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Social Networks

Submission + - SPAM: Digg's Kevin Rose: "We have to do better"

Submitted by alphadogg
alphadogg writes: Digg founder Kevin Rose said the social news recommendation site is not doing enough to reach people with niche interests, which will be key to keeping users engaged. Over the next two years or so, Digg's engineers will focus on ways to link users with similar interests and create tools that allow them to share news that's not necessarily of broad general interest. "We don't really do a good job of servicing the long tail of content," said Rose, who spoke at the Future of Web Apps conference in London on Thursday.
Link to Original Source
Hardware Hacking

Submission + - Expert Tweaking Guide for Modern BIOSes

Submitted by notthatwillsmith
notthatwillsmith writes: We all know how to change basic BIOS settings--boot order, USB settings, and power options are old hat--but do you know the difference between tCL and tRCD? Configuring a modern BIOS for maximum performance and stability isn't as simple as setting the bus speed and multiplier, you need to dig deep into the CPU and memory settings your BIOS offers. This is especially important if you shelled out big bucks for high-end motherboards and memory designed for overclockers. If you're running your rig using the default BIOS settings, and haven't dug into the advanced features your motherboard supports, you may not be getting all the speed you paid for. Maximum PC shows you how to tweak your BIOS's key settings to boost your PC's performance and improve your system's stability.
Graphics

Submission + - Facts and Fiction of GPU-Based H.264 Encoding

Submitted by notthatwillsmith
notthatwillsmith writes: We've all heard a lot of big promises about how general-purpose GPU computing can greatly accelerate common tasks that are slow on the CPU--like H.264 video encoding. Maximum PC compared the GPU-accelerated Badaboom app to Handbrake, a popular CPU-based encoder. After testing a variety of workloads ranging from archival-quality DVD rips to transcodes suitable for play on the iPhone, Maximum PC found that while Badaboom is significantly faster than X264-powered Handbrake in a few tests that require video resizing, it simply can't compare to the X264-powered Handbrake for archival-quality DVD backups.
Movies

Submission + - Comic Con '08 - Nite Owls Ship, Jabba, & more (maximumpc.com)

Submitted by notthatwillsmith
notthatwillsmith writes: What's at Comic-Con this year? Watchmen, Iron Man, Transformers, Lego Batman (and Robin) and a whole lot more. Maximum PC's own Norman Chan snuck around the show before doors opened and got killer shots of everything from the Nite Owl's ship (including interior shots) to a life-size Jabba the Hutt to Lego Batman & Robin. Also at Comic-Con, Maximum PC is auctioning a killer modded PC for Penny-Arcade's Child's Play charity. The mod for sale? A PC built into a replica of Batman's Utility Belt. You can meet the creator of the rig, Bruce Webb, or submit a bid to purchase the machine at the Maximum PC booth. 100% of the proceeds will go to Child's Play, so bid high if you're in San Diego!
Intel

Submission + - Intel vs. Nvidia Cold War Goes Hot

Submitted by notthatwillsmith
notthatwillsmith writes: Intel and Nvidia's not-so-private dispute has moved beyond mere verbal tussling and may impact system-building options in the near future. Maximum PC has the scoop on the conflict, which could present gamers with a tough choice: will they pick Intel's next-gen Nehalem CPU or SLI support for multi-GPU rendering. Is Nvidia intentionally dragging its feet on an SLI chipset for Nehalem in order to put a dent in what would be Intel's crowning achievement for 2008?
Networking

Submission + - Comcast Readies New 250GB Bandwidth Limit (maximumpc.com)

Submitted by
Acererak
Acererak writes: "Comcast is readying a 250GB bandwidth limit for subscribers' monthly downloads, with a $15 fee attached for every 10GB of overage. But that's a fatter tube than you think. Maximum PC crunches the numbers and discovers that Comcast wants to charge you over eight times its normal rates for Internet service, even though you'd have to download one 1080p movie per day to reach the cap."

Comment Re:This could kill PC gaming (Score 1) 5

by Ars-Gonzo (#23207888) Attached to: Phantom Lapboard May Actually Ship
I really think this type of peripheral is more for the PC gamers who want that "big screen" console experience. I know (back in my single days, at least) that I used to love hooking up my high-end gaming PC to the living room TV, so I could play Quake 3 on the 50-inch HDTV instead of my old 19-inch monitor. I don't think it's realistic to think that any console manufacturer is going to support mouse and keyboard, unfortunately.
Input Devices

Submission + - Phantom Lapboard May Actually Ship 5

Submitted by notthatwillsmith
notthatwillsmith writes: Despite never actually releasing the Phantom console, it looks like Phantom Entertainment (the company formerly known as Infinium Labs) may actually ship its sofa-friendly mouse/keyboard combo controller, the Lapboard, sometime this decade. The Lapboard is currently scheduled for a mid-June release at a price of $130, with the included laser mouse. Might this be enough to recoup the $73 million Infinium squandered on the Phantom console?
Censorship

Submission + - Comcast Filtering-For-Profit

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Maximum PC intercepted the following memorandum from a high-level Comcast executive to the company's Board of Directors. We suggest you read it once, and then immediately delete all traces of this text from your PC. This is seriously twisted stuff.
Hardware Hacking

Submission + - Modshop.net = Thunderdome for Computer Modders (modshop.net)

Submitted by notthatwillsmith
notthatwillsmith writes: We just launched a new site for modders — the folks who build the amazing custom PCs you see linked all over the net. The Mod Shop offers hardware hackers a place to share their building secrets with their fans, friends, and foes. Modders can enter their rigs in our monthly tournament, where their creations will compete Thunderdome-style in a series of head-to-head battles, where the site's visitors vote to determine the winners of more than $2000 in monthly prizes.
The Internet

Submission + - Comcast's Net Filtering Version 2.0 Unveiled?

Submitted by notthatwillsmith
notthatwillsmith writes: We all know that Comcast shouldn't be filtering protocols for their users, but it's only a problem for media pirates (and Lotus Notes users), who really deserve to be punished, right? Wrong. Here's a look at one possible outcome if we don't take action now to ensure that Comcast changes their filtering ways.
PC Games (Games)

Submission + - The Statistical Trends of a Poker Game

Submitted by
eldavojohn
eldavojohn writes: "There's a paper out for review on the statistics of poker. While one may wonder why we would turn such a fun game into a crusty old statistics problem, PhysOrg is running a summary on the paper. There's no breakthrough research coming out of this, but the models that Sire & Majumdar fit to poker games have resulted in some very interesting revelations about the game — and perhaps even the stock market or computational biology: "the growth rate of the blind bets entirely controls the pace of a tournament, which in practice allows the organizers of a tournament to control its duration. The model shows that the total duration of a tournament grows only logarithmically (i.e. very slowly) with the initial number of players, which explains why the wide range of real tournament sizes (100-10,000 players) remains manageable. "The model can also help poker players to evaluate their current ranking in a poker tournament," Sire said. "For instance, if a player owns twice the average stack, he is currently in the top 90%. If his holding is only half of the average stack, he only precedes 25% of the other players. "Consider a temporal random signal [such as the graph of a company's stock]. Its persistence is the probability that it never goes below (or above) a given threshold," Sire explains. "With my colleague Satya Majumdar, we have devised several ways to compute this quantity in various contexts, which decays exponentially fast, or as a power-law. Persistence has been measured in many physical systems, and has obvious applications outside physics: for example, what is the probability that Google's stock remains above $450 for the next year (certainly high, I admit)?" Other connections involve biological evolution. Due to the competitive nature of the game, Sire found similarities with evolutionary models dealing with competing agents. Also, when analyzing the statistical properties of the chip leader (player with the most chips at a given time), Sire found the same phenomenon that occurs in the 'leader problem' in evolutionary models. Namely, the average number of chip leaders grows logarithmically (i.e. very slowly) with the number of competing agents, or total number of players.""
Portables

Submission + - Hands on with Asus's upgradeable notebook

Submitted by notthatwillsmith
notthatwillsmith writes: Maximum PC went under the hood of Asus's new C90S notebook. This desktop replacement comes equipped with a standard LGA775 socket (to make CPU upgrades simple) as well as an upgradeable videocard. The notebook even sports extra cooling to make it easy to overclock your CPU!

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