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First Person Shooters (Games)

Submission + - Battlefield 3 Performance: 30+ Graphics Cards, Ben (tomshardware.com)

Submitted by wesbascas
wesbascas writes: Have you ever wanted to play a new PC game, but weren't sure where your PC falls between the minimum and recommended system requirements? I don't have a whole lot of time to game these days and with new hardware perpetually coming out and component vendors often tweaking their model numbering schemes, knowing exactly what kind of experience I'm buying for $60 can be difficult. Luckily, somebody benchmarked Battlefield 3's campaign on a wide range of hardware configurations and detail settings. If you've purchased a system in the past few years you should be in luck. The video cards tested start with the AMD Radeon HD 4670 and Nvidia GeForce 8500 GT, and go up to the brand new Radeon HD 6990 and GeForce GTX 590. I hate it that my aging Radeon HD 4870 isn't going to cut it at 1080p, but am glad that I found out BEFORE buying the game. I suppose it's time for an upgrade anyway, there's no way I'm missing this title.
Media

Submission + - ask slashdot: do some new movie DVDs not work on y 4

Submitted by
fade-in
fade-in writes: "Using RedBox has been really hit-or-miss for me lately, as about half of the movies I rent flat-out don't work on my PC. At first I thought it was a Linux problem, but when I tried the discs on a Windows 7 PC I met the same results.
After doing some research I've found that all of the titles that have failed for me are distributed by Paramount Pictures.
Am I alone in the world, or has anyone else experienced this? Is it a secret plot to drive folks to BitTorrent? Which movie distributors' discs cause the most trouble, and where do I complain to get it fixed?"
Android

Submission + - Dolphin, a 3rd Party Android Browser, relays visit (androidpolice.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: "As it turns out, Dolphin HD, one of the top browsers the Android platform has to offer, sends pretty much every web page url you visit, including those that start with https, to a remote server en.mywebzines.com, which belongs to the company. In fact, the WebZines feature was introduced only recently back in June with version 6.0, so it's safe to say this tracking started around the same time."

Dolphin's team says a fix is coming shortly.
AMD

Submission + - New AMD FX Chip Doesn't Live Up To Its Namesake (tomshardware.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The FX-8150, AMD's first Bulldozer (Zambezi) chip is here, and the reviews are rolling in. Tom's Hardware just posted an exhaustive look at the new eight-core flagship. Benchmarks for synthetic, gaming, content creation, and productivity workloads are included, as well as per-cycle performance, AVX throughput, memory bandwidth scaling, and power consumption.
The impact of second-gen Turbo Core and a preview of Bulldozer on Windows 8 are small lights of hope for AMD in what is otherwise a dour review. While in multi-threaded applications the FX-8150 is fairly competitive with Intel’s Core i5-2500K and i7-2600K Sandy Bridge chips, it turns out that Zambezi is actually slower than even AMD’s own previous generation Thuban and Deneb procs in less-demanding benchmarks! With the FX is priced right between the two Sandy Bridge chips, they conclude to stick with the ten month old Core i5-2500K. Worthy of the FX name, the 8150 is not.
Education

Submission + - Indian state government revises specs to get MS in (tehelka.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Tehelka, a newspaper from India, reports that a state government agency in the state of Tamil Nadu in India has revised the specifications for 7 million notebook computers to be acquired by the state government for distribution to poor students, to include Microsoft proprietory software thereby increasing the cost and edging out free software. The cost of each notebook has risen, as a result. Do you smell corruption here too ? (Some background on India's corruption woes: http://www.sunday-guardian.com/analysis/regime-of-scamsters-protects-the-corrupt). What can the FOSS community in India and their counterparts elsewhere do, to fix such problems ?
Microsoft

Submission + - Microsoft planning public beta of new Xbox 360 das (winbeta.org)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Microsoft is working on launching a public beta of the new Xbox 360's dashboard update, which is slated for release sometime around November 25th. Microsoft, which doesn't surprise many, "accidentally" rolled out the beta earlier today, only to remove it claiming it was an accident.
Cloud

Submission + - Intel gives up on TV (bloomberg.com)

Submitted by symbolset
symbolset writes: Bloomberg is reporting that Intel, on the cusp of having low-power embedded chips that can do true HD in a flatscreen, has given up on getting their chips embedded in TVs.

While many might say their efforts to date have been fruitless because of energy issues, Medfield might have had a chance on this field. Thoughts?
Power

Submission + - Leaked: GM to Reveal its 1st Pure Electric Car (greencarreports.com)

Submitted by thecarchik
thecarchik writes: GM had hoped to announce its latest green vehicle tomorrow morning, at a nice, orderly, staged press event to celebrate Chevrolet's 100th birthday, but the cat is now out of the bag.

Based on conversations with a number of sources knowledgeable about the electric car industry:

The vehicle is the Chevrolet Spark EV that was spied testing in Michigan just last month (and which we predicted would be GM's first all-electric car sold in the U.S.).

The Spark EV was originally unveiled this past June, as the Chevrolet Beat EV, in India. It is an electric conversion of the upcoming 2013 Chevrolet Spark minicar (known in some markets as the Beat).

Submission + - Amazon's Kindle Fire 7-inch display Android Tablet (bloggerzcafe.com)

Submitted by
rohi46
rohi46 writes: "Amazon‘s Kindle Fire Android tablet is out for sale for a price tag of $199! Amazon’s 7-inch display Kindle Fire Android was the hot pick today at Amazon event in New York City. People present were eagerly waiting for the milk to spill as Amazon’s Jeff Bezos went on stage and unwrapped the new player and showed its movie playback capability and other media features. This was bound to happen at the Amazon event in NY.

As per initial rumors, the Amazon tab looks a little narrower. It would weigh upto 14.6 ounces, which would be pretty much the same as the BlackBerry PlayBook. For my taking Amazon has come up with few sacrifices especially with the price tag, though the reader doesn’t come up with the touchscreen feature both in the Kindle Touch and its recent Nook and Kobo devices."

Submission + - Kindle disassembled (blogkindle.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Kindle motherboard cut open — reveals ARM Cortex-A8 CPU, 128Mb of RAM (half that of Kindle 3) and supporting hardware
Wireless Networking

Submission + - Citigroup questions if US spectrum shortage exists (networkworld.com)

Submitted by alphadogg
alphadogg writes: For more than two years, the U.S. mobile industry has warned of an upcoming spectrum shortage, but two analysts at Citigroup don't buy it. AT&T, trade group CTIA and even officials with the U.S. Federal Communications Commission have talked frequently about a coming spectrum crunch, as mobile customers move to data-sucking smartphones and tablets. Smartphones use 24 times the spectrum compared to standard mobile phones, and tablets use 120 times the spectrum, FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski said in a speech on Tuesday. But Citigroup analysts Jason Bazinet and Michael Rollins questioned what has become the convention wisdom in the mobile industry. The U.S. has plenty of spectrum for mobile broadband, but much of it is in the wrong hands, they said.
Chrome

Submission + - Web Browser Grand Prix 7: Firefox 7, Chrome 14, Op (tomshardware.com) 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Firefox 7 was released a couple days ago, and now the latest Web browser perfromance numbers are in. This article is the same series that ran benchmarks on Mac OS X Lion last month. This time around the new Mozilla release is going against Chrome 14 and Opera 11.51 in 40+ different tests on Windows 7. Testing comes from every category of Web browsing perfromance I can think of: startup time, page load time, JS, CSS, DOM, HTML5, Flash, hardware acceleration, WebGL, Java, Silverlight, reliable page loads, memory usage/management, and standards confromance. The article also has a little feature on the Futuremark Peacekeeper browser benchmark. An open beta of the next revision has just been made public. This new version adds HTML5, video codecs, and WebGL tests to the benchmark. It's also designed to run on any browser/OS/device combination — e.g. Windows desktop, iPad, Droid 2, MacBook, Linux flavors, etc. Another great read, a must for Web browser fanatics!

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