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LONDON/HELSINKI, May 18 (IFR/Reuters) – Nokia Oyj is tearing through its cash reserves at an unsustainable rate, raising what some analysts say are serious questions about the struggling Finnish phone maker’s ability to stabilize its finances in the months ahead.

With the cost of Nokia‘s debt rising, the most bearish of analysts in a Reuters poll said the company could even be at risk of default if it fails to slow the burning of its cash.

Over the past five quarters, the onetime darling of mobile telecoms has eroded its cash pile by 2.1 billion euros ($2.7 billion) – a rate that would wipe out its entire 4.9 billion euros reserves in a couple years.

Analysts on average expect the company will burn through almost 2 billion euros more in just three quarters, while the most bearish see the company wiping out its 4.9 billion euros net cash buffer completely next year, a Reuters poll of 30 banks and brokerages showed on Friday.

“In our opinion, the company’s ability to repay even its shorter-term 2014 bond could be an issue,” said Societe General credit analyst Juliano Torii.

The company, which had more than 10 billion euros in cash on hand in 2007, has two bond issues outstanding, 1.25 billion euros of 5.5 percent bonds maturing in 2014 and 500 million of 6.75 percent notes due in 2019.

The bonds – both junk-rated by Fitch and Standard Poor’s – are trading at record wides versus mid-swaps (a money market benchmark), at around 400 basis points and 683 bp respectively. And those levels may still not be wide enough, some say.

“Nokia’s spreads do not reflect the severity of the company’s situation,” said Torii.

It’s also getting more expensive to insure against default.

Five-year credit default swaps (CDS) were at 749 bp on Friday – an all-time high, according to Markit. Since its year-low of 309 in late January, it has therefore increased some 142 percent. According to according to Gavan Nolan, director of credit research at Markit, this implies a default probability of 49 percent over the next five years.

A Nokia spokesman said improving cash flow was an important goal.

“Nokia is implementing a decisive action plan to position our company for future growth and success,” spokesman James Etheridge said. “The main focus of these actions is on lowering the company’s costs, improving cash flow and maintaining a strong financial position.”

NO LIGHT FROM LUMIA

Nokia, which once ruled the mobile phone roost, was wrongfooted by the rise of smartphones. And while it may have hoped the iPhone phenomenon was close to running its course, Apple Inc last month said quarterly profit had almost doubled in the first quarter of 2012, quieting talk that its days of sharp growth were over.

Meanwhile Nokia’s response to the iPhone, the Lumia, has not so far demonstrated it can compete.

“Nokia’s Lumia was an attempt to catch up, but it was simply too little too late,” said Nancy Utterback, credit strategist at Aviva Investors.

“I would not rule out the possibility of Nokia being downgraded further,” Utterback said. “The company is in a negative spiral that will be hard to reverse.”

Societe Generale analysts this week downgraded Nokia stock – which was down 1.2 percent early on Friday, having slumped to its lowest in about 16 years – to a to “sell” and warned that the company’s operating losses and restructuring costs could accelerate a decline in sales.

“Such an additional fall could be enough to burn through most of Nokia’s existing cash pile and even bring into question Nokia’s very survival,” SocGen analyst Andy Perkins said in a note.

Not everyone is quite so pessimistic.

While the most bearish analysts doubt Nokia’s ability to retain a cash buffer, the average estimate in the Reuters poll was for the company to end 2012 with 2.8 billion euros in net cash.

If it can succeed in reducing the speed of its cash burn, it would be unlikely to face major hurdles in paying off its shorter-dated bond.

“The group appears to have sufficient liquidity, even under some reasonably onerous operating assumptions,” said Jens Vanbrabant, lead portfolio manager at European Credit Management.

And there is some optimism as Nokia gears up production of new smartphones using Microsoft Corp’s Windows Phone software. Analysts on average expect Nokia to sell 46 million of the phones next year, compared with 20 million expected this year.

But the rapid reversal in the company’s fortunes has given Nokia a steep hill to climb.

“There are chances for Nokia to shape up and recover, but it’s going to be tough,” one corporate banker said. “The TMT market is fast moving, and even one slip-up can cost a company its whole future.”

If Nokia fails to improve its fortunes, some bankers say Microsoft could become a white knight. After all, not only is Lumia’s software based on that of Microsoft, it also happens to be Nokia Chief Executive Stephen Elop’s former employer.

Microsoft is already paying Nokia $1 billion a year to use its software on Lumia smartphones. And some investment bankers familiar with the technology sector said the support could extend well beyond that amount, if Nokia’s problems intensify.

($1 = 0.7869 euros)

(Editing by David Holmes)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/worries-mount-nokia-burns-cash-091918429.html

What do you do after you’ve successfully crowd-funded and then created an amazing independent game? Distribute it on Origin. For free.

Today, we’re happy to announce that we will be waiving Origin distribution fees for any developer that has a successfully crowd-funded, ready-to-publish, downloadable PC game. Developers that qualify will enjoy 90 days of free distribution services and, more importantly, have the chance to reach more than 12 million users worldwide.

“The crowd-funding movement is incredibly healthy for the gaming industry,” said David DeMartini, Senior Vice President of Origin. “Gamers around the world deserve a chance to play every great new game, and by waiving distribution fees on Origin we can help make that a reality for successfully crowd-funded developers.”

Both Jane Jensen of Gabriel Knight fame and Wasteland designer Brian Fargo are optimistic about the program’s ability to open doors for independent developers. “Having Origin waive their distribution fees for 90 days for fan funded games is a major economic bonus for small developers,” said Fargo. “We look forward to bringing Wasteland 2 to the Origin audience.”

Developers who take advantage of the Origin 90-day distribution offer will be able to provide ongoing support to their fans. Applications are available now at www.origin.com/publishing.

Source: http://www.ea.com/news/origin-waives-distribution-fees-for-crowd-sourced-games

Our favorite deal this week is ARMA2: Combined Operations for $14.99 at Amazon. A sale on a two year old release wouldn’t normally be exciting, but the amazing Day Z zombie mod has us so fascinated that it’s biting into our Diablo III time. Also on Amazon, get Borderlands for $7.49 and Metro 2033 for $4.99.

Meanwhile, GameFly has Torchlight for $3.75, Steam has 33% off Ubisoft games, and GOG is selling EA classics such as Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri for $2.99. See all of this week’s game deals inside!

STEAM

Ubisoft dominates Steam’s big weekend sale with 33% off all the Clancy and Creed you could want.

• 33% off Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter 2 – $6.69
• 33% off Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter – $6.69
• 33% off Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon- $6.69
• 33% off Splinter Cell Conviction – $13.39
• 33% off Assassin’s Creed Revelations – $26.79
• 33% off Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood – $20.09
• 33% off Assassin’s Creed 2 – $13.39
• 33% off Prince of Persia – $13.39
• 33% off Driver San Francisco – $20.09
• 33% off Might Magic Heroes VI – $33.49
• 33% off Might Magic Heroes VI – $33.49
• 75% off Serious Sam Complete Pack – $21.75
• More Steam deals

 

AMAZON

Amazon’s picked up on the popularity of Day Z and has stripped 50% off ARMA 2: Combined Operations, which is all you need to play it. It’s also got good deals on Metro 2033 and Borderlands, and, as always, Tropico 4 is on sale. Maybe they should just change the list price?

• 50% off ArmA 2: Combined Operations – $14.99
• 75% off Metro 2033 – $4.99
• 75% off Medal of Honor – $4.99
• 75% off Borderlands – $7.49
• 50% off Mount Blade: Warband – $10.03
• 30% off Sid Meier’s Civilization V – $21.06
• 25% off Dungeon Siege 3 – $14.95
• 50% off Tropico 4 – $19.99
• 26% off Command Conquer: Red Alert 3 – $14.75
• 33% off Assassin’s Creed Revelations – $26.79
• 15% off Mass Effect 3 – $50.99
• More Amazon PC game downloads

 

GAMEFLY

If Diablo III isn’t your cup of tea, Torchlight is only $3.75 on Gamefly. If you don’t like tea at all, head elsewhere. You can probably find some coffee on Amazon or Steam. METAPHORS!

• 75% off Torchlight – $3.75

 

GAMESTOP

We’re calling this section “GameStop” instead of “Impulse” now, because “Impulse” isn’t used on the site. Though it’s only 20% off, it’s the only place we’re still seeing a Skyrim sale at the moment.

• 20% off The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim – $39.99
• 50% off InMomentum – $4.99
• 78% off 2K Ultimate Bundle – $69.99
• 65% off Tropico 4: Modern Times – $6.99
• 50% off Super Street Fighter IV Arcade Edition – $19.99
• More GameStop deals

 

GREEN MAN GAMING

GMG has now dropped 50% off Super Meat Boy, and this week it introduces a whopping 80% off Deus Ex: Human Revolution.

• 50% off Super Meat Boy – $7.47
• 80% off Deus Ex: Human Revolution – $5.99
• More deals from Green Man Gaming

 

GOOD OLD GAMES

This week’s themed GOG sale is a good one: 50% off classic EA worlds including Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri, Dungeon Keeper, and Populous!

• 50% off Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri – $2.99
• 50% off Dungeon Keeper – $2.99
• 50% off Dungeon Keeper 2 – $2.99
• 50% off Populous – $2.99
• 50% off Populous 2: Trials of the Olympian Gods- $2.99
• 50% off SimCity 2000 Special Edition – $2.99

 

GAMERSGATE

• 70% off Medal of Honor (2010) – $5.99
• 75% off Medal of Honor: Airborne – $2.49
• More offers from GamersGate

 

Know of any more game deals this weekend? Drop them in the comments!

Source: http://www.pcgamer.com/2012/05/18/weekend-game-deals-armazing-stories/

Virtual machines is one way enterprise IT departments addresses the issue of security when users want to use their own platforms. Virtualized solutions like Citrix and VMWare allow users to run approved applications. These applications run in a server in the local or internet cloud.

However, some power users, including heavy users of graphics and design applications need access to more robust graphics than most virtual solutions provide. The latest versions have allowed high performance GPUs to be virtualized, but it was an expensive solution, since each user still needed a dedicated GPU.

The latest Kepler GPU line from Nvidia, which is the heart of the GTX 680 graphics card, contains hardware virtualization hooks, including a hardware memory management unit capable of translating virtual addresses. But just the hooks alone don’t make a solution, so Nvidia is including a software based GPU hypervisor and manageability tools. The entire package is called Nvidia VGX, and will also include boards running four modest GPUs with just 192 cores each, which can be installed in enterprise servers.

The VGX Hypervisor integrates into commercial hypervisors, like Citrix XenServer. When users are running graphics intensive applications off the server, the right amount of GPU resources can be virtually allocated. It’s a more cost effective solution than providing a graphics card per user.

Gaming from the Cloud

Cloud gaming services, like Gakai and OnLive, render games on servers in the cloud using massive banks of GPUs. However, their Achilles’ heel has been latency. While part of this issue is natural latency due to moving packets over the Internet, the cloud-based gaming providers have added latency due to the need to capture and encode the frames to video.

Nvidia’s solution include boards with two Kepler GPUs, totaling 3,072 GPU cores. Each GPU also has a fixed hardware video encoder built in. The combination of Kepler’s power efficiency and the fixed function video encoder substantially reduces both power and the latency due to the encode step. Gamers playing games streamed over the Internet this way should see lower latencies and an improved gaming experience. Server side latency is reduced to as little as 10 milliseconds.

What’s more, gamers using these streaming services can play on any platform – PC, Mac, tablet or phone – with just a lightweight client application. Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang noted that some LG HDTVs will have Gakai’s client built into their smart TV infrastructure.

Source: http://www.pcworld.com/article/255650/nvidia_makes_the_gpu_virtual.html

SAN JOSE, CA–(Marketwire -05/16/12)-
GPU Technology Conference — NVIDIA today announced availability of the NVIDIA® Tesla® K10 GPU accelerator, designed to address the most difficult challenges in two high-performance computing (HPC) markets: seismic data processing in oil and gas exploration, and signal and image processing in the defense industry.

The Tesla K10 is based on the new NVIDIA Kepler™ computing architecture, the fastest, most efficient, highest-performance computing architecture ever built.

The Kepler architecture enables two high-performance Tesla K10 GPUs to be placed on a single accelerator board. Delivering an aggregate performance of 4.58 teraflops of single-precision floating point and 320 gigabytes per second memory bandwidth, the Tesla K10 is the world’s highest throughput GPU accelerator.

The Tesla K10 GPU was introduced at the GPU Technology Conference (GTC), as part of a series of announcements from NVIDIA, all of which can be accessed in the GTC online press room.

Seismic Data Processing — Oil and Gas
Seismic processing uses large data centers to crunch through petabytes of information about the Earth’s subsurface area, generated from reflected seismic waves. Geophysicists analyze the resulting 2D and 3D images to discover oil and gas deposits, and to determine the best and safest locations to drill.

NVIDIA GPUs improve the accuracy of seismic processing by enabling the use of more detailed, computationally intensive seismic processing software algorithms such as reverse time migration, full waveform inversion and Kirchoff time / depth migration.

Leading seismic processing companies — including Schlumberger, CGGVeritas, and TGS — and oil and gas companies — such as Chevron, Petrobras, Total, ENI, Repsol and Saudi Aramco — are using GPUs to dramatically increase their success rate in the identification of new reserves. By generating higher-quality images in a more affordable and timely fashion, GPUs give these companies a much greater degree of accuracy and confidence in drilling decisions.

“The Tesla K10 is simply amazing,” said Paulo Souza, developer in the Geophysical Technology Group at Petrobras RTM. “My seismic application is 1.8x faster on the K10, compared with the Tesla M2090 GPU within the same power envelope. This transformational technology will dramatically accelerate our ability to find and safely reach new oil and gas reserves, as 90 percent of our computational power comes from the GPUs.”

Signal and Image Processing — Defense
The NVIDIA Tesla K10 GPU can help agencies increase national security by improving the quality, and speeding the delivery of, actionable video analytics and image forensics to security and law-enforcement officials. GPUs speed up by as much as 100x the process of analyzing thousands of video feeds generated by security cameras and drones, enabling analysts to better identify events and individuals of interest.

“The massive amount of video data being generated from security cameras and UAVs presents a ‘new big data’ problem for the defense industry,” said Yiannis Antoniades, director of ISR Technology at BAE Systems. “We now have broad access to robust, high-quality video, but often we cannot analyze it quickly enough to generate actionable intelligence. GPUs are being used to accelerate nearly every aspect of video analytics, from video stabilization to orthorectification, enabling us to provide real, valuable data to the field quicker than ever before.”

Availability
The new NVIDIA Tesla K10 GPU Computing Accelerator is available beginning this month from leading OEMs, including Appro Supercomputer Solutions, Dell, HP, IBM, SGI and Supermicro, as well as through NVIDIA distribution partners. More information about the Tesla K10 is available on the NVIDIA Tesla website.

About NVIDIA Tesla GPUs
NVIDIA Tesla GPUs are massively parallel accelerators based on the NVIDIA CUDA® parallel computing platform. Tesla GPUs are designed from the ground up for power-efficient, high performance computing, computational science and supercomputing, delivering dramatically higher application acceleration for a range of scientific and commercial applications than a CPU-only approach. Today, Tesla GPUs power three of the world’s top five supercomputers.

To learn more about CUDA or download the latest version, visit the CUDA website. Follow us on Twitter (@NVIDIATesla).

About GTC
The GPU Technology Conference (GTC) advances global awareness of GPU computing and visualization, and their importance to the future of science and innovation. View the latest news from NVIDIA and its partners in the GTC press room.

About NVIDIA
NVIDIA (NVDA) awakened the world to computer graphics when it invented the GPU in 1999. Today, its processors power a broad range of products from smartphones to supercomputers. NVIDIA’s mobile processors are used in cell phones, tablets and auto infotainment systems. PC gamers rely on GPUs to enjoy spectacularly immersive worlds. Professionals use them to create 3D graphics and visual effects in movies and to design everything from golf clubs to jumbo jets. And researchers utilize GPUs to advance the frontiers of science with high performance computing. The company has more than 4,500 patents issued, allowed or filed, including ones covering ideas essential to modern computing. For more information, see www.nvidia.com.

Certain statements in this press release including, but not limited to statements as to: the availability, benefits and impact of NVIDIA Tesla K10 GPUs; and the effects of the company’s patents on modern computing are forward-looking statements that are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause results to be materially different than expectations. Important factors that could cause actual results to differ materially include: global economic conditions; our reliance on third parties to manufacture, assemble, package and test our products; the impact of technological development and competition; development of new products and technologies or enhancements to our existing products and technologies; market acceptance of our products or our partners’ products; design, manufacturing or software defects; changes in consumer preferences or demands; changes in industry standards and interfaces; unexpected loss of performance of our products or technologies when integrated into systems; as well as other factors detailed from time to time in the reports NVIDIA files with the Securities and Exchange Commission, or SEC, including its Form 10-K for the fiscal period ended January 29, 2012. Copies of reports filed with the SEC are posted on the company’s website and are available from NVIDIA without charge. These forward-looking statements are not guarantees of future performance and speak only as of the date hereof, and, except as required by law, NVIDIA disclaims any obligation to update these forward-looking statements to reflect future events or circumstances.

© 2012 NVIDIA Corporation. All rights reserved. NVIDIA, the NVIDIA logo, Tesla, Kepler and CUDA are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of NVIDIA Corporation in the U.S. and other countries. Other company and product names may be trademarks of the respective companies with which they are associated. Features, pricing, availability, and specifications are subject to change without notice.

Image Available: http://www2.marketwire.com/mw/frame_mw?attachid=1985698

Source: http://finance.yahoo.com/news/nvidia-tesla-k10-gpu-accelerates-130000921.html

A reader asked if I could do a post about blackberry; how to eradicate it and dispose of it so it doesn’t come back. A simple request, but one that I don’t have an easy answer for. At first I thought that finding an answer would be up there with solving the great questions of our time – how do you achieve world peace? What is the purpose of the Kardashians? Why did my broccoli bolt? So I did some research.

Blackberries are brambles – perennial plants that grow canes from a crown or a mass of roots under the soil. The plants spread when birds and animals eat the berries and excrete the seeds. The plants can also spread from root and cane cuttings. They fruit on two-year-old wood, that is, canes that have been around for two years. So if you can stop the plant in its first two years of life before it can set fruit, you can slow down its spread. The plant flushes in spring, but the leaves die back in winter. 

We have a tiny patch of blackberry in our lawn, of all places. When we moved in it was just a tangle of canes in the lawn by the path, which my partner slashed with his machete down to the ground. I think he may even have dug up the roots. We were at that point where we were about to start hacking up agapanthus and taking them in trailerloads to the dump, so the blackberry bits must have gone with it. Every now and then a little shoot pops up, but because it’s in the lawn, we just mow the thing down and it hasn’t bothered us since. I’m sure that when we come to getting rid of the path (it bisects the only flat ground we have, making it an obstacle for four-year-old football players) we’ll dig it out properly. 

You can see where the blackberry was to the right of the green watering can beside the path.

Across the road at our local sports playing field, it’s a different story. One side of the park has a steep slope leading down to the levelled out playing field, and this bank is covered in brambles, wandering willie, foxgloves, and all sorts of other stuff. I even found Italian parsley growing there over summer. The council likes to come along just as the berries are getting ripe and cut the whole lot back. This strategy obviously doesn’t work, because the brambles are back by spring and the plants have been allowed to set fruit, so birds will be happily pooping out seeds in the vicinity.

According to this article from Massey University, blackberry seedlings can be kept under control by grazing, and getting a goat might be an idea if you live in a rural area, as they love to eat blackberry and can control large infestations.

Going the herbicide route, the article says metsulfuron, triclopyr, picloram and glyphosate herbicides can be effective, though some forms of blackberry are resistant to glyphosate. If you’re going to use herbicides, this pamphlet is even more comprehensive. Smaller infestations can be cut down to stumps before spraying. 

In terms of disposing of blackberry, I would take the crowns, with as much dirt shaken off them as possible, and canes to my local landfill as green waste to make sure I didn’t inadvertently reintroduce blackberry through any cane or root pieces that may re-root. 

One thing is clear – getting rid of blackberry is not something you do overnight. It requires a plan, a pair of very sturdy prickle-proof gloves and patience. Good luck. 

Have you battled blackberry? How did you control it? Or did it get the better of you?

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OH but the berries are so good freshly picked in the late summer. Yum, I look forward to finding these tasty morsels every year.

I have a small patch of blackberry – it is slowly taking over the spot where plants that get purchased but still figuring out where to plant them get put. Sadly it hasn’t fruited, and will be getting the chop over the next few weekends.

The in laws go to Taupo every year in their camper, especially to pick blackberries (from their ‘secret spots’). Their freezer is full of them – used for the rest of the year for pies, jams, jellies and such. Sometimes they pop in to us on the way home and we are given a bag of them… yum!

Vigilant Gel is what you need. This contains Picloram, and is available without an Approved Handler Certificate. When the instructions are followed, there is not much it won’t get, although a second application is occasionally required.

more importantly, can you tell us how to get rid of those pesky apples and androids? LoL

Source: http://www.stuff.co.nz/life-style/blogs/woman-v-wild/6942005/The-scourge-of-blackberry

by William D’Angelo, posted 18 hours ago / 1,038 Views

Retailer GameStop has reported on its quarter one sales for 2012. Year on year revenue fell 12.2 percent to $2 billion in 2012, from $2.28 billion in 2011. Profits dropped from $80.4 million the same quarter a year ago, to $72.5 million. GameStop has forecasted sales for the rest of 2012 to be flat to at most down five percent.

New game hardware dropped from $432.2 million in the first quarter 2011 to $348.6 million quarter one 2012 and new software fell to $731.1 million, from $914.7 million. Used hardware and software dropped slightly from $625.0 million to $619.0 million. Digital, mobile, peripheral and other items are lumped together which was down to $309.3 million, from $303.5 million. The one bright spot is the increase in digital sales, which increased 23 percent year on year.

“GameStop continues to outperform the market in new game sales through the late stages of this console cycle,” said CEO Paul Raines. “Despite slower store traffic during the quarter, we achieved our earnings target due primarily to gross margin expansion and positive profit contributions from our pre-owned, mobile and digital businesses. We expect those segments to fill the profitability gap as we transition to the new console cycle.”

Iveyboi (17 hours ago)

Fuck Gamestop

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Salnax (14 hours ago)

Why? The one by me provides good service and a wide variety of games.

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withdreday (12 hours ago)

They open up brand new games, overprice used ones, and at checkout, try to sell you everything but the kitchen sink.

Is there any question why their sales are down?

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thewastedyouth (17 hours ago)

I hate gamestop!!! can I freaking buy a game without some jerk trying to sell me other crap even though I tell him no like 50 times

bitch slap that guy

( •_•)

( •_•)-

(_)

Deal with it.

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Salnax (14 hours ago)

Unfortunately, this is indicative of the industry in general at the moment. The HD systems have not made up for the fall of the Wii, and the switch to the 8th generation is slow for handhelds.

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oldschoolfool (15 hours ago)

Gamestop sucks,but I go there all the time,due to there greater inventory.

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LivingMetal (16 hours ago)

Almost the only time I go into Gamestop now is to hunt for a rare PSP game in near mint condition at a discounted price, or there is a pre-order item I have to have to exclusive to Gamestop. Amazon is my friend when it comes to gaming shopping.

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Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/VGChartz/~3/dOjYAWHSWik/

irishtimes.com – Last Updated: Friday, May 18, 2012, 07:33Minister for Jobs Richard Bruton has welcomed the announcement that IBM will locate its global services integration hub in Ireland.

CIARA O’BRIEN

IBM is to create several hundred jobs at its Dublin-based technology campus with the opening of a new global services integration hub in Mulhuddart.

The jobs boost for the area comes after Minister for Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation Richard Bruton met IBM executives on a recent trip to the US.

“Central to this Government’s plan for jobs and growth is developing and deepening the impact of major foreign companies here, and targeting sectors such as technology where we have developed major strengths over recent decades,” Mr Bruton said.

“In recent months we have seen some major successes in attracting new investment from multinationals. This decision by IBM, one of the world’s leading technology companies, that it is locating more innovative operations here with the creation several hundred jobs, is great news for west Dublin and Ireland.”

The multinational currently employs more than 3,000 people in Dublin, Cork and Galway, dividing its activities between research and software development, and services.

The company has based its European sales and services support centre in Blanchardstown, Dublin. It employs about 433,000 people around the world.

Taoiseach Enda Kenny said it was “most welcome news” for the country, and was one of several recent investment announcements from firms such as Apple and Cisco that proved the value of economic stability in attracting new investment.

“It also demonstrates the value of Ireland’s position in Europe when it comes to our ability to attract overseas investment,” he said.

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Nvidia’s taken the covers off of what it calls the “most complex” commercial chip on the planet.

We know all about Nvidia’s GK104 chip, which has most recently been flying through our labs in a dual configuration in the sexy GeForce GTX 690. While that card is the king of gaming (for now), the big daddy of Nvidia Kepler-based GPUs isn’t even here yet.

This week at the Nvidia GPU Technology Conference in San Jose, the graphics company took the wraps off of the Kepler-based GK110 GPU that will power the Tesla K20 – a professional-level graphics card for serious business.

The big reveal at this conference from a hardware standpoint definitely is the GK110, which packs an astonishing 7.1 billion transistors on a 28nm process. It also promises to have all the compute features that some were feeling missing from the GK104. Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang said at a post-keynote QA that the GK110 is “the most complex IC commercially available on planet.”

In comparison, next in complexity and transistor count is a chip from Xilinx called the Virtex-7 2000T FPGA, which integrates 2 million logic cells and 6.8 billion transistors. To help put that in better perspective, Intel’s 10-core Xeon Westmere-EX has 2.6 billion transistors.

The GK110 features 15 SMX units with 192 CUDA cores per unit, which gives a grand total of 2,880 CUDA cores. Nvidia hasn’t yet revealed full specifications on the Tesla K20 products yet, but indicated that not all boards will have all 15 SMX units running. Regardless, people can safely expect the use of around at least 2,496 CUDA cores from most Tesla K20 implementations.

The memory bus has been upgraded to 384-bit with six 64-bit controllers in parallel. As for memory capacity itself, Nvidia did not specify. When pushed for an answer, Huang said simply, “Not enough.”

To clarify, he added, “As much fast memory as possible behind 384 bits,” but no matter what, it will “likely not be enough, because the problems [the K20 is] trying to solve are so huge.”

Unfortunately, the GK110 isn’t quite finished yet, so we won’t be seeing this one until Q4 2012. When it does become available the GK110 GPU is expected to be incorporated into the new Titan supercomputer at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee and the Blue Waters system at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

For those who want a Kepler-based Tesla product today, Nvidia also announced was the GK104-based Tesla K10, which is available immediately. This accelerator board features two GK104 Kepler GPUs that deliver an aggregate performance of 4.58 teraflops of peak single-precision floating point and 320 GB per second memory bandwidth.

The Tesla K10 has already found use in the oil and gas industries, as well as signal and image processing.

 

“Fermi was a major step forward in computing,” said Bill Dally, chief scientist and senior vice president of research at Nvidia. “It established GPU-accelerated computing in the top tier of high performance computing and attracted hundreds of thousands of developers to the GPU computing platform. Kepler will be equally disruptive, establishing GPUs broadly into technical computing, due to their ease of use, broad applicability and efficiency.”

As Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang detailed at his keynote, the Kepler-based Tesla cards feature three new innovations that help add to the edge over Fermi. They are:

• SMX Streaming Multiprocessor — The basic building block of every GPU, the SMX streaming multiprocessor was redesigned from the ground up for high performance and energy efficiency. It delivers up to three times more performance per watt than the Fermi streaming multiprocessor, making it possible to build a supercomputer that delivers one petaflop of computing performance in just 10 server racks. SMX’s energy efficiency was achieved by increasing its number of CUDA architecture cores by four times, while reducing the clock speed of each core, power-gating parts of the GPU when idle and maximizing the GPU area devoted to parallel-processing cores instead of control logic.
• Dynamic Parallelism — This capability enables GPU threads to dynamically spawn new threads, allowing the GPU to adapt dynamically to the data. It greatly simplifies parallel programming, enabling GPU acceleration of a broader set of popular algorithms, such as adaptive mesh refinement, fast multipole methods and multigrid methods.
• Hyper-Q — This enables multiple CPU cores to simultaneously use the CUDA architecture cores on a single Kepler GPU. This dramatically increases GPU utilization, slashing CPU idle times and advancing programmability. Hyper-Q is ideal for cluster applications that use MPI.
   

Read more at our liveblog of the Nvidia GTC keynote, and find out what applications Nvidia has planned for gaming in the cloud with GeForce Grid.

_{Read more from @MarcusYam on Twitter.}

Source: http://www.tomshardware.com/news/nvidia-tesla-k20-gk110-gpu,15683.html

CESG, the UK government’s information assurance body, has approved Research In Motion’s (RIM) BlackBerry 7 OS for government use.

This will enable public sector staff to use the latest BlackBerry smartphones available in the UK, which include the BlackBerry Bold 9900, BlackBerry Torch 9810 and Blackberry Curve 9380.

According to RIM, the BlackBerry Enterprise Solution is the only mobile solution that CESG has approved to protect data classified up to ‘Restricted’ level, which is business Impact Level 3 (IL3).

There are six impact levels, starting from the lowest security level of IL0, to ‘Top Secret’ at IL6.

Public sector organisations that use BlackBerry smartphones include the Ministry of Defence (MoD), police forces like South Yorkshire Police, NHS and local government authorities.

“BlackBerry smartphones are enabling greater efficiencies and improved citizen service by providing access to data such as patient records, the Police National Computer and other government systems at the point of need,” said Stephen Bates, UK managing director of RIM.

Source: http://rss.feedsportal.com/c/270/f/470440/s/1f78c258/l/0Lnews0Btechworld0N0Cmobile0Ewireless0C3358450A0Cblackberry0E70Egets0Esecurity0Eapproval0Efrom0Egovernment0C0Dolo0Frss/story01.htm

The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings, follow-up to The Witcher, a well-received PC game from 2007, has been long-heralded as one of the stand-out RPGs of this generation since it emerged to critical acclaim on the PC in mid-2011. Nearly a year later and lucky Xbox 360 gamers finally have the chance to discover what all the fuss is about. Luckily, they will find an RPG experience quite unlike anything the console has to offer. Artistic ambition is met with technical scope; a grandiose plot with sharp narrative and exquisite details are driven without the need for overstatement. It is, in effect, the perfect epic. We originally reviewed the PC version here, where Arthur Kubrick has detailed many of the game’s characteristics, much of which still applies to the Xbox 360 version. The intention of this review is to relate the experience of the Xbox 360 version, in tandem with the previous review’s more technical critique of the over-arching game, from the viewpoint of someone who has never played the PC version (the likely audience for this game).

The Witcher 2 follows the adventures of Geralt of Rivia as he pursues (surprisingly) an assassin of kings, who (stunningly) has been murdering monarchs. If ever a subtitle sets up a game, this is it. Such a dismissal, however, is doing a great disservice to the grand, sweeping narrative that engulfs hardcore do-gooder Geralt, resulting in him pilfering in the affairs of all men, women, elves, and dwarves great and small. He is backed up in these intrigues by his sorceress girlfriend, Triss Marigold, and the head of the Temerian Special Forces, Vernon Roche, along with a cast of more minor characters. If little of that makes sense, or appears vague, do not worry; the game doesn’t necessarily assume a prior knowledge of Andrzej Sapkowski’s fantasy world (although it does reward players who do), and information can be quickly and easily gathered from the extensive journal. Many of the major characters are well-developed, with few rarely possessing no redeeming features (Loredo, Commander of Foltest is a notable exception); any inconsistencies that arise due to plot decisions can be laid to the difficulty in holding a consistent plot-line when a player can make entirely contradictory narrative choices. You care about them, question them, or even detest them, because their problems are recognisable, their difficulties understandable; unfounded prejudice, racial hatred, the confrontation between the individual and the community. That one man’s freedom fighter is another man’s terrorist has never been more relevant in a video game construction.

Whilst this dropped-in-the-deep-end feel can be confusing and somewhat imposing, it works to give the effect that you are a pawn in a world far bigger, and with far more issues, than you can possibly comprehend. Racial tensions threaten to boil over at any moment, kings barter over high politics and garrisons intimidate those they are supposed to protect. It is a tough and dark world, more oppressive and cynical than most fantasy environments; elves, dark and brooding, serve as Scoia’tel freedom fighters, humans appear as oppressors (or are they?), whilst dwarfs straddle the middle line, dipping a toe in as they please. Although many characters, disappointingly, do little more than grunt or nod, those who you do interact with depict a harsh reality of little towns forgotten by gods and people alike. The aesthetics of the game compliment this pessimistic reality. Streets are gritty, the populace weary and the stone worn, whilst reminders of local tensions lie everywhere; cages, containing the corpses of captured Scoia’tel hang over the walls of the border-town Flotsam, a reminder of the battle between humans and elves.

The effect, strangely, is to make you care about the people and the decisions you make more than if this were a gleaming fantasy world where everything was hunky-dory. You consider every moral option to a far greater extent than you would in, say, Mass Effect, where the fun, and thus evil option tends to be the one that prevails. Not here. The real glory is that I genuinely cannot tell to what extent my decisions have made an effect, except for the obvious partition at the end of Act One. This is an indication of good, seamless story-telling, something far more effective than a swinging moral barometer. Or, it could simply mean that any choice is superfluous, and any real decisions would get in the way of a good story. The decision, it appears on the surface, is yours.

Perhaps the most referenced feature of Witcher 2 on the PC was the fantastic graphics; on a full rig there is little that can match its splendour. For a machine pushing six years old, the Xbox 360 does an excellent job of keeping pace, although it clearly struggles at times under the pressure. The environments are fantastically detailed with plenty of variety, whilst characters portray plenty of, ahem, character. At its best, when sunlight drips over the lilted roses of the Elven gardens, little on the 360 can match it. Unfortunately, there are a range of glitches which hamper the effect; there can be a large amount of pop-up, especially early in the game during engine-rendered conversations, whilst some quests freeze mid-way through, leaving little option but to reset the console. For the most part, however, this isn’t the case, and you can’t help but be sucked in by the seductively plausible vistas, luscious forests and screen-engulfing battles. CD Projekt RED must be applauded for translating the graphical experience (for the most part) successfully onto the 360.

The varied and epic sound-scape is marvellous and fits the atmosphere perfectly; orchestral scores hum in the forest and roar in battle, never feeling too overstated in the pursuit of a suitable oracular experience. These scores also stand on their own, as shown by the extremely listenable soundtrack included with the game. Probably the most impressive element is the voice-acting; careful consideration has been paid to thwart the potential to overact, whilst regional English accents (mainly Northern) have been used to add a rough authenticity to the different styles of characters. Kings speak with austerity, courtiers with the right balance between respect and malice, and soldiers sound like they’re fixing your roof in Barnsley. However, it’s probably worth playing with subtitles on; without is more cinematic, but there is a chance you may miss information key to making a decision.

Sometimes, of course, it is worth remembering that this is actually a game, and one with a highly developed combat system at its core. Fighting involves a mixture of preparation, agility and timing; it may seem complicated at first, and you will die a lot, but the satisfaction and rewards once it is grasped are tenfold. The tutorial explains things relatively well, but does not suggest how useful a tactic just running away can be. Firstly, potions must be prepared, either defensive or offensive, to give Geralt the advantage in battle; this is absolutely key, and can be result in success or failure. During combat, you either use a steel sword for humans or a silver sword for monsters, which are wielded with either strong or quick attacks. Signs return – basic magical powers which need to charge up to use; these can range from the defensive Quen, to Yrden traps and Igni fire blasts. Relatively simple, but the devil is in the nuisances; it’s quite difficult, even on normal, but victory is all the more satisfying because it has been earned. The conversion to the Xbox 360 has been kind to the combat system; the moves have been well mapped onto the controller, resulting in a natural and intuitive system. Targeting can get a bit lost sometimes, resulting in stuck cameras, whilst anything beyond two enemies at once can be fiendishly difficult, but for the most part it is a fun and rewarding system.

Special mention should quickly be made of the quality of the retail package. CD Projeckt RED and Namco (this is a European copy) have created a gaming package of excellent value, despite the fact it is, really, just an extended port. The Enhanced Edition comes with four hours of extra gameplay, 36 minutes of new cinematics (the intro and outro really are quite something), hardboard packaging (sometimes signed by the producer), a soundtrack CD, a world map, and a mini-game guide. Combine that with the 40 hours or so worth of gameplay (an estimate; there are plenty of characterful side-quests, but the narrative is so absorbing you may find yourself ignoring them), and you have yourself an excellent value package.

The Witcher 2: Assassin of Kings offers a unique RPG experience for the Xbox 360; a sweeping, focused narrative on a grand scale, underpinned by a sterling and deep combat system, and supported by a dark and intriguing game world. The transition to console has been kind to the game; the graphics are some of the best on the system, whilst the combat works very well with a controller. The narrative is as strong as ever, as is the sense of character in the world. Everything that the PC game did well is here, with many of the outstanding issues ironed out; it doesn’t look as good as it does on a top-class rig, but it could never be expected to. The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings Enhanced Edition is not only a great package but one of the best RPGs the Xbox 360 has to offer. If you want a strong narrative with epic ideals and rewarding gameplay then look no further; Geralt of Rivia is waiting.

This review is based on a retail copy of The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings Enhanced Edition for the Xbox 360.

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/gamrReview/~3/M5NwL6h-YcE/

by William D’Angelo, posted 10 hours ago / 945 Views

Walking Dead, the video game based off of the TV series with the same name, has been downloaded more than one million times in two weeks. The game is available for download on the XBLA, PSN, PC, and Mac. This is also the fastest selling Telltale Games in history. The first of many DLC is set to launch in June, which like the series will be released in episodes.

“Premiering The Walking Dead game series to record numbers across so many diverse platforms is a tremendous achievement that shows the value of bringing strong storytelling and game play together,” said Dan Connors, CEO of Telltale Games. “The tailored narrative design puts gamers in control of their own story within the universe of The Walking Dead in a way that appeals equally to hardcore gamers and to more casual gamers who are fans of the franchise.”

“The most exciting aspect of getting off to such a great start is that this is just the beginning of the five episode series,” continued Connors. “The Walking Dead fans are going to experience some really great moments in the months ahead that are uniquely influenced by the choices they make throughout the season.”

VGKing (10 hours ago)

Zombie stuff always sells like crazy.
Gives me hope for The Last of Us!

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snowy4manutd (2 hours ago)

Seems good for a reasonably short time in development

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cusman (7 hours ago)

Good for all involved. I am always happy to hear good games doing well commercially as well.

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Areym (8 hours ago)

Hell yeah! Just finished it today and it was pure awesome!

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Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/VGChartz/~3/awDbQeRkxIo/

Epic have been showing off the next iteration of the Unreal Engine to developers for a short while. Wired got a look recently, and have posted their impressions alongside a few new shots showing a fiery demon, some busy wireframe scenes and a lovely vista.

Epic haven’t released the demo video yet, but Wired describe plenty of new tech, including an advanced particle rendering systems and a lighting program that models the way light bounces around rooms entirely in real time, bypassing the typical level design techniques that “bake” light and shadow into the textures of a scene. The days of designers hand-placing individual light shafts in a scene may well be over.

Epic demonstrated the subtlety of the new lighting system by bowling a ball of light down a dark hallway, which surely looked more impressive than that time they Epic rolled a cube of meat around Gears of War 2 to demonstrate soft body physics. Unreal Engine 4 will also include a new version of the user friendly Kismet programming system, improved liquid simulation and better scene destruction tech.

Hopefully Epic will show the video soon, their last big tech demo, codenamed Samaritan, was pretty spectacular.

Source: http://www.pcgamer.com/2012/05/17/unreal-engine-4-screenshots-feature-fire-demon-and-snowy-landscapes/

Source: http://www.pcgamer.com/2012/05/17/grim-dawn-trailer-shows-soldier-class-38-hours-until-kickstarter-campaign-closes/

One of the many intriguing features of action MMO Tera is the ability for players to be elected “Vanarch” of any of the game’s zones, and it’s kicking off right now. These elected player officials will preside over their domains for three-week terms, able to make decisions such as enabling or disabling open PvP and how much of the gold you earn is taxed to support the state.

To run for Vanarch of a province (a small group of connected zones), a player must be Level 50, leader of a Level 3 guild with at least 20 members, and pay 3000 gold and 100 Catharnach awards (a currency for buying guild perks.) Registration will be open for one week (May 18-25 for the first cycle.) The following week, each player will have one vote to cast per province for the registered candidate of their choice. The three-week Vanarch term overlaps with the registration and election cycle, so aspiring career politicians will have one week off before having to prep for the next election.

If you’re lucky enough to be elected, some of your powers will include:

• The ability to tax all NPC vendor transactions, such as those shiny, shiny crystals, (minimum 1%) and spend the earned gold for the good of your realm… or just pocket it in true politician style.
• Disable open PvP on a zone-by-zone basis on PvP servers. (Players will still be able to flag for voluntary PvP.)
• Earn “Policy Points” when people praise your guild, which can be spent to open up specialty vendors and services normally restricted to capital cities (class trainers, auction house access, etc.)
• Broadcast propoganda across your entire realm via a special chat channel.

 

All of this could be yours! For three weeks, anyway.

The campaigning has already begun, with hub cities like Velika filled with cries of “Vote for (Insert Anime-inspired character name here)!” Ocean, a player on the Valley of the Titans PvP server, has been advertising his campaign on the official forums. He is running on a platform to turn off PvP in some of the game’s lower-level areas. “I, like many other guild leaders of TERA have friends and members who are a low level,” his manifesto states. “I believe it is unfair to the community in general to have level 60s roaming low level areas slaying new players, and thus I vow to protect the lowbies from such incidents.”

Some are not so happy with this idea, presenting an intriguing alternative. Forum poster Philosonaught suggests that, instead of turning off PvP, Vanarchs should raise the tax rate and use the extra coin to hire player PvP militias. Said civil servants would patrol their liege’s zones and attack anyone who tries to prey on low-level characters. This idea evokes many intriguing possibilities on how the political system could evolve beyond the game mechanics built for it.

What would you do if you were given reign over a nation in an MMO?

Source: http://www.pcgamer.com/2012/05/17/teras-election-system-going-live-vote-for-xxpwnznubsxx/

Diablo 3 happened this week. We gathered to talk about the server frustrations, our characters (Josh’s Witch Doctor build is best described as “throwing animals at people”), our favorite abilities, and what we aren’t liking. We also brainstorm what new character class we’d like to see in a Diablo 3 expansion.

After that, Evan gushes about Day Z, the open-world zombie survival mod for Arma 2.

PC Gamer US Podcast 316: Diablo 3, Day Z

Hey. Hey you. Check out all of our Diablo 3 coverage over here.

Have a question, comment, complaint or observation? Leave a voicemail: 1-877-404-1337 ext 724 or email the mp3 to pcgamerpodcast@gmail.com.

Subscribe to the podcast RSS feed.

Follow us on Twitter:
@elahti (Evan Lahti)
@jaugustine (Josh Augustine)
@tyler_wilde (Tyler Wilde)
Asatj (T.J. Hafer)

Source: http://www.pcgamer.com/2012/05/17/pc-gamer-us-podcast-316-diablo-3-day-z/

The iPad and its imaginary, smaller friend.

(Credit:
CNET)

Apple has reportedly already tagged LCD suppliers for an
iPad mini, with an eye toward launching the
tablet in the second half of the year.

This latest scuttlebut comes courtesy of Taiwan news outlet Liberty Times (English translation).

Citing the usual, vague “market rumors” but also a report from Japanese securities firm Macquarie, the Liberty Times said the iPad mini could start shipping by the end of the third quarter with a goal of 6 million units.

That 6 million is the same number projected last month by Chinese online portal Netease.

LG and Au Optronics have already passed Apple’s certification tests to provide the tablet’s LCD panel, the report said. Both have been working to ship the panels for actual production of the diminutive iPad, according to the report.

Further details translated by Japanese blog site Macotakara say TPK Holding will produce 4 million backlight modules, with Chimei Innolux providing an additional 2 million. Nissha Printing would make the tablet’s touch film sensor.

This latest rumor follows other claims, some still tentative, that Apple will unveil a 7-inch iPad this year.

Barclays analyst Ben Reitzes recently pointed to evidence of an iPad mini in the supply chain, as seen by the firm’s global research team. One report said that the small tablet would offer 8GB of storage and sell for $200, while Netease put the price tag in the range of $249 to $299.

The iPad finally got a bit of competition in the fourth quarter from Amazon’s 7-inch
Kindle Fire, which boosted the overall market share for Android tablets.

Apple has since regained lost ground and remains the dominant player in the tablet arena. IHS projects a tablet market share of around 61 percent this year.

Still, the iPad has watched its lead decline amidst a swarm of Android tablets, large and small, released over the past year. An iPad mini could be the ticket to combat the Kindle Fire and other smaller tablets. But Apple typically sets the trends rather following those already set by others. So if we do see an iPad mini this year, I’d expect Apple to add some kind of twist to distinguish it from its Android rivals.

Source: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13579_3-57436077-37/ipad-mini-to-debut-during-second-half-of-2012/?part=rss&subj=crave&tag=title

Nokia has revealed its latest two Windows Phones will go on sale in Australia next month.

At a media event in Sydney last night, the struggling Finnish manufacturer revealed that the Lumia 900, Nokia’s new flagship smartphone, will initially be available through Optus for $0 on the $60 Optus plan or for $699 outright. The cheaper Lumia 610 will sell for $329 through Boost Mobile.

The Lumia 900 is basically a larger Lumia 800. It has a 4.3in screen compared to the much smaller 3.7in panel on the 800, though it uses the same AMOLED display with an identical resolution of 480×800. The Lumia 900 also has the same 8-megapixel camera as the Lumia 800, but it includes a front-facing 1.3-megapixel camera for video calling, a feature absent from the Lumia 800.

These features aside, the Nokia Lumia 900 differs little from the Lumia 800 when it comes to specifications. It is powered by the same single-core 1.4GHz processor and 512MB of RAM, while it also has the same amount of internal memory, 16GB.

Nokia first announced the Lumia 900 in January, but this was a US-only model designed exclusively for carrier ATT. It has since launched an LTE 4G model in Canada through telco Rogers, but the Australian model is not 4G capable.

In addition to the Lumia 900 Nokia will sell the Lumia 610, the baby of the Lumia family, in Australia from June. It will initially be available through Boost Mobile as a prepaid device next month and will then sell through Vodafone and other retailers in July.

The Nokia Lumia 610 is a budget smartphone powered by modest specifications but the hardware restrictions placed on Windows Phones by Microsoft should ensure performance does not suffer. The Nokia Lumia 610 has a 3.7in display with a respectable resolution of 800×480 pixels, significantly more than most low-end Android phones that it will compete with.

Nokia Australia’s managing director Chris Carr said the addition of the Lumia 900 and Lumia 610 in Australia will appeal to business users in addition to consumers.

“When you look at the solution that we are bringing to market, particularly in the business area, there is a very logical fit in terms of the assets that Nokia brings to the table along with Microsoft,” he said. “We’ve seen some fantastic traction already in that business space, in particular companies such as Bridgestone and Billcorp, just to name a few.”

“The introduction of the Nokia Lumia 900 and Nokia Lumia 610 has been very well-received overseas, and we expect a similar consumer reaction here.”

Source: http://www.computerworld.com.au/article/424973/nokia_launches_new_windows_phones/?utm_medium=rss&utm_source=taxonomyfeed

Reserving your Guild Wars character name for use in Guild Wars 2 is easy: just log in to Guild Wars. Any “active” Guild Wars player — meaning you’ve logged in since Jan 1, 2012 — will have his or her name added to a list which will be active during GW2′s Headstart Access period and launch day. During those periods, new players will not be able to claim your name.

The reserved list will be opened to the public sometime after launch day, so if you don’t claim your name early, it’ll be up for grabs. Also note that the list of reserved names will be generated before the Guild Wars 2 launch, so if you haven’t logged in this year, make sure you do it soon to ensure that your name isn’t left off. You wouldn’t want to be stuck with “Wizardex,” would you?

The full explanation of how name transfers will work is available in a post on the ArenaNet blog.

Source: http://www.pcgamer.com/2012/05/17/how-to-preserve-your-guild-wars-character-name-in-guild-wars-2/

The malware business growing around Google Android — now the leading smartphone operating system — is still in its infancy. Today, many of the apps built to steal money from Android users originate from Russia and China, so criminal gangs there have become cyber-trailblazers.

Sophos and Symantec on Wednesday released their latest Android malware discoveries written in Russian. While the language narrows the number of potential victims, the social-engineering tactics used to get Android users to install the malware is universal. The gang tracked by Sophos is using fake antivirus scanners, while Symantec is tracking cybercriminals using mobile websites to offer bogus versions of popular games.

[See also: Companies slow to react to mobile security threat]

Sophos says the criminals are like other entrepreneurs launching startups. They’re starting in Russia, but have far greater ambitions. “I don’t think we can say that they’re necessarily using it as a testing ground — think of it more as a local business that as it grows may gain multinational ambitions,” Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at Sophos, said in an email interview on Wednesday.

While criminals today are writing consumer-focused apps, it’s only a matter of time before the hackers go after corporate data, particularly if the number of people accessing employers’ networks with personal devices continue to grow, experts say. Android is the leading smartphone OS.

In the first quarter, 56% of the smartphones sold ran Android, compared with 23% with Apple iOS, according to the latest figures from Gartner.

The cyber scam tracked by Sophos was reported this week by GFI Lab, which discovered links to the bogus antivirus software on Twitter. Sophos dug deeper and found that the .ru domains pointed to the same Internet protocol address hosted in Ukraine.

When visited, the Web pages serve an Android .apk file that offers an AV scan. If activated, the scan installs an app that uses an icon to trick the victim in to believing it is from Russian security vendor Kaspersky Lab.

Instead of virus protection, the app sends expensive text messages to premium services that charge the Android user through their wireless providers. The malicious code also has the ability to download and install code from the internet.

Symantec’s discovery involves the latest version of the Android.Opfake malware the vendor has been following for a while. In the past, the malware masqueraded as an installer for the Opera Web browser or a pornographic movie, and charged the user when either was downloaded.

The latest version is disguised as popular games made available through dummy sites that link back to a central back-end site that acts as a file generator or repository. Bogus versions of Fruit Ninja, SIMS 3, TempleRun and Angry Birds are used to disguise the malware.

Cluley expects these criminal enterprises to expand, once the founders are confident they can scam people in other countries. “What makes money in Russia today, could be used in attacks against American users tomorrow,” he said.

Read more about wireless/mobile security in CSOonline’s Wireless/Mobile Security section.

Source: http://www.pcworld.com/article/255770/android_hackers_hone_their_skills_in_russia.html

There are nearly 4,000 different types of devices running Android, OpenSignalMaps has found. More than 1,300 of them have custom ROMs that tweak the android.build model.

Android brands are almost as diverse as the models, openSignalMaps discovered. Further, the application programming interface (API) level, meaning the Android version, has also become more fragmented over time.

These facts bear out the general impression that Android is a fragmented operating system. However, that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

Fragmentation “may make things tricky for developers, but by opening up to so many markets by its presence on such a diverse range of devices, it also affords developers huge opportunity,” James Robinson, the lead Android developer and cofounder of OpenSignalMaps, told LinuxInsider.

“Credit should also go to Google’s (Nasdaq: GOOG) Android team, who have continued to provide tools that help developers target many devices,” he added.

What Is Fragmentation, Anyhow?

“Fundamentally, the core of Android doesn’t change; what Google’s giving you is API access to different functionalities” when it releases a new version of Android, such as Honeycomb or Ice Cream Sandwich, Michael Morgan, a senior analyst at ABI Research, told LinuxInsider. “They’re bringing to the table new things you can now do with your app. It doesn’t mean you can’t do the old things any more, it just means you can do new things with it.”

That means older apps will merely be unable to access additional functions offered by new APIs, Morgan pointed out. On the other hand, devs don’t necessarily use all the functions of any API. “Just because you have a giant supermarket doesn’t mean you have to buy everything in it,” Morgan explained. “It depends on what you want to do with your apps.”

For supporting screen size, devs can either use dynamic design or hard-code support into their app. “Say you want 20 percent of whatever screen a device uses to be blue no matter the size of the screen,” Morgan said. “That’s one way to program. But, for graphic designers and people who stake their lives on how beautiful they can make things, they can hard-code the design and have only three screens it can work on.”

The Agony and the Ecstasy of Fragmentation

Android has a “good API set,” Sam Abadir, chief technology officer at AppMobi, said.

On the other hand, “it’s becoming impossible to target [Android] as a platform since almost every device has its own aspect ratio and resolution,” Abadir told LinuxInsider. “There are so many OS versions — 2, 3, 4 — that, in combination with OEM modifications, the cross-product results in thousands of variations on a testing matrix, meaning it’s impossible to test [the product] thoroughly.”

Android fragmentation “is definitely a problem, but it’s not insurmountable,” Andy Jones, senior Android developer at PayAnywhere, told LinuxInsider. “The important thing to do is identify the minimum API level that your app will run well on and program for that API level.”

Although there were “significant paradigm shifts” between the smartphone and tablet versions, meaning Gingerbread and Honeycomb, generally speaking devs don’t need to rewrite code in order for the newer versions of Android to run their app, Jones said. In that case, however, the apps won’t take advantage of the better APIs in the newer versions of Android.

The Thousand Faces of Android

Custom ROMs are “implemented by every major carrier and every third party company that I know of” because they are “the only way they can distinguish themselves,” PayAnywhere’s Jones said. However, the differences between ROMs “generally don’t hurt application developers — as long as one uses mostly the generic Android APIs.”

Screen support “is by far the biggest fragmentation problem,” Jones stated. Different image and layouts may need to be created for different screen resolutions, densities and sizes, especially if the accuracy of taps, is very important.

Another problem is that some brands fail to correctly implement APIs, openSignalMaps’ Robinson pointed out. For example, getting signal strength updates and tower locations “doesn’t work on many TouchWhizz devices from Samsung.”

While Google “does good work explaining the API changes and how to handle things when old functions are killed off, they need to do more to ensure that the APIs are implemented as uniformly as possible within the custom user interfaces,” Robinson stated.

Source: http://ectnews.com.feedsportal.com/c/34520/f/632001/s/1f74324f/l/0L0Slinuxinsider0N0Crsstory0C751420Bhtml/story01.htm

Billionaire Warren Buffett’s company is making another foray into newspapers, agreeing to buy 63 newspapers from Media General Inc. for $142 million.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/uk-agency-approves-blackberry-7-os-government-104711665--finance.html

View all images

The BlackBerry 7.1 operating system (OS) is now available for download in Australia from Optus and Vodafone.

The updated OS by Research In Motion, which rolled out in other countries from mid-April 2012, is compatible with BlackBerry Bold 9900, Torch 9860 and 9810, and Curve 9360.

Its new features include ‘BlackBerry Tag’ for near field communication (NFC)-enabled BlackBerry smartphones, a mobile hotspot for up to five WiFi-enabled devices, and Liquid Graphics.

The BlackBerry 7.1, along with its BlackBerry 7 OS predecessor, have been evaluated and approved for government use by the Defence Signals Directorate (DSD) of the Australian government.

The DSD certification guarantees the OSes meet the security standards of the Australian and New Zealand governments.

Follow Diana Nguyen on Twitter: @diananguyen9

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Source: http://www.computerworld.com.au/article/424854/blackberry_7_1_os_lands_australia/?utm_medium=rss&utm_source=sectionfeed

ARMONK, N.Y., May 17, 2012 /PRNewswire/ – IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced it is helping improve healthcare delivery in Haiti through its collaboration with ‘Colleagues In Care’ Global Health Network.

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The organization is using IBM cloud-based social analytics and collaboration services to provide the global network of healthcare volunteers with immediate access to critical data and information for the current healthcare needs of the Haitian citizens. The network consists of approximately 200 doctors, nurses, and business professionals coming together virtually from all around the globe including Canada, China, Haiti, France, Ireland, Italy, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

Prior to the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, the country’s healthcare programs were already poorly staffed with limited resources. According to the 2009 World Health Organization statistics, Haiti had one nurse and three doctors for every 10,000 people. Infant and maternal mortality, hypertension and stroke, and life threatening illnesses were among the highest in the world.

Today, Colleagues In Care is using the IBM SmartCloud for Social Business to virtually connect medical workers and volunteers from around the globe. Using the IBM SmartCloud, the volunteers and those on the front lines taking care of patients are armed with an online medical knowledge system that includes treatment options, clinical pathways, and best practices specific to the situation in Haiti.

For example, doctors on the ground in Haiti now have immediate access to information. Previously, a healthcare worker typically had no access to a specialist to consult about a specific medical condition. Via the IBM SmartCloud, they can now immediately determine how to best care for a patient directly in front of them, at the same time collaborating with colleagues to determine more population-based strategies of effective care.

Medical workers can then develop, post, and share their stories about their experiences, providing this critical background to incoming medical workers. The volunteers are also participating in approximately 70 online communities on topics including “Mother and Baby,” “Hypertension,” “Heart Failure,” “Stroke,” and “Eye Care” to track initiatives from start to finish.

“At Colleagues In Care, we share a deep level of purpose to stand with and support our medical colleagues in Haiti,” said John Kenerson, M.D. and co-founder of Colleagues In Care with his wife Lisbet Hanson, M.D. “Working with IBM, we are helping the citizens of Haiti find relief from the devastations they continue to face daily. Many of our medical volunteers come from highly respected medical institutions, and we’re humbled by the opportunity to share our knowledge with those that need it most.”

Through social networking, file sharing, Web-based meetings, activities, and forums, the volunteers are sharing ideas and information as if they were in the same room.

A video of Colleagues In Care using IBM cloud technology can be found here.

The medical knowledge system has been so effective that Colleagues In Care is looking to replicate the system in other under-served regions and countries facing low and limited resources.

IBM’s partnership with CIC began as the result of an IBM Services Grant, but has evolved to include dozens of IBM employees from around the world who volunteer their expertise to help connect medical colleagues. The long-standing commitment to working with charitable organizations around the world is part of IBM’s On Demand Community, an innovative global program reflecting IBM’s strategy to help the world work better, making a wide range of knowledge and expertise available to volunteers.

About Colleagues In Care:

CIC has connected many of the world’s leading healthcare organizations and associations’ medical specialists focused on a similar cause, mission and passion. The CIC best possible practices technology-based volunteer model can be replicated anywhere. There is no limitation to the potential reach of the Colleagues In Care healthcare collaboration model.

For more information, including how to volunteer and join CIC, or to make a charitable contribution, visit www.ColleaguesInCare.net.

About IBM:

For more information about IBM’s SmartCloud for Social Business, please visit www.ibm.com/smartcloud/social or follow @IBMCloud on Twitter.

Media Contact:
Hanna Smigala
IBM Media Relations
1-720-342-5343
smigala@us.ibm.com

Source: http://finance.yahoo.com/news/ibm-collaborates-colleagues-care-empower-040200631.html

SAN JOSE, CA–(Marketwire -05/15/12)-
GPU Technology Conference - NVIDIA today unveiled a new family of Tesla® GPUs based on the revolutionary NVIDIA® Kepler™ GPU computing architecture, which makes GPU-accelerated computing easier and more accessible for a broader range of high performance computing (HPC) scientific and technical applications.

The new NVIDIA Tesla K10 and K20 GPUs are computing accelerators built to handle the most complex HPC problems in the world. Designed with an intense focus on high performance and extreme power efficiency, Kepler is three times as efficient as its predecessor, the NVIDIA Fermi™ architecture, which itself established a new standard for parallel computing when introduced two years ago.

“Fermi was a major step forward in computing,” said Bill Dally, chief scientist and senior vice president of research at NVIDIA. “It established GPU-accelerated computing in the top tier of high performance computing and attracted hundreds of thousands of developers to the GPU computing platform. Kepler will be equally disruptive, establishing GPUs broadly into technical computing, due to their ease of use, broad applicability and efficiency.”

The Tesla K10 and K20 GPUs were introduced at the GPU Technology Conference (GTC), as part of a series of announcements from NVIDIA, all of which can be accessed in the GTC online press room.

NVIDIA developed a set of innovative architectural technologies that make the Kepler GPUs high performing and highly energy efficient, as well as more applicable to a wider set of developers and applications. Among the major innovations are:

• SMX Streaming Multiprocessor — The basic building block of every GPU, the SMX streaming multiprocessor was redesigned from the ground up for high performance and energy efficiency. It delivers up to three times more performance per watt than the Fermi streaming multiprocessor, making it possible to build a supercomputer that delivers one petaflop of computing performance in just 10 server racks. SMX’s energy efficiency was achieved by increasing its number of CUDA® architecture cores by four times, while reducing the clock speed of each core, power-gating parts of the GPU when idle and maximizing the GPU area devoted to parallel-processing cores instead of control logic.
• Dynamic Parallelism — This capability enables GPU threads to dynamically spawn new threads, allowing the GPU to adapt dynamically to the data. It greatly simplifies parallel programming, enabling GPU acceleration of a broader set of popular algorithms, such as adaptive mesh refinement, fast multipole methods and multigrid methods.
• Hyper-Q — This enables multiple CPU cores to simultaneously use the CUDA architecture cores on a single Kepler GPU. This dramatically increases GPU utilization, slashing CPU idle times and advancing programmability. Hyper-Q is ideal for cluster applications that use MPI.

“We designed Kepler with an eye towards three things: performance, efficiency and accessibility,” said Jonah Alben, senior vice president of GPU Engineering and principal architect of Kepler at NVIDIA. “It represents an important milestone in GPU-accelerated computing and should foster the next wave of breakthroughs in computational research.”

NVIDIA Tesla K10 and K20 GPUs
The NVIDIA Tesla K10 GPU delivers the world’s highest throughput for signal, image and seismic processing applications. Optimized for customers in oil and gas exploration and the defense industry, a single Tesla K10 accelerator board features two GK104 Kepler GPUs that deliver an aggregate performance of 4.58 teraflops of peak single-precision floating point and 320 GB per second memory bandwidth.

The NVIDIA Tesla K20 GPU is the new flagship of the Tesla GPU product family, designed for the most computationally intensive HPC environments. Expected to be the world’s highest-performance, most energy-efficient GPU, the Tesla K20 is planned to be available in the fourth quarter of 2012.

The Tesla K20 is based on the GK110 Kepler GPU. This GPU delivers three times more double precision compared to Fermi architecture-based Tesla products and it supports the Hyper-Q and dynamic parallelism capabilities. The GK110 GPU is expected to be incorporated into the new Titan supercomputer at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee and the Blue Waters system at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

“In the two years since Fermi was launched, hybrid computing has become a widely adopted way to achieve higher performance for a number of critical HPC applications,” said Earl C. Joseph, program vice president of High-Performance Computing at IDC. “Over the next two years, we expect that GPUs will be increasingly used to provide higher performance on many applications.”

Preview of CUDA 5 Parallel Programming Platform
In addition to the Kepler architecture, NVIDIA today released a preview of the CUDA 5 parallel programming platform. Available to more than 20,000 members of NVIDIA’s GPU Computing Registered Developer program, the platform will enable developers to begin exploring ways to take advantage of the new Kepler GPUs, including dynamic parallelism.

The CUDA 5 parallel programming model is planned to be widely available in the third quarter of 2012. Developers can get access to the preview release by signing up for the GPU Computing Registered Developer program on the CUDA website.

About NVIDIA Tesla GPUs
NVIDIA Tesla GPUs are massively parallel accelerators based on the NVIDIA CUDA parallel computing platform. Tesla GPUs are designed from the ground up for power-efficient, high performance computing, computational science and supercomputing, delivering dramatically higher application acceleration for a range of scientific and commercial applications than a CPU-only approach. Today, Tesla GPUs power three of the world’s top five supercomputers.

More information about NVIDIA Tesla GPUs is available at the Tesla website. Follow us on Twitter (@NVIDIATesla).

About GTC
The GPU Technology Conference advances global awareness of GPU computing and visualization, and their importance to the future of science and innovation. View the latest news from NVIDIA and its partners in the GTC press room.

About NVIDIA
NVIDIA (NVDA) awakened the world to computer graphics when it invented the GPU in 1999. Today, its processors power a broad range of products from smartphones to supercomputers. NVIDIA’s mobile processors are used in cell phones, tablets and auto infotainment systems. PC gamers rely on GPUs to enjoy spectacularly immersive worlds. Professionals use them to create 3D graphics and visual effects in movies and to design everything from golf clubs to jumbo jets. And researchers utilize GPUs to advance the frontiers of science with high performance computing. The company has more than 4,500 patents issued, allowed or filed, including ones covering ideas essential to modern computing. For more information, see www.nvidia.com.

Certain statements in this press release including, but not limited to statements as to: the availability, impact and benefits of the NVIDIA Tesla K10 and K20 GPUs; the availability, impact and benefits of the CUDA 5 parallel programming platform; and the effects of the company’s patents on modern computing are forward-looking statements that are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause results to be materially different than expectations. Important factors that could cause actual results to differ materially include: global economic conditions; our reliance on third parties to manufacture, assemble, package and test our products; the impact of technological development and competition; development of new products and technologies or enhancements to our existing product and technologies; market acceptance of our products or our partners products; design, manufacturing or software defects; changes in consumer preferences or demands; changes in industry standards and interfaces; unexpected loss of performance of our products or technologies when integrated into systems; as well as other factors detailed from time to time in the reports NVIDIA files with the Securities and Exchange Commission, or SEC, including its Form 10-K for the fiscal period ended January 29, 2012. Copies of reports filed with the SEC are posted on the company’s website and are available from NVIDIA without charge. These forward-looking statements are not guarantees of future performance and speak only as of the date hereof, and, except as required by law, NVIDIA disclaims any obligation to update these forward-looking statements to reflect future events or circumstances.

© 2012 NVIDIA Corporation. All rights reserved. NVIDIA, the NVIDIA logo, CUDA, Fermi, Kepler, and Tesla are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of NVIDIA Corporation in the U.S. and other countries. Other company and product names may be trademarks of the respective companies with which they are associated. Features, pricing, availability, and specifications are subject to change without notice.

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Source: http://finance.yahoo.com/news/nvidia-pioneers-standard-high-performance-175900519.html