User Functions
Don't have an account yet? Sign up as a New User
Who's Online
Guest Users: 8
What's New
STORIESNo new stories COMMENTS last 48 hrsNo new comments
Events
There are no upcoming events
|
 
GameRail
Wednesday, October 04 2006 @ 10:46 AM EST/GMT - Contributed by: Yankidank | Views:1052
GOTFRAG.COM - 2006 will forever be known as the year of gaming network performance. We have seen more gaming-related network advances announced this year than in any other. Many major communications companies have begun to recognize our massive market and are poising themselves to profit from us. Now, we are always looking to squeeze the most performance we can out of our connections. We are the gamers that don’t just play because the graphics are pretty; we are out for blood. We play to light up that scoreboard and become a local legend, even if just on one server. We asked for a price to be put on the head of our greatest enemy: Lag. Some of these companies have spent years in development trying to not only define that price, but to give us powerful weapons against it. Some of the powerful weapons that have been added to our available arsenal are software-based, such as PlayLinc, Xfire, and SteelSecurity, and others are based on hardware, such as the KillerNIC. These solutions range anywhere from free to almost $300. This is a considerable amount of money being spent to only eliminate one particular bottleneck; however, these companies realize how this can detrimentally affect gameplay, and how we will pay well to simply reduce it. Today’s definition of Lag is a culmination of negative effects which occur while in game. Lag is defined as anything that creates a stuttering or skip in our framerates - this could be anything, from an excess of graphical processing and CPU limitations to network latency and the fact you are still playing on your grandma’s dialup. Products like SteelSecurity look to reduce lag by optimizing, cleaning, and implementing preventative measures on your PC. Products like the KillerNIC attempt to reduce lag by offloading the network computations to an entirely separate processor on the NIC. While these solutions will help -- and probably gain you a few extra frames and a lower ping -- there is quite a bit of money required for this relatively small gain. So here we are in the middle of Q3 2006, and the announcements haven’t stopped. However, today I bring you something that is beyond what anyone else has ever attempted -- something that is proven solid, and on a massive scale in comparison to all other product announcements this year. Imagine a world where you could live in New York, connect to a server in California, and have a ping as low as 30-35ms. Imagine a private network, implemented nationwide, for gaming traffic only, where the normal congestion of the internet does not even come into play. Imagine no longer, because it has arrived.
NEWS.COM - Seagate Technology, a company that designs, manufactures and markets hard drives, announced on Wednesday that it will invest more than $300 million at its two manufacturing plants in Northern Ireland over the next four years. Seagate's Londonderry plant will become the company's main manufacturing facility and a development site for hard drives. The company said it will extensively invest in nanotechnology, including new clean rooms, at the nanotech research and manufacturing facility. The second Seagate plant in Northern Ireland, at Limavady, will produce a wider range of aluminium substrates for integration into Seagate's hard-drive products for desktop computers and business servers.
YAHOO.COM - Fox Filmed Entertainment sees the Sony-led Blu-ray high definition DVDs winning the next generation DVD technology battle on the back of widespread Hollywood support and the release next year of the PlayStation 3 video game console, Fox's co-chairman said on Thursday.
"In terms of the number of companies involved, the PS3 (PlayStation game console) momentum and the level of content that is committed to Blu-ray, it does seem to have a pretty strong lead," James Gianopulos, co-chairman of Fox Filmed Entertainment, said at the Reuters Media and Advertising Summit in New York. "We believe that Blu-ray not only has the superior technology and backing in terms of strength to market but also the superior content protection," Gianopulos added.
The media and technology industry is racing to offer next generation DVDs that offer higher definition video amid a spike in sales of flat screen high definition television sets, but many in the industry are concerned the dueling new DVD standards will confuse consumers and slow early growth.
The Sony (6758.T)-led Blu-ray DVD technology, which will be built into Sony's PlayStation 3 video game console next year, is fighting a consortium that includes Toshiba Corp. (6502.T) that has developed the HD DVD format. Gianopulos said Fox has no plans to release movies in HD DVD.
NEWSCIENTIST.COM - A computer disc about the size of a DVD that can hold 60 times more data is set to go on sale in 2006. The disc stores information through the interference of light – a technique known as holographic memory. The discs, developed by InPhase Technologies, based in Colorado, US, hold 300 gigabytes of data and can be used to read and write data 10 times faster than a normal DVD. The company, along with Japanese partner Hitachi Maxell announced earlier in November that they would start selling the discs and compatible drives from the end of 2006. "Unlike other technologies, that record one data bit at a time, holography allows a million bits of data to be written and read in parallel with a single flash of light," says Liz Murphy, of InPhase Technologies. "This enables transfer rates significantly higher than current optical storage devices." The discs, at 13 centimetres across, are a little wider than conventional DVDs, and slightly thicker. Normal DVDs record data by measuring microscopic ridges on the surface of a spinning disc. Two competing successors to the DVD format – Blu-ray and HD-DVD – use the same technique but exploit shorter wavelengths of light to cram more information onto a surface.
TECHTREE.COM - Gartner has posted a research note on its site, saying that it has discovered that the "stealth" DRM software that has put Sony in the limelight for all the wrong reasons, can be easily defeated. Gartner's analysis states that Sony BMG has made a prudent decision - after more than ten days of intense criticism from industry observers and consumer advocates - to end the use of its highly controversial DRM technology. This decision will help the company recover from what has become a serious public-relations problem, but Sony BMG still faces lawsuits filed by PC users who allege that their PCs have been damaged by the technology. The research note on the Gartner site says that what makes the Sony BMG incident even more unfortunate, is that the DRM technology can be defeated easily. The user can simply apply a fingernail-sized piece of opaque tape to the outer edge of the disc, rendering session 2 - which contains the self-loading DRM software, unreadable. The PC then treats the CD as an ordinary single-session music CD, and the commonly used CD "rip" programs continue to work as usual. (Gartner emphasizes that it does not recommend or endorse this technique.)
Moreover, even without the tape, common CD-copying programs readily duplicate the copy-protected disc in its entirety. For these reasons, Sony BMG's DRM technology will prevent neither informed casual copiers, nor high-volume "pirates" from doing whatever they like with the content on the disc. It does, however, load "stealth" software - software that has been demonstrated to have suspect effects - on uninformed users' machines.
Sony knows they screwed up finally and is now admitting their DRM allows hackers to penetrate your system and royally screw you over. So now Sony has killed it’s DRM program in the meantime and is pulling most DRM-protected CDs off the shelves. However, Sony is going to be a gentleman this time around and is offering to replace CDs affected by the XCP copy-protection software that’s embedded in the CDs if you bought some. But how can you tell if you bought one of 2.1 million CDs sold with the evil-DRM? Easy. A list was put together of 47 CDs that include the protection. So play it safe kids, and go stick it to Sony by demanding new CDs. CDs affected by the DRM [Idiot Abroad]
Sony to pull controversial CDs, offer swap [USA Today]
SYSINTERNALS.COM - My posting Monday on Sony’s use of a rootkit as part of their Digital Rights Management (DRM) generated an outcry that’s reached the mainstream media. As of this morning the story is being covered in newspapers and media sites around the world including USA Today and the BBC. This is the case of the blogosphere having an impact, at least for the moment. But, there’s more to the story, like how Sony’s patch can lead to a crashed system and data loss and how Sony is still making users jump through hoops to get an uninstaller. At the core of this story, however, is the issue of what disclosure should be required of software End User License Agreements (EULAs) and how the requirements can be made Federal law.
The Uninstaller can be found on the original article.
Sony Responds
GAMESPOT.COM - GeForce 6800 GS comes to market; hits $249 "sweet spot" for 3D video cards as some retailers put card into channel at even lower price point. Graphics manufacturer Nvidia today announced the news GeForce 6800 GS video card. The card replaces the popular GeForce 6800 in the highly competitive $249 video card price segment. The GeForce 6800 GS has 12-pixel pipelines and five vertex engines just like the original GeForce 6800, but Nvidia has increased the 325MHz core clock and 350MHz memory clock speeds up to 425MHz and 500MHz respectively for the new GS. The GeForce 6800 GS also features 256MB GDDR3 memory and a 256-bit memory interface. 
The GS variant is available in PCI Express format and is compatible with dual-video card SLI systems. Nvidia recommends a 350W system power supply for single cards and a 420W supply for SLI configurations. Nvidia GeForce 6800 GS-based cards have a $249 MSRP, but company representatives have indicated that actual retail prices will be substantially lower. EVGA and PNY branded GeForce 6800 GS cards are available immediately from major online retailers including Newegg, Monarch Computer, and Zip Zoom Fly with prices in the $229-$249 range.
YAHOO.COM - There's a new player in the lucrative market of semiconductors that power everything from cars and game consoles to medical equipment and supercomputers. P.A. Semi Inc. is set to emerge Monday after working the last two years in stealth mode, growing from a tiny team of big-name chip designers working out of a 600 square-foot office in Palo Alto to a company whose 150 employees occupy two floors in a high-rise in Santa Clara, the hometown of No. 1 chipmaker Intel Corp. At the Fall Processor Forum here this week, P.A. Semi will announce how it has designed a high-performance chip it claims will consume as much as 10 times less power than today's comparable products. But because it takes an average of four years to design and produce a new chip, P.A. Semi said its processors won't hit the market until 2007.
EFF.ORG - Today the Supreme Court issued a ruling that could impede makers of all kinds of technologies with expensive lawsuits. The long-awaited decision in MGM v. Grokster states that P2P software manufacturers can be held liable for the infringing activities of people who use their software. This decision relies on a new theory of copyright liability that measures whether manufacturers created their wares with the "intent" of inducing consumers to infringe. It means that inventors and entrepreneurs will not only bear the costs of bringing new products to market, but also the costs of lawsuits if consumers start using their products for illegal purposes.
"Today the Supreme Court has unleashed a new era of legal uncertainty on America's innovators," said Fred von Lohmann, EFF's senior intellectual property attorney. "The newly announced inducement theory of copyright liability will fuel a new generation of entertainment industry lawsuits against technology companies. Perhaps more important, the threat of legal costs may lead technology companies to modify their products to please Hollywood instead of consumers."
The Supreme Court has also ordered the lower court to consider whether peer-to-peer companies Grokster and StreamCast can be held liable under the new standard. StreamCast is confident that it will pass muster under the new, multi-pronged test.
MGM v. Grokster was brought by 28 of the world's largest entertainment companies against the makers of the Morpheus, Grokster, and KaZaA filesharing software products in 2001. The entertainment companies hoped to obtain a legal precedent that would hold all technology makers responsible for the infringements committed by the users of their products. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), along with StreamCast counsel Matt Neco and Charles Baker of Porter and Hedges, defended StreamCast Networks, the company behind the Morpheus filesharing software.
The entertainment companies lost their case in District Court, then lost again on appeal to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. The lower court rulings were based on the Supreme Court's landmark decision in the 1984 Sony Betamax case, which determined that Sony was not liable for copyright violations by users of the Betamax VCR.
First | Previous | 1 2 3 4 5 | Next | Last |
