Sharky's Notebook

Back in September of 2004, we ran a sidebar in the Dream Machine issue where a couple of editors made their predictions about what the Dream Machine of 2010 would look like. Well, it just so happens that the 2010 Dream Machine issue is on newsstands now, so we thought we'd take a look at how those predictions held up. First, the predictions in question:

So how'd we do? Well, Logan (now the Editor in Chief of PC Gamer) pretty accurately described the modern smartphone. Still, don't expect to see an iPhone on the cover of the September issue of Maximum PC any time soon. Josh Norem.... Well, the less said about his predictions, the better. We will, unfortunately, have to wait for another 90 years before we can test Will's predictions.

But Gordon's predictions... Not half bad! Being as he's right here in the office, we asked him to tell us about his predictions, and about the reality of this year's Dream Machine. Here's what he had to say:

"As some of you may know, I successfully predicted many months before the iPad launched that it would have an Apple OS, CPU, and no keyboard. 

But how did I do in my 2004 prediction of what Dream Machine 2010 would have? Let’s take a look:

Cooling: I predicted that liquid or phase-change would be standard in power rigs and I was right. I haven’t seen a high-end gaming rig without liquid-cooling. Of course, most of that is due to the hotter than hell GPUs, but the CPU also gets a lift from it.

CPU: I predicted a CPU with four cores on a single-die. Sure, I was off a couple of cores but my single-die prediction was right. That may not seem like much of a prediction now, but in 2004, a single-core 90nm Prescott was state of the art. From there Intel went to two chips on a die, but still connected to a front side bus, to dual-cores on a die and then two dual-cores in a chip. We didn’t really see the first “real” quad-cores from Intel until the Core i7 was introduced. AMD, of course, got there first.

RAM: I predicted 16GB would be the high-end with 8GB as standard. I’m off a bit. Today, I really believe that the standard enthusiast machine packs 4GB/6GB with power users running 8GB and 12GB.

HDD: OK, right on the money here. I predicted 4TB of “storage” running on “SATA III.”

Motherboards: I predicted that the BIOS would be gone by 2010 and I’m wrong – by a bit. Obviously, we’ll soon be moving to UEFI in the next 12 months so I was a little ahead of the curve.

Interface: Right on the money. The mouse and keyboard is still the premier way to game then and it is now.

Formfactor: You know, it didn’t even take more than a couple of years for my prediction of BTX being standard to proved wrong. I was wrong technically but I am right morally. I still see our clinging to ATX as irrational considering the needs of today’s computers. BTX may not be the answer but there needs to be some evolution.

But enough about today. I’ve been experimenting with overclocking to FTL  speeds using trilithium thermal grease and having returned from 2015 I can pronounce that Dream Machine 2015 will have:

CPU: a single 24-core CPU with graphics functionality.

GPU: a single multi-GPU card with a 6GB frame buffer.

HDD: Three 10TB hard drives on SATA9 and a 2TB SSD

Formfactor: ATX.

RAM: 72GB of RAM.

Don’t believe me? I’ll meet you here in 2015."

The Black Hat security conference attracts the creme de la creme of the security industry. This year the organizers even offered a paid live stream for those unable to make the trip to Vegas. Called Black Hat Uplink, the service carried a $395 price tag. But as security expert Michael Coates found out, the price could be waived entirely, thanks to “a combination of logic flaws and misconfigured systems which provided access to a testing login page that could be used with user credentials that were not fully "registered" (e.g. no payment received). “

Coates, who oversees web security at Mozilla, wrote on his blog that he was unable to attend this year's event and so decided to closely monitor it online. “In this process I noticed the new "Black Hat Uplink" service that would allow remote individuals access to streaming Black Hat talks from two select tracks,” he wrote.

“I identified a series of flaws that would enable the creation of an account with only providing an email address (e.g. no name, address, phone etc) and I was never asked to enter any credit card data. Odd I thought, perhaps you enter the credit card info upon your first login.” Upon completing the registration, he was faced with a slight problem: he didn't have a registration email do direct him to the login page.

“A few select Google searches and I ended up on a relatively vanilla looking login page. I have a username and a key, let's give it a shot. To my surprise the login was accepted and I was now sitting in front of the live Black Hat video stream.”

He wasted little time in contacting the event's organizers, holding off the public disclosure until they had fixed the flaw. He also revealed that Black Hat used a third-party solution for the video feed. Can't see them using the same vendor for the next event, though.

Every year, a wave of nostalgia comes crashing down as we make the final tweaks and finishing touches to our annual Dream Machine. Because we remember the amazing machines we built in the past, and know that the knowledge we gained and the lessons we learned directly influence our newest ultra-beast computers, year after year. So, as we wipe the sweat from our brows for 2010, we invite you to take a look back at four awesome Dream Machines of the past couple of years. Click to enlarge if you'd like to pick up some spiffy new wallpapers. Enjoy!

Sources are saying today that RIM's rumored iPad competitor is coming in November of this year, just in time for the holiday tablet buying season. The device is expected to have the same approximate physical dimensions of the iPad, i.e. a 9.7-inch screen. The tablet will have Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. The Bluetooth would be used to tether the tablet to a Blackberry smartphone for data.

Apple has, thus far, run away with the consumer tablet space, selling over 3 million iPads since March. Analysts fear that any company that cannot become competitive by the holidays will be unable to catch up to Apple. 

The Blackberry operating system has been falling behind in recent years, though a new version is expected to bring some improvements. Still, we were never completely happy with the Storm or Storm 2. Do you think a Blackberry tablet will fare better against the iPad, than the Storm did against the iPhone?

Until now, only users of Google's tragically short lived Nexus One had access to Android 2.2 (codenamed Froyo), but according to a communiqué from Verizon, the original Droid will be getting the update next week. This is big news for a large segment of the Android user base as the Droid was a very popular phone. 

Android 2.2 brings some useful new features to the platform. For instance, Google's new Jun-in-time compiler speeds up applications dramatically, and the browsers new JavaScript V8 engine makes web pages render much faster. We're going to be very interested to see how Motorola handles the mobile Wi-Fi hotspot functionality that Google added to Froyo. Carriers usually like to charge for the service, but there is no mechanism for that in Froyo. Many believe it will be removed altogether. 

No word on updates for the Droid Incredible or Droid X as of yet. Though, with their skinned versions of Android updates are likely to take a little longer. Any Droid users out there jumping with joy?

Until now, only users of Google's tragically short lived Nexus One had access to Android 2.2 (codenamed Froyo), but according to a communiqué from Verizon, the original Droid will be getting the update next week. This is big news for a large segment of the Android user base as the Droid was a very popular phone. 

Android 2.2 brings some useful new features to the platform. For instance, Google's new Jun-in-time compiler speeds up applications dramatically, and the browsers new JavaScript V8 engine makes web pages render much faster. We're going to be very interested to see how Motorola handles the mobile Wi-Fi hotspot functionality that Google added to Froyo. Carriers usually like to charge for the service, but there is no mechanism for that in Froyo. Many believe it will be removed altogether. 

No word on updates for the Droid Incredible or Droid X as of yet. Though, with their skinned versions of Android updates are likely to take a little longer. Any Droid users out there jumping with joy?

It turns out that your nosey neighbor isn't the only one interested in that cache of 100 million Facebook profiles that showed up on torrent trackers. Some major companies that you do business with are getting the package as well. By connecting to the torrent and recording IP addresses that are also in the swarm, some have noticed the extent of interest here. 

Among the companies seen downloading the data are Apple, Boeing, Church of Scientology, Disney, Intel, Pepsi Cola, Sony, and Viacom. It is worth noting that the mere fact that connections from these companies are present, does not mean this is a sanctioned action. All it means is that someone inside the company is downloading it. But our experience with corporate IT leads us be suspect Pepsi and Disney aren't in the habit of allowing employees to go around downloading torrents on their own.

It turns out that your nosey neighbor isn't the only one interested in that cache of 100 million Facebook profiles that showed up on torrent trackers. Some major companies that you do business with are getting the package as well. By connecting to the torrent and recording IP addresses that are also in the swarm, some have noticed the extent of interest here. 

Among the companies seen downloading the data are Apple, Boeing, Church of Scientology, Disney, Intel, Pepsi Cola, Sony, and Viacom. It is worth noting that the mere fact that connections from these companies are present, does not mean this is a sanctioned action. All it means is that someone inside the company is downloading it. But our experience with corporate IT leads us be suspect Pepsi and Disney aren't in the habit of allowing employees to go around downloading torrents on their own.

While Amazon and Barnes & Noble go for each other's jugular by releasing new and lower priced eBook readers, Sony says it's content to sit on the sidelines rather try to chase the lowest price eReader crown.

"Pricing is one consideration in the dedicated reading device marketplace, but Sony won't sacrifice the quality and design we're bringing book lovers to lay claim to the cheapest eReader," said Phil Lubell, Sony's vice president of digital reading. "Our global customers expect to get the best digital book reading experience and we’re concentrated on delivering that by investing in Sony’s award-winning design and original digital reading enhancements, such as eBook library borrowing and the only full touch-screen on the market."

Sony's comments are interesting because they seem to insinuate that the competition is cutting corners in order to lower hardware prices. That might be true with both Amazon and B&N now offering 3G-less Wi-Fi only models, but even their original eReaders recently came down in price.

What do you think is a fair price for a general purpose eBook reader?

While Amazon and Barnes & Noble go for each other's jugular by releasing new and lower priced eBook readers, Sony says it's content to sit on the sidelines rather try to chase the lowest price eReader crown.

"Pricing is one consideration in the dedicated reading device marketplace, but Sony won't sacrifice the quality and design we're bringing book lovers to lay claim to the cheapest eReader," said Phil Lubell, Sony's vice president of digital reading. "Our global customers expect to get the best digital book reading experience and we’re concentrated on delivering that by investing in Sony’s award-winning design and original digital reading enhancements, such as eBook library borrowing and the only full touch-screen on the market."

Sony's comments are interesting because they seem to insinuate that the competition is cutting corners in order to lower hardware prices. That might be true with both Amazon and B&N now offering 3G-less Wi-Fi only models, but even their original eReaders recently came down in price.

What do you think is a fair price for a general purpose eBook reader?

We’ve seen a few USB 3.0 external drives here at Maximum PC, and we do appreciate the long-overdue speed boost. It’s nice to have file transfers limited by drive speed again, rather than the interface—the 33MB/s maximum was killing us. And while we appreciated the boost we got from USB 3.0 in WD’s My Book 3.0 and the Vantec NexStar 3 SuperSpeed enclosure, the former was only as fast as the mechanical drive within it and the latter couldn’t even match the speeds of the drives it enclosed.

It’s great to have a USB 3.0 interface on a mechanical drive, but wouldn’t it be nice to combine USB 3.0 with SSD? With a theoretical bandwidth limit exceeding 5Gb/s, why wouldn’t you? Thankfully, OCZ did. The Enyo is a compact anodized aluminum brick stuffed with MLC NAND and a USB 3.0 SuperSpeed port.

The OCZ Enyo is beautiful, fast, and very expensive. And fast.

At 5.6x12x1cm, the Enyo is longer and slimmer than a 2.5-inch drive in an enclosure—it’s more the size of a slim phone. Its 128GB of MLC flash and 64MB of DRAM cache are controlled by a Barefoot Indilinx controller. So it’s essentially a last-gen OCZ Vertex or Agility (or any other Barefoot drive) and a SATA-to-USB 3.0 controller in a slightly different chassis. But the last USB 3.0 device we tested with an SSD couldn’t come close to a drive’s bare SATA numbers. How does the Enyo stack up?

Like a boss. We tested the Enyo on our hard drive test bed’s USB 3.0 ports (based on the NEC chipset) using both the latest NEC drivers and OCZ’s custom Enyo drivers. Performance was about the same using both drivers, topping out near 180MB/s sequential reads and 166MB/s sequential writes. The OCZ drivers actually seemed slightly more sluggish, with random-access times bumping up to .2ms from .1ms on the native NEC drivers. We were able to write a 2.79GB test file from our rig to the Enyo in 23 seconds (or about 121MB/s), while a 660MB folder of smaller files wrote in 11 seconds (60MB/s). Not shabby at all. The Enyo is USB 2.0 compatible, of course, but you won’t get more out of it than the USB 2.0 maximum of 33MB/s read and 30MB/s writes.

At $410 for 128GB—it’s also available in 64GB ($230) and 256GB ($820) flavors—the Enyo is slightly more expensive than a SATA solid state drive of the same capacity, which is to say it’s very expensive for external storage. It doesn’t support TRIM (because the signals can’t pass over USB 3.0) but it does have its own garbage-collection routines. It’s also stupid fast.

If you have a computer with USB 3.0 and you need fast, portable, external storage (and you have a spare $400 to spend), the OCZ Enyo is the best thing going. Given the obvious benefits of combining solid state drives with USB 3.0 interface, the coming months and years will surely bring a spate of USB 3.0 SSDs, including many that will surpass the OCZ Enyo in capacity and performance. But the Enyo is hella speedy, good looking, and available today. To quote Woody Allen, “Eighty percent of success is showing up.”

We’ve seen a few USB 3.0 external drives here at Maximum PC, and we do appreciate the long-overdue speed boost. It’s nice to have file transfers limited by drive speed again, rather than the interface—the 33MB/s maximum was killing us. And while we appreciated the boost we got from USB 3.0 in WD’s My Book 3.0 and the Vantec NexStar 3 SuperSpeed enclosure, the former was only as fast as the mechanical drive within it and the latter couldn’t even match the speeds of the drives it enclosed.

It’s great to have a USB 3.0 interface on a mechanical drive, but wouldn’t it be nice to combine USB 3.0 with SSD? With a theoretical bandwidth limit exceeding 5Gb/s, why wouldn’t you? Thankfully, OCZ did. The Enyo is a compact anodized aluminum brick stuffed with MLC NAND and a USB 3.0 SuperSpeed port.

The OCZ Enyo is beautiful, fast, and very expensive. And fast.

At 5.6x12x1cm, the Enyo is longer and slimmer than a 2.5-inch drive in an enclosure—it’s more the size of a slim phone. Its 128GB of MLC flash and 64MB of DRAM cache are controlled by a Barefoot Indilinx controller. So it’s essentially a last-gen OCZ Vertex or Agility (or any other Barefoot drive) and a SATA-to-USB 3.0 controller in a slightly different chassis. But the last USB 3.0 device we tested with an SSD couldn’t come close to a drive’s bare SATA numbers. How does the Enyo stack up?

Like a boss. We tested the Enyo on our hard drive test bed’s USB 3.0 ports (based on the NEC chipset) using both the latest NEC drivers and OCZ’s custom Enyo drivers. Performance was about the same using both drivers, topping out near 180MB/s sequential reads and 166MB/s sequential writes. The OCZ drivers actually seemed slightly more sluggish, with random-access times bumping up to .2ms from .1ms on the native NEC drivers. We were able to write a 2.79GB test file from our rig to the Enyo in 23 seconds (or about 121MB/s), while a 660MB folder of smaller files wrote in 11 seconds (60MB/s). Not shabby at all. The Enyo is USB 2.0 compatible, of course, but you won’t get more out of it than the USB 2.0 maximum of 33MB/s read and 30MB/s writes.

At $410 for 128GB—it’s also available in 64GB ($230) and 256GB ($820) flavors—the Enyo is slightly more expensive than a SATA solid state drive of the same capacity, which is to say it’s very expensive for external storage. It doesn’t support TRIM (because the signals can’t pass over USB 3.0) but it does have its own garbage-collection routines. It’s also stupid fast.

If you have a computer with USB 3.0 and you need fast, portable, external storage (and you have a spare $400 to spend), the OCZ Enyo is the best thing going. Given the obvious benefits of combining solid state drives with USB 3.0 interface, the coming months and years will surely bring a spate of USB 3.0 SSDs, including many that will surpass the OCZ Enyo in capacity and performance. But the Enyo is hella speedy, good looking, and available today. To quote Woody Allen, “Eighty percent of success is showing up.”

Word all over the Web is that on September 29, 2010, Nintendo will finally reveal pricing details for its upcoming 3DS handheld gaming console, and also give it a release date. Or at least that's what everyone is reporting from all corners of cyber space. We did a little digging and it appears the source of this inside info is someone inside Bloomberg's Japan operations, who claims to have heard the news during a phone interview with Mr. Yasushi Hiroshi Minagawa, a Nintendo spokesman.

The big selling point of the 3DS is that it will produce glasses-free 3D visuals using some type of parallax barrier display technology. Other features include a motion sensor, a gyroscope that willl likely be used to adjust perspective in 3D landscapes, tilt-sensitive gameplay, and a persistent Wi-Fi connection capable of downloading games in the background.

While it looks like we'll have to wait until late September to find out exactly when the 3DS is coming, speculation has the release date pegged for sometime in the first quarter of 2011.

Word all over the Web is that on September 29, 2010, Nintendo will finally reveal pricing details for its upcoming 3DS handheld gaming console, and also give it a release date. Or at least that's what everyone is reporting from all corners of cyber space. We did a little digging and it appears the source of this inside info is someone inside Bloomberg's Japan operations, who claims to have heard the news during a phone interview with Mr. Yasushi Hiroshi Minagawa, a Nintendo spokesman.

The big selling point of the 3DS is that it will produce glasses-free 3D visuals using some type of parallax barrier display technology. Other features include a motion sensor, a gyroscope that willl likely be used to adjust perspective in 3D landscapes, tilt-sensitive gameplay, and a persistent Wi-Fi connection capable of downloading games in the background.

While it looks like we'll have to wait until late September to find out exactly when the 3DS is coming, speculation has the release date pegged for sometime in the first quarter of 2011.

As the only option in town, Apple has been able to move a bunch of iPads to eager tablet owners, and don't think for a second Microsoft hasn't taken notice.

"They've sold certainly more than I'd like them to have sold," said Steve Ballmer, the ever candid CEO of Microsoft.

Ballmer's comments came while speaking at Microsoft's financial analyst meeting on Thursday, in which the CEO not only wanted to reassure that the future is looking hunky-dory, but that Windows-based tablets will definitely play a role in the near-term.

"They'll be shipping as soon as they are ready," Ballmer said. "It is job one urgency. No one is sleeping at the switch." Ballmer went to explain that the goal is "not just to deliver products, but to deliver products that people want to buy."

The problem for Microsoft is that it hasn't always identified which types of products people will want to buy, as exemplified by the company's recent Kin phone failure.

On the tablet front, it's been a bumpy road so far for Microsoft. The Redmond outfit ended up pulling its dual-display Courier earlier this year, and more recently, HP put on hold plans to launch its Windows 7-based Slate.

As the only option in town, Apple has been able to move a bunch of iPads to eager tablet owners, and don't think for a second Microsoft hasn't taken notice.

"They've sold certainly more than I'd like them to have sold," said Steve Ballmer, the ever candid CEO of Microsoft.

Ballmer's comments came while speaking at Microsoft's financial analyst meeting on Thursday, in which the CEO not only wanted to reassure that the future is looking hunky-dory, but that Windows-based tablets will definitely play a role in the near-term.

"They'll be shipping as soon as they are ready," Ballmer said. "It is job one urgency. No one is sleeping at the switch." Ballmer went to explain that the goal is "not just to deliver products, but to deliver products that people want to buy."

The problem for Microsoft is that it hasn't always identified which types of products people will want to buy, as exemplified by the company's recent Kin phone failure.

On the tablet front, it's been a bumpy road so far for Microsoft. The Redmond outfit ended up pulling its dual-display Courier earlier this year, and more recently, HP put on hold plans to launch its Windows 7-based Slate.

Oil immersion cooling isn't anything new, and long-time Maximum PC readers will recall our experience with Hardcore PC's oil-cooled Reactor back in December, 2008. Puget Systems, one of the few remaining boutique PC vendors to avoid being bought out by a bulk OEM, also sells a DIY oil-cooled kit, and it's just been updated.

The new Aquarium PC Version 3 is larger than any previous version and can now accommodate full E-ATX motherboards. But that isn't the only change.

"The biggest improvement is that it allows the power supply to be mounted on the motherboard tray, making it much easier to maintain the PC, as you don't have to worry about the power supply sitting on the bottom of the tank as you pull the motherboard tray out of the aquarium," Puget explains. "It also has more than twice the cooler power!"

To prove it, Puget dunked "the most extreme hardware available" into the revamped Aquarium, which consisted of an Intel S5520SC workstation board, two Intel Xeon X5677 processors clocked at 3.46GHz, 12GB of Kingston DDR3-1600 memory, a 30GB Kingston SSDNow V Series SSD, two ATI Radeon HD 5870 videocards, and a Corsair HX1000W PSU. You can catch the YouTube video right here.

The Aquarium and Cooling Module V3 is available now for around $670 and includes all the parts you need to send your PC swimming in mineral oil.

Image Credit: Puget

Oil immersion cooling isn't anything new, and long-time Maximum PC readers will recall our experience with Hardcore PC's oil-cooled Reactor back in December, 2008. Puget Systems, one of the few remaining boutique PC vendors to avoid being bought out by a bulk OEM, also sells a DIY oil-cooled kit, and it's just been updated.

The new Aquarium PC Version 3 is larger than any previous version and can now accommodate full E-ATX motherboards. But that isn't the only change.

"The biggest improvement is that it allows the power supply to be mounted on the motherboard tray, making it much easier to maintain the PC, as you don't have to worry about the power supply sitting on the bottom of the tank as you pull the motherboard tray out of the aquarium," Puget explains. "It also has more than twice the cooler power!"

To prove it, Puget dunked "the most extreme hardware available" into the revamped Aquarium, which consisted of an Intel S5520SC workstation board, two Intel Xeon X5677 processors clocked at 3.46GHz, 12GB of Kingston DDR3-1600 memory, a 30GB Kingston SSDNow V Series SSD, two ATI Radeon HD 5870 videocards, and a Corsair HX1000W PSU. You can catch the YouTube video right here.

The Aquarium and Cooling Module V3 is available now for around $670 and includes all the parts you need to send your PC swimming in mineral oil.

Image Credit: Puget

Fast approaching the size of major international brand vendors, smartphone maker HTC said it expects to ship upwards of 6.5 million handsets in the third quarter of 2010. If HTC reaches its goal -- and there's every reason to believe the company will -- it will represent a 132 percent increase from the same quarter one year ago.

HTC's rise as a dominant handset maker has come seemingly overnight. The reason, says company CFO Cheng Hui-ming, is that HTC thrived largely as a niche player, riding the waves of a single hot product every year. In more recent times, HTC has been able to pump out several popular smartphones simultaneously, and that's made all the difference in the world.

As Cheng sees it, HTC will continue to be a major force rather than this being a temporary upswing in shipments. The company plans to increase monthly capacity at both its Taoyuan and Shanghai plants to two million and one million units, respectively, in 3Q10, Cheng said.

Fast approaching the size of major international brand vendors, smartphone maker HTC said it expects to ship upwards of 6.5 million handsets in the third quarter of 2010. If HTC reaches its goal -- and there's every reason to believe the company will -- it will represent a 132 percent increase from the same quarter one year ago.

HTC's rise as a dominant handset maker has come seemingly overnight. The reason, says company CFO Cheng Hui-ming, is that HTC thrived largely as a niche player, riding the waves of a single hot product every year. In more recent times, HTC has been able to pump out several popular smartphones simultaneously, and that's made all the difference in the world.

As Cheng sees it, HTC will continue to be a major force rather than this being a temporary upswing in shipments. The company plans to increase monthly capacity at both its Taoyuan and Shanghai plants to two million and one million units, respectively, in 3Q10, Cheng said.