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2007: A Retrospective Who scored (other than Christina Aguilera), who looks forward to the future (like J.Lo), who almost scored.. (non names here) and who joins Paris Hilton...
(Author: Michael Schuette, January 13, 2008)

Games Convention Leipzig (Germany)

Forget CES, Computex, E3, and CeBIT, the far and away best gaming trade show for anything gaming-related is the Games Convention in Leipzig, Germany held every year during August. Undiluted by the myriads of cell phone gadged suppliers that are by now dominating any other computer trade show, Games Convention is where one can meet representatives of any major clan and witness high-end death matches of mother’s finest cyber warriors and inspect hands-on the latest technological achievements of electronic gaming. There is a certain lack of implanted silicon, though, that shouldn’t prevent the actual gamers from visiting.

Hybrid and SSD Disc Drives

Conventional hard disk drives are far from being obsolete but they will become more and more archival media rather than “real-time” mass storage devices. Solid state drives are pushing into the market at an alarming rate but they still fail to offer the capacity of conventional HDDs at any reasonable cost point. A great compromise is offered by hybrid drives combining the capacity advantage of the classic electromechanical drives with the speed of a large, Flash memory-based partition or non-volatile cache like in the case of Seagate's Momentus drives.

Coolermaster Cosmos Case

Nothing fancy or revolutionary but great attention to detail and superb quality have made the Cosmos our favorite case of the last year.

Intel P35 chipset, ASUS P5K3 Deluxe

Maybe not the greatest on paper but certainly the best in terms of robustness and overclockability, the P35 chipset powers boards like ASUS P5K3 Deluxe, probably the best motherboard of the year.

Hybrid SLI / Crossfire

So far, owners of motherboards with integrated video had the choice of upgrading to discrete graphics with the mandatory side effect of automatically disabling the on-board graphics processor. Both AMD and nVidia are releasing motherboards now with hybrid Crossfire / SLI in which a secondary discrete graphics card can be used in hybrid mode, meaning that for gaming application a crossfire / SLI functionality is enabled whereas in desktop applications the discrete graphics are power-gated / turned off for better energy efficiency of the system. Hybrid graphics finally offer an upgrade path rather than a replacement solution. Needless to say that no inter-brand hybrid modes will be supported.

gOS

Based on Ubuntu Linux distribution, gOS, short for “Good OS” has the makings of becoming the first Linux-based operating system for the masses. Distribution chains include Walmart (for a nominal fee of $20.-) and everything is geared towards Google, which means it is effectively free. Following the design of the Mac OS GUI, Good OS has an appealing look and feel. Support is done primarily through a self-propelled user-feedback online data base.

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