Nintendo plans new 'core' titles for E3

If you
were to go with the cliche, you'd say that this generation, Nintendo have made
the casual audience their priority. While this may or may not be correct, there
appears to be a feeling from a section of gamers that Nintendo hasn't turned out
a lot of 'hardcore' titles since the launch of the Nintendo Wii. Not so, says
Marc Franklin, director of public relations at Nintendo, in an interview with GamePro.

Though Nintendo's release schedule has been
surprisingly sparse since the release of Wii
Fit earlier this year, Franklin suggests 2008 will be a big year for
full-time fans of Nintendo. "We recently announced the upcoming release of Mario
Super Sluggers," said Franklin, "additionally, we will be announcing several new
titles that core gamers will be interested in around the time of E3."


Speculation on what these new titles are has already begun, with GamePro
pointing to a persistent rumour of a new Kid
Icarus game. Other suggestions include a new Zelda title, or even an
entirely new game. For Franklin, the 'core' gamer is Nintendo's number one
target, "The clear majority of people waiting in line outside retailers on
Sunday mornings to buy their Wii consoles are core gamers."

E3 will be
held next month. PALGN will be reporting all E3 news as it hits.

From : http://palgn.com.au/

Sony Ericsson sees strong global demand for handsets

Japanese-Swedish handset maker Sony Ericsson (6758.T: Quote, Profile, Research)(ERICb.ST: Quote, Profile, Research) said on Tuesday it projected strong demand for the global handset industry in the second quarter and the second half of this year. "We had a slightly slower start to the year due to some economic downturn in Western Europe and due to overstocking in channels in Q4, which meant inventories were higher going into 2008. That was a short-term issue," Sony Ericsson's head of global marketing James Marshall told Reuters in an interview.

He said the firm was keeping its 10 percent growth forecast for the global handset market this year.

"Projections for this quarter and the second-half of 2008 looks strong -- that's why we can keep the 10 percent growth projections," he said.

In April, Sony Ericsson posted a 47 percent dive in first-quarter profits, slipping to fifth place in global market share as demand slowed for its more expensive camera and music handsets.

The results were broadly in line with the company's forecast when it warned on profits last month, spelling an end to a long string of bumper quarterly results and market share gains.

Coupled with component shortages, first-quarter pretax profit fell to 193 million euros ($306 million) from 362 million euros a year ago.

From : http://uk.reuters.com/

IE8 development: Microsoft should learn from Apple, Mozilla

Internet Explorer 8 is set to be Microsoft's most standards compliant browser ever. After originally stating that IE8 would default to the same noncompliant behavior exhibited by IE7, Microsoft relented and plumped for standard-by-default. The first beta of IE8 was released in March and it did indeed default to standards compliance. Web developers have been clamouring for standards compliance for a long time; IE is a long way behind the competition, requiring considerable hacks and workarounds to get pages working properly. IE8 should make things a lot better—but it will still fall far short of the standards set by Firefox, Safari, and Opera. Some of these problems are technical, but others are cultural. Where the other browser developers are open and communicative, Microsoft is still leaving web developers in the dark.

Microsoft was initially concerned that defaulting to standards compliance mode would "break the web"—that is, make a significant proportion of web pages render so badly as to be unusable—and experiences with beta 1 have provided some justification for the company's concerns. Microsoft is appealing to web developers to fix their web pages, but the unfortunate reality is that the owners of many websites will be unwilling to foot the bill for those fixes to be made.

To mitigate this difficulty, Microsoft is adding a new feature to aid the transition. Web developers will be able to add a tag to their page (or their web server) to force pages to render in the same manner as IE7. Pages without the tag will continue to use the "doctype switch" to choose between the old, nonstandard "quirks mode" and the new "standards mode"; pages with the new tag will still use the doctype switch, but this time to choose between "quirks mode" and "IE 7 mode." The tag will be supported in beta 2 of IE8 (due in August), and is also available to IE 8 beta 1 with the latest security update.

With this tag, Microsoft is hoping that developers will have a low-cost way of making their pages work once IE8 ships, while still allowing standards mode to be the default going forward. The response from developers, however, has been lukewarm. Many commenters on the Internet Explorer blog have stated that they are happy to do the work to make their page's standards compliant; the problem is that Microsoft has not disclosed which parts of which standards it will support, nor which bugs will be fixed.

The ultimate reason for these problems with standards mode is that IE7's standards mode was both buggy and nonstandard. Developers wrote IE7-specific workarounds to ensure that pages worked in both reasonably standards-conforming browsers (such as Opera, Safari, and Firefox) and IE7. Without telling developers what to expect for IE8, the same problem is liable to occur with that, too; instead of targeting the standards, pages will contain workarounds and hacks to avoid IE8-specific problems.

Taking clues from Apple and Mozilla

To really tackle this problem, Microsoft will need to be a lot more open about its plans for the browser and offer updates far more frequently. Both WebKit (the rendering engine of Safari) and Firefox offer nightly builds, and even the commercial Opera browser has weekly builds available. These regular releases make it much quicker for bug fixes to get into developers' hands, making it easier for them to update their sites now rather than having to wait months between betas.

Greater transparency about what is and is not supported is also needed; for example, although Firefox 3, due for release any day now, will not have complete support for SVG, we can see exactly which bits it does support. Internet Explorer has no equivalent documentation, with the result that developers are operating in the dark. Although in the case of SVG, IE is "easy"—it has no support for any of the specification—in areas such as CSS and HTML, IE does offer partial support.

Microsoft has made steps in the right direction; the IE blog is giving more insight into the browser's development than it used to, and developments such as the CSS 2.1 test suite are a useful benchmark for all browsers. But the standard has been set by the open source browsers, and so this is the level of openness and transparency that MS should be striving for, even if it finds that this sits uncomfortably with its commercial nature.

Internet Explorer is hemorrhaging market share, thanks to its virtual abandonment between about 2001 and 2006 and the rapid progress by competing browsers. To stop losing ground to Firefox and Safari, Internet Explorer needs to stand head and shoulders above both of them. But with Microsoft's lack of clear objectives, infrequent releases, and poor communication, IE8 will be struggling to even achieve parity with its competitors.

From : http://arstechnica.com/

Parallels releases first Intel Mac server virtualization software

Parallels Inc. on Tuesday released what appears to be the first application to enable Intel Mac servers to virtualize the Mac OS X operating system.

In development for more than a year, Parallels Server for Mac will let users of Apple's Xserver and Mac Pro hardware to create virtual machines of Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard Server, in conjunction with Windows and Linux VMs.

The software, which costs $999 per server and allows for an unlimited number of CPU cores (maintenance is extra), could encourage businesses seeking the efficiency and reliability provided by virtualization to take a second look at previously-overlooked Mac servers.

Last November, Apple relaxed its server licensing rules so that its Mac OS X Server 10.5 Leopard operating system could run in a virtual machine, provided each VM is matched with a discrete license and the server hardware it runs upon is made by Apple.

VMware Inc. said last week that Mac OS X server virtualization will be available in the next beta release of its Mac virtualization software, VMware Fusion 2.0.

Apple still forbids desktop and laptop versions of Mac OS X to be virtualized or run on non-Apple hardware.

However, Intel Mac users can run Windows VMs on top of Mac OS X using other software from Parallels, formerly known as SWsoft Inc., VMware or Apple.

Parallels' Mac client virtualization software, called Parallels Desktop for the Mac, has the early lead over VMware Fusion, due to strong reviews and its faster time to market.

From : http://www.computerworld.com/

Vista Faces an Uphill Battle with Businesses

Microsoft’s Windows Vista operating system appears to be losing traction with businesses. Fears of an uncertain economy are one factor, but there’s also a more fundamental reason: Many businesses still don’t see the need.

Consumers tend to buy new operating systems when they buy new computers. For businesses, however, moving to a new operating system is a strategic decision that takes into account much more: factors such as cost, the time it takes to train employees, and whether the new operating system is compatible with the hardware and software the businesses already use.

When Microsoft released Vista last year, businesses greeted it enthusiastically. While few businesses ever install a new system during its first year on the market, a 2007 Sanford C. Bernstein survey of corporate tech leaders found that 31% anticipated installing Vista by the end of 2008; 68% anticipated installing it by the end of 2010.

But over the last year, many businesses decided to delay moving to Vista — some, indefinitely. According to a new Bernstein survey, only 8% of tech leaders now anticipate installing Vista by the end of 2008. And only 26% say they’ll install it by the end of 2010.

What happened? Businesses just don’t see the value. Vista only runs on powerful computers, so installing the operating system often also requires buying a new PC, something businesses want to put off with tightening budgets.

The situation for Delaware’s state government is fairly typical. The tech department there recently decided to delay moving to Vista and instead installed XP, an older version of Windows, on about 40 new computers. The state didn’t want to train employees how to use Vista, and some of the software the state uses may not work with Vista, says Rob Revels, a tech official there. There’s no compelling reason to upgrade, he says.

Microsoft Vice President Mike Nash says that many businesses are making their decisions based on outdated impressions of Vista. “There’s a lot of misinformation out there that we’re trying to correct,” he says. Part of the problem for Microsoft: The company focused on security and manageability when it designed Vista, which, while important, are tough to market.

Still, not everyone is wary of Vista. The U.S. Air Force, for example, intends to buy 150,000 computers over the next several months that will run Vista. Kenneth B. Heitkamp, a tech director for the Air Force, says security is a top priority for his service. Additionally, he anticipates that buying PCs with Vista already installed and some of Vista’s energy and time-saving improvements will help the Air Force save more that $25 million in energy and management costs each year.

Yet even Heitkamp understands why Vista’s benefits aren’t generating more buzz. “You’ll never hear a consumer talk about security and manageability,” he says.

From : http://blogs.wsj.com/biztech/2008/06/17/vista-faces-an-uphill-battle-with-businesses/

Blizzard of Snow Leopard Scat

Mac OS X 10.6, aka Snow Leopard, was announced last week at Apple’s developer conference and there are few details creeping out from under the developer non-disclosure agreements. Mac enthusiast sites are busy posting conjectures that fill in some of the blanks, including which processors that will run it, its performance, or whether it will run on the PowerPC.
A French Mac enthusiast site shows a list with the system requirements for Mac OS X Snow Leopard and an Intel processor tops the list. There’s no word about PowerPC support.

That could be. A number of developer blogs have expected this move for more than a year.

Still, from what I heard from Mac developers following the Macworld Expo, today’s Leopard is fairly abstract and there’s more trouble supporting the older Tiger version of the OS than having an application that runs only on Leopard, whether on Intel or PowerPC. One said, Xcode 3.0 “gives you the PowerPC version for free.” So, perhaps the deep plumbing changes coming in Snow Leopard will be difficult to achieve on PowerPC. (Or perhaps this situation will change as the year progresses.)

An Apple representative said on the subject: “We haven’t confirmed what architectures it’ll run on at this point.”

According to Apple, Snow Leopard’s big themes are primarily plumbing-related rather than a flurry of new features: 64-bit support for 16TB of RAM, “Grand Central” multicore optimization, and improved graphics support with Open Computing Language (OpenCL), which is called Botan.


(In my pre-WWDC post, Sean Safreed, co-founder of Red Giant Software, scored with one of his wishes for Snow Leopard:

“My Apple wish list really focuses on helping developers exploit the power of mutli-core and multi-GPU options to increase processing speed, a commodity that is always in short supply for video users. CPUs are only going to get more cores-even laptops will have four CPU cores in 2009 and likely the graphics card will have mutliple cores as well. Users can already load up to 4 GPUs into one machine but few games can even exploit this power fully.”)

Meanwhile, reader Mythic on Reddit last week said he had interviewed at the Apple team working on Open Computing Language. He offered more information on the scope of Apple’s work:

I think it’s more than that. I interviewed with Apple’s GPGPU group (they do have several people working full time on this stuff) a few months ago and got the impression that OpenCL is intended to abstract over a variety of cards and computing platforms. So you could write your program once in OpenCL and be able to run it on an ATI card, an NVIDIA card, or just your multi-core CPU. More interestingly, you could run it in tandem on your GPU and CPU with some sort of adaptive load-balancing performed automatically. I have no idea how much of this actually made it into Snow Leopard, but it’s a cool idea.

On the architecture front, DigiTimes said that Snow Leopard will arrive in time for Intel’s Nehalem family of processors. (The story is now available only to the site’s paid subscribers.)

Intel’s plans for Nehalem are to scale the architecture from between one to eight (or more) cores per CPU across mobile, desktop, workstation and server platforms, an increase from the limit of one to four available in current CPUs. Additionally, Intel will introduce (or re-introduce) simultaneous multi-threading technology (SMT), similar to its Hyper-Threading technology which allowed each core to execute two threads per clock cycle. …

The final correlation between the two companies is the launch date for Snow Leopard which Apple gives as in “about a year.” Intel is set to start introducing Nehalem later this year with Bloomfield for desktops and Nehalem-EP (Gainestown) for 2-way workstations or severs, but the mobile platforms Clarksfield and Auburndale are not scheduled to hit the market until the second quarter of 2009.

From : http://blogs.zdnet.com/Apple/?p=1866