What is Notch trying to do now! Monetise that’s what, but hey who can blame the guy!  The Minecraft Lego set is said to cost roughly £29.99, which seems quite steep given that most people only purchased the game for a mere £5.

So this also begs the question, who the hell is it aimed at, while gamers are playing their virtual form of Minecraft, is there really a need for is Lego counterpart? Well who knows, more than likely its for the die hards or the novelty crowd. All i hope is that they leave out the creepers explosive capabilities otherwise old Notchy might have a few legal issues on his hands.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LcwWN6jcdu8&w=560&h=315]

NVIDIA GeForce 290.36 Win 7 Vista 32-bit
NVIDIA GeForce 290.36 Win 7 Vista 64-bit

NVIDIA Ambient Occlusion

• Adds NVIDIA Control Panel ambient occlusion support for The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim.
• Adds NVIDIA Control Panel ambient occlusion support for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3.

NVIDIA PhysX

• Updates PhysX System Software to version 9.11.1107 for the best PhysX experience in Batman: Arkham City.

NVIDIA Surround

• Enables NVIDIA Surround support for Intel X79 SLI-certified motherboards.

NVIDIA SLI

• Added or updated SLI profiles for Crysis 2, Heroes and Generals, Inversion, Stronghold 3, and Syndicate.

3D Vision

• Adds support for 3D Vision over native DisplayPort 1.1 connection – available on BenQ XL2420T and BenQ XL2420TX monitors.
• Added or updated the following 3D Vision game profiles:
• Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 – Rated Good
• Cang Sheng – Rated Good
• Diablo 3 – Rated Good
• Fei fei – Rated Good
• Final Combat – Rated Good
• L.A. Noire – Updated Rating To 3D Vision Ready
• LEGO Harry Potter: Years 5-7 – Rated Fair
• Qian Nv You Hun Online – Rated Good
• QQ Xi You – Rated Good
• Sonic Generations – Rated Good
• Xian Tu – Rated Good
• Yong Bing Tian Xia Online – Rated Good

HD Audio

• Updates HD Audio driver to version 1.3.9.0.

Bug Fixes

• Fixes random flickering as Windows boot logo is loading or fading away.
• Fixes corruption in Crysis 2 with SLI and lower quality shadow settings.
• Fixes ability to set Surround resolutions to 5760×1080 using custom resolutions.
• Fixes some random instances of triangular artifacts when playing Battlefield 3.
• Fixes corruption and flickering of some objects in Battlefield 3 in the New York single-player level when anti-aliasing is enabled.
• Fixes corruption seen in Settlers 7 with the NVIDIA 275.33 drivers.
• Fixes playback of videos or live TV using Window Media Center resulting in a black screen.
• Fixes the issue where 1920×1080 @60Hz PC resolution mode switched down to @59Hz.
• Fixes mouse cursor flickering and shaking in Crysis 2, Battlefield: Bad Company 2, Deus Ex and Civilization V when SLI is enabled when using 3DTV Play.

New features

Adobe Flash Player 11 support

• Enables full support of the GPU accelerated Stage 3D API and Stage 3D applications
• Supported on the AMD Radeon HD Series of GPUs, A-Series APU and E-Series APU

Resolved issues

Windows 7 Operating System

• Images and textures are no longer corrupted (Blue) in Rage.
• Bezel compensation now works correctly with Far Cry 2.
• Screen tearing is no longer randomly observed while moving a window on the desktop while in Clone mode or Eyefinity mode.
• A black screen is no longer observed when extending displays.
• Homefront no longer crashes randomly when Crossfire is enabled.
• DC – Universe Online no longer hangs soon after selecting a character and entering the game.

Known issues

Windows 7 operating system

• Screen tearing may be observed occasionally while playing Portal 2 in DirectX 9 mode.
• Shogun 2 may exhibit screen corruption while playing on low resolution settings in 2×1 Eyefinity mode.
• Choppy playback may be observed playing interlaced DVD content in full screen mode using PowerDVD 11.
• A BSOD error may occur while playing Call of Duty – Black Ops in Multiplayer mode with Crossfire enabled.
• Video corruption may be observed while playing World of Warcraft in windowed mode and AVI file simultaneously.
• Dragon Age 2 may exhibit corruption during in game cinematics when run in DirectX 9 mode.
• Lost Planet 2 my display random corruption and flickering when run in DirectX 9 mode.
• Lost Planet 2 may crash randomly when Crossfire is enabled.
• The following games may experience random flashing textures during gameplay:
• Homefront
• Metro 2033
• Far Cry 2
• Stalker : Call of Pripyat

Windows Vista Operating System

• Windows Aero options may be missing after installing the driver.
• A ‘ghost’ cursor may be observed when playing Dragon Age 2 in Crossfire mode.
• The character avatar in Dragon Age 2 may display random flickering.
• HAWX 2 may experience random system reboots when run in Eyefinity mode.
• Civilization V may experience random crashing when run at medium or high in game settings.
• Bulletstorm may experience random flashing during gameplay.
• Dead Space 2 may hang occasionally soon after game launch.

GeForce Forceware 285.79 Win 7 Vista x32
GeForce Forceware 285.79 Win 7 Vista x64

New in Version 285.79

• Includes several bug fixes and performance improvements for Battlefield 3.
  • Fixes cases of irregular performance (stuttering) primarily seen on DirectX 10 GPUs. The fix improves the performance of both DX10 and DX11 GPUs.
  • Fixes shadow map corruption seen with DirectX 10 GPUs.
  • Fixes cases of black corruption lines/triangles with DirectX 10 GPUs.
• Fixes black screen during playback using Windows Media Center.
• Added or updated SLI profiles for the following games:
  • Aion v3.0
  • Anno 2070
  • Assassins Creed: Revelations
  • Bastion
  • Need for Speed: The Run
  • Payday: The Heist
  • The Adventures of Tintin
  • The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim
• Added or updated the following 3D Vision game profiles:
  • Airline Tycoon 2 – rated Fair
  • Assassin’s Creed: Revelations – rated Good
  • Batman: Arkham City – updated rating to 3D Vision Ready
  • Deus Ex: Human Revolution – rated Excellent
  • The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim – rated Excellent
  • FIFA 12 – rated Good
  • Hard Reset – updated rating to 3D Vision Ready
  • inMomentum – rated Fair
  • The Lord of the Rings: War in the North
  • Smash Cars – rated Fair
  • Two Worlds 2: Castle Defense – rated Good
  • Zombie Driver – rated Excellent

Other Details

• Includes HD Audio driver 1.2.24.0.
• Includes PhysX System Software 9.11.11.07

On Adobe’s official blog a post was made explaining why they believe stopping with mobile Flash player and focussing on HTML 5 is the right thing to do, at the same time they also explain that they want to focus more on Air to allow developers to create there apps for mobile devices.
Adobe also tells that they will continue developing Flash player for the PC and that there already working hard on version 12.

Why?
Product manager Mike Chambers sposted on his personal blog to explain as to why Adobe is stopping the development, surprisingly he actually partially blames Apple for it as well:

This one should be pretty apparent, but given the fragmentation of the mobile market, and the fact that one of the leading mobile platforms (Apple’s iOS) was not going to allow the Flash Player in the browser, the Flash Player was not on track to reach anywhere near the ubiquity of the Flash Player on desktops.

This effectively meant that if you wanted to use Flash to deliver a rich web experience in the browser on mobile devices you would have to provide both a Flash based, as well as HTML5 based solution. Given the strong support for HTML5 across modern mobile devices, it simply made more sense to create an HTML5 based solution. Now, there are some exceptions to this, especially around advanced video content, but it is very clear that HTML5 is the solution to turn to if you want to provide a richer browser based experience that works across browsers on mobile devices.

Just to be very clear on this. No matter what we did, the Flash Player was not going to be available on Apple’s iOS anytime in the foreseeable future.

Since HTML 5 is supported by nearly all major companies involved in both the mobile and PC browser market it is simply a better choice for both users and companies to set HTML 5 as the preferred standard.

The end of mobile Flash?
This news actually doesn’t mean the death of the mobile Flash player, RIM for example announced that they will continue to develop Flash for there Playbook tablet as it relies heavily on Flash and this is even advertised as one of the major advantages over Apple’s iPad.

As an Adobe source code licensee, we will continue to work on and release our own implementations.

RIM remains committed to delivering an uncompromised Web browsing experience to our customers, including native support for Adobe Flash Player on our BlackBerry PlayBook tablet (similar to a desktop PC browser), as well as HTML5 support on both our BlackBerry smartphone and PlayBook browsers.

Google on the other hand seems to focus on apps by organising Android developer labs all over the world but it might even be possible that Google follows RIM and continues developing Flash for Android, they have shown in the past that there very much capable of it.

I wonder if RIM will be able to effectively keep developing Flash for their Playbook but we shall see what happens.

It started with users reporting on Twitter that they were experiencing problems roughly 2 and a half hours ago, this has also been confirmed on Crackberry with users from different parts of the world having the same issues with BBM and Mail.

After a couple of tests of my own I seem to be fine in the receiving mail department and BBM at least locally here in the Netherlands* but it would be pretty worrying if RIM had another major outage with the last one still so freshly embedded into people’s mind.

It seems that Blackberry support are at least taking the complaints seriously and are looking into whatever is going on.

There is enough speculation and reports of it working or not working on the Crackberry forum, so stay tuned for an update.

*Edit: I have just been able to message someone outside of the Netherlands just fine.

Update 10-11-2011: Blackberry has reported on Twitter that the services should be working fine.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WaUzu-iksi8]

The first attempt was by AMD themselves to showcase Bulldozer’s potential, they set a speed of 8.429Ghz and within weeks an overclocker names Andre Yang set a new record at 8.46Ghz.
This same Andre Yang has pushed the record even higher just a week after his old record with the same CPU, by upping the Voltage to 2.076V (he used 1.992V in the old one) he was able to go up to 8.584Ghz.

Andre used Liquid Nitrogen in both his records while AMD used Liquid Helium in there attempt which cools even better so there might even be possible to push more out of this chip with some luck.

Do note that on all records there were only 2 cores active and for the people who now think “But frequency doesn’t say anything about a CPU’s performance!” or “Why would you even do something like that?”; Yes you are correct but pushing hardware to it’s limits can be allot of fun and because you can!

Source
Anandtech

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Steve was a truely unique model in the technology world, pushing the boundrys and demanding that style meets function. Something that has changed the world.

We would like to say thank you to Steve and we wish his family and friends all the best, and to remember the man for the truely world changing person that he was.