People seldom buy third-party SMPSes. They either come with the cabinet, or the dealer bundles in one. Exception – Gamers, Enthusiasts and Geeks. Reason? SMPSes provide the power to the computer. The more the power, the more hardware you can jack in. The more the hardware, the more functionality it has.

The search for the perfect SMPS will go on forever, but if you want big watts for small bucks, you stop at CoolerMaster. The CM eXtreme Power 600W is a 600W SLI- and CrossFireX-ready SMPS that makes it big.

The RS-600-PCAR-E3 (That’s the exact model number) is a standard ATX12V Switched Mode Power Supply capable of supplying a maximum of 600W. That’s almost enough for a serious graphics card, and does more than comfortably for mid-range ones in SLI or CFX. Yes, the recommended minimum for a ATI Radeon HD5970 is 650W, but it still works albeit without the overclocking bit. It contains enough connectors to power 6 SATA Devices,  3 Molex devices and a Floppy Drive. And while at above 2 kilos it’s a bit on the heavy side, it looks suave.

The CoolerMaster RS-600-PCAR-E3 - One very heavy SMPS!

The package comes with:

1. One SMPS (obviously),
2. One Power Cord
3. One User Manual
4. 4 Screws to screw it onto the cabinet.

Opening up the package for the first time, one can not help but treat the SMPS as a God, owing to its looks. Once you lift it, however, the weight hits you. The box is a standard ATX-dimensioned box, measuring in at 15×14x8.6cm, but with an unconventional design. One of the finer points of this is that its a very silent SMPS (and trust me, it really is silent. Really Silent.), and thus, instead of fitting a smaller fan spinning at high RPMs, CM choose to go with a 120mm fan spinning at low RPMs. the downside is that the fan is now on the down side of the box, throwing the hot air into the cabinet rather than expelling it, and therefore this SMPS can not be used in small HTPCs and Micro-ATX cabinets without serious heat issues. The upside is that the back sports a clean grille, and this looks uber-awesome. On the inside, the heatsinks are copper rather than aluminum, and this gives a much better cooling. Indeed, this 600W SMPS hasn’t gotten half as hot as the stock iBall 400W used to get, and I’ve been pushing it hard.

Fit the SMPS in and you get to the second downside – the cables are plain too long. The majority are 750mm long, and the floppy and molex cable is 900mm long! packing the thing in, even with cable ties become a challenge. Anyway, here is the power connectors listing:

• 1x CPU 4+4pin Connector
• 1x Motherboard Connector
• 2x 6+2 PCIe Graphics Card Connector
• 3x Molex Connector
• 1x FDD Connector
• 6x SATA Connector

Yeah, that’s a lot. Check out the connector topology diagram!

I dunno whether it was just me, but the SATA Connectors seemed to be rather tight and needed a fair bit of rocking around to get them to fit. Anyway, once fired up, this thing was damn silent. Not a sound to be heard. Well, all that done, it was time to stress this thing. The best way to test an SMPS is by uptime at high stress. I left it on for 12 hours, recoding a movie, downloading some ISO files and randomly performing some disk checks. No hiccups, and I didn’t expect any.

Well, that means this works. Let’s get back to discussing its features. This thing comes with a voltage selector at the back, switching between 230 and 110 Volts AC. Us here in India use 220V at 50Hz, and the 230V setting works just dandy. Something it doesn’t have is a power-out connector, which is useful for connecting the monitor power to the SMPS rather than the mains. However, not many people use such an arrangement, so it’s a pass.

CoolerMaster eXtreme Power 600

Now to it’s downside. This thing comes with Over Voltage Protection, OPP, SCP and conforms to a hell lot of regulatory stuff such as CE, Nemko, TUV, UL, FCC, BSMI, GOST, C-Tick, RoHS, blah blah blabbetty blabbetty, but comes without any form of PFC. PFC, or Power Factor Correction is responsible for correcting the waveform of the AC outlet to minimize “Mains Pollution”, and European Countries require it as a mandatory feature. The fact that this is not here does not mean that you will get higher electricity bills (they will actually be cheaper by a minuscule amount), but this does cause a bit of headache to power companies to manage their electricity. And lastly, with an efficiency of only 70% typical, it isn’t the best in the world.

So after all that, its time to vote on the thing. The verdict? Buy it. It’s an investment you will not regret. PFC and Efficiency apart, its support for all those connectors means you won’t run out of jacks anytime soon, and the unusually high wattage for a price of just 3700 INR make it a perfect SMPS for the mid-range PC or Entry-level Workstation.

Popularity: 14% [?]

Mel Gibson is back, Boston-accented and kicking butt as a bereaved father trying to figure out who killed his daughter (Bojana Novakovic) in the new thriller Edge of Darkness. Based on a UK TV series of the same name, the story centers on Thomas Craven, a crusty old Beantown detective who witnesses his scientist child’s murder on his own doorstep. Soon, he is embroiled in a far reaching conspiracy involving Defense Contractor Northmoor, its sleazeball CEO (Danny Huston), the usual ancillary suspects, and a professional hitman/cleaner (Ray Winstone) who may or may not be on Craven’s side.

The plot involves nuclear research, “dirty bombs”, shady covert government ops, and enough cover-ups and cabals to make Watergate look like a well staged robbery. But it’s all just a means to get Gibson up on his feet and running around, craggy faced and focused, uncovering clues with his fists and his firearms. Director Martin Campbell, most famous for reinventing James Bond as a steely man of action in Casino Royale, actually worked on the original British show, so you’d think he’d have a fine handle on the material. That’s not always the case. When he stays with the stuntwork, he’s fine. When he evokes the narrative’s more ethereal elements, Edge of Darkness falls flat.
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Popularity: 19% [?]

Not everyone can afford a handset as expensive as the iPhone, HTC Hero or Palm Pre. Manufacturers like LG and Samsung are well aware of this and have created a range of much cheaper touchscreen mobiles, like the S5600, to fill this gap. The S5600 can be seen as an evolution of the Tocco Lite, but whereas the Lite was hampered by slower EDGE data speeds, this new model supports HSDPA, so it’s much speedier when it comes to downloading music tracks or viewing web pages.

The S5600 certainly provides evidence that cheap doesn’t have to mean ugly, as Samsung has done a stellar job on this phone’s styling. Measuring 103 x 55 x 13mm, the handset is quite small and as it’s nicely curved on the rear, it sits comfortably in your hand. The glossy, piano black finish may be a demon for attracting finger prints, but it still manages to look quite tasty and is nicely offset by the graphite effect used on the two call handling buttons at the bottom the screen. Despite the fact that the chassis is largely made of plastic, the phone still manages to feel quite well built, and although it’s not laden down with buttons, there are dedicated keys for volume, camera and the lock mode.

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Popularity: 23% [?]

Perhaps the most distinctive hallmark of the Internet era that has come to be known as Web 2.0 is the social networking arena: MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, Digg, Orkut and a host of other catchy-named Web sites have sprung up to immense popularity on the strength of their addictiveness. With rising demands, social networking sites have sprung up all over the place: it was only a matter of time before someone let you start making your own.

Enter Ning, the latest monosyllabic contribution to the feisty and social Web 2.0 world. Ning isn’t a social network, it’s a network of social networks, and by signing up, you are given free reign to create one of your own (we have ours here). It’s certainly a clever idea and has real potential, but does it deliver the goods? You’re about to find out.

How to Sign Up With Ning

Ning, like all other things Web 2.0, is simple, fairly easy-to-use, and has gigantic, boldly-colored buttons. The attraction, however, is a little different from your Twitters and your Facebooks: instead of looking to join up with a social network, you might actually be looking to start one. And lest you get confused, there’s really only one place to go once you’ve taken a look at the main page. (Note: You can, of course, join other peoples’ Ning networks, but at this point, do you really care yet?)

Clicking “Join Now” puts you on through to Ning’s registration page, which is actually just as simple – your name, e-mail, and password are all you need to get started.

That’s it. A few clicks of the keyboard and you’re essentially signed up, all set to create your own social networking hub.
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Popularity: 8% [?]

Modern aviation: like Icarus himself, how lowly this once-golden enterprise has fallen. None of us is getting thinner, yet the seats get smaller all the time. The air stewards, forced to flog booze, fags and scratch cards like street-market hawkers, mooch down the aisles with sullen hatred for their passengers. The crowding; the waiting; that generic short-haul smell — like being forced to bathe in a pigpen: the folk at Peta would be up in arms if animals were confined like this.

The pleasure and part of the fantasy of Up in the Air, the latest drama by Jason Reitman (Thank You For Smoking, Juno), is that it wafts us through a very different aerospace. This is a realm where all the officials treat “guests” with pearly-teethed gratitude, where queues are non-existent, and the seats recline just so. Up, up and away: to a retro-tinged zone free from the gravity and tedium that earth-bound drones have to endure.

It’s a zone that pleases Ryan Bingham (George Clooney) no end. He’s what is euphemistically called a “career transition” counselor. Corporate bosses too scared to tell their employees that they’re being laid off hire folk like Bingham to do the nasty work for them. He jets over the inland empire of America, racking up millions of air miles, and swishing into company boardrooms where, with the refined charm we’ve come to expect from guys played by Clooney, he extols the positive aspects of career termination.
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Popularity: 11% [?]

Moblin is short for “mobile Linux”. Well, it’s also a Linux-based platform that’s optimised for small computing devices. Moblin 2.1 is a Fedora-based derivative of Linux. It’s so unique, it could now be viewed as a stand-alone version of its own branch, if not a true baseline for future Linux revisions.

Even though Moblin started out as a Fedora derivative, by this time is so customized that it is clearly its own distribution in appearance, if nothing else. Experienced Debian, Fedora, or even Ubuntu users, will recognize many telltale traits of their OS, including its familiar package and update managers. And some hints of the original GNOME desktop are also quite evident in standard apps, though in my opinion are somewhat subdued.

Installation

The installation procedure that worked for us, is as follows -

• Download the image file of Moblin from http://moblin.org/downloads.
• Insert a USB drive (minimum 1GB) in your machine. Make sure the drive is unmounted.
• Run the following command as root:
  dd bs=4096 if=<image file> of=<usb drive>
  …where replace <img file> with the location of the Moblin image, and replace <usb drive> with the device node of your USB drive (e.g., /dev/sdb)

Now, you can boot your machine off the USB drive and install Moblin just the way you would, for any other distro. Yes, it’s that simple!

Faster boot & shut down

On the ASUS Eee PC 1008HA (as it is configured today with the standard Moblin 2.1 release), from the time the power button is pressed until the machine is up and ready to go is 30 seconds. BIOS consumes 8 seconds, and Moblin boot consumes an additional 22 seconds. The shut down time for the OS was 8 seconds. This runs in sharp contrast to the boot times reported by the guys at Moblin, on their internal builds, which are already in the sub-10 second boot range.

Users want much faster boot times from cold starts, and the ability to use their machine rather than spending a great deal of time waiting. And this is something Intel (and Google as well) recognise, and this is a major area of focus or push, towards giving the user a robust, graphical and unique experience.
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Popularity: 31% [?]

As far as open source enthusiasts (like us) are concerned, Flash was already a necessary evil that we had to deal with. However, there are still a few who would use Windows Media Player to showcase videos, on the Internet, thus necessitating the presence of WMP plugin in your browser. Well, the plugin sure is available for people on Windows and Mac, but how about the ones on Linux?

MPlayer

Well, there’s MPlayer to your rescue. If you are using Konqueror, Firefox or even Opera as your browser, then all you need to do is install MPlayer in your machine and the job’s done.

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Popularity: 12% [?]

WebMynd, a Y Combinator company that launched a couple of months ago, has released a new plugin that is looking to streamline the way you search. The plugin, which is available for Firefox and Google Chrome, enhances the search results on most popular search engines by inserting a handy sidebar with related search results from a variety of other sites. You can either test out the web-based version, or download the plugin from the homepage.

This Firefox extension takes a stab at solving a common Web problem: finding again that which had been found before. WebMynd adds two very useful functions to your browsing: site-by-site recording of where you’ve been, and integrating your history and Delicious bookmarks into specific Google searches.

The site-by-site recording creates a timeline view of your browsing and a photo browser-like display. Want the site you found Friday after lunch? Rewind using the Reel view. Looking for the site with the purple logo thing? The Grid view is good for your visual memory. Since you might not want a record of every single site you visit, WebMynd lets you add sites to a permanent “do not record” list and zap specific site records.
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Popularity: 7% [?]

Are you a foodie? Then you will agree that nothing will stimulate your taste buds like South Indian food. But what if you happen to be in Kolkata, and just can’t make a quick trip to that restaurant in Chennai for lunch? Have no fear. Come to New Alipore. The Super Snack Bar is here.

This place is old. I dunno how old, but I came here back in ‘96 and it was old back then; so it must be really old. All the pillars inside the place still have a red, blue and white colour scheme, and feature Kwality Walls logos from back in the early 90s. It’s kinda nostalgic. The waiters are old men, mostly North Indian (yes), and wear Gandhi Caps, giving a Purana Dilli kind of feel to the place. I know what you are thinking, Dosas and Delhi don’t mix. Well, this is Kolkata.

To get to the place, you have many options. If you want to take the local train, get on a train in the Sealdah South section, or the Circular Railway, and alight at Majerhat. You can take buses; almost all buses that go to Behala, Taratala or Parnasree halt in front of the Indian Government Mint, which is your stoppage. Or you can take a Taxi.
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Popularity: 10% [?]

The gadget gossip this week was all about Apple’s long-awaited latest offering, the iPad. The touch-screen tablet device was unveiled at an event in San Francisco by company boss Steve Jobs amid more hype than it probably deserved. The handheld unit aims to fill the gap between a smart-phone and a laptop and will weigh in at a starting price of US$500, increasing to $830 depending on specification and model; the cheaper versions come without 3G connectivity.

Claiming to have broken the digital mold once again, Jobs and company boasted, “In order to really create a new category of devices, those devices are going to have to be far better at doing some key tasks; we think we’ve got the goods. We think we’ve done it.” Apple dismissed rival devices such as netbooks by branding them as “just cheap laptops”, despite their surge in popularity last year.

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Popularity: 8% [?]