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February 16th, 2012, 22:39 Posted By: wraggster
Advice Line's Bob Lewis sees ripe opportunity for Microsoft in the tablet market: Forget about outdoing Apple's iPad and give us the features that finally improve the way we work. 'The game isn't beating Apple at its own game. The magic buzzword is to "differentiate" and show what your technology will do that Apple won't even care about, let alone beat you at. One possible answer: Help individual employees be more effective at their jobs,' Lewis writes, outlining four business features to target, not the least of which would be to provide UI variance, enabling serious tablet users to expose the OS complexity necessary to do real work.
http://it.slashdot.org/story/12/02/1...et-opportunity
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February 16th, 2012, 00:50 Posted By: wraggster
THQ has confirmed a June 29th release for console and PC title Darksiders II in the UK.
The game will be released on June 26th in the US.
Two UK retailers have also signed up to offer specific pre-order incentives for the title.
Those who commit to a purchase from GAME and Gamestation will receive The Death Rides Pack. This adds an additional two hours of gameplay through the inclusion of extra side missions.
In Ireland, this DLC will be available to GameStop customers.
Pre-order from Amazon, however, and you’ll get the Deadly Despair Pack DLC, which unlocks an improved in-game horse.
So far no UK stockists are offering The Angel of Death Pack, which is available to Best But customers Stateside and offers improved weapons and armour.
http://www.mcvuk.com/news/read/darks...evealed/091275
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February 16th, 2012, 00:47 Posted By: wraggster
Those who have not yet pre-ordered the PC version of BioWare RPG sequel Mass Effect 3 have been offered a free copy of DICE shooter Battlefield 3 as an extra incentive to do so.
Two conditions apply, however. Firstly, you have to live in the US. Secondly, you have to buy the game through EA’s online content portal Origin.
The deal is all the sweeter when you consider that Battlefield 3 remains a financially viable product – in this week’s UK charts EA’s game holds a higher position than Activision’s Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3.
Sadly there’s no sign yet of the deal being offered in Europe.
Mass Effect 3 will be released in the UK on March 9th.
http://www.mcvuk.com/news/read/free-...-orders/091281
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February 16th, 2012, 00:42 Posted By: wraggster
Kinect hacks previously brought gesture and voice control to Boxee and XBMC, and now that the Kinect for Windows hardware has been released we've got a solution for Windows Media Center. The aptly named Kinect for Media Center brings all the normal playback controls (for WMC and add-ins like Netflix) to your fingertips and lips, at the cost of $6.99. While its control scheme seems to be fully featured there are unfortunately some limitations -- it doesn't work with the Xbox 360 Kinect due to Microsoft's restrictions, and it also doesn't work with WMC extenders. What is included are filters to keep your content from accidentally triggering the voice controls (something some of us have had problems with on the Xbox 360), and configurable settings for right or left hand dominance or sensitivity. You can check out a video demo of the beta version (compare to a demo we saw last yearfrom the makers of the Amulet voice control remotes) embedded after the break, or head directly to the site to try it out yourself if you're sure that finding the remote has simply become to much of a hassle.
http://www.engadget.com/2012/02/15/k...-media-center/
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February 15th, 2012, 22:36 Posted By: wraggster
PC maker giant HP has announced a compact all-in-one PC called the HP Z1 which the firm claims is the first workstation to use the form factor.
The 27-inch workstation crams the guts of a PC behind the a high-end LCD screen based on IPS LCD technology with 2560 x 1440 pixels. Entry level specs begin with a 3.3GHz Core i3 2120 with Intel integrated graphics but go up to quad core Intel Xeon processors and Nvidia Quadro workstation 3d graphics.
The party trick of the HP Z1 is that the device can flip over and open up with the slender internals laid bare for upgrades and maintenance. It actually looks quite nifty but an internal shot of one fully loaded Z1 shows a worrying number of those thin-type coolers, typically equipped with high-speed fans.
We reckon it's unlikely to be quiet but then that's the price of saving space, it seems. On the other hand HP say the Z1 is mostly based from laptop parts with significant power savings to be had over traditional desktop components.
The HP Z1 will arrive in April with entry level models priced at under £1,400 in the UK.
http://www.pcr-online.biz/news/read/...station/027947
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February 15th, 2012, 01:18 Posted By: wraggster
EA has confirmed that Star Wars: The Old Republic will go live in Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong and Singapore on March 1.
 Players in those parts will benefit from new regional servers from that date, and if you already have a character in the game you can get a free server transfer for a limited time."Players in these countries who currently have or have had an active Star Wars: The Old Republic account prior to February 28, 2012 will have the opportunity to request a free character transfer for a limited time to an Asia Pacific server after the launch on March 1, 2012. All players who qualify for a character transfer will be notified in early March with more details," explains EA.
The game will launch in Standard Edition ($79.99 AUD, $89.99 NZD, HK$389.00, S$64.00) and Digital Deluxe Edition ($89.99 AUD, $99.99 NZD, HK$465.00, S$76.00) versions, and can snag an in-game color crystal to change their weapon effect as a pre-order incentive* for reserving a copy of the Standard Edition from participating local retailers.
Star Wars: The Old Republic has sold through more than 2 million copies since its December launch, making it the 'fastest-growing MMO in history".
http://www.computerandvideogames.com...nd-neighbours/
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February 15th, 2012, 00:42 Posted By: wraggster
While we thought a tasteful retrospective was the way to go, it looks like HP's not finished picking over those webOS bones. The company has now released the UI widgets for Enyo 2.0 (following its source code release last month), details on how webOS deals with the Javascript core and a new Isis web browser. The browser will apparently add "enhanced support" for plug-ins and Flash -- even if its days are numbered. HP also plans to corral dev efforts, organizing projects and assigning management committees -- based on a "meritocracy" -- to different parts of the code. We're promised yet more OS components to reveal themselves in the next few months, with the full open webOS release expected to roll out in September.
http://www.engadget.com/2012/02/14/h...rowser-and-so/
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February 15th, 2012, 00:27 Posted By: wraggster
In its 2012 roadmap, the Mozilla Foundation highlights plans to create its own soup-to-nuts mobile platform, known as Boot to Gecko. With this move, the Mozilla Foundation 'is finally shaking off its dependence on browser revenues and treading where Google, with ChromeOS; Canonical, with Unity on Ubuntu; and (most recently) the Plasma community's Spark tablet have already started: the creation of standards-based platforms that rely on robust web applications (in varying degrees) more than native-run apps to provide the user experience,' writes blogger Brian Proffitt. 'I very much think that we are heading for a time when Linux flavors will be identified by environments, not distributions.
http://linux.slashdot.org/story/12/0...h-distribution
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February 14th, 2012, 13:56 Posted By: wraggster
Rovio, the people sprinkling stale bread behind Angry Birds, received the Property of the Year prize at the 12th annual Toy of the Year awards (yeah, that's totally a thing). Rovio won based on the massive amount of Angry Birdsphysical merchandise it's released over the past two years, which includes plush toys, backpacks, clothing, phone cases and bacon. OK, not bacon, but Rovio has branded almost every other item imaginable.
"Our physical goods business has great momentum just now," Ville Heijari, Rovio's VP of franchise development, told Develop. "It's especially interesting to see many app and social game devs emulate the merchandising strategy that Rovio has been pushing with Angry Birds for the last two years."
http://www.joystiq.com/2012/02/14/an...merchandising/
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February 14th, 2012, 13:48 Posted By: wraggster
We all know that Windows 8 will have a split personality, with a Windows 7 style "Classic" desktop environment working hand-in-hand with a finger-friendly Metro UI. Given that Firefox has a significant market share in the PC web browsing market, it's only natural for Mozilla to accommodate both parts of Microsoft's new OS. According to its 2012 Strategy & Roadmap, the company has plans for a proof-of-concept Win8 Firefox release in Q2 of this year. In that document, Mozilla reveals that a "simple evolution" of its existing browser will work with the "Classic" environment, but brand new new front-end and integration code is needed for Firefox to play nice with Metro. The plan is to build a Gecko-basedbrowser that brings full Firefox capabilities and can handle Windows 8's unique requirements like being suspended by the OS when it's not being viewed and supporting multiple "snap" states to ensure a good browsing experience when multiple apps are open. Looks like Mozilla's crew of coders has their work cut out for them, and you can peep the full to-do list at the source link below.
http://www.engadget.com/2012/02/13/f...-in-the-works/
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February 14th, 2012, 13:46 Posted By: wraggster
Canalys recently announced that smartphone shipments surpassed those of PCs for the whole of 2011. Well, NPD's just released its own set of hardware numbers, this time focused on revenue shares, and it appears PCs (that's laptops and desktops for NPD's purposes) are still far and away the biggest moneymakers around, bringing in about 19 percent (or $28 billion) of the reported $144 billion in hardware sales last year. TVs, PCs and gaming hardware each saw a decline in revenue share while smartphone and tablet sales grew -- slates and e-readers experienced a five percent increase, taking up nearly 11 percent of the hardware pie and raking in $15 billion. Unsurprisingly, Apple topped the chart for sales by manufacturer, seeing a 36 percent increase over 2010, while HP, Samsung, Sony and Dell rounded out the top five with varying levels of sales declines. For more number crunching and statistical whatnots, check out the full PR after the break.
http://www.engadget.com/2012/02/13/n...ead-the-money/
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February 13th, 2012, 23:43 Posted By: wraggster
David Perry, founder and CEO of Gaikai, has admitted that current TVs are not suitable for his company's cloud gaming platform because of in-built input latency.
Last month Gaikai announced a deal with LG that would see its service built in to the South Korean electronics firm's Cinema 3D range of Smart TVs, beginning with models produced this year. In an interview, however, Perry tells us that TVs won't be up to the job until next year.
"Televisions are not designed to be fast," he tells us. "The signal comes in and it's moving from board to board internally before it hits the screen with around 70 to 90 milliseconds of delay.
"At Gaikai, we're constantly battling latency. It's been my objective to build the fastest network ever. So when you suddenly get 90ms in the TV architecture, that's a big problem.
"But imagine a TV manufacturer totally gets into bed with us and gives us a direct link from our ethernet port to the screen. They would have to make modifications to their circuitry but say they plan that for the 2013 TVs.
"It's going to get to the point where the consumer won't be able to tell if it's going through the internet or TV. 2013 is my prediction for when we won't be able to distinguish between a streamed and a console version of a game."
Rather than being specific to LG, Perry believes latency is a problem all TV manufacturers are currently working on, and that cloud gaming will soon become a TV standard. "Every major brand will soon sell televisions with cloud-gaming services in-built," he says. "I haven't spoken to a single major TV brand that isn't in some process of deciding to do this."
Perry's comments are extracts from an interview in our new issue,E238, which should be with subscribers any day now and will be on shelves on February 14.
http://www.edge-online.com/news/curr...-enough-gaikai
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February 13th, 2012, 21:40 Posted By: wraggster
Industry leading MMO lost 100,000 active users in most recent quarter - 700,000 less than previous period
Activation Blizzard reported a net loss of 100,000 World of Warcraft subscribers for the three months ending December 31st, according to financial documents filed by the company.
An aggressive marketing campaign featuring Chuck Norris during the quarterly period may have acquired enough new subscribers to negate further losses to its established user base.
Three months prior to the fourth calendar quarter, Activision Blizzard revealed that the longstanding MMO had lost 800,000 subscribers – seven per cent of its total user base at the time. That followed another exodus of about 300,000 customers in the first six months of 2011.
But Blizzard appears to have decelerated the reduction, ending the quarter with 10.2 million subscribers after seven years of business.
Activision announced the figures during its most recent quarterly earnings report, where the company elsewhere declared $1.4 billion in profit for the quarter. Shares climbed on the results, which landed ahead of City expectations.
http://www.develop-online.net/news/3...er-losses-calm
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February 13th, 2012, 21:39 Posted By: wraggster
Unreal 'Samaritan' demo requires 2.5 terraFLOPS, says Epic's Tim Sweeney
Amidst rumors about the processing power of the next generation Xbox, Epic Games' CEO Tim Sweeney told the DICE 2012 audience that a recent tech demo required 2.5 terraFLOPS to Run.
That's ten times the power of the Xbox 360, which is capable of .25 terraflops.
Though the "Samaritan" demo was running in Unreal Engine 3, some have asked if the next generation Xbox will have the computing power to handle it.
It is uncertain what specifications Unreal 4 would require to run the demo, but Epic's vice president Mark Rein told G4 that the engine could see a reveal sometime this year.
Unreal Engine 4 is anticipated for a 2014 release.
http://www.develop-online.net/news/3...d-for-Unreal-4
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February 13th, 2012, 01:45 Posted By: wraggster
via http://www.aep-emu.de/
A new version of ReactOS has been released.
It is an effort to create a free software replacement for Microsoft Windows ™ that is compatible with existing hardware and software!
Quote:
This version includes a significant amount of changes including both user visible and architectural improvements. Also included in this release is the valuable work accomplished as part of the Google Summer of Code 2011 event, of which ReactOS was a mentoring project.
One of the more significant sets of improvements was to ReactOS’ networking stack. As part of the GSoC, ReactOS gained a new TCP/IP driver built around the LwIP project. The LwIP library is a popular and stable implementation of TCP/IP originally intended for embedded use. The new driver has significantly increased both stability and performance, allowing the use of high bandwidth applications such as torrents. Furthermore, ReactOS has improved compatibility with NT5.1 drivers with the export of scatter/gather DMA functionality. Last but not least, ReactOS now includes wireless network support and is able to connect to both open and WEP encrypted networks.
One of the more obvious user visible changes includes the implementation of theme support. Users can now change the look and feel of ReactOS’ user interface by installing XP based themes and changing the appearance of the desktop from the default classic look to something more exciting.
Architecturally, the addition of a kernel mode testing framework has helped to identify a variety of bugs in kernel mode components. This is an important change with regards to core stability and is proving invaluable in ensuring the project does not suffer unexpected regressions in the kernel.
Support for building ReactOS using the Microsoft toolset has also played a large part in the release. This is now at a stage where ReactOS can be entirely built using an MSVC based environment and can produce a working boot and livecd. Along with GCC, ReactOS can now be built using two different toolsets and on a variety of platforms including Windows, Linux and Mac OS X.
During the preparation of this release 789 bugs were fixed, including 118 regressions with the oldest regression being issue #1009 (can´t open context menu with Shift-F10). The oldest bug fixed was #209 (PrintScreen doesn´t work) from over eight years ago. 811 new bugs were opened since the release of 0.3.13.
The detailed 0.3.14 changelog:
Generic 0.3.14 Changes
CMake and MSVC efforts continue and a variety of linking bugs have been resolved due to differing strictness between GCC and MSVC.
Service control manager events are now logged in the system log.
Service startup and shutdown has been cleaned up significantly.
The pagefile has been limited to 2GB in size due to FAT limitations.
Services will now always return ERROR_SUCCESS when they have successfully started.
Both the VBE and VGA drivers are being marked as VGA compatible as a hack due another bug preventing VirtualBox´s video driver from loading when the VBE driver is installed.
Wireless network support has been merged into ReactOS. Currently ReactOS is able to join unsecured and WEP secured wireless networks.
Known Issues
There exists a memory manager bug that consistently occurred when attempting to install ReactOS using the VirtualBox 4.x series. The issue manifests as a hang when the installer attempts to copy over the mshtml.dll file. A hack was applied that appears to eliminate the issue, but users who encounter it can also use VirtualBox 3.x or another virtual machine platform.
Skype and TuxPaint both crash right now.
Applications
3DText: Rotation is now independent of computer speed.
Calc: Buttons have been realigned to better match calculator in Windows XP.
CharMap: Skeleton for advanced view implemented. Font zoom when scrolling and changing fonts has been fixed.
Cmd: File IO functions have been replaced with memory IO functions for batch files.
Device Manager: New device manager using ATL has been begun. Main window focus defaults to treeview to allow easier navigation by keyboard.
MSPaint: Cut function implemented.
Notepad: Notepad is now marked as unicode.
Ping: Option parsing has been made stricter and more robust.
Rapps: Links have been converted from FTP to HTTP until underlying Wine library starts supporting FTP.
Regedit: Ability to parse and display REG_RESOURCE_LIST values added. User is now prompted when importing from commandline. Fixes to handling of REG_MULTI_SZ values.
SndVol32: Application to control setting the volume in ReactOS.
Spider: Yes/No dialog is now used for exiting the game instead of Okay/Cancel.
Taskmgr: Terminating an application now uses 1 as the exit code.
Control Panel Applets
A variety of translation and memory usage fixes.
Appwiz: Directories can now be passed to the create shortcut wizard.
Desktop: The wallpaper and desktop background is only applied when they have been changed. Color scheme selection has bee fixed.
Sysdm: All hardware profiles are now displayed. Homepage link control now correctly shows the focus window. GPL license is now properly displayed.
Installer
FAT32 boot sector pointer arithmetic fixed, resolving error when installing FAT32 boot sector.
Floppy disk is now correctly formatted to FAT12 before the bootloader is installed and booting from floppy works again.
OemName in boot sector is no longer overwritten.
Volume Boot Record only is now an install option so that the MBR will not be overwritten.
= Core Functionality =
Audio/Video Stack
Kernel Streaming
Input/output parameters are now probed when a request comes in from user mode.
PORTCLS
Status codes of unhandled IRPs are no longer modified.
Filesystems
CDFS
Reading along non-aligned blocks has been fixed.
FASTFAT
A leading period in front of a file name no longer causes asserts as it is valid for long filenames.
Verification code moved so that they are in the codepath for more functions.
FSRTL
FsRtlIs
InExpression functions are now working after backtracking was implemented.
NPFS
Interruption of waits have been reworked to avoid potential deadlocks and corruption.
CCB access is now managed using reference counting, elimination a race condition and corruption during 2nd stage.
Hardware Management
IRP_MN_QUERY_POWER and IRP_MN_SET_POWER are now sent to all enumerated devices when a power state change occurs.
A volatile device tree is created during 1st stage booting so that the HAL loaded during 2nd stage will not have to deal with phantom devices.
ACPI is now automatically enabled when the ACPI HAL is loaded, and disabled when the standard HAL is loaded.
ACPI
ACPICA updated to 20110922.
Special devices are now identified with unique IDs.
Physical address retrieval has been implemented.
Reading and writing PCI configuration mistakenly interpreted a value representing bits as representing bytes, causing memory corruption and overreads. This issue is now resolved.
HAL
Support for Scatter/Gather DMA operations has been added.
Plug n Play
IRPs sent to PnP devices during enumeration are now compatible with XP/2003/Vista.
Duplicate loading of drivers is now properly resolved.
Device removal has been reworked so that the remove command will propagate down to the children of devices. When any device in the top level fails to honor the remove request, the remove command is canceled for all devices that received the original remove command.
Kernel
Time setting functions are now implemented.
Trap handling code continues to be separated into architecture specific blocks as needed.
Processor number count is now defined in one place instead of having a different version for each architecture.
Debug trace code has been cleaned up to avoid crashes in certain situations.
More Interlocked functions have been converted into C from assembly, improving portability.
Trap handling for user-mode traps has been fixed.
Text display using bootvid is now disabled after phase 1 initialization, eliminating graphical glitches when debug to screen is enabled.
A variety of internal data structures have been fixed thanks to the new kernel mode unit tests.
Resource acquisition now returns the correct boolean value depending on whether the caller wishes to wait for the resource to be available.
Assembly trap handlers have been moved so that a 32bit relative jump is always to ensure consistency now that a wider range of interrupt values may be used.
Execution yielding has been modified to match behavior on Windows, including attempting to locklessly check the processor control block.
The kernel now correctly reports whether there are pending APCs during a KiSwapContextExit call.
I/O
Names for internal IO functions have been renamed to match those on Windows.
IopDecrementDeviceObjectHandleCount, IopInterlockedIncrementUlong, IopInterlockedDecrementUlong, IopNotifyAlreadyRegisteredFileSystems, and IoEnumerateRegisteredFiltersList functions implemented.
Additional I/O device registration and removal functions relating to storage devices have been implemented.
The kernel now handles unexpected device removals.
Removal of locks when debug information is associated is now fixed.
The correct number of serial ports is now registered in the global configuration table.
KDBG
Output after doublefaults improved.
The mouse is now disabled when reading from keyboard.
Output counting fixed so that new commands will show even after previous command created large amounts of output.
Memory Management
Kernel debug pool implemented. The debug pool is designed to help driver developers find memory usages errors in their code.
Session space address layout initialization has now been separated on a per-architecture basis.
Continued work on memory management on AMD64 platform.
SEH usage has been streamlined to avoid an infinite loop when locking an address space.
Working set balancer code has been reworked to trim pages during low memory situations.
Alignment of memory blocks fixed up to make sure operations are done on page-sized blocks.
Traversal of virtual address tree has been fixed and optimized.
Mapping of memory sections has seen fixes to support the new loader.
A variety of locking related fixes.
Common Cache
CC now will flush dirty pages if it cannot satisfy a memory request from available free pages.
Network Stack
LWIP has been incorporated into ReactOS to serve as the TCP/IP driver.
MSAFD
Inflight disconnect IRPs are now canceled during socket closure.
Cancellation of operations and shutdown of connections has been reworked considerably. This included waiting for all pending requests to be fulfilled, issuing correct signals to initiate shutdown, and cleaning up lingering operations to make sure all data is delivered.
Data is no longer corrupted when the receive buffer is smaller than the incoming data.
Events whose conditions have already been fulfilled before a wait operation was called are immediately notified now.
AFD now immediately listens for new connections instead of waiting for the current connection to be accepted, helping increase throughput.
Arbitrarily large socked addresses are now correctly handled.
SO_LINGER and SO_DONTLINGER support is now implemented.
Network Driver Interface Specification
NDIS now reports itself as 5.1 conformant.
Memory allocations are now done at correct interrupt levels or have been made safe to do at lower interrupt levels.
A variety of DMA functions have been implemented, granting drivers access to Scatter/Gather functionality.
Addressing of slave DMA devices that do not support 32bit addresses has been fixed.
PnP issued IRP handling has seen fixes.
TCP/IP
The default packet and buffer pools have been increased to help deal with high network traffic situations.
IPPacket usage has been overhauled to fix a variety of memory issues and performance improvements when using third party network drivers.
IPv4 packets with headers larger than 20 bytes no longer cause a buffer overflow.
Shell
Explorer
Thread handles for startup processes in Run and RunOnce keys are now properly closed, fixing ghost command prompts on first startup of Explorer.
Network connections start menu item now opens the network connections folder.
Hotkeys that require the Windows key are now supported.
Explorer returns 1 when it exited without error.
Custom positioning is now possible, making positioning of icons look more like that of Windows.
Explorer-New
Start menu initialization has been improved to better show what fails.
A ReactOS registry key is used for ReactOS specific features.
Startup/Shutdown
FreeLoader
FreeLoader now splits the memory it needs into two different heaps, one that is preserved and passed onto the kernel and one that is discarded once booting is complete. This helps reduce the memory footprint of the OS when it first starts up.
FreeLoader no longer allocates entire pages for every small memory allocations, reducing fragmentation and overall memory usage during booting.
A variety of fixes for dealing with bios memory maps. These maps could have a range of problems including invalid entries, overlapping regions, and not aligning entries along page boundaries. FreeLoader also no longer overwrites itself when loading the HAL due to invalid memory maps.
Wine-like debug macros ERR, FIXME, WARN, and TRACE have been introduced.
Boot drive and partition is now stored in shared memory instead of a register due to register value being erased during switch to long mode for 64bit booting.
FreeLoader is now able to switch back and forth between realmode and long mode on 64bit platforms.
FreeLoader no longer attempts to load referenced DLLs from directories other than system32.
Interrupt Descriptor Table setup is now in C instead of assembly.
Page entries are offset on ARM platforms to eliminate wasted entries that represented unusable addresses.
A variety of changes were made to where data was placed in low address memory to conform with Windows 2003 expectations.
A hack was added to support booting with "exotic" languages.
The VESA bios signature is now checked before VESA extensions are reported as being present.
Support for booting from ramdisks further improved.
A problem booting with Award BIOSes has been resolved.
Filesystem drivers used by the boot process have seen various fixes.
Storage Stack
The disk geometry has been changed to be 63 sectors per track and 255 tracks per cylinder to match modern conventions.
UniATA
Synced to 0.41b2.
Timing values and sending of ATAPI commands has been modified to better deal with VirtualBox.
Drivers
Floppy
Initialization and resetting of the floppy controller have been reworked to prevent deadlocks in certain situations.
The count of floppy driver has been increased, fixing an issue where the drive would not show in Explorer.
I8042PRT
Hotplugging of PS/2 mice now supported if one was present at boot time.
Extended mice keys are no longer always treated as power keys.
All interrupts are enabled at the same time to avoid the controller going unresponsive.
KDCOM
Timing changes for better performance when transmitting output.
A specific serial port can now be specified.
Keyboard/Mouse
A hack was added to bind all keyboard devices to the same keyboard class device when no default setting is present.
PCI
False interrupt resources are no longer reported.
Additional IRPs relating to device removal have been implemented, including ones that inform the PnP manager a device cannot be disabled or removed.
PCNET
Backoff mechanism has been added to the buffer allocation operation.
Resource cleanup has been fixed to not attempt to free resources that were never allocated.
SACDRV
Initial implementation of Special Administration Console driver begun.
USB
= EHCI=
Initial transfer of data transfer and related DMA operations, very preliminary.
Linking of queueheads and cleanup of used resources has been fixed. Queueheads identify a list of queued transfer descriptors.
= USBDRV=
usbdriver has been renamed to usbdrv.
The status is now correctly set to not be STATUS_PENDING, which caused the keyboard driver to wait indefinitely. Keyboard input using usbdrv should now work.
Video
Mesa´s 3D driver is now recognized as HW_VENDOR_SOFTWARE.
= VIDEOPORT=
Legacy resources are correctly reported to the PnP manager.
All PCI buses are now checked instead of just the first eight.
Minor code cleanup to avoid usage of magic numbers.
A hack that resulted in the device object´s name differing from what was stored in the registry has been removed, fixing mouse integration in VirtualBox.
Various AMD64 related fixes.
= VGAMP=
Mode index 12 and video mode 12h are no longer confused, permitting ReactOS to boot once more when VGA mode is selected.
Libraries
ADVAPI32
RtlGenRandom has been hacked to be less dependent on the current time, producing better random values. This fixes non-unique RPC IDs that were causing problems for services.
Start arguments are also passed to ANSI services now.
Querying of service statuses has been fixed.
Registry query values have been fixed to avoid memory leaks and corruption.
The command packet transfer code between the service control manager and the service dispatcher has been rewritten.
CFGMGR32
Forwarders have been added for functions implemented in setupapi.dll.
COMCTL32
Subclassing is currently disabled when themes are disabled. This is a hack due to bugs in subclassing and requires the user to reboot if they wish to turn themes on.
CRT
All CRT DLL entrypoints have been normalized.
Floating point class has been reimplemented and pass all related winetests.
GDI32
Object attribute support completed.
IPHLPAPI
The entire TDI entity database and interface table are no longer leaked after calls to query interfaces.
KERNEL32
Path related functions have been rewritten, taking into account a variety of encoding conversions and buffer usage.
Beep has been refactored to follow the same chain of operation as on Windows.
Manual INF selection has been fixed by fixing retrieving of an environment variable and properly null terminating the string returned by GetDllLoadPath.
Functions handling environment variables have been reworked to perform better.
Pending I/O is now supported.
Pointer probing functions have been fixed.
Stack creation has been fixed to behave more like in NT 5.2 and later.
Heap allocation functions have been cleaned up with additional parameter checks, error checks, and failure cases.
System information functions have been reworked, removing unsupported architectures and some preparation work for WoW64 support in the future.
The time API now does its own conversions instead of relying on an external API.
Setting and retrieving handle contexts has been implemented.
Setting of the last error code has been fixed.
Fiber support has been greatly expanded, along with underlying thread support.
Several synchronization and event related bugs have been fixed, along with a new set of macros.
A major winesync took place in kernel32 of all code imported from Wine. Most of the major changes occurred in locale/language functions.
Loader related functions in kernel32 have been rewritten as part of the overall loader rewrite.
Conversion between ANSI and Unicode API objects has been fixed, resolving many longstanding bugs.
Mailslots has been fixed to use static unicode strings in the TEB for conversions.
LSASRV
The LSA object database has been implemented.
Required policy attributes are now initialized during database creation.
MSPORTS
Work has been done to create a database of serial ports on a computer and name them appropriately.
NTDLL
A new loader has been implemented, which respects more complex loader options and is better able to resolve dependency issues between various DLLs.
Security cookie initialization now correctly creates a 16bit cookie when asked, instead of always creating a 32bit cookie.
Thread Local Storage initialization has been fixed.
SEH has been applied to more parts of the new loader to protect against errors.
DLL loading has been improved, including optimizing checks for known DLLs.
RICHED20
ME_CharFromPoint has been fixed to not rely on Wine´s incorrect implementation of GetTextExtentExPointW and a patch has been sent upstream.
RPCRT4
Difference between Wine´s implementation has been greatly reduced.
The network address is now taken into account when trying to create a named pipe and correctly fails if the address is invalid.
RTL
A new heap manager with better support for various heap allocation flags has been implemented.
New path functions that handle differing types of encoding have been implemented.
SETUPAPI
Device installation no longer fails if an INF file already exists, which fixes VirtualBox additions installation.
Property sheet handling has been improved, eliminating memory leaks.
When creating device driver keys, ReactOS now checks to see if the device already has a key and uses that one instead of creating a new key.
SHELL32
A new C++ implementation of shell32 has been merged in. The C++ implementation was done to make implementing the COM aspects of shell32 easier and cleaner.
Shell extension registration still uses the implementation from the old shell32 due to as yet unresolved issues in the new shell32´s implementation.
A variety of path parsing related fixes to help correctly display paths and volumes.
SYSSETUP
The install date is now correctly set in the registry.
A random computer name is now generated in setup. Computer name is also now limited to 15 characters instead of 63.
System installation no longer relies on functions from setupapi that should not be exported.
USER32
A variety of string encoding conversion updates and fixes.
Class window procedure checks have been fixed, which prevents misbehaving applications from calling wrong class procedures.
Bitmap leaks when dealing with icons have been fixed.
A variety of drawing bugs in menus, buttons, and other regions have been fixed.
Usage of arrow keys in menus has been fixed.
Work continued on right to left language support.
Scroll bar controls have been been improved and pass significantly more winetests.
Client/Server Runtime
CSRSS
A reference leak when GuiConsoleOpenUserRegistryPathPerProcessId failed to open registry keys has been fixed, resolving ghost console processes in the LiveCD.
The keyboard and mouse input threads have been merged into a single CSRSS thread.
Desktop class rewrite completed, fixing several window drawing issues.
CSRSS is currently hacked to allow connecting back to itself.
Hard error messages are now formatted as ANSI strings.
Initial implementation of Sound Sentry CSRSS API, nonfunctional right now due to missing winsrv.dll.
CSRSS now properly creates shared memory sections to attach to every client to transfer static data.
Kernel-mode subsystem server (Win32K)
Theme support has been merged in.
Path drawing has been fixed and now passes all related winetests.
Keyboard layout loading has been fixed.
All top level windows are now forced to update the size and position of their non-client areas.
Mode enumeration when a second video adapter is present has been fixed.
Timer resolutions now match those in Windows.
A variety of additional timer fixes to resolve input message handling.
Retrieving the current process´ window station has been simplified and fixed.
A variety of hotkey registration fixes have been made, including corrected error codes and not permitting the overriding of special combinations.
Significant reworking of TrackMouseEvent API, due to added requirements imposed by themes.
Debug channels are now supported, permitting the activation from user mode extended debug output.
The GDI handle manager has been rewritten, fixing major memory leakage with a new GDI pool. Synchronization is now handled using a lock-free reference counter.
GetKeyState has been rewritten based on Wine´s implementation. State is now dependent on whether a keyboard message has been processed or not instead of the current state of the keyboard.
Message callbacks have been fixed.
Additional set active window tests have been fixed.
SxS support has been added for window classes.
Keyboard input processing now matches behavior on Windows.
Clipboard implementation has been rewritten to match Windows design.
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February 12th, 2012, 23:13 Posted By: wraggster
You remember Warhorse, right? The studio from Prague that's making that unannounced RPG for those unannounced next-gen consoles? Well it turns out the studio is employing Crytek's third CryEngine iteration for said unnamed project, according to a press release issued by Crytek earlier today.
Warhorse exec producer Martin Klima explained his studio's logic behind employing CryEngine 3 by saying, "We looked at every major technology out there and CryEngine 3 suits our needs perfectly." The Warhorse folks didn't offer any more information about the RPG in production, unfortunately, and we're betting it'll be some time before we hear anything more solid on the seemingly very early in production game. Thankfully we've got these infinite dragons and quests to deal with in Skyrim in the meantime!
http://www.joystiq.com/2012/02/10/wa...unced-rpg-jam/
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February 12th, 2012, 22:48 Posted By: wraggster
Frequenters of India's online Microsoft Store were briefly greeted with the suspicious visage of a Guy Fawkes mask this morning, following a hack that compromised the site's user database. According toWPSauce, Microsoft Store India's landing page was briefly taken over by a hacker group called Evil Shadow Team, who, in addition to putting a new face on Windows products, revealed that user passwords were saved in plain text. The group's motivations are unknown, though the hacked page warned that an "unsafe system will be baptized." The store is now offline, suggesting that Microsoft may have regained control. Read on for a look at the compromised password database.
http://www.engadget.com/2012/02/12/m...tored-in-plai/
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February 12th, 2012, 02:26 Posted By: wraggster
RPG fans still have a while to wait for the return of Blizzard's hugely popular Diablo series.
The publisher's CEO Mike Morhaime announced that Diablo III will be released in the second quarter of 2012 – anywhere between April and June.
The new release window was given during an investor call discussing Activision Blizzard's full-year financials for 2011, during which the publisher took $4.7bn in revenues.
"We can also confirm that we are targeting a Q2 launch for Diablo III," he said. "We expect to announce more details about the release schedule in the coming weeks."
Eurogamer reports that Activision Blizzard CFO Thomas Tippl added that "at least" two Blizzard games will land on shelves before the year is out. The other titles Blizzard has in the works are DOTA, StarCraft 2: Heart of the Swarm and the fourth World of Warcraft expansion Mists of Pandaria.
Diablo III was announced way back in 2008. Last year, Blizzard hinted at an "early 2012" release.
http://www.mcvuk.com/news/read/diabl...q2-2012/091079
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