3D notebook offers hefty power for a hefty cost

The Eurocom Scorpius lives a dual life. On one hand, it’s a dull-looking workstation; on the other, this highly configurable laptop can also be outfitted with a 3D monitor and killer gaming specs. We opted for the latter.

The Scorpius has a backlit keyboard that can change to seven different colors.

Along with a 120Hz refresh rate, the 17.3-inch monitor features a built-in 3D emitter that syncs up to a pair of bundled Nvidia 3D Vision 2 glasses. To test the 3D experience, we played the Batman: Arkham City and sampled some 3D movie trailers from Nvidia’s stereoscopic technology rivals the best that movie theaters have to offer in terms of depth, and never bothered our eyes, but the experience wasn’t perfect. Even though Nvidia purports to have solved the dimming issue with its Vision 2 glasses, you’re still essentially wearing sunglasses, so the experience is going to be darker than viewing content in 2D without glasses. We also feel that wearing glasses in and of itself is cumbersome.

The most vexing problem is that when 3D is enabled, performance suffers greatly. Our frame rate dropped by half, from 50s to mid-20s, when playing Batman in 3D as opposed to 2D. In our opinion, these various issues detract too much from the experience; we’d rather play in 2D mode. As for the TN panel in 2D mode, while some sing the praises of 120Hz’s ability to improve even 2D image quality, we didn’t see any noticeable improvement over 60Hz performance when surfing the web, watching videos, or playing games.

We had little complaint with our system’s internal specs, however, which included a 2.8GHz Far Cry 3 to give it a real workout. While the Scorpius wasn’t able to run the super-graphically intensive game on “Ultra” (the game’s highest settings), it ran at “Very High” with frame rates in the mid-40s to low-50s range, and often outperformed a 2.8GHz AMD quad-core gaming desktop armed with a GTX 590. It seems unfair to bring up the fact that the far less expensive ($1,500) GT60 zero-point laptop wasn’t even able to muster a solid 30fps on FC3’s “High” settings. The only performance test where the GT60 bested the Scorpius was in battery life, where Eurocom’s laptop lasted a poor 103 minutes. Something’s got to give when you’re powering two 680Ms.

In terms of storage, the laptop comes with two drives: a 128GB mSATA Micron and 512GB SSD. While the two speedy drives are appreciated, the lack of a hefty HDD really limits the overall package. Luckily, the laptop takes up to three 2.5-inch storage drives and installing an additional HDD requires the removal of just one screw from the bottom of the laptop. Users can also access the motherboard from underneath and swap out the RAM. Eurocom has made the main compartment easily removable, with only four screws holding it in place.

While the laptop certainly performs well, it still has issues. Its trackpad is unresponsive and can be an exercise in frustration to use. Perhaps a bigger problem is that this thing is heavy. With a carry weight of more than 13 pounds, the Scorpius is in backbreaker territory. Finally, at almost $4,000, it’s very expensive.

Fortunately, most of these issues can be mitigated. You can save money by skipping out on the 3D monitor and second SSD. And you can overlook its battery, weight, and trackpad issues by understanding that the Scorpius is best used as a desktop replacement. Its performance is simply off the charts, and complaining about its other problems is like complaining about how a Ferrari is expensive, bad with fuel economy, and doesn’t have enough cup holders. If those issues are enough to bother you, you’re looking at the wrong machine. This laptop is all about performance and here the Scorpius is a stinger.

$3,915, www.eurocom.com

The Russian communications regulator has put the countries most popular social networking website Vkontakte on a banned website list today.

Several Russian areas have reported that they couldn’t access the domain vk.com. Shortly afterwards the regulator’s representative explained that the social network had been entered into the registry of banned websites http://zapret-info.gov.ru. But it was an accident.

A representative of Roskomnadzor told the Interfax news agency “It was a mistake that was led to by a human factor.” According to the representative, the mistake has now been fixed. According to the Wall Street Journal Vkontakte ‘continued to stay on the registry after the statement.’

The registry is normally used to ban offensive websites featuring explicit content, including child pornography, drug use and suicide websites. It is not fool proof however as they have accidentally banned huge websites such as Google, Wikipedia and Yandex in the past.

A responsive radio could add localized, real-time weather updates, adjust background noise levels and more.

The Perceptive Radio premiered at the Thinking Digital conference yesterday in Gateshead, U.K.

The WiFi-streaming radio features a computer-generated voice that pulls data from external sources and can vary its references to the location of the listener and tailor weather-related references like “it’s sunny” or “it’s raining” accordingly. Its microphone monitors background noise and can adjust audio levels for specific sounds, amplifying speech and reducing background sounds, for example, if you’re sitting farther away.

According to The Next Web, the BBC’s Ian Forrester has suggested that it could be used in homes to create a kind of radio-drama karaoke that audiences could participate in.

BBC technologist Tony Churnside told BBC News it represents “the early stages of looking at what next-generation broadcasting is.” He compared it to responsive web design, shaping the user’s experience based on the different devices they might be on.

You can see a demonstration here of a short audio drama about a woman stuck in an elevator produced with Perceptive Media technology.

[BBC News]

The Daily Show host Jon Stewart ran a satirical segment (via Apple 2.0) on last night’s show about Apple CEO Tim Cook’s appearance in front of a U.S. Senate Committee examining the tax strategies of multinational corporations.

Stewart suggests that a number of Senators are Apple fanboys for praising Cook and his company, as well as questions asking Apple executives what they think should be done with the tax code.

Though the embedded video below is Flash-based, iOS users should be able to view the clip at The Daily Show’s website.

As the diminutive $25/$35 Linux-based Raspberry Pi devices continue to contribute to imaginative applications, they’re also emerging as shining examples of new ways Linux can be deployed. Tinkerers have already put all flavors of Linux on the devices, and now, Fedora and the Seneca Centre for Development of Open Technology (CDOT) have announced the release of Pidora 18, a custom version of Fedora specifically for the Raspberry Pi. Here is more on it.

Pidora has its own web site set up, complete with download links, installation instructions, release notes and an announcement, which specifies the following:

"We’re excited to announce the release of Pidora 18 — an optimized Fedora Remix for the Raspberry Pi. It is based on a brand new build of Fedora for the ARMv6 architecture with greater speed and includes packages from the Fedora 18 package set.

There are some interesting new features we’d like to highlight:

* Almost all of the Fedora 18 package set available via yum (thousands of packages were built from the official Fedora repository and made available online)

* Compiled specifically to take advantage of the hardware already built into the Raspberry Pi

* Graphical firstboot configuration (with additional modules specifically made for the Raspberry Pi)

* Compact initial image size (for fast downloads) and auto-resize (for maximum storage afterwards)

* Auto swap creation available to allow for larger memory usage

* C, Python, & Perl programming languages available & included in the SD card image * Initial release of headless mode can be used with setups lacking a monitor or display

* IP address information can be read over the speakers and flashed with the LED light

* For graphical operation, Gedit text editor can be used with plugins (python console, file manager, syntax highlighting) to serve as a mini-graphical IDE

* For console operation, easy-to-use text editors are included (nled, nano, vi) plus Midnight Commander for file management

* Includes libraries capable of supporting external hardware such as motors and robotics (via GPIO, I2C, SPI)

Pidora replaces Fedora Raspberry Pi Remix, a previous version of Fedora for the Pi.

It’s likely that we’re going to see many more custom operating systems tweaked for the Pi, especially as more users find unusual applications for the low cost but powerful devices. As noted here this week, Raspberry Pis are even being chained together into supercomputers and powerful clusters, giving them credibility at the high-end of the computing landscape, where Linux has long had a strong foothold.

For more on Raspberry Pis in high-end applications, see this post.

 (Photo Credit: University of Southampton)