Zonk notes that Mythic Entertainment, developer of Warhammer Online, is being hit by another round of layoffs. The report estimates that between 60 and 130 staff were let go as part of Electronic Arts' reduction of its workforce. This comes alongside news that the number of Warhammer subscribers has settled to around 300,000. Mythic's Mark Jacobs was quick to affirm that while they were "resizing the team," their plans and schedule are unchanged, citing lower demands on QA now that the launch period has passed. Hopefully this means that their upcoming "live expansion," A Call to Arms, will not be affected by the layoffs.

A reader writes with news that the Operation Anchorage downloadable content for Fallout 3 has been released. Rock, Paper, Shotgun details the extensive difficulties encountered by users of Games for Windows Live while trying to locate and install the new content. This is the first in a series of three DLC releases, and they are exclusive to the PC and Xbox 360. The last, Broken Steel, will allow players to continue within the game once the main story is finished. Unfortunately, Bethesda apparently doesn't plan to patch that ability into the PS3 version.

The Guardian's Games Blog looks at how the development of downloadable games has shifted over the past several years. As an example, they point to Capcom, its recent reinvention of the Mega Man franchise, and an upcoming game called Flock. Quoting: "[CEO Paddy Sinclair said], 'The first thing we realised was, it wouldn't be as easy as we thought. Luckily we're funded privately so we had the luxury of getting it wrong. It was very... educational. We learned very quickly that, no, you can't write a game in three months. We also realized we'd need a bigger team than just two or three.' 'The XBLA market has really evolved,' continues business development head, Chris Wright. 'If you look at the very early games they were simple ports — single-player, retro emulation titles, and you can kick those out very quickly. That market is disappearing. If you're going to do retro remakes you have to extend it, you have to add multiplayer. If you're going to do something new, it has to be bigger. We've got a team of 10-12 people working on this title. If you look back, it's what we would have had on PS1, and the game is probably of the same sort of size. It's not the huge budgets of a retail title, but it's not a trivial undertaking, either.'"

Trigger writes "At our work we were decomissioning six old HP/Compaq servers to clear up space for new servers and, naturally, each server had a fairly large raid array. Instead of formatting every hard drive (would have taken weeks performing a DoD level wipe) and disposing them all together with the servers, I decided to disassemble the hard drives and recycle them into something neat. With a lot (a lot) of patience, I made this shiny Xmas tree. In total there are around 70 old SCSI hard drives, between 9gb and 18gb in size each. They were nice and chunky, oldschool style. There were quite a few different hard drive models, which is good because they each had different bits which I could use. The Xmas tree is made with parts from hard drives only except for one nut which I had to purchase for $0.39." It's good to see that this guy has plenty to do at work.

Barence writes "The deplorable speed of British broadband connections has been revealed in the latest figures from the Office of National Statistics, which show that 42.3% of broadband connections are slower than 2Mb/sec. More worryingly, the ONS statistics are based on the connection's headline speed, not actual throughput, which means that many more British broadband connections are effectively below the 2Mb/sec barrier. Better still, a separate report issued yesterday by Ofcom revealed that the majority of broadband users had no idea about the speed of their connection anyway."

gyrogeerloose writes "In a column in Saturday's San Diego Union Tribune, Peter Rowe makes a connection between the popularity of horror movie genres and the political party in the White House. A Republican administration presides over a period of zombie movies while a Democrat in the Oval Office brings on a cycle of vampire movies. Why? Possibly because the two genres 'are really competing parables about class warfare.' Hmmmm, maybe. On the other hand, it might just be a coincidence." Socialists are best represented by lycanthropes, and the Libertarians are most closely tied to any sort of horror from space.

An anonymous reader writes "This year's GenCon Charity Auction raised over $17,000 which they intended to donate to Gary Gygax's favorite charity, Christian Children's Fund. However, the charity refused the donation when they learned of its connection to Dungeons & Dragons." It seems to me all they would need to do is cast remove curse or dispel evil and the money would be fine to use.