jom la lawan..hak3..
click sini lau nak lawan sini3!!
StarCraft II LAN Dropped Thanks to Piracy
Earlier this week, it was revealed that Blizzard's long-awaited RTS game StarCraft II would not offer LAN support when the first installment eventually goes retail. In fact, Blizzard's VP of game design Rob Pardo confirmed the company's lack of support during a recent interview with IncGamers, making a firm statement that Blizzard has no plans for LAN support whatsoever. To add insult to injury, Pardo didn't--nor anyone else over at Blizzard--bother to explain the reasons behind the non-existent LAN support decision.
The news caused a negative ripple effect across the gaming community, with many heated fans vowing to boycott StarCraft II and condemning the company, and even lit up the local Tom's comments system. A petition soon found its way online, asking Blizzard to insert LAN support within StarCraft II rather than forcing gamers to rely on Battle.net alone for multiplayer action. The petition has a current total of 16,398 signatures, and even lists five reasons why Blizzard should reconsider LAN support.
However, yesterday Bob Colayco from Blizzard's PR department further explained the company's reason. According to his statement to Joystiq, Blizzard is focusing primarily on Battle.net as the multiplayer gaming destination for all Blizzard titles. "While this was a difficult decision for us, we felt that moving away from LAN play and directing players to our upgraded Battle.net service was the best option to ensure a quality multiplayer experience with StarCraft II and safeguard against piracy," he said.
Colayco went on to provide minimal details regarding Battle.net and StarCraft II, saying that advanced communication options, achievements, stat-tracking and additional features require the player to be connected to the service. "We're encouraging everyone to use Battle.net as much as possible to get the most out of StarCraft II," he added. "We're looking forward to sharing more details about Battle.net and online functionality for StarCraft II in the near future."
StarCraft II fans will get their first taste of the multiplayer portion sometime this summer with the release of a public multiplayer beta. This first installment of the StarCraft II trilogy, Terrans: Wings of Liberty, is expected to ship by the end of the year, with Zerg: Heart of the Swarm and Protoss: Legacy of the Void to follow thereafter.
Source : Tom's Hardware US
USB 3.0 May Arrive on PCs by Q4 2009
Based on NEC Electronics and a recent convention, it's quite possible that PC's featuring USB 3.0 will hit the market by the end of the year.
The July edition of Nikkei Electronics Asia is reporting that PCs featuring USB 3.0 may ship from Taiwanese manufacturers by the end of the year. The verdict stems from the SuperSpeed USB Developers Conference recently held in Tokyo May 20-21, displaying numerous prototypes containing the upcoming technology that included PC hosts transferring data to connected external SSDs, and "mutual" interoperability between components from different vendors. NEA's Tadashi Nezu said it was clear that the industry is quickly pushing forward with compliant integrated circuits and more, and that the technology has actually matured since its earlier showings.
According to the article, one of the major factors accelerating the USB 3.0 commercialization is the shipment of the world's first USB 3.0 host controller. Manufactured by NEC Electronics Corp of Japan, the company originally introduced the device last month by providing a working sample, however the company believes--or rather predicts--that mass production will begin by September, consisting of a million units a month. This alone suggests that PCs containing USB 3.0 integrated circuits will begin to ship before the end of the year. NEC estimates that by 2011, 140 million units containing USB 3.0 will have shipped; 340 million by 2012.
"Industry observers predict the move will provide major impetus for the development of device controllers for peripherals such as external hard disk drives (HDD)," Nezu said.
Outside the promised 5 Gbps transfer speeds, Nezu also pointed out one of the biggest benefits stemming from USB 3.0: high-definition video streaming via isochronous transfer (data transmitted without interruption). An unspecified source--a measurement equipment engineer--said that the new technology should be able to handle 1080i HD video streams, "maybe more." However, the initial applications utilizing the new technology are expected to include external hard disk drives.
Source : Tom's Hardware US
Search Google and Bing Simultaneously
Google or Bing, why choose?
Over the last few weeks there’s been a lot of back and forth about which is better, Google or Bing. Some of you love Microsoft’s new search engine and others just couldn’t bear the thought of leaving Google.
Well now you can search both at the same time. It’s a pretty simple idea, similar to the Firefox add on that shows you Google results on one side and the relevant Wikipedia article on the other side. Go to www.bing-vs-google.com (or www.google-vs-bing.com) and type in your search. Hit enter and you’ll see Bing results on the left and Google on the right. From there you can refine your search for either one without starting all over again, or alternatively you can use the Bing vs. Google search bar at the top to have the two search engines run a new search simultaneously.
It’s a neat little tool designed by Croatian web developer and IT journalist, Domagoj Pavlesic in just a few hours. We love the idea but the URL doesn’t do much for us. What’s with the hyphens? People would likely have to change their homepage to bing-vs-google.com before they’d use it regularly. That said it’s a great way to compare results from the two. Anyone plan on using this? I’ll probably give it a shot for a few days, at least until the novelty wears off.
Source : Tom's Hardware US
No LAN Support or Consoles for StarCraft II
According to Blizzard, there will be no LAN support for StarCraft II, nor will the game be available on the current game consoles.
Yesterday IncGamers posted a recent interview conducted with three Blizzard masterminds working on the upcoming PC game, StarCraft II. Although the first installment of the game is slated for a Q4 2009 release, the interview took place during Blizzard's multiplayer sneak peek event during the third week of June. Talking with VP of game design Rob Pardo, lead producer Chris Sigaty, and lead designer Dustin Browder, the interview covered topics such as the overhauled Battle.net service, the map-making community, the single player story, LAN support and more.
According to both Browder and Sigaty, support for local area networking (LAN) was still a topic of discussion, nether confirming nor denying LAN capabilities. However, Pardo immediately provided a profound "no," saying that Blizzard does not have any plans for LAN, nor will it offer support. Apparently, the only multiplayer option provided by the game will be through Blizzard's free Battle.net service.
Unfortunately, this probably means that StarCraft II will not offer the "Spawn" feature as seen in the original StarCraft game, allowing owners to install the game on up to eight machines using one product key. "Spawn" copies featured local multiplayer support as well as access to Battle.net, however these "lite" versions locked players out of single-player games, the campaign editor, and block tge ability to create multiplayer games.
In addition to the LAN support, IncGamers asked the team whether StarCraft II would appear on the current consoles. Pardo replied by saying that there's a zero percent chance of console versions in the future. "In our opinion we just don't feel like we will deliver the type of RTS game that we've been creating [on consoles]," he said. "We have tried in the past, we actually tried the original StarCraft on Nintendo 64. It works, it's playable, it's just such a different playability gameplay experience than on PC and we really don't want to have it be that different."
StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty, will be the first installment expected to go retail in Q4. StarCraft II: Heart of the Swarm and StarCraft II: Legacy of the Void serves as installment two and three, respectably. All three installments will provide 26 to 30 missions each, and will not offer cliffhanger endings.
Source : Tom's Hardware US
