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The Day the Music Dies
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When is the last time you actually purchased music in a store? “The major labels are struggling to reinvent their business models, even as some wonder whether it’s too late. “The record business is over,” says music attorney Peter Paterno, who represents Metallica and Dr. Dre. “The labels have wonderful assets — they just can’t make any money off them.” One senior music-industry source who requested anonymity went further: “Here we have a business that’s dying. There won’t be any major labels pretty soon.””
Source: Rolling Stone
Interview With an MMOG Gold Seller
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MMOG subscriptions are at an all-time high, and while that’s a great thing to the game developers, it’s an even better thing for those who are involved in Gold selling, or power-leveling for those games. It’s not often that we can listen to what these sellers have to say, but Slashdot was contacted by one company with a request to get questions that people wanted answered.
It’s an interested read, but nothing is there that we didn’t really expect. I disagree with most of it anyway, simple because I hate Gold selling and wish it never existed. Games would be more enjoyable and fair without it. But it’s not going away anytime soon, sadly. That’s just me and I’m sure I don’t speak for everyone.
Sparter does not buy or sell game items and we don’t have an in-game presence. As a result, we cannot know for sure how our sellers behave in the game. But if you believe as we do that the truly damaging behavior is exhibited by the spammers, bot farmers, hackers and dupers, then the more we migrate the market to a true gamer-to-gamer exchange, the harder it is for those folks to profit from their actions.
Source: Slashdot
E3 2007 – The Hunt is On
We’ve known for a while that E3 would be cutting back significantly. The only way to get tickets is to get invited, the attendees from the press will be a much smaller number than previous years, and of course there will be fewer exhibitors this time around. All positive things. That is, until we started trying to plan our coverage.
Let’s look at this: 32 companies will be showing their games or products, and the show lasts for two ten-hour days and one seven-hour day. Many companies have hotel meetings, a press conference, and playable games on the show floor. So that’s three different areas where their games could be. But wait, it gets better! The hotel suites will be spread between eight hotels, with eight to twenty minutes of travel time between the hotels and the showroom floor. Much of this week has been spent talking to game developers and publishers with a spreadsheet in front of us trying to figure out when we have time during the show to cover the games we want to.
Let the games begin!
Source: Ars Technica
Confirmed: Apple Releasing a Phone
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In a surprise launch, Apple is releasing some type of phone tonight that should effectively change our lives. The “iPhone” promises the best phone experience possible. Ever. You can watch movies on it, listen to music, listen to music in movies, listen to movies based on music, listen to movie soundtracks, listen to pop idols who think they can act, watch The Sound of Music, use map software, browse your photos, take pictures to have photos to browse, play with a calendar, check out the weather instead of looking out the window, take notes and change settings. You can also use the device as a telephone.
This feature-packed phone will be available tonight at any Apple store and AT&T store. Even AT&T kiosks will have the phone, from what I understand. Regardless of where you live, the launch time is 6PM local, in order to give everyone a fair chance at getting a copy before they sell out. After all, a phone is such a unique idea, I am surprised no one has thought it up before. After all said and done, it looks good. I think you will like it.
Apple employees will especially like it, since they all score an 8GB model free, a $599 value. For those interested, a lucky few have already posted their reviews of the mysterious device:
Just a hunch, but I expect to see quite a few interesting updates throughout the day, especially tonight. If anything happens that you should know about, you can be sure we will post about it.
PS3 Firmware 1.82 Released, Resistance Receiving Map Pack
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I have to hand it to the PS3 developers, they don’t take long to get things done. It feels like firmware version 1.80 just came out, but already they are up to their second update to that one. It’s a stark contrast when you sometimes have to wait months for any sort of an update on the Xbox 360. On the other hand, it takes a good 10 minutes to perform the update…
Version 1.82 doesn’t bring about mind blowing updates, but rather an enabling of playback of AVC High Profile (H.264/MPEG-4) content. The update is available now, and you might very well be prompted to download it when you next turn your console on.
In other news, Resistance is receiving two new maps today for download, which will set you back $8. There will also be a non-related update that will enable global play as well as a slew of other enhancements.
Source: Playstation Blog
Logitech’s Webcams Pimped Up With Carl Zeiss
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Logitech has updated their QuickCam Pro line to include Carl Zeiss glass, which should be a good thing for everyone involved. Zeiss is a leader in fine optics, so the quality exhibited from these cameras should be the best we have seen to date. For those interested, the QuickCam Pro is looking to be their new high-end offering, which will retail for $99.99. Notebook users are not left in the dark either, as the QuickCam Pro for Notebooks will also feature Zeiss glass and retail for the same $99.99.
The autofocus is super fast, for better use of hand props and wild gesticulation. And of course they come with Logitech’s legendary Video Effects and Fun Filters, like the king’s crown and the sweet 1920s movie filter, for instant YouTube stardom.
Source: Gizmodo
Total HD Discs Delayed Until 2008
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Warner is out to make our high-def lives a little bit easier, but not until at least early 2008. Total HD discs are designed to take the hassle out of the format war, where one movie would be released on one disc that would play in either a Blu-ray or HD-DVD player. It sounds great for both the consumers and the publishing companies, but it seems it’s a little more difficult a task than originally anticipated, hence the delay.
“The Total Hi Def disc is about giving consumers complete choice, providing creators and artists the greatest possible distribution of their work, and helping retailers thrive in the marketplace,” said Kevin Tsujihara, President of Warner Bros. Home Entertainment Group, at the CES unveiling. “By eliminating potential apprehension over formats, we believe this new disc could help consumers fully embrace the greatest home entertainment experience available.”
Source: DailyTech
Incredible Photosynth Demo
I have to agree with a post on Evil Avatar, “Microsoft has tech like this they are hiding away while they show us a $10,000 coffee table computer?”
Using photos of oft-snapped subjects (like Notre Dame) scraped from around the Web, Photosynth (based on Seadragon technology) creates breathtaking multidimensional spaces with zoom and navigation features that outstrip all expectation. Its architect, Blaise Aguera y Arcas, shows it off in this standing-ovation demo. Curious about that speck in corner? Dive into a freefall and watch as the speck becomes a gargoyle. With an unpleasant grimace. And an ant-sized chip in its lower left molar. “Perhaps the most amazing demo I’ve seen this year,” wrote Ethan Zuckerman, after TED2007. Indeed, Photosynth might utterly transform the way we manipulate and experience digital images.
FTC: Net Neutrality is not needed
The Federal Trade Commission’s Internet Access Task Force today issued a report, “Broadband Connectivity Competition Policy,†which “recommends that policy makers proceed with caution in the evolving, dynamic industry of broadband Internet access, which generally is moving toward more – not less – competition. In the absence of significant market failure or demonstrated consumer harm, policy makers should be particularly hesitant to enact new regulation in this area.â€
Source: Federal Trade Commission
Anarchy Online Virtual Sales
Funcom introduces virtual item sales in Anarchy Online.
The first virtual items to kick off the program will be the introduction of jetbikes and hover boards, giving players the chance to cruise around Rubi-Ka in an all new fashion. In addition Funcom will offer previously released scout-mechs, luxury apartments, Leet pets and various sets of social clothing. By using points the players can also get access to previous and upcoming expansion and booster packs, as well as new services like changing in-game names or moving to another server.
For more information about the game please visit Funcom
ATI 2400 & HD 2600 Reviews
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Two months ago, AMD announced their 2×00 series of cards, although only the 2900 could be found at retail shortly after. NDA is now released on the rest of the cards, so 2400 and HD 2600 reviews are making their rounds today. What these mid-range cards offer is DX10 and SM 4.0 support and all the key features that the 2×00 series brought to the table. The big question is though, are they worth it?
Overall, the new Radeon HD 2600 XT, 2600 Pro, and 2400 XT cards should make for quiet, low-power upgrades from any integrated graphics solution and offer a relatively low-cost of entry into the world of DirectX 10. These cards are obviously not geared to hardcore gamers, but at lower resolutions without high levels of AA and anisotropic filtering enabled they’ll be adequate for casual gaming. – HotHardware
While gaming performance of the HD 2600 XT is generally a bit slower than the GeForce 8600 GTS, the price is lower as well. In this market segment price is often more important than a few percent more or less performance. The cooling solution of the 2600 XT works well, temperature controlled fan speeds keep the fan noise at a minimum. – techPowerUp!
Gamers on a budget should be pleased by the performance found with these cards, as they seem to scale well with NVIDIA’s offerings when pricing comes into play. These were the first two reviews we were sent, but no doubt more will be posted throughout the day. We will link to the rest in tomorrows daily roundup.
Man Lives In Underwater Cabin For 12 Days
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This doesn’t have much to do with tech, per se, but it’s definitely cool. A winner of a contest was awarded his “dream” which consisted of living under a lake for twelve days. The underwater cabin measured 7’x10’x7′ and included a bed, tools to convert carbon dioxide to oxygen, a lavatory and a exercise bike used to generate electricity. Not my cup of tea, but it’s a unique experience no doubt.
As the winner of a £20,000 “Live Your Dream” contest sponsored by the magazine Australian Geographic, 29-year-old Lloyd Godson lived in a 10-foot-long box at the bottom of a lake for 12 days. It doesn’t look like the cabin had windows.
Source: Boing Boing
Mozilla Releases Sunbird and Lightning 0.5
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I was really beginning to wonder if we were going to ever see another Sunbird/Lightning release, but here it is, and it looks sharp. For those unaware, Sunbird is a standalone calender application that allows you to keep track of anything, make notes and plan for upcoming events. Lightning is essentially the same thing, except it’s integrated with Thunderbird, as an extension. The new version brings on a better looking GUI, improved printing and also support for Google Calendar (no surprise).
About two months after our initial scheduled release date, Lightning 0.5 and Sunbird 0.5 bring us a huge step closer to our 1.0 release, which is scheduled for the first half of 2008. Lightning 0.5 and Sunbird 0.5 are available for Windows, Mac OS X (universal builds) and Linux in 22 different languages including English.
Source: Calender Weblog
Google Desktop Available For Linux
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In some good news for Linux users today, DesktopLinux is reporting that Google has finally released their Google Desktop application for the OS, adding to it’s Windows and OS X support. The search features have my interest a little piqued, so I might give it a try, despite being skeptical of installing too much Google software on my machine. The article notes that only Deb and Rpm versions of the installer are available, but as long as you have glibc 2.3.2+ and gtk+ 2.2.0+ installed, you should be fine.
Google Desktop for Linux is based on Google’s own desktop search algorithms. As such, it is not an open-source program. A Google representative also said that the program is not built on existing Linux search programs, such as Novell engineer Nat Friedman’s popular Beagle search program.
Source: DesktopLinux
Ten Ways To Improve GNOME
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GNOME is a beloved desktop environment for many Linux users, but can it be improved upon? Of course it can, and Venture Cake has a roundup of ten specific features that would help improve it as a whole. Ditching the acronym is at the top of the list, which I can’t personally agree with simply because it’s such a well known product… as GNOME, regardless of what it stands for. Other prospective features include highlighting of new apps, right-clicking an application to uninstall it, video screen capture among others.
Desktop Effects are great for impressing your non-Linux using colleagues, or dragging round windows during conference calls. But all that GPU usage comes at the cost of battery life. Gnome already knows when I’m plugged in, so why not let me skip the less productive effects when I’m roaming?
Source: Venture Cake
Intel Accelerates High Performance Computing Clusters
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Intel is not quickly thought of as being a cable manufacturer, but todays announcement brought on an Intel Cluster Ready technology and Intel Connects Cables, which is designed to help simplify cluster use for high-performance computing. This is a business-side announcement, with the target market including medical research, weather forecasting, super computer use or generally large networks that require a lot of data to be passed along. What’s great about these cables especially though is the fact that they can handle 20 Gbps speeds over 100 meters and are also far thinner than current networking cables. Less weight and easier management.
SANTA CLARA, Calif. and DRESDEN, Germany, June 27, 2007 – Intel Corporation today announced new technologies that will advance and accelerate growth of high-performance computing (HPC) – from deskside supercomputers to high-end petaflop-sized clusters. Intel Cluster Ready and Intel Connects Cables help simplify cluster use and deployment as high-performance computing use expands from academic and scientific realms to more mainstream use in data centers. Increasingly clustered systems are powering a wide variety of activities including medical research, weather forecasting, computer-aided design and financial modeling.
Source: Intel Press Release
A Tale of 11 Broken Xbox 360s
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I’ve been quite lucky to avoid the dreaded red ring of death on my launch Xbox 360, but it seems that many people are not so lucky, especially Justin Lowe. He’s currently on his twelfth Xbox since he purchased his first a month after the launch. Three have been red rings of death, two had disc read errors, two were DOA, others had audio and video problems and one exploded.
I personally am having a hard time believing most of this. There is audio in the article that verifies that he had many Xbox 360s repaired, but the chances of running into this many issues by chance seems unlikely. Lottery chances. Regardless of what I think, it’s an interesting read, even if it is hard to believe.
As Justin garnered more experience with 360 repairs, he discovered something. The consoles consumers sent back by Microsoft are often refurbished, rather than brand-new. Justin found out that, with enough problems and by specifically making the request, Microsoft would send out brand-new consoles as replacements. Midway through his ordeal, he began doing this, but quickly found the downside: new consoles can take even longer to send out, with up to two weeks spent waiting for Microsoft approval.
Source: 1UP
Top 10 Worst 2D to 3D Games
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The guys from ScrewAttack have thrown a new video on the GameTrailers website where they take a look at the top ten worst 2D to 3D conversions in gaming. Half of the games I have never played, but I can agree with them regardless, such as NARC and Altered Beast.. and Contra! The number one on the list won’t be a surprise to hardcore fans of the series as well. Why do companies need to ruin games by moving them to 3D? It’s not an easy thing to pull off, especially when most of the games seem so half-assed.
You can follow the link below to watch the video in a Flash player, or to download it to multiple formats.
Source: Game Trailers
Cell Processor Aiding Natural Security Technology
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Not only can the Cell Broadband Engine power our gaming consoles, but it can also aide the government to take on such challenges as national security, cyberspace and bioinformatics. The sheer power of the Cell is enough to analyze data streaming data in real-time, so it’s no wonder it’s in people’s sights. Next time you boot up your PS3, think about all the power being wasted on your games.
In the areas of defense and security, the new computing power could be used on unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to partially analyze incoming data onboard. Equipment on such platforms needs to be minimal in size, weight and power, such as the size of a games console.
Source: DailyTech
MySpace Videos To Become MySpace TV
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It looks as though YouTube has a serious competitor on their hands. Well, almost. MySpace Videos has been around for a little while, but I’ve never been there so I won’t pretend like I know what it’s all about. However, they are going to be renaming themselves to MySpace TV and will also become its own entity. It’s too early to jump the gun on assumptions, but if there is anyone to compete with YouTube, it’s MySpace.
Thursday’s launch of MySpaceTV may well be the long awaited NBC/ News Corp YouTube killer. It’s probably a case of MySpace TV being better late than never in launching, even if YouTube has doubled its traffic since October and is now even harder to challenge.
Source: TechCrunch
SplitFish FragFX PS3 Reviewed
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Gerry Block at IGN has taken a look at a very unique peripheral for the PS3. Essentially, it’s a mouse/mousepad and gamepad, all interconnected. It would be ideal for first person shooters, where you could aim and shoot with the mouse, but control your character and other things with your left hand. Very odd looking device, but it was awarded a 9.1/10 score. Whenever they become available, you can score yours for $69.99.
Nearly every aspect of the FragFX is customizable. Software available for download from Splitfish.com allows for button assignment reconfiguring for cases in which games don’t offer strong reassignment options. The sensitivity and neutral point of the left-stick-dongle’s motion sensing can also be configured. Throughout our testing we encountered no situations in which we were unable to get the FragFX to do what we wanted it to do, and we give SplitFish a lot of credit for not using the FragFX’s unique design as an excuse for omitting features or capabilities.
Source: IGN
Critical Updates For Intel Core Processors
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The Inquirer noticed a new entry on the Microsoft support site which mentions a hotfix to aide in reliability of Intel processors. What this means exactly, no one seems to know. According to the Inq, it affects most recent Core CPUs including the E4000/E6000, Q6600 and both the QX6700 and QX6800. You can download the hotfix through Microsoft’s support site although I am sure it would be available through Windows update as well. For those not using Windows, there should be BIOS updates available for your board. If not now, soon. Now if we only knew why a hotfix was necessary…
In the mobile world, people with the Core 2 Duo T5000 and T7000 need to visit Microsoft’s site, while the server guys will want to use motherboard BIOSes if they do not rely on Microsoft Windows operating systems. The affected servers are Xeon 3000, 3200, 5100 and 5300s – or just about every model from the second generation of Core marchitecture. Oddly enough, Yonah – 32-bit Core Duo processor – isn’t among the affected cores.
Source: The Inquirer
RealPlayer 11 Streaming Video Ripper Tested
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We posted earlier this month that Real was planning to release RealPlayer 11 with the capability of ripping online streams, such as YouTube, MySpace, Revver and more. Well, the beta has finally been released and Ars Technica wasted no time in giving it a spin. Their verdict is that it’s overall a very useful feature, but needs a little bit of work for certain kinds of video. All I can say is.. please Real, bring this beta to other platforms, not just Windows.
Clicking on the context menu or the Download This Video button automatically brings up a download manager screen, which saves the stream to the directory specified in RealPlayer’s configuration. Downloading works in slightly different ways depending on the type of stream being saved: Flash files from YouTube downloaded as quickly as they could be retrieved from the server, while a Windows Media Video file from Channel 9 would only download in the same time as it would have taken to watch it.
Source: Ars Technica
iPhone Reviews Are Here
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The reviews for the iPhone are finally starting to trickle in, proving that Apple likes to leave these kinds of things to the last minute. The general consensus between all the reviewers thus far is that it’s a great product, but still has a few flaws. Walt Mossberg noted the fact that the call quality was just “ok”. Seems foolish to me for a $600 phone to have “ok” call quality, but we are in an age when people would rather shoot a text message than dial a number, so in a way it’s not so surprising.
Here are the reviews available so far:
- New York Post – Glenn Fleishman
- The Wall Street Journal – Walt Mossberg
- MSNBC – Steven Levy
- USA Today – Edward Baig
For those interested in knowing what the iPhone doesn’t have, both Engadget and Gizmodo have summed it up for you. Now, only two more days before this thing is launched…
OCZ Releases PCP&C 750W CrossFire Power Supply
Sunnyvale, Calif.–June 26, 2007–OCZ Technology Group, a worldwide leader in innovative, ultra-high performance memory and PC components, today announced the release of the Silencer(R) 750 Quad CrossFire(TM) Edition under the PC Power & Cooling line. Designed to offer consumers a combination of legendary PSU architecture and the ultimate in quiet power management, the CrossFire Silencer is the ideal power solution for gamers and ATI enthusiasts. The “fiery red” exterior of this special edition PSU is the perfect compliment to any CrossFire-based high performance graphics system or gaming PC.
Source: OCZ Press Release