Tech News

Daedalus Project: Social Architecture in MMOs

A new issue of The Daedalus Project is now available at:http://www.nickyee.com/daedalus/

Also, several new surveys are available for current MMO players. You can participate at: http://www.nickyee.com/mmorpg.

The most recent issue entitled "Social Architecture in MMOs" deals with Death Penalties in games. Personally, I love a game with death penalty consequences, it makes you actually care a little more about your avatar and be a better player because it takes skill not to die. Information Databases are also commented on, as to whether or not having the entire guts of a game shown on a website, takes away some of the adventure. It’s a good read, plus there are always surveys to take part in.

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VoodooPC Reveals New Voodoo Envy and Omen

It looks like we finally know what was up Voodoo’s website  which went up in smoke a few days ago. HP’s gaming brand released two new products, the Envy ultraportable and Omen PC. In my opinion, both take a significant step forward in terms of style and functionality, but the specs aren’t quite up to par with what can be had for less (which, granted, has always been the case with Voodoo to an extent).

The products are the first ones the company has built from the ground up. The Envy 133 features a 13.3" LED screen, carbon fiber exterior, built in Ethernet port in the power brick , and Splashtop’s instant on operating system among other features. The Omen is a spiritual successor to HP’s Blackbird that takes measures with the chassis to further improve airflow and allow ease of use. Things look promising (and very, very sexy), now bring on the benchmarks!

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Microsoft Releases Windows Home Server Power Pack 1 RC

Windows Home Server has been a product rough around the edges for a lot of people. While some have happily used boxes with no issues whatsoever, others have been unfortunate enough to experience data-threatning bugs that turn them off of the platform.

Thankfully, Microsoft pushed out its new release candidate for the operating system’s "Power Pack", which will bring along a host of new features as outlined by ArsTechnica:

• Support for PCs running Windows Vista x64 editions
• Backup of home server Shared Folders
• Easier and enhanced remote access capabilities
• Better energy efficiency
• Improved performance
• Chinese and Japanese versions

The update also fixes potentially dangerous (and frankly terrifying) file corruption bug, which plagued a lot of users making the entire backup solution effectively useless. Personally, I’m not a huge fan of WHS and would rather use a more affordable and tested solution such as Ubuntu Server or FreeNAS, but the appeal and simplicity is there for home users who simply want to backup their data. Hopefully this fix will be the first of many from Microsoft’s doors.

We’ve seen delay after delay for Windows Home Server (WHS) Power Pack 1 (PP1) as Microsoft makes sure to thoroughly address a file corruption bug in addition to adding various new features and fixing bugs in the operating system. The software giant has now released build 1771 of WHS PP1 for public testing, a move that means the company is reasonably satisfied with the update and now wants to confirm that users feel the same. Redmond has also opened a new channel of communication for the beta: Power Pack 1 subforum on the Windows Home Server Community forums.

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Apple WWDC Announcements: New iPhone, SDK Features, MobileMe, Snow Leopard

In case you’ve been under a rock for the past few hours, you’ll probably be somewhat excited to know that Apple announced a few exciting products and the company’s 2008 Developer’s Conference. First up (well, technically last), the company lifted the veil off of the new phone, which sports 3G data, GPS, a lower pricetag ($199 and $299 for the 8GB and 16GB versions respectively), a new white model, better battery life, a flush headphone jack, and as one would expect, all of the features of the 2.0 upgrade which is due out in early July for existing owners.

The main draw here is really the inclusion of two things: the lower price and availability. Apple expects the phone to be available in 70 countries by the year’s end, and the phone shouldn’t exceed the $199 price in most cases. This obviously opens up the potential market a great deal, adding 65 new countries to the list. Even if you have no interest in the phone, the new discounted price will surely attract eyeballs from both customers and competitors.

Two things that weren’t mentioned during the keynote are the end of iTunes activations and data plan pricing, which has been increased from $20 to $30 with the inclusion of 3G. AT&T has since stated that they removed this option because people wanted the ability to activate the phone in store and walk out with it (which, oddly enough, was already possible), but I believe this is a blatant effort to combat the unlocking scene because of the new subsidized price.

Along with the new phone, Apple also told developers that they would offer a solution for the inability to run processes in the background by implementing a sort of server-side notification system that would run through Apple’s servers, free of charge for developers. The company claimed the upside would be increased stability and performance.

There was a demonstration of a new service, called MobileMe, which replaces .Mac, that the company calls "Exchange for the rest of us." The idea is that information (email, photos, calendar, address information, files) could be accessed from any "computer" and synced through the "cloud" wirelessly. This will undoubtably be an attractive feature for new users with more than one computer, or an iPhone, for instance, but I’m sure the $99 price tag will put some potential customers off.

Lastly (whew), Steve Jobs mentioned the new 10.6 release of OS X would be called "Snow Leoperd", as the rumors suggested, but…. didn’t go into any details. Developers were offered a preview "after lunch", but no details have been released.

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Leave my Games Alone! Mature Content

I figured the ‘Mature Content’ title would get you to look!

The Video Game Voters Network is a place for gamers to organize and defend against threats to video games by registering to vote and letting Congress know how important this issue is to the community. Without a critical mass of adult video game players who are registered to vote and willing to stand firmly behind their games, politicians will continue to fire criticism at games and game players in order to score easy points for their political campaigns.

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) recently released the results of its latest nationwide “secret shopper” survey, which employs undercover 13-to-16-year-old’s to determine if retailers follow rating guidelines and age restrictions. The annual study by the FTC is designed to show the extent to which retailers prevented unaccompanied children from buying tickets to R-rated movies, R-rated DVDs, M-rated video games and music CDs labeled with a Parental Advisory Label (PAL) for explicit content. The 2008 survey showed that video and computer game retailers scored well and indicated a significant improvement by entertainment software retailers to ensure that only age-appropriate games are sold to minors.

This year’s survey found that video game retailers are scrupulous when screening for underage shoppers, with 80 percent of underage buyers rejected at the point of sale when buying M-rated games. This is a major improvement for video game retailers from all prior surveys, as the percentage of underage buyers able to purchase M-rated games has decreased by 38 percent since 2006.

So does this mean that 1 in 5 kids is getting out the door with a mature rated game?

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NCsoft relaunches Aion site

NCsoft has announced the relaunch of the official site for their upcoming MMO title, Aion.
The new site, located at http://www.aiononline.com/ includes a developer blog from our old friend Charles ‘kieron’ Dane, formerly of CCP!

Here’s a quote from the first entry:

Chances are you’ve clicked around the site, taken a look at the various sections and checked out some of the awesome stuff like screenshots, videos and wallpapers. Please keep in mind that we are far from done; future updates will include more guides and lore, a media section showcasing art, screenshots and videos from members of the Aion community, a more robust Fan Sites page, a contests page, a section for official and community events, and any other cool stuff we (or you!) can think of to put in.

So have a look around the site, and huge congrats to kieron!

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VIA Releases Mini-ITX 2.0, NVIDIA Pleased with PCI-E Support

In case you haven’t noticed, VIA has been in the news a lot over the past few months, and for good reason. While they are still best known for their chipsets, they’ve been branching out into the CPU market, while juggling other ventures as well.

Announced during a press conference was Mini-ITX 2.0, an upgraded spec for the form-factor that was first incorporated about eight years ago… and one that Intel has also just picked up. The new standard has a few decent guidelines, such as requiring HDMI and VGA, 3 audio jacks for 6-channel sound, 1 LAN, 2 S-ATA and 1 P-ATA and also a PCI-Express slot.

Between the new and old, the size of the board itself remains identical. VIA of course had a board on display, using their Nano CPU, but anyone (namely AMD or Intel) is free to license the design.

VIA’s Mini-ITX 2.0 and NVIDIA Support

That announcement was of course significant news, but even moreso was the clear effort between NVIDIA and VIA to create a great low-powered and high-performance platform. Using a 1.6GHz Nano along with an 8500 GT from NVIDIA, the system was able to load and play Crysis and BioShock with little issue. They didn’t run ultra-smooth, but it was still playable… and we are on the right track.

The 8500 GT is not the most impressive card out there, but for this platform it’s very appropriate. It offered perfect 1080p playback, and allowed a decent gameplay experience. The reason they didn’t demo with a bigger card was for the simple reason that the GPU needed to be contained without the boundaries of the Mini-ITX board.

Given the performance we’ve seen and the potential price of the entire setup, this may very well be one heck of an attractive offering once all of the parts are available for purchase. We’ll be keeping our eye close on both the latest platform along with VIA’s quickly-growing relationship with NVIDIA.

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OCZ’s First DIY Notebook Out Soon, Other Models En Route

Last month, OCZ announced a brand-new product out of nowhere… a do-it-yourself notebook. As expected, they had just that product on display in their suite at Computex and from what I’ve seen, it’s definitely on the right path.

The initial model, which will launch very shortly, it’s built with mainstream users in mind. It’s not for hardcore gamers, and likewise not for those who want a very mild notebook. It’s for those who want a good notebook that sits right in the middle of the spectrum, and also want the ability to easily upgrade the CPU, RAM and hard drive.

In my post last month, I questioned why the GPU couldn’t be swapped out… and I pretty much just answered that question. This notebook is mid-range, so it includes a GPU that doesn’t suck, nor rocks. It’s right there in the middle, comfortably.

OCZ Technology’s DIY 15.4" Notebook

So it would make sense that other models are en route, and that’s just the case. When I tried to take pictures of them, I was brutally beat away with a few Fatal1ty-branded modules, so I backed off. However, I can say that the upcoming models will definitely appeal to a wider range of people and allow the flexibility that enthusiasts are after.

For those worried about the complications of choosing the correct components for a DIY notebook, OCZ mentioned that they’d be releasing compatibility lists that would help you in your journey, and no, they will not only feature OCZ, but many other manufacturers as well.

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Asetek Believes Quiet PCs Can Still Be Powerful

Asetek is no stranger to many enthusiasts, and it’s blatantly obvious that they take cooling very seriously. They became incredibly well-known with their VapoChill phase-change CPU cooler, which is the ultimate in high-end for those overclocking masters who want nothing less than an extreme overclock.

But Asetek’s main concern now is providing efficient cooling paired with silent cooling. In their suite they had a few examples of what their goals are all about. In the picture below you’ll notice a large gaming machine. It’s equipped with an overclocked QX9650 (4.0GHz), four sticks of overclocked RAM and dual 9800GX2s, also overclocked.

Where overclocking is concerned, ridiculous heat is sure to be there. However, when overclocking all this, the need for very efficient cooling is even more important. Add the desire for silence, and it’s a whole new ball game.

Asetek’s Quiet Bleeding-Edge Gaming PC

Well, the system above, as packed as it was, hovered only around the 45dB mark. The loudest feature of this particular PC is the chipset fan, which happens to be incredibly tiny, but very loud. Without it, Asetek claims that the dB would drop to around 30dB… totally reasonable, especially for an absolute top-of-the-line PC.

There is no real product wrapped around this, although you could purchase all of the parts separately and put one together. They are primarily showing what’s possible, and with so many PC boutiques picking up on their technologies, it’s very likely that you’ll find machines just like this one on the market very soon, if not today.

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Intel’s G45 Holds Lots of Promise

Intel had a big press conference yesterday to help launch their 4-series chipsets, all of which Rory talked about the other day. Nothing too exciting occurred here, mainly because we’ve already been well-informed on P45, as evidenced by the fact that we’ve already posted a review of an ASUS motherboard.

The truth is, P45 isn’t really that exciting. It’s based on a smaller process and uses less power, but that’s about it. G45 on the other hand is a far different story. It’s somewhat rare that I become interested in an mATX/SFF-bound chipset, but this one seems to have the right stuff.

The fact G45 does 1080p on the integrated hardware is nice, although that in itself is to be expected nowadays. Like P45, though, it also uses far less power. On stage they were playing a Blu-ray AVC movie (avg 30Mbps) on a mini-ITX board with G45, using an E7200, and the entire system was using only 53W.

AMD has done well with their 780G, but the power consumption is a lot higher there than on an Intel platform. Couple an efficient CPU, chipset and graphics together, and you have one fantastic multi-media machine that happens to be extremely quiet.

We’ll be taking a look at G45 in the very near future, but for now, feel free to check out our look at the latest chipsets so you can see all that’s new.

Intel’s Eric Mentzer holding G45 & MCH10

Intel’s next-generation chipset offerings in the mid-range and enterprise-level markets have arrived in the form of three mid-range offerings in Intel’s 4-Series of chipsets, including two with integrated graphics. In this article, we’ll lay out the differences, and help you understand your new options.

Source: Intel 4-Series Chipsets: G43, G45, P45

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Sony Playstation 3 Among Worst Offenders In Standby Power Draw

A recent Australian consumer agency study of a variety of consumer electronics products ranging from televisions to stereo systems to laptop PCs and DVD players, found that consumer electronics operating in standby mode are a major contributor to high power bills. Of the 16 electronic devices tested, the Playstation 3 and Xbox 360 were both represented.

The study found, overwhelmingly, that the Playstation 3 console was the worst offender when it came to standby power draw, drawing 5 times more power than it would cost to run a refrigerator for the same period. While it’s not specified in the article whether ‘standby’ simply meant a low power state entered into after a certain period of inactivity or the actual ‘standby’ state that the console can be placed into by switching it “off” but leaving it plugged into the wall (we suspect the former), it’s definitely time to take another look at what your consumer electronics devices contribute to your overall monthly power bill.

The report advised consumers to switch off their electronic devices at the source, rather than just from the remote control, which puts them on power-consuming stand-by mode. "This saves on money, not to mention carbon emissions," it added.

Additional Note: To find out how much power your AC-powered devices are drawing in standby and run conditions, you can use a power meter like the P3 International Kill-A-Watt.

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AMD Puma Notebook Platform Springs On Computex

At Computex today, AMD released their first mobile platform since the acquisition of ATI, codenamed “Puma”. Puma consists of a K8-based processor, called the Turion X2 Ultra, as well as the new RS780M mobile northbridge with a built-in Radeon HD3200 graphics core that’s also capable of running tandem with discrete AMD Radeon GPUs, and even switching “off” the discrete GPU when extra power isn’t needed, saving battery life.

According to a new article at ArsTechnica covering the release, the really big news here is “XGP”, the new AMD External Graphics Platform, which would allow a discrete graphics card to sit outside the laptop case and connect through an external PCIe 2.0 x8 connector. However, ArsTechnica speculates that Puma will have some trouble gaining the spotlight, which is currently hogged by sub-notebooks (like the ASUS Eee PC) powered by Intel’s Atom and VIA’s Nano CPUs, whereas Puma is more of a direct competitor to Intel’s Centrino platform.

Puma is the first laptop platform AMD has released since it bought ATI, and the combined companies are betting that the emerging synergy between their respective product lines will entice buyers in ways current Intel products cannot match. Santa Clara won’t be the only force to overcome; AMD will also have to draw attention to its new Puma-based products at a time when small notebook and "netbook" designs based on Nano, Atom, and Tegra are soaking up the headlines. 

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Firefox 3 Release Candidate 2 Available Now

Today, the Mozilla foundation released the newest release candidate for their popular web browser, which should be finalized later this month. RC 2 brings more bug fixes to the table, and ads some last minute polish for the final version. Since Mozilla has issued a feature-freeze, you won’t see many differences between this release and the final version, if there are any other releases between the two.

The release candidate will be published on the Firefox website and pushed through the auto-updator in the coming days, but if you want to get your hands dirty now, CyberNet has a links to the files on Mozilla’s FTP servers.

Mozilla has released Firefox 3 RC2 today which is right on schedule, and that means we might still be on for a June launch of Firefox 3! It’s even possible that this could be the last Release Candidate before Mozilla shoots for their world record. This time around there’s probably nothing that you’ll notice as being different from Release Candidate 1, which is a good thing. At this point they are focusing only on bugs that could keep the user from having a great experience with the browser, and if all looks well in this release it could be signed-off on to be the final version.

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No Escape For DRAM Makers From Market

Here’s another one from DigiTimes: In years past, manufacturers of DRAM (that’s ‘memory’ for you country-folk) have been diversified enough in the markets served by their companies that when the DRAM market wasn’t lucrative, companies could afford to scale back production. However, Kingston co-founder David Sun fingered a growing crisis in the DRAM industry, now that many DRAM makers aren’t diversified (they don’t make anything else but DRAM).

The problem is simply this — when DRAM prices fall due to a flooded market, DRAM manufacturers don’t make as much on the sales of the products they manufacture, but manufacturers lacking in product diversity can’t afford to scale back production, or else they’ll be in for serious financial trouble as a company. Essentially, when the prices are in the toilet, you can expect the market to be soon to follow, as companies are forced to consolidate, or close up shop.

Reviewing major DRAM makers such as Elpida Memory, Nanya Technology, ProMOS Technologies, Powerchip Semiconductor Corporation (PSC) and Winbond Electronics, Sun said all of these players have no other product line to shift to if they quit DRAM production.

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The Blu-Ray Blues

So Sony’s Blu-Ray managed to win the HD format war after all. Well, Laaaah-dee-frickin’-daaah! DigiTimes believes that the format still has an uphill battle ahead of it before it will have the kind of market staying power developed by the CD and DVD formats. Its shortcoming can be summed up in one word: "diversity".

The DigiTimes article looks at other market segments where CD and DVD media still enjoy broad acceptance – game consoles, in-car entertainment, camcorder storage, enterprise storage, and yes, PCs – and finds that the Blu-Ray camp may have a difficult time persuading those sectors that the technology transition to more expensive blue-laser media and readers is indeed a worthwhile one. Though if we had to put our finger on it, we suspect that the high price of Blu-Ray products in market sectors where it’s already achieved penetration (HD home video distribution) is to blame for the format not achieving wider acceptance in other markets.

Based on these factors, the initial applications for BD are limited to watching movies and playing games using a PS 3 consoles. There is not much demand opportunity in the IT market and almost no room for music applications.

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Starbucks Offers Free Wi-Fi for Reward Card Holders

We’ve known this was in the works for a while now (in a few different flavors), but today Starbucks announced that they would offer free Wi-Fi for their Starbucks card users. The partnership with AT&T would allow you to use the service in exchange for getting "up to four" emails from AT&T per year. Having to keep your card active and opening accounts with both AT&T and Starbucks seems like a bit of a hassle on paper, but the process should be painless in practice.

I can’t say I’m the type to go out of my way to take trips to my local Starbucks, but I can certainly see where and when free Wi-Fi access would be useful. Trips across the country will be less dreadful with the promise of free internet access, and Starbucks’ are quite literally everywhere.

The Wi-Fi freebie will be available starting Tuesday to customers who purchase a minimum $5 reloadable Starbucks Card, register online for the Starbucks Rewards Card program, and use the card at least once a month. The two hours must be consecutive. New members also receive a voucher for a free drink.

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I Have To Go To The Bathroom…

From the "We Wouldn’t Have Believed It If We Hadn’t Read It Ourselves" department comes the following story of brand loyalty taken to a new extreme. Edmunds.com has the story of an Argentinian family who drove a reconditioned 1981 Ford Falcon all the way from Argentina to Detroit, USA, in a trip spanning 47 days and over 4,700 miles. Diego Perceivaldi of Argentina packed his wife and two kids into the 27-year-old car, which had a rebuilt engine, and drove to the Motor City to pay homage to the Blue Oval.

What could inspire this kind of fanatical brand devotion? Apparently, the Falcon is an iconic car in Argentina, with an entire website – Todofalcon.com.ar – devoted to the car and its cult following in the country. Okay, you got us — this isn’t "tech" in the way that you likely think of Techgage as covering the world of "tech", but it’s an awesome story nonetheless. And while we still don’t know what could motivate even the most passionate car lover to make such an arduous journey, we do know this: If anyone asks "Are we there yet?" just one more time, we’re gonna start breaking legs.

For a trip that took three years to plan and 47 days to complete, Percivaldi played it pretty loosely at the end on Thursday, when he and his family walked up to the security desk at Ford World Headquarters with no previous contact and asked to talk to someone in charge. The AP reports they will spend a couple of days in Michigan — and fly home, having the Falcon shipped back to them.

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Incidences of Child Hackers On The Rise

Meet little Billy. For his twelfth birthday, his parents bought him a shiny new desktop computer. Billy recently learned how to steal your identity, while his parents thought he was doing homework. Are you prepared for Billy?

This DailyTech article details a bizarre but growing phenomenon among young pre-teens, some of whom are turning to cyber-crime to impress their friends, harm their enemies, and even make money. While you might not suspect that children as young as nine (!) would be involved in such schemes, cyber-crime investigators are finding an increasing number of young adolescents committing such crimes as identity theft and credit card fraud online.

"They want to be famous," Boyd says. "Not just known among their peers for their technical knowledge, but ‘American Idol’ famous." It is a scary thought that if kids are able to do these things at such a young age, just what may they be capable of later on in life with such a strong desire for fame.

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Solid State Drive Prices Set To Plummet, Analyst Says

CNET News.com analyst Brooke Crothers speculates that the long-awaited drop in solid state drive prices may finally be within reach. Making this happen, Crothers suggests, will be Multilevel Cell (MLC) technology, which enables SSD capacities above 100GB, competitive with the 80GB hard drives common in current laptops. In fact, it’s suggested that we could see MLC drives as large as 256GB by early 2009.

Since the introduction of MLC technology to the solid state drive product category, manufacturers have flocked to the technology, including Samsung, Toshiba, and STEC. Even Intel is preparing to enter the market for high-capacity SSDs, based on its own multilevel cell technology. However, Intel warns that with MLC designs, performance is slower than Single-Level Cell (SLC) designs, and can’t tolerate as many write cycles. And if anyone’s ever had a flash drive go dead on them, they know that once the data is gone, there’s no salvaging it. Adopters would still do well to keep meticulous backups of SSD data on a reliable mechanical hard drive, even if the drive doesn’t spin all the time.

"Compared to the price you’re paying today for a 64GB drive. You’ll get a 128GB of storage for less than half the price (of the 64GB drive)," said Patrick Wilkison, vice president of marketing and business development at STEC, a supplier of MLC-based solid-state drives.

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MediaDefender Attacks Revision3 Servers Mistakenly

 The best justice of all is poetic justice. If you don’t agree with me, check out the recent case of MediaDefender’s DoS attack on Revision3 servers. For the uninformed, MediaDefender is a company that simply exists to harm P2P networks, wherever they exist, typically contracted by groups like the RIAA and MPAA to flood torrent tracking sites with bogus torrents – they believe that by attacking the technology itself, they can stem the tide of pirated music and movies served via BitTorrent and other P2P networks, despite the potential for legitimate applications of P2P and BitTorrent technology, such as Revision3’s.

When Revision3’s servers discovered that they were being flooded with bogus torrents (that is, torrents that didn’t point to Revision3’s own media), they began to remove the torrent listings, prompting the initiation of a DoS attack by MediaDefender’s servers. Of course, in this case MediaDefender didn’t just attack any two-bit torrent-tracking site – they attacked a legitimate business that simply happened to be using BitTorrent technology to serve its customers. Never mind that the tactics MediaDefender used to try to shut Revision3 down were illegal under 18 different federal statutes. It’s our hope that Revision3 will seek to prosecute MediaDefender to the fullest extent allowed by law for this grossly errant and aggressive behavior on their part —  since a basic precept of American justice is that two wrongs don’t make a right. Though I suspect the RIAA and MPAA lobbyists may yet be at work on that one as well…

“We’d noticed some unauthorized use of our tracking server, and took steps to de-authorize torrents pointing to non-Revision3 files. That, as it turns out, was exactly the wrong thing to do. MediaDefender’s servers, at that point, initiated a flood of SYN packets attempting to reconnect to the files stored on our server. And that torrential cascade of ‘Hi’s brought down our network,” said Louderback.

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Gears Of War 2 To Ship Before Thanksgiving, Hint Suggests

The rumor mill forges onward. Lester “Mighty Rasta” Speight, the voice of Gears Of War’s Cole Train, let slip a comment that betrayed a potential ship date for Gears Of War 2. The suggested date was November 16, which is in line with earlier analysis (speculation) that suggested the game would ship sometime within the month of November.

CrunchGear speculates that TriForce might be planning the November 16 ship date in preparation for a Black Friday release. Of course, it’s still only speculation at this point, but this simply gives us an inkling of how massive Gears Of War 2 could be, given the amount of buzz that’s flying around the intertubes.

 DS and Wii Fanboy’s David Hinkle was at the panel to witness the football player-turned-actor’s Q+A session, and hopes to further press Mr. Rasta to discover the accuracy of his claims. Given that it falls in the game’s suggested November release window, we wouldn’t be surprised if Speight’s date was legit.

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Unlock Hidden Capabilities On Some GeForce 9600 Cards

Back in the day, the stories of hidden capabilities conveniently locked away for the enterprising modder to discover typically came from the AMD camp, with the 256MB Radeon 9500 Pro cards that could be software-modded to unlock Radeon 9700 performance, or the Radeon 9800 which could be effectively turned into a 9800 Pro with a simple pencil mod to connect a laser-cut bridge.

Now NVidia has their own sleeper performance part, in certain GeForce 9600GSO cards manufactured by Galaxy. As it turns out, all it takes is a BIOS flash to unlock extra pipelines on the card, converting it into the functional equivalent of a GeForce 8800 GTS. We’re providing a quick link to the blog that has the how-to, but be sure you’ve got a good pop-up blocker…and even that may not be enough to save you from the insidious pop-ups on the site. Got Patience?

Thanks to CrunchGear for the tip.

I am sure enthusiasts are familiar with the term "soft-modding". The days (of turning 9800SE into 9800Pro; 6800NU into 6800GT) are back! This time round, the spotlight is on the GeForce 9 series, namely the 9600GSO. In this extraction of the original guide, we will show you how to softmod a 9600GSO into a 8800GTS 512MB.

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Microsoft To Require Hardware Makers To Certify Drivers For Windows 7

It’s reassuring to know that Microsoft hasn’t turned a completely deaf ear to the anguished cries of users forced to migrate to Windows Vista, only to find that some of the hardware or peripherals they’ve recently invested in are now useless due to a lack of Vista driver support. To avoid the headache (and heartache) that Windows Vista caused among users because of hardware providers’ inadequate or nonexistent Vista driver support, Microsoft will now require that hardware makers test their drivers on both Windows Vista and Windows 7 before their products can even receive a ‘Certified for Windows Vista’ badge.

Here’s the rub: Drivers don’t actually need to pass Windows Logo testing for the new operating system in order to receive Vista certification – but the hardware manufacturers must still hand the results of said testing over to Microsoft, ensuring that Microsoft will be able to gauge progress toward working drivers for the new OS before it actually arrives. In another bit of recent good news, any device driver that worked under Windows Vista will also work with Windows 7, so the industry won’t face a similar setback to the one encountered with Vista when Windows 7 finally hits.

In a long explanation (download PDF) of the Windows Logo Program, Microsoft spelled out the new requirement. "Beginning with the release of the first beta of the next operating system, all Windows Vista client and Windows Server 2008 submissions must include a complete [set of] test logs for the new beta OS," the company said in the document.

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EVE Online: Empyrean Age

CCP, one of the world’s leading independent game developers, has announced the features for the upcoming free expansion, EVE Online: Empyrean Age. Slated for a June 10th release, Empyrean Age brings an explosive end to the fragile peace that has existed for one hundred years between the four central races of New Eden and entices players to pledge fealty to their faction of choice to gain fame, wealth and power.

The features page at http://www.eveonline.com/empyreanage/index.html highlights the expansion’s contents: the introduction of a faction ranking system, new militias being mustered, fresh agents pertaining to the massive conflicts, a dynamic new structure of system occupancy, details on hidden deadspace complexes and a whole new region in space, “Black Rise.”

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Valve Announces Steam Cloud

Today, Valve announced a new addition to their Steam platform: Steam Cloud. The premise is simply an online service that will keep saved games and configuration files tied to your Steam account, allowing you to install and play your games on any machine, right where you left off. Probably the most promising is the promise that the company will open the service to developers, so other games will be able to take advantage of its features. This feature is something I’ve personally wanted from Steam for a long time. It means that your save file will always be safe in case data becomes corrupt or unrecoverable, and it’s one less thing to beat myself up about after I forget to backup my saved games for a Windows reinstall.

The company also shed light on other features they plan to include, an auto-update feature for drivers, a calendar feature, and a system-requirement checker, similar to Vista’s implementation, which will scan for your hardware and recommend upgrades based on multiple games.

Half-Life and Half-Life 2 will be the first games to support the service. User key mappings will also be saved in Counter-Strike, and Left 4 Dead will ship with the feature.

If players are offline, the service will store the data and then add it to the network on the next connection. According to Valve, saved games and configurations will be stored forever.

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