News written by Jari Ketola (May, 2005)

According to the front page of The Pirate Bay the site has been raided by Swedish anti-piracy organizations this morning. The Pirate Bay was one of the most active BitTorrent hosting sites in Europe.

The statement on the page reads:

Today the swedish anti-piracy organisations raided The Pirate Bay and confiscated the computers running the tracker. This probably means the end of The Pirate Bay and we, the crew, apologize for all loss of income caused by our activity over the years.

The Pirate Bay's admin always responded to legal threats by mocking the lawyers that had contacted him and stated that The Pirate Bay is perfectly legal under the current Swedish legistlation. It is interesting to see how the case elvolves.

Source:
The Pirate Bay

According to the front page of The Pirate Bay the site has been raided by Swedish anti-piracy organizations this morning. The Pirate Bay was one of the most active BitTorrent hosting sites in Europe.

The statement on the page reads:

Today the swedish anti-piracy organisations raided The Pirate Bay and confiscated the computers running the tracker. This probably means the end of The Pirate Bay and we, the crew, apologize for all loss of income caused by our activity over the years.

The Pirate Bay's admin always responded to legal threats by mocking the lawyers that had contacted him and stated that The Pirate Bay is perfectly legal under the current Swedish legistlation. It is interesting to see how the case elvolves.

Source:
The Pirate Bay

Nintendo has announced their next-generation game console Revolution at the Electronics Entertainment Expo (E3) in Los Angeles.

"We will show the world what a next-gen system can be. Revolution marries the strongest heritage of innovation to the future of gaming," says Nintendo President Satoru Iwata. "With backward compatibility and the 'virtual console' concept, the stylish, compact body provides maximum gaming power. It will not only take home entertainment into another dimension by expanding the definition of video games, but it also will give you access to the great history of gaming."

What Mr Iwata means by 'virtual console' concept is the downloadable content offered by Nintendo. Revolution will have downloadable access to 20 years of fan-favorite titles originally released for Nintendo 64, the Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES) and even the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES). The console is also backwards compatible with existing GameCube games.

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Japanese electronics giant Sony unveiled their next generation superconsole at the E3 expo in Los Angeles. In addition to disclosing the technical specifications of the console, Sony displayed some impressive technology demos to the audience.

PS3 will be powered by a PowerPC based 3.2GHz Cell processor providing 218 gigaflops of floating point processing power. The graphics will be run by a GPU developed by nVidia -- the RSX (short for Reality Synthesizer) has 1.8 teraflops of floating point processing power. That puts the total performance to over 2 TFLOPS -- double that of the Xbox 360 console (officially) unveiled last week.

The full specs for the CPU and GPU are:

CPU
Cell Processor
PowerPC-base Core @3.2GHz
1 VMX vector unit per core
512KB L2 cache
7 x SPE @3.2GHz
7 x 128b 128 SIMD GPRs
7 x 256KB SRAM for SPE
* 1 of 8 SPEs reserved for redundancy
total floating point performance: 218 GFLOPS

GPU
RSX @550MHz
1.8 TFLOPS floating point performance
Full HD (up to 1080p) x 2 channels
Multi-way programmable parallel floating point shader pipelines

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We have re-enabled the online user counter, which shows the number of concurrent users visiting our sites (AfterDawn.com, forums and Dawnload.net). The counter is visible at the bottom edge of each page, and at the time of writing is showing a number of 2254.

Just thought that some of you might be interested in this type of "useless" information. I know I am!

Microsoft's Xbox 360 was unveiled on MTV last night, and simultaneously details surfaced on Xbox.com. The details confirmed all previous speculations and leaked specifications. The pictures seen earlier were indeed genuine.

Xbox 360 will provide HDTV picture when hooked up to a HDTV capable display. It will, of course, function also on standard TV sets. The unit is powered by a 3-core IBM PowerPC-based 3.2GHz CPU and a custom ATI graphics chip with 10MB of embedded DRAM. The amount of memory will be six fold compared to the first generation Xbox -- Xbox 360 will have 512MB of 700MHz GDDR3 RAM.

Up to four wireless controllers can be used simultaneously. They are powered by two AA batteries, which should give a play time of up to 40 hours with a range of 30 feet. When the batteries are running low the unit gives out a warning. The controller can be charged using a Play & Charge -cable during game play. The Xbox 360 Headset can also be plugged into the wireless controller for full duplex voice communication.

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Nintendo has announced that it is planning a wireless gaming network for its Nintendo DS portable gaming device. The service would allow gamers around the world to link wirelessly to play games.

Sony announced a similar service for its PlayStation Portable (PSP) handheld console in March.

Sony and Nintendo are both competing for the $4.5 billion global handheld entertainment market. While both Nintendo DS and Sony PSP have built-in WiFi capabilities, and require no additional hardware for wireless connectivity, PSP has more multimedia capabilities including movie playback (see our guide) and internet connectivity. Then again Ninteno DS costs "only" $150 compared to PSP's $250 price tag.

Nintendo's gaming service will use IGN's GameSpy technology to connect gamers around the globe.

The specifications of Microsoft's upcoming Xbox 360 console have been leaked a couple of days before the upcoming launch event on MTV.

According to Engadget the Xbox 360 specifications are:

-Support for DVD-video, DVD-ROM, DVD-R/RW, CD-DA, CD-ROM, CD-R/RW, WMA CD, MP3 CD, JPEG photo CD
-All games support 16:9, 720p and 1080i, anti-aliased
-Customizable face plates (picture below)
-3 USB2.0 ports
-Support for 4 wireless controllers
-Removable 20GB drive
-Wi-Fi ready

Custom IBM PowerPC-based CPU
-3 symmetrical cores at 3.2 GHz each
-2 hardware threads per core
-1 VMX-128 vector unit per core
-1 MB L2 cache

CPU Game Math Performance
-9 billion dots per second

Custom ATI Graphics Processor
-500 MHz
-10 MB embedded DRAM
-48-way parallel floating-point shader pipelines
-unified shader architecture

Memory
-512 MB GDDR3 RAM
-700 MHz DDR

Memory Bandwidth
-22.4 GB/s memory interface bus bandwidth
-256 GB/s memory bandwidth to EDRAM
-21.6 GB/s frontside bus

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