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Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince video game
23rd April, 2008
Electronic Arts has unsurprisingly revealed plans to accompany the upcoming Harry Potter film with a game. This game tied to the movie of the same name. Like the film, the game is based on J.K. Rowling's sixth volume in her best-selling franchise.
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, which is based on the movie and J.K. Rowling's sixth book in the franchise, will see players return to Hogwarts to help Harry survive a fraught sixth year.
Players may get sidetracked by Ron's romantic entanglements as they journey towards a dramatic climax and discover the identity of the Half-Blood Prince. Along the way there are plenty of duels to be done, a Quidditch cup to win, conspiracies to look into, love triangles to untangle, robes and wizard hats to put on.
"We believe that the Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince video game represents a milestone in the movie tie-in genre," said Harvey Elliott, head of EA Bright Light studio.
"Building on the technological advancements of previous games in the series and with a particular focus on the unique control system of Nintendo’s Wii, the team here is working closely with the filmmakers to create an immersive interactive experience that captures the story, the action, the excitement and, above all, the fun of the film."
"Working with EA, we look forward to offering fans a compelling Harry Potter video game, one which captures the thrilling storyline and high visual quality of the movie, The adherence to the rich fiction is a trademark of this franchise and with Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince fans will experience the most authentic and enjoyable game in the series to date. "Scott Johnson said, the vice president of Warner Bros Interactive Entertainment
"The adherence to the rich fiction is a trademark of this franchise and with Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince fans will experience the most authentic and enjoyable game in the series to date." He added.
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince book series is known as the sixth book in the series and it will be published under EA's Casual label, the first time that the boy wizard's adventures have been released away from the more core 'EA Games' label. Development is being handled by EA's UK-based Bright Light Studio.
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince will be out on Mac, PC, Xbox 360, PS3, PS2, PSP, Wii and DS later this year.
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Samsung announce Blu-ray/HD DVD drives for PCs
15th April, 2008
The biggest name in the Electronic multimedia which is know as "Samsung" has announced to launch their Blu-ray drives for desktop and notebook PC’s in United Kingdom in the late summer of this year.
Blu-ray technology is innovating by Blu-ray Disc Association (BDA). "The format war was confusing consumers", said a Samsung insider. "But our engineers didn't stop developing the Blu-ray drives".
Drive is capable for reading and writing, the Blu-ray disc will be the further next step of Samsung, but surprisingly considering the company's former pro-Blu stance, it will also offer read capabilities for HD DVD for desktop and notebook users. Spec and speeds were not unconcealed at this early stage.
"People are still supposed to want HD DVD discs to read, but no one wants to write to that format", confirmed from Samsung. By placing this condition in front of them, their aim will be to provide a solution allowing users to still access content on the now obsolete high-def format.
Samsung recently cancelled the launch of its dual format HD disc player in United Kingdom. The BD-UP5500 Duo, states,
"It remains a practical solution, but the window of opportunity is smaller than it was before. In the light of recent announcements, Samsung will not introduce the BD-UP5500 Duo HD Player".
One more thing is confirmed by Samsung that their drives should be available in August 2008, "We'll bring you more nearer the time", they said.
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IBM to launch European playout
10th April, 2008
IBM and ProSiebenSat.1 Group have agreed a €200 million outsourcing contract that will establish a new European playout centre in Munich.
IBM will take responsibility for software applications, Internet technology and IT infrastructure across ProSiebenSat.1's four TV channels and modernise advertising sales, scheduling and rights-management processes.
The all-digital infrastructure will deliver TV programming to multiple digital platforms across Europe.The platform is in addition to the exiting playout centre in Chiswick, used by SBS channels including Kanal 5 and VT4, which operate under UK licences.
The pan-European broadcaster said on Tuesday "it would completely digitise its infrastructure and do away with tapes, and in future would transmit all its programmes from London and a new playout centre in Munich, Germany, where it is based."
ProSiebenSat.1 has launched a series of thematic channels, which will move to the new operation. When the SBS channels are included the group operates 26 free TV stations, 24 pay TV channels and 22 radio networks in 13 European countries.
ProSiebenSat.1 will transfer 170 production staff to IBM in the first quarter of 2009 under the outsourcing deal.
"The aim of the transformation is to make the company faster and more flexible in the European media and entertainment market and to do so while reducing costs at the same time," ProSiebenSat.1 said.
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Intel and AMD will never solve the programming problems
10th April, 2008
UK multi processing experts says that Intel and AMD will never solve the problems of programming general purpose multi-core processors if they carry on with a shared memory approach.
"There's not a solution to the problem the way they are approaching it, the whole concept of multi-processing using shared-memory is flawed." Flemming Christensen said, the managing director of Sundance.
"People want to take code written for uniprocessors and magically turn it into something that will run on multiple processors and can be made to run as fast as you like just by throwing more processors at it. This is nonsense", Peter Robinson said, managing director of 3L, this statement is agreeing with the Flemming Christensen.
"The Dual Core approach running on Windows is to have completely separate programmes running on different processors, it hasn't solved the problem of getting one programme to run faster." said Robertson.
"The approach of Flemming and I is that you have to recognise you need a vast number of processors, only some of which talk to each other, and none of which talk to the whole system", Robertson added, "and then you have to write the programme in such a way that the bits that need to talk to each other, do talk to each other. You have to break the problems down, then you have a hope of distributing them across the processors."
Mr. Chris Rowen, CEO of multi-processor specialist Tensilica, said last week, "The challenge of writing software for programming general purpose computing applications is generally recognised in the scientific computing community as the biggest single unsolved, and perhaps unsolvable, computing problem."
Against a question regarding Intel and AMD to solve this problem in the future, Robertson replied, "They'll suddenly realise where they've been going wrong and take the right approach and then they'll say they invented it, I suspect Intel are doing it already, they're just too embarrassed to admit it."
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