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I could probably go back and forth all day, point by point, but in the end I think the numbers speak for themselves. XP and Win 7 trade first place back and forth on test after test and the ones that XP wins is frankly by a VERY small amount, which when you consider that honestly WinXP doesn't really DO much of anything when compared to Win 7, which has performance measuring and superfetch and a new GPU accelerated subsystem all going on at the same time that they were able to make them switch back and forth like that is pretty impressive.

As for Linux honestly i wouldn't even bring it up in discussion because if anything its like WinXP Mini or one of those other hacked all to bits OSes. Sure they have gotten pretty good on initial install but frankly do an in place upgrade or two (which you HAVE to do, because its length of support even on LTS is frankly like a bad joke) and then the thing quickly falls apart. To use a /. car analogy Linux is like that 74 Dart you have setting in the back yard. if you are willing to invest the time in learning ALL its quirks, learning to do everything the way IT wants it done, setting there with a book on 70s Dodges to learn all the things you'll be required to do to keep her going? Well then you can frankly build a nice hot rod out of it. but 99.99% of us simply don't have the time to mess with the fiddly suckers and would just prefer to just go buy something that actually runs without having to spend weeks learning the thing.

BTW just FYI but you want to know what I found the fastest OS on a Netburst Celeron, at least on a 3.06GHz Prescott Celeron that I had in the family and decided to try different things, just for shits and giggles? "Win 7 Tiny edition" which is a stripped down hacked Gamer Edition of Win 7 by the guy that has made tiny versions going back to Tiny 2K. Now TinyXP was faster to boot but once she was up and running the Tiny 7 really ran...well I can't say great as frankly NOTHING not even Linux is gonna make a Netburst Celeron a great chip, but I'd say it handled about as well as one of the newer single core Atom chips which is a hell of a lot better than it handled under default XP OR 7. Frankly I don't know who the "Tiny guy" is but MSFT should bust their asses to find him and HIRE HIM NOW because honestly I've tried every version of Windows, even WinFLP and WinEmbedded and the tiny versions royally stomped the crap out of their supposedly minimal embedded OS while having a lot better support for programs than either embedded or FLP. Whomever the guy is he really knows how to slim down a Windows OS while making it compatible with just about every app out there.

Verizon recently backpedaled on the 2.00 online bill paying fee.

The thing is, you don't want to have to re-invent the wheel for this project (models/textures/etc), and you sure as hell don't want a steep learning curve for the toolset.

Using Google Sketchup in combination with Valve's Source SDK might be a good option. You do have to purchase a game to get the SDK, but these can be had on Steam for as little as $2.49. I'm not a programmer, but I followed this comprehensive how-to, and I was able to build a decent Left4Dead map in 3-4hrs a day over the course of a week. (I built a map of our home that my nephews gleefully cleared of zombies last Halloween)

Props to you for taking on such a project. Good luck!

He wants a strong defense, not a military industrial complex. He wants to protect our borders. And who's regulating the regulators? E.g. Meredith Baker.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/a/af/Cave_troll.jpg

http://www.maximumpc.com/files/u46173/steve-ballmer.jpg

Point 1 - The premise that we are entering a "Post-PC" era requires some evidence to back the theory. TFA didn't provide anything, other than a reference to Newegg pulling out of their IPO in May 2011. And even with that statement, Kevin Purdy says, "What happened? The internal factors are unknown." That does not provide sufficient data to support his premise. Shame on you, Kevin Purdy, for your sensationalism.

Point 2 - Newegg.com sells a great deal more than just PC parts. Even if Kevin Purdy's apocalypse were to occur, Newegg has a great deal of other business to support their profits margins. Last time I checked, you can buy phones, tablets and ultrathin laptops from Newegg.com.

Point 3 - There is sufficient evidence that we are, in fact, in the midst of a PC expansion. Nvidia just made the claim that PC sales will overtake consoles by 2014, Microsoft believes in the prominence of the PC, Michael Dell comments on his predictions, Epic thinks the PC has been 2nd fiddle to the console for too long, and MaximumPC has an article showing the results of a Baird survey relevant to the issue.

Will some people buy phones, tablets and laptops (ultrathin or otherwise) instead of a PC? They have been for years, why would that change now?

Will the PC market dry up and force PC Enthusiasts into a world of non-replaceable component devices, where we will be forced to feed on the scraps of outdated machines? Doubtful. I point to the Audiophile market as a comparative case study, where you can spend an incredible amount of money on components that some might argue have been replaced by smaller and better integrated devices. I suspect the home built PC market will survive phones, tablets and ultrathin laptops, just as it survived Dell, Gateway, Micron, Acer, et al.

In 2010 Groupon lost $456M.

Let's put that money in perspective:

- That's like crashing a Bugatti Veyron nearly once per day. Almost exactly once per day if you assume they get their money for the scrap metal back.

- That's like crashing a Cessna Citation X (high-end business jet) roughly once every 18 days.

- That's roughly equal to crashing an A380, then getting another one half-built, and setting it on fire within a year.

- That's nearly 1/3rd the cost of the Burj Khalifa, except with nothing to show for it.

we have known that ivy bridge will be released in 2012 since april... http://www.maximumpc.com/files/u69/sandy_bridge-e_roadmap_updated.jpg

"Most video cards cap out at 2560x1600 per output, hard drives can be put in a RAID and solid state drives are damn fast, but the file sizes for videos at that resolution are absurd."

And 15 years ago a video card capable of 1920x1080 didn't even exist to consumers. In fact in 1996 the first consumer 3D gaming solution was released with an amazing 4 megabytes of RAM!

A good rule to follow is to never compare the hardware you're using now to what you'll be using 10 years from now. I have no doubt we'll have CPUs with hundreds of cores and SSDs (or whatever they're called by then) that are several terabytes and transfer data at gigabytes per second. Remember, largest hard drive in 2001 was 100gb for $300 which could be read at an amazing 26 megabyte/second!

Like reminiscing about old video cards? Check out the history of 3D Graphics

The problem for peripherals is not the emulator, but the host environment. Windows 7 has no gameport support at all (I've even tried replicating hacks that people did in Vista to put back gameport support, with no luck). That means the Sidewinder 3D and the Logitech Cyberman 2 (it even makes the cover of Boot magazine in 1997) are doorstops, which makes your Descent experience a little less 3D when you can't use the 3D controllers you already have.

The problem for peripherals is not the emulator, but the host environment. Windows 7 has no gameport support at all (I've even tried replicating hacks that people did in Vista to put back gameport support, with no luck). That means the Sidewinder 3D and the Logitech Cyberman 2 (it even makes the cover of Boot magazine in 1997) are doorstops, which makes your Descent experience a little less 3D when you can't use the 3D controllers you already have.

People know and understand Windows, and don't have to learn arcane command line syntax or application imcompatibility.

The GP referenced Android. It doesn't even come with a way to get to the command line much less the need to learn any syntax. Considering it has the highest smartphone market share, I'd say there are millions and millions of people that "know and understand" it. Application incompatibility? There are 200,000 applications in the Android market and many outside of it. All of the staples anyone would need on a four inch screen device that you shove in your pocket are present and accounted for. And if it isn't? Well, that's just pure opportunity.

Try Maximum PC's Best of the Best list. Sometimes it's a little out of date, but it's my first stop when I'm overhauling my gaming PC.

Please show me the drive that can take 100MB/s 100% of the time

http://www.maximumpc.com/article/reviews/seagate_barracuda_720012_1tb

It must also last years unpowered and be rated for such use. Max cost should be $30, the cost of an LTO4 tape.

You are confusing archives with backups and the cost difference is insignificant. Furthermore, the ease of use reduces the cost to less than that of using tapes (unless your time is free?)
While there may be theoretical advantages to tapes, in practice, in a small company envorinment, hard drives work much better. Also, with a hard drive, I can have 10 or more backups of 1TB of data on a 1.5TB hard drive, through the magic of rsync and "cp -al ". Try doing that with tapes! Yes, you can do incremental backups with tape, but they rely usually rely on the files' datestamps, and require multiple tapes, increasing the probability of (undetected) failure.
Hard Drives are a pragmatic and effective solution to backups for many small companies.

• Microsoft sues TomTom over Linux and other patent claims
• Aiming at Android, Microsoft sues Motorola
• Microsoft sues Salesforce.com for alleged patent infringement

That's before we get to the actions of the major Microsoft shareholders e.g: Microsoft Co-Founder Launches Patent War "

And finally of course ; Microsoft's apparent involvement in many proxy actions.

• Microsoft Proxy Fights Against Google in the United States
• Microsoft Proxy Attack on GNU/Linux Continues With TurboHercules
• Google Accuses Microsoft of Proxy Legal War
• Also suggestions of MS involvement in the SCO lawsuit

Under previous management MS may not have been lawsuit happy. Nowadays they pretty clearly are.

More recent ones have anti-tamper (Droid X) or auto-reflash (G2), making it a pain to root.

I honestly think Google is very disingenuous to say Android is open when many currently-selling actual devices are locked tighter than the iPhone.

Perhaps Google is just happy that Android is "open to the carriers".

You want a sure bet for an open system, go with the N900.

It's unethical if you look at it from a disclosure standpoint.

http://www.maximumpc.com/files/u46173/best-buy-firmware_thumb.jpg

That's the pitch. Broken down it says "Our $30 service will make lots of improvements to your PS3."

What it doesn't tell you is that those improvements will be made anyway, the first time you hook the PS3 up to the network.

It's like charging someone for making the sun set at night. It's going to happen whether you pay me for it or not, so if I imply that you have to pay me to make it happen, it's unethical.

And then when you add in Best Buy's usual practice of being magically "out of stock" of the non-altered PS3's, it's doubly unethical because they're advertising PS3's at one price and then trying to force you to pay $30 more once you get to the store.

So Easy a Caveman can do it.
Well as long as he can read.

I run Windows 7 on my my new Revo box 64-bit 2core, 4GB, Nvidia, 500GB Hard Drive. Runs so slow. I spent £300 on it because of lies like yours.

Alrighty. I run Windows 7 on my old Dell Inspiron 1520 with 64 bit dual core, 4GB (aftermarket), Nvidia and 120GB Hard Drive. Bought it in Feb 08 with XP on it. This was during the reign of Vista and this was the only laptop Dell still sold with XP on it.

Got hit by a virus (damn AVG Free did not protect me; even though I scanned the suspect file thoroughly before trying to use it. Switched to Avira, we'll see how that does ;D) and had to re-install. I had already tried Win7 during RC and decided it is marginally better than XP, just not better enough to switch unless you're rolling a new OS anyway.. and now I was. So I switched from 32 bit XP to 64 bit 7.

Now it seems to run every bit as fast as XP did, with Aero turned on. It eats more RAM (900MB used at startup instead of 350MB, overhead appears constant after days of uptime) and this is after applying most of Black Viper's recommended service tweaks to both OSen. I find win+tab is handy when you've got a ton of browser windows open (each with tabs; I generally run one window per distinct project) and want to quickly get to one which is visually distinct.

so tuppe, does my counter-example anecdote mean that you're the liar now? Or perhaps we should yeild the predictive power of all of our personal one-off experiences in favor of actual research?

ZDnet's benchmarks maintain that Windows 7 is faster than XP for standard use, although XP remains more capable for devices with limited memory and outdated graphics.

Maximum PC's benchmarks claim that Win7 simply feels faster than XP on the hardware they tested.

Tom's Hardware's netbook benchmarks show that Windows 7 does not beat XP on the netbook but that it is quite responsive, and would probably surpass XP with better driver support.

TechRadar's benchmark includes many plusses and minuses for Windows 7 with a net plus, but clearly states that it provides "better performance than XP can deliver on today's hardware."

I'm not picking up on any benchmarks that have the same trouble you've had, so unfortunately I have no way to confirm you did not just misconfigure your machine.

If you're talking about virtualisation on Windows 7, it comes with a free license for XP

"Free"? The last time I checked, most PCs sold at big-box stores came with Windows 7 Home Premium, and the upgrade to Windows 7 Professional to unlock XP Mode costs $89.95 plus sales tax. Besides: No. XP Mode does not support 3D graphics APIs such as DirectX.

You mean an RPG game like this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n94E3IeBquY

And a cheap DIY Surface like this: http://www.maximumpc.com/article/features/maximum_pc_builds_a_multitouch_surface_computer?page=0,0

-Rick

Build one yourself for a small fraction of the price. It's been done.

Or go the commercial route. Who needs micros~1?

http://www.maximumpc.com/article/news/breakthrough_nand_flash_memory_could_lead_10gbs_ssd_writes We have had a breakthrough in solving the voltage problem. I think the authoer is nothing but idiotic to believe that SSD isn't going to replace hdds for the average consumer. Later this year intel is going to release its G3 SSDs, with the lArgest at 600GB. G2 drives were 60% cheaper than G1 drives. Let's hope we see a similar drop.

http://www.maximumpc.com/article/news/atts_first_android_phone_doesnt_allow_nonmarket_apps
http://www.intomobile.com/2010/06/05/sprint-htc-evo-4g-ota-update-here-to-save-your-sd-card-issues-and-kill-your-root-acces/

So.... uh... "black!"

Motorola had the first QWERTY data phone.. the Motorola DynaTAC 8000X.

QWERTY?Where?
No mention of QWERTY on the wiki page either.
And where do you see data capabilities?

Nokia was next with their Mobira Senator.

Also not QWERTY

Then IBM had the personal communicator.

Bingo, looks like you got one right. (even though it cost $900)

I had the first real smartphone the QCP6035 from kyerocera. It predated the first blackberry by 2 years.

The Nokia 9000 beat you to it (1996 vs 2001).
RIM had their Inter@ctive Pager in 1995, even though it didn't have a phone.
They added a phone with the Blackberry 5810 in 2002 (only a year after your Kyocera).

Why all the RIM hate? Did a Blackberry kill your dog or something?

I agree, except you have one thing backward. It's not that big business isn't a market they want. On the contrary, they've made many attempts to penetrate this market. Why even bother to have a rack mount server if you don't care about business customers? Or sophisticated internet technologies?

It's the other way around. Apple tries to sell to big business, but they pretty thoroughly suck at it. So a sort of economic Darwinism guarantees that the only Apple products that succeed are ones that sell well to individuals and small organizations. In other words, the person who uses the product is either the same person who makes the purchase decision, or has a lot of direct influence over that person.

That tends to slant their product line towards kewlness. But not always. Apple's first really successful product was the Apple ][. Note that this is not a proto-Mac, it's a proto-PC. Note the open bus, which encouraged the creation of third-party hardware extensions. This is the basic design paradigm that almost all desktop computers (and a lot of servers) follow to this very day. It's a good utilitarian system, like something from Dell, not a sleek, sexy proto-iMac.

Geeks know the ][ because it was a great hacking platform. But geeks didn't drive its success, business did. When business people discovered that they could pop in a Z80 card, run Visicalc, and do really sophisticated financial projections without hiring a programmer, they had to have them. It pretty much created the business PC market.

But if the ][ created the market, why didn't it create the market lock-in that the IBM PC did a little later? Because the biggest consumer of computing is big business, and Apple simply didn't know how to sell to them. I don't mean bad salesmanship, I mean they literally didn't have the ability to integrate and distribute them in the quantities large business would have needed. So Fortune 500 companies would go to Apple and say, "please sell us 1,000 Apple ][s with Z80 cards, disk drives, and monitors" and Apple would simply have no way of filling the order. All they knew how to do was to ship out job lots to their wholesalers, none of whom were set up to integrate systems this way.

Apple did develop better business-oriented sales channels eventually, but their ability to create stuff that businesses want is still pretty limited.

MPC: So, you said Rage is a 60Hz game. Is it an OpenGL or DirectX game?

JC: It’s still OpenGL, although we obviously use a D3D-ish API [on the Xbox 360], and CG on the PS3. It’s interesting how little of the technology cares what API you’re using and what generation of the technology you’re on. You’ve got a small handful of files that care about what API they’re on, and millions of lines of code that are agnostic to the platform that they’re on.

Sounds like it's not that much of an issue. As I recall the reason for using OGL 2 rather than 3 is card support not how much work it would make for him.

Not at all. You can still get these for free.

You may be thinking of changing the CPUID on Via chips to GenuineIntel vs AuthenticAMD vs CentaurHauls.

There's one of the 'big' benchmark suites where the chip's score is roughly the same on AuthenticAMD and CentaurHauls, but gets a boost on GenuineIntel. Via's chips are the only ones with (user) changeable cpuid, so we don't know how differently IDed AMD or Intel do, but still interesting.

(First google'd link talking about it.)
http://www.maximumpc.com/article/news/pcmark_memory_benchmark_favors_genuineintel_over_authenticamd

Still seams that very few computers are faster with Vista than XP. So sure Vista is now OK, if you can't get XP drivers, but for anything but gaming, XP still comes out faster.
In our tests, Windows 7 was a few percent slower than XP SP3, but faster than Vista SP2.
So on high end 64 bit hardware, 64 bit version of Vista is slower than the X86 version of XP. So it still seams very clear, anything less than a multicore 64 bit machine, forget about Vista, if you can.

Also with Vista being released in Dec 2006, but networking performance was not good until SP1, in February 2008. Even then SP1 still didn't fix network performance for VISTA to XP/2000, or over wireless. I know I finally gave up on Vista, 2 months past SP1. I still couldn't stream HD videos from a XP box over 100mB Ethernet link on a core duo laptop, that same video had no problems over a 11 mB wiFi link to that same network using a 800Mhz atom w/linux (of course no issue same laptop running XP, Vista had released drivers, XP didn't).
So vista deserves it's reputation for taking over a year to be usable on networks.

according to several major computer publishers the '09 version of Norton did a lot better than all other antivirus software according to MaximumPC.com http://www.maximumpc.com/article/features/protect_your_pc_from_guys_like_this

and PCWorld.com
http://www.pcworld.com/reviews/product/44052/review/internet_security_2009.html

Not that either are like security mags I'm an MPC fanboy, so take this as you will.

Unlike Seagate, Intel still has a R&D department :)
http://www.maximumpc.com/article/news/seagate_suffers_setback_ssd_development

I am sure we had a story like this the other week. I am pretty sure we have it every couple of weeks.

Yeah, but the last article I remember was $500. So this is new news because they're spending $300 more and not promising to run crysis. In the summary anyway. Oh, it's overclocked too.

Am I missing a joke or is it an error that the description of the GeForce FX 5800 features the image of a vacuum cleaner? I mean... not that a vacuum cleaner with 15 million transistors is not impressive...

It's a joke, yes. It was REALLY loud

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eYWaUJakMfg

Am I missing a joke or is it an error that the description of the GeForce FX 5800 features the image of a vacuum cleaner? I mean... not that a vacuum cleaner with 15 million transistors is not impressive...

It was REALLY loud

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eYWaUJakMfg

Am I missing a joke or is it an error that the description of the GeForce FX 5800 features the image of a vacuum cleaner? I mean... not that a vacuum cleaner with 15 million transistors is not impressive...

Im as "oh, they big companies are screwing the consumer" as anyone else, but thats hardly Rick-rolling in million dollar notes there! http://www.maximumpc.com/article/news/rickroll_songwriter_only_made_16_youtube

CAVE-type displays (you're surrounded by rear-projected screens) have been around since 1992. Mechdyne (which bought FakeSpace) makes a number of variations on this theme. Their standard CURV display can be purchased in sizes up to a full hemisphere. A full sphere would be a custom order.

The new California Academy of Sciences building has a "planetarium" which is really a 75 foot dome equipped for full digital projection over slightly more than a hemisphere. There's a writeup in Maximum PC.

They aren't the same card, but the 9800GT is only different from the 8800GT in adding triple SLI support. Some later 9800GTs are a die shrink but the original card was not. And I said GT250, not 260. The 250 is a rebranded 9800GTX+, although I thought it was a 9800GT. See http://www.maximumpc.com/article/news/nvidia_geforce_250_rebranding_complete and http://www.hexus.net/content/item.php?item=14656&page=2

My only beef with this article is that in their final comparison chart as well as in their write up, they act like firefox doesn't have a privacy mode, so to speak. Since you can always clear it manually with tools>clear priate data now, or by setting it to do so automatically under edit>preferences>privacy>always clear my private data when I close firefox, I would argue that it does indeed have a privacy mode, even though it's not explicitly called that.

Single page version

"For those who hate ads"

http://www.maximumpc.com/print/5491

So many engines ...

Or so many pages, so little time, so here is link to the "print" page -- one page with all the text and pictures and no ads.

PS. Mods, if you are tempted to downmod this post as redundant because there is a similar post above mine in your listing, please check times of posting first.

IBM may have invented the first floppies, but the 3.5 version was Sony's. Here's a link about the history of storage from another thread:
http://www.maximumpc.com/article/news/computer_data_storage_through_ages?page=0%2C1

Since Digital8 was simply recording digital video to a High 8 cassette, I'd say it made Sony plenty of money too. I've known quite a few people that bought them, and some are still in use to this day.

Memory Stick is debatable as to it's success. Granted no one but Sony uses it, but they sure have sold a lot of their own products that do use it. I see it at every retailer beside the other formats and there is a Memory Stick slot on every "universal" card reader that I've seen.

MiniDisc got killed in the consumer market due to bad timing and Apple out-marketing them by figuring out a way to make a MP3 player cool and easy to use for the average person. However it is still alive an well in broadcast radio. Again, making Sony more that enough money to justify it's existence.

I do agree with you about the engineering and build quality and have bought many of there products over the years. Their ES line of audio equipment is excellent IMO. I also stay away from their products that require proprietary formats though.

For those who don't want to go through several pages of ads, is here.

And here I'd already used a combination of EditCSS and Repagination to do it for myself when I could have just used the Print link.

I've never shopped for one and didn't know what the maximum size was. I just ran through a maximumpc article that compared different storage media and quoted their maximum storage capabilities. If you're interested, my source can be viewed here. (Or on a single page here.)

I've never shopped for one and didn't know what the maximum size was. I just ran through a maximumpc article that compared different storage media and quoted their maximum storage capabilities. If you're interested, my source can be viewed here. (Or on a single page here.)

For those who don't want to go through several pages of ads, is here.

available here

• Subscription based models like MMOs
• Sell a different service
• Trust that pirates will still buy your game
• Move entirely to consoles
• Move to arcades only
• Tie your games to hardware
• Ask fans for donations
• Offer tiers for pricing giving away more scarce goods
• Offer incentives to buy

However, what you are really asking is for someone who is complaining to do the job of the business department of the video game companies. It is their job to figure out how to make money, not the legal departments, not their customers. It wouldn't matter if piracy were never an issue, sitting around hoping that the previous generation's business model will work for you is the most certain way to be a dying company.

I would suggest that any game company that resorts to DRM really needs to fire their business people. It fails miserably in its intended purpose, pisses off paying customers, and costs more money (thus less profit) to implement. It is an abject failure, yet some brain dead idiots think they'll get it right "this time."