For the price of a low-end PC plus a monthly fee you’ll soon be able to play ultra-high-end games like Borderlands, Mass Effect 2, Assassin’s Creed 2, and Crysis. According to VentureBeat, the service, dubbed OnLive, will launch in June after eight years of research and development, offer up to 720p-caliber high-def gameplay, and cost $14.95 a month.
Billed as a games-on-demand service, OnLive handles all the intensive game processing on the server side, so your local computer doesn’t have to. What you see is tantamount to a “screen-scrape” video feed send to your client device. All the intensive computing that might normally convert the insides of your homebrew rig into a mini-bake oven renders instead in the cloud.
It’s an ancient concept in computing terms–the model’s existed since mainframes and green-screens, in fact–but until recently, no one’s come up with a system to transfer high-bandwidth video with low enough latency to pass muster with gamers.
This is an interesting VPN concept, perhaps to allow you to run a home https web server, but to make your content available to users stuck behind the Great Firewall, etc.
Like rssCloud, PuSH adds a line to your feed to let clients know where they can send PuSH subscription requests. In the RSS2 feed this looks like . . .
a (very) tiny BitTorrent client on a (very) tiny USB
µTorrent for USB combines a special edition of the world’s most popular BitTorrent client on a tiny microSD powered USB for ultimate portability and convenience.
No installation required
μTorrent for USB is a pre-installed special edition of µTorrent that runs directly from the USB. There’s no installation or administrative privileges required to use the client.
Self contained downloads
All application files (µTorrent executable, configuration files, temporary files) and file downloads (torrents, data files) stay on the USB, not on the host PC. In addition, there are no leftovers on the local hard drive or the Windows registry.
Transportable
µTorrent for USB is a fully portable torrent client that enables torrenting anywhere you go. Stop your download at any time and take the USB with you. Next time you are at a PC, just insert the USB and pick up where you left off. With µTorrent for USB, take your torrents anywhere you go – home, school, cafe, work.
Available NOW in 8GB or 16GB
Choose the size of USB that fits your lifestyle. Each USB is fully functional as a traditional storage drive with the added convenience of microSD. Downloaded content can be copied or backed-up to other disk and USB flash memory or its microSD card is compatible with many TVs, STBs, and mobile phones.
Product contents
USB Flash Memory drive adaptor
microSD flash memory card (8GB or 16GB)
Pre-installed µTorrent for USB application and configuration files
System Requirements
Windows XP, Vista or 7
For Macintosh, µTorrent will not work. You can use as USB memory.
Control what files and programs are stored into memory (loaded at boot time)
Create temporary disks for added security
Speed up disk-to-disk activities such as video encryption and audio ripping
Accelerate databases
Reduce compile times
RAMDisk features:
Freeware version (up to 4 GB disk size). Please register with Dataram for larger disks (there is no charge).
Universal version for WindowsXP/2000, Vista (32 and 64-bit) Home Basic, Home Premium, Business and Ultimate, Windows Server 2003 Standard, Web and Enterprise Edition
Up to 32 GB disk in Vista and Windows 2003, 2008 Server (registered mode)
Save and load features allow RAMDisk to appear as persistent storage even through reboots
Security is an important topic these days. However, it’s typically only recognized as important by professionals. If security were to suddenly turn into a mainstream selling point, though, then perhaps it’d make more sense for companies like Intel to promote it.
The Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) has already been adopted by the United States government—including the NSA—along with many other institutions. Intel’s 32nm Clarkdale-based CPUs (only the Core i5-600-series, so far) now promise significant performance benefits for AES encryption and decryption via new instructions. Today we’re looking at the real-world benefits of Intel’s AES-NI functionality, comparing a dual-core Core i5-661 with AES New Instructions (AES-NI) to a quad-core Core i7-870, which lacks the new encryption acceleration capability.
Encryption is used much more intensively than you might suspect. Consider Internet sites that hold you sensitive personal information, or utilize sensitive data for transactions. They all use protocols like Transport Layer Security (TLS) or Secure Sockets Layer (SSL). VoIP, instant messaging, and email may also be protected with these protocols. Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) and electronic payments are other popular encryption applications.
However, TLS and SSL are cryptographic protocols for secure communication, while AES is a general-purpose encryption standard. It can be used to encrypt individual files, data containers, archive files, entire drives (including thumb drives), and even multi-drive volumes. AES can be implemented in software, and there are products based on hardware acceleration as well, since encryption/decryption represent a rather significant workload. Solutions like TrueCrypt or Microsoft’s BitLocker, which is part of Windows Vista and Windows 7 Ultimate, are capable of encrypting entire partitions on the fly.
(for the rest of the first page, and all the other pages, hit up Tom’s)
It worked fine for me in Windows 7 on the first shot. While I’d already been using Cygwin, the instructions were clear, though I did follow the Vista section at step 5. The version I used was dated November 18, 2009.
jsSHA is a JavaScript implementation of the entire family of SHA hashes as defined in FIPS 180-2 (SHA-1, SHA-224, SHA-256, SHA-384, and SHA-512) as well as HMAC. Despite JavaScript not natively supporting 64-bit operations, SHA-384 and SHA-512 are even implemented! jsSHA is also 100% cross-browser compatible.
jsSHA Security Blog
Got feedback on jsSHA? Want to read about how to use jsSHA? Check out the developer’s Blog and leave feedback!
Newest Release / Download
As of 22 July 2009, the newest release is v1.2 and can be found at SourceForge
N.B. I was sorely tempted to post an image relating to the futility of trying to contain crypto / ideas that was penned on flesh, in an image titled “howto-export-crypto-system-from-usa.jpg” (!)
I relish making changes to my primary work PC only slightly more than dental surgery. Things can go wrong. My productivity vanishes. I’ll deal with work-arounds for months before cracking open my case for an upgrade.
And yet, I just published a story called “Can Bargain SSDs Give Windows A Quantum Performance Leap?” for Tom’s Hardware, and what I’d found when doing that story blew my mind. I was used to measuring Windows startup times in minutes, literally being able to make lunch in the time it took to go from power off to having all of my normal apps loaded. I built a similar configuration on my bench, placed it on Western Digital’s VelociRaptor (the fastest SATA hard drive around), and got a full load time of 65 seconds. Then I cloned the configuration to Kingston’s entry-level SSDNow V-Series SSD and saw the load time plummet to only 27 seconds. Feeling like Will Smith at the controls of some fresh alien tech, I hollered, “Oh, I have got to get my Windows 7 one of these!”
We heard a lot of off-the-record praise from readers after publishing our recent feature on laptop SSD upgrading. Experienced users tend to populate our forums, but those who have never done a hands-on system upgrade tend to hang out invisibly in the background and it seems they appreciated a step-by-step guide to the upgrading process. It’s primarily for this latter group that we’re returning now with a companion piece on how to take your desktop PC through the same process…only I’ve added a new twist, as you’ll see below . . .
)
