Maingear Shift Super Stock: Beauty and Brawn Doesn't Come Cheap

Maingear's Shift has sat at the upper end of the Performance desktop category for nearly a year, besting the latest and greatest that competitors had to offer with a combination of top-tier components, a strong overclock, and painstaking attention to detail.

But quite a bit has changed in the last few months. The relative newcomers at Origin offered up a pair of desktops -- the $7000 Genesis and the $3600 Genesis Midtower -- that bested the original Shift in general performance on our WorldBench 6 benchmarks.

Maingear's response: a new $8000 (as configured, as of 12/31/2010) Shift, fitted with "Super Stock" options. It's an updated variant of the previous Shift, tailored for extreme performance, and style. The super stock Shift is powered by the venerable Core i7-980X Extreme Edition processor, a mainstay in the Performance category. The CPU has been overclocked to 4.35GHz, from its stock speed of 3.33GHz. There's also 6GB of DDR3-2000 RAM, and four 128GB SSDs, arranged in RAID. That much solid state storage might feel a bit excessive, but you'll be getting exactly what you pay for: the Super Stock Shift is the first machine to break 200 on PCWorld's WorldBench 6 benchmark suite, earning a 203.

That's a mere 9 points higher than the Origin Genesis, for an extra $1000. What gives?

First, there's the signature Shift case. We've seen this chassis before: in the last Shift, and models sporting a similarly styled chassis, like Digital Storm's Black Ops Assassin. But let's review: Heat flows upward, and the Shift accommodates by rotating the motherboard 90 degrees. The latest variant adds a large, relatively quiet fan down in the case's midsection. It pushes the heat generated by the massive GPUs up and out of the case through the roof, keeping the decibels low by preventing the cards from relying too heavily on their own cooling solutions.

While tool-free, the case is kind of a pain to get into -- the side walls are latched securely, and take a fair bit of effort to tug off. That said, the Shift's bold red interior is striking, and reveals a great deal of care. Wiring is tidy, as everything is routed from the main cabin over to a compartment on the opposite side of the chassis, where cables are tied down and arrayed against the side wall. Unlike the previous model, the innards are readily visible through a large window, and a bright white LED light strip illuminates the components inside. You'll definitely want to show off your investment, as it all looks rather impressive.

Superior gaming performance comes care of Nvidia's Geforce GTX 580 -- three of them, to be precise. In our Unreal Tournament benchmark (2560-by-1600 resolution, highest settings), the Shift saw 226 frames per second -- the Genesis' three GTX 480s earned 208 frames per second. In Codemasters' Dirt 2, the Shift cranked out 207.1 frames per second, against the Genesis' 190 frames per second.

The overclocked CPU is kept in check with liquid cooling (complete with a custom, Maingear-branded reservoir), and the tubing is sparse enough to stay out of the way. If you decide to upgrade the CPU or swap out the motherboard later on down the road, you'll need to be prepared for a bit of wetwork.

Three of the available RAM slots are free, as are two of the 5.25-inch drive bays; the Shift includes a Blu-ray burner, and a DVD burner. There are also four more hard drive bays -- like its predecessor, hard drives are stored on sliding trays and can be slid in with ease. There's room for four more 3.5-inch drives, or eight more 2.5-inch SSDs.

The rest of the hardare (optical drives and GPUs, specifically) aren't tool free, so you'll need to break out the screwdriver if you want to tinker. The massive GPUs take up all of the available PCI space on the motherboard, and also leave the case feeling a bit cramped. If you have a few add-in cards to consider, you'll need to sacrifice a bit of gaming performance.

The vertically-mounted motherboard makes accessing the Shift's connections easy, as the computer's rear-end is now on top. You'll find 7.1 channel analog and SPDIF optical audio ports, an eSata port, a pair of USB 3.0 ports, a PS/2 serial keyboard port, a gigabit ethernet port, and 6 USB ports. One of these USB ports is co-opted by the pop-up panel that sits on top of the case, which offers quick acess to a multi-format card reader, Firewire port, and the requisite headphone and microphone jacks. The Shift's motherboard also offers a Bluetooth receiver.

Like the previous model, a removable grille preserves airflow and masks the wiring, giving the machine a seamless profile. The cables that would typically protrude from the rear of a desktop can be snaked through a gap in the brackets that form the lid.

The Shift arrived with a plastic binder-case, containing all of the manuals you would've received had you ordered the components yourself, as well as a user manual that details the ins-and-outs of the chassis. This includes software for making use of the Blu-ray burner, spare cables for the modular, 1500W power supply, and miscellaneous screws. The package includes a build log signed by the technician who worked on the machine, so you'll have a direct point of contact if you have any questions or concerns. Oh, and the Maingear-branded mouse pad is a nice touch.

Price isn't a factor in our reviews, and it becomes especially superfluous when reviewing built-to-order systems. But the Super Stock Shift still sits in a precarious position. You'll be hard pressed to match the blisteringly fast data transfer rates offered by the solid state drives. And where general performance is concerned, it is the fastest machine we've ever reviewed -- but only a scant 4.6% faster, by our tests. Maingear's signature style shines, and the internal paint job and lighting is sure to appeal to your inner aesthetician. But you'll have to decide if the Super Stock glitz is worth the price.

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Source: http://feeds.pcworld.com/click.phdo?i=893f00ae968b13f5a56cbe7c237078a9

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Dead Space: Scarier Than Clowns or Invisible Skeletons

To paraphrase Stephen King, if you find you cannot horrify, you go for the gross-out. EA's third-person "survival horror" game Dead Space (for PC, Xbox 360, and PS3) frequently horrifies and grosses out. It's also ironically produced -- if we're to believe Wikipedia and MobyGames -- by a guy who paints "fantastic sunsets, huge redwoods, snowy mountains and colorful seascapes." Let's just say there are no sunsets, redwoods, mountains, or seascapes in Dead Space, though there are buckets of blood, mangled body parts, mangled body parts protruding from bodies in ways you've perhaps never imagined, and imaginative ways to excise said parts from the skittering, screeching, spine-tingling trunks of creatures you wouldn't want to meet in broad daylight, much less on a derelict space freighter.

Does it matter that you're tethered to a story that trots out Gaming's Top 100 Tropes like it's teaching a freshmen level seminar? Not really. You're here for one purpose: to walk into rooms, have something pop out and go boo, fumble to carve the freakishly nimble mess of flesh into giblets before it eats your face off, then do it again times 11 or 12 hours of Space Hulk meets John Carpenter's The Thing. Did I say "carve"? Dead Space takes the counterintuitive and tactically intriguing tack that shooting off limbs instead of central body parts is how you kill enemies faster.

Besides, we all know by now that interstellar space distress signals are just Evil Hallmark Invitations to die messily and with a chorus of shrieking violins or guttural whisperers (or both) soundtracking your gurgling, squelching demise. Still, someone's got to go in with a bucket or a bazooka and mop up the mess, so why not a guy like Isaac (Asimov + Arthur C.) Clarke? He's the right name, and more importantly, the right profession: an engineer, which means he's Mister Fixit in a pinch, and this is a game full of pinches: Missing keys, broken widgets, mechanical puzzles, an A-list of malfunctioning hatches and elevators -- you name it and you'll probably have to crawl over half the ship to get it, then half as much again to carry it back to where you started from.

Which is all the excuse the design team at EA Redwood Shores needs to not so much kill the lights, as make them juke and jive while creatures that resemble amped up versions of a Clive Barker action figure lurch and scramble and strike stomach-upending poses. In fact it's the work of minutes, counting the intro, until you're kicking and hacking through snarling squads of creatures called "necromorphs," which just so happens to dovetail with a game design tidbit Bethesda's Todd Howard (Fallout 3) offered Gamasutra's Chris Remo in an interview published today. Explaining the way his own games start, Howard said: "I've always been interested in games that just start, and you play them, [and] the character generation is part of the game."

Scrap the character generation bit (there's some statistical health and weapons augmentation as you locate scattered power-ups, but that's it) and Dead Space fits Howard's bill to a tee, a game that accelerates from zero to 60 to "scared-out-of-your-wits" in the space of minutes (maybe five, tops, if you're a dawdler). If you hate lengthy preambles and interruptive cutscenes where you're standing around while other people blah blah blah, Dead Space is Just the Facts, Ma'am, or at least the facts according to a weapons arsenal that speaks the lingua franca of bolt cutters and stasis fields and other sundry energy weapons.

Of course there's still a bit of cliche to tromp through, like the part where you're conveniently separated from your crew almost immediately, the series of escalating encounters with pop-up necromorphs in dim lit corridors plagued by steam and tendrils of smoke, the solving one engineering problem after another to open doors that leads to more doors with increasingly complex "solve" states. There's the wonderfully nuanced if altogether familiar soundtrack with its inexplicable and unintelligible whisper sounds accompanied by shivery violins -- screeching string sections that slow to clicking arpeggios like fingers on a chalkboard plucking the ribs of a fishbone -- all keyed to make your nerves jangle (hey, it works!). You've got "found" audio logs that tell the story on the go, pretty well cribbed from System Shock (take note if you thought these originated with BioShock). And who can forget all those crew buddies who, despite occupying a completely different part of the ship, can somehow "see" every move you make, and who frequently chime in to offer clairvoyant advice?

On the other hand, Dead Space gets plenty right. The interface, for instance, is a thing of subtle beauty that carries off a few high wire ideas with watch-for-imitators-to-come aplomb. Game designers are always asking questions like "How do I scrub extraneous information from a heads-up display?" or "How do I keep players focused on the action and not a bunch of peripheral dials and switches?"

Simple. Make you the interface, or in this case, Isaac Clarke.

Take something as straightforward as "health," commonly a bar or dial or derivative of a number between one and 100 running along a corner or panel of the screen. In Dead Space, it's a stack of cylindrical mechanical vertebrae running up the back of Isaac's space suit, an electric blue exo-skeletal spine you can easily and intuitively monitor without feeling like the camera guy tagging along behind the hero (since the game is third-person, you tend to be viewing Clark from behind and slightly off to the right). Other attributes represent as parts of the suit too, like your "stasis" power levels, which feed an ability to momentarily zap a creature or object into slow-mo.

Bravo, person-who-put-all-that-together, and take a bow.

But enough said for now, because I need to stop typing and go back and finish the darned thing, which I'm masochistically and somewhat regrettably playing on the "kill me, I'm easy" difficulty setting. As it stands now, I'm calling "buy it."

Quick design-y sidenote: Throughout the game, Isaac Clarke doesn't say a word, he just grunts and gasps apprehensively. We're only afforded a glimpse of his face at the outset (and, I'm told, the ending). The trouble with this fairly common approach is that it makes you feel like a child at the outset. People wheel and deal around you, laugh or joke, talk to or tease you, but all you can do is sit or stand in mute repose. As soon as you've boarded the space freighter, you pop on a full-masked helmet, completing the psychological distancing trick that's typically employed to imply that you're the hero, not the third-person avatar you're starting at on screen. Maybe it's that you can see Isaac's avatar as you play here (instead of just a pair of hands, or "floating gun"). Granted it's a subtle, nitpicky thing, and maybe you won't care or even notice, but for some reason Isaac's uncanny silence drew my attention in Dead Space, and made me wish he had more than merely a physical role to play.

Quick tech-y sidenote: If you're thinking about running the PC version and you're wondering how this thing performs, try "amazingly." I've got it running at the highest all around detail settings in Boot Camp mode on a 2.4GHz Macbook Pro with 2GB RAM and a measly NVIDIA 8600M GT w/256MB VRAM and it's smooth as glass while somehow managing to look every bit like something that'd run on dual SLI GPUs in a monster rig.

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Source: http://blogs.pcworld.com/gameon/archives/007922.html

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United We Fall and Divided We Stand

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No I didn't get my� "title" an age old adage upside down� and wrong.� Sadly it is the state that we find our nation in,� and its people are headed towards an actual physical clash of civil disobedience.

I usually try to highlight the differences between ideologies not by pointing fingers but by trying to hold both sides accountable.

However I feel in this instance when one side keeps pushing it is only going to be a matter of time before the other side pushes back.� That is if they ever get a spine.

As usual its the neo-con chickenhawks in our society fueling the ignorant with lies and misinformation to stoke hatred and fear, for their own corrupt corporate gains and to take care of their contributors and to fuck their constituents.� Instead of arming the right wing with policy talking points, and legitimate information to counter the left they (leaders and spokespersons from the right) are arming them with the encouragement of violence and subversion.� Counting again on the inability of a certain segment of society to know the difference between a disservice or a service.�

When people are shouting out "keep government out of my medicare",� you know they are ignorant dumb asses marching to the orders of O'Reilly and Limbaugh.

They call for them to compare the leaders of the left to Hitler, they preach to them the ills of socialism, and lie to them saying that part of health reform entails the government to euthanize the elderly.

When people are supporting the continuation of the preexisting clause in health insurance and the escalating costs of even the shitiest HMO,� you can be sure that they are ill informed especially when they actually think that the government wants to euthanize them, and that Obama is not an American citizen.� If you believe in any of the things mentioned in this paragraph then there is a good chance that we will remain a divided country from here on out.

Hannity, Beck, and Limbaugh to name a few along with some elected officials from the right are on a daily crusade to cause physical harm to elected officials from the left and in general anyone that doesn't buy into their sick version of conservatism.

They and others like them are taking the principles of conservatism and are distorting the truth about matters that will help all Americans.� They like to hide behind the shield of conservatism while spewing hatred and hoping for the worst possible outcome of left wing policies without any regard for America or Americans.

They are no better than the Islamic terrorist that hide behind their religion to propel their agenda at any cost too.

When Bush and company had to deal with 9/11 the whole country rallied behind him including the left, not to mention most of the world.

Now with America facing two wars, rising unemployment, record home foreclosures, a collapsing economy on the brink of a deep recession or depression.� Where was the support from the right?

Maybe it is time for this country to split.� I am certain that I don't want to live in a country where the ideals of this type of conservatism are shoved down my throat.

Whatever happened to the Eisenhower Republicans? Now that was principled conservatism that you could live with.

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Source: http://www.thepoliticalpunch.com/2009/08/united-we-fall-and-divided-we-stand.html

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Bad Holiday Food: Tried Some Of That Lutefisk?

Copyright � 2010 National Public Radio�. For personal, noncommercial use only. See Terms of Use. For other uses, prior permission required.

AUDIE CORNISH, host:

What would the holidays be without good food: Christmas ham, sugar cookies, gingerbread, champagne on New Year's Eve, then black-eyed peas and collard greens on New Years Day?

We heard about some of the mouth-watering fare last week. But this week, we've asked you to tell us about the other kind - the stomach-churning kind. Those dreaded dishes that return to the table year after year after year.

James Farwel(ph) of Fairfield, Connecticut, writes: My sister-in-law makes a Jell-O mold with suspended Mandarin oranges with a special twist. The mold she uses makes an impression of a Christmas tree on top, which she fills with mayonnaise.

Ms. DONNA ELLERY(ph): I'm Donna Ellery of McAdough Falls(ph), Vermont, and I can only tell you this now because my grandmother is dead. Every Christmas, my children and I, we would receive at least one of these huge loaves of candied fruit bread. Everything was in that bread. We couldn't understand why they were so heavy. They were so heavy. They were un-edible, they were so heavy. You didn't dare to want to eat one.

CORNISH: One thing Gregory Blue(ph) of Chester Springs, Pennsylvania, doesn't dare eat anymore: rouladen. His wife makes it every year, supposedly from a family recipe brought over from the old country. Blue writes, it begins with what always seemed to me as an overpriced piece of beef thinly sliced and cured so as to render it dry. You then slice a carrot stick and quarter a dill pickle so that the two pieces are approximately the same size.

Blue goes on to tell us, the beef is rolled up with the carrot and the pickle inside, along with a slice of bacon and toothpicks keep the wraps together. And then, into the Crock-pot they go. He continues, you add enough canned golden mushroom soup to cover all the wraps and hide the flavor of the beef in the event that the pickle juice and bacon would not already accomplish that goal. You let them slow cook in the Crock-pot until the meat becomes unrecognizable and turns to mush.

Gregory Blue concludes, I have yet to decide whether this recipe has been modernized or that my wife's family actually believes that 18th century Europe had access to canned golden mushroom soup, toothpicks and Crock-pots.

Mr. JOHN ANDERSON(ph): Well, it probably wasn't until the third consecutive year we had lutefisk for Christmas that I realized the Vikings sailed icy oceans not in search of riches and conquest, but rather for decent food.

CORNISH: That's John Anderson of Washington D.C. with his bad holiday food.

Mr. ANDERSON: Lutefisk is a dried whitefish soaked in lime. And as the song goes: oh, lutefisk, it looks like glue and tastes like a shoe. By the time we had it for a fourth consecutive Christmas, I asked everyone in the family at the dinner table if anyone really liked it. Even my grandfather, a die-hard Swede and for whom the dish was prepared, a man who once ate carp and liked it, confessed to having trouble getting past the third bite.

That same year my mother had been in contact with a distant relative in Osteraker and she asked what they did to make lutefisk more enjoyable. She learned that since refrigerators became widely accessible, hardly anyone in Sweden ate lutefisk. I believe the combination of the two revelations that year prevented the meal from finding its way onto the dinner table a fifth year.

(Soundbite of song "Oh, Lutefisk")

Unidentified Group: (Singing) You smell so strong you look like glue, you taste just like an (unintelligible) shoe. Oh, lutefisk come Saturday I think I'll eat you anyway.

CORNISH: That's a trio of anonymous young ladies from YouTube performing that classic sing-along "Oh, Lutefisk." Thank you for sending in your bad holiday food stories. We did enjoy them in a stinky cheese kind of way.

(Soundbite of song, "Oh, Lutefisk")

Unidentified Group: (Singing) ...how well I do remember. On Christmas Eve how we (unintelligible) our big tree of December. It wasn't turkey or fried ham, it wasn't seasoned...

CORNISH: You're listening to ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News.

Copyright � 2010 National Public Radio�. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to National Public Radio. This transcript is provided for personal, noncommercial use only, pursuant to our Terms of Use. Any other use requires NPR's prior permission. Visit our permissions page for further information.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by a contractor for NPR, and accuracy and availability may vary. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Please be aware that the authoritative record of NPR's programming is the audio.

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Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/NprProgramsATC/~3/_MCB1q8gjNg/Bad-Holiday-Food-Tried-Some-Of-That-Lutefisk

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Welcome To Humor Vice - Funny Photos And Videos

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Developing Services with Rational Asset Manager

Governing, and Tracking the development of Services end to end is not a simple task.

In this movie, Dr. Gili Mendel extends the ALE series (by Derek Baron) and provides a technical perspective on the development of service specification and implementation.

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Source: http://rationalassetmanager.wordpress.com/2010/08/02/developing-services-with-rational-asset-manager/

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Windows Live Photo Gallery

Editorial Review of Windows Live Photo Gallery

Windows Live Photo Gallery offers a nice array of consumer-level tools for photo organizing, editing, and sharing.

On startup, your photos display in Windows Live Photo Gallery's Organizer. With the click of a button, you can sort them by Date, Rating, Person, Geotag, Tag, Name, Folder, or Published. Adding Tags, Names, and Ratings couldn't be easier. Simply open the Tag and Caption pane, then select the photo or group of photos and type in the relevant information into the appropriate field for that tag or select it from a list. To rate a picture(s), click on a star (1 to 5). As you identify photos as containing a certain person, Photo Gallery learns that person's face, and will attempt to recognize it in future pictures. We found the program's face recognition engine works rather well and learns very quickly. For instance, after we identified actor Eli Wallach in only two pictures, Photo Gallery offered his name in the People tag field for every other photo we had of him. Importing photos from a camera, memory card, or other external source is similarly simple.

Photo editing in Windows Live Photo Gallery is as basic and easy as possible. The one-button Auto Adjust can be set to include (or not include) Straighten, Noise Reduction, Color, and Exposure. You can click individual buttons for automatic correction of Red Eye, Retouch, Straighten, Noise Reduction, Retouch, Color, or Exposure. If you'd rather have some choice regarding Color or Exposure, you can choose from among nine thumbnail variations. Straighten Photo and Noise Reduction also have custom options. The Crop tool can be set to Custom or a number of standard print or display sizes, such as 4x6, 8x10 or wide screen (19x9). Choosing any of those options places a crop box over the photo, so you can adjust what portions of the picture are retained before applying the crop. Special Effects has only six duotone options.

The Create tab doesn't have projects like greeting cards or other novelty items offered by competitors (such as Kodak EasyShare). Photo Gallery does directly connect to Windows Live Movie Maker, and can easily download other tools from Microsoft, such as Auto Collage. When you click on Email, you're given an option of the size photo you'll share: original, large (1280x1024), medium (1024x768), small (800x600) or smaller (640x480), which will then provide an estimate of how large the file will be when you send it. For our Eli Wallach portrait, for example, a medium resize would be about 230KB--quite a reduction from the original 30MB file. After you download Windows Live Writer, it's easy to post photos to a blog. The Slideshow option is entirely automated. You get to select the pictures in the show, and Photo Gallery decides on transitions, timing and all other options. Unfortunately, you can't save the slideshow, but you can share it. You can share photos or slideshows via Windows SkyDrive, Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, and Windows Live Group. You could also add a plug-in for additional sharing networks. Other output options include printing to your own device or via an online print service, CD or DVD burning, and setting any photo to your monitor desktop with a click of a button.

Windows Live Photo Gallery is intuitive, with a very easy learning curve--which is good, since the Help is not organized conveniently. For consumers who enjoy using their photos, it can be a very useful--even valuable--program for easy, comprehensive photo organizing, and for basic editing and sharing.

Note: This link takes you to the vendor's site, where you can download the latest version of the software.

--Sally Wiener Grotta & Daniel Grotta

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Source: http://feeds.pcworld.com/click.phdo?i=5be786291226894c4958d87f7a0d2731

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