One of the most epic Battlefield 3 kills you've ever seen
My good friend Chris posted this on my wall today, and while the title "Most Epic Battlefield 3 kill EVER" caught my eye... I thought it would be some trick shot, or long headshot. But no. I'm pretty sure Chuck Norris or Bruce Willis have gotten onto Battlefield 3 and played out the most epic kill you've ever seen.
It starts off with Rendezook/Stun Gravy in a SU-35BM FLANKER-E fighter jet, where he blows up a helicopter, he then takes vertical flight at a 90-degree angle into the air, ejects out of his plane... looks down at another fighter jet flying up on his six, and fires a damn rocket launcher at the incoming plane. The rocket flies directly into the plane killing the pilot and scoring him some sweet, sweet points in one of the best things I've seen in the game yet.
This deserves your 30 seconds, for sure. Multiple watches from me already!
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LeakedTT: AMD Radeon HD 7970 specs, 30% faster than 6970, launches on December 22
As the launch of AMD's next-generation Radeon cards gets closer, we have some exciting leaked specs to share with you. From some leaked slides, the specs of AMD's first Graphics Core Next (GCN) chip, the Tahiti XT, which goes under the suave name of the AMD Radeon HD 7970, will sport 3GB of GDDR5 (and not the rumored XDR2 memory), 3.5 TFLOPS of power, 2048 stream processors, 384bit memory width at 5.5Gbps, total load consumption of up to 300W and an less than 3W for idle.
Display outputs include 1 x DVI, 2 x miniDisplayPort and HDMI, in terms of power connectors, it should have one 8-pin and one 6-pin. If these specs are true, we should expect the single-GPU Radeon HD 7970 to keep up with, and most likely beat in some games, the dual-GPU Radeon HD 6990 and NVIDIA GeForce GTX 590. It seems to be about 30-percent faster than the single-GPU Radeon HD 6970.
Once some great drivers are released for it, we should see more performance sucked out of the new cards. Two of these should see a game like Battlefield 3 run at Ultra quality, 1920x1080 at 120Hz absolutely maxed out with AA/AF at 120fps minimum, or 2560x1xx0 at 60Hz, minimum 60fps.
Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, it's Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen who has plans to create a business for commercial space travel
Space Travel. Microsoft. Skynet. The steps are there, and we're hitting them at a nice pace. Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen has announced new plans to create a business for commercial space travel. It should take roughly five years to develop.
With the U.S. government slicing space flight, Allen has sensed a gap in the market for investment. Yesterday, Allen showcased designs for a new craft that would eventually have the ability of taking human passengers into the vast space that is, well, space.
Allen has previously funded spaceflight, as he was behind SpaceShipOne, which was the first manned private journey. Stratolaunch System are the ones behind the building of the new craft, which is a company founded by Paul Allen.
ARM & GlobalFoundaries show off 2.5GHz+ 28nm Cortex A9 and 20nm test vehicle
GlobalFoundaries will be a name that will be commonly mentioned in 2012, which is something they'll be easily doing if they continue at this pace. They've announced a dual-core Cortex A9 test chip that is built on a 28nm HPP (High Performance Plus) process.
This test chip clocks in at 2.5GHz and is said to be capable of higher frequencies. It operating voltage is just 0.85V. Both the frequency and voltage targets are good for a Cortex A9 implementation, but remember, this is just a test chip.
Most companies are expecting to pass the 2GHz mark next year on high-performance 28nm processes, so we should see this by the end of 2012, if not early 2013. We should see these designs in tablets and netbook replacements, with ARM being Windows 8-compatible now.
Basemark Halti annouced, an OpelGL ES 3.0 benchmark for your smartphone
RightWare, who are behind BrowserMark and the very popular Basemark ES 2.0, have announced the latest in their smartphone testing software: Basemark Halti, an OpenGL ES 3.0 benchmark.
Basemark Halti contains two primary benchmarking scenes, in the same fashion that Basemark ES 2.0 had two scenes. This time they're named Rush and Car Race. The two tests will have triangle counts of roughly 100,000 triangles per frame, and be rendered front to back where possible.
First up, Rush is an action scene based on a city rooftop and its aim is to bring PC-quality game rendering. Character animation with skinning and bones, dynamic shadows and reflections, per-pixel lighting with 3 point lights, depth of field, light bloom, and SSAO are all featured in Rush.
Hitachi unleashes new 10k RPM HDD, enter Ultrastar C10K900
Hitachi have only just unleashed some 4TB consumer hard drives, and throughout the the Thailand flood crisis, one would think we wouldn't see any new hard-drive announcements, well, you were wrong.
Hitachi Global Storage Technologies have just unveiled something for the enterprise market, the Ultrastar C10K900 series. This new series comes in 300, 450, 600 and 900GB sizes, which all feature a 2.5-inch form factor, a SAS 6Gbps interface, 64MB of cache, an average seek time of 3.8 milliseconds, an average latency of 3.0ms, and an operating/idle power draw of just 5.8/3.0W. A Bulk Data Encryption option will also be available on specific models.
According to Hitachi, the new Ultrastar drives deliver 18-percent higher sequential and up to 17-percent higher random performance than their nearest competitor, and are said to be perfect for Tier 1 enterprise networked storage arrays, or for blades and other rack-mounted servers.
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Duke Nukem Forever gets some fresh DLC, The Doctor Who Cloned Me
Duke Nukem Forever is still cranking along, and a second DLC pack is now out called "The Doctor Who Cloned Me". It's available through Steam for $9.99 US and includes a bunch of new material including four new multiplayer maps, a full new single player campaign which includes brand new weapons, all-new enemy types and bosses, more Achievements, and brand new interactive items within the DNF world.
A detailed run down of what is included is below (or in the full story):
Sky-High: The alien-infested corporate offices of Pooty, Inc. near the center of Las Vegas. This map includes three indoor floors taken over by the aliens and two rooftops, jump pads, stairwells, and building-to-building combat.
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American Airlines Pilots can now use iPads in cockpits, will play Flight Control like a pro
Usually when in a plane, all electronic devices such as smartphones, tablets and the like, are required to be turned off. Including the cockpit and its pilots. Not for American Airlines pilots in the cockpit, who have now been approved by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to use electronics, and more specifically, iPads in the cockpit.
The FAA announced on Tuesday that American Airlines pilots in the cockpit will no longer require the use of paper-based flight manuals during those times, and could now use Apple iPads instead.The FAA came to this decision after they conducting a test of the use of electronics in the cockpit, in an effort to potentially replace the use of paper manuals and charts.
Some are left wondering why the FAA didn't run the same tests for passengers, which would see passengers having the ability to use their electronic devices before and after takeoff, instead of having to wait until the plane reaches an altitude of 10,000 feet before the use of electronics is allowed. The New York Times called the rule that passengers needed to wait until the plane reached 10,000 feet "outdated," and even bought up the idea that the rule may just be used to keep passengers' attention during takeoff and landing announcements.
OCZ releases new Petrol SSDs, includes high-octane performance
Why didn't OCZ use the line high-octane in this new SSD... feel free to use that line, OCZ. OCZ have released yet another SSD onto the market, a new range line called "Petrol." Petrol is based on a 6Gbps SATA interface and comes in the usual 2.5-inch form factor. Ryan Peterson, CEO of OCZ Technology says:
The Petrol SSD is based on the Indilinx Everest SSD processor, which is capable of 400MB/sec bandwidth and 35,000 IOPS. The chip also features advanced features for longevity like proprietary page mapping algorithms. Those allow for more stable mixed-workload environment. Latency in the SSD is reduced to as low as 0.6ms.
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Hitachi-LG price fixing update: three executives will face jail time
Three Hitachi-LG Data Storage (HLDS) workers, Young Keun Park, Sang Hun Kim and Sik "Daniel" Hur will face jail time after pleading guilty to fixing optical disk drive prices, according to the US Department of Justice. Throughout 2005 to 2009, the three employees suppressed competition by rigging bids for optical disk drives sold to both Dell and HP, in addition to fixing prices for devices sold to Microsoft.
Under the plea agreement, Park and Kim will serve eight months in prison, while Hur will experience seven months in jail. All there will have to pay a $25,000 fine. The three executives will also be charged with multiple violations of the Sherman Act, which covers antitrust and anticompetitive activities. Each count of the Sherman Act comes with a statutory fine of up to $1 million, (and more if the damages are large enough), and up to 10-years behind bars.
This is the first ruling against individual workers, but is the second round of charges against the join Hitachi-LG venture. Last month, HLDS itself pleaded guilty to 14 counts of violating federal antitrust laws between the June 2004 and September 2009. Hitachi-LG were sentenced to pay a $21.1 million fine and is said to be helping the DoJ with its investigation.
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