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Role Playing (Games)

BioWare Goes Episodic With New Games 52

Posted by Zonk from the downloadable-planets-are-the-best-kind dept.
The word from the site Computer and Videogames is that BioWare will be offering episodic content for all of its upcoming games. This includes Mass Effect, Dragon Age, and Jade Empire: Special Edition. CEO Ray Muzyka, in an interview with CVG, talks about this and many other elements of the coming year in PC gaming. From the article: "The videogame market is very cyclical and PC and console gaming have an uneasy alliance - as new console systems are released, early adopter fans move over to check those games out and as PC systems reach and surpass console systems at the end of a console life cycle, a good number of those early adopter fans move back over to PC gaming. Console gaming is huge of course, especially when you add in hardware sales, but it's hard to quantify the enormous impact of online gaming on the overall PC market - retail sales just don't capture the revenues from the increasingly successful PC MMOs as well as digital distribution and episodic gaming (which are both gaining strength year after year)."
Intel

Submission + - Is your software ready for 80-core chip?

Submitted by
prostoalex
prostoalex writes: "Dr. Dobbs' Journal is reporting on Intel getting ready to demo an 80-core chip: "That's right: Not an 8-core; this is an 80-core chip. The microprocessor manufacturer has jumped way ahead of the expected progression from dual-core to quad-core to 8-core, etc., to delve into different ways to make something as complicated as an 80-core chip actually work.""
Google

Submission + - Online Office Suites: The Winner Is Clear

Submitted by jcatcw
jcatcw writes: Computerworld reviewed four online office suites — Ajax13, Google Docs & Spreadsheets, ThinkFree Online and Zoho Office Suite. None has all the applications and features of Microsoft Office, but if you're looking for the core office applications in an access-anywhere format, at least two were surprisingly sophisticated. The article weighs the ability to save files to a centralized server quite heavily in its ranking. The winner is ThinkFree Office because it provides the most sophisticated features and has the best Microsoft Office compatibility. Zoho's suite is the second choice.
Movies

Submission + - Startup tries watermarking instead of DRM

Submitted by Loosehead Prop
Loosehead Prop writes: A U.K. startup called Streamburst has a novel idea: selling downloadable video with watermarks instead of DRM. The system works by adding a 5-second intro to each download that shows the name of the person who bought the movie along with something like a watermark: 'it's not technically a watermark in the usual sense of that term, but the encoding process does strip out a unique series of bits from the file. The missing information is a minuscule portion of the overall file that does not affect video quality, according to Bjarnason, but does allow the company to discover who purchased a particular file.' The goal is to 'make people accountable for their actions without artificially restricting those actions.'
Space

Submission + - Element Creation 101: Big Bangs and Supernovas

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: It's an unwritten law that every popularizer of astronomy or physics inevitably publicly states that humans are made of stardust. This idea is mentioned so consistently that it has unfortunately become cliché. But the great minds who have talked about this (Carl Sagan, Stephen Hawking, Martin Rees, etc.) aren't suffering from a lack of creativity. Rather, they realize that the story of nucleosynthesis (element creation) is one of the most profound and beautiful tales science can tell, and immediately connects the events at the beginning of time, or within the hearts of stars, to each person's every-day, Earth-bound existence. Coordinating with two leaders in nucleosynthesis research, Gary Steigman at Ohio State University and Bradley S. Meyer at Clemson University, Seed magazine has condensed the story of the elements into an illustrated poster to give a glimpse of the grandeur behind one of science's most-repeated statements.
The Internet

Inside MySpace.com 250

Posted by kdawson from the like-Topsy dept.
lizzyben writes "Baseline is running a long piece about the inner workings of MySpace.com. The story chronicles how the social networking site has continuously upgraded its technology infrastructure — not entirely systematically — to accommodate more than 26 million accounts. It was a rocky road and there are still hiccups, several of which writer David F. Carr details here." From the story: "MySpace.com's continued growth flies in the face of much of what Web experts have told us for years about how to succeed on the Internet. It's buggy, often responding to basic user requests with the dreaded 'Unexpected Error' screen, and stocked with thousands of pages that violate all sorts of conventional Web design standards with their wild colors and confusing background images. And yet, it succeeds anyway."
HP

Submission + - HP advances fight to keep Moore's Law healthy

Submitted by jcatcw
jcatcw writes: "HP Labs today said it created a method of using a "crossbar switch" that more efficiently routes signals inside a common kind of chip called a field programmable gate array (FPGA). The technology could lead to the creation of chips packed with far more transistors on board, leading to faster computing times. HP calls its new technology field programmable nanowire interconnect (FPNI). The lab hopes to make an actual prototype chip using the technology within a year, and HP believes it could produce chips that contain a 15-nanometer crossbar by 2010."
Communications

Submission + - Cell Phone in Pocket Badly Burns California Man

Submitted by westlake
westlake writes: Computerworld and USA TODAY are reporting a cell phone fire that has a California man in hospital with second and third degree burns over 60% of his body. The cell phone was in his pants pocket when he fell asleep while sitting in a plastic bathroom chair, apparently leaning against a button. The phone overheated, igniting his polyester pants, nylon shirt and jacket, spreading the fire to the chair. It's likely he survived only because his apartment had sprinklers. Fire investigators are calling it a freakish accident, the man had four times the legal limit of alcohol in his blood. But still you have to wonder about a product that ignites before it shuts down. Even an ordinary household iron has that much protection these days.
Music

Submission + - Apple to play fairer with Fairplay?

Submitted by NewbieMonster
NewbieMonster writes: According to tech.co.uk (http://tinyurl.com/yd7ac9), Apple are preparing to license Fair Play to Made for iPod accessory manufacturers. They understand that Apple will also allow streaming of protected AAC content via USB. From the article: The expected announcements could signal a move on Apple's part to take some of the sting out of its Fairplay DRM which has come in for a great deal of criticism over recent months. It may also be a way of keeping Made For iPod makers onside, as the draw of the Microsoft Zune becomes stronger. Could this signal a move to allowing other music players to access and play ITMS content?
AMD/OSTG

Vendor AMD will remain in the discrete GPU business

Submitted by OSTG Marketing
Rick Bergman of AMD has confirmed that the new combined AMD/ATI business will indeed remain in the discrete graphics chip business for the foreseeable future. "Many had anticipated that AMD's venture into platforms might cause the processor designer to use GPUs only for enabling its processor business via platforms, and eventually forsake the discrete graphics market. Now, it appears AMD has the R700 waiting in t
Enlightenment

Submission + - 1UP's Top 10 WTF moments of 2006

Submitted by MasterPoof
MasterPoof writes: From Scott Sharkey 1UP's Top 10 : "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, but mostly, it was the what the f***iest of times. Barely a day went by this year when something absoludicrous didn't assault us from our own news page. Given the relentless march of progressively more insane events and the dilated nature of internet time some of this stuff has already begun to fade from collective memory. But it happened, no matter how much the shriveled rational halves of our brains try to tell us that it didn't." Though must of you probably know what half of these already are, its still worth a read (or at the very least a cheap laugh).
The Internet

Submission + - VirtualCity Launches Street Level Images in Canada

Submitted by
chris_toronto
chris_toronto writes: "The Globe and Mail has an article, as well as the Montreal Gazette about VirtualCity, a website that has been capturing millions of street level photos tied to a map interface (ala A9.com style) throughout Toronto and Montreal. They've tied this together with a neat Ajax interface to explore these cities in detail. The images appear to be in Hi Def and I've seen one of the trucks on the road in Toronto, it looks like the torch has been passed on since A9 pulled BlockView off the market."
The Internet

Submission + - Inside MySpace.com

Submitted by lizzyben
lizzyben writes: Baseline is running a long piece about the inner workings of MySpace.com. The story chronicles how the social networking site has continuously upgraded its technology infrastructure — not entirely systematically — to accommodate more than 26 million accounts. It was a rocky road and there are still hiccups, several of which writer David F. Carr details here.

In many ways, the success of MySpace is counterintuitive. From the story: "MySpace.com's continued growth flies in the face of much of what Web experts have told us for years about how to succeed on the Internet. It's buggy, often responding to basic user requests with the dreaded "Unexpected Error" screen, and stocked with thousands of pages that violate all sorts of conventional Web design standards with their wild colors and confusing background images. And yet, it succeeds anyway."
Movies

The First HD DVD Movie Hits BitTorrent 537

Posted by kdawson from the nailing-jello-to-a-tree dept.
Ars Technica reports that the first HD DVD movie has made its way onto BitTorrent, showing that current DRM efforts to prevent illegal sharing of copyrighted content are still futile and fighting an uphill battle. From the article: "The pirates of the world have fired another salvo in their ongoing war with copy protection schemes with the first release of the first full-resolution rip of an HD DVD movie on BitTorrent. The movie, Serenity, was made available as a .EVO file and is playable on most DVD playback software packages such as PowerDVD. The file was encoded in MPEG-4 VC-1 and the resulting file size was a hefty 19.6 GB."

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