Sunday Tech Reading - tech
(hx) 12:16 AM CET - Nov,03 2003
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- Physical perils of gaming - A sofa, a console, and a joypad do not
really sound too dangerous. But from the frenetic manhandling of your
controller in a fighting game, to the similarly intense activity of playing a
super-fast racer,
there is a definite physical element to some gaming. Those finger tendons
and neck muscles can suffer when your game of choice involves efforts to
overtake a craft travelling at 1,400kph.
- French gamers get a helping hand - Ten years ago games cost about
$200,000 to produce,
but now they cost between $3m and $7m. "It is expensive because you
have about 24 months of production and the production team is about 20 and it
can go up to about 40 in the peak," Stephane Baudet, head of Eden Studios,
told ClickOnline. "So it requires a lot of time and a lot of people." With
budgets mounting, production money is targeted rather than spread around,
which is great if you have a proven track record as a developer and a winning
formula. It is not so good if you are a struggling independent looking to make
your mark, explains Mr Baudet.
- New switching rules may trash millions of cell phones - The new
rule that takes effect November 24 allowing users to change wireless companies
without losing their phone numbers is expected to motivate as many as 30
million people to switch within the first year. Those who do will need to buy
new phones. That's because even carriers that use the same network
technologies employ different encryption.
So what will become of all those old phones?
- World drowning in oceans of data - US researchers estimate that
every year 800MB of information is produced for every person on the
planet. Their study found that information stored on paper, film, magnetic and
optical disks has doubled since 1999.
- Sun more active than for a millennium -
The Sun is more active now than it has been for a millennium. The
realisation, which comes from a reconstruction of sunspots stretching back
1150 years, comes just as the Sun has thrown a tantrum. Over the last week,
giant plumes of have material burst out from our star's surface and streamed
into space, causing geomagnetic storms on Earth.
- Metal Heads - Scientists in Iowa have developed
a magic metal that can turn walls into speakers and remove the smell from
manure. Last August, Etrema-an innovative technology firm nestled in the
cornfields of Ames, Iowa-started selling those chrome discs for $1,500 a pair.
Called Whispering Windows, they can turn any wall, window, or drab conference
table into a speaker. When Conley lifts the discs from the table, Freddie
falls silent.
- Chinese to issue EVD standard soon as a replacement for DVD - China
could shake up the works with a technology that we have been hearing about.
Just in time for HDTV and the accompaning hardware. This non-user recordable
format is capable
of 5 times the resolution of current DVD technology. Couple that with the
fact that this proprietary item skirts the DVD royalty and you have a serious
contender in the marketplace. Not to mention China has the capability to
efficiently mass produce and distribute their own products.
- Athlon 64 Notebooks - While AMD stock is flying to the moon,
AMDboard's slaves are quietly collecting the smallest pieces of the huge
Athlon 64 jigsaw. After tons of motherboards, wonderful barebones, smart
chipsets and thousand of useful links they are now back with a compilation of
anything comestible on Athlon 64 laptops, notebooks and desktop replacements
(sorry but that's AMD official terminology). This fascinating stuff, and all
the pictures that go with, are all in one gorgeous page,
waiting for you in a the wild wild web at the following address.
- Sony NW-MS70D Digital Player Review - Spending that little bit
extra on a Sony product usually means the purchase offers a high minimum
standard of quality. This is the case for
Sony's new NW-MS70D, part of Sony's "Network Walkman" line. While it will
not take out the iPod, the NW-MS70D is certainly not just an expensive
paperweight, either.
- Klipsch GMX D-5.1 Speakers -
The
GMX D-5.1 sound system is one of Klipsch's newer creations and is unique
in the fact that it is geared towards console gaming. That's right, Klipsch
made the GMX D-5.1 with the console gaming industry- more specifically the
Xbox, PS2, and Gamecube users- in mind. They have observed the huge
advancement console gaming and decided it was time to act. They thought, why
not give users the chance to complete their gaming experience by adding 5.1
surround sound to complement the stellar graphics of these new video game
consoles.
- Gigabyte 8IPE1000 Pro 2 GT2004 - Springdale at Full Speed -
Gigabyte is the second company to bring optimization control to the desktop
board, with MSI being the first with Core Cell. We see the GT technology as a
step forward that most motherboard manufacturers will start to adopt as a
selling point to the lesser informed PC users. This is one of Gigabyte's best
value motherboards that has been released for quite some time. Overclocking
features were a mixed bag - great FSB selections and CPU voltage options were
only soured by the low DIMM voltages. Overall
Gigabyte has put out a good motherboard for its starting line in the GT
2004 family that is due to come.
- GeForceFX 5600 Ultra -
It
looks like the buys at XFX have done it again with a fantastic solution
for people looking to upgrade to the nVidia GeForceFX line of product. This
5600 Ultra card performed well against card priced $150+ more and is a sleek
and useful tool in gaming performance. This card comes highly recommended for
purchase.
- PowerVR Series 5 Is A PixelShader 3.0 VPU -
If still another proof was required that the in-development PowerVR Series
5 (Series 3 = KYRO I/II/SE, Series 4 = finished, but never hit store shelves
because of STMicro's omission as a chip manufacturer) VPU actually equals a
Pixel and Vertex Shader 3.0 capable hardware piece then PowerVR Technologies -
a division of Imagination Technologies Ltd. - has revealed that fact alone by
some new developer relations 3D demo examples.
- Will "brilinear" filtering persist? -
There is an alarming development for a while: Newer Cards and/or newer
drivers lower the image quality without being asked to do so. On a GeForce4Ti
4200 a better texture image quality (via anisotropic filtering) can be
produced with current drivers (compared to a GeForceFX 5900 Ultra). On the
other side the following is correct: The 4x-FSAA-Quality of the GeForce256 is
by default better as with GeForce3 (and also as with GeForce 5900 Ultra).
Because here stands 4x ordered grid supersampling vs. 4x ordered grid
multisampling. But here it's not called "a step back".
- Windows Xp and Longhorn Installation Differences and Guide -
Wondered how Windows XP and Windows Codename Longhorn Install? Not a lot
of people know that and are very much confused. See the installer in Windows
Codename Longhorn is not like the one in Windows XP yet similar. Windows XP
just copies the files to the hard drive and did a install where has Longhorn
copies the full backup compressed to the hard drive and then does a restore,
so basically for the installer it bypasses any pre-registry (preg) files, but
the preg files are there but then they are merged back into the backup file
and reburnt and that makes them work.
- Make Windows XP Self-Maintaining -
Fred Langa explains how to automate Windows XP tools and tasks that
normally require manual intervention.
- Behind Windows XP SP2 -
XP SP2 will also include new features that will let developers write
applications that more safely handle email attachments, and Microsoft will
release new versions of Microsoft Internet Explorer (IE), Microsoft Outlook,
Outlook Express, and Windows Messenger that take advantage of this technology.
IE will be locked down in a manner similar to, but not as restrictive as, the
IE version in Windows Server 2003. The company is also reducing XP's
susceptibility to buffer-overrun errors, which worms and viruses commonly
exploit, by adding support for new code execution features available on newer
Intel and AMD processors.
- WinXP - Wireless Update Rollup Package - This
update provides support for Wireless Protected Access, a new
standards-based wireless security solution developed by the Wi-Fi Alliance.
The following problems are resolved by this update: You Experience a Long
Delay When You Connect to a Wireless Network; An Incorrect Media Status
Appears for the Wireless Interface; User Interface Items Are Incorrectly
Translated in Other Languages, etc.
- Outlook 2003 Add-in: Video Email - Use a Web camera to easily send
and reply with a video email to your friends and family with just two clicks
on the
Video Email for Outlook 2003.
- Outlook 2003 Add-in: Personal Folders Backup - Backing up your
Microsoft Outlook information is quicker and easier with the Personal Folders
Backup feature. Personal Folders Backup creates backup copies of your .PST
files at regular intervals, in Outlook 2000 and later versions, making it easy
to keep all of your Outlook folders safely backed up. With
Personal Folders Backup, you can choose which of your .PST files you wish
to back up, and how often you wish to back them up.
- OpenMEX version 0.2 ALPHA 2 - This weekend sees the release of
the second Alpha installment
of XeNTaX' open source project OpenMultiEX (OpenMEX), version 0.2. The new
and fresh offspring of the original MultiEx Commander now increases
functionality and game resource archive (GRA) support! The total of supported
GRAs for resource extraction is now 142. The new GRAs supported are those for
: HALO (*.MAP), Lock On (*.CDDS) and Sacrifice (*.WAD). Plus, it now also
supports zip archives, for those games that use standard zip for their GRAs.
- CPUCool 7.2.9 Beta -
CPUCooL
is a program that monitors temperature, fan speed and voltages for many
motherboards. It works with all chipsets from Intel, ALI, VIA, AMD and SiS
5595 motherboards.
- PowerVR Kyro Drivers - PowerVR released a
new
generic drivers for their Kyro-1 and Kyro-2 VGA cards. Tagged as driver
2.1 (Build 2.01.21.0007) it is available for Win9x/W2K/XP and Linux. (thanks
Warp2Search)
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Updated:03:04 PM CEST Jun,20
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