259w ago - From the PS Blog today: The games industry is always on the look-out for new, talented engineers and programmers who understand how the hardware works under the hood. However, it isn't possible to buy a PlayStation development kit at your local computer store and development for the PlayStation has remained a mystery, even to very interested individuals.

It gives me great pleasure to unveil the mystery and announce the PlayStation-edu program! We expect this program to be a great tool to teach students about the PlayStation platforms.

PlayStation-edu is a program for universities and colleges to get access to PS2 and PSP development kits...the same ones that professional developers use to make the games you love to play. You get the development software, the hardware, and the SDK to learn and experiment with. SCEA wants to make sure that students who are graduating from college are ready to program on PlayStation hardware and that means getting it into your hands.

PlayStation-edu is not a general game creation program (sorry artists and designers). It is for computer science and engineering students who want to understand how the hardware works in the PlayStation consoles. Schools which teach game programming or computer architecture can use the development kits in their classes.

260w ago - If you've been waiting with bated breath for the battle between motherboard giants Asus and Gigabyte to come to blows, it looks like your hopes may come to naught after all.

For a while it looked like Asus was going to take Gigabyte to court over claims the company made regarding the quality of Asus's products, not to mention the veracity of information provided regarding its Energy Processing Unit technology.

With Gigabyte insisting that it did nothing wrong and it was all Asus's fault for passing off shoddy hardware, everyone was waiting for the inevitable courtroom showdown and damages settlement.

Now, however, saner heads at Gigabyte have made the decision to issue a very public apology for the slurs cast upon its competitor's good name before the company finds itself in front of an unamused judge.

According to Digitimes, who broke the news on Friday, Gigabyte has slunk off into the sunset still grumbling that its DES technology is the better option for power saving than Asus's EPU but will smooth things over by paying for an apology to be published in various Taiwanese news publications.

Asus, knowing a good result when it sees one, has in turn agreed that this little spat needn't see the inside of a courtroom and has dropped all legal proceedings against Gigabyte.

260w ago - Microsoft's Internet Explorer 7 is the leading web browser, but the fresh-outta-beta Firefox 3 and Apple's Safari 3.1 are gunning for its crown, each claiming new speed records. So which is the fastest? We fired up all three to find out

A few short years ago the browser war seemed dead and buried. After Microsoft's Internet Explorer usurped Netscape's Navigator in the late 1990s, it's domination of the Internet seemed complete, over 95 percent of us using a version of IE.

Those days are gone. The guts of Navigator were reborn in 2004 as Firefox, a browser that has been drinking more and more of IE's milkshake ever since. Firefox now owns at least 18 percent of the market, with some estimates giving it more than a quarter.

More recently, Apple has threatened to start a three-way fight, using the software updater included with iTunes to slip its Safari browser onto PCs. While its market share is miniscule - less than one per cent among PC users and around three per cent overall -Safari offers a PC users a credible third choice.

Meanwhile, IE 7 is groaning under the weight of bad press, criticised for its instability and sluggish performance. Apple is trumpeting Safari 3.1 as the world's fastest browser, while Firefox 3 - which is now out of beta and into the...

260w ago - With Vista struggling Windows 7 it's the OS on everyone's lips at the moment. It could be set for an early release in Q4 2009. Chris Flores, from the official Windows Vista Team Blog brings us up-to-date.

Flores has conceded that Microsoft is working on Windows 7, but has stated that this is normal in the Windows OS cycle. "...we started working on Windows Vista even before we released Windows XP. So naturally, we've been thinking about the investments we made in Windows Vista and how we can build on these for the next version of Windows," he said.

This time around Microsoft has taken a new approach with Windows 7 by strategically sharing information with key partners. While this has already begun, neither Flores or Steven Sinofsky, Windows and Windows Live Engineering SVP, in a chat to CNET, would be drawn on a firm release date for Windows 7.

Sinofsky stated that they didn't want another five year wait as was the case with Windows XP and Vista, and it was more likely to be three years between the day Windows Vista went on sale to the day Windows 7 does. If you do that math, that would still mean start of 2010, but not far off late 2009. The possibility of an early release is still alive.

Flores has also confirmed that Windows 7 will be a major release. It...

261w ago - Analyst Opinion - Floating Point Operations Per Second - FLOPS - one of the more obscure processor performance indicators, and one of the oldest ones.

Over time, it has been modified with prefixes such as M (mega), G (giga), T (tera) and will soon get a P (peta). "Tera" describes a million millions - one trillion (1012) - which is a whole lot of anything whether it is cycles (Hertz), bytes, dollars, or FLOPS.

Recently I was asked how many TFLOPS are in all the game consoles shipped to date. There are two answers to that question. You can look at it from the perspective of all the game consoles built and you can look at this question with specific consoles in mind.

Let's look at the combined TFLOPS rating of all game consoles, which actually provides two answers as well. If you count central processor FLOPS then you have one answer and if you count the FLOPS potential of the GPU and add it to the CPU's FLOPS, then you have the second answer.

This second version is controversial since the FLOPS of the GPU aren't used in computations and some therefore claim that the GPU should not be counted as it simply represents a theoretical number. Others argue that GPUs are used in computation - the computation of shader operations. Both sides, however, agree that there isn't...