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Motion controls are coming and there is nothing you can do about it. They’re coming to your favorite games too, not just new ones. With the new PlayStation Move site up and running we can check out which games will feature Move controls. Nothing much surprising there under the featured game list… wait, is that Gran Turismo 5? Well, that’s interesting to say the least. Could Move work with GT5?

Now, it should be kept in mind that this is simply under a listing of featured games on the site, so it may be that Sony is just randomly listing Gran Turismo 5 as a cool game for the PS3. However, looking over the rest of the featured games on the page, which include SOCOM 4, Move Party! and Sports Champions, they have all been confirmed as Move compatible except for Split Second and ModNation — two other racing games that could easily have motion controls. The fact is this confirms nothing, but offers up plenty of speculation.

Considering that motion controls have really only been proven with kart and arcade racers this is an interesting find. It’s even more interesting when you consider the fact that Move doesn’t really lend itself to well to being turned sideways and pushed into a plastic steering wheel. Would we be using both the Move and its sub controller to drive or simply grabbing the light bulb end and steering that way? Would the latter even work considering the light is what the PlayStation Eye picks up on?

Even more importantly, do Gran Turismo fans even want this? I can hardly believe it would add to the realism of the racing no matter how 1:1 the controls are. Do you want waggle with your Gran Turismo?

Gran Turismo 5 works with PS3 Move? [CVG]

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Dealing with the terabytes of data generated by users online and serving up relationships tied to that data quickly are forcing web-scale sites like Twitter, Reddit and Facebook to investigate a variety of home-built, open sourced and hardware solutions, and reject as many closed-source software (such as Oracle) and specialized hardware solutions as possible.

It may seem like a forgone conclusion, but the ideological and practical bias against closed-source software products, as well as specialized physical hardware inherent in web-scale companies, has big implications, not just for vendors like Microsoft and Oracle, if they get locked out of businesses built on the web, but for all businesses. That’s because broadband networks, cloud computing and the shift toward more rapid adoption and integration of web technology into our everyday lives changes the business models and opportunities for all businesses.

The new business models will take into account the need to attract users individually, on a personal level, while also connecting them out to other products they use. These services will be available and designed to be accessed on phones, monitors and any other screen. They are hyper-personal, even for services dictated by corporate IT departments. Because of the “use anywhere” nature of these services, and the myriad connections out to other applications, they will have to manage a lot of user data, a lot of requests from outside a network, and scale out to meet demand.

Given this framework, the panel on scaling open source frameworks past MySQL was one of the more interesting ones at the South by Southwest Interactive conference this weekend. Scalable databases are part of the future of IT for many businesses. You can’t build the types of services discussed above without scalable databases. And those databases, and generally all of the tools used to achieve cheap and agile scale, are open source.

Citing a desire to support open source code, as well as the need to peek under the hood and be able to solve problems quickly, a panel of four guys responsible for building various architectures at Twitter, Facebook, Reddit and Imgur said specifically that they avoid Oracle in favor of rolling their own databases. Most even derided proprietary hardware and specialized networking gear, with the exception of Facebook’s Serkan Piantino, who said the company does use proprietary F5 gear behind software load balancers. Piantino also said that Facebook was testing super fast solid-state hard drives from a company called Fusion IO as a means to speed up access to data.

But for the most part, building your own code and working with open source code ruled the day. Even if there wasn’t an open source solution that was readily available or mature, the consensus was that folks would wait until something was ready, or if the pain was too much, build it themselves. For example, an audience member questioned the panel about any good columnar database stores beyond Hadoop, and Kevin Weil from Twitter explained that there were some closed source options out there, but the open source world’s products were still, ” a little early.” So Twitter does without for now.

Other tidbits of interest on scaling databases from the panel were:

• Nginx got a big shout out as an alternative to full Apache as a web server.
• HAProxy is also a popular way to either load balance or merely break requests up to have a cache or a database serve those requests faster
• Both Twitter and Facebook are using P2P technology (Twitter calls it Murder) to provision services because instead of taking five to 7 minutes to bring one online, it takes 37 seconds.
• Facebook plans to open source Haystack, its visual storage system within a few months
• While Hadoop isn’t used much or at all on the front end for both Twitter and Facebook, engineers use it on the back end to deliver granular analytics that otherwise wouldn’t have been possible about how people use the site
• If you can’t speed up the process with better databases, caching or anything on the software and hardware side, try user interface tricks to make it seem faster, such as saying the video is done uploading even if it isn’t yet.
• Facebook no longer thinks in terms of servers deployed, it now thinks in terms of deploying entire racks. The software the company is running is rack aware so it can take advantage of all of the bandwidth on a given switch in the rack. It looks like an intermediate step in running your data center as a computer.

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Filed under: Features, Troubleshooting, Ask TUAW

Welcome back to Ask TUAW, our weekly troubleshooting Q&A column. This week we have questions about replacing a MacBook hard drive, refreshing a NFS mount, getting a simple clock on screen, improving iCal’s note handling, and more.

As always, your suggestions and questions are welcome. Leave your questions for next week in the comments section at the end of this post. When asking a question, please include which machine you’re using and what version of Mac OS X is installed on it (we’ll assume you’re running Snow Leopard on an Intel Mac if you don’t specify), or if it’s an iPhone-related question, which iPhone version and OS version you have.

Felix asks

I’m a iMac user in search for a USB hub and a FireWire hub with a Mac-like design. Sure there are several of them (especially USB hubs) that have a Macish look but then theres the thing about performance. Some years ago I bought a USB2.0 hub just to find that some of the ports feel much slower than others and that sometimes my iPod (now my iPhone) just don’t get recharged at all when connected to the hub. So my question is, what do you think are the most Mac-like looking and well performing USB and FireWire hubs available?

Here are a couple of combo hubs you might be interested in from Belkin and IOGEAR. The Belkin hub does not feature its own power supply (apparently it draws more current from the FireWire port), whereas the IOGEAR does have an independent power supply, so if you’re concerned about power you might want to go in that direction. In general if you want particularly “Macish” hubs, I’d recommend searching for ones made for the Mac mini (there are quite a few out there).

Derek asks

I recently replaced the LCD in my aged Powerbook 15″ 1.33 (A1095). When it arrived on my doorstep there was a plastic film applied on the face to protect it during shipping. I’ve always had a problem with the LCD on this Powerbook (and my old G3 Wallstreet, for that matter) touching the keyboard when the lid is shut, thusly leaving permanent marks on the face of the display. So, I left the film on the replacement LCD, and it has worked very well to protect the new screen. However, it’s starting to peel and bubble on one edge and I’d like to replace it. Does anyone make screen protectors such as the variety of stick-on protectors for iPod Touch/iPhones in sizes for laptop screens? I have considered hitting the local megamart and just getting several to piece together, but I think the seams would be more annoying than the bubbling.

There are several different film screen protectors available, such as this Crystal Screen Guard at Amazon. The biggest problem is finding one that will exactly fit your PowerBook, since most everything sold today is made for the MacBook Pro line. I think that the PowerBook actually had a 15.2″ screen, rather than the 15.4″ screen on the MacBook Pro. So I’m guessing you’d have to trim down a MacBook Pro Screen Guard to fit your PowerBook.

SMartenup asks

I would like to find a way to save all of my open programs / documents, and then restore to that same set of programs & documents. Is there any way to do this?

OS X does have a feature called Safe Sleep, which is much like the hibernation features on other operating systems. When invoked it saves the state of your Mac to the hard drive and then actually shuts the computer off. When you restart the machine, it will be restored to the state that was saved. There’s a handy Preference Pane app called SmartSleep that will allow you to invoke Safe Sleep automatically.

I get the sense, however, that what you want is something analogous to session saving a web browser’s tabs, but for all your open documents. Unfortunately, I’m not aware of anything that does quite what you want.

ooglek asks

I have a 250GB SimpleTech SimpleShare NAS. I’ve had it for about 3 years, and it works well enough. Now on Snow Leopard both my 2008 Mac Pro and my 2006 Macbook Pro can access the NAS via NFS Automount setup in the Disk Utility (new for Snow Leopard). My problem is that when I take my laptop out of my home office, when I come back, I have no way to “refresh” or reconnect to the NFS mount. I’m not sure if it is hung (used to have to kill nfsd in Leopard), awaiting some user action or just not set up right.

I don’t have much experience with NFS mounts, but if I’m understanding the problem correctly you need to flush the cache with the sudo automount -vc command. That should cause it to essentially “refresh.” Check out this thread over at Apple Discussions.

vulgo asks

I am a long time Mac user and as far as I can think back I was using Microsofts Entourage as a calendar and before that Outlook for Mac. Since I got my iPhone 2 years ago I always wanted to migrate to iCal to use that as my main calendar application because of synching reasons. Unfortunately iCal is in my opinion a bad solution. It sure does allow notes in the notes field but there is no way to work properly with lots of text in the notes field like you can easily do in Entourage. You cannot just drag the corner of the window and make it bigger to get a good overview about what you write or copy/paste there. The column is and stays just too small. Do you have any idea for a good solution to make iCal fulfill the task of a proper note field without moving to another software?

I know you asked for a solution that involves iCal, but I don’t really think there is one. I completely agree with you that the iCal notes interface is terrible, but I’m not aware of any way to make it work better. However, if you are willing to drop a little coin, you should check out BusyCal ($49), which offers iCal / MobileMe / iPhone compatibility and superior better features, including a much more robust notes field (especially in List View).

David asks

I desperately need a bigger drive for my MacBook. Everyone says it’s pretty easy to replace, I just need to buy a 2.5″ SATA drive. But I’m so afraid of buying the wrong drive that I can’t make a purchase. Here’s why: Some folks have strongly recommend not using a drive that is larger than 250GB, and/or faster then SATA 150, 5400RPM. And most of the drives available out there are at least 320GB and often SATA 300 and 7200RPM. Am I being too conservative in my desire to stick to the recommended guidelines? Should I just stop worrying and buy a bigger/faster drive? If I understand the articles, I could/should be safe with a bigger drive as long as I don’t use more than 250GB of the drive? I’m nervous enough about replacing my drive so any advice you have would be much appreciated.

Frankly, I don’t really understand why anybody would tell you that you have to be limited to 250GB. I am aware of no reason whatsoever that you would need to limit yourself to a drive that small. You should be able to install any 2.5″ SATA drive you like, including SATA 2 (SATA 300) / 7200 RPM drives. One thing to consider is that faster 7200 RPM drives will be more power hungry, thus reducing your battery life and increasing heat (your MacBook likely shipped with a 4200 RPM drive, so a 5400 RPM drive might be a good compromise). If you’re particularly paranoid you could get a Mac-specific upgrade kit, like those from MCE Tech or OWC, but you don’t really need to do that. One nice thing about some of these kits is that they include an external enclosure allowing you to continue to use the old drive as an external hard drive.

No matter which drive you end up with, it’s a good idea to get an external enclosure, or at least a USB to SATA adapter (like this one). That way, as soon as you get it you can use Carbon Copy Cloner or SuperDuper! ($27.95) to clone your existing drive to the new drive. Then install the new drive into the computer and you should be able to start right back up where you left off without reinstalling anything. Good luck!

Brent asks

I am running dual monitors with my macbook and I don’t need a menu bar on both, but I would like a clock running on the second screen. What is the best thing I could use?

There are a gajillion little clock apps available for OS X. Check out this search at MacUpdate for a sense of what’s out there. You’ll probably have to churn through a few of them until you find one that fits your style. If you want a place to start, check out SimpleFloatingClock.

David asks

For the upcoming iPad my wife and I are planning on sharing one. Our question is about the email. Is there a way to switch users so to our email is not available to the other. I don’t see any way of doing that on the iphone, but we don’t share them.

Obviously we don’t know for sure yet, but everything so far indicates that the iPad will function more or less like the iPhone. That being the case, just as the iPhone doesn’t support multiple users, I consider it extremely unlikely that the iPad will either.

TUAWAsk TUAW: Clocks, screen guards, MacBook hard drive replacement, NFS automount, and more originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Sun, 14 Mar 2010 12:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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iPad mania has hit since Apple’s answer to the tablet became available for pre-order on Friday morning. We already mentioned with glee that the mute switch has been transformed into an orientation lock. Now, sales estimates suggest that virtual iPads are flying off virtual shelves as fast as Apple fans can click “Buy Now,” and a number of details are surfacing about iBooks, 3G data services, and more.

Of course, Apple hasn’t made any official announcements about sales numbers, but that hasn’t stopped clever buyers with a Google spreadsheet from estimating how many iPads Apple is selling. Using order numbers matched up to the time of order, estimates range from about 20,000 to 25,000 iPads sold per hour in the hours after Apple raised the curtain. Assuming the majority of sales are the $499 entry-level model, Apple could be grossing about $10 million per hour. If this rate keeps up, it’s possible Apple will sell through its first batch of iPads (set to ship April 3) this weekend.

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Short Version: Fresh from the box, Creative’s World of Warcraft, is here! They were designed for WoW players and their performance definitely reflects that. While a tad bulky, they don’t feel heavy.
Pros
• Very Comfortable
• Hard to hear outside the headphones
• Wireless Mic works well. Does not get in the way.
• Driver allows deep customization of audio to serve your needs.

Cons
• No way to determine battery power.
• Volume buttons feel a little flimsy.
• Microphone can adjust but not very well.
• In order to download drivers, you must register the product.
• Reasonable but not impressive range.
• Not compatible with consoles (at least the PS3)

The headset packs a serious punch. Immediately, when you first put them on you’ll notice they muffle out sound very well. Despite the size they feel comfortable and even after prolonged periods of play your ears won’t ache. Windows has no trouble finding the skeleton drivers once I plugged in the USB device.

I sought out to download the drivers and was surprised that they required me to register the product in order to install the drivers. Once that way squared away, I played around with the Audio Control Panel. They allow you to customize the Glyph illumination (change color, pulsation, etc). There’s a panel that allows you to customize 5 audio options that massively enhance the audio quality. There are also voice filters that allow you to mask your voice into various characters from WoW including XT-002 Deconstructor. Finally, you can bind your keys to various actions like mute to your keyboard.

There’s no way to tell how much battery life you have on the wireless headset. Eventually they will simply go off. They can be charged by a simple mini-usb cable. They also work while plugged in so you can play while charging – granted – this technically defeats the purpose of a wireless headset.

All the audio options make a huge improvement to the game. The surround sound works surprisingly well. Better than previous simulated surround sound devices I’ve ever used. Quick note: all sounds are based on the character’s perspective (not camera) so be wary if you’re in a PVP zone and you hear fire off in the distance.
I only have 3 significant complaints. They probably placed the microphone far from the mouth to prevent pop but you can only bend it so far. This can also be troublesome if you raid late at night and loved ones are in the room: you can’t mumble effectively. Other than that, the microphone works very well. The volume buttons are flimsy and often don’t feel like they work. They are sensitive but don’t increase the volume more than 2 percent making it quicker to adjust volume via the slider. You may also hit the volume (or even microphone mute) buttons while taking off/putting on the headphones. My last major gripe is the lack of compatibility of with the consoles. The PS3 can recognize some USB headsets and the WoW headphones would have made an excellent headset but alas; the PS3 could not detect the wireless USB key. I haven’t checked for the 360 yet.

You can walk around your room with the headphones on, but they won’t last a bathroom trip. This is mildly disappointing but considering you’re not meant to be roaming your household with them on, it can be forgiven. On that note, I discourage roaming around with the glyphs pulsating. Sure they may look cool to you, but to anyone else, you will be confused with a tool.

Creative’s World of Warcraft wireless headset sells at $159.99. While not completely necessary, the audio improvements they make are incredible and the headset does serve as a status symbol. There’s nothing quite like going to the kitchen with your headset on listening to music of Dalaran.

Gabriel Deleon, Nicholas’ younger brother who has like 10 level 80s, wrote these fine words.

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