Digital Storm Veloce

Pros High-resolution display beats most competitors. Top performance marks, thanks to 4th-generation Intel Core i7 processor and Nvidia GeForce GTX graphics. Full feature set.

Cons Short battery life. Thicker and heavier (and therefore less portable) than the competition. Bottom Line The Digital Storm Veloce packs a lot of punch, and promises gaming performance on the go, but it falls a bit short in terms of battery life.

By Brian Westover

The ultraportable revolution has reshaped the entire laptop industry over the last year, but some of the most dramatic changes have happened in gaming, where performance has finally reached the point that portability is attainable. While powerful 17- and 18-inch laptops are still the choice for high-performance gaming, the shift to smaller, slimmer ultraportables has made PC gaming on the go a reality. As such, the 13-inch Digital Storm Veloce is a bit of a surprise, not because it's small and portable, but because it still manages to look a bit bulky despite being under 5 pounds and only 1.26 inches thick.

Design
The body of the laptop might look familiar to anyone shopping around for a gaming system, because it's a Clevo W230stp chassis, so you'll see a few similar looking systems from other manufacturers. Digital Storm does try to distinguish this system from others with a red Digital Storm logo across the matte-black lid, but not everyone wants a large logo on their system.

Though much smaller than the average 15- or 17-inch gaming laptop, the 13-inch Veloce is pretty bulky compared with the likes of the Razer Blade (2013) or the MSI GE40 2OC-009US, measuring 8.9 by 13 by 1.26 inches (HWD) and weighing in at 4.6 pounds (with a 1.2-pound power adapter). While that's not too heavy to carry around, it is a half-pound more than the Razer Blade (4.1 pounds) and the power adapter is unfortunately a necessary extra to pack with it.

The 13.3-inch display does differentiate the Veloce from other gaming ultraportables we've reviewed, stepping up from the likes of the Razer Blade and MSI GE40 with 1,920-by-1,080 resolution, providing full 1080p—the other two top out as 1,600-by-900 resolution, opting for lower resolution in the pursuit of higher frame rates. Depending on where you fall in the frame rates vs. resolution debate, the 1080p display may be a good or bad idea, but there's no denying that it looks good. The colors are rich, the blacks are deep and dark, and the details are sharp.

By comparison, the audio from the built-in Onkyo speakers (enhanced with Creative SBX Pro Studio software) is passable, but disappointing. There isn't much bass to speak off, but the real let down is in volume, which never seemed to get loud enough. You'll definitely want to use some headphones, whether on the go or in the quiet of your own home.

The full-size chiclet keyboard is good, but the key motion is a bit shallow and stiff, especially compared to the slimmer Razer Blade. It also features an adjustable backlight, which will be helpful during late night raids and campaigns. While many gamers will prefer to use their own gaming keyboard, the keyboard on the Veloce will get the job done when you're gaming on the road. The touchpad offers sold navigation and gesture support, along with separate right and left buttons; but it's a bit small, measuring only 3.4 by 1.6 inches, as opposed to the Razer Blade's expansive 4.2-by-2.5-inch touchpad.

Features
The chunky dimensions of the Veloce do have the benefit of providing lots of room for all of the ports and connectors you might want, from the common, like USB ports (three USB 3.0, one USB 2.0) and HDMI, to the harder to find, like Ethernet, VGA, and an SD card slot. Thanks to an Intel Wireless-AC 7260 wireless card, you'll enjoy both 802.11AC Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 4.0.

A combination of solid-state storage and spinning hard drive provide both performance and capacity, thanks to a 128GB solid-state drive (SSD) and 750GB 7,200rpm hard drive. It's also fairly clean out of the box, with nothing preinstalled but Windows 8, a handful of Nvidia drivers, and Windows Recovery Toolkit. Digital Storm covers the Veloce with a generous three-year warranty, along with free labor for repairs and upgrades, and lifetime phone support.

Performance
The Veloce is outfitted with an Intel Core i7-4800MQ processor, a quad-core 2.7GHz processor overclocked to 3.7GHz. It's a step up from the CPU found in the MSI GE40 and Razer Blade, and Digital Storm pairs it with 8GB of RAM. The resulting performance is great, finishing PCMark 7 with 6,302 points, ahead of both the MSI GE40 (5,339 points) and the Razer Blade (5,904 points). It pulled ahead in our other processor intensive tests as well, beating all competitors in CineBench R11.5 (6.68 points), Handbrake (35 seconds) and Photoshop CS6 (3 minutes 31 seconds).

Thanks to an Nvidia GeForce GTX 765M mobile GPU with 2GB of dedicated memory—the same found in the Razer Blade—but it uses it to greater effect, leading the category in 3DMark 11 with scores of 6,731 points (Entry settings) and 1,299 (Extreme settings). It also squeezed out better frame rates at low resolution and detail settings, with 59 frames per second in Aliens Vs. Predator and 55 fps in Heaven. Where it did fall behind, however, was when we dialed up the resolution and detail. Because it has to push all of the additional pixels that come with 1080p resolution, the 13-inch Veloce fell behind the 14-inch Razer Blade, with 20fps (Alien vs. Predator) and 21 fps (Heaven), compared with the Razer Blade, which scored 26 fps (Aliens vs. Predator) and 25fps (Heaven). Again, whether this is a bad thing depends upon whether you prize resolution or frame rates. In either case, you should be able to play any current gen game, albeit with the detail settings lowered a bit.

Despite the Veloce leading in other performance categories, it fell behind in battery life. In our battery rundown test, the Veloce lasted only 3 hours 31 minutes with a 6-cell 62Wh battery. Even a year ago this would be short—the Alienware m14x R2 lasted 4 hours 40 minutes with a similar sized 63Wh battery—but compared to the likes of the MSI GE40 (6:14) or the Razer Blade (6:52), it's hardly in the same league. Given that the 13-inch size is ideal for portability, the short battery life is especially disappointing.

Ultimately, the Digital Storm Veloce is a question of priorities. If you value power over portability and display resolution over frame rates, then there's a lot to like about the Veloce, which led in most of our performance tests and offers a higher 1080p resolution. However, at this size of laptop, portability is often the greater concern, and the heavier weight, chunkier design, and dramatically shorter battery life prevent the Digital Storm Veloce from taking home top honors. As a result, while the Digital Storm Veloce is recommended for performance fiends, the Razer Blade (2013) remains our Editors' Choice for ultraportable gaming.

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Decline of Digital Equipment offers lessons for Microsoft

Computerworld - Microsoft has piled up so many stresses on its corporate body in the last 10 months that it must beat almost insurmountable odds to remain healthy and viable, a business strategist said today.

"There's something endemic in technology companies that they are not built to last," said Peter DeLisi, founder and president of Organizational Synergies, a Fremont, Calif. strategy consulting firm. "The larger and larger they become, the more they spin out of control. In a highly empowered culture like Microsoft or DEC, the pieces are loosely held together. And in a crisis, down they go."

DeLisi was not predicting the collapse of Microsoft -- the Redmond, Wash. firm is a member of the Fortune 50, with revenues in its latest fiscal year of $78 billion -- but current and former Microsoft employees have been struck by the parallels between the company's current situation and that of DEC, or Digital Equipment Corporation, which in the late 1980s was the world's second largest computer company. By 1996, DEC had disappeared, sold at a fire sale price of $9.6 billion to Compaq.

And DeLisi knows DEC -- specifically its downfall. A 16-year-veteran of the Maynard, Mass. company, half of those as a strategy, IT and organizational culture consultant to DEC's largest enterprise customers, DeLisi wrote a seminal paper on the company's decline, "A Modern-Day Tragedy: The Digital Equipment Story," in 1998. Five year later he co-authored the book, "DEC is Dead, Long Live DEC" with Ed Schein, a former professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management and one of the world's foremost authorities in organizational behavior.

Computerworld spoke with DeLisi after seeing his paper mentioned numerous times in a semi-underground blog, "Mini-Microsoft," purportedly written by a current Microsoft employee, when the blog's author posted his or her take on Ballmer's retirement. Among the several hundred comments left by others -- most anonymously -- were dozens referencing DeLisi's description of DEC's downfall.

Those with time at Redmond saw similarities between the tale of DEC and today's Microsoft:

"I spent 12 years at Microsoft after leaving DEC in 1994," stated one anonymous commenter. "The time between DEC's first [layoffs] and its closing shop was brief. DEC in its heyday had 140K employees, large cash reserves (no debt) and was the 2nd largest computer company in the world (behind IBM).

"DEC missed early entry into the PC market and was not able to catch up; similar to Microsoft missing on mobile. Missing the market, sound familiar? [emphasis in original].

"DEC's beloved CEO and visionary, Ken Olsen, left in 1992 and was replaced by Bob Palmer who had been internally lobbying for the job for years ("managing up"). Palmer I believe is still on the board at debt-laden AMD. [Editor's note: Palmer left AMD's board this year.] CEO change, sound familiar?

"If employees think it cannot happen at Microsoft because of its large cash reserves, they are wrong."

While DeLisi was hesitant to cast Microsoft as a DEC doppelganger because he was not inside Microsoft -- as he had been at DEC two decades before -- he was confident that Microsoft had, purposefully or not, stacked the deck against itself.

Microsoft's strategy turn-about and the resulting July top-to-bottom reorganization, then the announcement six weeks later that Ballmer would depart and a new CEO found, and then 10 days after that, the acquisition of Nokia -- a move that will boost the company's head count by a third -- are an incredible number of corporate strains in quick succession. "Any one of those are by themselves major efforts to assimilate," DeLisi said. "Sometimes companies can weather some of those changes, but when they must deal with more than one major change, most cannot."

Just absorbing Nokia and its estimated 32,000 employees will be a chore that could disrupt Microsoft or otherwise end badly, said DeLisi. "The integration of Nokia is not a slam dunk," he said. "Half of all mergers and acquisitions fail outright, and in two-thirds of the cases, the companies would have been better off investing in Treasury notes. That by itself is going to be difficult to pull off."

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Western Digital continues SSD efforts, acquires Virident

IDG News Service - Western Digital is continuing its acquisition spree of flash storage companies, announcing a definitive agreement to buy enterprise solid-state drive (SSD) vendor Virident for $685 million.

Virident's operations will be integrated into WD's HGST (previously called Hitachi Global Storage Technologies) subsidiary, which was acquired from Hitachi. Virident is best known for its FlashMax range of products, which include SSDs that can function as server-side memory or long-term storage, and also related software that can manage SSD storage resources in data centers.

WD is well-known for its hard drive offerings, but has been on an acquisition spree as it expands into the SSD market. Earlier this year, WD invested $51 million in Skyera, which develops energy-efficient storage systems with SSDs, and also acquired Velobit, which makes SSD optimization software, for an undisclosed amount. The company in July acquired SSD maker STEC for $340 million. WD also offers its own SSDs and has also announced consumer-grade solid-state hybrid drives that combine hard drives and SSDs.

Virident's acquisitions will aid WD's strategy to deliver highly integrated server-based storage products to data centers, said Mike Cordano, HGST president, in a statement.

SSDs are being increasingly used in the enterprise as cache, memory and cold storage. Industry observers feel the enterprise SSD market has yet to mature, as a lot of storage is still based on spinning disks like hard drives, which can be slower and more power-hungry.

The smaller size of SSDs can also provide more storage in fewer servers, and can run in-memory database applications as an alternative to DRAM. For example, Facebook replaced DRAM with flash memory in a server called McDipper, and is also using SSDs for long-term cold storage. SSD adoption is also growing as flash storage becomes cheaper and more durable.

WD said the acquisition of Virident is expected to close in the fourth quarter.

Agam Shah covers PCs, tablets, servers, chips and semiconductors for IDG News Service. Follow Agam on Twitter at @agamsh. Agam's e-mail address is agam_shah@idg.com

Reprinted with permission from IDG.net. Story copyright 2012 International Data Group. All rights reserved.

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Mozilla considers rejecting long-lived digital certificates following similar decision by Google

Mozilla is considering the possibility of rejecting as invalid SSL certificates issued after July 1, 2012, with a validity period of more than 60 months. Google already made the decision to block such certificates in Chrome starting early next year.

"As a result of further analysis of available, publicly discoverable certificates, as well as the vibrant discussion among the CA/B Forum [Certificate Authority/Browser Forum] membership, we have decided to implement further programmatic checks in Google Chrome and the Chromium Browser in order to ensure Baseline Requirements compliance," Ryan Sleevi, a member of the Google Chrome Team said Monday in a message to the CA/B Forum mailing list.

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The checks will be added to the development and beta releases of Google Chrome at the beginning of 2014. The changes are expected in the stable release of Chrome during the first quarter of next year, Sleevi said.

The Baseline Requirements for the Issuance and Management of Publicly-Trusted Certificates, sometimes simply referred to as the Baseline Requirements, is a set of guidelines agreed upon by all CAs (certificate authorities) and browser vendors that are members of the CA/B Forum.

Version 1.0 of the Baseline Requirements went into effect on July 1, 2012, and states that "Certificates issued after the Effective Date MUST have a Validity Period no greater than 60 months." It also says that certificates to be issued after April 1, 2015, will need to have a validity period no greater than 39 months, but there are some clearly defined exceptions to this requirement.

The shortening of certificate validity period is a proactive measure that would allow for a timely implementation of changes made to the requirements in the future. It would be hard for future requirements, especially those with a security impact, to have a practical effect if older certificates that aren't compliant with them would remain valid for 10 more years.

Google identified 2,038 certificates that were issued after July 1, 2012, and have validity periods longer than 60 months, in violation of the current Baseline Requirements.

"We encourage CAs that have engaged in this unfortunate practice, which appears to be a very limited subset of CAs, to reach out to affected customers and inform them of the upcoming changes," Sleevi said referring to the fact that Chrome will start blocking those certificates in the beginning of 2014.

On Thursday, a discussion was started on the Mozilla bug tracker on whether the company should enforce a similar block in its products.

"Everyone agrees such certs, when newly issued, are incompatible with the Baseline Requirements," said Gervase Markham, who deals with issues of project governance at Mozilla, on the bug tracker. "Some CAs have argued that when reissued, this is not so, but Google does not agree with them. We should consider making the same change."

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Mozilla may follow Google's lead and reject long-lived digital certificates

IDG News Service - Mozilla is considering the possibility of rejecting as invalid SSL certificates issued after July 1, 2012, with a validity period of more than 60 months. Google already made the decision to block such certificates in Chrome starting early next year.

"As a result of further analysis of available, publicly discoverable certificates, as well as the vibrant discussion among the CA/B Forum [Certificate Authority/Browser Forum] membership, we have decided to implement further programmatic checks in Google Chrome and the Chromium Browser in order to ensure Baseline Requirements compliance," Ryan Sleevi, a member of the Google Chrome Team said Monday in a message to the CA/B Forum mailing list.

The checks will be added to the development and beta releases of Google Chrome at the beginning of 2014. The changes are expected in the stable release of Chrome during the first quarter of next year, Sleevi said.

The Baseline Requirements for the Issuance and Management of Publicly-Trusted Certificates, sometimes simply referred to as the Baseline Requirements, is a set of guidelines agreed upon by all certificate authorities (CAs) and browser vendors that are members of the CA/B Forum.

Version 1.0 of the Baseline Requirements went into effect on July 1, 2012, and states that "Certificates issued after the Effective Date MUST have a Validity Period no greater than 60 months." It also says that certificates to be issued after April 1, 2015, will need to have a validity period no greater than 39 months, but there are some clearly defined exceptions to this requirement.

The shortening of certificate validity period is a proactive measure that would allow for a timely implementation of changes made to the requirements in the future. It would be hard for future requirements, especially those with a security impact, to have a practical effect if older certificates that aren't compliant with them would remain valid for 10 more years.

Google identified 2,038 certificates that were issued after July 1, 2012, and have validity periods longer than 60 months, in violation of the current Baseline Requirements.

"We encourage CAs that have engaged in this unfortunate practice, which appears to be a very limited subset of CAs, to reach out to affected customers and inform them of the upcoming changes," Sleevi said referring to the fact that Chrome will start blocking those certificates in the beginning of 2014.

On Thursday, a discussion was started on the Mozilla bug tracker on whether the company should enforce a similar block in its products.

"Everyone agrees such certs, when newly issued, are incompatible with the Baseline Requirements," said Gervase Markham, who deals with issues of project governance at Mozilla, on the bug tracker. "Some CAs have argued that when reissued, this is not so, but Google does not agree with them. We should consider making the same change."

Reprinted with permission from IDG.net. Story copyright 2012 International Data Group. All rights reserved.

View the original article here