Fable 3 dev: Used-game sales hurt industry more than piracy, say what!

Anthony Garreffa | Gaming | May 19, 2011 9:09 PM CDT

Developers have complained for the longest time that piracy is the number one killer in sale numbers but it is now looking like the used-game sales could be an even bigger problem. Fable III designer Mike West says that the sale of second-hand Xbox 360 games costs the developer more than piracy on PC.

He elaborates by saying:

Continue reading: Fable 3 dev: Used-game sales hurt industry more than piracy, say what! (full post)

Apple MacBook Air set to get an injection of Sandy Bridge, Thunderbolt in June or July

Anthony Garreffa | Laptops | May 18, 2011 10:20 PM CDT

Apple is set to inject their ultra-thin MacBook Air range with some Sandy Bridge and Thunderbolt goodness come this June/July. The refreshed models will bring the Air range in line with the Sandy Bridge-refreshed MacBook Pro and iMac range that have just recently been updated. DigiTimes is citing industry sources saying that the supply chain makers for the new models remain the same.

Quanta Computer doing assembly work, Catcher Technology supplying casings and Simplo Technology and Dynapack supplying the batteries. The refresh should cause quite the stir as it'll give Apple the much needed speed boost in their ultra-thin notebook line at the same time as winking toward competitors like Dell and Samsung who are tripping over themselves trying to compete.

Continue reading: Apple MacBook Air set to get an injection of Sandy Bridge, Thunderbolt in June or July (full post)

ASUS 990FX Sabertooth Mobo flaunts in front of the camera, lifts skirt just above knee and bites its bottom lip

Anthony Garreffa | Motherboards | May 18, 2011 10:06 PM CDT

ASUS are really going for gold with the AM3+ platform by including the Republic of Gamers (ROG) teaming of two motherboards in the form of the ASUS Crosshair V Formula and The Ultimate Force (TUF) Sabertooth 9900FX which go hand-in-hand with AMD's 990FX chipset that is designed to run up to four discrete graphics cards. ASUS are keeping the color scheme in line with other TUF-series boards and it doesn't look too bad at all.

The board comes with ultra-durable components, 10-phase Digi+ VRM, four DDR3 DIMM slots supporting dual-channel DDR3-1866MHz memory and connects to the 990FX chipset over a HyperTransport 3.1 link. The board includes four PCI-Express 2.0 16x (capable of 16/4/8/8x or 16/4/16/nc - depending on what is installed). The electrical x4 slot is wired to the SB950 southbridge and is placed there to hold PCI-Express SSDs (such a great addition).

One each of the PCI-E x1 and PCI end the slots in a slower fashion. Storage wise the board sports six internal SATA 6Gbit ports supporting RAID, two internal SATA 3Gbit from a third-party controller, one power-eSATA/USB combo and one normal eSATA on the rear. To finish the board off we have 8+2 channel HD audio powered by a Realtek ALC892 with optical SPDIF output, one GbE port, four USB3.0 ports (two rear, two via header), a bunch of USB2.0 ports and Firewire.

Continue reading: ASUS 990FX Sabertooth Mobo flaunts in front of the camera, lifts skirt just above knee and bites its bottom lip (full post)

Angry Birds flies past 200 million downloads, like a boss

Anthony Garreffa | Gaming | May 18, 2011 9:40 PM CDT

Rovio's famously awesome Angry Birds has reached a very amazing milestone. Downloads have topped 200 million, Apple's iPad and iPhone have contributed to this success by a large portion but the franchise has grown up a little bit. Angry Birds has seem phenomenal success even on Google's Chrome Web Store with 5 million downloads.

Keep in mind that Rovio had more than fifty games before they struck gamers across the globe with the amazing Angry Birds. Rovio's Peter Vesterbacka has shown off Angry Birds hoodies (omg!) and has said that he sees Angry Birds as a huge entertainment platform which isn't just limited to merchandise and movies but he will be experimenting with location-based services and other schemes to blend the game's footprint into the real world. Interesting, huh?

Continue reading: Angry Birds flies past 200 million downloads, like a boss (full post)

NBN launches for Armidale, 7 customers start up their torrents and download the_internet.zip

Anthony Garreffa | Networking | May 18, 2011 8:34 PM CDT

Seven customers have been connected to the National Broadband Network (NBN) trial services in Armidale ahead of the official launch. The launch of the NBN marks the start of trial customer services for various ISPs such as Telstra, iiNet, Internode and Primus. iINet and Internode have two customers each, Primus with a single lucky customer and Telstra has a "handful" of customers on NBN services.

Each telco had connected to the NBN on a trial basis with no cost to the customer (where's my invite?). iiNet has their two customers on 100Mbps services with 1TB of data per month. One of the iiNet customers said he would use his new 100Mbps NBN service to work from home. Peter Erskine is a researcher at the University of New England and has said:

Continue reading: NBN launches for Armidale, 7 customers start up their torrents and download the_internet.zip (full post)

Brink PC issues, affects virtually all NVIDIA GeForce 400 and 500-series owners - makes the game unplayable

Anthony Garreffa | Gaming | May 18, 2011 8:19 PM CDT

Brink made its debut to the world over a week ago now and with the PSN being down at the time - fail number one occurred, Xbox 360 reviews were a bit hard on the game, fail number two occurred. The PC version seemed to be OK, apart from serious frame rate issues (for me at least), FOV issues (console port) but other than that it seemed to be stable. Well, that's what I thought. 5 or so minutes into the game and it's absolutely abysmal FOV (it really is bad) and I get a CTD.

YAY. It was thrilling. Yet another release of a game from a developer where they promise the PC won't get shunted to the side in favor of console releases. I tried tweaking the config, re-downloading my Steam files, downloading the new NVIDIA beta drivers I posted up yesterday but nothing worked. Tried it again last night after I installed the Beta drivers and CTD. This was really pissing me off. I wake up this morning to find "Frustrated Gamer" has e-mailed me with a forwarded e-mail he sent to Kotaku asking them about this issue.

As my readers would know, I'm against console ports and I hate seeing the destruction of the once great PC gaming industry. Sure it's still there, with releases from Valve strong, but from everyone else? Not so good. Splash Damage used id Tech for this game, you would think it would be perfect on PC - wrong. Bethesda have a great track record of PC games too, well, not anymore.

Continue reading: Brink PC issues, affects virtually all NVIDIA GeForce 400 and 500-series owners - makes the game unplayable (full post)

NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang says Android tablets will overtake iPad in 30 months, time for a new tattoo?

Anthony Garreffa | Mobile Devices | May 17, 2011 8:56 PM CDT

I've decided, with the power vested in me, that today be renamed "NVIDIA Day". On with the news, NVIDIA co-founder and CEO Jen-Hsun Huang has stated that Android-based tablets (and more specifically, Honeycomb-based tablets) will overtake Apple's iPad in 30 months. The tattoo-clad Huang was quoted at the Reuters Technology Summit saying:

NVIDIA is cementing their place into the tablet market by releasing very powerful Tegra 2-based tech and their line up for the future is looking nothing short of amazing. Especially after it's named after my favorite superhero, Kal-El. Kal-El is something I typed up a news piece about a few months ago, it will be a quad-core NVIDIA chip that will most likely be called Tegra 3. Kal-El has been sampling for the last three months and might find it's way into products as early as August.

Continue reading: NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang says Android tablets will overtake iPad in 30 months, time for a new tattoo? (full post)

Chrome OS 12 hits beta, this is it folks, the shipping version is nearly complete!

Anthony Garreffa | Software & Apps | May 16, 2011 8:57 PM CDT

Google have just announced that the Chrome OS beta has hit R12 release 0.12.433.38 which includes Chrome 12 Beta, new trackpad, new flash player and several "stability and functional improvements over the previous release". This new release includes various security fixes:

There are a tonne of new features in Chrome 12 as well as a number of Chrome OS improvements such as:

Continue reading: Chrome OS 12 hits beta, this is it folks, the shipping version is nearly complete! (full post)

California Bill Will Give Parents Access To Social Networks If Passed

Trak Lord | Business, Financial & Legal | May 16, 2011 5:19 PM CDT

Senator Ellen Corbett wants to force social network sites such as Facebook to allow parents access to their child's account. Excuse me? I thought I was living in a technology-welcoming, plugged-in liberal utopia here in San Francisco (so liberal in fact, that the public transportation has completely abandoned fascist principles like punctuality and reliability), but evidently I was incorrect.

Parents would be able to request that any content be removed from any social network (Twitter, Foursquare, etc) within 48 hours upon his or her request. More importantly, any social network that would fail or refuse to comply with these requests would be fined $10k for each refusal of compliance. This is a clear case of conservative "well-meaning" protection / governmental "nannying" that would have extraordinarily pernicious consequences for both social network sites and the concept of privacy as a whole. It's understandable that parents would want some kind of oversight over their children's public information, but won't this encourage a demographic backlash of secretive and encoded information? If the kids know the parents are "watching", won't they just find new and different forms of communication within that system to maintain their privacy? When I was a young upset, my group of friends most certainly had codewords for behavior or intentions we didn't want to expose publicly to our parents. Also, how are they going to logistically control the number of requests? Authentication? Verification? What's to stop an adult from sending an arbitrary request to remove content from an under-18 user's profile to whom he or she has no relation? Especially when a network has to respond within 48 hours before incurring $10k in fines.

Also, since when are minors not entitled to privacy and/or freedom of speech in any outlet? Does no one remember Tinker? If minors do not shed their constitutional rights at the school house door, why would they at the log in page?

Continue reading: California Bill Will Give Parents Access To Social Networks If Passed (full post)

Sony Invites Europe Users Back To PSN With Free Stuff

Trak Lord | Gaming | May 16, 2011 4:48 PM CDT

PlayStation outlined its "Welcome Back" policy to users in Europe and Australia, offering all sorts of free stuff. Nick Caplin, Head of Communications SCEE wrote today in the PlayStation Blog that users will net up to four games for PlayStation 3 and PlayStation Portable for their troubles earlier this month.

Details are below in the full post, but some of the games for PS3 include LittleBigPlanet and WipeoutHD/Fury, and Killzone Liberation for PSP. Doesn't really make up for all that crazy stuff, but hey, it's something.

Continue reading: Sony Invites Europe Users Back To PSN With Free Stuff (full post)

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