Category Archives: hardware

Games hardware

PS3 gets its price cut (at last)

August 19, 2009 – 11:32 am

Finally. After months of speculation and general acknowledgement by all except Sony that the PS3 is too expensive for the market, and that no amount of brand loyalty, Blu-ray cross-marketing or theoretical performance advantages were going to outbalance that inconvenient fact, the inevitable has happened and the PS3 is now £50 cheaper in the UK. That’s actually pretty good; we usually get stiffed on prices in Europe so despite not quite being on par – a $100 cut in the US should mean about a £60 cut at current exchange rates, but they do have to hedge their bets there – it’s a healthy amount and I’m sure will help sales.

The new 120GB Slim is interesting too, especially since it’s priced at the same level as the newly-reduced 80GB ‘fat’ edition (as it will no doubt be known from now on); I’m not quite sure how they expect to clear the old stock when they’re priced the same with little difference except a bundled game. Although, I think aesthetically the old machine, despite being bigger, has a nicer looking design; the new one looks a bit plain, having gotten rid of the shiny looks presumably to save on dusting.

I’m semi-tempted, but right now I already have too many games to play for the time I have available – some of that is Fallout 3′s fault; I play a lot of co-op multiplayer games with my wife & friends so I only spend a couple of hours 1 or 2 nights a week playing ‘traditional’ single player games and F3 has gobbled that up for months – and I haven’t even touched the DLC yet. We’re still playing through new Gears 2 content (Horde rocks), and new Rock Band 2 tracks (we buy something almost every week), so really we’re getting loads of play time for our money these days. On top of that, XBLA fills in the remaining slots – if you don’t own Peggle, you have not lived, Trials HD is great,  and Shadow Complex is out today too. I’m just about finding time to play Dead Space a bit – I’m 8 hours in after a month! There are plenty of games I haven’t played yet, and the end of the year will supply more – L4D2, Brutal Legend, Dragon Age maybe. So, I don’t really have time for another games machine right now – I already have 2 I’m not using (DS & Wii). Maybe if my queue dies down a bit….

I wonder if the emergence of the slim edition might finally push MS to produce a slim 360 soon though. Come on guys, the 360 has remained fat, noisy and hot for almost 4 years now, with some improvements but not really enough. The PS3 slim makes it look like even more of a sweating hulk – time to get that machine’s ass on the treadmill! ;)

[edit]I’m disappointed to read they dropped the Linux support with the slim though. It’s the ‘official’ support they dropped, I don’t know if it will continue to be possible to do it anyway (preferably without firmware hacks), but despite the RSX lockout it was quite a nice idea, and I’m obviously always in favour of giving developers tools to play with rather than keeping people at arms length. I’m not sure what the reasoning was, I wouldn’t have thought it would be that onerous to maintain the status quo. Hmm.

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hardware OS X Tech

Apple owns the US premium retail PC market

July 25, 2009 – 12:37 pm

apple_logoThis was pretty interesting; CNet reports that according to NPD stats, Apple has 91% of the retail PC sales in the US above $1,000.

Now, let’s add the caveats here:

  • That’s retail PCs. Of course, loads of people build their (desktop) PCs from OEM parts rather than buying a prebuilt machine, so it’s safe to say that these sales are almost all going to be laptops, where Apple particularly shines.
  • Also, these are primarily going to be consumer purchases, because businesses tend to buy in bulk and not at retail (excluding the smaller businesses) – again Apple is far more popular in the consumer space than in business (barring the iPhone).
  • The above $1,000 range is a minority of all sales; a majority of people buy cheap rubbish ;)
  • This is only the US, where Apple seems more popular

So, the headline isn’t quite as accurate in its crushing assessment as the wholesome reality, but even so it’s pretty impressive. When it comes to laptops, I always buy quality because I’ve been disappointed many times by machines that looked good on paper but turned out to be poorly constructed, poorly designed, and had all kinds of heat / battery life / general robustness issues, which led me to always buy from the ‘premium’ range in the last 6 years or so. At first that was the likes of the top-end Sonys, but after being convinced to try a MacBook Pro, I’ve been so pleased with the overall construction / design and the ability to use OS X as well as Windows that I’m very unlikely to buy anything else next time (my next hardware revision will be 2010, I generally switch every 3 years, which is reasonable if you buy something decent to begin with).

The talk now is about whether Apple will start making a netbook, to compete at the cheaper end of the market. Personally I don’t care – I quit buying cheap laptops ages ago, I don’t think it really ends up being cheaper in the long run. Powerful and cheap machines tend to be poorly built – I’ve burned through (literally in a couple of cases!) far too many laptops that couldn’t handle their power actually being used regularly, or which developed problems because the build quality was naff. Cheap machines with decent construction but lower spec (e.g. netbooks) just need upgrading faster if you have my sort of needs, or are just a supplement to a ‘real’ machine, either of which costs more in aggregate, and the resale value when you do upgrade is usually not even worth considering. In the round, buying a premium laptop relatively infrequently works far better for me, and as such Apple already provide what I want. YMMV :)

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hardware Linux OGRE Personal

News Mash-Up

June 27, 2009 – 3:30 pm

I’m busy, again. A ton of things just bunched up towards the end of the month, and I’m on-site with a customer in Cambridge some of next week, so I’m keeping my head down a little right now. Here’s a news-blast though.

I love Ubuntu server

I’ve been setting up my new server. I’ve probably said this before, but for servers, Linux rocks. I’m ambivalent about Linux on the desktop, where I believe consistency and usability are more important (the Mac floats my boat the most there, and Windows if only because of MSVC++), but for a server Linux really brings great things to the table. Rock solid server apps, ridiculously good performance for the hardware (a mere Intel Atom 330, goes like a greased whippet), easy and most importantly infrequent maintenance. When it comes to distros, I loved Debian for its sensible defaults and great package management, but Ubuntu server takes that and makes it even better.  The added bonus of a LTS version that I know will be supported with security updates until at least 2013 is welcome too, because I like to set these things up and mostly forget about them.

I’m glad Ubuntu’s default mail/IMAP servers are Postfix and Dovecot respectively – they’re just ridiculously easy to set up. I’d been using Exim4 on my Debian box, which was the default at the time, and learned to dislike it because of the over-complex configuration (I’d been used to Postfix when I ran a Gentoo server before that). I’m also planning on trying out Bacula as a replacement for my manual backup scripts this time around.

PSUs hate me

One of my jobs this week was building a machine around some customer hardware which I was testing an abberation on. Having built it, I realised I didn’t have a spare PSU rated highly enough, so I ‘borrowed’ one out of another GPU test machine I had. It ran all day, then decided to die – this just 2 weeks since my server’s PSU died and needed to be replaced. It’s just bad luck – my decent APC UPS should be providing ample power regulation. So, I’ve ordered 2 new PSUs to make sure I have enough stocked in future!

Excitement is infectious

I was happy to show off some shots of my new & improved core terrain system for Ogre, which isn’t entirely done yet but was usable enough to get some nice shots out of. I knew I had to move on to some other work for a while but I was still pleased to be able to show off some initial eye candy (which BTW, is still very early – I haven’t finished yet by any means). I was glad to get some positive & constructive feedback, but of course now people are rushing off an including it in their projects, since all the code is public in svn. Despite my slapping a big red warning sticker on it saying ‘handle with care – volatile material’  and that they shouldn’t assume it works properly yet, people are hacking on it already, with some nice results I have to say (such as Ogitor integration) – but of course with many questions and issues. Such is the nature of open source – it’s a blessing that you get instant, voluminous feedback, and it’s a curse that you get instant, voluminous feedback ;) I hope to get more time to deal with the fallout from that if not next week (because of my travels), then the week after.

The OGRE Patch Mountain

Our community is always active, and it’s great to get patches. I do have a quite high validation standard for the core though, and processing patches can often take a fair bit of time. I try to spend a few hours per week doing this, but mostly that’s only just enough to keep the level static, rather than reducing the backlog, and it still spikes up sometimes (as it has this week) – that’s because even if I get an afternoon on it, to review and test things properly can eat that up very fast.

If there are any experienced members of the Ogre community who would like to assist me with keeping the patch mountain down to a small hillock in future, and are willing to adhere to our high standards of review, please contact me at sinbad AT ogre3d DOT org.

iPhone 3G / 3GS port coming soon

We’ve had a fledgeling GLES rendersystem around for a while, and obviously the iPhone / iPod touch are the highest-profile targets of that. I’d been intending to have a go at it later in the summer, but masterfalcon on the forums has beaten me to it and already has it running (with a few small issues remaining to be ironed out) on the 3G and 3GS. There should be a public release of that in the relatively near future.

3D Web Browsing With OGRE

I love this video. Nice work princeofcode (aka ajs15822)

That’ll do for now I think.

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hardware Tech

Server hardware scouting

June 11, 2009 – 12:29 pm

Ok, so I’ve been doing a bit of looking around for my new server builds. As I’ve thought about this, I’ve firmed up my requirements to the following:

  • Low-power, low-noise
  • 2 x 3.5″ SATA2 hard drive bays (hot plug not required, I’m just going to use Linux’s built-in RAID1 again)
  • All standard, replaceable components – no custom PSUs especially
  • Small form factor (as much as possible given the other requirements)
  • Cost-effective
  • Performance almost irrelevant

The things I have decided on:

  • CPU / Motherboard: Intel Atom 330 on D945GCLF2 motherboard. The Atom’s power usage is great (8W idle), the 945G chipset is not so great (25W!) but as a combo they’re still pretty damn good, and not expensive. VIA do the only other alternatives but I’ve had some issues with VIA in the past.
  • HDD: 2 x Western Digital Caviar Greens, because they’re low-power and run cool
  • 1GB miscellaneous RAM :)
  • No optical or floppy drives, I don’t need them (boot from USB flash drive, OS and other software will be directly downloaded)

The main problem I have now is finding a case. It has to be relatively small, and preferably stackable so I can put two of them on top of each other. Most of the Mini-ITX cases have 2 problems: they either don’t take 2 HDDs, or they use a custom PSU (or both) – I’ve been burned with having a custom PSU on a Mini-ITX machine that failed before, with no replacement available, and have no intention of going down that route again; everything has to be stock, so I can whip it out and replace it easily even if the case model has been discontinued.

Some cases come with an external ‘power brick’ PSU which in itself is pretty standardised (60/80/120W usually), but I remain concerned about the DC circuitry that the brick connects to in the case; if that fails it could be a pain. At least a standard PSU is replaceable in its entirety very easily. And plus, those cases that externalise the PSU tend to be too small to take 2 HDs anyway – all except the Chenbro ES34069 but it’s stupidly expensive.If anyone knows of any others, and has experience of the resilience of external DC power systems, please let me know.

So in the absence of a better option, I’m leaning towards a standard ‘cube’ case like the ThermalTake Lanbox – I have one of these already for a test machine and it’s good, if a little heavier and larger than I actually need (and even the lowest power standard PSU will be overkill, even if I go for an 80 plus certified one). If I was a case designer, I’d take this case, slice about 4 inches off the side and a little off the top, and I’d have precisely what I want – a stackable compact mini-ITX box which uses all standard components and can fit 2 HDDs comfortably. Is that so much to ask?

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