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| News: Lancade announces launch of Network Services Division |
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 Lancade is now offering the following hosting services:
Website Hosting (shared, virtual, private, fully managed)
Email Hosting (POP3, IMAP4, Exchange)
Game Server Hosting
File Server Hosting (FTP)
Online Backup w/ Backup Exec
CMS Installs and Setups
CMS Graphic Template Design
Lancade is also now creating CMS (Content Management System) websites for small to medium size businesses specializing in vertical markets, such as:
Real Estate (RETS and IDX compliant)
Auto Dealers
Healthcare
News/Media
Food/Beverage
eCommerce
If you would like more information, to view our client portfolio, or to speak with a sales representative, call Lancade Networks today at (321)549-7810 or email our sales team at sales@lancade.net.
Curtis Brotherton
CEO
Lancade Networks
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| News: Valve joins forces with Electronic Arts! (o) |
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 Valve announced that, Spore, Spore Creepy & Cute Parts Pack, Warhammer Online
: Age of Reckoning, Mass Effect, Need for Speed Undercover and EA SPORTS FIFA Manager 2009 are available now to gamers in North America via Steam, a leading platform for PC games and digital content with over 15 million accounts around the world.
In the coming weeks, Mirror's Edge , Command & Conquer Red Alert 3, and Dead Space will also be added to the catalog of EA's titles available via Steam.
"EA is one of the industry's largest publishers," said Gabe Newell, co-founder and president of Valve. "The EA titles coming to Steam this holiday include some of this year's top PC titles."
"We are pleased to extend our holiday titles to gamers worldwide via Steam -- a revolutionary technology that is one of the game industry's most successful digital distribution services," said John Pleasants, President, Global Publishing & Chief Operating Officer.
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Posted by Curtis on Wednesday, December 24 @ 14:23:57 EST (185 reads)
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| News: Microsoft facing lawsuits over scratched discs (o) |
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 Microsoft is currently facing several lawsuits claiming that Xbox 360's DVD drive causes damage and scratches to inserted discs when moved. The company's position got weaker today as court documents revealed that it already knew about the problem well before the console's launch.
"When we first discovered the problem in September or October (2005), when we got a first report of disc movement, we knew this is what's causing the problem," Microsoft program manager Hiroo Umeno told the court. Xbox 360 was released a month or 2 later, in November 2008.
Microsoft's testing revealed that when the console is tilted, discs inside become "unchucked" and collide with the drive's pickup unit, causing damage and scratches.
Microsoft's engineers considered three solutions. The first solution was decreasing the drive's reading speed, but it was refused because it would increase game loading time. The second solution was also dismissed because it interfered with the drive's opening and closing mechanism. The third solution, installing small bumpers, was technically alright, but it was too expensive. It would have cost between $35 million and $75 million, and thus it was refused.
Instead, Microsoft opted to adding the following section the product's manual: "Remove discs before moving the console or tilting it between the horizontal and vertical positions." Another warning was also affixed to the Xbox 360's disc drive later.
Microsoft also initiated an Xbox 360 disc replacement program that sends out new discs to customers if their discs are damaged for any reason. The program only applies to Microsoft titles and costs $20 per disc.
An internal Microsoft email, quoted in court, revealed that Microsoft's employee considered those actions to be insufficient.
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Posted by Curtis on Wednesday, December 24 @ 14:20:36 EST (167 reads)
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| News: Sony is still loosing money on PS/3 (o) |
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 As the Playstation enters its third year in market, Sony still is losing more than $50 on each unit sold.
Research firm iSuppli estimates that every $399 Playstation 3 console costs Sony $448.73 to build.
This
loss is a significant improvement over the losses Sony incurred at the
PS3 launch. During that time, it was estimated that the company lost
$240 on the $599 consoles and $305 on the $499 version.
Moving
both Cell processor as well as Nvidia Reality Synthesizer manufacturing
to smaller die chip sizes helped reduce the CPU's cost from $89 in 2006
to $46 and the GPU from $129 in 2006 to $58. Thanks to the power
savings caused by the smaller chips, Sony also managed to nix $10 off
the Playstation 3 power supply unit.
Sony
also redesigned the Playstation 3 in order to reduce its production
costs. The company managed to cut down the number of internal parts
from 4,048 to 2,820 parts, but not without sacrificing the "Emotion
Engine" PS2 CPU chip, which was used for backwards compatibility with PS2 games
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Posted by Curtis on Wednesday, December 24 @ 14:16:21 EST (164 reads)
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| News: PC Gaming Alliance President Scolds Lucas Arts (o) |
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When we found this story, we felt we had to share it. We at Lancade have seen the decline of PC Gaming for several years now, and when someone sees what we see, it only validates the problems our market has. One such person is Randy Stude, president
of the PC Gaming Alliance who just recently criticized Lucas Arts decision not
to release Star Wars: The Force Unleashed on PC.
In addition
to calling the decision "uneducated", Stude also criticized Lucas Arts
for not releasing any good PC games for a long time.
Lucas
Arts producer, Cameron Suey, earlier said there wouldn't be a PC port
of Star Wars: The Force Unleashed due to the difficulty in developing
for the range of PC models and capabilities in the market, but Randy Stude believes that this "is not an educated answer. In the last
several years there have been at least 100 million PCs sold that have
the capabilities or better of an Xbox 360. It's ridiculous to say that
there's not enough audience for that game potentially and that it falls
into this enthusiast extreme category when ported over to the PC.
That's an uneducated response."
"If they're making
games for the Wii, Xbox and PS3 they're scaling their experience to
meet all three of those platforms. They're good on the Wii, better on
the Xbox 360 and the best on the PS3" he added. "There's no argument
that they could give not to be able to support good better and best on
the PC."
"LucasArts hasn't made a good PC game in a long time," the PC gaming alliance president said. "That's
my opinion. They make some pretty good games for the Wii, you know
those little sticks you wave in the air, that seems like a natural fit
for a lightsaber game, sure. But I think the last good PC game they
made was probably Jedi Knight 2, and even their strategy games weren't
that great. So I can understand why they would make that call."
"They're not really creating product within LucasArts themselves, they're going at it job shopping their IP."
"That may be a little controversial for me to say", Randy Stude concluded. "But
that's what I see. There's no development team necessarily within
LucasArts any more, they've basically turned into an intellectual
property machine and supporting the PC, why should they? It really
doesn't fit their property."
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Posted by Curtis on Monday, October 27 @ 23:43:12 EDT (205 reads)
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| News: Woman Faces Jail Time For Killing Virtual Husband (o) |
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A 44 years old Japanese woman is facing
jail time for killing her husband after he suddenly divorced her
without a warning, but why is that newsworthy? Simple! The divorce as
well as the killing all took place virtually in MMO game, Maple Story.
The
woman used the username and password of her (virtual) 33 years old
ex-husband to login to his account and kill/delete his avatar.
Of
course, she isn't being prosecuted for murder. Instead, she is being
trialed for illegally accessing a computer and manipulating electronic
data.
"I was suddenly divorced, without a word of warning. That made me so angry,",
the woman told the invistigators. A Japanese police official said that
he doesn't know yet if the woman is married in the real world.
If convicted, the virtual killer could face a prison term of up to five years or a fine up to $5,000.
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Posted by Curtis on Monday, October 27 @ 23:15:06 EDT (259 reads)
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| News: Spore goes Gold (o) |
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 Electronic Arts and Maxis have announced
that Spore, the most anticipated video game of the year from the creator
of The Sims, has gone gold and will be available for the Mac and PC at
retailers September 5 in Europe and September 7 in North America and
Asia Pacific.
Spore Creatures for Nintendo DS and Spore Origins for mobile phones will also be available globally September 7.
Players
who preorder Spore or Spore Galactic Edition from participating
retailers will receive a coupon good for $10 off their next purchase of
custom merchandise at www.zazzle.com/sporestore
. For the ultimate Spore fan, the limited Galactic Edition will contain
the 'Making of Spore' DVD, 'How to Build a Better Being' DVD (a 50
minute National Geographic Channel documentary DVD hosted by Spore
mastermind, Will Wright), 'The Art of Spore' hardback book, an
exclusive Spore poster, and a premium 100-page Galactic Handbook.
"We are so excited to finally get Spore into the hands of fans and players," said Lucy Bradshaw, executive producer of Spore at Maxis. "The
Maxis studio has had an absolute blast creating Spore, but the fun is
just beginning. The most engaging stories are truly the ones people
create themselves, and we can't wait to see how players not only craft
and explore the Spore universe, but hear what stories they have to tell
as a result."
Spore gives players their own personal
universe in a box, allowing fans to create and evolve life, establish
tribes, build civilizations, sculpt entire worlds and explore a
universe created by other gamers. Spore gives players a wealth of
creative tools to customize nearly every aspect of their universe:
creatures, vehicles, buildings, and even spaceships. Players can then
seamlessly share their creations with the world via the Sporepedia and
explore infinite new galaxies created by other gamers.
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Posted by Curtis on Saturday, August 16 @ 14:56:32 EDT (259 reads)
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| News: OpenGL 3.0 Released (o) |
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OpenGL 3.0 has finally been released.
The
official Khronos Group press release cites "strong industry support to
bring significant new functionality to the open, cross-platform
standard for 3D graphics acceleration" However, based upon discussions with several game programmers, this isn't the case
among the game developing community.
Khronos Group promised
to overhaul the OpenGL API (Application Program Interface, the way
programmers interact with OpenGL) but they did not. A lot of game
developers believe that this was done to please CAD developers who
don't want break their 10 year old code.
"It should have been called OpenGL 2.3, not 3.0", a game developer who asked to remain anonymous said. "As far as I am concerned, this is just a minor update."
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Posted by Curtis on Saturday, August 16 @ 14:45:14 EDT (260 reads)
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| News: Unreal 4 Engine Will Target Next Generation Consoles (o) |
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 Speaking at Gamefest in Seattle, Mike
Capps, Epic Games President, revealed that Unreal Engine 4 is currently
in development and that its main target is next gen consoles, around 5
years ahead.
"We've got Unreal [Engine] 4 in production right now", he said. "It's going to be in the next console generation - our rough guess is 2012 [to] 2018."
This ties in with recent comments from Epic's founder, Tim Sweeney, who said that "[Unreal
Engine] Version 4 will exclusively target the next console generation,
Microsoft's successor for the Xbox 360, Sony's successor for the
Playstation 3 - and if Nintendo ships a machine with similar hardware
specs, then that also. PCs will follow after that."
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| News: Rambus Sues Nvidia For Patent Infringement (o) |
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Rambus has announced it has filed suit
in the United States District Court for the Northern District of
California against NVIDIA for patent infringement.
The lawsuit alleges that a number of NVIDIA products with memory controllers for SDR, DDR, DDR2, DDR3, GDDR, and GDDR3 SDRAM infringe 17 Rambus patents.
The accused products in the complaint include chipsets, graphics
processors, media communication processors, multimedia applications
processors and other products from at least six NVIDIA product lines.
Rambus is seeking injunctive relief barring the infringement,
contributory infringement, and inducement to infringe the Rambus
patents, as well as monetary damages.
"For more than six
years, we have diligently attempted to negotiate a licensing agreement
with NVIDIA, but our good faith efforts have been to no avail," said Tom Lavelle, senior vice president and general counsel at Rambus. "Graphics
and multimedia products require leading-edge memory performance, and as
NVIDIA advances its product portfolio, it infringes more and more of
our patents. We are left with no other recourse than litigation to
protect and seek fair compensation for the use of our patented
inventions. Nevertheless, we hope to continue discussions with NVIDIA
to reach a negotiated settlement."
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