BCCHardware - Your Daily Tech News & Reviews

It's already been a year since the last BCCHardware sponsored LAN party. And this year we are going big as this marks 10 years of VulcLAN here in Vulcan, Alberta!!! BCCHardware is proud to announce our 10th annual LANParty - VulcLAN 2012!! - This will be an amazing LAN party that aims to claim a precious few days of your life as you spend it fragging with a host of other people.

FutureLooks has posted their review of the Dell XPS 15z Notebook computer and while the XPS used to meant something really special from Dell, I think they've dropped their standard on the label.  That being said, it's still a pretty solid system, but when packing a Core i5 CPU, it sits at the lower end of the performance spectrum.

The Dell XPS 15z borrows much of its design inspiration of the 15-inch MacBook Pro. It has the same kind of latchless design, the same kind of aluminum finish, and a similar kind of slot-loading drive. The battery is sveltely integrated with the laptop as to prevent any unsightly bulges.

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• MyDigitalSSD 128GB mSATA SATA2 SSD - TheSSDReview
• Corsair Performance Pro 128GB SSD - TweakTown
• Seagate Barracuda 3TB HDD - HardwareSecrets
• Synology DS212 2-Bay NAS - TweakTown --=-- TweakNews
• Kingston SSDNow V+200 120GB Upgrade Kit - RWLabs 
• Kingston DataTraveler HyperX 3.0 Thumb Drive - TweakTown 

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It cracks me up when a Mini PC has a "Plus" with it, but when you start to look at all the features that Zotac packs into the AD04, you can sometimes justify the addition of the plus moniker.  This is a small AMD E-450 system that supports HDMI, DVI, WiFi, VESA Mounting, USB 3.0 ports and more.  HardwareHeaven has the full review.

Elsewhere ZOTAC has gone with a Samsung 2.5" SATA drive in this system and it has a speed of 5400RPM with 8MB cache and 320GB capacity. Beside it are dual DDR3 200-pin SODIMM slots one of which is populated by 2GB of Samsung memory. On the bottom of the PCB is the AzureWave AW-NB037 Wireless-N card.

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One of Microsoft's big announcements at CES 2012 was that they will be bringing the Kinect to PC this year. This wasn't too much of a surprise as it had been rumored for quite some time but now (starting Feb. 1, 2012) you can officially get one for your PC. Gizmowatch takes a look at this and tries to figure out just how this might change the way everyone uses a Windows PC.

In the long illustrative history of electronic peripherals, very few technologies have managed to make a commercial impact like Microsoft's very own Kinect. As a matter of fact, this motion sensing input device still holds the world record for the fastest selling consumer electronics system, with a whopping 8 million sales in just two months of its launching. And now after notching up our Xbox 360 experience and going through a multitude of other applications (including a slew of DIY hacks), the exalted Kinect is about to make its much touted splash in the realm of Windows.

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Facebook filed their IPO this week and interestingly enough one of the most used words in it was "mobile" which they used 123 times in this document. Almost half of Facebook's users used a mobile device to login and yet Facebook gets no revenue from that and it doesn't appear like they have any plans to change that yet. Gigaom has the full story and all the details.

In its IPO filing Facebook mentions the word “mobile” 123 times, which, given the term’s buzz-worthy status, is hardly surprising. But in most cases Facebook doesn’t use the word “mobile” in positive ways. In fact, it identifies the proliferation of traffic to its mobile app and website as the biggest risks that its advertising-driven business model faces. The S-1 filing is one big official warning to potential investors: Facebook’s future growth is being driven by user behavior that it has so far failed to monetize.

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NetworkWorld must have been having a slow day because they decided to see which smartphone could handle being cold the best. They've matched the iPhone up against a couple phones from Nokia and HTC for a battle royale. Probably the most interesting part of the testing was finding out that iPhones are only rated for temps between 0 and 35 Celsius which their warranty voidable if you use them outside in Canada for pretty much half the year.

According to Apple, its iPhones can be used only in temperatures between 0 and 35 degrees Celsius (32 to 95adegF). In other words, an iPhone user taking his device outside in typical Scandinavian winter conditions will do so at his own risk. If the phone breaks down, Apple claims they will not be responsible and it is not covered by the phone's warranty.

HTC and Nokia have not given out operating temperature guidelines in user manuals or on their websites. Samsung, on the other hand guarantees its phones to function in temperatures between -20 and 50 degrees Celsius (-4--122adegF).

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Every day more than 200 Million Tweets are sent through Twitter, but just how many of them are actually relevant? Carnegie Mellon University has done a bit of research into this and have found that 25% of Tweets are useless and try to figure out what makes a good tweet that people actually care about. There are actually a bunch of good points to help make your tweets more well received and I'm sure the same theories could be applied to pretty much any social network.

Keep it to yourself: The cliched "sandwich" tweets about pedestrian, personal details were largely disliked. Reviewers reserved a special hatred for Foursquare location check-ins.

Don't whine: Negative sentiments and complaints were disliked.

Limit Twitter-specific syntax: Overuse of #hashtags, @mentions and abbreviations makes tweets hard to read. But some syntax is helpful; if posing a question, adding a hashtag helps everyone follow along.

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There has been a lot of news going around the internet the past couple weeks thanks to Google updating their privacy policy. Most people probably didn't even both reading the updates or chances are good didn't really understand what they were all about so the folks over at Electronic Frontier Foundation have summarized what the changes are all about and how they affect you.

Last week, Google announced a new, simplified privacy policy. They did a great job of informing users that the privacy policy had been changed through emails and notifications, and several experts (including Ontario’s Privacy Commissioner Dr. Ann Cavoukian) have praised the shift toward a simpler, more unified policy. Unfortunately, while the policy might be easier to understand, Google did a less impressive job of publicly explaining what in the policy had actually been changed.  In fact, it took a letter from eight Representatives to persuade them to provide straightforward answers to the public about their new policy.

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Apple has come under fire over the past couple years for their manufacturing practices and now they've got a group of fans who have a petition to urge Apple to change their manufacturing practices and make an "ethical" iPhone5. Over 50,000 people signed the petition in the first 2 days and one would assume that number will grow even larger. Not that an online petition will change much but I'm sure Apple is none too impressed to have to deal with this issue again and I'm sure they'd do pretty much anything to get this to go away (maybe they'll release a new iPhone or iPad and most people will quickly forget about this). NYDailyNews has the full story as well as the links to the petition.

Apple fans are flocking to sign an online petition urging the tech giant to change its labor practices before releasing the iPhone 5 in order to make the device "the first ethical iPhone."

The campaign, launched by consumer group SumOfUs, urges Apple "to overhaul the way its suppliers treat their workers in time for the launch of the iPhone 5," which is expected in the latter half of this year.

"Apple has this brand that appeals to ethical consumers. They need to live up to that brand," SumOfUs executive director Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman told the Daily News.

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