Da-Banana

There are a plethora of free Linux games out there. Numerous FPS based on the Quake 3 engine along with numerous arcade style games and so on. As great as all these free games are the question still remains, can Linux be a profitable commercial gaming platform. Windows has controlled the commercial games market for years. Even Mac OS is lacking in this area. There have been some commercial games released to Linux. ID Software is well known for bringing its title Doom 3 and Quake 4 to Linux along with Epic Games and there Unreal Tournament 2004. In recent years there have been several startup companies that are handling porting games to Linux however most of these titles are older and lesser known. Linux Game Publishing is one of these companies. It was started back in 2001 and has ported Cold War, Shadogrounds, X2: The Threat and many more. If you look hard enough you'll find plenty of diamonds in the ruff like the new Linux port OSMOS that will provide hours of entertainment to bo...

OSMOS is a indie game released by Hemisphere Games. This game was released last year first to Windows (August) and then to Mac OS X (December) but it now has been ported to the Linux OS. The game costs $10, is DRM free and once purchased you have access to the Windows, Mac and Linux versions if purchased directly from the OSMOS website. If purchased through Steam, only the Windows version is available. The same applies for direct2drive. The game itself is simple in concept but surprisingly fun to play. This game can be easily played for a short time so you can quickly load it up and play a round or two if you only have a few minutes. The game doesn't require the latest computer either. I was able to play it on my HP DV2 with no issues on its mobile ATI 3410 graphics using the binary drivers. I also found it plays fine on my desktop with an ATI x1950 running the open source ATI drivers. This is quite awesome know that the open source drivers are able to handle this game since the AT...

The Intel Core i7 has been out for over a year now. It without doubt is the fastest processor and it's cost clearly shows this. The question is, is this excellent performance due to its heavily advertised hyperthreading (HT) or is this mostly and advertising gimmick. Lets take a look at the facts and see. An article at vr-zone.com shows that in the games Crysis Warhead and Far Cry 2 enabling HT actually causes a reduction in performance. In Crysis not even one frame per second but in Far Cry 2 it 9 frames shy. http://vr-zone.com/articles/does-core-i7-hyper-threading-helps-/6160.html At iXBT Labs, they ran tests disabling HT and Turbo Boost. In numerous cases, the HT either didn't help, offered very little gain or actually caused a drop in performance. In the games tested, only one game actually saw a boost in performance with HT enabled and it was only a 1% gain. The other 7 saw either no change or a slight drop. http://ixbtlabs.com/articles3/cpu/ci7-turbo-ht-p1.html Another te...

For about a month now I've owned the new Samsung T260HD. This is a big monitor with HDTV capability. This monitor is magnificent. So, first lets start with its benefits. First, its big. This monitor allows you to view so much stuff at once. You can easily have a browser, chat, console and music player up and running and not interfering with each other. The monitor has a nice menu system that allows you to control all its features. You can easily switch between the different inputs and there isn't a long delay when switching. The best feature of this monitor though is that it can do 1080p resolution. Actually, its does higher than 1080p, so when you're running 1080p, you'll actually have black space on the top and bottom. The monitor doesn't auto adjust to the correct aspect ratio but it can with a click of a button on the remote. It also remember the last ratio for that input...so as long as you are not changing your resolutions often, its not a problem. Now for the...

I've had my magicJack for over a month now and I have been very impressed with it. I sometimes am required to work from home and only had a cell phone, like a lot of people. This was a problem though because I would sometimes have conferences calls and would have to eat up my minutes. MagicJack was mentioned to me and it sounded like the solution to my problem. So far, this is turning out to be exactly that. With magicJack I can make calls from home for work and it doesn't cost me anything. Just the $20 a year service and Internet connection. The magicJack has many nice features including a address book, callerID, 411 service and voicemail, all included in the normal price. The voicemail even sends you an email with the voicemail as an attachment. A feature I was going to recommend, only to find out they already implemented it. As good as the device is there are some drawbacks. The major drawback is that in order to use the device it must be hooked to a computer that is u...

Well, my old computer has now been replaced. I've upgraded to a new faster dual-core system. I'm an AMD fan so I went with the Athlon X2 5000+ Black Edition. This processor is awesome. It runs cool at stock speeds but has the capability to be heavily overclocked. For cooling I used the Arctic Cooling Freezer 64 Pro. The CPU stays at a temperature of around 25 degrees. The case I chose is the Antec P180 (black). This case keeps everything nicely spaced out and running cool and quiet. The case is very heavy but has all the features needed. The power supply is stored down below in a separate compartment so it doesn't get heated from the CPU and video card. The power supply chosen is a 700w model from Thermaltake with cable management. This power supply is very nice and fits nicely in the case. It is also very quiet which is what I wanted and designed the computer to be. For the video card I chose was the PowerColor ATI x1950 512mb Pro with a Artic Cooling cooler. This ...

I received a motherboard and CPU that were having issues. The CPU was a Athlon 2600+ and the motherboard was an ASUS A7V600. Something was wrong with one of these two devices but it was unknown to me which, but my guess was at the motherboard, specifically the BIOS. I did some reading and found many articles on this motherboard. I was trying to find ways of trying to flash the BIOS without getting a full boot. After many hours of reading through dreadful amounts of forums I came across someone that said to remove the video card and boot with only a floppy attached. This would then force the motherboard into the most basic of programming and have it boot from the floppy looking for a BIOS to use and update. (This is only with the ASUS A7V600 to my knowledge) I did all the necessary stuff and the floppy started to run, I was so pumped. I waited several minutes until it was done. Let it go a while after that then I shut it down and placed the video card into the slot and started it up. Un...