Latest News - Page 3109

Freemium music subscription service, Spotify, has revealed a "new direction" that they are going in. A new API that will allow developers to create apps that are powered by Spotify.

These apps will be coded in HTML5, and will live inside the Spotify app, which means users don't need to install any other standalone pgrams in order to use them, and developers can build the apps with "an easy to use Javascript API."

Spotify users can use these apps whether they pay for Spotify or not, and right now Spotify developer partners do not share in Spotify's revenue, but Spotify CEO Daniel Ek has said that these are still "early days" for the platform.

I didn't think this would be this soon, details on Apple TV, but here we go. Apple analyst Gene Munster has reiterated his belief that Apple is set to launch a TV in 2012.

Munster made the comments at Business Insiders' IGNITION: Future of Media conference this morning. Gene is so sure that Apple TV is coming he told anyone thinking of buying a new TV set to actually wait, because Apple's TV is going to be that awesome.

Here are some details:

Teampoison are reportedly behind an intrusion into the United Nations, in which they gained access to at least one of the UN's servers, where they stole over 1,000 e-mail addresses, usernames and passwords during the hack.

Teampoison posted their hacked goodies online through Pastebin, along with messages explaining the reasoning behind the attack, where they've said:

It is a great time for AMD graphics card owners, with releases of new drivers for what seems every few days. Today AMD have released the Catalyst 11.11c performance drivers.

The new Catalyst 11.11c drivers include AMD CrossFireX performance scaling for the AMD Radeon HD 5000 Series in Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. The drivers include everything the Catalyst 11.11b did, with a list of features below:

Elder Scrolls V Skyrim:

Sony have release a new system software update, version 4.00 for some. Not all users, but some at this stage. This new version is in preparation of the NGP launch, PlayStation Vita in Japan.

This update will prepare the PS3 to serve as a content management device, allowing users to copy over media such as games, music, photos, and videos between the PS Vita and PS3. It will also allow the backing up of PS Vita save data to your PS3 hardware, and update the system software for your PS Vita using the network features of your PS3.

Other changes include:

A few quick gaming nuggets today! Firstly we have the news of the long-awaited Counter-Strike: Global Offensive beta beginning today. It was delayed for a little while there, but some good news for CS fans out there today!

The game is still aiming for an "early 2012" release, and it should be good to go then too if the beta has lifted off today. If any of our readers have gotten into the beta, please do let us know what you think by commenting below. Personally, I'm hesitant with CS:GO, I really expected a next-gen FPS, with the same feel of "freshness" that Counter-Strike first introduced all those years ago.

I wouldn't mind some real-time destruction, making for much more frantic shoot outs and battles. One can only wish.

Google's Android dev team have just released Android 4.0.1/Ice Cream Sandwich for x86 chipsets, which has been a promise of theirs to open Android up to both Intel and AMD-based systems.

Of course, with any new release, its not fully stable with many bits missing such as sound, camera, ethernet, and hardware acceleration for Intel chips. Included and working however is, Wi-Fi, sound, and hardware acceleration for AMD chipsets. If you'd like the instructions on how to download the source code, check below [or over the page]:

Hi all, The ics-x86 branch based on Android 4.0.1 is ready.

As always, the MSDN blog has a long, but interesting read on large disks and large sectors in Windows 8 and goes into lengthy detail of how the upcoming OS will handle such things.

I will note, that in the article, they state that from a recent IDC market research report, that they estimate the maximum capacity of a single hard disk will reach 8TB in 2015. But, does this take into consideration the flooding in Thailand? I don't know. Impressive to think though, 8TB in a single disk. Imagine losing all that data. Eep.

Microsoft see two challenges that require attention with large disk sizes, first, ensuring that the entire available capacity is addressable, second, support the hard disk drive vendors in their effort to deliver more efficiently managed physical disks - 4K (large) sector sizes.

With several of our meetings out of the way, Day 2 at I/ITSEC turned into a festival of weapons. Since we are talking about real simulators built to train military troops all over the world we are talking about real weapons. I don't mean tasers or those girly weapons either. M60s and M16s baby!

What is the easiest way to take an M60 to the battle? You mount it on an Hummer.

Our sponsor for this trip, AVADirect built the computers that run this simulator and several others like it. This system isn't just about shooting things with the big gun, the driver has to drive the Hummer in the virtual world. The passengers don't get a moment to relax either, they are armed with M16 rifles that also shoot a fast laser burst that registers on the computer. The most amazing thing is your shots fired are tracked and you have to change magazines and charge the weapons when you run out of virtual ammo.

Thermaltake have just outed a new case, dubbed Thermaltake Commander MS-I Snow Edition, which sports a brand-new "snow look", which allows it to "move its way through a snowy battlefield."

The case comes with extra-long VGA support, which means it can house some of the largest GPUs on the market such as AMD's Radeon HD 6990 or NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 590. Cable management is of course a key feature, the case also sports a 12cm blue LED fan, USB 2.0 and USB 3.0, 9 drive bays and more.

The "snow look" is actually quite impressive and I'm personally now a fan of it after checking out the screenshots and reading about it before typing up this piece. The case sports a gorgeous white "snow" color, but with an interior black and red design. It actually looks quite good, so kudos Thermaltake!

To tell you the truth, I've been holding back my excitement on AMD's new GPUs for a while now. I was a huge fan of the HD 5000-Series, it just completely outperformed Fermi in virtually every way. Sure, it wasn't the fastest in every test, but it had great temps, great overclockability, great noise levels, and to me, was a better card to launch onto the market than the GTX 400-Series.

But, now we have AMD's first true new graphics architecture since the HD 2000-Series. Dubbed Graphics Core Next, or GCN, the new Radeon HD 7000-Series will be the first to feature the new technology, which is set to have a much bigger focus on GPGPU functionality than any ATI or AMD GPU previously, which should at least keep up with NVIDIA's CUDA, or beat it.

The new HD 7000-Series is rumored to launch in notebooks first, with GPUs seen shortly after. High-end gear is not expected until early next year, but AMD could always surprise us. The unveiling event is to be held in London, and AMD haven't sent me my plane ticket, hotel booking, 4 x high-end GPUs or even a post card. I guess I'll sit here and cry red tears of sadness and await the news in a few more days.

Some Ivy Bridge details have been leaked, and CPU World have them split across two articles that cover no less than 18 different CPU models. Ivy Bridge looks to be a native quad-core design with 8MB of last-level cache, just like Sandy Bridge.

Hyper-Threading makes its return, but only with the more expensive Core i7 range of processors, like Sandy Bridge. Turbo Boost also returns, but strangely, there is no mention of Core i3. The only dual-core chip amongst the 18 models is the Core i5-3470T, which sports four threads thanks to Hyper-Threading.

The high-end Core i7-3770K includes a stock frequency of 3.5GHz, ramped up to 3.9GHz when Turbo is enabled. More impressively, it will only feature a 77W thermal envelope, shading nearly 20W from the 95W TDP that the Core i7-2700K has. The Core i7-3770K's TDP is the highest in a range that goes down to 35W. Most of the chips fit into 77W, 65W, and 45W TDPs, with K, S, and T suffixes.

PCIe 3.0 is barely here and rumblings of PCIe 4.0 is coming through the cracks of the Internet tubes. PCI-SIG, who are responsible for developing the PCI Express spec, have listed some preliminary details about PCIe 4.0.

PCI-SIG says that they've decided on a transfer rate of 16GT/sec for the next-generation PCIe technology, with a study showing that 16GT/sec can be achieved over copper wires, at roughly the same power levels of PCIe 3.0, using chips fabbed with "mainstream silicon process technology".

PCIe 4.0 will be backward compatible with older PCIe devices, and vica versa. PCI-SIG haven't mentioned which encoding scheme the new standard will use, so assuming it uses the same 128b/130b system as PCIe 3.0, a 16GT/sec peak transfer rate would translate into per-late, per-direction bandwitch of just under 2GB/sec, a two-fold increase over the PCIe 3.0 standard, and nearly four times as fast as PCIe 2.0. We'd be looking at 31.5GB/sec per direction for a PCIe 4.0 x16 slot.

It's been a busy November with the LSI AIS trade show a couple of weeks ago and I/ITSEC going on now. I'm in Orlando preaching SSD technology to defense contractors and checking out some of the amazing systems from AVADirect. AVADirect has a large presence at this event, the largest simulation trade show in the world. I/ITSEC brings together all of the large defense contractors, accessory makers, global mapping and several other companies that feed into the real world of simulation. It's not uncommon to see a US Senator or general at I/ITSEC. If you every wondered what happened to all of the game developers that brought us such hits as Microsoft Flight Simulator or even the old Jane's collection they are here too.

AVADirect has several systems on the show floor, systems that were built for serious functions. Many of the systems we are not able to photograph due to the sensitive nature of the programs ran on them. We were able to take a few images of this system, running 14 monitors.

That is right, 14 monitors off of a single desktop.

STEC have just unveiled a new SSD at the Server Design Summit today, dubbed ZeusIOPS XE. ZeusIOPS XE is the industry's highest endurance enterprise-class MLC flash-based SSD which is an extension to their flagship ZeusIOPS SSD family and enables at least 30 full capacity writes per day, every day, for five years.

Impressive, isn't it? STEC's CellCare technology is the behind-the-scenes driver that when applied to MLC flash, extends the performance, endurance and reliability of the ZeusIOPS EX drives.

The drive can fully write roughly 33 Petabytres of data over the working life of a 600GB drive, which is how it works out to 30 times per day over five years. Where STEC's CellCare technology comes in is with its unique ability to measure and manage the wear of the drive using adaptive flash management algorithms and advanced signal processing techniques.

Super Mario 3D Land hit the Nintendo 3DS and store shelves on November 11, and has since become the fastest-selling Mario game in Nintendo's history by selling more than 500,000 copies since launch.

Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword which was released on the Nintendo Wii on November 20 has sold 535,000 copies, which makes it the fastest-selling Zelda game ever. Black Friday is filled with wonderful things, even with the way the world's economies are right now.

The two releases also spiked Nintendo 3DS and Wii systems, with the 3DS sales tripled (by 325-percent) compared with sales the week of November 6th, the week before Super Mario 3D Land launched out of its green pipe. The week of its debut, however, sales rose 49-percent from the previous week.

Internode have a pretty good offer for games.on.net, where they've offered a no signup fee, with the first two months free. Internode! Internode really cater to gamers, and push this obviously through their gaming portal, games.on.net, but also in their services they offer to gamers.

Internode have a dedicated games network in games.on.net which offers patches, videos, demos and more, your favourite Internet TV shows and podcasts where you can download them all, unmetered, as fast as your Internet connection can handle. Internode even have two Steam content servers, where you can buy your Steam games, download them and get playing faster than ever - with everything above all quota free.

How can it get better?

During an interview with Industry Gamers, creator of Ultima, Richard Garriott had a few things to say about consoles. He thinks consoles will be extinct in the near future. Really...

With consoles multi-billion dollar, long-term investments for companies such as Sony and Microsoft, it is a bet. A big one. Longer development cycles are now the norm, with both companies touting a 10-year life cycle for this generation, and we're already up to seven years now.

Consoles are also now faced with super-tough competition from what seems all sides. Smartphones are more powerful than ever, tablets will receive quad-core chips within days thanks to NVIDIA's Tegra 3 and the first Tegra 3-powered tablet, ASUS' Eee Pad Transformer Prime. Social gaming on PC is not helping with companies such as Zynga having over 100 million active users on games such as CityVille.

This is kind of not unexpected, but there are rumors that AMD might be exiting the CPU market, probably from the unsuccessful launch of Bulldozer and the constant #WINNING of Intel's Core range of processors.

Mike Silverman, AMD company spokesman has said:

YES! Battlefield 3's first [and hopefully not last] expansion pack, Back to Karkand, has a release date of December 14. It comes out seven days earlier on the Sony PlayStation 3, with a release date of December 7.

Sony's Asian PlayStation Store lists Battlefield 3 Back to Karkand for December 7, 2011, which is how the news broke of the December 14 date. I don't mind waiting 7 more days, because I'm just so damn excited.

For now, enjoy yesterday's gameplay footage from one of the maps on Back to Karkand, Gulf of Oman.