As a member of “society” (you can loosely call it that), sometimes you feel the need to help others. Sadly, that usually comes at the price of doing something vaguely boring, disgusting or degrading in order to help (for example sponge baths, as in you washing someone with a sponge and water, not you getting bathed).

Folding@Home is one way of “helping”, but really it isn’t if you only run it on your home machine and maybe your PS3. You need to use multiple machines, or if you are adventurous, a server farm. That is one large step in the right direction, but you can always go one further…

Overclock.net forumgoer “nitteo” has decided to go down the road of graphical prowess. Using a large number of graphics cards, a few motherboards and one control station, nitteo is capable of over 260,000 points of work in 24 hours. That is a lot, when many people have trouble getting into just 4 figures.

Although it’s great for the fight against things like Cancer, the real question is: Will it run Rage?

[Via Bit-Tech]

Apologies to you all, but sadly E3 is on, and that means that all hands are on deck at Gametactics.com and E3coverage.com until the flood of news ends. Normal service should return next week.

Have you won the lottery recently, hit your mid-life crisis or generally have a ton of cash doing nothing? Well, why not blow a chunk of change at Alienware. Yes, I got bored and looked at the UK site to see what kind of potential damage I could do.

Well, how about £10,323.15? (That’s $20,591.48) On a single PC….

Of course, how could a sane person spend so much money on one PC!? Well, by adding lots of stuff that you don’t need or really want for the expense value alone. Like a watch, mug, all possible game controllers, and MS Office Professional 2007. In German. It could have been potentially worse, but I decided not to include things that wouldn’t fit in, such as if there are too many drives or cards in the back.

To see what I could have “Bought” had I the finances and the nature to blow so much cash, come on through to the other side… Continue Reading »

The Blizzard Authenticator is designed as a supplemental authentication method for your World of Warcraft account, giving you the security of Two-Factor authentication. Each time you log in using the Blizzard Authenticator you are provided with a unique, one-time use password to use in addition to your regular password. Log in with both and you can rest easy knowing that your account is now even more secure from malicious attacks such as keyloggers and trojans.

[From Blizzard Store]

I’d get one. Except that I don’t want the guys I game with to see that I think they’re thieving goons with no other objective than to steal my (non-existent in real life) gold. I don’t want to lose my friends that quickly…

Take the great voice of GLaDOS. Add in a Garmin GPS unit. Mix in some trickery, and you have a sudden need for a portal gun in your Volvo.
Yes, someone at Vanmiddlesworth has created the Portal Glados Voice File, allowing everyone’s favourite demented computer voice to tell you where to buy cake from…

Just… don’t go anywhere that buys incinerators. That test is impossible…

Nokia (They make phones, apparently…) have paid a stupid amount of money (254m Euros, £209m, $410m or 4 Esso Tiger Tokens) for Symbian. They already owned almost half of it already, but they went ahead to get the rest of it. What will they end up doing with the newly bought entity? Why, create an Open Source platform for phones. Where have I heard of that before…

The foundation will bring together Nokia, AT&T, LG, Motorola, NTT Docomo, Samsung, Sony Ericsson, STMicroelectronics, Texas Instruments and Vodafone in collaboration on a new, royalty-free open software platform for mobile phones.

[From BBC NEWS | Business | Nokia in full buy-out of Symbian]

Open-Source platform? For mobile phones? Supposedly groundbreaking? No matter how you look at it, this looks and smells like an attempt to beat Google’s Android, even if Kai Oistamo (Exec-VP at Nokia) says it isn’t.

OTT comment of the day:

“We’re freeing up innovation - this is epoch-making.”
Nigel Clifford (Symbian)

No it’s not. Interesting? Yes. Epoch-making? Not even close.

Now, I’m the kind of guy that like the idea of being able to take my work with me wherever I go. Many of us that work on computers do, it’s a fact. However, there are many occasions where a laptop just won’t do. For example, if I’m visiting relatives and I know that the younger family members are quite boisterous, then I won’t really be happy on bringing my Macbook with me, lest they suddenly want to play World of Warcraft. In real life. Using my computer as a shield.
Online versions of software are perfectly fine, but generally they function in a way that I find lacking. I want pretty much all of the functionality of a proper install of the software, not a heavily cut-down version.

PortableApps.com seems to be a good compromise. You download an installer (or a suite if you can spare the space and bandwidth to get it) and put it onto a USB thumbdrive. The next time you plug that flash memory into a computer (Windows), it’s own version of the Start menu appears, containing the list of applications you have got installed. And all of these programs run from the memory, without installing them onto the PC itself.

Sure, they’re a bit slow to initially load, but once each program is running they go pretty damn fast. And by default for most software in it, the saved files go onto the flash drive itself. And they have a good list of software, from the obvious Firefox to OpenOffice.org, and even the Gimp. I therefore have my favourite browser with the plugins I want and all of my favourites list intact wherever I go. There’s even an antivirus, making it even more useful if you have to clean a PC for someone in an emergency.

If you have a flash drive big enough (and you probably do. I own a few including a cheap 8 Gig drive), I would suggest at least trying PortableApps. It’s near enough a replacement of a laptop, and my last resort.

A nice bit of news for once from the world of graphics cards and hefty expense…

Despite the fact that no-one you know bought a PhysX card, if you’re a PC gamer with a relatively recent NVIDIA card, you’ve already got one. Or, at least, you will soon. Spooks.

[From NVIDIA, CUDA and PhysX Article // PC /// Eurogamer]

If you have something like a GeForce 8800 or higher, you will be getting much better ragdolls in your games, as a portion of your graphics card’s… err… graphical processing… can be given over to running physics simulations. We’re probably going to lose a bit of graphical oomph (a tiny bit, not a huge chunk) but at least we will see things happening on screen more realistically, gravity-wise.

The same article from Eurogamer also notes that when you upgrade your card, you could potentially (if you have a motherboard that can do it, anyway) dedicate your old card to physics stuff and your new card to just visuals. Fantastic, although the people I hand my old video cards down to will not be happy…

And now filed under “I should have placed bets on this happening years ago…”

Nasa’s Phoenix lander has unearthed compelling evidence of ice on Mars, mission scientists believe.

Chunks of a bright material found in a trench dug by the craft have disappeared over four Martian days, suggesting they have vapourised.

[From BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Mars probe makes 'ice discovery']

Phoenix, using it’s scraper shovel type thing, uncovered some white stuff on the ground. 4 days later, parts of it had gone, and since salt and cocaine doesn’t just disappear (unless some random famous person known for drug abuse happened to be on Mars at the time…) it has to be water.

They found the bits in the Dodo-Goldilocks trench (Who names these important things?!) and some more similar features at Snow White 2 (Seriously, who does it!?), which makes me wonder how long it will be until the Google Copernicus Center will be fully operational on the surface instead of on the moon where it was originally planned…

Got $22 Million?

Whatever your feelings are about Comcast, you’ll be helpless but to fall in love with the media giant’s 10 million pixel display at the new Comcast Center in Philadelphia. The media wall covers an area of over 2100 square feet and uses four-millimeter LED lights, packed together as one giant, seamless array. It plays all manner of video, and even cool segments where three-dimensional-looking dancers seem to hover in thin air at five times the resolution of HD television.

[From DVICE: This is what 10 million pixels look like]

Yes, it’s a stupidly huge wall which stretches around the room. No, there aren’t many practical uses for such technology. Yes, that’s $2.2 per pixel. No, that’s not too much to spend. Yes, it’s still damn cool.