Friday, March 27, 2009

The new CryEngine 3

Crytek showcases their new engine, CryEngine 3 which at first glance looks very similar if not identical to the old engine. Overall, it is the same thing with maybe a few updates in physics and such, but that is not the main idea behind it. Its basis lies in the fact that it can now be used in most consoles such as the Xbox 360, Playstation 3 and of course the PC. It also has scalable computation and graphics so that all major upcoming platforms can utilize it as well.

Here is a video showcasing the new engine:

Windows 7 Release Candidate May Release


The Windows 7 beta is indeed getting quite old now and even Microsoft did a good job at keeping people interested in this release for quite some time but the numerous changes announced on the Engineering 7 blog got people quite hungry for the next Win7 release; more precisely, the first RC. Now thanks to some good lad at Microsoft, we were able to get a leaked date a few days back and it sounds quite promising. After a fortunate slip-up on Microsoft's side when the RC download page accidentaly appereade on Microsoft's TechNet webpage, we were able to get enough information on the RC to give us an idea of where this is all going. Planned to be released sometime in May and to run until it's expiration in June 2010, this new release on Windows 7 will have an unlimited number of keys given out in order to avoid what happened during the last release when the servers fell under the pressure.
Both 32 and 64 bit versions will be available and you can be sure that we will grab one and review it for you revealing all the changes and possibly make it easier for you to decide if it's worth wasting your bandwith and time or not.

Intel to ship it's new Core i7 in early April


Intel's new Bloomfield 975 processor seems to be coming to the market sooner than we had expected. Various websites such as this one seem to already have the new processor listed. Although quite unofficial yet, these dates are a leap considering this model was not supposed to come out until the end of May. Nonetheless, this new chip from Intel showed some big improvements from its predecessors as the leaked version was able to go up to an amazing 5,239MHz. Costing around $999USD and featuring 3.33GHz, support for LGA 1366 sockets, 1MB of L2 cache and 8MB of L3 cache and a whopping TDP of 130W, it will soon be the new extreme for hardcore gamers and power users.
Another chip Intel will be releasing shortly is the Core i7 950 which will be clocked at 3.06GHz and will replace the 940 for a more decent price of $562USD. Check back regularly for more news on these processor's releases.

Sunday, March 22, 2009

AT&T to sell contract-free Iphones for soaring prices


Previous rumours have been confirmed by AT&T as they announced that starting Thursday, March26th, they will begin selling contract-free Iphone 3Gs. Sounds good right? Wait until you hear the rest. In order to buy one of these units, you will have to already be an AT&T customer and have $599 to throw out for the 8GB model and $699 for the 16GB one. When compared to the existing $199/$299 contract deals, it doesn't sound so good , does it? However, for those of you who have the cash to burn on these unlocked Iphones, it's quite a good deal considering you don't have to sell your life for two years to a greedy wireless carrier.

Gmail now has a message undo button


Have you ever sent an email to someone and upon hitting the send button regretted it because you either misspelled something or you just sent it to your mother when it was supposed to go to your best friend? Well, Gmail now has a new feature that lets you take back emails 5 seconds after you've sent them. Just enable it in the Labs settings on your Gmail account and start having some peace of mind when composing your emails. Kudos to Google for this great little feature that will save a lot of people's behinds from being fired, mocked or given long moral talks from their parents. As a word of advice to all those who sighed upon reading this post, go make a Gmail account as soon as possible and avoid this kind of mishap.

NZXT's new all aluminum Panzer box


NZXT never ceases to amaze me with their great cases. Recently, they have released a new mid-tower to the market that has the potential to run against Antec's 900 gaming case and possibly come out on top. Named the Panzerbox, this case is made out of welded aluminum and has tons and tons of features for its small size. Weighing in at around 6KGS, it supports ATX, Micro-ATX and Baby AT motherboards, has 7 expansion slots, 4 internal 3.5" drive bays and 3 external 5.25" drive bays, 3 fans - two 190mm and one 120mm fans as well as USB/Audio/ESATA ports on its top. One feature however that is often neglected or ommited when designing cases is a removable motherboard tray. Well, the Panzerbox has it which means that building your rig as well as upgrading it and cleaning it just got easier. Also, if you are thinking of overclocking and running a liquid cooling system, this case has great support for 2 radiators, while still leaving enough space for today's huge graphics cards and large heatsinks and fans. The price is also quite catchy and affordable; $120 for all these great features and performance boasts so if you are a hardcore gamer and in need of a new, completely redesigned rig or if you're just looking for a new case make sure you put this one at the top of your list. After all, it's rather small and portable with amazing airflow and bound to be a looker at any LAN party. If that doesn't have you hooked, then nothing will.

Sunday, March 15, 2009

EVGA's New Classified X58 Motherboard


EVGA never ceases to impress us with it's high tech, cutting edge hardware. The new Classified motherboard has features that will make gamers and power users go completely nuts. With support for Core i7 processors, RAID 0, 1, 5 and 10, 6 DIMMS, support for 2-way or 3-way SLI (or CrossFireX) with an additional PhysX card, this piece of hardware right here is sure to make the top of every gamer's wish list. The price of $449.99 might make you second guess yourself but by all means, if you have the extra cash burn it on this motherboard. You will not be dissapointed.

Here is a link to EVGA where you can take a look at and munch over all the spicy details.

Android app for remote torrenting

For all you pirated material lovers out there, torrenting has gotten even easier. After Androidandme launched it's "Android Bounty" which is a "contest" that gives people incentive to build torrent apps in order to collect bounties from people, Alec Holmes came up with Torrent Droid, an app that scans UPCs with the built-in cam of an Android phone, finds the torrent on a major torrent host site and automatically starts downloading it on your home computer. Pretty impressive eh?
Only downside is that it only works on the Android platform of G1 phones but will hopefully be ported soon enough to Windows Mobile and the Iphone. The app has not yet been released to the public but Alec said that it will only take another month at the most to finalize this project. To get an idea of what this app is all about take a look at the video below.

Ski-jump (dump) bathroom stall


I love how Japanese people always come up with intriguing ideas that are certain to get people hooked. This is a bathroom stall meant to be a Coca-Cola ad at a ski resort in Japan and the idea behind it is both thrilling and dangerous at the same time. Thrilling because it looks like a real ski jump and dangerous because, captured by its realism, you might find that you're throwing yourself off the seat only to notice that you were not completely finished, if you know what I mean. Nonetheless, props to whoever thought this up. It's sure to get quite some attention and profit both to the ski resort and to Coca-Cola

EVGA implements Loaner Program

So the guys over at EVGA thought it would be practical or just good for advertising to start out a "loaner program" that works somewhat similar to the well known software trial idea. This Loaner Program as they called it gives people the chance to sign up and randomly get selected by EVGA to receive products for reviewing and testing. Like the "random" part won't get people skeptical enough, they thought it was a good idea to impose a rather harsh time limit on the loan. To be more precise, you only have two weeks before you have to send your product to ther participants chosen by evga. Also, at the moment they only have two programs available: one for their new X58 Classified motherboard (which I will talk about in a separate article pretty soon) and one for a Samsung 22-inch 120Hz LCD monitor with Nvidia GeForce 3D Vision glasses. The motherboard sounds like a rather delicious hookup but only if either you already have all the X58 setup parts but haven't decided on the motherboard or if you are just not satisfied with your current motherboard. Nonetheless, this sounds like a good deal for reviewers or for people who enjoy playing with the latest in technology for free. Don't lose this opportunity as you might be amongst the first ones to review the new Classified motherboard.

To sign up or get more information, click here


Thursday, March 12, 2009

Samsung releases a Q2 portable media player



If you are looking for a media player that will last you a whole (long) weekend, look no more. Samsung has recently anounced this amazing little PMP gadget that has up to 50 hours of audio playback on only a single charge. Great for a very long trip or if you are just too lazy to constantly plug your choice media player in for a recharge. With a QVGA 2.4" display, microphone, FM radio, 8 or 16 GB of flash storage and a few other small features, this new PMP is bound to be your new take-it-everywhere gadget. However, for those internet aficianados, I'm sorry to burst your bubble and tell you that it lacks WiFi and Bluetooth. As for the pricing, there is no word out yet, however it is expected to come out for a pretty decent and affordable price due to it's lack of wireless features. Hopefully, Samsung will add a pricetag to it's newcomer PMP soon so we can get an idea if it is worth it or not.

Sunday, March 8, 2009

Kepler leaves in search of other Earth-like planets

The Kepler spaceship left our planet on Friday, March 6th from Cape Canaveral, Florida for its three and a half year long trip to find other planets in our region of the Milky Way that resemble our own. In one of its reports NASA said that the main objectives of this spacecraft are to:

• Determine the percentage of terrestrial and larger planets there are in or near the habitable zone of a wide variety of stars;
• Determine the distribution of sizes and shapes of the orbits of these planets;
• Estimate how many planets there are in multiple-star systems;
• Determine the variety of orbit sizes and planet reflectivities, sizes, masses and densities of short-period giant planets;
• Identify additional members of each discovered planetary system using other techniques; and
• Determine the properties of those stars that harbor planetary systems.

For those of you out there that are keen on astrology and love to see rockets and satellites get blown into orbit, here's a video showing the launch of the 2200lbs of fuel per second burning Kepler spaceship.

Saturday, March 7, 2009

Terminator 4 Trailer

Even though I am not a big fan of the whole Terminator franchise I have to admit: Terminator Salvation otherwise known as Terminator 4 looks like the series' saviour. The repeating plot and theme in all three of the first movies had most people and critics somewhat skeptical about this new installment. However, this new Terminator seems to take a different approach. Finally, after his numerous battles with the robotic assasins from the future, John Connor(Christian Bale) comes back in this movie to finally lead the human resistance against Skynet and its army of robots. The trailer is trully breathaking and to be honest, it's got me really worked up. May 21st seems quite far away but I guess I'll just have to wait it out. Nevertheless, Terminator Salvation has a very high chance of being one of 2009's best movie releases

New Music Player Added To The Side


Well I figured sometimes it is just too boring to look through other people's blog entries or read a whole 2 page review on something so I was thinking about a way to spice it all up a bit so I said to myself: how about some music. Thankfully, the guys at grooveshark.com had just the thing. They let me customize my own music player and even let me add the music I wanted to a playlist which then you, my faithful visitors can use to select whichever song you want to hear. I hope you will all enjoy it and will come back later for more reviews and news. Thanks and leave a comment with your opinion on this new addon.

Asus's new Eee Keyboard Scheduled to hit the market this summer

We've all heard about the Eee PC craze a while back and some of us were interested enough to try them out. Nothing too crazy about them except for their rather small size and cost. After all they were netbooks which serve the purpose of mainly surfing the webs and doing some other low profile jobs such as word processing and instant messaging. After having died down, Asus is trying to re-initiate the Eee craze with its new Keyboard PC. Yes! You heard right! It is a netbook stuffed into a keyboard. The specs are quite okay as well. With a 1.6GHz Atom processor, 1GB of RAM, a choice between an 8GB or a 16GB solid state drive for your files and storage, Bluetooth, WiFi as well as a 5" touchscreen display where the number pad once resided, the Ee Keyboard PC already has a ton of fans. On top of the aforementioned specs, this new form of PC will have VGA and HDMI support so if the little touchscreen doesn't really do it, you can still hook it up to your big monitor. Like all that isn't enough, you have the option of connecting your screen wirelessly through the HDMI port. As for prices, this new PC will come in two flavours. The wired model will come out for about $400 while the wireless one will cost about $600. Make sure you check back on this product closer to its release date in either May or June of this year as prices might slightly change.

Moron smokes a bong with his cat inside

Ok so this is what happens when you frantically surf the webs in search of news and stuff to review: you stumble across idiotic things like this. The news of Acea Schomaker, an unemployed man living in Nebraska who put his cat in a bong as many as 3 times and smoked marijuana out of it has been madly circulating the internet. After being questioned as to why he did it, the 20 year old man answered by saying that the cat had been really hyper and scratched both him and his girlfriend and he only did what he did to calm down the cat. Police removed the cat from his custody and charged the man $400 but that is not it. He also faces a list of drug and misdemeanor animal cruelty charges. For those animal lovers out there, I am pleased to tell you that the cat was not hurt physically, however I cannot comment on the damage done to its mental abilities. One of the cops also reports that the cat did not move an inch while in the passenger seat of his squad car on its way to the humane society. After being thoroughly lectured by animal specialists, Acea told officials that he learned from his mistake and apologized for his conduct.

Sunday, March 1, 2009

The release of office 14 now delayed until 2010

As you could probably guess from the title, Office 14, whose release date was hinted a while back to be sometime near the end of 2009 when Windows 7 is expected to be released, has now been delayed further to 2010. After an interview with a couple of Wall Street analysts, Steven Ballmer bluntly told them that “Office 14 will not be this year”. His quote coupled with the rumors that a Release Candidate version of the new Office is not planned to hit the web before this summer, all hopes of having a final version of the suite have been shut down. This might not seem as much of a problem since at the moment we have Office 12 otherwise known as Office 2007 that we can rely on. However, if we take into consideration the fact that in the past Microsoft has released most of its Office suites either at the same time they released a new OS or within a week or two of that particular OS's release, it is probable that Windows 7's date will also be pushed back in order to be put out on the market simultaneously with Office. Lets hope that this time Microsoft will act out differently and will release the new Windows before the end of the year as promised.

Saturday, February 28, 2009

Windows 7 : A look at the Beta


After having fiddled with Microsoft’s new OS for a while this week I have finally reached an overal conclusion. It is one kickass operating system and the much needed improvement over its predecessor, Windows Vista. Not only does it address Vista’s performance glitches and hiccups but also brings to the table a new visual experience with its new taskbar and the ribbon interface integration that we have seen with Office 07 for Paint and WordPad. Some of its aspects are still quite similar to Vista which leaves me in doubt as to why Microsoft decided to go with a new name for this OS as opposed to just calling it Vista SE as it has done in the past with some previous operating systems. My guess is that Microsoft just wanted to start a clean sheet and leave behind the disaster that Vista brought during its period of existence. After all, most of us get a stomach ache just when we think of Vista therefore trying out a "Vista SE" would undeniably be out of the question. Nonetheless I think that Microsoft has gone a long way since Vista and even though this new installment in their OS line may have a few glitches here and there, we should keep in mind that it is only a beta version and that Microsoft will most likely address them before the final version is put on the market.

One of the things that struck me the most when I first tried this product was its great performance which, contrary to previous OS experiences was not short lived. Even when I started loading the system up with lots of software and games, performance hogs were quite minimal if existent at all. The time to boot the OS up was quite consistent and windows as well as applications would still open up as fast as they did when Windows was freshly installed. As for CPU and memory usage, a minimal amount of around 500mB was drawn and much to my surprise it stayed around that same mark all throughout the time I used it.

A rather big turndown however was the lack of implementing anything different in the user interface (UI) other than the ribbon interface for WordPad and Paint which was probably done with the intention of bringing them up-to-date with the new OS and the taskbar which isindeed quite different than any other operating system put out by Microsoft. Almost double the size, the new taskbar includes a ton of new features such as jump lists which with only a right click show for each window grouping stuff like browser's history and recent documents for Office. The new taskbar is also less cluttered as now the text is gone (don't worry you can stsill turn it on) and similar windows will be grouped together under the main software icon and can be previewed and switched by simply hovering over the icon with your mouse. This is great for people who have lots of windows open at one time and makes navigation much easier. One other aspect that is really worth noticing with this new Windows is that the sidebar is gone. Yes! That’s right! That awful, resource eating nuisance is finally gone. However, for the ones out there that liked it in Vista, you can still turn it on through Control Panel under the Appearance and Personalization link.

As for new features that come with Windows 7, there are quite a few that are worth mentioning . First of all, we have the “new and redesigned” Internet Explorer 8 or IE8. After working my butt off to find anything good about it, I decided to just leave it alone and focus my attention towards other things. Relatively faster than its predecessor, it was quite incompatible with some websites and forums that I could not get to work no matter what I tried and also, overall it just lacked any noticeable improvements and things that would just wow me. I guess the major cause of that is because this beta of IE8 is mostly for developers and designers and not end users like myself. Nevertheless, for the time being it’s a good idea to just stay away from IE8 and stick with Firefox or whatever other browser you might prefer. The second thing that Microsoft needs to be congratulated for is the implementing of Aero Shake. We all have tons of windows open at one time on our screen and sometimes it can be tiring for the eyes or just plain annoying. With AeroShake, just give your window a gentle shake and voila! All other opened windows magically get minimized in the taskbar faster than you can say Aero. If you happen to want them back, just give your window another gentle shake and they will all come back to life from the taskbar. How’s that for intuitive! Also for those people out there that shop a lot online and want to compare two products, browse two pages simultaneously or look at two Explorer windows at the same time, Microsoft makes it even easier for them to do that. By snapping one window to the left side of the screen and the other to the right side, Windows automatically stitches them side by side and halves their sizes so that they both fit on the screen equally. A feature that will most likely get lots of people very psyched. PC maintenance is also amongst the issues addressed in Windows 7 and as a result, Microsoft came up with Action Center, a feature that houses many useful options and actions that users utilize frequently. Security options, the UAC (User Acount Control) , performance info, updates, backups and many others are stored under this great new Windows 7 feature. Also one last thing that I think is great in this new OS is the ability to somewhatt customize your UAC settings. In Vista, you could either turn it off or have it always notify you whenever a change was made and for people that have used Vista at some point know how frustrating that can become. Now, with Windows 7 you still have the option to turn it off or have it notify you at all times, but there are two more options in between. These options allow you to choose whether to not be notified when you make Windows changes which is the default option with the OS install or have the rather irritating screen blackout removed. Even though Microsoft does give users a bit more flexibility with the UAC in Windows 7 personally, I hope that in the near future the User Acount Control will become fully customizable to allow the user to dictate it exactly whenever they want to be notified and when they do not.

Conclusion:
While this is still a beta and we do not know what to expect in the near future, it is quite apparent that Windows 7 will far outweigh its predecessor, Windows Vista. Microsoft left a bitter taste in our mouths after the rather unpleasant release of Vista but they seem to be getting back on track. Now it is just a matter of time until the final release of the OS will be put on the market but needless to say it’s got everyone quite intrigued to see what Microsoft will come up with in the end. Tempers are cooling and resentment towards Microsoft seems to be gradually going away as more and more people are filled with content towards this new OS. Hopefully Microsoft will not let us all down and keep up the excellent work in the months to come and if they do this right, it could truly increase their rank and stature.