Google’s upcoming set-top box effort, Google TV, which has already been announced will be built into some upcoming displays from multiple different manufacturers, has been detailed in a video by the search giant in an effort to explain just what to expect from the device.
The biggest issue with Google TV is that we know an awful lot about the device without knowing, in any explicit sense, just what it is it’s supposed to do. We’ve known for a while that it runs a custom build of Google’s mobile operating system, Android, and that Intel seems to have had a hand in the hardware side of things, but other than that word has been relatively thin on just what we can actually expect the thing to do if we shell out for it. Now though, Google had released a video to detail just what the whole affair does, and while none of it is too surprising, it does shed some light on the device.
It seems that the latest MMO offering on the go, Cryptic Studio’s Star Trek Online, has proved to be just a little too popular at launch, with many reporting issues connecting to the game’s servers.
Sometimes, I wish new Atari and old Atari were the same company...
Indeed, word comes via Cryptic Studios itself of the issue, which has dogged it since the launch of its beta phase (which saw invitations issued to all those who had opted to pre-order the game) when complaints began to emerge of long queues for those looking to play. Cryptic had reassured users that it would be upgrading to keep its capacity in line with subscriptions, but it seems that the launch has been successful enough for those upgrades not quite to keep up.
The official line from Cryptic’s Star Trek Online team is that,
It seems that Facebook has been picking up speed since the implementation of a new PHP compiler, with reports indicating as much as an 80% speed increase.
For now, people are just hoping Facebook open sources its new PHP arrangement...
Word of the new, internally developed PHP compiler comes via ReadWriteWeb, which indicates that Facebook has “rewritten the PHP runtime from scratch,” resulting in that nice 80% bump. While all of this is still technically unofficial, it’s been confirmed by a fairly wide array of different sources, so it’s being treated as “all but announced” for now.
It’s emerged that Microsoft has patented a system by which peer-to-peer (P2P) sharing, or downloading via bittorrent, would see the integration of digital rights management (DRM).
Word comes via TomsHardware of the patent filed by Microsoft, which would help the company roll out software through digital distribution without putting too much weight on its own servers. It’s an interesting distribution model, and one that usually allows users to have their content on release day without fear of stock shortages. Of course, the general issue with heavy-duty digital distribution is the stress on servers, which generally results in slowed downloads on busy days; this is neatly turned to an advantage using P2P networking.
Microsoft is currently investigating reported instances of updates to Windows 7’s security that have apparently caused some machines to boot directly to a black screen or a black screen with a single icon present.
According to a report from PC World, Microsoft has been fairly quick to respond to the “black screen of death,” as it’s been called, saying that the issue has been restricted to a fairly narrow band of users, but also admitting that the issue is, for those who’ve encountered it, “massively debilitating.”
For anyone who hasn’t seen one before, every Thursday we do a nice and quick article on a single piece of hardware we’ve either bought ourselves (as in, a member of staff) or had our beady little eyes on for a while. All that means is that you guys can be absolutely sure of the recommendation; if nothing else, we like it enough to buy it ourselves.
Click the image to follow through to the main page for the ShareSpace
This week’s product spotlight is on Western Digital’s ShareSpace Network, which is fundamentally just a really fantastic NAS setup. While it’ll set you back a pretty penny at €699, it boasts fully 4TB of storage, which for your nearly €700 might not seem that much, but the option to throw it into RAID 0, RAID 1 or RAID 5 means that it’s attractive for anyone a bit paranoid about one of their discs failing on them.
As you’d reasonably expect, it’s network ready and all that. In reality it’s mainly for people with a very small business or a large home setup that they’d like to keep centralised (datawise) or well backed up without having to worry about the hassles of setting up your own server and installing FreeNAS on it.
As Shleton from our RMA department put it, “There’s an 8TB version too, but for extra cost, but you can even just buy the 2TB one, and when it gets full take out the HDDs, stick them in your computer (easy) and then upgrade the new drives to 4 or 8TB for substantially less money.”
You can grab the 4TB Western Digital Sharespace Network here for €699.
One of the products we find sees a lot of traffic is small NAS (Network Attached Storage) setups. Admittedly, they’re a very specific way to get a relatively general piece of work done, but the fact is that buying an independent piece of NAS hardware is, for most people, one of the more expensive ways of getting a healthy block of storage onto a network. It’s significantly cheaper to just rebuild an old machine, throw in a few extra hard drives and set it up as a file server.
Not all file servers look like this... household ones are a lot less monstrous
Some NAS devices do offer pretty attractive extra features, like this AC Ryan PlayOn, which boasts both 1TB of internal storage and the ability to play media directly from the box to an attached display (in HDMI) without needing the intervention of a TV. The fact is that some of our more capable readers would be far better served by simply opting to recommission an older desktop to act as a file server, and it’s a lot easier than you might think.
