Over the next week we’ll be reviewing Diablo III in a series of posts which explore the basics of the game from an outsider’s perspective. This first review shows what its like to play Diablo III from the beginning having only a rudimentary knowledge of what Diablo I and II were like and how the crossover hit World of Warcraft works in practice. Our first run begins with the character class “Monk” and takes on this world of demon fighting in a mostly visual sense.
Toshiba has confirmed that it will no longer be offering new netbook models in the US. The news isn't too surprising given the forthcoming onslaught of Ultrabooks, but it does further confirm the grim outlook for the ill-fated netbook market. Dell and Lenovo are already officially out of the netbook space, while Samsung and Sony haven't launched any new models this year either.
Read The Full Story
This week Microsoft Vice President Frank Shaw has described a future in which the 80-inch Windows 8 machine Steve Ballmer has in his office is a normal situation. This beast of a device was revealed by Shaw in a talk with Wired in which he also noted that this device was one of a vast array of machines that Windows 8 was being aimed at.
Read The Full Story
This week NVIDIA demonstrated the power of their Kepler GPU in its future iterations in an investor call covering both desktop and mobile computing. The three different elements that focus the power of NVIDIA's Kepler GPU were listed as SMX, Hyper-Q, and Dynamic Parallelism, each of these explained in brief, and two relatively new products were reintroduced: Tesla K10 and Tesla K20, the first available now, the second available in the forth quarter of 2012.
Read The Full Story
This month we heard Steve Ballmer shoot out a figure that put Windows 8 adoption well into the record books for highest adoption rate in the history of operating systems: 500 million by 2014 - Microsoft has since clarified. This week we're finding a Microsoft spokesperson making things a little more clear, saying that it's not that Windows 8 will be on half a billion computers, but that it'll be POSSIBLE for it to be on that make computers by the end of 2013.
Read The Full Story
Earlier today it was reported that Siri was being blocked for IBM employees nationwide as a sort of cut-back on their "bring your own device" policy for smartphones and tablets at the workplace - that policy has expanded, it seems. A new addition to the reports we've heard this morning indicate that IBM not only has Apple's Siri blocked, but several other applications such as Dropbox and Apples iCloud. The reason IBM has these applications blocked from the their offices is simple: data might not be as secure through these applications as they want their employees data to be.
Read The Full Story
This week HP is showing off their second financial quarter earnings wares with $1.6 billion in GAAP earnings no less than a 27k employee cut restructuring plan. This call includes HP's announcement of a new revenue of $30.7 billion, this a decline of 3 percent year-over-year. HP's earnings of $1.6 billion this quarter compared to last quarter is a massive 31 percent decline - not the news you want to hear if you're an investor, to be sure.
Read The Full Story
Regardless of his gung-ho attitude at the partner conference that took place recently, it appears that HP's restructuring plan has Autonomy co-founder Mike Lynch's name on its chopping block. To help HP's Autonomy performance, says the company, they'll be replacing Lynch with executive vice president of HP Software Bill Veghte. This move has Mike Lynch, also the executive vice president for Information Management, heading out after a transition period.
Read The Full Story
This week HP is sending out word that not only are they doing relatively well in the stock market with per-share earnings of 98 cents (over 91 cents projected), they're cutting 27,000 jobs by 2014. According to HP, this is 8% of their total workforce according to - strangely enough - numbers they have from October 31st, 2011. This "restructuring" plan includes a "portion" leaving the company as a part of a voluntary early retirement program "whose combined age and years of service exceed certain levels."
Read The Full Story
This week Apple's head of design Jonathan Ive has been knighted at Buckingham Palace by Princesse Anne for his services in design and enterprise. This is the second time Ive has been knighted, the first being in 2006 when he was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) for his service to the design industry - this 2012 honor has upped him to a Knight Commander (KBE). In an interview with The Telegraph on the subject of his new knighthood as well as on his design philosophy, he let loose several talking points worth noting, including on the subject of future projects.
Read The Full Story
Yesterday I mentioned that Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer was predicting 350 million Windows 7 devices would be shipped by the end of 2012. Ballmer also made prediction during the same speech about the future of Windows 8. Ballmer's prediction for Windows 8 is even grander than what he sees for Windows 7.
Read The Full Story
Sony Online Entertainment is showing off a video game called Bullet Run that is a first-person shooter set in a reality show environment. The game lets players play more or less traditional online shooter combat under the guise of the player's online character being part of a reality TV show. The best part about this game is that it will be free to play on the PC and Sony is accepting beta registrations now.
Read The Full Story
