July 23rd News Roundup Part II

Over the weekend the Linux 2.6.26 kernel was released. This quarterly update to the Linux kernel introduced Kernel-based Virtual Machine improvements, new One Laptop Per Child support, a new video web camera driver, updates to the Direct Rendering Manager, and other improvements. In this article we have done some quick benchmarks of this new kernel from within the Phoronix Test Suite.

As the world changes so do the demands of consumers -- this is particularly true with technology. One of the most pressing issues today is that of digital television. But to most this subject is shrouded in mystery. Why are we being forced to convert to digital signals? What does going digital even mean? Most importantly, how will the shift to digital television affect me? These are all excellent questions, ones I hope to address sufficiently, and thereby purging the digital switch from its aforementioned shroud of mystery.

It isn’t all about the Master Chief and Gordon Freeman, you know. Sometimes we have to give some love out to the NPCs and supporting characters too – which is exactly what we’ve tried to do here. Below, we offer up the list of our top ten supporting characters from computer games. The only rules we imposed on ourselves are that entrants cannot be the main playable character of a game and that each franchise can only feature once. Other than it’s a level playing field – villains and heroes are both welcome!

While this isn't intended to be a buyers' guide of any kind, I will be explaining in a little detail the various options and settings you might see on a wide variety of these cameras and how to use them. From there, you can decide both whether these options are important to you and at what ranges you'd consider acceptable. Hopefully, armed with this information, you can then make a more informed purchase for yourself.

Does your Windows-based PC crash for no apparent reason? Well OK, mine does too, but does yours crash often? At random times? With Nasty blue Screens of Death? If the answer is "yes", you may very well have a memory problem. Faulty memory, or RAM, is often the cause of the dreaded 'flaky PC' syndrome, those hard-to-replicate errors that get you nasty looks from the store technician.

I can probably cover the problems with one long sentence. Each console has unique advantages and disadvantages but no one game plays on all of them (and you often have to buy different versions of the game for each anyway). While PC Games have to deal with a missive diversity of hardware and operating systems with the result being that they typically aren't as reliable as they need to be and fall well short of cutting edged performance. This increases substantially the cost of developing a new game and reduces the value of that game to us because if we don't have the right platform we won't buy it, and if it sucks on the platform we have we'll likely not buy another. Ideally the game developers would like a market where everyone had access to the same hardware and the buyer would like a market where they don't have to spend hundreds on new hardware just to play one game. What if you hosted the entire game experience and provided it as a service?