OnLive Desktop, that popular app that gives you a hosted Windows 7 environment and full Office 2010 support, will no longer be giving you a Windows 7 environment. Instead, you will now be receiving a Windows Server 2008 environment. The App that was first shown to the world back at CES 2012 in Las Vegas immediately sparked a debate about licensing terms.

Microsoft had remained silent about whether or not the app was breaking their license terms. In March, however, the software giant spoke out saying that they didn't believe that the app was operating inside licensing terms. They said that they were in talks with OnLive to reach an acceptable license agreement.

"We're pleased to have been told that the OnLive Desktop application is now accessing our software by hosting it on Windows Server, an important step in delivering any Microsoft-licensed desktop-like service to the public. Based on this information, we will work with OnLive to take a closer look at its service and ensure it is operating according to its license like thousands of other partners and utilizing our standing pricing and licensing terms," Microsoft said in a statement to The Register.

After Capcom's recent "Captivate" event, in which it spilled out the details on current and upcoming projects, Capcom has announced that it is well into development of the third installment of Lost Planet 3. Lost Planet 3 is Capcom's third-person shooter line of games and is pretty good, or so I hear. I've never actually played them.

Lost Planet 3 is set to be a prequel to the previous two games. Capcom provides us with a brief story line: "Lost Planet 3 introduces Jim, a rig pilot who leaves Earth to take on a hazardous but lucrative contract on E.D.N. III. Working for Neo-Venus Construction (NEVEC) who are preparing the planet for colonization, Jim joins his fellow pioneers at the Coronis base and begins surveying the uncharted terrain and obtaining samples of the planet's energy supply - Thermal Energy."

Capcom has also been nice and provided us with the screen shots you can see in this post. The development has been passed to the US-based Spark Unlimited. They are using Unreal Engine 3 rather than Capcom's own MT Framework 2.0 engine. There are more screen shots available here.

BREAKING NEWS: An 8.9-magnitude, then downgraded to 8.7-magnitude by the USGS (United States Geological Survey) has struck off the coast of Sumatra, Indonesia. The earthquake struck 308 miles (500km) southwest of the city of Banda Aceh, on the northern tip of Sumatra Island, at a depth of 20.5 miles (33km).

The quake was so severe it was felt as far away as the Thai capital, Bangkok, and as well as southern India. Because the earthquake was a strike-slip, it means there is less chance of a devastating tsunami. A strike-slip earthquake happen vertically, and the water dispersement is not as bad as a reverse fault, or normal fault, where the normal fault sends the crust up horizontally, where tsunamis usually happen, especially at this magnitude.

Just two hours later, and only moments ago, an 8.2-magnitude earthquake has struck in the same region. This was at a depth of 10.2 miles, so much closer to the ground itself. We'll try to update as news is out, but for now the first earthquake isn't said to create a tsunami worth worrying about, but the second one has just happened, so we'll report back when we have news.

Mosaid Technologies have sampled the industry's first NAND flash MCP (multi-chip package) with a 16-die NAND stack operating on a single high-performance chip. Impressive, eh? Jin-Ki Kim, vice president of research and development at Mosaid:

Mosaid's 512Gb HLNAND (HyperLink NAND) MCP combines a stack of 16 industry standard 32Gb NAND flash die with two HLNAND interface devices to hit 333MB/sec output over a single byte-wide HLNAND interface channel at 1.8V with no power termination resistors needed. Conventional NAND flash MCP designs cannot stack more than four NAND dies without being hit with performance degradation, and then also require two or more channels to deliver what Mosaid can do with one.

Apple's next-generation MacBook Pro 2012 could be hitting us much sooner than expected, this is all in relation to some of the current models being out of stock, including J&R and Best Buy. Best Buy isn't even accepting online orders for them right now.

If you want a 2011 Edition MBP, you'll have to find out, if they're available. According to Apple Inside, 40- to 60-percent of Best Buy shops in Chicago and Austin are reporting "stock outs" on the 15-inch 2.4GHz MacBook Pro. Retail channels usually find themselves running out of stock as Apple shuts down production.

This is done to flush the distribution channels out of units, so that the new models can come through. No details are available on the new MacBook Pro, but we expect them to at least sport Intel's latest 22nm Ivy Bridge CPUs, upgraded HD4000-series graphics as well as a discrete AMD or NVIDIA GPU. I'm also expecting SSDs to be a default now, which should've been made so in the 2011 Edition, as well as a personal hope here: higher-resolution screen. 1920x1200-pixel should be default, with the 17-inch hitting 2560x1440. Please, Apple. Do this and I'll replace my 17-inch 2011 Edition MacBook Pro.

One game I'm so very anxious for is Max Payne 3, and today developers Rockstar Games published a list of the Max Payne 3's achievements and trophies. A few of the secret badges have been held back, so we don't get all the goodies at once.

I've never really been one for achievements/trophies, but there are some very keen, very dedicated gamers out there who will love this list. There seems to be quite a bit to do in the game, and it's such a change to the original two Max titles, where you just dived in and played. Now you've got a bunch of achievements and trophies to acquire.

I will note that some of these achievements/trophies do contain spoilers from the game, so if you want to stay spoiler-free, don't read below.

We reviewed (in both text, and video) the new iPad, and loved it. But how much does the rest of the world love Apple's latest tablet creation? A lot, it seems. A new study by analytics analyst firm Chitika, has suggested that the third-generation iPads in Internet traffic has doubled since the initial four-day launch window.

The new iPad now makes up around 10-percent of all iPads surfing the web only three weeks after it splashed down. Online tracking metrics aren't a direct method of measuring sales, but it does help. Apple announced four days after the new iPad launched that they had sold 3 million units worldwide, and Chitika have noted that this figure correlated into about 5-percent presence of all iPad traffic, correlating with Apple's own total figure of around 55 million iPads sold up until that point.

If this growth continues, we could be looking at 12 million units sold by the time Apple's fiscal Q2 comes around, and 15 million new iPads sold overall by the end of June. The iPad makes up around 60-percent of all tablets shipped, with online usage rates indicated that in most areas the iPad is responsible for up to 90-percent of tablet web traffic. Some very impressive digits for the Cupertino-based company.

Intel have announced something out of the blue today, a reference design for a new 7-inch tablet that has quite the special ability: it can run either Windows 7 or Android operating systems. The 7-inch tablet would sport Intel's Atom processor, and would be tailored to students and developing countries.

Intel's "Studybook" is made from a single piece of plastic that is designed to resist liquid spills and survive up to a 27-inch drop onto concrete. The Studybook sports a rubber band reinforcing the bezel and around the ports to keep sand and other elements out. The 7-inch tablet weighs in at 525 grams, with the reference design featuring a 1.2GHz Intel Z650 Atom "Oak Trail" CPU, 1GB of RAM, a 1024x600-pixel capacitive touch screen, USB 2.0, HDMI, microSD/SIM slots, WI-Fi, dual cameras and varying storage from 4GB to 32GB.

Battery life isn't too bad, with Intel rating it at 5.5 hours on active usage, which is quite poor compared to the iPad and Android-based tablets that are hitting 10 or so hours on a single charge. The Studybook does have a trick up its sleeve, though: it can run either Windows 7 or Android 3.0 Honeycomb. Windows 7 will be available first, with Android ready by mid-summer. Intel will also bundle e-reader, note-taking and drawing apps, as well as digital textbooks from Kno.com and other education-based apps.

Google's Chrome OS has been in development for quite a while now, and has since late-2010 had the same system interface, until now. The latest developer version of the operating system sports a major redesign in its UI, and it is not only looking great, it's looking more and more like Windows, which isn't a bad thing.

The first thing people are going to do with Chrome is think "is it Windows?" and once they realise its not, they're going to attempt to use it. If they've never used the Chrome browser before, it'll feel very alien, much like OS X does the first time you use it after using Windows for X amount of years. Chrome OS now looks like a traditional OS, with a full-blown desktop and window manager instead of just a browser and tabs.

Chrome's next-generation use interface framework, known as "Aura", makes its public debut with the new developer version of Chrome OS. This is a huge change, as previous iterations of Chrome OS were just an operating system, within a browser that very closely resembled Google's popular web browser. This is a great move, something that I applaud Google for doing. You can sometimes think outside of the square, but sometimes floating outside of that square makes you think you require a triangle to be 'better' or 'evolved', a simplistic UI will go a long way to ensure that Chrome OS is a serious contender for the OS wars to come.

It seems like just yesterday that I was updating my router from b to g spec to increase speeds. Then n came along and made me upgrade again. It hasn't even been around that long, yet Qualcomm and Broadcom would like to replace it with a new spec dubbed 802.11ac. The new spec will only operate on the 5GHz band to avoid interference.

The new standard is expected to debut late this year or early 2013. Because of the lack of 2.4GHz, the range is shortened, so the spec is including something called beam-forming technology. This allows the device to figure out where the other devices are located and broadcast that direction only.

Additionally, the 5GHz band has more channels available for use. The channels are now 80MHz wide rather than the 40MHz. Furthermore, each spatial stream has a theoretical bandwidth of 433 mbps per spatial stream versus only 150 mbps on -n. The number of spatial streams is being increased from 3 to 8 which will further increase bandwidth.