IT News HeadLines (Elite Bastards) 03/03/2010

Valve's Portal Mystery

There's been some strange things going on in Portal and some industrious gamers have been investigating. In some sort of interesting covert marketing scheme, Valve have release a patch for their Half-Life universe puzzle game, Portal. The game's changelog mentioned, "Changed radio transmission frequency to comply with federal and state spectrum management regulations". To add to the mystery, users have managed so far to figure out part of the hidden data is a telnet number! Only the username and password remain to be found.

Curious players have discovered that now the radios found littered throughout the Aperture Science test labs, if carried to certain locations, will broadcast a series of different codes. You can check these two videos of the near 18-minutes of sounds: Part #1 - Part #2. There are hidden images embedded into sound, Morse code, dinosaurs, newly added radios to the game's levels, and so much more. As far as I know, the users on the Steam forums have already managed to reverse engineer a BBS phone number (Telnet number is (425) 822-5251) out of all of that data. Now they're trying to figure out what the username and password are.

Get more information at Gameguru Mania here.

UPDATE: It seems the login information has been discovered as well. Check it out. Thanks to IRQ.

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AMD 890GX with SB850 motherboard chipset reviews

It's been a while since we've seen a new high-end motherboard chipset from AMD, but today sees the company launch just such a part courtesy of their new 890GX chipset. Arguably of more interest is that this offering is also matched up with a new southbridge, the SB850, which comes complete with native Serial ATA 6Gbps support. If you want to find out more and see what motherboards based around this combination have to offer, then check out the reviews below.

- Guru 3D
- [H]ard|OCP
- Hardware Canucks
- Hardware Heaven
- Hardware Secrets
- Hardware Zone
- HEXUS
- PC Perspective
- Rage 3D
- Tech Gage
- Tweak Town

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Infernal Engine updated with support for Intel Core i7 980X

Are you looking for an excuse to pick up a six-core CPU when they become available shortly? Well, here's one for you, with the announcement that Terminal Reality (creators of last year's Ghostbusters video game) have updated their own Infernal Engine to support Intel's Core i7 980X part (and six-core CPUs as a whole I would imagine) as part of a wider set of changes and improvements.

March 1, 2010 – LEWISVILLE, TX - Having experienced a stellar 2009, Terminal Reality has announced major technological updates to its popular Infernal Engine. Used to power the award winning Ghostbusters: The Video Game, the Infernal Engine will now support Intel's New CPU, the Core i7 980X, as well as benefit from significant renovations to their animation system and notable lighting system improvements.

Terminal Reality also recently hired industry veteran Marius Ulsamer, formerly of Threewave Software as their new network architect. Ulsamer's longstanding technical programming experience will undoubtedly take the Infernal Engine to the next level.

You can read Terminal Reality's full press release at Firing Squad.

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NVIDIA's next generation ION announced

Despite Intel being far from thrilled with it, NVIDIA's original ION platform for netbooks and nettops proved to be a pretty popular and powerful setup that certainly extended what you could do with these diminutive Atom-based systems. However, with new Atom processors coming with an integrated graphics core on the CPU package, is it the end of the road for ION? Of course not, and NVIDIA have used the CeBIT show in Hannover to announce their plans for a second-generation ION platform.

If you've got any math skills, you've probably already put two and two together to figure out what NVIDIA is announcing today. The Next Generation ION (NG-ION) platform consists of a Pineview netbook with a discrete graphics chip from NVIDIA, with Optimus allowing the GPU to switch on/off as needed. Note that there is no Optimus technology for nettop solutions, which will simply use an NVIDIA discrete GPU all the time. On a nettop that's always plugged in, NG-ION might use ~3W more power at idle, but that's not enough to worry about. There's also a benefit to just keeping things simple by using a standard discrete GPU.

Simplifying NG-ION like we just did is great for the layman, but there are plenty of other technical aspects to discuss that make things a bit more interesting. We don't have hardware for testing, so all we can pass along are NVDIA's performance information, but they make sense as we'll see in a moment. We'll also discuss some of the implementation specific details, expected availability, etc.

Anandtech has more on the announcement, while TechARP has commentary on and images from NVIDIA's entire slide deck.

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"Fat" PlayStation 3 suffers major PlayStation Network failure

Doubtless you'll already have heard all about this by now, but if you haven't and you're coming home from work to switch on your old-school "fat" PlayStation 3 - Don't. Sony have recently released the latest information regarding the bug which is currently causing major issues for a large number of their PS3 owners, advising on the issues you might see and giving an estimated time before the problem is fixed.

As you may be aware, some customers have been unable to connect to the PlayStation Network today. This problem affects the models other than the new slim PS3.

We believe we have identified that this problem is being caused by a bug in the clock functionality incorporated in the system.

Errors include:

- The date of the PS3 system may be re-set to Jan 1, 2000.
- When the user tries to sign in to the PlayStation Network, the following message appears on the screen; “An error has occurred. You have been signed out of PlayStation Network (8001050F)”.
- When the user tries to launch a game, the following error message appears on the screen and the trophy data may disappear; “Failed to install trophies. Please exit your game.”
- When the user tries to set the time and date of the system via the Internet, the following message appears on the screen; “The current date and time could not be obtained. (8001050F)”
- Users are not able to play back certain rental video downloaded from the PlayStation Store before the expiration date.

We hope to resolve this problem within the next 24 hours. In the meantime, if you have a model other than the new slim PS3, we advise that you do not use your PS3 system, as doing so may result in errors in some functionality, such as recording obtained trophies, and not being able to restore certain data.

As mentioned above, please be advised that the new slim PS3 is not affected with this error. We are doing our best to resolve the issue and do apologize for any inconvenience caused.

You can find all of this information on the US PlayStation 3 'blog, which should also be your first stop for any further updates about the issue.

EDIT: Sony have confirmed that PlayStation Network access has now been restored:

We are aware that the internal clock functionality in the PS3 units other than the slim model, recognized the year 2010 as a leap year. Having the internal clock date change from February 29 to March 1 (both GMT), we have verified that the symptoms are now resolved and that users are able to use their PS3 normally.

If the time displayed on the XMB is still incorrect, users are able to adjust time settings manually or via the internet. If we have new information, we will update you through the PlayStation.Blog or PlayStation.com.

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