Written by John Ponio
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Friday, 10 February 2012 14:58 |
Web and Industry News
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Activison-Blizzard, the company responsible for games such as Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, Starcraft 2, and World of Warcraft, released its 2011 Q4 financials, as well as released a "targeted launch date" for the upcoming title Diablo III. Non-GAAP net revenue nears $5 billion, higher than expected, with operating cash flow nearing $1 billion. Also announced with their financials are what's coming up in 2012, including World of Warcraft: Mists of Pandaria, Starcraft 2: Heart of the Swarm, and Diablo III. For WoW, there will be a global press conference in March where a lot more information about the game will be released. For Starcraft, not much new information was released. Blizzard did say they will take a more active role in e-sports in 2012, which will be amazing. Regarding Diablo III, Blizzard announced they will be targeting a Q2 2012 release date. Keep in mind that Blizzard's stance on a release is always "when it's done," so it could very easily be later than that. Last but not least, Blizzard announced a free-to-play DOTA online game as well as that their new, unannounced MMO is on their "large and innovative pipeline." Not really sure what that means, but hopefully more information about it will come out this year. You can read more about Activision-Blizzard's financials here.
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Written by John Ponio
on
Thursday, 09 February 2012 13:54 |
Web and Industry News
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Hitachi GST announced Wednesday the launch of their new Ultrastar SSD400S.B enterprise-class line of SSDs. Using a Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) 6Gb/s interface, the drive packs a wallop. It can handle up to 536/502 MB/s sequential read/write, respectively, with 57,500/25,500 read/write IOPS. They come in 100GB, 200GB, and 400GB sizes. And since they're enterprise drives, they're also built to be reliable. In the lifetime of the drive, they withstand up to 35 petabytes of random writes. According to the press release, this is equivalent to writing 19.2TB per day for five years. Ultrastar SSDs are also the first to use 25nm SLC technology, which is probably another reason why the performance is so amazing. Internally, the NAND flash memory is from Intel, but it didn't say what controller it uses. Something that is puzzling to me is that Hitachi GST is releasing the drive instead of Western Digital. Almost a year ago Western Digital announced that they were going to buy the company, and the deal was expected to go be done by the third quarter of last year. The drives are available now, and the company is working with OEMs to get them out on the market.
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Written by John Ponio
on
Thursday, 09 February 2012 13:38 |
Web and Industry News
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Remember HP's Envy 14 Spectre? It's HP's almost-ultrabook, "almost" because it's just outside of the ultrabook specifications. Well, it's available for pre-order now. Specs-wise it's not too shabby of a laptop, but its price makes it outside of perfect. Starting at $1,399.99, the HP Spectre comes with either an Intel Core i5-2467M (1.6GHz-2.3GHz, 2 physical cores, 4 logical) or an Intel Core i7-2677M (1.8GHz-2.9GHz Turbo, 2 physical cores, 4 logical); 4GB 1333MHz DDR3 memory on 1 DIMM; either a 128GB SSD or 2x128GB SSDs for a total of 256GB; 802.11 a/b/g/n wireless with bluetooth; a blacklit keyboard that lights up and dims as you approach and go away from it; a standard 4 cell Li-ion battery; and a 1600x900 14-inch display crammed inside of a 13.3-inch chassis. Oh, and did I mention that the screen, back of the lid, and the palm rest are covered with Gorilla glass (the glass that you can use as a cutting board without scratching it *don't try it if you aren't willing to scratch it*)? It's not a bad laptop, just very, very pricey. You can get a similarly spec-ed Macbook Air, which is smaller than the Spectre with its 13-inch display but extremely thin design, for $1,299. Because of the high price, I don't expect it to do very well. It will ship on February 29 if you pre-order soon, so if you want to get your hands on one go here to customize and pre-order.
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Written by John Ponio
on
Wednesday, 08 February 2012 18:00 |
Web and Industry News
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Avast!, a popular anti-virus program, is changing up how they do updates, kind of. Instead of the program having to check online every so often for definition updates, Avast! will start to "stream" the updates. This means that updates will be pushed to computers, rather than fetched. Ondrej Vlcek, CTO of Avast Software, said, "Instead of our clients having to 'pull' in the updates, we can 'push' it to them. Once we have decided to publish an update, we can push it out to all of our users in minutes." They will continue to have regular definition updates in addition to the new streaming, which sounds like a better way to do things rather than just streaming every update. This feature will be in the upcoming Avast! 7 version update.
Source.
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Written by John Ponio
on
Wednesday, 08 February 2012 17:53 |
Web and Industry News
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The much-anticipated Windows 8 Consumer Preview, in contrast to the Developer Preview that's out now, will be released on February 29 to the public. In this release, the App Store should be working. According to The Verge, Microsoft has a short list of apps and games that they will be releasing with the Preview. The list is as follows: Applications: - Camera
- Messaging
- Mail
- Calendar
- SkyDrive
- People
- Photos
- Video
- Music
Games: - Hydro Thunder
- Toy Soldiers
- Reckless Racing
- Angry Birds
- Ilomilo
- Rocket Riot
- Full House Poker
- Tentacles
- Crash Course
- Ms Splosion Man
- Wordament
Also new in this preview is the lack of a start menu, at least according to some leaked screenshots. In place of the start menu orb will be a link back out to the Metro UI, which honestly makes a lot of sense. Currently they have the start menu and the Metro UI, so you have two ways to access your applications. While I'm a fan of the start menu, I can appreciate Microsoft trying to make the most out of their new user interface. I can't wait to install it and see all of what has changed since the Developer Preview. |
Written by John Ponio
on
Tuesday, 07 February 2012 14:52 |
Web and Industry News
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Raspberry Pie, the eagerly anticipated $25/$35 computer than can easily play 1080p video (making it the perfect home theater PC) among other things, has started its manufacturing stage. The U.K. foundation who designed the computers was originally going to manufacture them in England, but it worked out that doing it in China was easier. Manufacturing in China, however, ran into a hiccup because the quartz crystal that they designed the computer to use isn't as available in China as it is in England, so production was delayed until they could find a supplier. A supplier has been found, and now they can start production. They hope and plan to have 10,000 Raspberry Pie units done by February 20, which means that you could possibly get your hands on one before the month is over. Also released was a highly detailed specification sheet on the Broadcom BCM2835 chip that the system uses. You can read the original post here and download the PDF specification sheet here.
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Written by John Ponio
on
Tuesday, 07 February 2012 14:40 |
Web and Industry News
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For a while now Adobe has been working on a sandbox for their Flash player, which basically limits its activities to avoid malicious activities and exploits. It's been in the workings for Chrome for a while now, and Adobe is finally launching a beta for Firefox. Part of the announcement read, "Flash Player will establish a low integrity, highly restricted process that must communicate through a broker to limit its privileged activities. The sandboxed process is restricted with the same job limits and privilege restrictions as the Adobe Reader Protected Mode implementation. Adobe Flash Player Protected Mode for Firefox 4.0 or later will be supported on both Windows Vista and Windows 7. We would like to thank the Mozilla team for assisting us with some of the more challenging browser integration bugs. For Flash Player, this is the next evolutionary step in protecting our customers."
While something needed to be done about the numerous exploits found in Adobe's Flash Player, I wonder how this sandbox will affect performance. I guess that's why there's a beta, though, and hopefully everything will be worked out. If you're a Firefox user and want to get in on this, go here and download the Flash Player Incubator plug-in.
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Written by John Ponio
on
Monday, 06 February 2012 15:02 |
Web and Industry News
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NVIDIA's upcoming Kepler graphics card lineup was recently leaked, and it's full of those lovely details all of us love. Before I post the specs, I should reference that they're all taken from here. And now for what really matters, NVIDIA's Kepler graphics cards:
| Model | Code Name | Die size | Core Clock | Shader Clock | Stream Processors | Streaming Multiprocessor Count | ROPs | Memory Clock (effective) | Bus Width | Memory Bus Width | | GTX690 | GK110x2 | 550mm2 | TBD~750MHz | TBD~1.5Ghz | 2x1024 | 2x32 | 2x56 | 4.5GHz GDDR5 | 2x448bit | 2x252GB/s | | GTX680 | GK110 | 550mm2 | TBD-850MHz | TBD~1.7GHz | 1024 | 32 | 64 | 5.5GHz GDDR5 | 512bit | 252GB/s | | GTX670 | GK110 | 550mm2 | TBD~850MHz | TBD~1.7GHz | 896 | 28 | 56 | 5GHz GDDR5 | 386bit | 240GB/s | | GTX660Ti | GK110 | 550mm2 | TBD~850MHz
| TBD~1.7GHz | 768 | 24 | 48 | 5GHz GDDR5 | 384bit | 240GB/s | | GTX660 | GK104 | 290mm2 | TBD~900MHz | TBD~1.8GHz | 512 | 16 | 32 | 5.8GHz GDDR5 | 256bit | 186GB/s | | GTX650Ti | GK104 | 290mm2 | TBD~850MHz | TBD~1.7GHz | 448 | 14 | 28 | 5.5GHz GDDR5 | 224bit | 154GB/s | | GTX650 | GK106 | 155mm2 | TBD~900MHz | TBD~1.8GHz | 256 | 8 | 24 | 5.5GHz GDDR5 | 192bit | 132GB/s | | GTX640 | GK106 | 155mm2 | TBD~850MHz | TBD~1.7GHz | 192 | 6 | 16 | 5.5GHz GDDR5 | 128bit | 88GB/s |
| Model | Bus Interface | Frame Buffer | Transistors | Price Point | Release Date | | GTX690 | PCIe3.0x16 | 2x1.75GB | 2x6.4B | $999 | Q3 2012 | | GTX680 | PCIe3.0x16 | 2GB | 6.4B | $649 | April-12 | | GTX670 | PCIe3.0x16 | 1.75GB | 6.4B | $499 | April-12 | | GTX660Ti | PCIe3.0x16 | 1.5GB | 6.4B | $399 | Q2/Q3 2012 | | GTX 660 | PCIe3.0x16 | 1.75GB | 3.4B | $319 | April012 | | GTX650Ti | PCIe3.0x16 | 1.75GB | 3.4B | $249 | Q2/Q3 2012 | | GTX650 | PCIe3.0x16
| 1.5GB
| 1.8B
| $179
| May-12 | | GTX650 | PCIe3.0x16 | 2GB | 1.8B | $139 | May-12 |
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Written by John Ponio
on
Monday, 06 February 2012 14:52 |
Web and Industry News
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If you're a Steam user as well as one of the many users of Avast! Antivirus, you probably ran into a problem on Sunday where Avast! falsely deemed Steam as a trojan and locked it up in the vault. The definition that listed Steam as a trojan was taken back about an hour and a half after it was released. For some odd reason, I had no problems even though my computer was on, Avast! was running, and Steam was open. But if you were affected, you just simply have to reinstall Steam. If you can before you uninstall, try to backup your steamapps folder (C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps if you're on a 64bit system or C:\Program Files\Steam\steamapps if you're on a 32bit system) then copy it back to the same place you found it after Steam is reinstalled. This will allow you to not have to re-download all your games again, saving you a lot of data-usage, time, and hassle. Source.
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Written by John Ponio
on
Friday, 03 February 2012 14:09 |
Web and Industry News
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Ubisoft will be moving their servers starting on February 7, meaning that some games will become completely unplayable during the down time. There are only a few games that will be completely unplayable. Most games will just lose their online content for a while, but offline-mode will work as it should. The announcement does not include how long the move will take. I would expect a few days to a week, but you never know. Read on for a list of games that won't be affected and a list of games that will be completely unplayable.
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