28046562
submission
RobinEggs writes:
After long speculation and a few affirmative hints, Blizzard has confirmed that Diablo 3 will have a console version. Responding to a fan who asked him to "confirm or deny" a console version of D3, Blizzard community manager Bashiok said: "Yup. Josh Mosqueira is lead designer for the Diablo console project."
Here's hoping Blizzard remains one of the few companies to fully develop both the console and PC version of their titles, rather than simply porting the Xbox version to PC. I think we've all had enough of bizarre scrolling, menus that can't be used with a mouse, and of "Controls" menus that don''t even bother replacing the 360 controller image with an actual keyboard layout.
26818400
submission
RobinEggs writes:
Nintendo's Shigeru Miyamoto, the creator and producer of the Zelda and Mario franchises among other works, is stepping down at Nintendo.
After personally managing Nintendo's blockbuster franchises for ~20 years, Miyamoto said today: ""What I really want to do is be in the forefront of game development once again myself. Probably working on a smaller project with even younger developers. Or I might be interested in making something that I can make myself, by myself. Something really small."
26809518
submission
RobinEggs writes:
A case before the US Supreme Court today addresses the legality of medical patents.
From TFA: "The case focuses on a patent that covers the concept of adjusting the dosage of a drug, thiopurine, based on the concentration of a particular chemical (called a metabolite) in the patient's blood. The patent does not cover the drug itself—that patent expired years ago—nor does it cover any specific machine or procedure for measuring the metabolite level. Rather, it covers the idea that particular levels of the chemical "indicate a need" to raise or lower the drug dosage.
The patent holder, Prometheus Labs, offers a thiopurine testing product. It sued the Mayo Clinic when the latter announced it would offer its own, competing thiopurine test. But Prometheus claims much more than its specific testing process. It claims a physician administering thiopurine to a patient can infringe its patent merely by being aware of the scientific correlation disclosed in the patent—even if the doctor doesn't act on the patent's recommendations."
The ACLU, AMA, AARP, multiple libertarian groups, and the ghost of Michael Crichton all filed strongly worded amicus briefs urging the court to decide against Prometheus claims.
It's amazing how friendly the justices seem toward medical patents in general. Newest member Elena Kagan offered an opinion I find particularly stupid, which is easiest read and understood in the context of the linked article.
26150654
submission
RobinEggs writes:
Some reviews of Bulldozer's performance in servers have arrived, and Arstechnica has a breakdown. The results are pretty ugly. Apparently Bulldozer fares just as poorly with servers as with desktops.
From the article: 'One reason for the underwhelming performance on the desktop is that the Bulldozer architecture emphasizes multithreaded performance over single-threaded performance. For desktop applications, where single-threaded performance is still king, this is a problem. Server workloads, in contrast, typically have to handle multiple users, network connections, and virtual machines concurrently. This makes them a much better fit for processors that support lots of concurrent threads. Some commentators have even suggested that Bulldozer was, first and foremost, a server processor; relatively weak desktop performance was to be expected, but it would all come good in the server room.
Unfortunately for AMD, it looks as though the decisions that hurt Bulldozer on the desktop continue to hurt it in the server room. Although the server benchmarks don't show the same regressions as were found on the desktop, they do little to justify the design of the new architecture.'
It's probably much too early to start editorializing about the end of AMD, or even to say with certainty that Bulldozer has failed, but my untrained eye can't yet see any possible silver lining in these new processors.
