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Latest OCAU News

Sponsor Specials (0 Comments) (link)
Monday, 15-March-2010 20:46:10 (GMT +10) - by Agg

Remember to keep an eye on our Sponsor Specials Forum if you're shopping around. In there our various sponsors have specials and info on monitor stands, media players, fitness supplements, amplifiers, headphones, watercooling gear, office chairs, data recovery, web hosting and lots of other goodies. There's also a Glamour Photography Workshop coming up in Melbourne soon.

Monday Afternoon (10 Comments) (link)
Monday, 15-March-2010 16:02:33 (GMT +10) - by Agg

Our (other) man in Japan, Sciby, has a blog about all the interesting food he's been finding over there. That's right, he'll eat things like "Strawberry Chocolate Sandwich Lunch Pack" so you don't have to.

Cracked have an article on how games get you addicted in creepy ways. They call these "Variable Ratio Rewards" in Skinner land and this is the reason many enemies "drop" valuable items totally at random in WoW. This is addictive in exactly the same way a slot machine is addictive. You can't quit now because the very next one could be a winner. Or the next. Or the next.

HardOCP have played around with Eyefinity, in a video review. Given that Eyefinity gaming has had some time to mature, we wanted to kick the tires on it and see just how easy it was now day to get Eyefinity up and running with the latest games. We execute Bad Company 2, Supreme Commander 2, and Aliens vs. Predator for the first time and show you what it takes to configure the games for a 3x1 Eyefinity Landscape configuration at 5760x1200.

BenchmarkReviews compared some CPU coolers. Using both the overclocked 140W AMD Phenom-II X4-965 BE and six-core Gulftown Intel Core i7-980X Extreme Edition processors, Benchmark Reviews tests several new thermal solutions for our Best CPU Cooler Performance Intel/AMD Q1-2010 article. Notable entries include the ProlimaTech Armageddon, Cogage Arrow, Noctua NH-D14, Thermalright Venomous-X, and Zalman CNPS10X-Performa.

Motherboards.org have a video taking an Intel i7-980X to 4.02GHz on air. Follow along as we take the new Intel i7 980X up to 4.02GHz using air cooling. Special thanks to Asus/Kingston and Noctua for there participation in this review. Check it out, this is one mean ass system that will blow the doors off most anything.

HyRax1 spotted this personal propellerpack. Our research and development program has spanned almost 30 years. The Martin Aircraft Company was founded in 1998 specifically to develop a jetpack that could fly 100 times longer than the 26 seconds of the Bell Rocket Belt. Which reminds me, how cool is this hexacopter?

InsideHW compared seven H55/H57 motherboards. We’ve decided to gather round all motherboards available at the market at the time of this review and determine whether it is wiser to base the decision about which motherboard to buy on the chip itself or the accompanying equipment and capabilities. We’ve had a total of seven models tested, signed by ASUS, Biostar, Gigabyte and MSI, which are the most common choice of buyers.

Orgone500 points out what can happen when Google Street View unexpectedly visits. Unfortunately it seems to have coincided with Grafton and other centres having their streets littered with rubbish for the annual kerbside collection service and residents are now in for a nervous three-to-six month wait to see what will appear.

OpenGL 4.0 has been released, thanks wes. The OpenGL 4.0 specification has been defined by the OpenGL ARB (Architecture Review Board) working group at Khronos, and includes the GLSL 4.00 update to the OpenGL Shading language in order to enable developers to access the latest generation of GPU acceleration with significantly enhanced graphics quality, acceleration performance and programming flexibility.

Photography Gallery (1 Comments) (link)
Monday, 15-March-2010 12:37:46 (GMT +10) - by Agg

Here's some recent photos from our Photography Gallery forum:

Geeky Self-Portrait Contest Winner! (10 Comments) (link)
Saturday, 13-March-2010 21:50:55 (GMT +10) - by Agg

So, the winner of our geekiest self-portrait contest has been decided, and it was this entry from hoopstar:

click to enlarge

2nd prize went to DrFrag, 3rd to MoonShadow and a bonus extra prize to Gypsyking.

Hoopstar of course scores a triple-LCD monitor stand from Proluma! You can read a review of one here on Tweaktown if you're keen.

Saturday Evening (3 Comments) (link)
Saturday, 13-March-2010 20:46:40 (GMT +10) - by Agg

iXBTLabs have a 59 CPU roundup posted. As we promised late in 2009, today we shall sum up test results obtained with our Test Method v4.0. Initially, we planned on publishing the article in mid-January, but then we decided to do it according to updates in manufacturers' product series. January brought us nearly ten new processors which we added to this summary.

China have warned Google to comply with the censorship laws in that country. Minister of Industry and Information Technology Li Yizhong was speaking at China's annual legislation session. "We need to preserve our nation's interest, our people's interest, we cannot be relaxed with any information that will cause harm to the stability of our society, to our system, and to the health of our under-age young people," he said. Discussion continues in this thread.

A New Zealand inventor has created a cool-looking folding electric bike for scooting around the city. YikeBike is a statement about using smart technology to solve the problems of our increasingly congested, polluted, stressful cities. It is the first commercial expression of the mini-farthing concept, created up by a bunch of successful entrepreneurs, engineers and dreamers.

Pink Floyd have won a lawsuit against EMI, preventing EMI from selling individual songs (as opposed to entire albums) without the band's permission. Their latest record deal, signed with EMI before legal downloads came along, said individual songs must not be sold without the band's permission. They argued that the same rule should apply to digital sales as well as CDs.

JimX sent in this video clip with a Heath Robinson contraption. Or if you're American, a Rube Goldberg machine. Either way, they're cool and fun and I must build one one day. :)

A few places are reporting that new hard drives might confuse Win XP. The big obvious name missing from this list is Windows XP (and its server counterpart, Windows Server 2003). Windows XP (along with old Linux kernels) has, somewhere within its code, a fixed assumption of 512 byte sectors. Try to use it with hard disks with 4096 byte sectors and failure will ensue.

mpot spotted this Australian dot com crash quiz. Test your knowledge about the dotcom boom and its spectacular end. It is now ten years since the bubble burst. I remember it well, because I left my "real" job and started work full-time on OCAU right as everything collapsed. Still, here we are. :)

While we're quizzing, you can test your video game knowledge. You click on the image and guess what computer game they're trying to convey. Discussion here.

And if you're STILL not quizzed out, there's another huge game-identifying image here.

Saturday Evening Reviews (0 Comments) (link)
Saturday, 13-March-2010 19:27:26 (GMT +10) - by Agg