Who's #1 in broadband? 1Gbps fiber for $26 in Hong Kong
According to people like Ivan Seidenberg, Verizon's CEO, the US is number one in broadband, no question about it. But one only has to look around the world to see just how specious such claims are.
Take Hong Kong as an example. City Telecom made waves a few months ago with its US$13, symmetric 100Mbps connections. Today, the company slashed prices on its much faster 1Gbps fiber-to-the-home offering; a fully symmetric, 1Gbps connection costs HK$199... or US$26 a month.
Want phone service with that? That'll be US$3. IPTV service will cost another $6-12, depending on the channel package. (There's also a US$115 installation charge to run the fiber link from the building basement up to an individual apartment.)
This is an exceptional offer, but City Telecom isn't alone in offering service that should make US operators cringe—and US customers green with envy. Hutchson Telecom offers 100Mbps symmetric connections for US$13. i-Cable offers 130Mbps downloads for $39 per month using DOCSIS 3.0 tech.
This isn't the US market, so prices aren't directly comparable, but Hong Kong and the US are almost identical when it comes to GDP per capita, adjusted for purchasing power parity (PPP).
Hong Kong is one of the densest spots on earth. One wouldn't expect to see this level of price and competition across a country as broad and sprawling as the US, but one would expect it to be possible somewhere. Sadly, even something like 100Mbps is hard to come by in most US cities; 1Gbps is unknown, except to tiny specialty operators, even in a place like New York City.
City Telecom took out a full-page ad in the South China Morning Post today, advertising its new offering with the tagline, "1000M: Transform your life."
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Google Q1 2010 Earnings liveblog on April 15
We'll be liveblogging Google's first quarter 2010 earnings report. It will take place at 3:30pm Central Time on April 15th (see it in your own timezone). Sign up below to get an e-mail alert as we begin, or simply bookmark this page and come back later.
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Advocates warn court of Viacom's "dangerous" DMCA proposals
A small battalion of public interest groups filed an amicus brief on Monday on behalf of YouTube in its battle with Viacom. The latter accuses the Google-owned company of massive, even "brazen," copyright infringement of its content. While much of the he said/she said in this huge case centers around whether Youtube or Viacom staff allegedly uploaded the lion's share of Viacom content to the video sharing site, the brief doesn't delve deeply into that war.
Instead these advocates take aim at what they see as Viacom's "dangerous and unnecessary" interpretation of the crucial "safe harbor" provisions in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act—those that take the heat off online service providers for copyright infringement under reasonable circumstances.
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Perl 5 development resumes, version 5.12 released
The Perl 6 project, which aimed to radically reinvent the open source programming language, first began to take shape in 2000. A decade later, there are several implementations with varying levels of completeness, but it is still not ready to replace Perl 5 in production environments.
In order to ensure that Perl doesn't completely stagnate during the protracted revamp, a group of developers have decided to pull Perl 5 out of maintenance mode and begin actively enhancing it with new features. The result is Perl 5.12, which was officially released this week. It was preceded by 5.11, an experimental development release that was issued last year.
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Apple delays international launch of iPad due to high demand
Apple had originally planned to slowly roll out the iPad around the world beginning April 24. However, due to "surprisingly strong US demand," Apple has announced that it will delay the international launch of the iPad until late May.
According to a statement released this morning, Apple has sold over 500,000 iPads to date, and demand in its stores continues to outstrip supply in many cases. Though no specific numbers were given, the company has apparently received an unexpected number of preorders for the WiFi + 3G iPad model as well, set to begin shipping in the US by the end of April.
Apple will begin taking preorders for international customers on May 10 for delivery later in the month. Pricing will also be announced then.
"We know that many international customers waiting to buy an iPad will be disappointed by this news, but we hope they will be pleased to learn the reason—the iPad is a runaway success in the US thus far," Apple said in a statement.
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Government uses NSA tool to detect thumb drives on network
USB thumb drives and other portable storage devices offer a lot of convenience, but they also pose some unique security challenges. We have seen incidents over the years where misplaced thumb drives led to the accidental exposure of sensitive information or were used as an attack vector to infect networks that would otherwise be difficult to infiltrate.
Although having strong IT security policies can help reduce the risks, it's not always easy to enforce such policies. The NSA built a tool, called USBDetect, that is designed to help government agencies track the usage of USB storage devices on their internal networks. The tool is not publicly available, but is briefly described in a section of the NSA's 2011 budget proposal, which was highlighted yesterday by NextGov defense technology blogger Bob Brewin.
"A Computer Network Defense Tool developed by NSA, USBDetect 3.0, is available to U.S. Government (USG) users free of charge. USBDetect gathers data (locally or on a network) from personal computers running Microsoft Windows 2000 or later operating systems, and reports unauthorized usage of Universal Serial Bus (USB) thumb (a.k.a. flash) drives, external hard drives, compact disk drives, and other storage devices," the budget proposal says. "The USBDetect tool provides USG network administrators and system security officials with an automated capability to detect the introduction of USB storage devices into their networks."
The NSA characterizes the development of USBDetect 3.0 as one of its major accomplishments for the fiscal year 2009. Previous versions of the tool date back to 2008, when its use by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) was documented in an Office of the Inspector General report about DHS IT policies relating to removable storage.
The NSA budget proposal lists several of the agency's other accomplishments for 2009, including the development of a Secure Mobile Environment—Portable Electronic Device (SME-PED) platform, which is basically a high-security, multifunction smartphone that is certified for handling Top Secret classified voice communication, as well as e-mails that are classified at the Secret level.
The agency's goals for 2011 include continuing to advance Public Key Infrastructure standards, begin rolling out the High Assurance Platform Release 2, and developing new products to enable interoperability between the cryptographic tools used by the US government and those of foreign allies. The agency will also continue playing a key role in overseeing the Department of Defense's Cryptographic Modernization Program.
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Harassing Nancy Pelosi: Yes, feds can trace magicJack calls
It was like something out of a movie: a US Capitol Police Special Agent and three San Francisco cops drop by a suspect's home to ask about threatening phone calls targeting House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. They know the calls all came from a specific phone number, one assigned to the VoIP provider magicJack, but the suspect denies that the number is his. The agent steps into the other room and uses his cell phone to call the number. A telephone connected to the suspect's computer starts to ring, and the suspect answers it. "Hello," says the agent.
When the agent returns to the room and asks if the suspect wants to change his story, the man admits that the calls were his own.
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Emotions linger even as amnesiacs forget their cause
For most of us, consciousness seems like a fairly unified experience. But it's the product of a brain that's composed of a variety of structures with specialized jobs, many of which don't communicate directly to each other. For the most part, we can only identify the disconnection either through carefully controlled experiments or when the brain is suffering from some sort of disease. Some researchers have now used a handful of subjects with severe amnesia to separate the memory of emotional events from their impact, and shown that the feelings invoked can linger well after the memory is gone.
The biggest weakness of these sorts of studies is the fact that people with narrow, specific forms of brain injury are few and far between—the new study focuses on only five subjects, each with damage limited to the hippocampus in a way that interfered with memory. The subjects, along with healthy controls, were shown film clips that either induced sadness (Six Feet Under, Sophie's Choice, etc.) or amusement (Robin Williams, Bill Cosby, and America's Funniest Home Vides, among others). Observers found that all subjects showed expressions that indicated they were experiencing the content of the videos normally.
A short time after the viewing, the subjects were asked to take tests that examined their memories of the video clips. Although the scores varied with the severity of the amnesia, the test subjects were far more likely to not remember what they'd seen, or have only the vaguest of recollections—in an example given by the authors, an amnesiac might remember they'd seen a Meryl Streep film, while a healthy control would remember the film title and details of the scene they saw.
Despite these substantial differences in what they recalled, however, measures of the emotional impacts of the clips indicate that those with amnesia continued to experience feelings driven by items they could no longer fully recall. In general, the emotional recall trends were similar to those seen in healthy control subjects. There are differences between the two groups—and between the emotional impact of sad and happy videos—but, with a sample of five, it's probably risky to attach too much weight to even those differences that are statistically significant.
Nevertheless, the results strongly indicate that the emotional impact of events can largely be disassociated with any memory of the events themselves. That isn't hugely surprising, given what we know about the processing of emotions and memory. But it may be worth keeping in mind when we consider treatments for conditions like Alzheimer's disease.
PNAS, 2010. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0914054107 (About DOIs).
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feature: First look: Crysis 2 comes to consoles, destroys NYC
The original Crysis, despite being three years old, is still one of the best looking PC games. Having a system that ran the game well was a badge of pride when the game launched. The game's allure was enough to merit shelling out major green for upgrades in order to view the bleeding edge graphics. The sequel is coming to both the PC and consoles, however, which is more than enough to worry fans of the original, which was highly optimized for PC gaming.
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Review: ForScore sheet music viewer for iPad misses cutoff
ForScore from MGS Development is a perfect example of an application that was rushed to completion to meet a hardware launch. The premise of digitized sheet music on the iPad is a popular one as of late, but unfortunately, it will remain little more than a premise until MGS provides a more feature-rich app or another company steps up to the plate. The application is best described in the words of one App Store reviewer as "a PDF viewer with a metronome."
Fortunately, the music displayed in ForScore for iPad looks beautiful. Notation is a reasonable reading size and is quite clear. The smallest fingering notations are visible without a problem. Pages do have a slight light-to-dark gradient that some may find distracting, but from a purely aesthetic viewpoint, it works. Music can be displayed in portrait or landscape orientation, but is fixed in size; you cannot zoom in or out on a piece of music.
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EU: We'll talk about net neutrality rules this summer
In a Parisian speech today, Vice President of the European Commission Commissioner for the Digital Agenda Neelie Kroes pledged that a robust net neutrality discussion is coming to Europe—and she dragged out a dreaded car analogy of her own to describe the process.
Kroes, best known for leading the EU's antitrust charge against Microsoft, now has new responsibilities, and she's ready to talk about net neutrality. Admitting that the US debate on the subject is "more advanced," Kroes chalked this up to Europe's "regulatory framework and the competitive investments that it fostered." In other words, since Europe's line-sharing policies have created substantial ISP competition in many countries, competitive pressures have made net neutrality less important.
But the time has come to start thinking about the issues, and Kroes told the conference attendees that she would launch such a consultation by summer. While pledging to come at the issue without preconceptions, she did affirm the FCC's 2005 Internet Policy Statement and its "four freedoms." The FCC is now considering two more principles: transparency and nondiscrimination. Kroes is also on board with transparency, but nondiscrimination will be the subject of the consultation.
Given that so much of this debate is about different forms of traffic management, let me use a road traffic analogy. There are many ways to manage traffic: by improving infrastructure, adding tolls, creating junctions or roundabouts to improve bottlenecks. But creating new rules and crowding the street with signs does not automatically help the traffic to flow. Indeed, putting a police officer at a busy corner can often deliver the slowest traffic of all.
So, I will not be someone who comes up with a solution first and then looks for a problem to attach it to. I am not a police officer in search of a busy corner.
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Palm may be for sale, but are its patents really valuable?
Bloomberg reports that Palm is putting itself up for sale, and that HTC and Lenovo are among the interested parties. In a separate article, the publication also quotes a company official whose comments indicate that HTC in particular is evaluating the merits of having its own smartphone OS to compete with Apple, Google, RIM, Nokia, and Microsoft. So will HTC buy Palm?
Most of the discussion of potential Palm buyers centers on Palm's presumably valuable patent portfolio, but it's not clear that there's as much value there as most seem to think.
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Some hot Jupiters orbit the wrong way
All of the major bodies in our solar system orbit in the same direction our sun rotates, and are roughly in the same plane. This is nicely explained by the process that produced them, a combination of rotation and gravity that flattened the dust and gas they originated from into a disk. These models for the formation of planetary systems probably still apply, but some new findings are indicating that what happens afterwards may not be so neat and orderly: nearly a quarter of the hot Jupiters (gas giants orbiting in close proximity to their host stars) found in a recent survey of other stars are orbiting their hosts backwards.
Now, it's worth pointing out that, although the formation of our solar system seems neat and tidy, its evolution probably involved major collisions among most of its rocky protoplanets. And, in fact, the existence of hot Jupiters suggests other systems undergo significant changes during their evolution. There's simply no way to form anything that big close to a star, which indicates that these planets originated towards the outer edges of the systems, and were then pushed inwards by orbital interactions with the dust disk and fellow planets. But the new findings (along with some older ones) suggest that this gravitational pushing and shoving may not be limited to a single orbital plane.
Earlier work had indicated that more than half the hot Jupiters examined in an early survey had orbits that were not in the same plane as the rotation of their host star. The new survey adds a few more, as well as six that were orbiting in the opposite direction. This suggests that the orbital interactions aren't limited to pushing and pulling within the plane—large bodies must get close enough to swing a Jupiter-sized planet out of the plane of orbit, and possibly flip it to the opposite plane. The definition of "close," of course, will vary with the mass of the second body. If that second body is really large—maybe it's an additional star—it can be quite far away, at least relative to the typical distance between planets.
The researchers involved in the announcement helpfully point to an animation, generated by a Harvard researcher, that shows a large collection of odd orbits that can be generated if a stellar companion is orbiting out-of-plane. Any smaller bodies that were in orbit anywhere near this planet would obviously have had an equally chaotic history.
The big message here is that it's tempting to try to slot what we're finding elsewhere in the galaxy into what we know about our own solar system and its history. But it's dangerous to extrapolate too much for a sample size of one, and we need to make sure our observations are able to find things that we might not necessarily expect to see.
Although the paper hasn't been through peer review yet, the processes of detecting extrasolar planets and measuring stellar rotation are pretty well worked out, so the survey results seem reliable.
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Facebook tries to be proactive with new Safety Center
Facebook's new Safety Center won't prevent you or your teenager from being harassed or coming into contact with slimy individuals, but it will help you get a grip on how to handle the situation. The company unveiled the redesigned section of the site Tuesday. It offers numerous resources to users, parents, educators, and even law enforcement, with input from a board of organizations aimed at improving online safety for users of all ages.
There's not much in the Safety Center for savvy 'Net users. However, for less techie users like our friends, coworkers, and family members, the Safety Center acts as a helpful one-stop shop for finding all manner of information. For example, users can find step-by-step instructions on what to do if someone is impersonating them on Facebook, how to report unwanted messages, what to do if a current or ex-spouse is controlling your account, how to report offensive Facebook groups, and what to do if another user makes a suicide threat.
These are just a handful of the topics covered under the General Safety section—there are topics of interest for parents and law enforcement too. Police can report a registered sex offender to Facebook, for example, or suspected terrorist activity. The parent section is largely to help them help their teens deal with cyberbullying and other abusive content, though it also offers information on what Facebook's privacy policies are for minors as well as how parents can better understand this Big Scary Internet that their kids are partaking in.
As critics have pointed out, Facebook seems to be dancing around its own shortcomings when it comes to promoting safety—many users feel that Facebook has made its site less safe recently by making nearly all user information public by default. Indeed, it's easy for casual users to post information that they thought was private and have it broadcast to the world instead. This remains a sticking point for safety critics, but the Safety Center still offers a plethora of resources beyond what nearly every other social network makes available to its users.
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Inside Apple's automatic graphics switching
Apple touts the automatic graphics switching in its new 15" and 17" MacBook Pros as a "breakthrough technology from Apple." Some readers scoffed at the description earlier today, assuming (as we originally did) that Apple was using NVIDIA's Optimus technology. We discussed the graphics switching technology at length with Apple this afternoon, and though Apple's implementation is similar in concept, it differs in a few key areas from Optimus.
The main goal of Apple's automatic graphics switching is to balance graphics performance with long battery life. Intel's latest stable of mobile processors—Core i3, i5, and i7—all include integrated graphics in the same package as the CPU. Dubbed Intel HD, this integrated graphics processor is designed primarily for efficiency. While its performance is far better than the previous GMA950, for instance, it still wouldn't be classified as good for "performance" graphics in any sense of the term in common usage.
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More talent leaves Infinity Ward, bonuses held in litigation
The very public and ugly breakup of the team behind the Call of Duty games and Activision continues with yet another key player in the game leaving Infinity Ward. Jon Shiring, a programmer on the title who was nearing his sixth year with Infinity Ward, has resigned. Kotaku is also reporting Modern Warfare 2 lead designer Mackey McCandlish has left the company.
Lead designer Todd Alderman and lead software engineer Francesco Gigliotti left Infinity Ward at the beginning of April. So far, none of these men have given solid details about where they're headed, but the newly formed Respawn Entertainment, led by the ousted head of Infinity Ward Jason West and Vince Zampella, is currently hiring. Could there possibly be a connection?
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Microsoft offers limited troubleshooting for unsupported SPs
Changes are coming to the Service Pack Support policy: users will now get limited troubleshooting on unsupported service pack versions. For most of its software, Microsoft provides Mainstream Support, followed by Extended Support, and finishes with just Self-Help Online Support.
Today is the end of support date for Windows Vista RTM users (SP1 and SP2 users are still covered). Since Windows Vista is still being supported, RTM users now get limited troubleshooting, which according to Microsoft translates to the following:
- Break/fix support incidents will be provided through Microsoft Customer Service and Support; and through Microsoft's managed support offerings (such as Premier Support).
- There will be no option to engage Microsoft's product development resources, and technical workarounds may be limited or not available.
- If the support incident requires escalation to development for further guidance, requires a hotfix, or requires a security update, customers will be asked to upgrade to a supported service pack.
Under the former Service Pack Support policy, when a service pack reached the end of support, the user would need to upgrade to a newer service pack to get technical support from Microsoft unless he or she purchased a customer support agreement. They were no longer eligible to receive troubleshooting help from Microsoft Customer Service and Support.
The old policy was a (small, but still critical) way for Microsoft to motivate users to upgrade and install service packs. Microsoft will earn goodwill by helping out its users a bit more than it already does, but no doubt at the cost of some early upgrades.
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Molecular-scale bling as a green catalyst
Propylene oxide is a commodity chemical often used as a precursor to commercially relevant polyurethanes. Unfortunately, current methods of producing it on an industrial scale are generally not profitable or environmentally friendly. New research, reported in a paper in this week's edition of Science, describes how it's possible to use clusters of only three silver atoms to effectively catalyze the oxidation of propylene to propylene oxide.
The catalyst is composed of groups of three silver atoms (Ag3) supported by an amorphous alumina film. Reactions were carried out by flowing a dilute gas mixture of propylene and oxygen in helium over and through the alumina support. Analysis of the reaction effluent found that propylene oxide, acrolein, and carbon dioxide were the primary products—the latter two are undesired byproducts. As the temperature increased, the selectivity (the ratio between the amounts of two products produced in a reaction) for propylene oxide over acrolein increased. However, above 60°C a combustion reaction began that resulted in less acrolein and more propylene oxide, but also a lot more carbon dioxide.
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New MacBook Pros support audio over Mini DisplayPort
Those hooking up the latest MacBook Pros to an HDTV using an HDMI adapter can now do so a little more easily: Apple has updated its implementation of Mini DisplayPort to pass audio signals through to any device that supports them. Until now, the miniDP port only transmitted video, even though the DisplayPort spec supports optional alternate signal channels such as audio or USB.
Apple confirmed to Ars that the just-updated MacBook Pros will pass both video and audio signals to an HDTV or receiver when using an miniDP to HDMI adapter. Apple sells one such adapter from Griffin online, though alternative from suppliers such as Monoprice are also available. Apple doesn't have any plans at this time to make its own adapter, contrary to earlier speculation.
As for the current 24" LED Cinema Display, it still relies on USB for audio signals even when paired with the new MacBook Pros. Aside from the fact that this Cinema Display was designed before Apple updated its implementation of miniDP, the USB connection also takes care of the on-board iSight video as well as the built-in USB hub.
The change in the miniDP ports will make connecting a MacBook Pro to an HDTV a little easier. We have no doubt that Mac mini owners in particular will look forward to the new miniDP ports being added to a future hardware update, as that machine practically begs to be put to use as an HTPC.
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Silverlight 4 arrives... on Thursday
Microsoft announced today the release and availability of its Silverlight 4 application framework. This launch comes hot on the heels of yesterday's Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 release; taken together, the new versions constitute a complete refresh of Microsoft's managed code platform.
Unlike Monday's announcements, which made those products available immediately, Silverlight 4 won't be downloadable until Thursday.
The new version boasts a range of new features for both in-browser applications and standalone ones. In the former role, Silverlight's major competitor is Adobe's Flash; the two are used for similar kinds of complex, interactive sites. Silverlight 4 builds on its predecessor's capabilities by adding support for technology like webcams and microphones. The plug-in is now also more compatible, with Google's Chrome browser a supported platform, in addition to the existing support for Firefox and Internet Explorer on Windows, and Firefox and Safari on Mac OS X.
It's the latter role that Microsoft is pushing hardest. Silverlight is being promoted as a way to build easily-deployable, data-driven business applications at lower cost than the full .NET environment. In this way, Silverlight is competing with products like Adobe's AIR. To boost Silverlight adoption in this area, version 4 brings such features as print support, clipboard support, and charting capabilities.
For both groups of developers, the new Silverlight offers a broader set of controls, improved networking support, support for right-to-left languages, and a better XAML parser that's more compatible with the WPF XAML parser—making Silverlight 4 easier to use for desktop developers.
Silverlight is an increasingly important part of Microsoft's portfolio. The company boasts of its expanding desktop installed base (Silverlight is now available on more than 60 percent of computers on the Internet), and the technology has been used in a number of high-profile sites such as the official site of 2010 Winter Olympics. This is set to grow further still with the release of Windows Phone 7; a derivative of Silverlight 3 is used for third-party development on the forthcoming phone platform.
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Google buys visual search company to improve Google Goggles
Google Docs isn't the only Google product benefitting from acquisitions lately. It looks as if Google Goggles (and perhaps eventually Google's search) will soon integrate the capabilities of Plink, a visual search engine that identifies user-snapped photos of artwork.
Plink has only been available to the public for four months, but it's clear that its capabilities line up with Google's goal for Goggles. Google Goggles is a project (integrated into an Android app) that inputs user-uploaded photos of all manner of things—from landmarks to books to wine bottles and more—and identifies them along with more information. This includes the name of the object or product, applicable prices, and various search results associated with those pieces.
Goggles already has an "Artwork" category, but Plink's technology will undoubtedly help improve Google's visual search offerings across the board. "We’re looking forward to helping the Goggles team build a visual search engine that works not just for paintings or book covers, but for everything you see around you," reads a post on Plink's blog. Plink already offers an application on the Android Market and claims that the current app will continue to work, but that future development efforts will go towards Goggles.
This is likely just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to Google's buying spree, too. Google CEO Eric Schmidt said in September that the company hopes to acquire one small company per month in the aftermath of the recession. The Plink acquisition—Google's first in the UK—represents one in a string of many that will continue to be announced in the coming months. We hope that some of Google's plans for Plink (and Goggles) will involve spreading the love to its Web search engine and other, non-Android devices.
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US government finally admits most piracy estimates are bogus
We've all seen the studies trumpeting massive losses to the US economy from piracy. One famous figure, used literally for decades by rightsholders and the government, said that 750,000 jobs and up to $250 billion a year could be lost in the US economy thanks to IP infringement. A couple years ago, we thoroughly debunked that figure. For years, Business Software Alliance reports on software piracy assumed that each illicit copy was a lost sale. And the MPAA's own commissioned study on movie piracy turned out to overstate collegiate downloading by a factor of three.
Can we trust any of these claims about piracy?
The US doesn't think so. In a new report out yesterday, the government's own internal watchdog took a close look at "efforts to quantify the economic effects of counterfeit and pirated goods." After examining all the data and consulting with numerous experts inside and outside of government, the Government Accountability Office concluded (PDF) that it is "difficult, if not impossible, to quantify the economy-wide impacts."
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feature: Cooling the datacenter: "hippie engineering" meets modern IT
Tourists visiting Newcastle upon Tyne are more likely to pack a warm wool sweater than a beach blanket. In northern England, swimsuit season brings summer rains and chilly temperatures. Yet according to the Palo Alto, CA-based Hewlett-Packard, you won't find a better spot for a data center.
"The cool location is very attractive. We will probably only run the auxiliary cooling devices three days a year," says Ed Kettler, a fellow at Hewlett-Packard (HP).
In February the company opened a facility that pulls sea air through seven-foot intake fans. The first story of the building is used to channel air. "We built a second story for the data center, and put intake fans on the first level," says Kettler. "We basically have a twelve-foot raised floor."
Typical data centers look nothing like this. Most use a three-foot raised floor to circulate cold air. Beneath perforated floor tiles, an air conditioner often runs day and night. Even with air-side economization—a cooling system that brings in outside air—chillers are usually needed to cool the air after intake. Inefficient compressors force the air upwards through tiny holes in the floor tiles.
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Gears of War 3 trailer released, four-player co-op confirmed
Just a day after taking the wraps off of Bulletstorm, Epic Games has officially announced that other game we all knew was coming: Gears of War 3. Described as the finale to the Gears trilogy, Gears 3 will be launching worldwide in April 2011 and will once again be an Xbox 360 exclusive.
"When we released Gears of War more than three years ago, we set out to tell the world an unforgettable story of bravery and sacrifice in the face of insurmountable odds, and a year from now, players will get the chance to experience the final chapter in the story of Marcus Fenix and his companions in Delta Squad," series mastermind Cliff Bleszinski said. "This is definitely the biggest and most dramatic chapter yet in the Gears of War saga, and we can't wait to deliver it."
In traditional Gears of War style, Epic has released a fancy debut trailer dubbed "Ashes to Ashes."
The official announcement didn't contain much in the way of gameplay details, but Bleszinski did confirm via Twitter that the game will feature "4 player integrated story co op in the campaign." Epic is also wasting no time getting the hype train rolling and will be releasing a series of new Avatar items for purchase starting as early as April 20.
So there it is; we don't know much, but we know it's coming. And over the course of the next year I'm sure we'll be hearing quite a bit about the game.
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