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PS3 Dualshock 3 Gamepad En Route… Finally!
It feels like forever that PS3 gamers have been waiting to get their rumble on… because well, it almost has been. The PS3 launched in November 2006, which means that we waited a long SIXaxisTEEN months to see this thing hit the street! What was the hold up? Who knows… maybe they had a billion SIXAXIS gamepads to sell off first?
The good news in all of this, besides the rumble of course, is that the DUALSHOCK 3 (caps are theirs) retains the SIXAXIS (caps are theirs) capabilities, which means that the original SIXAXIS GAMEPAD WILL BE DISCONTINUED SOON (caps mine out of spite).
These new gamepads are being sent out to retailers right NOW, and can be had for the same price that the original was priced at, $54.99USD. The entire list of supported rumble games is listed through the link below, with some, such as MotorStorm and Resistance: Fall of Man, requiring a quick download prior to the feature being enabled.
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Just to give you a small refresher course, the DUALSHOCK 3 wireless controller includes pressure sensors that rumble with each action. SIXAXIS technology is also included, so you can still use motion control, and the controller features Bluetooth technology for wireless gameplay. You can pick it up at any of the major retailers and at a cost $54.99 MSRP.
Source: Playstation Blog
Survey Contest E-mail Clarification
I made a post the other day that explained that those who signed up during March for our contest and did not receive a confirmation e-mail, would receive one in the coming days. I have to apologize, because it seems I confused a lot of people with my wording.
I have received numerous e-mails from those who did fill out the survey, but I’m just looking to hear from people (not right now, but tomorrow perhaps) if you did NOT receive a confirmation e-mail during March, even though you signed up for the contest. If you filled out the survey, you are entered, so do not worry.
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There was a little delay in getting these fresh e-mails out, but it should be soon. I’ll extend the deadline accordingly, but we will most definitely announce the winner next week at some point. I am awaiting ONE last part for the PC, which should be here this week. Once it is, I’ll build the beast and post a few pictures before we choose a winner and send it out. Thanks for the patience all!
But while you are waiting, how about checking out our brand-new contest for April, where you could win some wicked NCsoft swag?! Check it out here!
Intel Demos 3.2GHz Nehalem at Shanghai IDF
The Intel Developer Forum is the place to be to get sneak-peeks of what Intel has up their sleeves, but that’s a given. IDF in Shanghai is taking place right now, and Intel has wasted no time in breaking out the Nehalem and impressive specs.
The demo chip was running at 3.2GHz, on par with the current QX9770 and QX9775 processors, but it’s uncertain whether it will be a launch frequency or not. However, Intel does release higher-clocked products with any new launch, so if such high clocks on the new architecture are stable, then it might very well be 3.2GHz that we see.
Unsure what Nehalem even is? Then you need to check out our reports from a few weeks back, where we explained that architecture along with Dunnington, Tukwila and others. With Nehalem at the stage it is now, I cannot wait to see what’s unveiled at the next IDF in August.
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The first available Nehalem processors will be built on the existing 45nm manufacturing process, will incorporate SSE4 instructions, and will feature four fully integrated cores. Each core will have its own dedicated 256KB L2 cache and each core will share an 8MB of L3 cache pool. The bulk of these 731 million transistor processors are dedicated to cache.
Source: DailyTech
The D-SLR That Requires a Signed EULA
I admit I’ve had to sign some odd NDA’s and EULA’s in the past in order to acquire either a piece of hardware or software under embargo, but never, not once, have I been asked to sign a EULA for purchasing a product on a public e-tailer. BoingBoing has posted news about B&H Photo, a popular photography e-tailer, that requires a EULA to be signed prior to being able to purchase a Fujifilm IS-1 camera.
You are at a loss for words… admit it. So was I when I first read it. But some of the questions themselves begin to make you really think. “Is End User purchasing a Fujifilm Infrared or Ultraviolet Sensitive Digital Camera for a legitimate business purpose?” What? Does this camera have the ability to see through clothes or something?
Well, as it turns out, it IS a special camera, in that it’s designed for use with law enforcement due to it’s Infra-Red capabilities. A filter can be added to have it act as a normal camera, however. So, if you want a special camera none of your friends will have, get that pen out.
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“I’m in the market for a digital SLR, and found something rather disturbing. B&H Photo says that to purchase a Fujifilm IS-1 camera, you must fill out an end user license agreement. Even weirder is the EULA itself: It asks what ‘legitimate business purpose’ (their words, not mine) the camera will be put to.
Source: BoingBoing
Gear Up at Techgage Contest
Gear Up! at Techgage!
For the month of April, Techgage wants you to Gear Up! From our great friends at NCSoft, we’ve been given a selection of rare and sought after game gear from NCSoft games such as Richard Garriott’s Tabula Rasa, Guild Wars, City of Heroes/Villains and Lineage II!
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This week’s contest is all about Richard Garriott’s Tabula Rasa!
Here’s what you’ve really been wanting to know – what do I win!? First off, there will be three winners randomly drawn from the qualifying entries.
First prize: RG Tabula Rasa t-shirt (size men’s medium), RG Tabula Rasa knit watchcap / tuque, RG Tabula Rasa dog tags (very rare!)
Second prize: RG Tabula Rasa t-shirt (size men’s medium), RG Tabula Rasa knit watchcap / tuque
Third prize: RG Tabula Rasa t-shirt (size men’s medium)
One entry per person per weekly contest please.
Creative Driver Modder Sends E-mail to Wired
If for some reason you’ve been sleeping for the past week, you probably overlooked the the numerous Creative-related news posts that have been hogging up the tubes. For those unaware, Creative stepped forward and told a driver modder to quit doing what he was doing, even though their own drivers are buggy and purposely lack certain functionality.
Well… I first recommend you take a look at my editorial from Monday to get a sense of what’s going on, then check out Wired for an e-mail that Daniel sent to them.
Reading through his e-mail… it becomes increasingly impressive just how overboard Creative went with their barring of his modded drivers. He admits that he shouldn’t have asked for donations, but in all 20,000 downloads of the driver, he made $146, and in Brazil, that can’t even purchase an X-Fi card. It’s also interesting to see that Creative purposely disabled features on the Audigy card under Vista in order to encourage people to upgrade to an X-Fi.
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What Creative did wrong: They publicly threatened me, just to show their arrogance.
If they had contacted me by e-mail or private message I would do the same thing (remove everything) and no one would know about their insatisfaction.
Source: Wired
Playstation Store to Receive Revamp Mid-April
If you thought that the current Playstation Store was ugly, then you are in for a treat. The entire store will be revamped and unveiled mid-April, via a firmware update. Although the current store works, I never found it to be visually appealing, and for such a great console, you’d imagine that the built-in store would at least reflect the clean styling of the rest of the PS3s UI.
Well… that’s exactly what the forthcoming update is going to tackle, as you can see in the below screenshot. Nice use of curves and gradients along with a cleaner template make for a store that’s far easier to look at, and one that could very well be fun to navigate.
The downside in all of this? Absolutely no new content will be unveiled between now and the updated store’s launch, which essentially means I have to go weeks before being let down by the fact that Gex 3: Deep Cover Gecko still isn’t available as a downloadable title!
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Customers will be able to access, browse, shop and download content as usual prior to the store’s re-opening. However, no additional downloadable content will be posted prior to then, including this Thursday, April 3rd, and next Thursday, April 10th. Regularly scheduled content updates will resume with the Store’s re-opening, at which time additional games and game-related items will be added, including the downloadable version of the highly-anticipated exclusive PS3 title Gran Turismo 5 Prologue.
Source: Playstation Blog
DisplayLink Offers First Beta Drivers for Mac OS X
For those unaware, DisplayLink is a company and technology with the same name, and the product is one that allows daisy-chaining displays via a USB cable. I took a look at the technology back in January and was left rather impressed. Though I am anticipating an updated version more than anything, the product I did have worked a lot better than I expected, and it’s a real feasible product that should suffice for most consumers.
What the technology did lack, though, were OS X drivers to enable the functionality. Well now, the company has released beta drivers for all to test out, however, they are called “beta” for a reason. Right now, they lack both 2D and 3D acceleration, so performance will be worse than what’s seen on Windows XP or Vista. So needless to say, DisplayLink for Mac is en route, but now is not the time to purchase an adapter.
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Thing is, it doesn’t support any kind of acceleration, so any kind of hardware-based tracking, smoothing, filters, or hardware handling of codecs is inapplicable. Bad news, but chances are if you’re using USB as your primary display connection, you’re not using too much hardware acceleration. It looks like there are a lot of limitations, but it is beta after all.
Source: CrunchGear
Is Gentoo Linux 2008.0 Ever Going to See the Light of Day?
If there is one thing Gentoo Linux can’t seem to catch, it’s a break. Since the 2007.0 release, the distro’s future has been plastered with uncertainty, all for varying reasons. Gentoo’s developers mean well, but it seems something always happens that prevents smooth upgrades. As a result, the 2007.1 release was entirely cancelled… something that did not help the distros image.
The next release is 2008.0… one that should have been in public beta in early March and officially released as of this point, but once again, we are a month behind. The problem isn’t so much that the crew are behind schedule, but the fact that the public are left oblivious… not even a simple news post was made to fill people in. To me, that’s a big no no, and only clouds the distros image even further.
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As it turns out, though, there are good reasons for this latest delay. One of the main reasons was due to a death of a close relative of two key developers – completely understandable. The other reasons are due to “usual delays that affect most open-source projects” and also due to upgrades in their release processes. So, Gentoo is still alive and well, and that’s all that matters. Like Duke Nukem Forever, 2008.0 will get here when it gets here.
Source: Gentoo.org
Our 2008 Survey Contest is OVER!
Ahh, April 1st. The smell of spring is in the air and the sun is shining, what’s not to love? Well, if you didn’t find three-minutes during the entire month of March to enter our huge contest, then that’s something definitely not to love!
Allow me to send out a massive Thank You! to everyone who partook in this contest and made it such a great success. It was our goal to get reader input, and that’s something we certainly accomplished. Our original target for entries was far surpassed, so the Techgage staff has a lot of reading and data crunching in their future!
If you signed up during the month and did not receive an e-mail, don’t worry… I will be e-mailing every one of you today or early tomorrow manually. If you don’t receive an e-mail from me but you did sign up during March, please e-mail me at “rob dot williams at tg” and let me know as soon as possible. After I send out all of the e-mails, we’ll allow four days for the remaining fill-outs.
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If our contest wasn’t enough and you are still hankering some prizes, then our friends at NinjaLane have got a cure. They are offering a couple killer DFI LanParty boards to two lucky winners. How do you enter? Check out the site and find out!
FINAL DAY! Techgage 2008 Survey Contest
Whew, how a month could pass so fast, I have no idea! But it’s true. Today is the FINAL DAY to enter our contest, so if you are planning on entering, doing it as soon as possible would be a great idea! Once again, we are offering a full-featured computer that’s likely had it’s worth halved since we launched the contest on March 3rd!
The computer is SLI-ready with dual ASUS 8800 GT cards and is powered by a fast Intel Q9450 Quad-Core processor. Included also is 4GB of Crucial memory, an ASUS Xonar D2 sound card, among other fantastic peripherals. Even Dell’s latest high-end 24″ LCD is included, so it truly is a gaming PC ready for anything.
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To enter, click the link below and read through the details. Once you click the enter button, you’ll have to enter an e-mail address for verification, and soon afterwards, you’ll receive an e-mail with a unique URL that leads you to the survey.
As I mentioned last week, we’ve had a problem where a few visitors haven’t received that e-mail, but we will be taking care of that on Tuesday. If you entered sometime during March, don’t worry, you are still able to take the survey. I plan to manually e-mail each and every person who didn’t receive the e-mail to give a last chance to fill it out prior to picking a random winner.
We again thank our incredible sponsors for making this contest possible, but instead of mentioning them by name, I’ll let their company logos do the talking:
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Source: Techgage 2008 Survey Contest
Blu-ray Sells Nine Millionth Movie
With Blu-ray being the only high-definition format, you might be thinking that there is no real competition. Well, you’d be right. Thanks to the sudden boost of exclusivity, Blu-ray has just sold its nine-millionth movie, thanks to No Country For Old Men, a current top-seller.
According to reports, the first three million Blu-ray copies this year were sold within the first eleven weeks, so taking averages into consideration, 2008 might end with over fifteen million sold. Given that Blu-ray popularity is only going to continue to grow, however, that number should prove even higher when the time comes.
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To put things into perspective, only 6 million Blu-ray Disc movies were sold since the format’s inception through 2007. While the growing number of players on the market directly affects software sales, consumers may now be willing to purchase more software with HD DVD out of the picture.
Source: DailyTech
NVIDIA Most Responsible for Early Vista Crashes
According to some fresh Microsoft reports, we can now see what caused most of the reported crashes after the consumer launch of Vista last January. Intel and ATI both claimed 9% of the responsibility each, according to Microsoft, while they themselves were responsible for 17.9%. The biggest share belongs to NVIDIA, whose driver failures were responsible for a staggering 28.8%.
This doesn’t come as a huge surprise to me, because as I was working on our gaming performance reports pre-launch, I experienced an incident where an NVIDIA driver caused Vista to completely crash, which proved unrecoverable. As we discovered in that same article, performance was also lacking, so there was a definite problem.
Luckily, that’s been all sorted out, though it did take a few months. It was a time when ATI actually had quite an advantage with reasonably stable drivers, but as it stands now, both companies have very stable drivers under the OS (even though ATI’s takes three times as long to install).
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As part of the ongoing Vista Capable class action lawsuit, Microsoft released data on exactly what drivers caused the bulk of logged Windows Vista crashes. The number one culprit of Vista crashes related to driver failure was NVIDIA at 28.8%. Microsoft only broke logged crashes out for a few companies including NVIDIA, Intel (8.8%) and ATI (9.3%). Microsoft’s data shows that it was responsible for 17.9% of logged crashes.
Source: DailyTech
Adobe Launches Photoshop Express Online Application
We posted first about Adobe Photoshop’s online counter-part just over a year ago, and finally, it’s now here. Though still considered a beta, it’s feature-rich and can help you get your basic tasks done. The only thing you need to bear in mind when checking it out is that it is not a Photoshop replacement, but rather a scaled-down photo editor to allow you to get small jobs done quick. Essentially, it’s designed for novice users who don’t know much about photography and want a simple tool to use.
The entire program is built around Adobe’s own Flex technology, along with the ActionScript coding language (JavaScript-compatible), and to make sure it ran smooth, a few of the top Photoshop developers dived in and re-wrote some of the algorithms in order to optimize them for web use.
So for those who want something simple while on the go, or for those who don’t have a decent editor installed, you can sign up for the beta and give it a go yourself. Adobe also offers 2GB worth of webspace to store your photos, so that’s another draw. It’s going to be interesting to see just how well this new program is adopted, given the amount of competition from both online and offline services.
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Adobe already has a few other Photoshop-branded products–Photoshop Creative Suite 3 and Photoshop Lightroom are aimed at professional and serious amateur photographers, while $99 Photoshop Elements is a consumer-oriented product. Photoshop Express is designed to be used essentially by anyone who uses a point and click digital camera, said Mack.
Source: C|Net News.com
Super Talent Unveils 256GB 2.5″ SSD (Which You Can’t Afford)
Solid state drives are getting a lot of attention lately, and at this point, it’s hard to not want one. Faster speeds, low noise, low latency… it seems like a win all around. Except for the price, of course. That in itself is one of the main reasons the market for SSDs is still incredibly small. Oh, and not to mention the fact that overall densities are severely lacking as well.
No more, thanks to Super Talent. They shot off a press release yesterday announcing the “world’s slimmest 256GB solid state drive”, which it would be given its 2.5″ frame. So, that’s a lot of space, and could even be used in a notebook computer. Despite the large density, it’s read and write speeds are good, at 65MB/s and 50MB/s, respectively.
The downside? The $6,000 pricetag. Ouch. Let’s give this a few more years…
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The FSD56GC25H uses an industry standard 2.5-inch hard drive form factor and uses an industry standard SATA-I interface, making it 100% interchangeable with conventional 2.5-inch SATA hard drives. This SSD implements Super Talents patented stacking technology to pack an enormous amount of solid state storage into an exceptionally small and slim case, measuring a mere 12.5mm thick 40% thinner than any other 256GB SSD available. The signature black case is made from a durable lightweight aluminum alloy.
Source: Super Talent
Microsoft Serious About Punishing Gamerscore Cheaters
Cheaters. Some love them, most hate them. Of course, we know that the people who love them, are them. To help eliminate them from Xbox Live, Microsoft has taken an entirely new approach to laying the smack down. Best of all, it’s hilarious.
If someone is caught cheating to increase their gamerscore (it happens a -lot-), Microsoft will remove ALL of the points earned by the player up to that point. On top of that, absolutely no gamerscore points can be earned back from previously earned achievements. Since I dislike cheating and think it’s foolish, I love this idea. Though it’s a harsh punishment, what do these people expect? Sure, they earned some of their points legitimately, but it doesn’t matter if you pay for one chocolate bar and steal another… it’s the same crime.
What might be even funnier is the fact that someone wasted no time at all in creating a new blog thats sole purpose is to publicly humiliate these cheaters, if their Xbox Live accounts are found to have suffered such a fate. Good times. Maybe now we won’t be seeing so many games with 100,000+ gamerscores.
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The problems with cheating on services like Xbox Live are myriad, but our biggest problem is that, if we lose – which, of course, is almost statistically impossible and would likely cause a chrono-rift in the space-time continuum – we assume the other party was cheating … especially if the other party’s gamertag is an illegible gaggle of letters and numbers, flanked by various capitalizations of ‘x’.
Source: Joystiq
Apple Safari – Soon to Be Real Competition to IE and Firefox in Windows?
Last summer, Apple made a surprise announcement at WWDC about Safari’s heading to Windows. To give that announcement some merit, a beta was released later that day. It was quickly discovered though, that the new browser was not much of a threat to IE, Opera or Firefox, for numerous reasons, and because of that, it didn’t take too long before it was completely forgotten about.
Things change now, however. Apple has released Safari 3.1 for both OS X and Windows, and Ars Technica took the latest revision for a spin on their Windows OS. Overall, the browser turned out to be quite stable, on par with the competition, but left a smaller memory footprint than Firefox. It also scored the highest in the Acid 3 test by a large margin, so Apple is definitely on the right path to making itself real competition.
Even now though, the browser is lacking in a few small regards. It doesn’t even include a “New Tab” button, which could drive some people nuts (me included), but once these small issues are ironed out, Safari may very-well increase in usage quick.
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…we ran into problems trying to add certain buttons to the toolbar. Doing so would consistently fail, but a restart fixed this. I can live with Control-T and the few bugs that will be fixed soon. Apple has bigger fish to fry, though (like fonts), if it wants to accomplish something with this browser on Windows.
Source: Ars Technica
ASUS Announces Splendid HD1 “Video Enhance Card”
While visiting ASUS at CES this past January, I noticed the Splendid HD1 card tacked to a wall, but no one around could explain to me what it was. So here we are today… ASUS have announced the card. The problem is, many still don’t know what it is.
Essentially, the Splendid HD1 is both an upscaler and enhancer add-in card, and utilizes a PCI-E 1x port. It’s not a video card in itself, but rather contains a special chip (or chips) that can enhance the quality of any video passing through your computer. For lower-bitrate video, the card will upscale it to 1080p resolution. How well it does this is unknown, and no examples are given on the web site.
It comes down to a simple fact… this card should improve both quality and color for both games and video, although the games would not benefit from the upscaler. Rather, the card would improve the color and make the game appear better. ASUS’ Splendid software does this already, but it seems a hardware solution could improve on things even further.
All of this is tough to conclude on until we have the card in our labs, however. We should be taking a look at the card within the weeks to come, so stay tuned and we’ll let you know if it’s worth looking into. Although no price point or release date has been confirmed, we expect it to launch in late April with a sub $100 price tag.
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This astounding piece of hardware is able to increase picture quality for HD content to deliver sharper, more vividly colored visual outputs. It can even enhance lower resolution inputs by recovering image clarity when viewing legacy content for viewing on LCD TV or monitors; as well as provide true HDMI with audio and HDCP.
Source: ASUS Press Release
Less Than a Week Left for Our Gaming PC Contest!
It seems like we just launched our latest contest, but before we know it, it will be drawing to a close. Not including today, there is only SIX days left to enter, so if you are going to do it (which you will), don’t waste time! For those who need a reminder, we are offering a gaming computer valued at over $4,500!
Value aside… this computer is a beast, no matter how you look at it. It’s powered by a blazing-fast Intel Q9450 Quad-Core at 2.66GHz and includes two ASUS 8800 GT cards in SLI mode for ultimate gaming. Those cards will come in handy with the included Dell 3008WFP monitor, capable of displaying 1920×1200… a gorgeous resolution that’s not quick to get old.
To enter, go here and type in your e-mail address. You will quickly receive an e-mail with a unique URL to enter the contest. It’s simple… and takes about three minutes. What if you won? You sure wouldn’t regret spending those three minutes!
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I do admit though that we’ve had a problem with some people not receiving their confirmation e-mail. We have not ignored this and will remedy it as soon as the contest closes. At that time, we will be going through the entries and seeing who has entered, but not filled out the survey. I will then manually e-mail each person to assure it’s received. If you happen to be in this crowd, you can use the new URL that I send and take care of business. The winner will be announced during the week of April 7th.
So if you haven’t already, go in there and enter!
Source: Techgage 2008 Birthday Contest
Sun Sets Out to Replace Wires in Computer Chips with Laser Beams
Computer chips can offer fast performance, we know this. But, the Pentagon believes that there should be a faster method to transmit information between chips than the typical wire. So, they’ve given Sun Microsystems a $44 million contract to explore the prospect of replacing these wires with laser beams.
In theory, replacing the wires with a laser beam would offer major benefits in every regard. For one, it would rid the problem of current leakage and could improve temperatures (probably), while also improving the performance dramatically. Though it seems like a far-out estimate, the article at the New York Times states that a beam of laser light could carry tens of billions of bits of data a second. Wow.
But, this project is not one that can give us great confidence in seeing a final product. One of the researchers at Sun Laboratories is quoted as saying the project has a 50% chance of failure. For a lottery, those odds would be great, but where a $44 million project is involved, they don’t seem overly promising. The goal is immense, but if laser beams replacing wires become a reality, the future of computer chips could be very interesting.
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The wires that connect chips are analogous to the on and off ramps that cars use to move between freeways — just as cars slow down as they move onto city streets from multilane highways, electrical signals run more slowly between chips. The bottlenecks also generate additional electrical current and heat.
Source: New York Times
The Multi-GPU Conundrum
Picking out a graphics card today is more difficult than ever, given the sheer amount of choices available. It goes beyond the scope of simply choosing AMD or NVIDIA, since multi-GPU solutions change everything. In some regards, AMD’s solutions outperform NVIDIA’s, and vice-versa. The folks at X-bit labs have taken this predicament to heart and figured the best way to find a solution was to test out all scenarios and see what came out on top.
Not surprisingly, even with all of their testing, the answer is still not clear. In the end, there are many aspects that come into play with a new purchase. High-end cards that contain a single GPU can outperform a 4-GPU setup of mid-range cards depending on the game, but in other ways, it could hold performance back as well, since some games thrive on as much GPU power as it can get.
Their results do reveal something interesting though. The NVIDIA 9800GX2 in an SLI configuration didn’t outperform Quad CrossfireX-enabled HD 3870’s in the majority of games, especially at higher resolutions. If you want to go with the solution with a demanding lead, it looks to be AMD’s.
But, I think my solution is better. Go out and build four different computers with each configuration, that way you will never have to worry about suffering with lackluster performance! See? It’s easy!
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So what can a gaming enthusiast expect from modern multi-GPU platforms offered by ATI and Nvidia? Unfortunately, it is much easier to say what he or she shouldn’t expect. And you shouldn’t expect stable and flawless operation at least with the currently available drivers.
Source: X-bit labs
Windows XP to Die Off at ‘Some Point’
Are you still in love with Windows XP? Many are, and probably for good reason. Despite its history of security flaws, XP has proven to be a rock-stable OS for those who know how to be careful and not download anything off of a P2P network and also update their PC anytime a new security fix is issued. But those who think love with XP will last forever, they are in for a hard reality.
Computerworld is taking a somewhat in-depth look at the Windows XP life-cycle and talks about how it will die off. Essentially, the recommendation I gather is that if you want XP in the future, you should purchase a few copies to store for when they cease to exist, although it still won’t be too long after that point that support will end, so Vista might actually be an attractive option.
Whether or not that will actually be the case is yet to be seen, since Vista hasn’t exactly been well received by many.
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Microsoft has already made changes in its timetables. Last year, the company extended the sales life cycle — the time during which PC manufacturers and system builders could sell computers with XP installed — to June 30, 2008. It will stop selling XP altogether on Jan. 31, 2009. And it extended the mainstream support period for XP to April 14, 2009, in an effort to reassure customers made nervous by the long delays in shipping Vista.
Source: Computerworld
New Sonic Game Due Out Late This Year?
I admit that I am somewhat of a Sonic fanboy (aren’t we all?), so whenever a rumor of a potential new game comes about, it’s impossible to not pay attention. Well, rumors have been spreading like wildfire over the weekend about an upcoming game called Sonic Unleashed, and the evidence is so impressive, it would be more surprising to find out that it is actually a rumor and nothing more.
According to SEGA ON, some materials were leaked from an official FTP server, but not surprisingly, nothing is there now. Other tidbits include an unveiling which should happen in May and also a worldwide release in November. Now, these could be the guesses of any random person, but the rumor carries a lot more weight with the video that’s been posted.
The video is interesting in numerous ways. First, the game doesn’t look to be fully 3D like the few previous games, but rather carry 2D and 3D elements, so as to cater to fans of the old-school classics and also to recent fans (I also personally love Sonic Adventure 1). If one thing is for sure… every single Sonic fan out there is now excited, so hopefully this proves to be a lot more than a simple rumor.
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SEGA is launching SONIC UNLEASHED with a HUGE production budget and it seems not only SONIC TEAM is involved but a very huge part of SEGA’s developer teams including those from Japan, the US and, apparently for the first time, even Europe. There seems to be one clear mission: Rebuild the Sonic brand and prove it could work in 3D environments. We also have one new artwork for you.
Source: SEGA ON
Most Powerful Explosion In Universe Could Be Seen From Earth
Whether or not you are a space enthusiast, it’s hard to not be impressed by the recent discovery of what is the most powerful blast in the universe ever observed. The gamma-ray burst was discovered last Wednesday by NASA’s Swift satellite which runs an advanced algorithm that can intelligently detect anything out of the ordinary, including these gamma-ray blasts.
The bursts, named GRB 080319A – D, proved to be the most powerful blasts ever observed. So powerful in fact, that it could have been seen with the naked eye if looking at the sky at exactly the right moment. The fact that the explosion occurred at a distance of half the universe away makes it only more spectacular.
As if the blast wasn’t impressive enough already, the brightness of the event is also staggering. After running through their calculations, scientists discovered that the second burst (GRB 080319B) had over 2.5 million times the luminosity of the brightest supernova ever observed. Truly staggering.
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It’s unclear what exactly caused this incredible brightness, but most theorists think that gamma-ray bursts produce two narrow jets of matter and energy, so we may have been lucky to look right into the cannon’s barrel. But, says Vreeswijk’s colleague Jens Hjorth, “in this business, getting surprised ceases to surprise you”.
Source: New Scientist
Sony Offers “Fresh Start” to TZ2000 Notebook
Last week, Engadget posted about an option that Sony added to their TZ2000 notebook – one that you don’t see often. For $50, Sony would give you a “fresh start”, with equates to a new laptop without all of the bloatware. Sadly, no option exists that would give you a notebook with no OS.
What rubbed many the wrong way was the fact that it cost $50 to include this option, which essentially meant that they would remove bloatware that shouldn’t be there in the first place. Thanks to a public outcry (not verified) though, Sony wasted no time in removing the price tag for that option, making it free to all.
Was this a mistake, or did Sony actually mean to make this a free option? If it was meant to cost $50 from the get go, then offering the option to begin with was a mistake, since if they kept quiet, they’d still be able to load bloatware on all of their notebooks. Here’s a guess that this option will not soon be available on their other models, though it would be nice.
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After a minor outcry at Sony’s new “Fresh Start” option to skip the crapware on TZ laptops for a hefty $50 charge, the company has seen the error of its ways and is going to start offering the option for free as of tomorrow [Saturday].
Source: Engadget