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Thirteen WoW windows in 36 seconds with an SSD
This is cool, but pretty technical -- if you don't know your USB from your Firewire, it might not make much sense. But the guys at TGDaily were apparently playing around with a Fusion-io solid state hard drive at E for All last weekend, and to show off the drive, they loaded up thirteen World of Warcraft windows in just 36 seconds.Normal hard drives, like the one in your computer (unless you've already shelled out a ton of cash for an SSD) have discs in them that spin, and they take time to find the information stored on them -- that's why, when you double click your WoW icon, it takes a few seconds (up to a few minutes if you've got a slower computer) for your WoW window to load up. But a "solid state" hard drive doesn't have discs or moving parts -- it's essentially one big block of memory -- so it's much, much faster in terms of retriving information. And what's going on in the video on their website is that they're pulling so much information from the hard drive that WoW is installed on that it's taking only seconds to load up thirteen windows' worth of WoW.Of course, how fast all of those windows actually run depends on a lot of other things in the computer -- you'd need a lot more than just an SSD to have the video power to run 13 separate 3D windows at the same time (though TGDaily says they weren't breaking the bank at 5 instances running, they just didn't have any more accounts), not to mention the bandwidth that would come from 13 different connections. But just the startup is interesting enough -- eventually these SSD drives will become cheap enough to be used all over the place, and information will be almost instantly accessible from wherever it's stored on your PC.
Dell says XPS 700 will NOT ship overclocked
We can't blame TG Daily for reporting that the Core 2 Extreme-powered version of Dell's XPS 700 gaming desktop will ship with a factory overclocked processor; after all, the placard in front of that demo machine at the World Series of Video Games did indeed mention an overclocked Conroe, with the promise that "system specs like this [will be] available within the next 30 days at [Dell's website]." After Cnet received a review unit of the new configuration that had not been overclocked, however, they called up Dell to set the record straight once and for all. According to company spokesperson Liem Nguyen, although "Dell has unlocked the BIOS so that customers can overclock the processor themselves...at this time Dell is not factory overclocking the system." So there you have it, straight from the horse's mouth: Dell's not actually doing the dirty work here, but it is giving customers the opportunity to tweak and possibly fry their machines themselves.
Laptop Vista Premium certification will require hybrid HDDs
Far from being a niche technology that just happens to fully thrive in Windows Vista, it turns out that those hybrid hard drives we've been following for some time will actually be required equipment for laptops wishing to sport the Vista Premium logo. TG Daily caught up with Microsoft's Windows Client Performance program manager Matt Ayres at TechEd 2006 to pin him down about recent updates to the Windows Logo Device Program Requirements, and sure enough, Ayres confirmed that the new wording does indeed mean that hybrid drives will be part-and-parcel of Premium-labeled mobile systems released after June 1, 2007. As you may or may not recall, these so-called ReadyDrive HDDs manufactured by Samsung, Seagate, and unnamed others offer up to 256MB of on-board flash memory for faster boot times and better battery life thanks to buffering that reduces the amount of necessary drive spinning.[Thanks, Mack S.]
HDMI issues at GDC? Or simply no cable?
The PS3 dev kits on display at GDC apparently skipped the HDMI connection for some of their demos, casting doubt on how far along Sony's come with its hardware and digital standards compliance.During GDC, Sony brought along a few PS3 demo units to show off audio and video, which TG Daily spied from a distance. As you can see above, the PS3 graphics demo unit used a standard AV Multi-Out connector while the "two HDMI ports right below the AV Multi-Out port were unused." TGD apparently offered to lend Sony officials an HDMI cable of their own to connect to the system, but they were turned down.Of course, there's also a conflicting pic which Chris Grant took for us on Joystiq Central that seems to show that very HDMI connection being used, probably with another unit. (Scroll down to the second pic here to see it.) So what's the real story? Was Sony lacking enough updated HDMI 1.3 hardware and/or 1.3-compatible TVs to show off the HD goods, or were they simply short on cables? Maybe their budget was a bit tight for GDC (what with Phil's focused keynote and abundance of GDC sessions from Sony), so hopefully we'll see everything hooked up nice and tidy for E3.[Thanks, Michael, Racky, pheen, and DocEvil; via TechSpot and CD Freaks]
CES: First generation Blu-ray players may not be "full featured"
TG Daily is reporting that the first generation of Blu-ray players, just announced, will not include hardware support for the vaunted BD-J interactive layer. Apparently the key word to look for when shopping for Blu-ray players later this year is "full-profile". Based on what's been reported, we can expect full profile players to launch at around $1800, while "basic" players may be closer to $1000. Is the Blu-ray spec as done as we've been lead to believe, if the players launching possibly six months from now aren't going to support one of the key features?Also in Blu-ray news, they expect to support streaming media over internet connections, as a way to get people to connect their players to the internet (and update their encryption). The last interesting note was about thier insistence about only wired connections and that they need to keep high definition off the WiFi airwaves. That is really weird to me, even if it only ships with a wired connection, how can they stop someone from using a wireless bridge? It seems silly. I really have the feeling we'll end CES not knowing much more than we already suspected about Blu-ray or HD-DVD.
