20 PCs FROM ANOTHER WORLD

 

If you've heard it once, you've heard it a million times: The reason why desktop Linux hasn't made it is because of its lack of games. Thanks to Gabe Newell, CEO of Valve and its Steam game platform, that's not true anymore.

Lets get the obvious thing out of the way first, we all want Grant Theft Auto V on PC and any news these days that say “GTA V on PC” is either a hoax or a funny Meme, but we have found something that peaks out interest. A Czech game retailer ( SuperGamer ) has updated their site to buy GTA V for the PlayStation 4, Xbox One and PC which is supposedly release in the middle of June this year. It lists the 13th, which hint the European Friday release dates, and could perhaps signal a US release date of 11 June.

“Despite short term uncertainties, as we look forward to 2014, we have a very strong pipeline… We expect to launch new Call of Duty and Skylanders titles and our major, new potential franchise with Bungie’s Destiny. We will also continue to develop Call of Duty Online with our partner TenCent for the growing Chinese market.”

Creator Markus “Notch” Persson announced the milestone in a tweet, although the sales tally for the mothership Mac and PC version is always available on the Minecraft website.
We don’t get rapid updates on how other versions are selling, but as of last week the PlayStation 3 version had sold over 1 million copies, reaching the impressive figure in just five weeks.
As of December last year, the Xbox 360 version had sold 10 million copies – it was one of the best-selling games of 2013 in the US, according to the NPD, despite only releasing on disc in June, after a full year of availability on Xbox Live.
The Pocket Edition for various mobile platforms hit 10 million sales in May 2013.
Given that all these figures are likely to have grown in the interim, that brings Minecraft to a conservative estimate of at least 35 million copies sold. That’s about peak Call of Duty annual figures; not bad for what began as a one man affair. Thanks for changing the industry forever, Notch.

The release dates for the second episode in Telltale’s take on the Fables series were tweeted by the firm yesterday evening.
PC , Mac and PlayStation 3 users in North America can pick the title up on February 4.
PlayStation 3 users in Europe and Xbox 360 users can download it the following day, February 5.
The episode will also release next week for iOS through the App Store.

A new Sonic title is in the works for PS4, Xbox One and Wii U according to a sign on display at the Jazwares booth during last week’s Nuremberg Toy Fair.

Spotted by Spindash, and re-posted on Sonic Stadium, this would be the fourth Sonic title SEGA has in the works.
Last year, the firm announced it had three exclusive Sonic titles coming to Nintendo platforms – so either this is indeed a fourth title or the deal changed regarding title number three. We’re going with the former.
Sonic: Lost World was released exclusively on Nintendo platforms in 2013 as was Mario & Sonic at Sochi.
The unannounced Nintendo exclusive is slated for release this year, while the PS4, Xbox One and Wii U title mentioned at the fair has a 2015 release date noted

         

WD Black2 Dual Drive

Manufacturer: Western Digital
UK Price: £234
US Price: $299

On the surface, Western Digital’s WD Black2 Dual Drive (WD1001X06XDTL) appears to be simply yet another version of the same hybrid storage idea that’s been floating around for a few years now: have a small SSD for fast access backed up by a large HDD, all in the same package. However, the trick to WD’s latest product is that instead of using the SSD as an invisible, high-speed cache here the two are kept separate. In one drive you literally get a 120GB SSD and a 1TB hard drive.

What’s the advantage of this? Well, first and foremost, most hybrid drives have only 4-8GB of cache whereas the Black2 has a full 120GB. It also means you get to decide what data goes on which drive and you get the performance of an SSD at all times. For instance on a hybrid drive overall transfer speeds are little better than a standard 5,400rpm hard drive because the cache is already full of all your most used programs. With the Black^2, though, you can read and write to the SSD at full pelt. All told, it should theoretically be the ideal speed and capacity upgrade for a laptop or small form factor system.


Retailing for a hefty ~£230, this drive clearly carries a premium over the cost of buying both a 1TB HDD and a 120GB SSD, so is heavily reliant on selling the message of convenience and, ultimately, being the only solution out there to offer what it does.

Acknowledging this premium price, Western Digital presents the Black2 Dual Drive in a very fancy box with a magnetic clasp and an extra outer sleeve. Inside is a hefty printed quick install manual, a comically oversized USB drive with the installation software (you can also just download it from the WD website) and there’s also a USB 3.0 to SATA cable included, for easily transferring files across before physically swapping your drives.


The drive itself is also rather more tarted up than your average hard drive. On its top a gold logo is painted on a glossy black plastic cover which is actually the backside of the SSD’s PCB sprayed black. The effect with the PCB traces marked out on the surface is rather funky.

Flip the drive over and we can see that the inclusion of an SSD has created quite a complicated front section to this drive. The SSD is sandwiched between the top surface and the metal bulk of the hard drive, with the hard drive PCB on the underside. Three screws are used to hold this front section of the SSD PCB in place but a rather less tinkering-friendly sticky foam is used to fix the rest of it to the back of the hard drive, making it too risky an operation to dismantle for photography. Essentially, though, it’s pretty clear Western Digital has really had to work to pack in all that tech.


The drive is a standard 9.5mm model which should fit all SFF systems and the vast majority of laptops, though some slim laptops use 7mm drives so be sure to check before taking the plunge.

Installation of the drive is the same as any other hard drive but until you’ve installed the Windows-only Dual Drive driver only the SSD will show up. Once the software is installed the HDD will appear as another partition. The utility works whether the drive is a primary or secondary drive though the HDD portion doesn’t work if connected over USB, so only your ‘boot data’ can be copied over before an upgrade when using a laptop (unless you connect both drives to another PC of course).

That really is it for features: this upgrade is all about its performance, so let's see how it stacks up.

Fresh from its acquisition by Toshiba, the formerly bankrupt OCZ has announced a family of high-performance solid-state drives (SSDs) with which it hopes to make its new owner proud.

When OCZ Technologies filed for bankruptcy protection late last year, there were concerns it would prove the end of the company. Thankfully, Toshiba stepped in with an offer the buy substantially all assets of the company, a plan which completed earlier this week with Toshiba spinning the acquisition off as OCZ Storage Solutions, a wholly-owned subsidiary.

Even while OCZ was technically bankrupt, it kept announcing new products - and it's celebrated its deal with Toshiba with the announcement of a new family of SSDs dubbed the Vertex 460 Series. Designed to replace the Vertex 450 Series, the new drives move to a 19nm process node MLC NAND flash from the 20nm of their predecessors, and include an in-house Barefoot 3 M10 controller. The result, OCZ claims, is up to 545MB/s sequential read and 525MB/s sequential write from the SATA-III interface.

The drivers are to launch in 120GB, 240GB and 480GB capacities, come with a three-year warranty - one that now has Toshiba's backing, of course - and include retail packaging with a bundled 2.5"-to-3.5" desktop adapter and a copy of Acronis True Image to clone the contents of an existing drive over onto the SSD. UK pricing for the drives has yet to be confirmed, but an early listing on retailer Kikatek has the 120GB model priced at just under £77.

With the release of the PlayStation 4 (and in many countries the Xbox One as well) and several great games to close off the previous generation, 2013 was a great year for gaming. From the looks of it, 2014 won’t be any less impressive. Here are my eight most anticipated titles of this year.

Number 8

Number 7

Number 4

Number 3

Number 2

THE DIVISION

Number 1

Just Saw a reviews of Borderlands on different sites,which were just incredible  but I thought the game was so lacking.I read about its strategy and gameplay but I witnessed a lot more lacking of fun and unpredictable boring game play.On the start game seems to be cool but as you exceeds more in the game that fun goes out.After witnessing a lot of negative points,I was shocked to hear that this game is a lot more popular in gamers. After That I searched different aspects and also have many conversations with gamers
Even Borderlands 2 got best FPS Game Of The Year Award. I was tired playing it again, but like last time, got so bored because of repetition of  fetch-quest, rummaging through garbage, and endless wastelands.Borderlands with endless sketch artworks was more attractive but the game play enhancement got bad for it

• It’s Split Screen Co-Op play.

Amazon knows a lot about retail, but that’s knowledge is mostly confined to the online world right now. Reports indicate that the company is working on a new initiative that would see it expand its presence into brick-and-mortar retail, but not in the way you might expect. Amazon is working on a plan to get Kindle tablets in the hands of retailers to use as point-of-sale devices.

Immersion’s all well and good, but: I’d had Garrett balanced on a beam above a shop. Able to hear voices, I searched carefully for guards – but couldn’t see anything except the beam, which filled Garratt’s entire field of view. Dropping down, I was immediately spotted and chopped to bits. I indicated, politely, that I did not consider this an appropriate consequence to my actions.
Cantin did not agree, saying that Eidos Montreal deliberately leads players to locations where they are not supposed to take action – players are supposed to make mistakes and learn from them.
“The first-person view gave you a lot of possibilities. But yes, at some point – you can’t see behind you. You don’t have a rear-view mirror,” he said. “The goal is to explore, and as you explore you’ll come to know the world more, and then you’ll start to understand the universe and the map. But there’s some challenge there.”
Which segues nicely into Thief’s Challenge Mode; maps which you can choose to run again and again under various conditions, submitting your high scores against those of your friends. It’s a perfect idea for the Let’s Play and Speed Run age, and nicely complemented by the PlayStation 4′s easy sharing capabilities, which Square Enix seemed a little besotted by. Experts who have learned the maps thoroughly, Cantin agreed, will get a lot out of Challenge Mode.
“I think there’s a big replay value to the game. It’s a competitive game. You want to beat yourself at some point,” he said.
“I love that people are playing their finest; ‘Oh, I did that map in two minutes.’ ‘Oh, yeah, I did that map in 20 minutes, but I got all the loot.’ It’s all about your objectives, what you want as a thief or as a player.”
Marvellous, yes, but it does lend an element of rote learning; to progression by trial and error rather than organically problem-solving with the tools at hand, which is what I – perhaps unfairly – expected.
Maybe I expected it because Thief does look so very much like Dishonored at first glance, a game I came to love most tenderly. This visual similarity, which dissolves on closer inspection, is kind of appropriate, because Dishonored sprang, through Harvey Smith, from the same Ion Storm and Looking Glass DNA – think Ken Levine and Warren Spector. Thief has been in the works for a long time, and there’s no suggestion that it took cues from Dishonored, but that’s something people are likely to banter about given their relative release dates. Cantin doesn’t seem bothered by this possibility, saying both games stand on their own merits, like scions of the same family.
“When Dishonored was released, we were really well advanced in the project. Both games had Thief as a reference, but our goal was really to stay true to what was a Thief game. We really encouraged the stealth aspect; it’s really our main core mechanic,” he said.
“If you walk in the city, you’ll see it’s the city from previous [Thief] games. It’s a medieval city on the verge of the industrial revolution. A lot of those aspects, on our side, come from Thief. It was our main reference.
“It’s true that when they released the first trailer we were like, ‘Oh my god, it looks like Thief’. We were really well advanced. The story was written and everything.
“And then we saw – phew, it’s not like Thief. Yeah, it has a lot of similarities, but you don’t play it like the same thing.
“It was really cool to see the success of Dishonored. It told us people want stealth games. We were really happy about the success they had because it confirmed for us that we were going in a good direction.”
Thief is not Dishonored. It’s hard for me to be okay with that, because what I really want, all day every day, is more Dishonored. But I ought to be okay with that, because what Thief is is a thing that should exist – an unforgiving stealth simulator that’s a long way from the accessible new-school romp fans have been afraid would turn up.
I didn’t immediately love Thief the way I expected to – the way I feel about Dishonored, and to a lesser extent BioShock Infinite and Deus Ex: Human Revolution, also distant cousins. I don’t know if I’m going to end up just as besotted with Thief as I was with Arkane’s glorious stab-’em-up, once I get over that initial learning hurdle and come to terms with the fact that I’m playing – gosh! – an entirely different game.

Thief will be available on PC, PlayStation 3, PS4, Xbox 360 and Xbox One from February 25 in the US, Feb 27 in Australia and Feb 28 in Europe.

Microsoft will release a cheaper Xbox One this year, a well-respected source has told VG247, apparently confirming this week’s leaks out of Redmond.
Microsoft has told trusted publishing partners that it will release a new model Xbox One before the end of the year, a senior source has confirmed to VG247.
Although the source was unable to confirm that the system will be disc-less and feature  a bluetooth adaptor, the new console will be priced cheaper than the current $499 model.
Upon release, Microsoft would likely drop the price of the current Xbox One model, placing it in the same price point as Sony’s PlayStation 4.
New hardware isn’t the only leak from Microsoft this week, with reports suggesting Halo 2 Anniversary Edition will be released on November 11, complete with a beta for Halo 5.
Although Microsoft isn’t commenting on the rumours, it isn’t taking these leaks lightly – the firm is reportedly looking to get legal on someone’s ass, adding fuel to the fire.

Remember Me developers Dontnod have dismissed earlier reports that it has filed for bankruptcy. Instead, the firm is under judicial reorganization which will allow it to “rezie” in order to continue working on current projects.
Speaking with GI International, the firm’s CEO Oskar Guilbert said that any financial issues the firm may have faced are in the past.
“There are some rumors about the bankruptcy of Dontnod,” he said. “There is no bankruptcy, Dontnod is not in bankruptcy.
“We are in something called in France ‘judicial reorganization’ which allows us to re-adapt our production pipeline to the new situation. Because as you know we finished a game called Remember Me for Capcom which was out in June 2013, last year. This game, I think it’s important to mention, is number two in terms of downloads on PlayStation Plus in Europe, so it’s a big success on the digital side at least.
“We started new projects and those new projects need some investment and we decided to resize the company in order to match these new needs. That’s why we needed judicial reorganization.”
How this works, is a judicial administrator is assigned to the case in order to oversee the company’s “sustainability, settling liabilities and managing labor costs,” according to GI.
Guilbert said the appointment allowed it to flexibly reduce costs. He was unable to comment on whether there would be any layoffs at the company.
“We are also in close negotiations with one big partner; I cannot of course announce the name and say that but we are in very close negotiations for our next project with one of the top publishers,” he said.
Earlier reports form multiple French outlets this morning via Gamasutra such as Factor News stated the studio had entered receivership, and financial site Societe stated the firm had legal representatives assigned to the case.
Remember Me was released on PS3 and Xbox 360 in the US on June 4, and across Europe on June 7, 2013 and was published by Capcom.

EverQuest Next Landmark goes into Alpha starting today with Founder’s Pack purchasers able to access the tester. Those who purchased the pack at either Explorer or Trailblazer level can dive right in, providing their system meets the updated system requirements. RPS and Shacknews both played around in it. You can read each site’s respective thoughts on it through the links. Everquest Next will be released on both PC and PlayStation 4 at some point.

Storage giant Seagate has pledged to launch a desktop hard drive with a capacity of 6TB in the second quarter of this year, in an attempt to catch up to rival Western Digital.

Western Digital's HGST division - previously Hitachi Global Storage Technologies - became the first manufacturer to offer a single standard form-factor 3.5" hard drive offering a whopping 6TB capacity in November last year. The surprising jump in capacity came thanks to a novel manufacturing technique which replaces the air normally found inside a hard drive with helium in order to reduce drag - allowing for a seven-platter spinning-rust storage device that just about crams into a standard hard drive bay.

Now, Seagate has pledged to match that but with a more sedate six-platter layout - and to launch the device by the end of the second quarter. 'We are continuing to expand our offering of high capacity drives,' Seagate chief executive Steve Luczo told investors and press during the company's most recent earnings call, 'with our six-disk, 6TB drive shipping early next quarter.'

Luczo was, however, silent on how the company has managed to add an extra platter to its drives' design without taking a leaf from Hitachi's book and using a novel gas for its interior. The company has, however, confirmed that the drives will be based around perpendicular magnetic recording and be of the same design as the company uses in its existing 1TB-per-platter storage offerings.

Sadly for those hoping that the launch will lead to a high-capacity price war, Luczo noted that the first 6TB drives will be aimed firmly at the enterprise storage market - meaning it could be a while before prices drop to the level of the enthusiast's pocket.

If you build a new PC in 2014, chances are you’ll end up installing three types of storage inside: RAM, SSDs, and hard drives. RAM is the fastest, but wont retain its data without power, SSDs beat out hard drives on speed but is price-limited on storage size, and hard drives give you terabytes of space at very affordable prices, but they are slow.
That transition to using faster, and currently more expensive flash memory has been going on for a number of years now and is set to continue, but it goes well beyond the consumer market. Enterprise computing is also experimenting heavily with flash memory, with the latest company to embrace it being IBM who put 12TB of flash memory inside a server. The reason: the huge performance gains being realized by doing so.
Now the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) is using flash storage to revolutionize the so-called “Big Data” industry. We’re talking systems that have to cope with massive amounts of data, like the University of Washington’s universe simulation, which requires gigabytes of data be passed around a network in order to function.



Doing such work using existing systems requires thousands of hard drives all linked together and accessed over an Ethernet network. It works, but it’s relatively slow. A hard drive typically has an access time measured in milliseconds, where as flash memory cuts that to microseconds.
Even if you switch out the hard drives for flash storage, you are still limited by the Ethernet network that connects them all together. You get a performance increase for sure, but it’s still slow, and by no means real-time.
A team at CSAIL believes it has come up with a solution to this problem and in the process created a real-time data storage system. It’s called the Blue Database Machine, or BlueDM, and the key to its speed is a combination of flash storage, programmable FPGA chips, and a serial network connecting the nodes together.
What the team did was to create a node consisting of flash memory connected to an FPGA. By doing that the node not only has very fast storage, it gains the ability to do some local processing on the data stored there using the FPGA. That’s much faster than sending the data to a central computer to be processed.
Nodes can also be linked together to form large networks, and by using a high performance serial network, communication between the nodes is measured in nanoseconds. The end result is a network of storage and processing power that allows real-time access to data while remaining highly scalable.
CSAIL has been working out the kinks in BlueDM using a 4-node network built using 5-year-old hardware. A new 16-node prototype should demonstrate the true potential of the system, though, which is expected to have 32 terabytes of storage and nodes operating at 3 gigabytes per second.
The BlueDM is prototype is expected to make an appearance at FPGA 2014 symposium being held in California on February 26-28.