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Real Time Strategy (Games)

StarCraft II To Be Released On July 27 220

Blizzard announced today that StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty, the first game in a series of three, will be released on July 27. The game will contain the Terran campaign (29 missions), the full multiplayer experience, and "several challenge-mode mini-games," with "focused goals designed to ease players into the basics of multiplayer strategies." It will launch alongside the revamped Battle.net, which we've previously discussed. Blizzard CEO Mike Morhaime said, "We've been looking forward to revisiting the StarCraft universe for many years, and we're excited that the time for that is almost here. Thanks to our beta testers, we're making great progress on the final stages of development, and we'll be ready to welcome players all over the world to StarCraft II and the new Battle.net in just a few months."

Comment Don't overlook the hardware basics... (Score 1) 274

Sometimes a quick visual inspection of the interior of the computer can lead to the cause of the problem. Double-check the cabling, cards, memory, etc. to make sure that everything is secured in place. Even if the cards appear to be fine, I've seen it where they sometimes need to be removed and reseated. Don't forget about cooling as well. Make sure that the system has adequate cooling, that the existing fans/heatsinks are not clogged with dust and have good mobility with the flick of a finger. Double-check the fans are operational with case open and system is powered, and most motherboards have basic temperature monitoring for the CPUs and speed monitoring for the fans. On the motherboard, make sure to check the capacitors. Over the years (as recently as a couple weeks ago), I've had to replace motherboards because the capacitors had gone bad:

see -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacitor_plague

Some people have already mentioned it, but it needs to be stressed, a *good* power supply is mandatory and if necessary a UPS. The power supply can be perfectly operational and even pass with a power supply tester (also a good investment), but if the power being supplied to it is not consistent (brown-outs) or simply not adequate to drive all the components (e.g. video cards, # of drives, etc.) that can cause problems. In one case by simply swapping the cheap power supply out for a good quality one that I had as a spare from an older system resolved the problem.

Inproper BIOS settings can also cause problems. Memory/CPU voltages or speed may be incorrect? Conflicting on-board video/audio still enabled when add-in video cards and audio cards have been added?

I still haven't even gotten to the software debugging side of things...

Patents

Submission + - NTP: A Taste of Its Own Medicine

UltraAyla writes: "NTP's patent suits seem to have attracted the attention of Oren Tavory, a man who claims to have worked on a project with NTP founder Thomas Campana back in 1991. From the article: "In September, Tavory filed a lawsuit against NTP in U.S. District Court in Richmond, Va., demanding that a judge issue a court order naming him as co-inventor on seven NTP patents, and accusing NTP of copyright infringement and unjust enrichment.""
The Internet

Submission + - Has Verizon forfeited common carrier status?

An anonymous reader writes: Freedom of speech, the future of the net, you name it.

In October, a U.S. vigilante group asked Verizon to cut off net access to Epifora, a Canadian ISP that hosts a number of (entirely legal) web sites that offer support to minor-attracted adults. Shortly thereafter, Verizon gave 30 days notice to Epifora, ending a 5 year relationship.

The telecoms have traditionally refrained from censoring legal content, arguing that as a "common carrier", it is outside of their scope to make such decisions. Furthermore, they have refrained because if they did so in some cases, it might make them legally liable for other cases where they did not exercise censorship.

The questions are: has Verizon forfeited their claims to common carrier status by selectively censoring legal speech which they do not like? can the net effectively route around censorship if the trunk carriers are allowed to pick and choose whom they allow to connect? Are there implications for net neutrality?

There have been few published articles about this case, yet it could be a harbinger of things to come. Perhaps Verizon is counting on the fact that few people will object to MAA forums being cut off — the thin edge of the wedge.

Here are two articles:

http://www.guidemag.com/magcontent/invokemagconten t.cfm?ID=A2E247F1-CB55-4215-9F96211CDCD52F41

http://www.cippic.ca/ (may be difficult to find the blurb on the page — they posted it 25 October)

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