Preaching to the converted آ– The scourge of piracy warnings
Friends, today I feel the need to speak out against a scourge that is afflicting the home entertainment industry. It's annoying, it's disruptive and it's treating the very customers that are doing the right thing, as criminals. I am speaking of forced copyright warnings and threats.
Copyright warnings date back to VHS and beta video tapes, with small text on the back cover and a ten second warning preceding a movie that you'd go to jail and receive a $100,000 fine if you attempted to make a duplicate copy of a movie, if you were lucky enough to own two very expensive VHS units. Then in the late 1980's, a small start-up company called Macrovision Corporation patented a process that confused VHS hardware and disallowed copying of content, which spelled the end of small mum and dad instances of duplication.
When DVD hardware was released in 1997, it too featured Macrovision protection, but tech savvy consumers were fast becoming adept at dodging methods such as these. In addition, the cost of DVD burners and DVD media and the ease of use and availability of DVD copying software such as DVD Decrypter would become prevalent enough to cause studios to be concerned.
When development of the next generation disc formats began, Blu-ray in particular courted aggressive DRM copy protection, to ensure support from studios such as Twentieth Century Fox, although most pundits would agree that this battle has essentially been lost by this point.
Whilst there is little doubt that piracy has had some effect on sales figures, there are certainly other reasons why sales of packaged media have reduced. To blame piracy as almost the sole reason is plain wrong. But if you believe the MPAA and numerous industry groups, they'll have you believe that the end of the world for home video is nigh.
Unfortunately, a side effect of this mentality is punishing consumers, the very consumers who are supporting their products. As discussed earlier, anti-piracy warnings have been a staple since the very beginnings of home video. But in recent years, they've taken a more annoying tone, with unskippable messages and warnings. On VHS, the static warnings were skippable with the fast forward button. Simple.
Originally with DVD this was the case, too. Then they became non-skippable. That is, the DVD has been authored in a way that prevented the next chapter/title, fast forward, or main menu buttons from being used. Then the static warnings became full motion video - effectively ads. These too were unskippable. Then this practice was transposed to Blu-ray. Combined with often poor load times for older Blu-ray players, elaborate and long load time BD-Java menus, and other commercials, these warnings add even more time that a consumer must wait before they can begin their movie.
This loathsome practice is treating the very customers that have actually purchased and supported their product with complete contempt. The irony is that if you had actually illegally copied the film, you could elect to re-author the disc without copyright warnings. So the very people whom these warnings are intended for, would not be bothered by them.
This practice must stop and a return to a common sense approach must be re-instated, before the good will that consumers who wish to do the right thing and support the industry, retracts their support.
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Thecus N4200 PRO Review - The 4-Bay, Battery Backup NAS with Many Features
Introduction
Last year we reviewed the Thecus N4200 just days after its release. The N4200 is still to this day the only consumer NAS that offers dual status display screens, but more importantly, the only consumer NAS to include a battery backup system. When Thecus first marketed their N4200 a lot of emphasis was placed on the new dual display feature, but we felt that the battery backup feature was the real standout feature.
In an enterprise environment power is regulated to a degree unseen in our homes. Businesses regularly spend a portion of their budget on keeping clean, consistent power flowing to their servers. In our home power fluctuates and in many places across the country you can expect at least one power outage a year. Here in the Midwest where I'm at you can expect several brief outages in winter as ice builds on power lines and trees, and again in the spring when severe storms disrupt the flow. One of the easiest ways to take out a hard drive is to remove power abruptly without a proper shut down sequence.
The Thecus N4200 PRO is based on the award winning N4200 design, but has a faster internal processor, now an Atom D525, and gets industry leading DDR3 memory. Thecus' new firmware, now up to revision 5, is also included and has been updated significantly since we started reviewing Thecus products.
Let's take a detailed look at the Thecus N4200 PRO.
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Corsair TX850V2 850 Watt Power Supply Review
Introduction
Back in 2008, Corsair launched the TX series of power supplies. It was an instant success and a power supply that many still love today. It provided plenty of power for gamers and enthusiasts and did so without breaking the bank. The TX series also offered great connector availability and longer cables for those with larger cases and those that routed cables to keep them from being seen. Corsair has been updating several of their power supply series and the TX series is the latest in the line of refreshments.
Fast forward to today and we now have the Corsair TX Version 2. The specific power supply on the bench right now is the Corsair TX850V2. On the surface, the TX850V2 differs little from its predecessor. Connector availability remains the same and if it wasn't for the sticker denoting it as a TX850V2 instead of a TX850W, you probably wouldn't know they were different.
Corsair took a good look at the internals and decided to make some changes there, bringing with it improved efficiency and higher quality DC output. Read on as we take an in depth look at the Corsair TX850V2.
Specifications, Availability and Pricing
Taking a look at the power rating chart, those familiar with the TX850W will notice that the TX850V2 has a little less power on the minor rails; 25A each. Power available on the 12V rail has remained the same, providing up to 70A under full load.
The TX850V2 has a great list of features going for it. Aside from the current, voltage, circuit, and power protections, the TX850V2 has fully sleeved cables. Before, the cable sleeving stopped just short of entering the power supply and now goes all of the way inside. The power supply has also been updated to comply with ATX V2.3. The TX850V2 is rated for 100% continuous output at 50C. Perhaps one of the largest changes to the TX850V2 is that the power supply is now 80Plus Bronze certified instead of simply 80Plus certified. This means a tad bit more efficiency has been squeezed out of the unit.
Those looking to get their hands on the TX850V2 shouldn't have any trouble as it is readily available. Corsair has set an MSRP of $139 on the TX850V2, but a little bit of searching will yield cheaper results as usual. Newegg currently has the power supply with a $20 mail-in rebate dropping the price down to $119, and that includes free shipping. Warranty for the TX series power supplies remains unchanged and they will be covered for 5 years.
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TweakTown's SSD Fill Testing Explained
Introduction
It would be difficult for most people to imagine the amount of testing that goes into a product review. I think most reading this have run a benchmark on their system before, but few can really grasp what it means to systematically run test after test without varying order or timeline. We run a lot of tests, several more than what makes it into a final review. Once you master the art of testing and the discipline of keeping a dedicated test machine, certain patterns emerge. Some of these show up in the tests that are published and sometimes they show up in others. When a test shows something of value and isn't redundant with another test, we typically bring that test into the review. This can sometimes be to explain something we saw in another test or at times add a way to look at a product.
In June 2010 at Computex we were given the opportunity to test an early sample of the ADATA S501. The S501 uses the Marvell 88SS9174-BKK2 controller, the same used in the Corsair Performance 3 and Intel 510 Series. In our post review testing we noticed that even after pounding the drive with our entire test suite the drive actually increased both read and write performance by a small margin. Typically, as a new drive gets 'broken in', performance decreases; this is called bringing the drive to a steady state.
We've always liked the idea of steady state testing, but found it is difficult to determine just how much pretesting needs to be conducted before a drive is at that point. It has been far easier to start with a fresh drive to record data and progressively work through the tests, always in the same order to keep uniformity in the testing procedure and performance analysis. To put it simply, if we beat the hell out of each drive at the same rate we retain apples to apples comparisons across all products.
When the ADATA S501 performed the impossible, we were caught off guard and left to think about what happened for nine months. After purchasing three Corsair Performance 3 drives we had everything needed to unravel the mystery and even found another oddity.
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HIS Radeon HD 6870 IceQ X TurboX Video Card Review
Introduction
March has just been an unreal month with the amount of launches we've seen. We saw both AMD and NVIDIA release extremely fast Dual GPU models along with NVIDIA releasing a new mid-range one.
If you thought it was going to quiet down, you'd be wrong, because April is looking just as crazy with more releases from NVIDIA and AMD along with partners releasing fancy versions of popular models.
Today we've got a fancy HD 6870 from HIS; the IceQ X TurboX. It's a bit of a tongue twister, but we're fairly sure we're going to love it as it carries that IceQ tag along with the Turbo tag, our two favorite from HIS.
Before we look closer at the actual card, though, let's check out the package that HIS has got gone on. Then we'll see the IceQ cooler they're using before looking at the specifications. We'll then finally get into the performance that's on offer.
The Package
There's nothing too interesting going on with the bundle; we've got a similar package design to what we've seen for a while from HIS and inside we've got a couple of power convertors, Crossfire bridge, DVI to VGA along with some paperwork and driver CD.
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Yakuza 4 PlayStation 3 Review
Many would say that last year with the release of Yakuza 3 SEGA had a misstep. Having decided to remove much of what makes the series unique, SEGA recorded a backlash almost like no other from gamers and sales dwindled as a result. SEGA got the message that western gamers were not going to put up with a game that was half the original and pay full price, and that lesson has been learned. Yakuza 4 has hardly anything cut for the western release, but does that make it a better game?
Yakuza 4 like the third iteration once again mainly takes place in Kamachuro, Japan, which could come across as a disappointment; however, it's fair to say that Yakuza 4 is one of the more innovative games in the series. The previous three games have focused on one character, but Yakuza 4 has four characters which you play throughout the game, however the structure is a little disappointing.
The main story of Yakuza 4 is set around events which occurred in 1985, the murder of a Japanese police officer and a major hit on a Yakuza family by another rival family. Each...... Read the rest in your browser!
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