Parallel computing and GPGPU, the super-PC genesis between universal libraries and proprietary platforms
Far from slowing down because of the worldwide economic crisis, PC technology evolution (and particularly the videogaming peripherals one) continues to break records and Gigaflops, opening usage scenarios that was solely related to super-computers just a few years ago. Such scenarios are currently colliding with the opposite development of standards and API competing with each other, resulted from the desire of market supremacy or from the need to reach an agreement on a common computing platform.
How RIAA and Silvio Berlusconi plan to ditch P2P
In what sounds as an unexpected and dangerous development of the lasting industry’s war against the P2P users, last Friday the Wall Street Journal has reported that RIAA, after years of intimidations, mistakes, twistings and abuses of the USA judiciary system now wants to change strategy, dismissing its mass lawsuits campaign to focus on the “next level” of the prearranged plan with which the majors would like to survive to the technological progress while keeping forever the privileges from a past (anyone should have this clearly in mind) that will never come back.
The return of (old) PC graphic adventures
Though they belong to a genre already considered defunct and inadequate for the mainstream videogames market years by now, adventure games have a glorious past, a past that deserves to be remembered and of course replayed. At the center of a good part of this effort of collective memory there is ScummVM, the already quoted virtual machine which acts like an interface between the feelings and the puzzles from the good old times and the modern operating systems.
Console war: Microsoft & Nintendo smile. Sony lays off
Maybe it isn’t correct to use expressions like “the Sony failure”, “the death of PlayStation platform” and others on the same model, but the numbers released by market research experts and by NPD Group in particular surely outline a more and more discouraging situation for the market adventure of PS3, continuously highlight the mistakes and the inability of Sony Computer Entertainment into innovating the videogaming market as in the past years and set off even more the clamorous success of Microsoft and Nintendo branded home consoles.
AVIRA AntiVir is the best antivirus of the year
Are you constantly searching for a good antivirus, or better still the best antivirus currently on sale to stay away from the many dangers of that very dangerous place Internet has become? Here is a good chance: AV-Comparatives, the reference point for antimalware software testing, has proclaimed AVIRA AntiVir the winner of best antivirus of the year award.
Internet? A very dangerous place
Trend Micro security enterprise has ranked the attack vectors exploited by the 100 most widespread malware from January to November 2008, and the results speak by themselves: among all the possible infection ways Internet is absolutely the most used (or better still abused) one by worms, trojans and other types of digital pathogenetic agents constantly hunting for victims and unprotected systems to compromise.
Videogames highlights - November 2008
In a way almost specular to the knots of the global economy, the videogames market is in this period gathering releases with an unprecedented quality and quantity. Waiting for the storm to pass away, the interactive entertainment proves to suffer much less the effects of the recession hence it is a great pleasure for me to feature a short but selected collection of streaming videos for some of the best gifts a videogamer could ever get during the holidays.
Links & Suggestions # 6: zombies, astronomical 486, digital dark ages, 3D fiascos & Windows
This new round up of sparse suggestions has heterogeneity as its distinctive mark. I mean, here we’re trying to keep together a zombiecon with the Hubble Space Telescope, the Google fiascos with the possible future ones by Microsoft, the usual crap on P2P and even the ostracism by Western Digital for the SSD technology! I need a 36 hours-long day, definitely 
The mouse figures: 40 years, 1 billion samples. And an uncertain future
Next December 9 will mark the 40th year since, for the first time in computer history, public saw a mouse at work. Four decades later, in the Memorial Auditorium of that same Stanford University where one of the most important inventions of the then-germinal information society was born, the academy and the industry will celebrate the “mother of all demos“, the start of a new era for the interaction between man and machine.
AV-Comparatives releases the latest proactive tests results
AV-Comparatives, the Austrian team of experts dedicated to antivirus tests acknowledged as a reference point in the field, has published the second part of the mid-year comparative, an ideal addendum to the one already released in the past September. This time the aim is to evaluate the antimalware tools effectiveness against unknown threats, in a test scenario meant to prove the heuristic part and the generic markers of the on-demand scanning engines.
New Gpcode version detected. Ransomware strikes again
A dangerous malware breed skilled in cryptographic techniques is coming back under the spotlight. Trend Micro has spotted in the wild a new Gpcode variant, the trojan that since 2005 has let everybody know the meaning of the world ransomware, that is a type of malware expressly designed to encrypt the user’s data files asking afterward for a money ransom to restore them.
MAME 0.128u4, structural changes and a new emulated lasergame
The development cycle for the MAME 0.129 release isn’t finished yet, but the last intermediate version delivered by the mamedevs brings such important changes and novelties that it’s worth to look closely at them. The structural design of the emulator of emulators has undergone the nth shift while the list of emulated games includes now Firefox, the second laserdisc videogame to be added to MAME after Cube Quest.
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