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Sun May 9 22:49:01 EDT 2010
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A Gamer's Week: May 9 - This week, we've seen quite a bit of announcements related to launch dates for high profile videogames set to come in the second half of the year. But for those looking for something to read, we also have a Weekend Reading piece about what comes after StarCraft II and an EndWeekGame featuring Splinter Cell and Neptune's Pride. And, speaking of Sam Fisher, we also have some ...

Weekend Reading: Beyond StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty - Blizzard finally announced that StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty would be coming on July 27, launching at the same time on all big gaming markets. It's a moment real time strategy gamers who played the first title in the series have been waiting since at least 2002 and while it stops the speculation train related to StarCraft II, it opens up a ...

Iron Man 2 – Movie Review - When “Iron Man” came out in 2008, it wasn’t just another comic book story turned into a long feature film: it became the underdog sensation that got to re-write history on how such films should be made. Under the inspired hand of Jon Favreau, Tony Stark and his alterego Iron Man acquired human dimensions, while also holding on to their silly side, br...

Installing Ubuntu 10.04 LTS - Ubuntu 10.04, also known as the Lucid Lynx, arrived on April 29th, 2010 and is the twelfth release of the Ubuntu OS. We've created the following tutorial to teach Linux newcomers how to install the Ubuntu 10.04 LTS operating system on their personal computer. Therefore, it is addressed to people who have just heard about Ubuntu, those who have never installed Ubuntu ...

Lisbon in 3D in Google Earth - Google Earth has always been a fascinating tool and with the new exposure it’s bound to get thanks to the integration in Google Maps, it will be an even greater way to explore vast landscapes or cities around the world. More recently, Google has been working on giving a third dimension to the cities and towns of the world in Google Earth. With the help of eage...

Unique Weather Station Yields 114 Years of Climate Data - Analyzing long-term weather trends in a single region is usually a tricky business. As the decades go by, numerous changes take place, and the stations are dismantled, moved to make way for new developments, or are shut down for ever. At other locations, readings are only taken once a week or once a month, and so the data is fairly stretch...

New Evidence for Ancient Life on Mars - Scientists from the NASA Johnson Space Center (JSC) recently announced that a new study they conducted on a famous Martian meteorite found in 1996 lends further credence to the fact that ancient life existed at one point on Mars. The space rock has been a cause for discord in the international scientific community since it was first discovered, and many gro...

IE9 vs. Firefox 3.6.3, Chrome 4.1, Opera 10.52, Safari 4.05 vs. Same Markup - Internet Explorer 9’s evolution with the release of Platform Preview 2 is illustrative of the work the company is doing with the goal of achieving “same markup” across all browsers. But same markup (the same HTML, same CSS, and same script working seamlessly across all browsers) is not just about the Redmon...

Compare the Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill to the Size of Your Town - The explosion at the Deepwater Horizon off-shore drilling rig, which led to a massive amount of crude oil leaking into the Gulf of Mexico, with no signs of stopping, is proving to be one of the biggest ecological catastrophes, certainly in US history. The oil spill that has been growing for a few weeks now, has reached a massive size...

Gigabyte Updates Its VESA Mount-Equipped ITX Chassis - Gigabyte, like all companies that make motherboards, has been mostly focused on providing Intel's and AMD's newest central processing units with as large a variety of platforms as possible. Even despite this, the hardware maker seems to have somehow squeezed out enough time to address a certain niche market, that of miniature PCs....

Experts Teach Robots to Wield Knives - Many people fear that robots may be taking over our world. Critics protest each time the military announces the development of a new unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) or similar robot featuring advanced weaponry and intelligence, saying that accidents are bound to happen if decisions are left to the merciless, calculated minds of computers. These individuals als...

Google Drops O3D, Gets Behind WebGL for Web 3D Graphics - There are web document editors, web photo editors, even web audio editors, yet the general conception is that the desktop is the only place for ‘serious‘ applications. That is gradually changing and one thing that will help is the work carried out to bring native 3D graphics to the browser. One very interesting project is WebGL,...

OCZ Agility 2 Extended SandFoce SSDs on Their Way - OCZ has been quite aggressive on both the storage, as well as the memory market lately. In fact, the company unveiled a variety of DDR3 memory kits, flash drives (with or without USB 3.0 support) and, of course, solid state drives. End-users will also likely know that SandForce controllers have proven very popular among storage solutions develop...

NASA Satellite Images Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill in Infrared - Scientists at NASA announce that they have just recently obtained a new photograph showing the extent of the damage caused by the oil spill currently taking place in the Gulf of Mexico. While numerous other satellite images of the disaster have been taken, the new one, snapped on May 7, is different because it was collected during the n...

AMD Mobile CPUs Score 109 Design Wins - Not long ago, it was reported that Advanced Micro Devices was getting very close to launching a significant number of central processing units for mobile PCs. This included multiple new Phenom II chips, as well as Athlon and Turion parts. What remained to be seen, however, was how they would actually fare on a market more or less dominated by Intel's 32nm C...

Google Reader Gets HTML5 Support and Update Notifications - Google Reader is the kind of tool most people don’t really notice, but use all day. There’s all kind of talk of moving away from RSS feeds, about Twitter being the place to be and all that, but fact is feeds work and they’re only getting better. And Google Reader is getting better with them. In the latest update, the po...

Chemicals Underlie Mother-Child Relationship - One of the few things you can absolutely be certain about in this world is a sane mother's affection towards her child. There are little things mothers wouldn't do to protect their small ones, and keep them out of harm's way. The famous Greek philosopher Aristotle at one point argued that women tend to love their children more than their father do be...

Explaining Why Some Suddenly Die in Their Sleep - One of the most peculiar medical disorders is undoubtedly the sudden unexpected nocturnal death syndrome (SUNDS). People who develop this condition eventually die in their sleep, due to the fact that their heart simply stops. In an interview for Cinemafantastique magazine in 2008, “A Nightmare On Elm Street” (1984) director Wes Craven ...

Chip Industry to Mark an All-Time Annual High of over 30% - The past month has been loaded with news of how most, if not all, hardware makers and PC suppliers have seen on-year and sequential sales and revenue growth. As such, it wouldn't be a stretch to assume that the industry itself has, more or less, gotten back on its feet after two dismal years (2008 and 2009). Market research firm iSupply e...

Poor Hook Implementations Leave Most Antivirus Products Vulnerable - According to a new research paper published by the matousec project, critical protection mechanisms are poorly implemented and can be easily bypassed for the majority of desktop antivirus programs. The problem stems from an unreliable and insecure use of kernel and user mode hooks to get the job done.The research s...

Fujitsu Improves Color E-Reader Displays - E-readers may have looked like a promising market a few months ago, but the emergence of slates and the continued lack of color on e-paper screens seem to have reduced, at least in part, the hype of this segment. On the other hand, since slates cater to a different set of needs, it is unlikely that they are any real threat to e-readers, just as they don'...

SpaceX Pushes for Falcon 9 Launch This Month - Representatives of Hawthorne, California-based Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX) announce that they plan to push ahead with their scheduled rocket launch this month. The company has yet to receive the final approval of a critical system, but officials say they are confident this will not delay the maiden flight of their new Falcon 9 delivery sy...

Electrically-Charged Water Found in Dust Cloud - Scientists at the ETH Zürich in Switzerland have recently determined the existence of a new phase of water in a star-forming region of the Milky Way. The researchers there say that the vapors their analysis revealed have electrical charges, something that has not been observed in nature back on Earth. Generally, the stuff is considered as bein...

Inno3D Straps a Triple-Slot Cooler onto the GTX 470 - Over the past couple of weeks, NVIDIA's partners managed to come out and show off their respective custom versions of the GeForce GTX 470, all of which focus on resolving one of its two main disadvantages, namely high operational temperature. In all cases, manufacturers used a different cooler to achieve this goal, with various degrees of succ...

Splinter Cell: Conviction – Stumbling from Cover to Cover - One of the stated aims that Ubisoft wanted to reach with Splinter Cell: Conviction is to make the adventures of Sam Fisher more accessible to the wider gaming crowd, more interested in quick and lethal action in the spirit of James Bond than in the slow progress punctuated by situation evaluation that was the norm for those going through Pa...

Lose Weight with Mario Lopez Without Going to the Gym - Ever since on the hit show “Saved by the Bell,” Mario Lopez has been in top shape. In fact, the star has maintained his toned figure so wonderfully he can even write a book about it – which he did. Called “Extra Lean,” the book aims to show dieters how to lose 14 pounds in as many days by simply changing the way...

EndWeekGame: May 7 - I have never cared much for Sam Fisher and the whole universe Tom Clancy and Ubisoft built around the character. I liked Hitman quite a bit more, even if the game was much harder and I never got to complete it. But judging by the long development process the most recent Sam Fisher adventure, Splinter Cell: Conviction, had gone through, I was curious to see what the developers ...

Blizzard Uses StarCraft II Launch to Present Facebook Integration - In a move that will surprise no one, StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty, which is poised to be the biggest real time strategy launch of the year, is set to be the reason for a new partnership between Blizzard, the developer renowned for Diablo and World of Warcraft, and Facebook, the biggest social network service in the world at the...

Shoe Architect Mihai Albu Comes Out with Stunning, New Collection - Mihai Albu, former architect turned shoe designer, now known as Romania’s “shoe architect” for the structurally complex and beautifully intricate designs he comes out with at regular intervals, has just stunned the world of fashion once more. His latest collection, for Spring – Summer 2010, features not onl...

Civilization V Is Steamworks Powered, Has Deluxe Edition - 2K Games and Valve have announced that the upcoming turn-based strategy title Civilization V will come packaged with the Steamworks package, complete with features like automatic updating, Steam-based Achievements, easy delivery of downloadable content and better multiplayer matchmaking. The presence of Steamworks means the game will like...