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.