Now that the HD-DVD format has been officially abandoned by Toshiba, CEO of Microsoft Steve Balmer announced yesterday in Las Vegas that Microsoft will officially support Blu-ray technology in upcoming projects.

When questioned on Blu-ray, Balmer replied:

“We’ve already been working on, for example, in Windows, device driver support for Blu-ray drives and the like”

“and I think the world moves on. Toshiba has moved on. We’ve moved on, and we’ll support Blu-ray in ways that make sense.”

When asked about an external Blu-ray player for Xbox 360 consoles, Microsoft said they don’t have anything new to say except the above comments and that they would keep media updated if something happens.

With the recent abandon and heavy price cut of the Xbox 360 external HD-DVD players by Microsoft, who knows what could happen. An external Blu-ray player could very well be out within the end of the year. The only downside is the bad talk they would get from Sony fanboys and biassed Sony media.

During a conference he gave, CEO of activision Bobby Kotick talked about the possible future of the Call of Duty franchise.

When questioned about his plans, he revealed that a Call of Duty MMO would interest him but would cost allot and would need to be monetized in some way.

He talked about how he would like to compete with top MMOs such as world of warcraft. With the recent merging of Activision and Blizzard, it’s going to be interesting to see how it goes on with World of Warcraft. Could dual accounts be offered? Only time will say.

I think this could be a good idea but they need to think of the competition. Before they could have the time to make this game, many MMOFPS games will be on the market and they will need to convince people to switch to their game.

I hope we see some news about this in the coming months/years.

Every web developer knows it, when your making a website, you always need to adjust your layout’s padding and margins because of IE6 and IE7’s way of displaying CSS and HTML.

According to Microsoft, they developped IE8 in a more web standard friendly way. They will still offer their users to switch from IE8 rendering to IE7 rendering. They also introduced a new mode to handle older websites. This is probably IE6 rendering or even lower.

By default, websites will be displayed with the new and improved IE8 rendering. If website developers absolutely want to use the IE7 rendering, they will need to add a special HTML tag into their pages.

It’s about time Microsoft decides to switch to the real world and comply with the real HTML language. This will make allot of people’s life much easier while coding websites.

Today, Valve finally patched Team Fortress 2 for the Xbox 360. Here are the details of the patch givin by a valve programmer:

-Fixed a medic invuln exploit.
-Fixed grenades going through players or buildings.
-Fixed exploit with rockets causing damage through thin walls.
-Fixed exploit allowing snipers to fire faster than intended.
-Fixed exploit allowing players to teleport with the intelligence.
-Fixed exploit attaching sappers to buildings through walls.
-Fixed spy backstab exploit.
-Fixed spy being able to attack without dropping his disguise.
-Medics no longer heal enemy spies when they’re not disguised.
-Tweaked autobalance calculations.
-When an engineer dies in sudden death, his buildings explode.
-Fixed stats sometimes not reporting correctly.
-Added a dialog to indicate when the host shuts down the server.
-Added rumble to TF weapons.
-Fixed ping column sometimes getting hidden in some resolutions.
-Added 10 and 14 player game sizes.
-Prevent hosts selecting game sizes above their bandwidth limits.
-Improved handling of large network packets to eliminate bandwidth spikes.
Reduced respawn times for smaller games.

First thing that I love about the patch is that people with crappy connections cannot host 16 player games anymore! They think that because they have absolutely no lag (when you are host, you have 0 lag), that no one lags. You enter their game and cannot even exit your spawn because the lag is so terrible. This is gonna limit the number of 16 players games but at least this will trim out the wannabe hosts.

The added rumble is nice. It adds more feeling to the game. Most modern games have rumble so it seems like this is something that should have been there from the start

Aside from bad hosts, the net-code seems allot more solid than it previously was. Much less lag combined with the host restrictions on player capacity.

Now this is where they screwed up… They changed the medic and dispenser healing to 50% speed. This pretty much killed the medic and nerfed the engineer badly. The Team Fortress 2 community doesn’t understand why this happened and it’s not even like that on the PC version. It’s not in the official fix list so allot of people think this is an error which shouldn’t be there. If so, we can expect another patch to fix this “error?”.

John Markoff from the New York Times published that the iPhone started out as a project for a handheld safari browser. Here’s what he said:

Apple’s multitouch technology began life not as a cellphone, but as a notepad-sized skunkworks project internally dubbed Safari Pad, run by Tim Bucher, then Apple’s head of Macintosh hardware. To his credit, Mr. Jobs seized on the technology and morphed it into the iPhone.

Knowing that the iPhone would be too expensive or too big of a phone for a large part of the apple community, Apple released the iPod Touch. It does everything the iPhone does except obviously having a phone.

Those are the numbers of february. The Nintendo Wii console actually outselled the PS3 331,627 to 89,131 units.

The rise of the Playstation 3 popularity expected in Japan seems to be overshadowed by Nintendo and its great games such as Super Smash Bros. Brawl which sold 1.33 million games in february alone.

Nintendo is destroying the competition in Japan. The Xbox 360 sold only 14,079 units in february. For the Xbox 360, it’s not surprising but for the Wii to continue outselling the PS3 like that, there’s a clear sign of how the Japan gamers like their gaming.

Ninja Gaider: Dragon Sword for the Nintendo DS has officially gone gold. It will release in the US on March 25 and retail for 34.99$

In this unique game, players will control Ryu Hayabusa in his latest adventure by holding the DS sideways. This new way of playing DS games is being used by more and more game developers.

Unlike its original titles, Ninja Gaider: Dragon Sword for the DS got a T for Teen by the ESRB. The original Ninja gaiden games for the Xbox were very graphic and got M for Mature ratings.

The Apple Time Capsule is a wireless backup solution for Macs. It automatically backs up your computer’s hard-drive wirelessly with airport. There are 2 models available at launch:

• 500GB ($299)
• 1TB ($499)

Here are the first impressions from reviewers around the web:

• You can’t transfer an existing Time Machine backup to the Time Capsule. You must start over and redo the initial backup process.
• Initial backup is very long but you can make it faster using an ethernet cord instead of doing it wirelessly with airport.
• You cannot pause the initial backup. Even if it’s long, you must keep your computer on the whole time.
• Easy setup and it works as good as it says it does.

The Time Capsule is the perfect backup solution for laptops. While you’re on your couch browsing on safari, your computer automatically backs itself up wirelessly without you doing anything.

The patch that was much anticipated by the Xbox 360 Call of Duty 4 community came out today. It fixes what gamers complained about in the lasts months. Infinity Ward is known for taking care of it’s customers and giving gamers what they want. Here’s the info IW published abut the patch:

New Kill Cams

We’ve added new Kill Cams for everything. So now those “WTF!” grenades that seemingly come from no where, you can see that a guy threw it over the house, it hit a tree branch, bounced off a rock, into a tiny window, where you happened to be pointing out of, and say…… whoa. Follow behind RPGs and M203’s kill cams, claymores, Airstrikes where you can follow the bomb from the plane until it hits you.

Host Migration

Now you won’t have to be dropped back by yourself when a host leaves. Instead, everyone will stay together, a new host will be assigned, and the game will auto-start back up. Keeping everyone together, no more re-inviting, re-joining games because some host leaves. This has been a tall order and something that we’ve put a lot of work into which has allowed us to really optimize online play all around not just specifically with Host migration.

Improved Sniper / ACOG Accuracy

Sniper and ACOG scopes have been tweaked and are really improved. I use to not snipe at all (mainly because I’m a horrible sniper), but now it’s so much more fluid and natural, while still having the same difficulty to use, it has no more “WTF I know I hit that guy!” moments.

Upgraded Spectator Cam

Now when you’re in spectator mode you can follow them in 3rd person, switch to their first person view, or rotate the camera in a full 360 degrees around whoever you’re watching.

Quick Mute Option

Users will now be able to quick mute players on the fly by pulling up the scoreboard in-game or via the lobby by simply going to their name and hitting the mute assigned button. As quickly as calling in and designating an airstike. So no longer getting killed while trying to make your way through the Xbox blades for the mute option so you can shut up the guy who always seems to find it funny to sing into his mic or cover up for his lack of skill by telling you how to play Domination his way.

A study provided by an independent warranty provider has proved the short term failure rate of the Xbox 360 to be about 16.4%.

After selling 1040 warranties between April 1 and July 31, 2007, 171 claims were made up to last week. 16.4% After such a short time period is a terrible. The group used to do the study will be followed for about 2 years so the failure rate will dramatically go up.

Out of the 171 claims, 102 were due to the 3 red lights. (3 out of 4 red lights light up when powering the console and nothing works)

Here’s the percentage of failure for the 69 other warranty claims:

• 7% Disc tray problems
• 10% Power supply problems
• 13% Hard drive problems
• 13% Video card problems
• 18% Optical drive problems

Those failure rates are the reason Microsoft had no other choice but spend the billions in making the warranty for the 3 red lights 3 years by default.