NerdZone Articles

Today, Sky launched Sky Glass, the new way to get the full Sky service, available 18th October, by streaming via the internet instead of a dish and... it's interesting, but in all the wrong ways. The issue is choice, or rather the way Sky denies choice while promoting it as a must-have premium product and the ramifications of this. Click to enlarge As a Sky customer, I've been looking forward to the new Sky-by-Internet service for a good couple of years now in case it offered something better than the hybrid satellite and internet service that they've got now with Sky Q, which works quite well (annoying design niggles with the Sky Q firmware aside). As such, I was expecting a new version of the Sky Q box or something similar...

It might surprise you, but there's no such thing as an analog output from a digital computer. The output remains digital, no matter what. This might seem a strange thing to say when there are things like an "analog" audio port on a sound card for connecting to analog speakers, or an "analog" VGA port on older graphics cards for connecting to an analog CRT monitor, but it's true. What they really output are analog compatible digital signals. Allow me to explain. Your regular PC, smartphone, games console etc, being digital, works on the base 2* (binary) number system, so any analog inputs from the real world have to first be digitised by an analog to digital converter (ADC). This means that the signal is now represented by a stream of...

I'm a PC gamer and everyone knows that the PC is the most powerful gaming platform with the best graphics, but, it does come at a high dollar price, especially the graphics cards... The other downsides are the inevitable glitches and fiddling with Windows patches, drivers and game settings required to make games run just right (hopefully). It's all a bit of an inconvenient faff if I'm honest, something that console peasants users usually don't have to put up with. Now, I game online cross platform with friends where it's a heady mixture of PCs, PlayStations and Xboxes in crossplay mode, which is just asking for trouble, bless. And true to form, it's normally quicker and more convenient for the console gamers to be up and running, but...

See bottom for update. I keep having to RMA the damned things since they fail after a short time. I want to say upfront that all these cards have never been overclocked and for the vast amount of time are just sitting there, rendering the desktop, so are hardly stressed at all. The CPU does have an overclock, but a pretty small one. It's a 2700K running at 4GHz with 16GB RAM in two sticks. My last high end card which still works properly, is the ancient MSI 780 Ti Gaming that I've got (I have two for SLI goodness at the time). Both still work flawlessly today, even after a lot of use. In 2017 I upgraded to a Palit GTX 1080 GameRock Premium. Great card and great performance while it worked for the first couple of months, then went...

In 1980s during period of Western oppression of great Soviet Union, imperialist raiders of US & A and British Empire sought to steal Soviet innovations and prevent superior Soviet technology from benefitting the world. Nonetheless, despite attempts of evil capitalists to hold back progress, majestic Soviet Union invented many computers using finest materials and components: All of these and many more were copied by British Empire using inferior components and then sold to unwanted western parts of Soviet European expansion territory and US & A. Key to robustness and reliability of superior Soviet computing is use of DIN socket to make connection to other devices. Unlike US & B, DIN socket is strong, secure, dependable...

Console vs PC - Past to Present Self-confessed console addict, Robert Vaughan, gives his take on the evolution of gaming and what has influenced his buying choices over the past 30 years. Glory Days Let me start by saying I’m a bit of a console whore, but it wasn’t always that way… My first memory of computer gaming was ‘Horace Goes Skiing’ on the ZX Spectrum (48k), and I was hooked. Anyone who remembers loading a game via external cassette and the frustration of it failing will know what I’m talking about. The 128k version with a disk drive was always a bridge too far. Soon after, I was lucky enough to own a Sega Master System, then a Sega MegaDrive. Around this time, we travelled to the US a lot, as my dad worked for...