In his last day of GDC 2010 coverage, Loyd Case sits in on a handful of sessions, listening to some of the most influential voices in the gaming community. Is Farmville the future of gaming, or will big-budget blockbusters continue impressing us?
View original here:
GDC 2010, Day 3: Diversity Or Fragmentation?
In the future, an increasing number of hard drives will be writing data in 4KB chunks (rather than 512 bytes) to increase storage capacities. Performance isn’t impacted, as long as you follow some rules.
Go here to see the original:
HDDs, The Next Generation: Drives With 4KB Sectors On The Way
It’s a Rashômon like moment. Today, former Microsoft vice president Dick Brass lays the wood to Microsoft in the New York Times for being a “clumsy, uncompetitive innovator.” Mere hours later, on the Official Microsoft Blog, vice president of Corporate Communications Frank X. Shaw responds with a ‘no we aren’t’ rebuttal. What’s interesting is that both make valid points, and, legitimately, both may be right.
Brass’s bone of contention is the way Microsoft handles competition. Despite allocating tons of resources, and employing hundreds of bright, creative engineers, innovation is often stifled, if not outright trampled because there is no centralized mechanism for governing competition and shepherding innovation. Rather, it’s one big cage match, where the entrenched technologies hold sway over the newly emergent, innovative ones. Competition at Microsoft, says Brass, “created a dysfunctional corporate culture in which the big established groups are allowed to prey upon emerging teams, belittle their efforts, compete unfairly against them for resources, and over time hector them out of existence.”
Not so fast, responds Shaw. Yes, it may be true that Microsoft may be slow to innovate, but that’s because so many people depend on Microsoft’s products. Getting in a bit of a dig at Apple, the shadow lurking in this background, Shaw says “For Microsoft, it is not sufficient to simply have a good idea, or a great idea, or even a cool idea. We measure our work by its broad impact.” The delays in ClearType, an example offered by Brass, were due not to limitations on innovation, but were because Microsoft had to be sure it was a good idea before inflicting ClearType on the masses--that it was “innovation at scale.” (For the moment, let’s leave Vista out of this.)
There’s a tit-for-tat over Xbox, Zune, and tablet PCs that make both of these worth reading. In the end, it is possible to side with either Brass or Shaw, or with both. There’s no real dispute over the basic facts. But, like in Rashômon, each sees these facts as telling a different story about Microsoft's capacity to innovate.
Image Credit: Microsoft
There are some interesting takes on the future of PCs, and then there’s Warren East’s take on the future of PCs. East is the CEO of ARM, which produces processors for mobile products, which offers good power and low energy consumption. According to East, not only will ARM processors become commonplace in the netbook market, but that the netbook market will come to represent 90 percent of the PC industry.
What’s particularly amazing about East’s projection of the future is that ARM’s processors lack Windows support. It’s going to be a pretty tough transition to ARM processors if they can’t run the dominate operating system for PCs.
Not a problem, says East. Yes, people love their Windows, but, he says, “the trajectory of progress in the Linux world is very, very impressive. I think it’s only a matter of time for ARM to gain market share with or without Microsoft.” So Linux, which currently has a market share smaller than Apple, is going to topple the Windows behemoth.
That’s not the only option, speculates Slashgear. It might be that the threat of Linux will force Microsoft to change--and rework Windows so it will support non-x86 hardware. Slashgear points to Texas Instruments’ OMAP4, NVIDIA’s Tegra 2, and Qualcomm’s Snapdragon, in addition to ARM, as hints of a non-Intel/AMD future. Microsoft may have to adapt or die.
And ARM has an advantage over the Intel-Microsoft option: it’s cheaper. Because of cost efficiencies, Robert Castellano of Seeking Alpha, predicts ARM processors will have a 55 percent share of the netbook market by 2012.
East may be onto something here. But if it comes to pass, what will gamers be left with? It’s hard to imaging running Crysis, at any frame rate, on a netbook--even one from the future.
Image Credit: ARM
DHT is the future, says Pirate Bay.
Here is the original post:
Pirate Bay Torrent Tracker Shuts Down Forever
Good news for your battery in your device from the future.
Here is the original:
Rambus Making Mobile Memory More Efficient
Crytek’s Carl Jones said that the future of gaming will harbor massively multiplayer communities.
Originally posted here:
CryEngine 3 Ready for Massively Multiplayer
All you World of Warcraft fans out there will be glad to know that Blizzard is collaborating with Future Publishing to bring you folks a fancy World of Warcraft print magazine.
See the rest here:
Blizzard Making World of Warcraft Magazine
AT&T has reportedly told celebrity hacker Kevin Mitnick that the company can no longer offer him cell phone service because of the inordinate amount of attacks on his cell phone account.
More:
AT&T Tells Hacker to Find Cell Service Elsewhere
