Battlefield 2142 Demo available for download from EA

Battlefield 2142 Demo just become available for download. Full version hits the stores early next week!

Posted by 42 [PC Gaming] ( October 11, 2006 11:24 PM ) Permalink

Metal gods Iron Maiden hit Philly

For the first time in their 25+ year career Iron Maiden felt so strong about their new album "A Matter of Life and Death" that they are playing all 10 tracks as they appear on the album!

I was initially skeptical of this idea, having only a few weeks from the album release date to the concert date to become familiar with the tracks, but I came to find the setlist actually enhanced my enjoyment of the ENTIRE album, raising my appreciation of a track or two that would have normally been overlooked.

I had good seats (3 rows back from the pit), if not a little to far to the left of stage, but nice and close to see Bruce, Dave, Adrian and Steve up close when they did their walk around stage!

Posted by 42 [Metal] ( October 11, 2006 09:03 PM ) Permalink

CEC2006 day 3 almost over - so what did I learn?

Well that's it for me, CEC2006 is over and just waiting for Jonathan to give his keynote. Great experience getting to know Sun better, and as I sit here waiting for the crowds to get into the ballroom I'm running through what I managed to learn:

Storageville – the ex-Storagetek demo area where I found out more about VTL (Virtual Tape Library), the massive SL8500 (with 150PB native storage capacity!), the T10000 tape drive and my favorite the X4500 Data Server.

Security practices in delivering remote management services (great stuff here on what we do in the Managed Operations sector)

Grid and HPC (High Performance Computing, how we got back on the Top 10 list of supercomputers with our work at the Tokyo Institute of Technology and what we are planning to do next.

New architectures and products can't say anything here but very happy to be a Sun Employee :)

and more (to follow), gotta get to the ballroom myself now!

Technorati Tags: cec2006

Posted by 42 [General] ( October 04, 2006 03:50 PM ) Permalink

Managed Operations takes the stage

Paul Hughes, VP of Managed Operations takes the stage and talks about our portfolio! Big wins highlighted through the adoption of the AIM methodology (more on that later). Growth in the storage area and other stuff I can't blog about (yet :))

Great questions from the attendees.

Missing the early breakout sessions (sorry Stevie G), tough choice but worth the chance to listen to the services exec team.

Technorati Tags: cec2006

Posted by 42 [General] ( October 04, 2006 11:34 AM ) Permalink

Last day at the CEC

Ian Whites Services team takes the stage for an early start for the last day here at the CEC. Focus is on the customer experience and enhancing it through employee growth. More presentations later in the morning, including a keynote from our leader Jonathan Schwartz to close the event.

A slightly non-related highlight of yesteday was the showing of the Sun Galaxy tv ads/spots. These are very funny and worth the time to check them out at http://sun.feedroom.com

Technorati Tags: cec2006

Posted by 42 [General] ( October 04, 2006 11:15 AM ) Permalink

CEC day 2 kicks off! The Geeks are back

Reoccurring theme of the conference "The geeks are back" is an understatement, and in a good way! The level, quality of presentations, demos and advanced product reviews show how Sun really does has the best geeks in the industry! This confidence in what we're doing in Sun is generating attendee excitement like never before...

This morning's presentations covered Storage and Services, can't get the grin off my face after having one of my customers used as an example of our successful (global) heterogeneous managed service offering... and not just once, but they were mentioned twice!

That was almost as good as learning more about the X4500 Data Server product line, click X4500 for more – it was the highlight of yesterdays break-away sessions (well, for me anyways). I mean, how can you not get excited about 24+ TB of storage, including 2 x AMD dual core ZFS front end, in a 4RU unit????

Technorati Tags: cec2006

Posted by 42 [General] ( October 03, 2006 01:40 PM ) Permalink

3000+ Customer Engineers + 3 days = enhancing our competitive advantage!

Sun's premiere Customer Engineering Conference hit it off today with 3000+ employees of Don Grantham's Sales and Services organisation converging on San Francisco for 3 solid days of technical interchange, networking and learning - reinforcing Sun's committment to envolve from a hardware/software shop of years gone by into a truely well-rounded technology AND service company.

I'm excited to be part of this and looking forward to leveraging and helping my fellow engineers and bring together all Sun's core competencies (The 4 S's – Servers, Services, Software and Storage) to work for our customers.

Hot topics for me today are:

* Heterogeneous offerings! How we step up and support our customers business needs – not just their Sun hardware and software.

* 'Galaxy' and future X86/64 systems

* What we're doing with HPC (High Performance Computing)

Technorati Tags: cec2006

Posted by 42 [General] ( October 02, 2006 02:58 PM ) Permalink

How to get the most out of your day

Just worked out that if you wake up an hour earlier every day (or go to bed an hour later) you end up with an average of 15 days a year of extra 'awake' time. Work that out again over a life time you can add years! I'm happy about this because I now have an answer to my life long dilemma - where to find the time to get to stuff done, you know, like getting the chance to play Battlefield 2 again :( Well, I did file this under useless knowledge!

Posted by 42 [Useless Knowledge] ( August 24, 2006 09:30 AM ) Permalink

Check out the latest Battlefield 2142 E3 demo Video

While you're waiting for the Battlefield 1.3 patch to be fixed you can entertain yourself by checking out the E3 video for EA's latest addition to the Battlefield series - Battlefield 2142.   Expected release date Q4 2006.

You can find the video here

Posted by 42 [PC Gaming] ( June 02, 2006 06:02 PM ) Permalink

Ageia's PhysX processor finally hits the market

Check out the article at Hothardware for a more detailed review of BFG's, and I believe the industries first gaming PPU (physics processing unit). Designed to offload (funnily enough) physics calculations from the main CPUs similar to how 3D graphics processing was moved away from the CPU back in the days of 3dfx. Look for games and consoles to start taking advantage of these chips and the associated APIs (the PPUs function can be software emulated I believe? but at much reduced performance - need to check that out) over the next 6 to 12 months. This has potential to change how we interact with gaming environments, and how they react to us :)

Posted by 42 [PC Gaming] ( May 09, 2006 09:31 PM ) Permalink

Never trust your home builder

After finishing off some work to my water heater in preparation for my final inspection (running an overflow pipe to the sump pump) I decided to test my pump. My house is a little over a year old so thought nothing of it - until it didn't work :( After an hour removing all necessary pipes and covers I found the sump to be bearly 5 inches for the top of the tank! Long story short, there was nothing wrong with my sup pump, problem was with construction material in the sump hole! And I don't mean no little pieces of paper or nails, I'm talkin' foot long lengths of pipe and strips of rubber that where not cut back properly. End result was the float could not move freely, therefore it would never trigger (either on or off so I found) the pump. What a lucky save.

Posted by 42 [General] ( April 10, 2006 09:07 AM ) Permalink

Charger CAI (cold air intake)

Have ordered my CAI (or Cold Air Intake) for my 06 Charger, first (of many) car mod for me. Also looking at a 180 deg. thermostat and superchip programmer. This with some other minor changes have netted quarter mile runs as good as 13.1 seconds. Gotta love the HEMI - oh, and that is without forced induction on a 4 door, 4000lb car! Now if I could only work out how to get a good CAI onto my gaming rig, I'd be a happy man.

Posted by 42 [General] ( April 07, 2006 09:21 AM ) Permalink

Sun making moves into the REAL gaming world - online

With the Darkstar Project expect to see more of Sun in the online gaming world. It is about time someone developed a scalable backend framework for gaming, and I'm glad it is us. Maybe now we'll see real massively multiplayer worlds, where people can move from one world to the other seaminglessly. Imagine, first person shooters such as the Battlefield, unreal, and quake series, extending their battlegrounds from single maps with one-off, round based game play with no affect on a larger scale to a 'realistic' campaign style play where multiple 'maps' are played across the theater of combat! Your squad can /join/progress/unjoin battles (maps) while still maintaining the consistency and flow across the whole game (or multiple maps). The outcome of a battle in one region can affect battles in others (reinforcements and supplies can now make it to your squad for example when the battle one sector behind you is won)

Posted by 42 [PC Gaming] ( April 05, 2006 11:23 AM ) Permalink

Iron Maiden annouce their first tour packages

With Maiden's 2006 tours planned for the end of the year it was only a matter of time before the tour packages started coming through. There are no 'Bruce Air' packages yet so I'm anxious - don't know whether to wait it out and possibly miss one all together or just book one of the coach trips. Option A would be my pick (need to check flight prices to the UK at that time first :) ) Options available from http://www.ironmaiden.com/frameset.php?section=1&subsection=1&article_id=1298 4 DAY / 3 NIGHT / 2 CONCERT COACH TRIP : OPTION A — Designed for the BIG Maiden fan wanting to see 2 shows in 2 days! Day 1 Sun 26th Nov – Depart from the points shown on the enclosed booking form on the early hours of 26th Nov (nb: Some Northern points may be late evening on Sat 25th Nov, London, for example will be 7.30am on the 26th Nov.) We drive down to Dover for the ferry crossing to Calais and onwards to Antwerp in North Belgium for late afternoon. Here we will stay for 2 nights at our hotel. After check in the eve of the 26th Nov is free. Day 2 Mon 27th Nov – Free morning /afternoon in Antwerp. Mid afternoon transfer across to the Brabenhalle in Den Bosch & IRON MAIDEN live in concert. After show, return to hotel for 2nd nights stay. Day 3 Tues 28th Nov - Depart Antwerp after breakfast & drive onto Paris for early afternoon arrival — check into hotels—free afternoon before transferring across to Bercy Arena and IRON MAIDEN live in concert. Day 4 Weds 29th Nov - Depart Paris after breakfast and return to Calais for mid afternoon sailing and return to original points of departure from late afternoon onwards. Price from £264-274pp ************************************ 3 DAY / 1 NIGHT / 1 CONCERT TRIP : OPTION B Day 1 Mon 27th - Depart in the early hours of 27th Nov. We drive down to Dover for the ferry crossing to Calais and onwards to Paris for late afternoon. Here we will stay for 1 nights at our hotel. After check in the eve of the 27th Nov is free. Day 2 Tues 28th Nov – Free morning /afternoon in Paris before transfer across to the Bercy Arena and Iron Maiden live in concert. After concert we depart Paris and travel back to Calais Day 3 Weds 29th Nov—arriving back in Dover for very early morning and return to original points of departure from mid morning onwards. Price from £144-168pp

Posted by 42 [Metal] ( April 05, 2006 10:42 AM ) Permalink

Is there a pattern here with EA?

Argh, seems like things just don't work well with EA. I downloaded and installed the latest booster pack for BF2 (the euro pack) and sure enough, it didn't work 'out-of-the-box'. After searching and searching I found a support article that told me I needed to change my account alias to match the account I play online with and not the AE alias I purchased the game with. A bit of automation or messaging during install would have REALLY helped reduce the frustration levels and MAXIMISE game playing time :-) That said, the Euro pack looks good from the first couple of hours.

Posted by 42 [PC Gaming] ( March 15, 2006 06:04 PM ) Permalink