In a genius move by Ubisoft, Haze has officially become a PS3 exclusive! It was supposed to be released in November on PC, X-Box 360 and PS3 but now they simply canceled the first two. I wasn’t really looking forward to playing this game as much as some of the other November releases, but I would have definitely tried it out. Oh well, it looked like another Halo clone anyway so who cares. This is what Gamespot (source) says:

Ubisoft has told GameSpot that First Radical’s sci-fi first-person shooter Haze is now being planned solely for Sony’s PlayStation 3 platform.

Originally, Haze was slated as a multiplatform release for the PC, Xbox 360, and PS3 in spring, but back in May Ubisoft announced that the PS3 had become the “lead platform” for the title, which would be released in November on the PS3-only, although “no exclusivity for any platform has been officially announced.”

Today, Ubisoft said that currently no other versions in development, and although it was still leaving the door open in the future for “new partnerships,” currently the game is indeed only planned for the PS3. A spokesperson said, “The official statement on PC and Xbox 360 is that these platforms are not confirmed.”

The Web sites of Free Radical, the Official Haze site, and Ubisoft site, all now only list the PS3 version of the game.

I bet Sony thinks this game is going to boost PS3 sales, which only makes their stupidity more obvious to the rest of the world. Now if they had Assassin’s Creed as a PS3 exclusive, THAT would have made huge difference. Fuck Haze.

Cyborg-like memory? Oooh boy! This looks interesting. I can’t wait to get me a cyborg from the local mall and teach it how to say: “I’ll be back.”. That would be cool for about 2 minutes before becoming very obvious.

Tel Aviv (Israel) – Two scientists from the Tel-Aviv University have shown that information can be stored in live neurons. The research results provide a new way to help understand how our brain learns and store information, but also indicate that a “cyborg-like integration of living material into memory chips” could become a reality in the foreseeable future.

The full article is filled with all the details. Bring on the dystopian future that inevitably awaits us all once the machines turn on us! We’re DOOMED!!

The world’s first “holographic” human body. It’s interesting to see that all that Star Trek crap from the ’60s is now being realized by scientists. Those Japanese are also progressing a bit further with real holograms every year or so, and that’s all nice and everything but… Where are the fucking spaceships?!

The 4D human atlas is built upon data from basic anatomy textbooks. Fundamental body systems and organs were rendered into animated drawings by a graphic artist, and converted into Java 3DTM to bring them to life in the CAVE environment. “CAVEman is designed to look like a real human, but can also be sized to any scale we want,” says Sensen. “We can display all or only a few select components of the model at any given time.”

CAVEman is designed to help medical researchers investigate the genetics of various diseases, and new approaches to targeted treatments. “This technology is a powerful tool for my research into how genetic mutations lead to developmental problems such as cleft lip and palate,” says Benedikt Hallgrimsson, PhD, associate professor of cell biology and anatomy, U of C’s Faculty of Medicine. “As the technology grows, it will be useful for diverse studies of growth and development, both for creating predictive models and also for complex visualization.”

There’s a little more to the story but this is basically it. So what does this mean? Better and faster research in medical science? Can I expect a Ghost in the Shell-type of cyborg body to transfer my brain into anytime soon? No? Then what’s the point…

Blu-Ray player now cheaper than PS3. The cheapest BR player is now being sold at 500 Dollars. But it’s still more expensive than a 400 Dollar HD-DVD player!

Sony, who once touted the PS3 as the cheapest Blu-ray player on the market, has appeared to have crossed off its own talking point. But if priced the same, the BDP-S300 would be a tough sale against the game console, whose only apparent benefit is quieter hardware.

Way to go Sony! No seriously, you guys suck. Read the full article here.

PSP being overclocked by firmware?! Even though there was home brew modified firmware for the PSP for some time that overclocked the PSP’s CPU, now an official firmware update will do the same! I was actually surprised that Sony did this since I had never heard of any console manufacturer doing something like this before. Pretty smart though, touché Sony.

The new PSP firmware slaps some “go faster” stripes on the little handheld, bumping its processor up 50 percent from a wimpy 222MHz to 333MHz. That’s right - no new hardware required. The PSP actually has always run on a bit of an underclocked processor, presumably to aid in battery life until some extra horsepower was needed.

Now, game developers will be able to flag their software for faster speeds if necessary. The bump won’t be noticeable in older games, as they have all been programmed on and will run at 222MHz. Instead, developers will be required to tell the device whether to step up its speeds - the firmware just unlocks the potential. This way, older games don’t act buggy or accelerated without intent.

As usual, here’s the full article.

Nextgen computing. Quantum computing is the new buzz word everyone seems to be talking about lately. Here’s an interesting article to help you understand just why this is such an interesting new development.

In the race to make computers more powerful, magnets may be out and lasers may be in. Ultra-rapid pulses of polarized light fired from lasers, new tests show, can outperform conventional magnetic data writers by as much as two orders of magnitude. The technology could form the foundation of a new generation of computers that link lasers to their hard drives.

Long gone are the days when computers were required only to make mathematical calculations. Even modest desktop models are now expected to handle streaming audio and video from multiple Web sites simultaneously, for example. Those functions require huge amounts of data to be transferred quickly to and from the hard drive. But current data-processing systems, which use magnets to write and read the binary code that constitutes computer language, can only work so fast. Some users’ needs have begun to bump up against the limitations of this technology. If computers are to become faster, they’ll require a different data-transfer system, and the awesome promise of quantum computing remains years away.

So that means we’ll get computers that are literally two times as fast as current computers, which will inevitably result in cheaper rendering of stuff as well as photo realistic games. Considering the fact that Crysis is pretty much borderline photo realism on the current gen of hardware one can only imagine what could be possible once computing power is doubled! Check it out!

The Phantom returns… No-freaking-way!

Phantom(R)
Entertainment, Inc. (OTC Pink Sheets: PHEI) announced today that it has
signed a $1.3 million loan agreement with European Investors LINLEY
Management S.A.

“This operating loan gives the Company immediate funding to manufacture
the Phantom(R) Wireless Lapboard and to launch marketing and sales in the
Fourth Quarter of this year,” noted Greg Koler, Phantom Entertainment’s CEO
and President. “This funding will allow the Company to manufacture product
lines this year with our partners Alienware and IONE Technologies.”
“The Company will pursue other applications for the Phantom Lapboard
including new digital media centers being developed by companies like Intel
and Gateway,” Koler said. “We are currently working with distributors, VAR
resellers and e-tailers in the U.S, Europe and Asia to initiate marketing,
sales and distribution of the Phantom Lapboard.”

“Phantom Entertainment is an attractive investment for digital media
investors in new consumer products and services,” explained a spokesperson
of European Investors LINLEY Management S.A. “Our funding is based on the Company’s success in securing a licensing agreement with Ione Technology
Inc. to manufacture and distribute the Phantom Wireless Lapboard and
Phantom Wireless Laser Mouse under Ione’s brand name throughout Asia and the Company’s agreement to manufacture the Phantom Wireless Lapboard for Alienware’s Media Centers,” the spokesperson of LINLEY Management said.

Under terms of the financing, the Company will receive a $1,300,000
operating loan immediately to support manufacturing, marketing, sales and
distribution of the Phantom(R) Wireless Lapboard and Phantom(R) Wireless
Mouse in the U.S. Europe and Asia.

This story has been going on for many years now and so many millions have been lost to this project with people basically just running off with money from their investors and all kinds of crap. I can’t believe people are still even considering throwing their money into this… Vaporware project. Why would you do such a thing? How many times will histoy have to repeat itself before people realize this is a lost cause? You rich people; are fucking idiots.

HD-DVD still winning the European market! Yay! I’ve always been in favor of HD-DVD since they’re way cheaper than Blu-Ray stuff. And it would seem the Europeans know this and they are in favor of HD-DVD over Blu-Ray!

FRANKFURT - HD DVD video players have outsold rival standard Blu-ray players by a three-to-one margin in Europe’s main markets so far this year, according to a lobby group.

The European HD DVD Promotional Group claimed it had 74 percent market share in Britain, Germany, France, Italy, Spain and Switzerland for stand-alone players, citing sales figures it commissioned from market research group GfK.

…

The figures were for stand-alone players only and did not include sales of games consoles such as Sony Corp.’s PlayStation 3, which contains a Blu-ray player.

The Sony-led Blu-ray lobby group includes Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd., Apple Inc. and Dell Inc. Its discs, which are outselling HD DVD discs, can store more information and special features but the technology is more expensive.

Toshiba cut prices for its HD-E1 HD DVD player to $549 in Europe and $299 in the United States last month.

Sony’s BDP-S300 Blu-ray player costs $499 in the United States, and its BDP-S1E European version has recently gone on sale, with prices starting at around 900 euros. Other Blu-ray players have been on sale in Europe for longer.

Sony has a history of failed mediums with UMD being among the most recent one’s. Sony, just give it up! We don’t want your expensive license-only formats when there’s too many better alternatives! Article from EvilAvatar. Oh and just in case you think that this 3 to 1 ration can somehow be lessened by the fact that the PS3 sales were not included in the statistics, don’t. The PS3 sold like shit, so even if they did include the PS3 it’d still be 3 to 1 or at the very least 2 to 1. But then… Considering a recent study showing that most people who own a console don’t even know it can play movies… Nope, it’s still 3 to 1.

A 40 GB PS3 with no backward-compatibility? Well at this point Sony should do stuff like this. The PS3 is too expensive and since they really need to recover as much as possible of everything they have and are still losing in terms of money I think this rumor could very well be true.

According [to] Game Informer magazine, a $399 40gig PS3 system is on the way, but it will have no backwards compatibility. They actually expected to hear the announcement at E3 on it. So they may have just heard different rumblings altogether.

True, the article is out-dated but the rumor is pretty old. It only resurfaced recently and I wouldn’t mind making a bet on this.

The iPhone has been hacked. Already?! Well it was bound to happen sooner or later. I guess the short amount of time it took ‘em to get this done means that Apple pulled one of those: “Woops we forgot to patch a few security leaks! Now more people will buy our product because they can hack it and use it in a way they wouldn’t have been able to to if we had patched it up.” .

Holy cow. Those guys at fusion.osx86.hu/#iphone are geniuses. Late yesterday, I downloaded a copy of iASign, their new iPhone activation tool. Right now, at this second, my iPhone just made its first call using the SIM from my disposable Cingular phone with its $10 card. After, I dialed *777# and it told me I’ve got $9.25 left on my account. The phone number in Settings -> Phone shows the proper number for the disposable phone (versus the one I activated with the iPhone PickYourPlan).

Getting this to happen was neither intuitively obvious or completely without roadblocks. To make this happen, I had to put together some basic information including my iPhone’s IMEI, the SIM number for the disposable phone, and my Macintosh’s private key information. All the steps on how to do this have been put together in an easy-to-follow tutorial over at HackTheiPhone.com.

So what does this mean? It means you can buy an iPhone and activate it using a disposable Cingular SIM. It does not mean that the iPhone has been unlocked in general, but given this step forward, do we really care? I’m still investigating what it will take to add data to the iPhone and whether you can roam internationally. Just to be clear, text messaging does work and only costs $0.05 both to send and receive (shown here), a nice savings compared to the $0.15 I’m paying using the normal iPhone service.

This made the iPhone a better deal in my opinion. Not only do you get an iPod and a mobile phone in one, you also get to pay acceptable prices for it too!! Check out the article over here with a step-by-step tutorial on how to accomplish this.

The new Windows (Windows Vienna) will make heavy use of web-based applications! A good thing or a bad thing?

In addition to making available its existing services, such as mail and instant messaging, Microsoft also will create core infrastructure services, such as storage and alerts, that developers can build on top of. It’s a set of capabilities that have been referred to as a “Cloud OS,” though it’s not a term Microsoft likes to use publicly.

“Cloud-centric is probably a better way to say it because Cloud OS makes it sound like it is only running on the cloud,” said Brian Hall, general manager of Windows Live. “A lot of the data, a lot of the apps, a lot of the interesting things are on the edge. They are on the PCs. They are on the Xboxes. They are on the phones.”

But, quibbles over nomenclature aside, Microsoft made clear this week that it aims to play the same role on the Internet that it plays today on the desktop–that of providing its own applications as well as the underlying plumbing and tools that developers use to build their products.

My only question is: Why? I mean, what can we get from such an OS that we can not get from a traditional OS? Click here for the full story.

An interesting article on in-game physics and the PhysX card. An interesting read for any gamer.

It’s fair to say that the PhysX card developed by Ageia has been a controversial new product for the geek and hardware enthusiast community ever since its introduction. It’s a fairly simple idea at its base level; a piece of hardware dedicated only to processing physics so that the graphics card and processor don’t get bogged down by the calculations, but it’s one which has struggled to catch on in quite the same way as other hardware devices.

Designed for games which use complex physics, a trend spurred on massively by the fantastic Physics Gun in Half-Life 2, the company has faced an uphill battle with consumers as it tries to persuade gamers that they must invest in a new, additional piece of kit in order to get the most out of their game.

So, why has the market not chosen to fully embrace the PhysX card and what has Ageia been doing to help persuade those gamers and geeks who are still sceptical about the potential of an Ageia PPU? It’s a question which has been burning at the back of our minds lately and, with Unreal Tournament 3 set for release later this year and Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter 2 just seeing a release on PC, it seemed like an ideal time to have a chat with Ageia and find out just what it has been up to lately.

I went along to have a chat with Ageia’s Michael Steele and Daniel Forster, to catch-up with Ageia and to see what the PhysX PPU may hold in store for gamers in the future. Check out the story within…

Click here for the full article.

Why aren’t we still using Pentium 4’s with higher clockspeeds? Why are we instead going for multiple cores? Doesn’t a dual core with 2,4 Ghz for both cores just run games slower than a single core Pentium 4 3,6 Ghz? The answers are right here. I decided to write this columns because I found a huge wave of ignorance that swept the average computer users. They all believe that multi core is a step backwards and that instead, we should concentrate on higher clockspeeds. Well, I have one thing to say to you: You are fucking idiots.

First things first, the reason why we can’t get up to 100 Ghz and more is simple. This world and everything in existence has to obey natural laws. I dropped science class so I couldn’t tell you how much the exact maximum amount of Ghz is, but there is nevertheless a limit. What these Hz produce in terms of computing is heat. The more Ghz, the more heat. The higher we crank up the clockspeeds the more heat sinks and fans we have to cram into our PC’s not to mention on the CPU itself. The fans create noise, and the bigger and more powerful the fans get; the more noise they produce. So raising clockspeeds only has a whole lot of contras attached to it. This is why we are moving up to multi-core CPU’s. Multi-Core CPU’s will no doubt need a lot of cooling too, but this is acceptable for the performance you gain from using multiple cores. While multi-core CPU’s will also get higher clockspeeds, there is a difference in heat production. While two times 2,4 Ghz will produce more heat than a single core 2,4 Ghz CPU, they will produce way less heat than a single core 4 Ghz whilst still beating it performance-wise.

The only downside for multi-core CPU’s right now is that older applications and games do not make use of multiple cores. So in that case a single core 3 Ghz would completely destroy a dual core 1,8 Ghz in a benchmark since the application only uses one of the available cores in the dual core CPU and thus making it as good as a 1,8 Ghz single core CPU. Keep in mind though that the Core 2 Duo architecture is completely different from the Pentium’s architecture. So a single Core 2 Duo core running on 2,4 Ghz would still be better than a single core 3 Ghz from the Pentium 4 product line in terms of processing power. Another pro for multi-core CPU’s is the ability to move up to 64-bit processing. Right now though, it’s pretty useless. Not only do you need at least 4 GB of (fast) memory but most games and applications aren’t supporting it nor do the software companies responsible for those products plan to support it any time soon simply because there are way too few people running an actual 64-bit compatible OS. While multi-core CPU’s are already being sold in pre-built computers, 64-bit OS’s are nowhere near being sold in mainstream hardware shops. It is, however, a very cool technology for the future which will give games and other heavy CPU dependent applications an incredible boost in performance once it becomes mainstream. For now though, stick to 32-bits.

Right now multi-core CPU’s aren’t exactly required for gamers, but that is sure to change very very soon with games like UTIII and Crysis coming up. For people that are into professional tools like Photoshop and 3Ds Max multi-core CPU’s are already very interesting since these applications already take full advantage of them and can increase rendering times by at least 200% depending on how many cores you’re using. But even for amateur game modders it’s interesting because the upcoming Unreal Ed 3 (for Unreal Engine 3) will already be using quad-core CPU’s to their fullest and I’m 100% sure that Crytek’s Sandbox Editor 2 (for Crysis) will do the same. Scalability is another very interesting thing developers are working on right now. Basically this means that a game or an application is able to use a very wide (and maybe unlimited) range of cores, which will prove very useful in the next 10 years when everyone is playing games that were originally meant to be played on dual cores, with octa-cores (8 cores) or more. I hope I have convinced you now!