This week Tom’s Hardware launched its world-wide Overdrive overclocking competition right here in the States. Four teams flew in from all over the country—some even outside—to compete in what turned out to be quite a battle using liquid nitrogen.
The prize? An all-inclusive trip to Paris where the winning team from the U.S. will be competing with teams from several other countries for $5,000.
IRONMODS took the top spot in last week’s preliminaries and is represented by:
John J. Crimmins
Jeremiah L. Allen
Vachira Kwodee
The three gentlemen will be practicing and gearing up for the final competition in Paris, where they will be representing the United States.
Check out the details from the competition here.
Check out Chris Angelini’s interview with the victorious team here.
The back and forth between gamers and game publishers continues this week with Electronic Arts facing two more lawsuits for its use of SecuROM. The proverbial stuff hit the fan with EA’s launch of Spore, which caused a big commotion in the gaming community for its excessive use of copy protection technology.
The story behind the lawsuit brings up the issue of using root-kit-like technology to protect the game content from piracy. Protection that relies on root-kits install hidden drivers on a user’s computer system, often without the user’s knowledge. In some cases, root-kits have been known to cause damage to a user’s setup, often forcing the user to have format and reinstall the operating system.
In the last several years, EA has received bad press about the anti-piracy technology it employs. Now known as the "second evil empire" in the software industry, EA recently vowed to repair its image and produce better games.
Time will tell.
Now that Barack Obama is on his way to be the 44th president of the United States, he’s busy building his support team. One of those team members will be a first for the United States—a chief technology officer (CTO).
There was much talk about Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt becoming the nation’s first CTO, but it looks like that’s not going to happen. Schmidt said that he loves his role at Google so much that even if Obama asked, he would decline.
Whoever joins Obama’s team as CTO will certainly have his or her job cut out for them. The media is always up in arms about electronic attacks on the United States from overseas. Hackers, crackers, and viruses. The war goes on.
Check out Schmidt’s response here.
Everyone’s going green these days—it’s a big topic. Global warming, power saving, clean coal; green is a big business market.
Motherboard companies have been touting green boards for the last while, but are the technologies that they use really effective? This week, Tom’s Hardware takes an in-depth look at several motherboards from Asus, Gigabyte, and MSI to determine if there is any value in building a mainstream machine with "green" platforms.
How much power is really saved? Are there hidden costs like CPU throttling? The results we found may surprise you!
The holiday season is approaching, and typically games are advertised the most during this time of year. Usually, consumers can also expect some price cuts from the major console players, but this time Nintendo says no.
According to the pioneering console giant, its Wii console is still in such high demand over competing consoles that a price cut isn’t necessary. Microsoft lowered the price on its Xbox 360 console recently, but the Wii is still sitting at a comfortable price of $249. Nintendo even has a straight forward recommendation of buying a Wii as soon as you see one—just in case there’s a shortage of course.
Are you a Wii fan, PS3 fan or an Xbox 360 fan? This generation’s console wars have been the most competitive of any so far. As December 25th comes closer, it will be interesting to see if Nintendo budges.
Check out the full report here.
More news from the Nintendo camp this week came in the form of its new Wii Speak accessory. The accessory allows voice communication for the first time, but it comes with one caveat: you can’t sell it.
The new Wii Speak comes with a unique code that will lock the device to the console that it’s first installed on. Essentially, if you buy one and don’t like it, too bad.
A few weeks ago, there was news that game publishers feel selling used games caused a loss for them in terms of sales. The argument was that if you resold a game that you bought and paid for to own, it would be like taking away money from the publisher. Nintendo’s stance on the Wii Speak prevents owners from doing just that.
We want our money in our pockets, says Nintendo. Check out the full report here on Gizmodo.
Spam bothering you much? If not, you’re one of the few fortunate people, or you don’t use the Internet and aren’t reading this article. For the hundreds of millions of other Internet users however, spam is a fact of Internet life and it causes severe productivity losses in some cases.
This week, a major ISP by the name of McColo in northern California had its plugged pulled from the Web. After the yank, a massive world-wide drop in spam was witnessed to the tune of 75 percent. Security firms around the world confirmed that McColo was harboring some of the most notorious spam operations on earth.
Thanks to investigations and subsequent actions, however, the Internet world was able to breath clearly. Unfortunately, the level of spam is already on the rise again as spammers scrambled to find new breeding grounds.
Read the full report on McColo here.
