Content and news by Rob Williams

Notebooks are great for offering computing on the go, but at the same time, the portability can also be a downside. The more the notebook is out of the house, the greater the chance that it could get stolen, even if you only take your eye off of it for a minute. I’ve never had this happen to me, but I can understand the frustration that it would cause… the money paid for it wouldn’t even be the problem. The problem would be all of the personal information loaded on there, including photos, videos and even documents.

With notebooks growing extremely quick in popularity, the risk continues to grow with it that your notebook could suffer the fate of being stolen. Intel is looking to fight that possibility back by offering a new technology called Anti-Theft Technology, or ATT.

The concept is simple. If your notebook is stolen, it cannot be boot without the owners permission, which I assume to be either be a password-based solution or require the swipe of a finger. Swapping the hard drive would have no effect either, and I’d imagine that with ATT and an encrypted drive together, the notebook would be virtually useless to any thief. Here’s to hoping that this tech is well executed and catches on fast.

Intel isn’t working on this initiative alone, though. In fact, a number of third parties announced today that they were partnering up with Intel to support ATT, such as Absolute Software Corporation (creators of firmware-based data protection/tracking solutions), BIOS maker Phoenix, and Utimaco (a data security company), to name a few. Intel also says that McAfee is on board, as well as manufacturers like Lenovo and Fujitsu.

Source: Ars Technica

While not a sign of PC gaming as a whole, the news that EA is pulling Madden 2009 out of the PC is big news regardless. If I had to guess the reason, I would assume it to be that sport games on the PC tend to suck, and from my experience, the graphics, despite being on a fast computer, don’t compare to a console. It’s obvious where more development time goes. Let’s face it… even Need for Speed pales in comparison on the PC when compared to a console.

For those of you royally pissed, Peter Moore has some not-so-soothing words, “The PC presents some very serious business challenges to us in the sports category, particularly because so many of you all are playing your favorite sports games on the PS3, Xbox 360 and Wii.”

Though not direct about an answer, the PC clearly sells far less copies of a game than the consoles do. I’d be willing to bet that even the Wii would sell more copies of a title than the PC would, but I could very well be jumping to the wrong conclusions. But, it has to be something if EA is to pull a series off a platform entirely, especially considering that they tend to release countless copies of their other games on all other platforms.

The news doesn’t seem to be sitting well with PC-only Madden players, who suggest that EA Sports “EAT A ***” though we’re not sure what that means. Another commenter asks “WFT Peter? NO PC??”, suggesting that Peter “needs grow some balls instead of hair!” which certainly gives us a lot to think about.

Source: Kotaku

It feels like forever that PS3 gamers have been waiting to get their rumble on… because well, it almost has been. The PS3 launched in November 2006, which means that we waited a long SIXaxisTEEN months to see this thing hit the street! What was the hold up? Who knows… maybe they had a billion SIXAXIS gamepads to sell off first?

The good news in all of this, besides the rumble of course, is that the DUALSHOCK 3 (caps are theirs) retains the SIXAXIS (caps are theirs) capabilities, which means that the original SIXAXIS GAMEPAD WILL BE DISCONTINUED SOON (caps mine out of spite).

These new gamepads are being sent out to retailers right NOW, and can be had for the same price that the original was priced at, $54.99USD. The entire list of supported rumble games is listed through the link below, with some, such as MotorStorm and Resistance: Fall of Man, requiring a quick download prior to the feature being enabled.

Just to give you a small refresher course, the DUALSHOCK 3 wireless controller includes pressure sensors that rumble with each action. SIXAXIS technology is also included, so you can still use motion control, and the controller features Bluetooth technology for wireless gameplay. You can pick it up at any of the major retailers and at a cost $54.99 MSRP.

Source: Playstation Blog

I made a post the other day that explained that those who signed up during March for our contest and did not receive a confirmation e-mail, would receive one in the coming days. I have to apologize, because it seems I confused a lot of people with my wording.

I have received numerous e-mails from those who did fill out the survey, but I’m just looking to hear from people (not right now, but tomorrow perhaps) if you did NOT receive a confirmation e-mail during March, even though you signed up for the contest. If you filled out the survey, you are entered, so do not worry.

There was a little delay in getting these fresh e-mails out, but it should be soon. I’ll extend the deadline accordingly, but we will most definitely announce the winner next week at some point. I am awaiting ONE last part for the PC, which should be here this week. Once it is, I’ll build the beast and post a few pictures before we choose a winner and send it out. Thanks for the patience all!

But while you are waiting, how about checking out our brand-new contest for April, where you could win some wicked NCsoft swag?! Check it out here!

The Intel Developer Forum is the place to be to get sneak-peeks of what Intel has up their sleeves, but that’s a given. IDF in Shanghai is taking place right now, and Intel has wasted no time in breaking out the Nehalem and impressive specs.

The demo chip was running at 3.2GHz, on par with the current QX9770 and QX9775 processors, but it’s uncertain whether it will be a launch frequency or not. However, Intel does release higher-clocked products with any new launch, so if such high clocks on the new architecture are stable, then it might very well be 3.2GHz that we see.

Unsure what Nehalem even is? Then you need to check out our reports from a few weeks back, where we explained that architecture along with Dunnington, Tukwila and others. With Nehalem at the stage it is now, I cannot wait to see what’s unveiled at the next IDF in August.

The first available Nehalem processors will be built on the existing 45nm manufacturing process, will incorporate SSE4 instructions, and will feature four fully integrated cores. Each core will have its own dedicated 256KB L2 cache and each core will share an 8MB of L3 cache pool. The bulk of these 731 million transistor processors are dedicated to cache.

Source: DailyTech

I admit I’ve had to sign some odd NDA’s and EULA’s in the past in order to acquire either a piece of hardware or software under embargo, but never, not once, have I been asked to sign a EULA for purchasing a product on a public e-tailer. BoingBoing has posted news about B&H Photo, a popular photography e-tailer, that requires a EULA to be signed prior to being able to purchase a Fujifilm IS-1 camera.

You are at a loss for words… admit it. So was I when I first read it. But some of the questions themselves begin to make you really think. “Is End User purchasing a Fujifilm Infrared or Ultraviolet Sensitive Digital Camera for a legitimate business purpose?” What? Does this camera have the ability to see through clothes or something?

Well, as it turns out, it IS a special camera, in that it’s designed for use with law enforcement due to it’s Infra-Red capabilities. A filter can be added to have it act as a normal camera, however. So, if you want a special camera none of your friends will have, get that pen out.

“I’m in the market for a digital SLR, and found something rather disturbing. B&H Photo says that to purchase a Fujifilm IS-1 camera, you must fill out an end user license agreement. Even weirder is the EULA itself: It asks what ‘legitimate business purpose’ (their words, not mine) the camera will be put to.

Source: BoingBoing

If for some reason you’ve been sleeping for the past week, you probably overlooked the the numerous Creative-related news posts that have been hogging up the tubes. For those unaware, Creative stepped forward and told a driver modder to quit doing what he was doing, even though their own drivers are buggy and purposely lack certain functionality.

Well… I first recommend you take a look at my editorial from Monday to get a sense of what’s going on, then check out Wired for an e-mail that Daniel sent to them.

Reading through his e-mail… it becomes increasingly impressive just how overboard Creative went with their barring of his modded drivers. He admits that he shouldn’t have asked for donations, but in all 20,000 downloads of the driver, he made $146, and in Brazil, that can’t even purchase an X-Fi card. It’s also interesting to see that Creative purposely disabled features on the Audigy card under Vista in order to encourage people to upgrade to an X-Fi.

What Creative did wrong: They publicly threatened me, just to show their arrogance.
If they had contacted me by e-mail or private message I would do the same thing (remove everything) and no one would know about their insatisfaction.

Source: Wired

NVIDIA’s 9-series might be brand-new, but the 8-series should not be overlooked. Most 8800 GTS 512 cards cost less than the 9800 GTX, and can be easily overclocked to overpower it. In the case of this pre-overclocked ASUS card, the 9800 GTX doesn’t have a fighting chance.

If you thought that the current Playstation Store was ugly, then you are in for a treat. The entire store will be revamped and unveiled mid-April, via a firmware update. Although the current store works, I never found it to be visually appealing, and for such a great console, you’d imagine that the built-in store would at least reflect the clean styling of the rest of the PS3s UI.

Well… that’s exactly what the forthcoming update is going to tackle, as you can see in the below screenshot. Nice use of curves and gradients along with a cleaner template make for a store that’s far easier to look at, and one that could very well be fun to navigate.

The downside in all of this? Absolutely no new content will be unveiled between now and the updated store’s launch, which essentially means I have to go weeks before being let down by the fact that Gex 3: Deep Cover Gecko still isn’t available as a downloadable title!

Customers will be able to access, browse, shop and download content as usual prior to the store’s re-opening. However, no additional downloadable content will be posted prior to then, including this Thursday, April 3rd, and next Thursday, April 10th. Regularly scheduled content updates will resume with the Store’s re-opening, at which time additional games and game-related items will be added, including the downloadable version of the highly-anticipated exclusive PS3 title Gran Turismo 5 Prologue.

Source: Playstation Blog

For those unaware, DisplayLink is a company and technology with the same name, and the product is one that allows daisy-chaining displays via a USB cable. I took a look at the technology back in January and was left rather impressed. Though I am anticipating an updated version more than anything, the product I did have worked a lot better than I expected, and it’s a real feasible product that should suffice for most consumers.

What the technology did lack, though, were OS X drivers to enable the functionality. Well now, the company has released beta drivers for all to test out, however, they are called “beta” for a reason. Right now, they lack both 2D and 3D acceleration, so performance will be worse than what’s seen on Windows XP or Vista. So needless to say, DisplayLink for Mac is en route, but now is not the time to purchase an adapter.

Thing is, it doesn’t support any kind of acceleration, so any kind of hardware-based tracking, smoothing, filters, or hardware handling of codecs is inapplicable. Bad news, but chances are if you’re using USB as your primary display connection, you’re not using too much hardware acceleration. It looks like there are a lot of limitations, but it is beta after all.

Source: CrunchGear

If there is one thing Gentoo Linux can’t seem to catch, it’s a break. Since the 2007.0 release, the distro’s future has been plastered with uncertainty, all for varying reasons. Gentoo’s developers mean well, but it seems something always happens that prevents smooth upgrades. As a result, the 2007.1 release was entirely cancelled… something that did not help the distros image.

The next release is 2008.0… one that should have been in public beta in early March and officially released as of this point, but once again, we are a month behind. The problem isn’t so much that the crew are behind schedule, but the fact that the public are left oblivious… not even a simple news post was made to fill people in. To me, that’s a big no no, and only clouds the distros image even further.

As it turns out, though, there are good reasons for this latest delay. One of the main reasons was due to a death of a close relative of two key developers – completely understandable. The other reasons are due to “usual delays that affect most open-source projects” and also due to upgrades in their release processes. So, Gentoo is still alive and well, and that’s all that matters. Like Duke Nukem Forever, 2008.0 will get here when it gets here.

Source: Gentoo.org

Ahh, April 1st. The smell of spring is in the air and the sun is shining, what’s not to love? Well, if you didn’t find three-minutes during the entire month of March to enter our huge contest, then that’s something definitely not to love!

Allow me to send out a massive Thank You! to everyone who partook in this contest and made it such a great success. It was our goal to get reader input, and that’s something we certainly accomplished. Our original target for entries was far surpassed, so the Techgage staff has a lot of reading and data crunching in their future!

If you signed up during the month and did not receive an e-mail, don’t worry… I will be e-mailing every one of you today or early tomorrow manually. If you don’t receive an e-mail from me but you did sign up during March, please e-mail me at “rob dot williams at tg” and let me know as soon as possible. After I send out all of the e-mails, we’ll allow four days for the remaining fill-outs.

If our contest wasn’t enough and you are still hankering some prizes, then our friends at NinjaLane have got a cure. They are offering a couple killer DFI LanParty boards to two lucky winners. How do you enter? Check out the site and find out!

Despite Creative being a leader in PC audio, their stature as such is being compromised with newcomers releasing superb offerings. To make matters worse, they’ve just added to the pile by banning modded X-Fi/Audigy drivers, a move that received an outstanding response from the community.

NVIDIA’s 9600 GT card is a great offering for the price range, but ASUS ups the ante by offering a TOP version that adds 70MHz to the core and 100MHz to the memory. Add in HDMI support and the ability to overclock the card even higher… then the EN9600GT TOP proves to be a great offering.

Whew, how a month could pass so fast, I have no idea! But it’s true. Today is the FINAL DAY to enter our contest, so if you are planning on entering, doing it as soon as possible would be a great idea! Once again, we are offering a full-featured computer that’s likely had it’s worth halved since we launched the contest on March 3rd!

The computer is SLI-ready with dual ASUS 8800 GT cards and is powered by a fast Intel Q9450 Quad-Core processor. Included also is 4GB of Crucial memory, an ASUS Xonar D2 sound card, among other fantastic peripherals. Even Dell’s latest high-end 24″ LCD is included, so it truly is a gaming PC ready for anything.

To enter, click the link below and read through the details. Once you click the enter button, you’ll have to enter an e-mail address for verification, and soon afterwards, you’ll receive an e-mail with a unique URL that leads you to the survey.

As I mentioned last week, we’ve had a problem where a few visitors haven’t received that e-mail, but we will be taking care of that on Tuesday. If you entered sometime during March, don’t worry, you are still able to take the survey. I plan to manually e-mail each and every person who didn’t receive the e-mail to give a last chance to fill it out prior to picking a random winner.

We again thank our incredible sponsors for making this contest possible, but instead of mentioning them by name, I’ll let their company logos do the talking:

Source: Techgage 2008 Survey Contest

With Blu-ray being the only high-definition format, you might be thinking that there is no real competition. Well, you’d be right. Thanks to the sudden boost of exclusivity, Blu-ray has just sold its nine-millionth movie, thanks to No Country For Old Men, a current top-seller.

According to reports, the first three million Blu-ray copies this year were sold within the first eleven weeks, so taking averages into consideration, 2008 might end with over fifteen million sold. Given that Blu-ray popularity is only going to continue to grow, however, that number should prove even higher when the time comes.

To put things into perspective, only 6 million Blu-ray Disc movies were sold since the format’s inception through 2007. While the growing number of players on the market directly affects software sales, consumers may now be willing to purchase more software with HD DVD out of the picture.

Source: DailyTech

According to some fresh Microsoft reports, we can now see what caused most of the reported crashes after the consumer launch of Vista last January. Intel and ATI both claimed 9% of the responsibility each, according to Microsoft, while they themselves were responsible for 17.9%. The biggest share belongs to NVIDIA, whose driver failures were responsible for a staggering 28.8%.

This doesn’t come as a huge surprise to me, because as I was working on our gaming performance reports pre-launch, I experienced an incident where an NVIDIA driver caused Vista to completely crash, which proved unrecoverable. As we discovered in that same article, performance was also lacking, so there was a definite problem.

Luckily, that’s been all sorted out, though it did take a few months. It was a time when ATI actually had quite an advantage with reasonably stable drivers, but as it stands now, both companies have very stable drivers under the OS (even though ATI’s takes three times as long to install).

As part of the ongoing Vista Capable class action lawsuit, Microsoft released data on exactly what drivers caused the bulk of logged Windows Vista crashes. The number one culprit of Vista crashes related to driver failure was NVIDIA at 28.8%. Microsoft only broke logged crashes out for a few companies including NVIDIA, Intel (8.8%) and ATI (9.3%). Microsoft’s data shows that it was responsible for 17.9% of logged crashes.

Source: DailyTech

We posted first about Adobe Photoshop’s online counter-part just over a year ago, and finally, it’s now here. Though still considered a beta, it’s feature-rich and can help you get your basic tasks done. The only thing you need to bear in mind when checking it out is that it is not a Photoshop replacement, but rather a scaled-down photo editor to allow you to get small jobs done quick. Essentially, it’s designed for novice users who don’t know much about photography and want a simple tool to use.

The entire program is built around Adobe’s own Flex technology, along with the ActionScript coding language (JavaScript-compatible), and to make sure it ran smooth, a few of the top Photoshop developers dived in and re-wrote some of the algorithms in order to optimize them for web use.

So for those who want something simple while on the go, or for those who don’t have a decent editor installed, you can sign up for the beta and give it a go yourself. Adobe also offers 2GB worth of webspace to store your photos, so that’s another draw. It’s going to be interesting to see just how well this new program is adopted, given the amount of competition from both online and offline services.

Adobe already has a few other Photoshop-branded products–Photoshop Creative Suite 3 and Photoshop Lightroom are aimed at professional and serious amateur photographers, while $99 Photoshop Elements is a consumer-oriented product. Photoshop Express is designed to be used essentially by anyone who uses a point and click digital camera, said Mack.

Source: C|Net News.com

Solid state drives are getting a lot of attention lately, and at this point, it’s hard to not want one. Faster speeds, low noise, low latency… it seems like a win all around. Except for the price, of course. That in itself is one of the main reasons the market for SSDs is still incredibly small. Oh, and not to mention the fact that overall densities are severely lacking as well.

No more, thanks to Super Talent. They shot off a press release yesterday announcing the “world’s slimmest 256GB solid state drive”, which it would be given its 2.5″ frame. So, that’s a lot of space, and could even be used in a notebook computer. Despite the large density, it’s read and write speeds are good, at 65MB/s and 50MB/s, respectively.

The downside? The $6,000 pricetag. Ouch. Let’s give this a few more years…

The FSD56GC25H uses an industry standard 2.5-inch hard drive form factor and uses an industry standard SATA-I interface, making it 100% interchangeable with conventional 2.5-inch SATA hard drives. This SSD implements Super Talents patented stacking technology to pack an enormous amount of solid state storage into an exceptionally small and slim case, measuring a mere 12.5mm thick 40% thinner than any other 256GB SSD available. The signature black case is made from a durable lightweight aluminum alloy.

Source: Super Talent

Cheaters. Some love them, most hate them. Of course, we know that the people who love them, are them. To help eliminate them from Xbox Live, Microsoft has taken an entirely new approach to laying the smack down. Best of all, it’s hilarious.

If someone is caught cheating to increase their gamerscore (it happens a -lot-), Microsoft will remove ALL of the points earned by the player up to that point. On top of that, absolutely no gamerscore points can be earned back from previously earned achievements. Since I dislike cheating and think it’s foolish, I love this idea. Though it’s a harsh punishment, what do these people expect? Sure, they earned some of their points legitimately, but it doesn’t matter if you pay for one chocolate bar and steal another… it’s the same crime.

What might be even funnier is the fact that someone wasted no time at all in creating a new blog thats sole purpose is to publicly humiliate these cheaters, if their Xbox Live accounts are found to have suffered such a fate. Good times. Maybe now we won’t be seeing so many games with 100,000+ gamerscores.

The problems with cheating on services like Xbox Live are myriad, but our biggest problem is that, if we lose – which, of course, is almost statistically impossible and would likely cause a chrono-rift in the space-time continuum – we assume the other party was cheating … especially if the other party’s gamertag is an illegible gaggle of letters and numbers, flanked by various capitalizations of ‘x’.

Source: Joystiq