General Gaming Article |
- Intel Reaffirms Its Commitment To The Atom Platform
- Google Engineers Hide BSOD Easter Egg Inside CR-48
- Office 365 Launches on June 28th, And Why It Matters
| Intel Reaffirms Its Commitment To The Atom Platform Posted: 05 Jun 2011 11:31 AM PDT
To reach this goal Intel will continue to invest heavily in R&D on the ultra mobile CPU, and forecast three separate die shrinks over a three-year time span. The plan is to transition from 32nm, to 22nm, and eventually 14nm as quickly as possible. Further improvements will also be made to address transistor leakage, lower the overall power consumption, and increase transistor density at a rate that should outpace Moore's Law. It's difficult to imagine a future where our phones are rocking an Intel Atom, but sign me up for a netbook with all day battery life and decent performance.
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| Google Engineers Hide BSOD Easter Egg Inside CR-48 Posted: 05 Jun 2011 10:27 AM PDT
Google's engineers are known for having a somewhat unique sense of humor, but this CR-48 Easter Egg is a pretty hilarious shot across Microsoft's bow. An intrepid young developer by the name of Brad Wells discovered a series of clues spread across the web, which when analyzed carefully, allowed him to uncover a fake blue screen of death. Hidden within the error code he also discovered message from the Chrome OS development team. According to his blog post, Brad began his search on LinkedIn after taking up the challenge left by Chrome OS developer Bill Richardson. In Richardson's profile he noticed a project entry for "Integrated Lights Out Management" (ILOM). A simple Google search for "ILOM easter eggs" uncovered an odd-looking command titled "xyzzy". According to Wikipedia "Xyzzy is a magic word from the Colossal Cave Adventure computer game. In computing, the word is sometimes used as a metasyntactic variable or as a video game cheat code, the canonical "magic word". In mathematics, the word is used as a mnemonic for the cross product". Brad went on to discover that if he typed "Xyzzy" into his CR-48 during boot, he was greeted with a hexadecimal message that could be converted to English using ASCII characters. "Greetings from the Chrome OS x86 firmware team. This message is brought to you by Randall, Bill, Vadim, Gaurav, and Kelly. Also by the letter G and the number 42. If you've enjoyed this gadget, please join us at http://www.chromium.org to help make it even better. We now return you to your regularly scheduled program, already in progress. No animals were harmed in the production of this message. Apply only to affected area. Cape does not enable wearer to fly. Contents may have settled during shipment. Use no hooks." I never would have found this in a million years, so kudos to Brad Wells on the discovery! |
| Office 365 Launches on June 28th, And Why It Matters Posted: 05 Jun 2011 09:18 AM PDT
Microsoft has confirmed it is holding an invitation only Office 365 launch party in New York on June 28th, and CEO Steve Ballmer will be in attendance to head up the marching band. It might sound like a lot of pomp and circumstance for the release of yet another new productivity suite, but trust us when we say this marks a pretty significant milestone for how Microsoft does business. Microsoft offers a ton of cloud services, but most of these have a very experimental feel to them, and more often than not they are typically free. Microsoft has been very careful up to this point to not cannibalize their core products such as Windows and Office, even in the face of competition from Google Apps who have been aggressively targeting their customers. Office 365 is really just the evolution of their BPOS services suite, but this time it is being aggressively marketed as an alternative to a traditional Office implementation, rather than simply a complementary service. In the consumer space rolling out updated software is simple. Enthusiasts will always want the latest and greatest, and the rest of us will simply buy whatever looks reasonable when upgrading to a new PC. In the world of big business however, upgrading software becomes a much more complicated proposition. Many IT departments to this very day are still rolling out Windows XP with Office 2003 pre-installed simply because that's what everyone else at the company uses. The last thing IT departments want to worry about is support calls on what a .docx file is, or why someone can't find an option on the ribbon that was in Office 2007, but not 2010. Not to mention the challenges involved in upgrading Office versions on thousands of remote machines should they choose to standardize on the latest and greatest every 3 years. Office 365 promises to solve these problems for business of all sizes, and what we've seen so far looks promising. It will offer a per seat license that is custom tailored for the individual needs of each employee. A license for the receptionist for example might only unlock email and Office web apps, while the CEO's copy might include all of this plus web conferencing, instant messaging, and even a full copy of Office 2010 Professional Plus. Microsoft takes care of the server hosting, and keeps all local and remote users fully updated with the latest and greatest features as time goes on. Microsoft is beginning the slow transformation from a software company to a services company, and if successful here, expect to see this business model make its way into Windows. |
Intel's new found commitment to Ultrabooks might lead you to believe they are giving up on the Atom market, but the company used its forum at Computex to reassure the media that the platform is not just alive and well, but 
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