GeekwithEnvy

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Are Days of the Desktop Computer Numbered?

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Desktop ComputerAs I look around at so many smart phones and super light weight and thin laptops of today’s world, I can’t help but imagine the desktop computer fading out of the picture. For the longest time, it was said that laptops just don’t have enough power to do everything a desktop can.

Aside from making calls, mobile devices at best were used for mini-games, calculating a tip or text messaging. As our chips have become smaller and our wireless networks more advanced, we see our world becoming more connected while at the same time we become less connected, that is, in a wireless sense. I can do just about anything I need from my laptop and heck just about anything I need with my smart phone. Let’s not forget about the in between products like tablets, these things are great for handling day to day business and if I’m feeling bored at lunch I can open up my favorite game and update my achievements from anywhere.

To go even deeper, our devices look to become a nothing but a shell, a shell that connects to the cloud. The cloud won’t just be for storage either. Cloud computers may soon handle our processing needs. There is talk of cloud gaming in which our televisions connect to remote hardware to play our favorite titles. Cloud gaming would be a dream come true for developers who will no longer need to port from system to system or wonder how well the game will look and perform on a given machine. Why make thousands of small somewhat powerful devices when you can have everyone just plug into one massively powerful and connected “mega device”. It really can get hard to wrap your head around such a future.

There is however something that bothers me about this change. Perhaps it is the geek in me, but building my own machine is just the kind of weekend project I look forward to. Maybe there will be a market for custom built mobile devices with different CPU architectures for the same phones, a kind of a-la carte mobile experience for the uber geek in some of us or perhaps we focus our efforts elsewhere with the cloud. Mobile is guiding our future in computing faster than ever before and I can’t wait to see how this all evolves.

Wifi Analyzer

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This handy little app will help you optimize your wireless network as well as find others with ease, and all for the great price of free. You can get this Android app from Google Play and start optimizing your wireless network immediately.

WiFi Analyzer Screen Shot

Besides being fun this app is useful when trying to pin down which wifi channels are less crowded. It has an easy to read display with good amount of customizable features. With the the Scan interval option set at its shortest you can watch your signal increase or decrease in near real time. One of the view options included is the signal strength over time which i found quite useful when checking for interference. This app is simple but very useful and for free its definately worth checking out.

The Nvidia Tegra 3

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Nvidia Tegra 3 Chip
Nvidia Tegra 3 Chip

The Tegra 3 is one powerful little chip, featuring four cores plus a fifth “power saver” core to create what Nvidia is calling Super 4-PLUS-1™ which provides power when needed by enabling and disabling cores based on workload. The chip is made to deliver console quality gaming and superior HD video.
If your not familiar with this chip, this is the work horse behind the new Google Nexus 7.

The big thing I personally see with this chip when going through all of its specs are the all the power saving features and efforts to improve overall responsiveness. Mobile devices like the Nexus 7 have been noted for smooth performance, Nvidia attributes the smooth feel to its DirectTouch™ architecture that is designed to improve touch responsiveness by handing a portion of the touch processing onto the Tegra 3 processor.

The overall feel of the device has long been a deciding factor for me when choosing mobile devices. It really takes alot away from the experience even when there is a small amount of lag when navigating.

The Tegra 3 is also inside many other devices including the Acer Iconia Tab A510, Asus Transformer Pad TF300 and the Toshiba Excite 10 Tablet.

Solid State Drives: Why You Need One

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SSD
SSD

As we go over the long list of specs on a new computer we usually gloss over our storage options and focus more on processing power and memory, and for good reason as our storage options haven’t really changed much over the years.

Now, a new option has arrived on scene, Solid State Drives (SSDs). Solid State Drives are a whole new beast and they have a lot to offer. SSDs are comprised of multiple flash memory chips that are all connected together.

Being comprised only of chips means that Solid State Drives contain no moving parts and unlike the Hard Drives we are used to using, are completely silent when in operation. We can finally say goodbye to that grinding sound we hear everytime our drives spin up, but to their credit they have become much quieter over the years.

What makes this technology so amazing is its speed. SSDs read and write data at such blazing speeds that on some systems, can make Windows load faster than the animation that plays during boot up. Load times in games are reduced drastically and content loads much faster though out the whole system. It really shows how much of a bottleneck our old Hard Drives were.

However, it took me a while to build up the courage to buy one and put all my data on one these new drives. When SSDs first started to pop up in stores there were many problems with the firmware installed on these drives, some of which could result in a complete failure of the drive itself. Another issue was price, it was hard to justify the cost per GB. SSDs that have been on the market for a while now and a lot of manufacturers seem to have worked out alot of the bugs that plagued early SSDs. SSDs are becoming much more popular, in fact SSDs are now being installed in the new Macbook Pro (retina), and performance gains are obvious

Prices are still not nearly as cheap as the old hard drives but there are many deals going on right now as companies and retailers are trying to push the world towards this new storage option. Still think its a bit to pricey ? No need to worry, as consumers buy more of these drives I expect to see prices drop again.

I did remain skeptical for a long time about how much performance gain I would really see until I just jumped in and bought one of these drives. If your curious as to how my experience was, let me just say that once you buy one of these you will probably never go back.

Prision for RuneScape Robbery

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RuneScape

Two University Students David Emani and Jonathan Dokler were robbed at gunpoint of 4.7 billion RuneScape coins by a another student named Humza Bajwa.

At first, Humza attempted to buy the coins from Emani using counterfeit money but he was quick to call him out on the fake cash.

Once he realized Emani wasn’t buying his scam, Humza pulled out and air pistol, that looked much like a real gun, and pointed it to Emani’s head.
Humza then ordered Emani to call Dokler to have him transfer the coins.

Even though the gun was fake and the property stolen was virtual, Bajwa was arrested by local authorities and charged with second-degree robbery and grand larceny. The stolen coins could be valued over $3,000. Bajwa faces up to 15 years in prison for his actions.