Content and news by Rob Williams

What game developer isn’t going to wind up on the Steam platform? Capcom is the latest, with Lost Planet: Extreme Condition, Onimusha 3, Devil May Cry 3 and Super Puzzle Fighter on the way, with all future releases to be thrown on Steam as well.

SAN MATEO, Calif , June 11, 2007 – Capcom(R), a leading worldwide developer and publisher of video games, and Valve(R) today announced an agreement that brings a collection of Capcom’s current and future PC games to Valve’s Steam digital distribution service. Under the arrangement, PC versions of Lost PlanetT: Extreme Condition, Onimusha(R) 3, Devil May Cry(R) 3: Special Edition, Super Puzzle FighterTM II Turbo HD Remix, and future PC titles will be made available via the leading online distribution platform. Capcom is the first major Japanese software publisher to sign on with Steam.

Source: Valve Press Release

Steve Jobs wrapped up his keynote just two hours ago, and there was a lot to come out of that 90 minutes. Leopard has quite a few new additions, including a cool multi-view video browser, which actually has all the videos playing while you are surfing through them. Time Machine was also discussed, which many people will learn to appreciate when the time comes that they need to rely on it.

Also of interest is the fact that gaming on Macs is really ramping up, thanks to support from iD, EA and EA Sports. I still think it’s going to be a while before gaming on Macs -really- picks up, considering that you can purchase a PC for $1,000 when Mac Pros start off at $2,500, but it wouldn’t surprise me to see a wider product line in the coming year. Any support for gaming is good support though.

Another surprising announcement is that the Safari browser is available for both Windows XP and Vista, but sadly, not for Linux (no it doesn’t emulate either). I am unsure the benefits of the browser when compared to the likes of Firefox and Opera, but you might give it a shot if you are curious.

As for the secret 12th iPhone app? It looks as though it’s non-existent. Kudos to Ryan Block and his crew at Engadget for the fast updates as the keynote progressed.

Source: Engadget

If you are a camera user (and who isn’t?), chances are you are interested in knowing the life expectancy of your cameras shutter. This web site lists all of the popular camera models on the market right now, and based on user submission, gives you an idea of shutter expectancy.

Life expectancy will obviously vary between the same camera models though. It’s all based on luck. Some may get 8,000 shutter releases while someone else gets 35,000. The important thing is finding out if your camera is notorious or not for short-lived shutters. For the record, my Nikon D80 is almost at the 10,000 mark, but still going mighty strong. Course, I shouldn’t jinx myself…

Source: Shutter Life – Via: Engadget

DigiTimes is reporting that AMD has begun shipping HD 2400 and 2600 GPUs to customers, so they should be popping up on your favorite e-tailers in the weeks to come. The HD 2600 card is ATI’s answer to NVIDIA’s 8600 GT and should compete nicely despite the current lack of amazing DX 10 results.

AMD has said that it has begun shipping its ATI Radeon HD 2400 and ATI Radeon HD 2600 series graphics processors (GPUs) in volume to its add-in board (AIB) customers. Graphics cards based on these processors are expected to be available at online retailers within a few weeks.

Source: DigiTimes

Some people would quit when they are ahead, but not these guys. They made over 232,000 false bids on their own auctions in order to jack the price up by as much as 20%. As disgusting as it is, it’s certainly not surprising. By the sounds of things though, they earned $5 million through all of these auctions, so a $400K fine is unlikely to teach anyone a lesson.

In around a year, these bids totalled some $5m, the attorney general’s office claimed. Attorney general Andrew Cuomo said: “This scam highlights the growing vulnerability of online auction shoppers. Consumers should not have to surf with sharks.”

Source: The Register

eVGA has released numerous motherboards in the past two years, but we are going to take a look at their most recent top offering, the nForce 680i SLI. Coming from a company who knows how to cater to enthusiasts, will the board leave us impressed like their graphics cards do?

Some people know no boundaries, one of them being this German programmer. He hit up a huge field, and mowed a “Hello, World!” in a Semacode design. It’s a good thing he didn’t run into any compile errors. Wheat takes a while to grow back.

An ambitious German programmer decided to write the world’s biggest “Hello, World!” result. Those of you who are programmers know that writing your first code in a programming language usually involves writing a program to print out the words “Hello, World!”. It’s been a tradition for several decades now. This guy decided to show the words in a crop field so it would be visible in aerial photos.

Source: Google Earth Blog

This will likely come as a surprise to no one, but Google has officially been rated the worst for privacy. Who’s to disagree with an organization known as Privacy International? Notes brought up include the inability to expunge your personal data, unstated duration for held data and failure to accept popular privacy practises.

If you are worried that Google might have too much info on you, and no doubt they do, you may want to consider using other services to break free from the Google Grasp (I coined it. Ok maybe not in order to avoid being sued). While I don’t necessarily disagree with their data tracking, I do disagree with the inability for a user to request an expunge of their data. They allow you to delete your GMAIL account for example, but they still keep all retained data indefinitely.

Privacy can be a touchy subject; generally people want their privacy maintained and yet the delivery of many services from Internet startups is dependent on personal data to deliver personalized content.

Source: Tech Crunch

The WWDC 07 conference begins today, and if you listen carefully, you may just be able to hear the millions of Apple fans twitching in unison. While the conference will likely focus most on Leopard, iPhone will no doubt be brought up many times as well. Will we find out more about the supposed 12th application? I heard that it was a one-click access to the newest porn, but I could be mistaken.

The guys at Gizmodo promise to post immediate updates of their findings, as will CrunchGear and Engadget. For those of you who would like to listen on in, iPhone Alley is streaming the entire keynote.

Should anything monumental happen throughout the day, we will relay the information to you.

The Nikon D3 rumor is heating up again, and hopefully for good reason. It’s been a while since the D2xs has been released and people are waiting for an upgrade, especially one that has a full frame sensor. Apparently, the rumor is that the D3 will come at least close, with a 1.1 near full frame sensor, which might very well deem a lot of the newer DX lenses useless. Compared to Canons high-end Mark III, the D3 is supposed to have a much higher megapixel rating, at 18.7. Will it be able to keep up to the Mark III’s incredible 110 images burst speed?

Nikon didn’t respond to requests for comment. And it should be noted that rumors are not reliable: one report of a Nikon D3 with similar specifications predicted that Nikon would announce the D3 at the Photo Marketing Show in March, which came and went without a peep.

Source: News.com

Warner Home Entertainment has a reason to be proud, as their movie, The Departed, has sold over 100,000 units since its release in February, effectively becoming the first movie to reach that milestone. This accomplishment was helped by the fact that they support both HD-DVD and Blu-ray formats.

While Warner is not the only format-neutral studio, it has been the most aggressive, releasing more titles than any other studio, and even planning to release (and license to other studios) its own hybrid format (dubbed “Total Hi-Def”) sometime later this year.

Source: High-Def Digest

Turtle Beach makes some great headphones for those who want quality sound at a good price. Now they have outdone themselves, fitting four speakers in each earpiece along with dual woofers, to create true 5.1 sound. I have used another one of their 5.1 headsets for well over a year now, but these new ones are the clear winner. At least on paper.

Besides sporting a removable boom mic, it features a 10-band, six-channel EQ and allows you to hear outside sounds as well. (Though I’m not sure why you’d want to be distracted by the real world or your girlfriend during a hardcore fragging session.)

Source: Gizmodo

Those of you using BitTorrent sites may want to be careful, as TorrentSpy has been ordered to track its visitors. TorrentSpy in the past has vowed to never track their users, so considering the fact that this is ordered for US visitors only, there might be a slight chance that they will just ban all IPs that reside there.

The Motion Picture Association of America, which represents Columbia Pictures and other top Hollywood film studios, sued TorrentSpy and a host of others in February 2006 as part of a sweep against file-sharing companies. According to the MPAA, the search engine was sued for allegedly making it easier to download pirated files.

Source: News.com

The folks at Bare Feats have taken a performance look at the latest MacBooks out of Apple, utilizing the Santa Rosa chipset. I feel sorry for anyone who just bought a MacBook prior to these ones being announced, because the 8600GT really adds a nice punch.

The new MacBook Pro with the GeForce 8600M runs 3D accelerated games significantly faster than the previous 2.33GHz model with the Mobility Radeon X1600. For example, Quake 4 ran 60% faster, Prey 55% faster, and Doom 3 ran 38% faster. The “Rosa” even beat the 4-Core Mac Pro desktop with a GeForce 7300 GT in 4 out of 5 of our tests.

Source: Bare Feats

One of the most talked about features of the iPhone, is probably the simplest. When the phone is locked, you can simply touch the screen and slide the virtual lock in order to unlock it. Who says the iPhone should have all the iPhun? Not one developer apparently, who wrote a screensaver that offers the same functionality on a PDA.

It works on an Pocket PC phone and gives it the same “slide to unlock” capability. It’s essentially a glorified screensaver, but since anything even remotely related to the iPhone is “in” these days, it can’t hurt to mention it.

Source: Crunch Gear

If you’ve ever wanted to have interesting fun with networks but didn’t know where to begin, Life Hacker might be able to give you a head start. In yet another top ten, they are taking a look at network tools that you should know about. It’s hard to disagree with a few of them. Angry IP Scanner, DynDNS and Himachi are of the few listed.

Looking at the history of computing, anyone can see that it wasn’t until some brilliant folks connected a couple of computers together that the real fun began. Countless tools let you do all sorts of network trickery, many with their roots at the Unix command line. But forget arcane command line tools.

Source: Life Hacker

Despite the fact that Bill Gates is the richest man in the world, he values education. He went back to Harvard to acquire his law degree he originally set out to get in ’77.

“We recognize the most illustrious member of the Harvard College class of 1977 never to have graduated from Harvard,” said Harvard University Provost Steven Hymen, who didn’t seem too humbled to present the honorary degree. “It seems high time that his alma mater hand over the diploma.”

I am not sure how much work Bill had to do in order to earn the degree, but at least now he has something to add to his already impressive resume.

Source: Engadget

Just when you were excited about your QX6800, Ryan Shrout of PC Perspective comes along and stomps on your pride and joy with his Intel V8 system, which consists of dual Quad-Core Xeons running at 3.0GHz alongside 4GB of DDR2-667 FB ram.

When compared to current CPUs on the market, it’s no surprise that the V8 creamed them in every synthetic benchmark. In some cases, the V8 outperformed the 2.93GHz X6800 CPU by more than 4.0x. While the performance results are drool-worthy, the setup is not that affordable. The motherboard alone will set you back a minimum of $600.

The current top of the line Xeon CPU, the X5355 that runs at 2.66 GHz on a 1333 MHz FSB, is selling for just under $1200. If we transpose that price to the upcoming X5365 as the new top-end Xeon processor in that family, then we can assume that it too will fit in at the $1200 price point. That makes the entire system configuration including the processors, motherboard and memory price out at something like $3400. For comparison, you can get a QX6700, an Intel 975XBX2 and 4GB of memory for $1600-1700.

Source: PC Perspective

Don’t get too excited, but more prices have been ‘leaked’ for Dell machines at Wal-Mart. For $498 you can get a decent box without a monitor and a few other extras, while $200 more will get you the same computer with a monitor, printer and a few other extras. As lackluster as these computers may be, it’s Wal-Mart we are talking about. If they sold body parts, people would buy them.

A little later in the month, those lucky enough to have been accepted into Sam’s Club will have their choice of an $828 multimedia bundle featuring the same Dimension E521 desktop supplemented by NVIDIA GeForce 6150 LE graphics and another gig of RAM, or a 15.4-inch dual-core Inspiron 1501 notebook with a DVD burner, 2GB of RAM and a 120GB hard drive for a few cents under $900.

We posted the other day about rampant rumors that half of Nintendos Redmond PR department have quit the company, and it is now confirmed by Reggie Fils-Aime. The reasoning is that the PR department should be split up in order to be close to other companies.

“In our minds, it’s essential to spend physical time with people from other companies, to be involved with them as neighbors and do business with them face to face,” he said. A similar rationale was offered for the relocation to Manhattan, where many marketing and advertising firms are located.

Definitely a reasonable explanation, but many notables left Nintendo in this move and it will probably take a little time to replace them.

Source: Gamespot