Priced to go up against Intel's Sandy Bridge
By Lawrence Latif May 24 2011

PRICES for AMD's upcoming Llano and Bulldozer chips have been leaked, showing that the x86 processor and graphics chip design firm has six Llano chips and four Bulldozer chips ready to go. Rumours were doing the rounds late last week that AMD will launch its much hyped Llano and Bulldozer chips next month. A price list for desktop chips also found its way onto a number of web forums, with many web publications viewing the leak as accurate information. AMD's next generation Llano and Bulldozer cores are seen by the company as its most important chips since the K8, the line of processors that brought out the AMD64 architecture in 2003. If the leaked prices are accurate, AMD will have chips starting from £43 for the dual core Llano E2-3250 all the way up to £200 for the eight-core Bulldozer FX-8130P. These prices are for 1,000 unit lots, so expect single chip retail prices to be somewhat to a lot higher than those mentioned. While Bulldozer will attack Intel's Core i5 and Core i7 lines of chips it is Llano, with its integrated GPU, that will be most important for AMD. The firm's Fusion application processor unit (APU) design has been promising so much for so long that the Llano APU chips simply have to deliver against Intel's mid-range Sandy Bridge Core i5 chips in both desktops and laptops.

Read more here –>theinquirer.net

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By Jared Newman, May 24, 2011

Slowly but surely, the Amazon tablet is becoming one of the biggest tech rumors of 2011. Every week, there seems be another story about this fabled device — or series of devices. Most recently, PCMag reported that the Amazon tablet will ship in 7- and 10-inch configurations by the holidays, priced at $349 and $449, respectively, running on Nvidia's upcoming quad-core processors. Although Amazon won't officially confirm the existence of these tablets, CEO Jeff Bezos said to "stay tuned" when asked point blank about the devices by Consumer Reports. What's the big deal here? After all, the tablet market is growing increasingly crowded with devices from Acer, Asus, HTC, Motorola, Research in Motion and Samsung. If you're looking for a tablet right now, there's no shortage of options. Still, the Amazon tablet would be a major development in consumer tech. Let's take a step back and look at why: 

Read more here –>pcworld.com

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By Ginny Mies, May 24, 2011

Tuesday morning, Microsoft took the wraps off "Mango," an update to its Windows Phone 7 platform that includes more than 500 new features designed to improve multitasking, offer more dynamic information and make apps and the OS work together more efficiently. The good news is that the update will be free for all Windows Phone 7 customers. The bad news is that owners will have to wait until the fall to receive it. In addition to a slew of new features, Microsoft also announced new hardware partners including Acer, Fujitsu and ZTE. Microsoft has once again chosen Qualcomm's Snapdragon processor to power the next generation of Windows Phones. What Microsoft showed today is only just beginning for Mango; the company will be revealing even more new features. Mango essentially takes the features we liked about Windows Phone 7 and makes them even better. Live Tiles, those dynamic widgets you can customize and rearrange on your homescreen, will have more real-time information. You'll also be able to make personalized live tiles for either individual friends or a group for your homescreen. If you want to keep an eye on your partner or track what your boss is doing, you can pin that contact to your screen and see what they're writing on Facebook at-a-glance. 

Read more here –>pcworld.com

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By Andy Chalk 24 May 2011

Another day, another attack against Sony, this time Sony BMG in Greece, which coughed up part of its user database to hackers over the weekend.It's nowhere near as jaw-dropping a breach as the attack that took the PlayStation Network offline for more than a month but the attack on Sony BMG in Greece is nonetheless proof that people somewhere still have  it in for Sony, or at the very least think this bandwagon is still worth jumping on for some reason. The Naked Security blog says the nature of the attack suggests the hackers responsible may not have been particularly skillful but they were nonetheless able to get their hands on a user database containing user names, real names and email addresses of people registered at Sonymusic.gr. The hackers provided the user database to The Hacker News website, which posted it to pastebin.org, although the entry has apparently since been deleted. Fortunately for Sony BMG users, the passwords, telephone numbers and other data it claims to include is either missing or "bogus," but all users of the site are nonetheless being advised to reset their passwords as a precaution. 

Read more here –>escapistmagazine.com

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By Ben Kuchera May 24,2011

When we say a game has "gone gold," it means that the work on the game has finished, and a master copy has been sent out to the duplication plants to be pressed, packaged, and shipped out to consumers. This used to mean that the development team could take a break, but now going gold is likely to simply start a countdown to the inevitable day-one patch. Let's not be cynical, however, because today is a grand day: Duke Nukem Forever has gone gold. "Duke Nukem Forever is the game that was once thought to be unshipppable, and yet here we are, on the precipice of history," said Christoph Hartmann, president of 2K. "Today marks an amazing day in the annals of gaming lore, the day where the legend of Duke Nukem Forever is finally complete and it takes that final step towards becoming a reality." Sure, it took us 15 years or so to get here, but the important thing is that the game is coming out. It's happening. The game will be released on June 14, with a demo coming on June 3 for preorder customers and those who bought the Game of the Year Edition of Borderlands. 

Read more here –>arstechnica.com

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By Mark Milian, CNN May 19, 2011 

Next time Grandma asks why you're going to the mall on Sunday morning instead of church, tell her you're going to Apple Chapel. For Apple fans, the brand triggers a reaction in the brain that's not unlike that of religious devotees, according to a BBC documentary series that cites neurological research. The neuroscientists ran a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) test on an Apple fanatic and discovered that images of the technology company's gadgets lit up the same parts of the brain as images of a deity do for religious people, the report says. The first episode of the documentary shows Apple employees "whipped up into some sort of crazy, evangelical frenzy" at the recent opening of an Apple store in London. Observers and Apple critics have long accused fans of the tech company of taking their infatuation to an extreme. People have gone to great lengths to prove their love of Apple with tattoos, bumper stickers and home shrines to outmoded Mac computers. Apple's cult-like following was highlighted in a 2009 documentary called "Macheads."

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May 19, 2011

San Francisco Bay Area metal veterans TESTAMENT are currently writing material for the follow-up to 2008's "The Formation Of Damnation" for a tentative late 2011/early 2012 release. The new CD will be recorded this summer with British producer Andy Sneap, who has previously worked with MEGADETH, ARCH ENEMY, NEVERMORE, EXODUS and MACHINE HEAD, among others. In a brand new posting on his Twitter profile, TESTAMENT guitarist Alex Skolnick writes, "Another tune done! My riffs from last week [plus] some of [fellow TESTAMENT guitarist Eric Peterson's plus] new ones we wrote today. Planning one more, then we've got more than we need." Regarding the musical direction of the new TESTAMENT material, the band's vocalist, Chuck Billy, stated in a 2010 interview, "The new album will most likely be a culmination of 'The Gathering' [1999] and 'The Formation of Damnation', but we're definitely not going to forget who we are or our roots. I think we've found a comfortable spot in our writing style." 

Read ore here –>blabbermouth.net

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Journalist and musician Barbara Caserta of Italian web radio Linearock.it recently conducted an interview with legendary heavy metal guitarist Tony Iommi (BLACK SABBATH, HEAVEN & HELL) about WHOCARES — the renewed musical union between Iommi and DEEP PURPLE singer Ian Gillan — as well as Tony's other projects and future plans. On the one-year anniversary of Ronnie James Dio's (BLACK SABBATH, HEAVEN & HELL, RAINBOW, DIO) death:

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The Wii 2 is expected to arrive next year, and already, studios are gearing up for the next-generation Nintendo console. Here's what Wii 2 might offer.
By Matthew Shaer May 16, 2011 repost here 5/19/11

Wii 2, Project Cafe, Wii HD –– choose your appellation. Either way, a new Nintendo console will hit store shelves sometime next year, and according to Ives Guillemot, the CEO of Ubisoft, the next generation Wii is going to be a doozy. "The platform Nintendo is coming up with is really a fantastic platform. We think it will be extremely successful," Guillemot recently told investors. "What we see is that we will be able to leverage a lot of the work we do for Xbox 360 and PS3 while we create games for the platform. So we will not have to redo completely the games that we create. We’ll be able to use all the capacity the console is giving but also use all the work we do for the other platforms." Guillemot was speaking to investors; his comments were picked up by the tech site Eurogamer. As Eurogamer's Fred Dutton notes, Nintendo has not yet released a full spec sheet for the Wii 2, or really any details at all. But Guillemot's comments could be construed as meaning that the next Nintendo console will get much more firepower than the original Wii, which has always lagged behind the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 in terms of graphical capability.

Read more here –>csmonitor.com

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