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:

We're at an inflection point. We will all need to let go of the old 'AMD versus Intel' mind-set, because it won't be about that anymore.

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.

Just days ago, 2K Marin had a Canberra, Australia-based arm to help with development. This studio is now working with former sister studio Irrational Games on BioShock Infinite. Irrational Studios boss Ken Levine said when asked for a comment:

We had a number of open positions on BioShock Infinite. When we found out our former sister studio 2K Australia was becoming available, we thought they would perfectly fill those roles. If every decision was this easy...

Then we have a history lesson, in 2007, Irrational Games was bought by Take-Two, just before the release of BioShock. Just before this, the studio was split apart and renamed 2K Boston and 2K Australia. Since this time, 2K Boston has become Irrational Games, but 2K Australia was skipped. 2K Australia helped 2K Marin on BioShock 2, after which 2K Australia became 2K Marin, but based in Australia. After this, they helped with the XCOM reboot.

Skyrim has received a 1.2 patch for the PS3 version of the game, which fixes a whole heap of annoying issues and strange bugs. PC or Xbox 360 Skyrim gamer? You'll have to wait 48 hours for your patch.

The 1.2 notes are below:

Improved occasional performance issues resulting from long term play (PlayStation 3)

Microsoft's next-generation Kinect 2 is set to receive a hefty upgrade in specs, which will allow it to be so accurate, it could lip read. Yes, lip read. Kinect 2 will also offer improved motion sensing and voice recognition.

Eurogamer was told by a development source that Kinect 2 will be so powerful it will be enable games to lip read, detect when players are angry, and determine in which direction they are facing. Kinect 2 should also have the ability to track the pitch and volume of player voices and facial characteristics to measure different emotional states.

Current Kinect technology is held back by USB technology as it has to pass data through the ageing technology. Kinect launched in November 2010 with the depth sensor set to 30 frames per second and a 320x240 resolution limit. The USB interface is capable of roughly 35MB/sec but is artificially held back to use only 15/16MB/sec because multiple USB devices can be used at once on the Xbox 360.