into each game to help make things a bit different. The changes range from big things, like bomb scares or after-school parties, to smaller alterations, like characters changing their opinions or reactions. Popular girl Liz might like you one day and hate you another.
Virtua School isn?t a revolutionarily complex game, nor is it particularly unique in any identifiable way. It?s just something simple, done really well ? and I?ve always had a soft-spot for things like that. It?s why I like beans on toast so much; it may just be beans on toast, but I cook it really well.
Virtua School was so popular when it was first released that the creators, Dana Lodico and Josh Noe, even planned on making a sequel. Unfortunately, nine years after that fact the official website still hasn?t been updated ? so it?s probably off the cards. Still, at least the original still holds up well.
Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/bit-tech/blog/~3/8zgx91gSV-Q/
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Kenneth T. Cuccinelli II, Virginia?s attorney general, is quick to cite the legal basis for challenging President Obama?s signature legislative achievement: Congress has no power to punish people who choose not to buy private health insurance, he says.
A federal judge on Monday agreed with him, ruling that parts of the health care reforms Mr. Obama championed violate the Constitution. Mr. Cuccinelli sued the federal government on behalf of Virginia.
?On the issues the Tea Party cares about, I land right in their bulls eye.?
?I wouldn?t have brought a case like this if it didn?t have legal merit,? he said in an interview with The Caucus. He added that he had turned away plenty of activists urging him to sue the federal government in other areas. ?My answer is usually, ?no.? I don?t get to sue just because I don?t like something.?
But it doesn?t take long for Mr. Cuccinelli to acknowledge that his motivations are not purely legal. The onetime state senator is a conservative Republican who has long sought to shrink government, limit federal powers and trumpet state rights.
His quick rise to power in Virginia, where he became the state?s top lawyer in 2009, has given Mr. Cuccinelli a state ? and even a national ? platform from which to argue those views. And just as he was in the state legislature, Mr. Cuccinelli is blunt, outspoken and supremely confident about his positions.
?I start with a concern about the growth of federal government,? Mr. Cuccinelli said in the interview. ?I start with a perspective concerned about the growth of that power, and containing it within the bounds of the Constitution.?
A virtual unknown outside of Virginia, Mr. Cuccinelli is beginning to get noticed as he takes on the health care battle. He has begun appearing on national talk shows, and he is fund-raising well beyond the borders of his state. Within hours of the judge?s decision on Monday, his political Web site was advertising on the conservative drudgereport.com and other Web sites.
?Help us fight off the liberal attacks as we work to defend the Constitution,? says a page on his fund-raising Web site. In a video message on the site, Mr. Cuccinelli says: ?It?s the 21st century version of the ?shot heard ?round the world.? Of course, that doesn?t mean we?ve won the war. And the liberal left will be on the attack. Will you help me fight their offensive today??
That has given rise to speculation that Mr. Cuccinelli has ambitions for higher office. (He has said he will not run for the Senate in 2012 and will likely run for re-election in 2013. But he told The Caucus on Monday that ?I haven?t ruled out other options. Any of that is a long way off.?)
For now, Mr. Cuccinelli ? known in a not-so-affectionate way in Virginia as ?cooch? ? is concentrating on winning the biggest of legal cases against the biggest of adversaries: the president of the United States.
The federal government?s power, he said, is veering out of control. In addition to the health care lawsuit, Mr. Cuccinelli?s office has sued the Environmental Protection Agency. And Mr. Cuccinelli supports a proposal to change the federal Constitution to give states the power to override federal laws in some cases.
?When I ran in 2009, I talked rather bluntly, as I do, about what I perceived to be the imbalance between the power of the federal and state governments,? he said. ?We have a battle over the fundamentals of our country. How much power are we going to give this federal government??
The bottom line, he said: ?It?s about liberty and it?s about protecting the Constitution.?
If he sounds like a Tea Party activist, he says it?s no surprise, though the Tea Party didn?t exist when Mr. Cuccinelli, who is from the Virginia suburbs outside of Washington, was running for office.
?On the issues the Tea Party cares about, I land right in their bull?s-eye,? Mr. Cuccinelli says. But he quickly adds: ?I was doing that long before there was a Tea Party. I?m glad they are there, and I?m glad they are independent. It would be a mistake to become part of the Republican Party.?
Mr. Cuccinelli says he is ?very encouraged? by the judge?s ruling Monday, though he says he recognizes the case has a long way to go.
?The reality is that this is really just round one,? he said. ?I don?t mind losing everything except the last one. After taking an awful lot of spears and arrows about what a bunch of morons we were to even think of bringing this, there is a certain degree of validation to prevailing at this stage.?
There?s also a bit of validation just in his presence in the attorney general?s office.
As a state senator, Mr. Cuccinelli endured years of political cold shoulders from the moderate Republicans who were then in charge of the Virginia Senate. On Monday night, he referred to an e-mail from one of those leaders saying that Virginians owe Mr. Cuccinelli a ?debt of gratitude? for his health care crusade.
?For me, it was more, persevere in the face of this,? he said, recalling his time in the legislature. Asked who sent the message, he said: ?That?s not what I want to do. I?m glad they are in the right place. I?m glad they are on the right side.?
?It?s the political version of no one is beyond redemption.?
Source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=9af9e77bf27ee5fcd51bbcc76306a5de
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In fact, Microsoft has been regularly promising that more slates and tablets in various form factors were coming in 2011. OEMs have already announced plans, or have watched their plans leak, regarding touch devices running Windows: Acer, Asus, Toshiba, among others (Samsung and Dell come to mind), are all on board. The article does, however, get interesting at the very end:
A person who works at Microsoft said the company was encouraging partners to build applications for these devices that use HTML5, the Web programming language. This person said the applications would not be sold in an app store, as with the Apple iTunes model, but Microsoft will encourage software partners to host the applications on their own Web sites, which will then be highlighted in a search interface on the slate computers. It is unclear if these applications will be ready for C.E.S. as most are still in production. Another person with knowledge of Microsoft's plans said Steve Ballmer might demonstrate a tablet and other companion devices running the next operating system, Windows 8.
There's a few things that are contradicting in this piece of information. While the App Store part is hard to deny, even with leaks regarding an app store for Windows, the Windows 8 part is definitely fishy. We would have definitely heard something sooner if Windows 8 was ready to be showed off in one form or another.
Less than two months ago, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer was asked about the riskiest product bet that the software giant is currently developing, and he answered "the next release of Windows" without so much as a second of hesitation. There have been many leaks related to Windows 8 before and after this quote, but the fact remains that Windows 8 isn't slated to arrive until 2012.
We seriously doubt Ballmer would be able to strut on stage next month and show off Windows 8 running on a tablet. He could, however, show off some touch improvements for Windows 7 and emphasize that they're a glimpse of what's to come in Windows 8. Beyond something like that, don't hold your breath if you want to see Windows 8 next month.
Source: http://www.techspot.com/news/41574-rumor-microsoft-to-show-off-windows-8-at-ces-2011.html
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According to a statement given to Reuters, Nokia said it concluded negotiations with employee representatives on the latest planned reductions. The company will offer severance packages worth five to 15 months of regular salary but hopes some of the employees affected will be relocated elsewhere in the company.
The news follows soon after Nokia announced 1,800 job cuts worldwide in October 2010, most of which were largely related to Symbian. It appears that the 800 number is part of the bigger employee reduction announced two moths ago, and thus is not cumulative. The company has been cutting jobs left and right for almost two years now.
"The cuts are a part of the plan to increase our competitiveness we are simplifying our product creation, expanding the use of common tools and streamlining software development, among other things," a Nokia spokesperson said in a statement. "According to the labor legislation in Finland, we started the negotiations about the planned reductions in October with personnel representatives, and now those negotiations have been concluded that is the news item in this case. The max impact in Finland is 800 (as opposed to the 850 we originally announced), and we are offering people affected voluntary severance packages and will try to redeploy people into other positions as much as possible. We will only know how many reductions there will be after the process has been completed, and this takes some time. So the actual layoffs is likely to be much smaller than the 800, as we believe many people will choose the voluntary package and we also hope to be able to find new positions to a part of the affected group."
To make matters worse for the company, Nokia is also delaying yet another smartphone. This time, it's the Symbian-based E7 that is being postponed until early next year. "To ensure the best possible user experience on the E7 we have decided to begin shipping in early 2011," a Nokia spokesperson said in a statement.
The E7 is similar to the Nokia N8, but features a full slideout keyboard and is intended to appeal to earlier users of Nokia's Communicator line and Qwerty-keyboard phones. It was introduced at the Nokia World trade show on September 14 at a list price of 495 ($663) before taxes and operator subsidies.
Source: http://www.techspot.com/news/41573-nokia-cutting-about-800-jobs-in-finland-delays-e7-until-2011.html
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Posted on 6th Dec 2010 at 12:36 by Paul Goodhead with 58 comments
Obviously the fact that we're testing these CPUs must mean we've got some compatible motherboards in the labs too, so you can also expect a veritable bevy of motherboard reviews at launch too.
It?s also our first chance to take a look at the EFI BIOSes that are being introduced with all Sandy Bridge motherboards. What we?ve seen so far is interesting - it looks like EFI BIOS design will become a major area that motherboard manufacturers can differentiate themselves in. We?ve got no doubt EFI BIOSes will improve with time but we?ve been pretty impressed with what we?ve seen so far.
Are you in the market for an upgrade in the New Year and looking forward to seeing what Sandy Bridge can offer? Let us know your thoughts in the forums.
Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/bit-tech/blog/~3/lyVIM6woPvI/
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EBay seller C. Jepsen has quite the sense of humor. With a 100% positive feedback report, it?s safe to assume he?s never disappointed a customer before.

He writes that ?3g and WiFi may be used on any page, you just need to define them first.?

If you want to apply to get a REAL Google CR-48 Notebook, read here.
Source: http://thenextweb.com/shareables/2010/12/14/google-cr-48-notebook-cr48-for-sale-on-ebay/
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Last week, I joined Diaspora.
Not the Diaspora?I didn't convert to Judaism or emigrate anywhere. Instead, I accepted a coveted (by geeks) invitation to sign up for Diaspora, a decentralized, privacy-focused social network created by four New York University undergrads in response to what has been seen as Facebook's focus on profits at the expense of users' privacy.
The foursome officially announced the project on April 24; they released an open-source developer version of the code in mid-September, and invitations to the website's private alpha (the first phase of testing) began going out on November 23. Though Diaspora is a little buggy, a little underpopulated (I have two contacts, compared with hundreds on other sites), and a little Spartan in the way of features, it is already different in interesting ways from the sites that came before.
Facebook is like a casino: garish, crowded, distracting, designed to lure you in and keep you there far longer than you ever intended. (The same is true of its predecessor, MySpace.) Status updates?not only by actual friends and acquaintances but also from companies, news outlets, celebrities, sports teams?jockey for space with videos, ads, games, chat windows, event calendars, and come-ons to find more people, make more connections, share more data.
Diaspora is more like the calm, minimal workspace of a Zen devotee. Unlike Facebook and its competitors, Diaspora makes it easy to separate your social spheres. Your home page displays your status updates and those of your online friends, along with lists of your contacts and the categories, called "aspects," into which you've sorted them. The default aspects are work and family, but adding new aspects is as easy as opening a new tab in a Web browser. You can craft a status update to share across all aspects, with only one, or with a few, and it's very clear on every page which information has gone out to which groups.
This simplicity and clarity have been key design objectives for the Diaspora team from the start. In a blog update posted during development over the summer, they remarked on "spending a good chunk of time concentrating on building clear, contextual sharing. That means an intuitive way for users to decide, and not notice deciding, what content goes to their coworkers and what goes to their drinking buddies." The investment shows, and it's a huge contrast to the complicated and hidden privacy controls in Facebook.
Another difference is the ease of sharing?or not?your Diaspora content with Facebook and Twitter. Rather than making such connections difficult to find and use, the site makes it easy to connect to other services, and it offers the option of sharing any public upload via Facebook, Twitter, or RSS, simply by clicking a box. In the long run, says cofounder Maxwell Salzberg, Diaspora should be service-agnostic and able to import and export data from any Web service, in nearly any format. The goal isn't to replace Facebook or any other service as a way to interact online but to eliminate the need to store private data on multiple websites, many of which seem geared to an all-or-nothing sharing of personal information.
The "like" button is nowhere to be seen on Diaspora. You comment on a post, or don't. I'm curious to see how this will affect my online interactions. I confess that I am frequently guilty of "liking" friends' Facebook updates; it's much easier than taking the time to comment and interact with someone on even Facebook's typically perfunctory level. Diaspora is also less intrusive: rather than sending you an e-mail by default every time someone comments on your status or on a friend's status that you've commented on, you see content only when you log in. This does make it easier to lose track of online "conversations"?but wow, what a relief to my always-overcrowded inbox.
Source: http://feeds.technologyreview.com/click.phdo?i=9363e33ac3a951675bfa038a8d4689e7
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Microsoft PR almost hit a home run today, but they made their graph too hard to read. You see, the Microsoft teams around the world are touting a new browser security study that clearly shows that Internet Explorer 8 and 9 are the top browsers in the world for blocking consumer malware.
While that is perhaps surprising in and of itself, look at the chart below from the study which shows the percent of malware that each browser blocks, and tell me if you can spot just what looks wrong. It may take a second.
Yes, it is clear that Internet Explorer 8 and 9 are very good at ?protect[ing] users against malware attacks,? but you may have pulled a double take when looking at the browser versions that were listed. We did, and so we chased down the study and looked into how it was executed.
On first blush the chart looks ridiculous. Opera 10? It had better not be 10.0 and so forth, that would be as out of date as a Model T. These were the tested browsers:
Chrome 6? Really? Chrome 8 is the current average user version, and Chrome 9 is just around the corner. Chrome 6 is quite a ways back from that, as you can imagine. To compare such an out of date browser is just unfair, and a bit ridiculous. If you want to pick on the competition, pick on their current version.
The other browsers seem to be more or less up to date, although we would have loved to see the Firefox 4 beta included in the test.
What do we make of all this? It seems completely plain that Microsoft is scrambling to save whatever may be left of Internet Explorer?s good name, so that when IE9 does finally come out, they can push it and not blush. The IE team has been working around the clock on its 9th version, and it is worlds improved, but it needs to be proven better, and this study is a step in that direction.
Microsoft sent us this quote, which should summarize exactly what the company is thinking:
Jason Miller of Shavlik Technologies, a global leader in simplifying the complexity of IT management, notes that with the recent NSS findings, ?Microsoft is showing, with their current browser technologies, that security for end user browsing is important to them.?
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