How sports sims became the real deal
Ever wondered how video game characters are able to replicate the unique technique of a David Beckham free kick or a Tiger Woods drive?
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How sports sims became the real deal
PC shipments boom - at least compared to last year
Gartner and IDC have just released preliminary numbers that show booming shipments in the PC market, but that's in comparison with the slump in last year's first quarter.. Worldwide PC shipments grew by an unexpectedly high 27.4% to 84.3m units in the first quarter of 2010, according to Gartner , or by 24.2% to 79.1m units, according to rival research company IDC . This is the best growth since 2001, although it's more a result of the recession-induced slump at the start of 2009. Still, PC sales are now approaching the one million-a-day level, which is remarkable for a market that is now over 30 years old. The resurgence even included a growth in desktop PC shipments, instead of the usual decline. IDC also credited "continued recovery in emerging markets, improved business sentiments, and growth of specialized designs like All-in-One PCs". Gartner's Mikako Kitagawa, principal analyst, added that "Major PC replacement demand driven by Windows 7 will become more apparent in the second half of 2010 and the beginning of 2011." The world's top five PC suppliers became a top six at Gartner. HP continued in first place, shipping 15.3m machines for a market share of 18.2%, followed by Acer (14.2%), Dell (12.1%) and Lenovo (8.3%). Toshiba and Asus tied for fifth place with 5.5% each, after Asus increased its shipments by 115%. HP also kept the top spot in the US market , on Gartner's figures, shipping 4.4m PCs for a market share of 25%. It was followed by Dell (23.4%), Acer (15.6%), Toshiba (8.6%) and Apple (8.0%).
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PC shipments boom - at least compared to last year
Looking for a laptop for home entertainment | Ask Jack
Neil Chivers has a shortlist and a budget but would like a bit of help I'm looking for a laptop for home entertainment, surfing the internet, photo editing, watching TV, YouTube etc. My specification includes a dual core processor with 2GHz+ speed, 17in screen, 300GB+ hard drive, and 3GB+ RAM, with Windows 7 Home Premium as the operating system. The models I'm considering are the Samsung R780, Toshiba Satellite Pro L550-17U, and Hewlett Packard Pavilion DV7-3101sa. My budget would ideally be close to £600. Is there any major disadvantage with the AMD Turion II Dual Core processor in the HP over the Samsung's Intel Core i3 processor, and also which is better: Windows 7 Home Premium 64 bit (HP) or 32 bit (Samsung)? Neil Chivers Three people have asked very similar questions, and you're all in what's known as the "desktop replacement market". In other words, you're looking for a big screen and fast processor, but are not concerned about weight or battery life. However, if you could find room for a desktop PC, you'd get a much faster machine with a bigger screen for less money. It would also be much easier to upgrade, so it should last longer, and ergonomically speaking, it would be better for your health. I still feel it's important to give this advice, even though no one takes it. Most companies offer desktop-replacement laptops with a choice of processors, and today's top-of-the-range models should have Intel Core i3, i5 and i7chips, which are now appearing in 32nm versions codenamed Arrandale. The Core i3 is the entry-level version and lacks the Turbo Boost feature that amounts to slight overclocking when the processor is fully extended, but it's still much more powerful than the old 45nm Core 2 Duo chips (codenamed Penryn) in most current laptops. After these come what Intel calls Pentium and Celeron chips, though this is now a matter of price/performance and branding rather than technology. (For example, a Pentium Dual Core chip could be a 45nm Penryn or a 65nm Merom design. It's not a Pentium in the old sense.) You can check the performance of the various chips using the benchmarks at Notebook Check . Tick the box that says "Still available (not archived)" then click Restrict to get a smaller table
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Looking for a laptop for home entertainment | Ask Jack
Google executive: ‘Desktops will be irrelevant in three years’
Google's prediction jumps on an obvious trend - but the implications betray the company's growing hubris It's likely that you don't know a lot about John Herlihy, the head of global advertising operations for Google. He's not a publicly-recognised figure in the same way as Eric Schmidt, Larry Page or Sergey Brin, and - like many vice-presidents at big corporations - he doesn't get a great deal of time in the limelight. But he is certainly basking in it today, after a series of comments - reported by Silicon Republic - caused a stir around the web. "In three years time, desktops will be irrelevant," he told an audience at University College Dublin. "In Japan, most research is done today on smartphones, not PCs." "Mobile makes the world's information universally accessible. Because there's information and because it will be hard to sift through it all, that's why search will become more and more important. This will create new opportunities for new entrepreneurs to create new business models - ubiquity first, revenue later." Various camps reacted in a mixture of ways.
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Google executive: 'Desktops will be irrelevant in three years'
Charlie Brooker | Want to read this article? Then enter your password
Forgotten your password? That'll be the 58th one you've not remembered this year, then In days of yore, we're told, people had less leisure time because everything – everything – was a protracted pain in the fundament. Want to clean that smock? Then you'll have to walk six miles carrying a pail of water back from the village well. And that's before you've tackled the laundering process itself, which consists of three hours laboriously scrubbing your soiled garment against a washboard and wringing it through a mangle. By the time you've finished, it's bedtime.
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Charlie Brooker | Want to read this article? Then enter your password
Vancouver Winter Olympics go green with recycled metals for medals
Circuit boards from trashed computers in Belgium recycled to provide tiny amounts of metal to make winter olympic medals The gold, silver and bronze medallions slung around winning athletes' necks as they step on to the winners' podium at the Vancouver Winter Olympic Games could well be made from the guts of an old Belgian computer. The manufacturer of medals for this Olympics is for the first time incorporating token amounts of recycled material into the medals. Medals historically have been made of freshly mines ores. The innovation – though largely symbolic – was directed by an Olympic organising committee which had vowed to put on the greenest games ever, raising the bar for London in 2012. Organisers aimed to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 15% from business as usual. The nine new buildings constructed for the games set a new green standard for any complex of buildings in North America, drawing heat from the ocean and exhaust systems, incorporating green roofs and solar panels. The village for the athletes will be converted into housing when the games are over. However, efforts to put on a green games were undermined by unseasonably warm conditions, which forced organisers to fly and truck in snow for the freestyle skiiing and snowboarding venue .
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Vancouver Winter Olympics go green with recycled metals for medals
Tech Weekly podcast: PlayPower.org, Football Manager 2010
This week on Tech Weekly, we hear from Miles Jacobson, who gives us the lowdown on not just what to expect from Football Manager 2010, but what the future might bring to the games franchise. Bobbie also delves deep into the PlayPower project, a scheme aiming to equip kids in the developing world with computer skills, via good old 8-bit gaming. And of course, there's top tech news analysis, from the likes of the unrivalled Charles Arthur, touching on iPhone pricing, illegal downloading and more, and finally, a look at what's been causing controversy on the blogs in the past week. Phew. Don't forget to... • Comment below... • Mail us at tech@guardian.co.uk • Get our Twitter feed for programme updates • Join our Facebook group • See our pics on Flickr /Post your tech pics Charles Arthur Bobbie Johnson Scott Cawley
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Tech Weekly podcast: PlayPower.org, Football Manager 2010
The great escape | Guy Dammann
In our emotionally deprived, over-administered society, could virtual reality provide the excitement real life lacks? Sex sells. It sells so well that even when you are wanting neither for sex nor for whatever it is being used to sell, you still find yourself having a quick look. Thus it was that I recently found myself answering the question "Bored at work?" by clicking on an advertisement in which the question was framed by a finely-pixelated décolletage. The bountiful bosom duly disappeared and I soon found myself signing up for a Civilisation -style game so clearly cynically designed to take all of your time and quite a bit of your money that it would be unethical to mention its name. Typically I am not bored at work. Nonetheless, I played three games of blitz chess between writing the second and third paragraphs of this article. If this is not typical that is because, often, I play at least five games between paragraphs. (My paragraphs have also become notably shorter over the years.) The site I play on used to have a statistic for "percentage of life" spent logged in, but they removed it because such raw confrontation with the facts of addiction is probably ill-advised on mental health grounds. In zoological terms, the evolutionary function of play among primates is quite clear. The games we play provide a training ground where we acquire many of the skills and fine-tune the instinctual responses that will help us survive out in the real world. Think of lion cubs learning hunting skills through play-fighting, or human children learning the rudiments of social inequality through musical chairs. In contemporary adult society, however, we can rarely analyse games in this way. When solitaire and minesweeper were introduced as standard on Windows 3.1, Microsoft pretended they would help develop eye-mouse co-ordination. Instead, they developed a way for millions of office workers to happily fritter away their employers' money. At best, they helped develop peripheral sensory functions that afford even the most thoroughly numbed minds intuitive awareness of an approaching supervisor. There is one reverse-evolutionary analysis that fits many of the gaming activities that today occupy so many of us, so much of the time. For while it is neither particularly useful to us in ordinary life to be able to drive virtual or real automobiles at breakneck speeds (unless of course that happens to be the way you make your living), or to mow through armies of zombies with machine guns that never overheat, we look to these activities for the sense of danger and violence, romance and death-defying physical agility that evade the emotionally deprived realities of our over-administered societies.
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The great escape | Guy Dammann
What are the most and least useful kitchen gadgets?
Which food gadgets are indispensable works of creative genius, and which are useless, cupboard-cluttering tosh?
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What are the most and least useful kitchen gadgets?
Microsoft profits and revenues plunge again
• Company's shares drop more than 7% • Profits for last three months fall 29% on last quarter Microsoft shocked investors yesterday by announcing another plunge in revenues and profits, sending the group's shares tumbling and leaving some analysts questioning the technology giant's prospects. In its latest quarterly financial results, the world's biggest software company announced revenues of $13.1bn, down from almost $16bn over the same period last year. Profits for the last three months fell 29% to $3.05bn, down from $4.3bn for the fourth quarter of 2008. While some of the drop could be attributed to customers waiting for the arrival of Windows 7 – due to go on sale this autumn – the company has also been struck by the tightening of the economy and a general slowdown in PC sales. Until the previous quarter, the company had never experienced negative growth since going public 23 years ago. The company's chief financial officer, Chris Liddell, said: "Our business continued to be negatively impact by weakness in the global PC and server markets. In light of that environment, it was an excellent achievement to deliver over $750m of operational savings." Microsoft said it had made the savings through streamlining operations and cutting thousands of jobs, but admitted that it had spent large amounts on legal costs and redundancy packages. Legal charges totalled $193m, while the company also counted $108m in impairments and $40m in additional severance charges. The results were lower than Wall Street analysts expected, with consensus guidance hovering at around revenues of $14.3bn – and shares dropped more than 7% in after-hours trading as a result. "It's a real disappointment … a significant miss," said Brendan Barnicle, an analyst at Pacific Crest Securities. Not everyone was depressed by the company's prospects, however. Katherine Egbert of Jefferies & Co said that although results were "tepid" there were "some green shoots". Among those prospects is Windows 7, the latest version of the company's operating system. With PC sales underperforming, Microsoft is desperate for software to be a hit - particularly since the 2007 launch of its predecessor, Windows Vista, proved so difficult
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Microsoft profits and revenues plunge again