Gaming Lagoon

Gaming Lagoon

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Saturday, September 25, 2010

Microsoft to "lead the way" for PC Games

Microsoft just doesn't know when to stop. The company dropped a doozy earlier this week after saying "hardly anyone plays first person shooters on the PC anymore," with many abandoning the platform to play titles such as Halo. "It's all about the console," Redmond said. Obviously that's a stretch, and the company received due criticism. In an interview with MCV, Microsoft acknowledged its blunder and said it is working hard to deliver Windows games too, promising to "lead the way" on PC.

"Other companies should look to Microsoft for leadership, but I'm not sure they do," said Microsoft Game Studios general manager Dave Luehmann. "It is our job to lead the way on PC. And in some ways we are doing that and in other ways we are not. So we need to step up." Luehmann continued by flaunting three "big IPs" Redmond is preparing for the PC, including Fable III, Age of Empires Online, and Microsoft Flight, with more to follow.

Wednesday, September 22, 2010

Intel Wants $50 for Software Unlock of CPU Features

The Pentium G6951 dual-core LGA1156 processor may not have made any headlines when it was known to be almost identical to the Pentium G6950, until now. Inteldesigned the G6951 to support "hardware feature upgrades" by purchasing them and enabling them using a software, so users with this processor installed can upgrade their systems by enabling that are otherwise locked for the SKU. The $50 upgrade fetches support for HyperThreading Technology, enabling four threads on the processor; and unlocks the disabled 1 MB of the L3 cache (Clarkdale has 4 MB of L3 cache, of which 1 MB is disabled on the Pentium SKUs).

There isn't much value in buying a $99 Pentium G6951 and the $50 Upgrade Card upfront, but later down the line, companies can opt to mass-upgrade system performance without touching any of the hardware inside. The service works by the purchase of an upgrade key that the user has to feed into the software, which is then verified by Intel's activation server, following successful verification, the software unlocks the processor's features. This is a one-time process, portable between software reinstallations.

Saturday, September 18, 2010

Anyone remember "Microsoft Bob?"

Unfortunately, some of us older geeks remember it like a bad dream. It was Microsoft’s most spectacular failure and is still remembered as one of the worst “applications” ever produced for the PC/Windows. IMNSHO, it ranks up there with IBM’s Top View.

Here’s a posting by John Sheesley on TechRepublic that has tons of screenshots. If you remember Bob, take a couple of valiums first. If you don’t remember, enjoy and be close to the bathroom because you just might pee in your pants… :-)

Google continues to improve their search utility

Most of you probably use Google to search vs. Bing or Yahoo!. It seems that Google has decided to continue “improving” their search engine. Now, it will start searching for you as you type in the search parameters. I think I’ve noticed this already. It seems to do a nice job.

In this article in Network world, They say that Google estimated that it would save users “3.5 billion seconds per day”. That’s 405 days. What on earth are we going to do with all that time?? :-)

Don't know if this is going to change our lives, but it’s fun to watch MS/Yahoo! and Google go at it….