Content and news by Rob Williams

Recently launched Guild Wars will be having a few updates coming up this week. This will be the first official patch that Guild Wars has. PvP Arenas: We’re changing the way PvP Arenas work to provide players with more variety. Previously, each Arena had a separate outpost. When you joined an Arena, Comment (0) -->

” Digital music service Napster has unveiled a new store aimed at selling ring tones for mobile phones.

Created in partnership with Dwango Wireless, the Napstertones service offers most ring-tone downloads for prices between $1.99 and $2.99. For now, the service is available to Cingular and T-Mobile subscribers, but the companies hope to make it more easily accessible through phone carriers’ networks later this year.”

Next up? Video? We will see, Napsters definitely planning on keeping current customers, and grabbing new ones. Read it at News.com.

“A week after Novell made Ron Hovsepian president of worldwide field operations, Richard Seibt (one of the leading minds behind SuSE Linux) has quit. Richard came to Novell when the company aquired SuSE in 2004, but had become increasingly unhappy and disillusioned at Novell since the takeover. His exodus mirrors similar departures from the company by vice chairman Chris Stone last November and of chief technology officer Alan Nugent this March. Is Novell starting the slow process of ridding itself of its original SuSE staff? Looks like it.

Ouch.. hopefully this trend doesn’t continue. I love SuSE Linux, and don’t want it screwed up like so many other things in the biz. Source: TechSpot.

“Users of the latest version of the open source Firefox browser face two “extremely critical” security holes relating to cross-site scripting and hacker remote access.

Security researcher Secunia has reported the “proof of concept” flaws and said that they are extremely critical as exploited code has been circulated on the internet.”

Until the holes are patched, Mozilla recommends disabling JavaScript in your browser. Read the full posting at Computer Weekly.

“How about an all-new game powered by the next generation of Epic’s powerful Unreal engine, known as Unreal Engine 3? This time around, the game will be powered by the very same graphically impressive technology we’ve seen bits and pieces of at this year’s and last year’s Game Developers Conference in March. The engine will have support for advanced special effects, including high dynamic range lighting and bump offset mapping–which is an advanced form of lighting that can make a completely flat surface appear to have protruding features, like a brick wall built from jagged, uneven stones–and an all-new physics engine powered by Ageia’s Novodex technology. “We’ve never been able to do an avalanche in-game before,” says Epic president Mike Capps, referring to both the simulated mountain avalanche in this year’s GDC demo and to the sorts of effects you’ll see in the game.”

I can’t wait for this game, it’s going to kick so much ass. Read the full article as well as see 4 cool screenshots over at GameSpot.

“Take a glance back up the page and you’ll see that Gordon Moore first made his prediction in 1965. He did this in a magazine called ‘Electronics’, a notable publication of it’s time. Now, considering that this will be the fortieth anniversary of Moore’s famous law, the bods at Intel thought it’d be rather nice to get their hands on an original copy of said magazine. All well and good, but where, exactly, do you start looking for a 40 year old magazine that had a limited following all those years ago and is unlikely to have survived the ravages of time?”

Hehe, check out the full read at Hexus!

“Well what do you think? We think another stunning computer case from Thermaltake is the Tenor. Ideally designed for both Home Theatre use it also makes a superb desktop PC case for those of us that do not want to use a tower PC case.”

Head over to A1 Electronics for the full review!

“MSI has put out a very good product with their NX6600GT. It looks good with the red PCB and the MSI standard gold heatsink. The cards performed flawlessly through a barrage of tests with absolutely no hiccups, and I’ve been using them for tons of games for hours in my main machine for at least a good month.”

Check out the full review at Viper Lair!

“There are several different varieties of thumbscrews on the market today; I myself have a couple different kinds, but most just look like oversized screws. NOT these, the Mutant Mods brand of thumbscrews are shaped like skulls. An interesting twist on the idea of thumbscrews for your case.”

Check out the full read over at Think Computers.

Thanks to dropping prices, this month we were able to give our video card yet another boost. Sapphire seems to be the low-end choice in both price and performance. We’re pleased to make the switch to a 9600XT. Architecturally it’s almost identical to the 9600PRO with the notable exceptions of a built-in hardware monitor and higher clock speeds. Specifically, the 9600XT uses a 500MHz/650MHz core/memory configuration. Compare this to the 9600PRO’s 400/446 setup and the difference becomes clear. This card is more than capable of playing every new release on medium settings at the very least. Unfortunately a 256-bit 9800PRO or a vanilla GeForce 6600 (non-GT) is still out of reach, but this is still a nice upgrade.”

Check out the full guide over at MikhailTech.

Just a reminder that MikhailTech’s May contest only has three weeks left. You have chances to win an inverted Aerocool Spiral Galaxies case, gold plated GT-1000 universal cooler, and some Turbine fans.

Check out the full details at MikhailTech.

“At Phoronix, this will be our fourth time examining a power supply from ePower Technology. The power supply up for testing today is the 480W Tagan (TG-480-U01) which implements much of the same features we’ve seen on previous models including the Xmicro, Xscale, and Lion. Will the ePower Tagan bring anything new to the table?”

Head over to Phoronix for the full review!

“Today 3DXtreme is proud to present our latest review, we are taking a look at the newest product from our friends over at Saitek. The Saitek Gaming Keyboard was a huge hit with the gaming community, the only flaw that product had was while it was backlit, it was still impossible to see the actual keys. Saitek went back to the drawing board to right this wrong thus the evolution of the Gaming Keyboard to the new Saitek Eclipse.”

Far from being an ordinary keyboard, that’s for sure. Check out the full review over at 3D Xtreme.

“Today I’m taking a look at a Club-3d X800 128mb PCIe graphics card, which is sold for less than € 250,- in Europe (its bigger brother the X800 XT costs about € 150,- more). But seeing the costs makes me wonder “how will it perform?”. Well I have run a few games and I must admit, seeing as it doesn’t even need a external power connected it performs quiet well.”

Head over to HardwareXL for the full review!

“Today I’m trying out the Zen Micro Mp3 player from Creative. As stated in the specs it can hold up to 5Gb of mp3/data and can be used as an organizer and fitted with well put together software makes it one little kickass product ;-)”

Check out the full review at HardwareXL.

“In the first two parts of our set of Beginner’s Guides to the Linux operating system, we familiarized you with the popular KDE desktop environment via a ‘live’ CD Linux distribution and explored installing Linux permanently onto your system. But what if you need or want to install new programs in the future? Everyone knows how to install new software in Windows… Just double click the installation file and ‘next, next, next,’ etc. Linux is a little more complicated and installing programs is not near so immediately intuitive. In this third PCSTATS Beginner’s Guide to the Linux operating system, we’re going to explore an essential Linux skill; how to track down and add new software packages to your Linux installation.”

Check out the full guide at PC Stats.

“The key things to take from today’s look at the 4800+ is that it’s generally no slower, but generally no faster either, than an FX-53 in single-threaded tests, yet it’ll cost you a fair bit more. I hope it’s obvious that a dual-core processors benefits lie elsewhere, with multi-threaded applications and real-world operating system usage. Think HyperThreading.”

There’s a lot of these reviews today, but they are all very informative, this one is no exception. Check it out at Hexus.

“However, if the editor is one that transcodes to an intermediate I-frame format for editing and compositing, there’s a new challenge in handling material with a datarate of around 14MBytes per second for 1080i material at 50Hz. And all that’s on top of the large frame size of 1440×1080 pixels, as opposed to PAL DV’s resolution of 720×576.

A year ago, when standard definition DV was king and even the most affordable PC was able to cut it like butter, we thought that editing hardware companies had had their day. Now, it seems, they’re being called on to save the day again.

Check out the full article over at Hexus.

It’s about time that Microsoft started using different colors in their crash screens. I would have preferred a MSOD, Maroon Screen of Death, but whatever, red works.

You can check out the RSOD on Joi Ito’s blog. Source: Slashdot.

“HiTec Digital Audio has been making audio products for some time now, mainly accessories like coax to optical S/PDIF (Sony/Philips Digital Interface) converters and I/O boards for Sound Blaster based cards. HDA saw an opportunity, though, with the latest chip from C-Media, the CMI8768/PCI-8ch+. C-Media is probably best known by the NVIDIA crowd for their AC97 audio chipsets on boards not equipped with the SoundStorm MCP in OEM-style products, such as the non-Deluxe Asus nForce and nForce2 motherboards as well as interface chips used by SoundStorm MCP equipped machines. And while the CMI8768/PCI-8ch has been available to motherboard manufacturers and add-in card makers for some time, it is the plus symbol that is important.”

My 5.1 setup seems so inferior! Check out the review at nV News.