RIM slashes forecasts as profits drop, shares plummit 15 percent

Research in Motion has been forced to reduce its forecasts for this quarter after profits and revenue dropped in Q2, resulting in a 15% drop in the Canadian smartphone vendor?s shares on Thursday, Reuters reports.

With Google and Apple experiencing huge growth in the smartphone market, the Blackberry maker is due to release new models to compete with the iPhone and powerful Android smartphones but has warned they might not hit US stores until late August, potentially missing the lucrative back-to-school season.

The company is currently in a transition phase where it is working to release new QNX-powered BlackBerry devices, the same operating system that is featured in the PlayBook, but they will only be released after RIM launches devices powered by an updated version of the BlackBerry OS.

Following Apple?s WWDC keynote, the Canadian smartphone vendor?s stock fell below $37 ? the lowest level since 2007, dropping more than 3% on the Toronto Stock Exchange to close at $36.92, experiencing a similar drop on Wall Street, closing at $37.82 after a drop of 2.8%.

Analysts had pegged RIM?s shipments at more than 14 million but a delay has forced RIM to slash its estimates to between 11 million and 12. 5 million smartphones in the current quarter. This lead to the company?s shares to fall more than 15 percent to $29.84 after the closing bell in the US.

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Source: http://thenextweb.com/2011/06/17/rim-slashes-forecasts-as-profits-drop-shares-plummit-15-percent/

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Adventures and Adventuring

Three of my five weapons were offline and leaving small ion trails in space, my cargo hold was full of rare and expensive artefacts and a band of pirates was chasing me down a frantically plotted and improvised course. With a route that picked its way in and out of asteroid fields through systems that were well and truly off the charts, it is fair to say I was panicking. I was also pretty sure that my eyes had stopped blinking.

I loved Freelancer; Microsoft's space trading open world game. It resembled an extremely stripped down Eve Online, but with gameplay replacing the spreadsheets. I'm aware that it was a
condensed version of games that did the same thing better and with more depth many years before, but I found it to be a deep and beautifully realised sandbox. In fact, I'm convinced that most players only ever scratched its surface.

I wouldn't be able to tell you the plot of the game, or name any of the systems, although I could tell you that they had flavours of America, England, Germany and Japan. I couldn't name any of the characters without a short trip to Google either. The game didn't leave that sort of impression on me. What I do very strongly remember, though, was having an adventure.


I've played a lot of games that bill themselves as adventure games. Some of them are point and click adventure games, some of them are 3D action adventure games and almost every triple A release involves an adventure of some description. However, I can only think of one time where I have actually had an adventure for myself.

An adventure is only ever an adventure in retrospect. At the time, it's just an ordeal that the adventurers would rather not be tolerating. It was an adventure climbing Mount Snowdon in the cold and the rain in my jeans, but at the time I just couldn't believe I was so stupid to think it was just a hill. It was an adventure getting a chest of drawers home sticking out of the back of my Ford Ka last week, but at the time it was a living nightmare going up hills, as I was worried that it would slide into the car behind that I couldn't see.

An adventure game is a comfortable experience, no matter how well it immerses you in its world. You're still playing an interactive story, and it's only once you start getting towards the open world games that the capacity to have an adventure starts to kick in. However, even then there's a danger that it will just feel like a great big toy box, rather than sparking any significant connection with the player.

For example, for all the sandbox fun to be had in GTA, I couldn't care less when one of the thugs got shot, arrested or squashed by his own stolen ambulance. In those cases, what I was doing felt like an exercise in karma, as opposed to anything that could provide sufficient tension to facilitate adventure.

With Freelancer, I had become invested in the game, and my main memory of it is a single encounter of being chased. Most of my ship had been destroyed, and I was limping from wormhole to wormhole, desperately trying to get back to civilisation so that I could hide and repair my craft after my ill- advised drift from the beaten track.

There probably wasn't even that much of a consequence if I failed, got killed or ditched my cargo, but still I felt as if failure would result in me being hunted down in the future by bounty hunters, and that I would maybe end up frozen in Carbonite and propped up in Jabba's palace.

I've never seen or experienced this sort of gameplay before or since. I've felt engaged by games, and I've even been threatened with high-stakes failure, but never has it felt quite the same as this single encounter in which I was trying to get away from space pirates.

That said, I nearly felt something similar quite recently while I was playing Mount and Blade: Warband. My medium sized army was chasing down a small band of looters while being chased by a much larger army from an enemy faction. I was the latter that provided the fear of failure. There was a feeling that this was of my own doing, and I felt outside of my comfort zone.


However, this thrill subsided shortly after the second day of chasing, when it became clear that all three armies were running at exactly the same speed and not gaining or pulling away from each other. After that, the only excitement was the realisation that sooner or later my army was going to run out of food and become highly irritable.

There was also a brief foray into genuine adventure during my time with Morrowind, as you can easily get lost in the game's huge world. After missing a crucial direction, I once ended up on the other side of the game world several hours later, being chased by a crocodile-like demon walking on two legs. Again, however, this was less of an adventure and more of an exercise in making me feel like an idiot.

I'm fed up with pre-baked sequences and scripted events in my first person shooters. I get tired of plodding through what amounts to an overly long film with hand-eye-co-ordination exercises to progress the plot. Although I love playing through some of these titles, and it would be difficult to argue that Half-Life 2, the absolute king of disguised linear gameplay, was anything other than a masterpiece, but I want to have adventures as opposed to sitting through those of someone else.

I can't help feeling that the medium would be greatly helped if more games were just a little bit more of an ordeal to play. That's not to say that they need to be frustrating, overly difficult or painful to
play, just that they should provide a bit more than 'press X not to die' and raise the stakes for failure a little higher.

Basically, I want to play more games that facilitate the experience of an adventure, as opposed to adventure games. If you know of any games ripe for adventure-mining, let us know in the forums.

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Panasonic preparing Toughbook tablet, Lenovo aims at the enterprise

Although there's no shortage of Android tablets on the market, few are suitable for the business environment according to Panasonic. Catering to "frustrated" enterprise customers, the company has decided to fill that void by introducing a new rugged slate to its Toughbook product family. Due sometime in the fourth quarter of this year, Panasonic expects its creation to be embraced by mission critical government personnel, highly mobile field forces, small and medium businesses, security-minded IT managers and cash-conscious executives.

Outside of the "Toughbook tablet," we haven't seen a catchy name for the device, so it seems Panasonic might just let the hardware speak for itself. Unfortunately, today's announcement doesn't contain particularly revealing specifications, but it does mention a 10.1" 1024x768 multitouch display with a high brightness screen that's viewable in broad daylight -- unlike the glossy coating slathered on consumer slates. There's also word of an active stylus to capture signatures and other handwriting, as well as embedded GPS and 3G/4G modules.

The company doesn't cite specific autonomy figures apart from noting that the device will be equipped with a "full-shift" battery. We assume that means it'll last for at least eight hours of usage. Being a Toughbook product and all, you can expect a ruggedized body but Panasonic isn't ready to claim the device will withstand being dropkicked from your second-story office window. Beyond physical durability, the company promises to deliver unprecedented hardware-level security, but details are scant. We'll keep our eyes peeled for more info.

Lenovo's also making a dash for the enterprise market, according to a Dow Jones report. Alongside its consumer slates, the company is preparing to launch a 10-inch Android tablet for professionals toward the end of the summer -- around August. "We've really been working to tailor the experience" of our tablets, said Lenovo COO Rory Read. "Some of the early-generation Android devices were a little ahead of their time, and what we're doing here is making sure [our tablets] are strong. We only have one opportunity to make that first good impression."

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Source: http://www.techspot.com/news/44289-panasonic-preparing-toughbook-tablet-lenovo-aims-at-the-enterprise.html

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Facebook soon to release long-overdue iPad app

Facebook is almost ready to release its long-overdue iPad application, the New York Times reports.

While the company had a Facebook app for the iPhone ready to go as soon as the App Store was available to users, it has neither released or indicated a release for the iPad in the year since the amazingly successful tablet device was released.

And users haven?t been happy about it, forced to use the iPhone application, which handles poorly and looks worse on the iPad, or the mobile web app.

But the day when iPad users can sigh in relief is almost upon us. The New York Times is quite sure of its sources when it says that ?people briefed on Facebook?s plans say that in coming weeks the company plans to introduce a free iPad application that has been carefully designed and optimized for the tablet.?

In Jobsian style, Mark Zuckerberg took a particular interest in getting this project right, which could explain the delay and sounds like Facebook?s absence on the iPad was borne out of fear of screwing it up more than anything.

We look forward to seeing what Facebook has done with their iPad application to make it so special.

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Source: http://thenextweb.com/facebook/2011/06/17/facebook-soon-to-release-long-overdue-ipad-app/

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Gaming 27 - The PlayStation Ryvita

Gaming 27 - The PlayStation Ryvita

Posted on 15th Jun 2011 at 07:41 by Podcast with 5 comments

Joe, Clive and Harry are joined by David Hing, who sit down to help discuss the wealth of news that poured out of E3 2011 last week. This includes the unveiling of the Nintendo Wii U and the PlayStation Vita, as well as the release dates for Mass Effect 3 and Battlefield 3.

We didn't limit ourselves to just E3 announcements, though. A croaky Joe also let us know what the Duke Nukem Forever launch party was like, while the rest of us speculated about how the game would shape up. Check out the Duke Nukem Forever review to see how right everyone was in their predictions!


After that, we go through the usual reader mail and competition details. As always, feel free to send in any questions you might have for us too.

The bit-gamer podcast features music by Brad Sucks, and was recorded on Shure microphones. You can download the podcast direct, listen in-browser or subscribe through iTunes using the links below. Also, be sure to let us know your thoughts about the discussion in the forums.

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ZURB?s flickrBomb makes your design?s placeholder images relevant

ZURB today released a new tool for web designers that provides dynamic placeholder images for your HTML mockups. But there?s a twist that gives the new tool, called flickrBomb, a leg up: the images it provides are relevant.

We?ve covered dynamic placeholder tools before. Placekitten puts images of cats wherever you need them. But flickrBomb is the first that?ll help you match your placeholder images to the topic of the site, giving you a more accurate idea of how the site will look with the sort of images it?s likely to go live with.

After all, the color palettes and other elements of, let?s say, a gaming website are completely different to those of kitten pictures.

flickrBomb is a jQuery plugin and like most dynamic placeholders, you use an <img> tag to indicate that a placeholder is needed and set the size of the image to be fetched and cropped. Only with flickrBomb, when you specify that the image is a placeholder you also include a search term, so that only relevant images are grabbed.

Here?s some example syntax:

<img src=?flickr://Kevin Bacon? width=?175px? height=?175px?>

If you?re not happy with the image that?s selected, just click on the wrench icon to select another from the search results.

Attribution features have been added to flickrBomb, which leaves me wondering if ZURB are far off an implementation that can be used to instantly provide images for blog posts on live sites.

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Source: http://thenextweb.com/dd/2011/06/17/zurbs-flickrbomb-makes-your-designs-placeholder-images-relevant/

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California Governor Vetoes Budget

The veto means that the governor will have to reopen negotiations with the Legislature to win approval for his plan to close a nearly $10 billion gap. The plan relies on extending some taxes that are set to expire this year, and for it to pass, Mr. Brown needs the support of two Republicans in each legislative chamber. Those votes have been elusive.

Many lawmakers said they had expected the governor to continue to negotiate with Republicans, but few expected the veto. It was the first budget veto since at least the 1920s.

Mr. Brown, who has railed against maneuvers that the state has relied on for years to balance its budget, placed the blame on Republicans and commended lawmakers from his party for their ?tremendous efforts.? But he said the plan that was approved on Wednesday was not truly balanced.

He said that the spending plan contained ?legally questionable maneuvers, costly borrowing and unrealistic savings,? and that it would not meet the state?s financial obligations.

?A balanced budget is critical to our economic recovery,? he said in his veto message. ?I am, once again, calling on Republicans to allow the people of California to vote on tax extensions for a balanced budget and significant reforms.?

He said the extensions, on sales, income and vehicle taxes, were the only alternative to deep cuts and were needed to solve long-term problems.

?California is in a fiscal mess,? Mr. Brown said. ?The political class is deeply divided.?

?If we can?t find a way to get around that, then we will irreversibly enter on a pathway of decline.? He added that deeper cuts would be ?a tragedy for which Republicans will bear full responsibility.?

One reason for the legislators? scramble to pass the stopgap budget by Wednesday?s deadline is that state law calls for them to be docked a full day?s pay for every day the budget is late. The law requires legislators to pass a balanced state budget, but it was unclear whether the state controller, who issues their paychecks, would consider the budget they passed to have met that criterion.

Mr. Brown?s veto angered members of his own party, who said they had yet to hear his plan for what he would do if he could not secure support from Republicans in the final two weeks of the fiscal year, which ends on June 30.

?His decision is apparently part of some elaborate strategy to force a confrontation,? said Darrell Steinberg, the president pro tempore of the Senate. ?We are too far down the road for the governor to continue avoiding a specific set of proposals if he cannot gain those votes.?

John A. Pérez, the speaker of the Assembly, said the veto was ?unnecessary and counterproductive, and it leaves us back at square one.?

Talks between the governor and Republicans broke down in March.

The State Senate minority leader, Bob Dutton, said in a statement that Mr. Brown was wrong to place the blame on his party. ?The truth is Governor Brown and the Democrats blocked the people?s right to vote because they can?t stand up to the powerful public employee unions,? he said. The budget requires ?meaningful pension reform, a spending limit and business-regulation relief for job creation.?

Mr. Brown said he would urge lawmakers to take ?24 hours to reflect on where we are,? adding that he would ?move heaven and earth? to secure the Republican support he needed to get the budget passed.

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Source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=1775a3ba2cdda2e2e954598f079f57ca

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Prepare for the "Advanced Persistent Threat"

A recent string of cyberattacks against large companies, government contractors, financial institutions, and even security providers themselves has highlighted a new type of heist: the advanced persistent threat, or APT.

This spring, these ambitious attacks have hit organizations that have valuable data and the resources to defend it well, including Google, Citigroup, and the International Monetary Fund. A recent APT-style attack on RSA, which provides security technology to some of the biggest banks, alarmed RSA's high-profile clients and appears to have led to an intrusion at Lockheed Martin, an RSA customer.

Unlike recent website takeovers by brazen "hacktivists" or massive thefts of credit card data, APTs are elaborate and sustained con jobs that are difficult to detect. The term was coined by government organizations accustomed to fighting online espionage, says Tom Cross, manager of the IBM X-Force Advanced Research security team, but these kinds of attacks are now becoming common enough to be discussed in corporate boardrooms. In a March survey of 563 IT security specialists by nCircle, a security technology company, 16 percent of the respondents listed APTs as their biggest security concern in 2011. That made it the second-most-worried-about security issue; 26 percent of respondents said their top priority was complying with security-related regulations.

RSA did not respond to Technology Review's requests for interviews, but Uri Rivner, the company's head of consumer identity protection, described some details of the attack in a company blog. First, one employee, who had limited administrative access to internal files, fell for a phishing scam and opened a spreadsheet labeled "2011 Recruitment plan.xls." Rivner said the file exploited a zero-day (previously unknown) security hole in Adobe Flash software. The hackers then installed a remote administration tool and breached multiple employees' accounts before extracting information over FTP, or file transfer protocol. According to Rivner and Cross, the breach had many of hallmarks of advanced persistent threats: repeated attempts to find a weak human link, a zero-day opening, sophisticated malware, and strategic methods to avoid detection while extracting data. APTs may lie dormant for months before finding a strategic moment to extract information.

"The first thing that these people do is collect info about their target," Cross says. "We put a lot of information about ourselves? both our personal and work life?on the Internet, so it's easy to do research and develop a profile of an organization."

That's one reason why many security experts urge companies to assume they are going to be targeted. "That's the reality," says Catherine Lotrionte, executive director at the Institute for Law, Science and Global Security at Georgetown University. As a result, she advises companies: "Make sure you have the best intrusion detection in place."

When RSA was attacked, it was using the services of a company called NetWitness to detect unusual activity across its networks. NetWitness was in fact "instrumental" in detecting the intrusion, says Eddie Schwartz, who was that company's chief security officer and has held the same title at RSA since it recently acquired NetWitness. Schwartz declined to reveal details of how the company detected the intrusion. However, he says that overall, the idea of securing networks by trying to "build a gigantic wall that nobody can climb over" is outdated. Training all employees to better detect phishing won't significantly help, he says, essentially because there will always be someone who will fall for a scam.

IBM's Cross disagrees; he thinks more companies should try training employees to be more alert for phishing or other signs of cyberattacks. "The goal is not to stop everything; the goal is to detect something," he says. "If you educate these people and show them that there is a real threat, they become your front line."

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The Old Republic: All I Want is the Cutscenes

The Old Republic: All I Want is the Cutscenes

Posted on 13th Jun 2011 at 07:29 by Clive Webster with 19 comments

The latest trailer for Star Wars: The Old Republic has been released and it?s freaking awesome. This follows previous cut-scene and video releases that have been similarly impressive, engaging and enjoyable. However, with the game looking a bit duff, I?m wondering if Electronic Arts, Bioware and LucasArts could be persuaded into releasing a cut-scene-only version? I?d happily pay to watch a short film made from them.



If you?re not sure what I?m on about, have a look at the Star Wars: The Old Republic intro cinematic (watch it in fullscreen mode) above, then the other trailers (not the gameplay videos) and come back.

See what I mean? They?re much more reminiscent of the original trilogy than the rubbish prequel films. There?s a focus on people that you readily recognise and empathise with overcoming obstacles; the classic setup for injecting drama and interest into a scene or story. Furthermore, there?s absolutely no mention of trade disputes, midi-sodding-chlorians or annoying lizard-rabbits.

In fact, some of the intros' cinematic characters are really close to those of Episodes IV to VI. There?s a dependable droid that happily receives rushed instructions, and it?s on a ship with dingy, circular corridors and laser-cannon pods. Then there?s the pilot of this ship ? he?s instantly introduced as a likeable yet roguish smuggler, and his attire hardly suggests otherwise. He even seems to steal Han?s dialogue: his is the fastest ship in the fleet, even though it might not look like much. All we need is a co-pilot with a shaving phobia and we?re done.

But who cares if Bioware is borrowing heavily from the source material to produce something this fun? Arguably, the mistake that George Lucas made with his prequels was refusing to follow his own conventions. We wanted a bit more of the same please, not some confused reinterpretation of the Universe we?d spent the last however many years discussing in detail.

So when the ?trader? ship blasts through the Imperial turbo laser, rushes through its guts, and then hits its hyperdrive, we?re cheering on the crew. When the Jedi master Force-pulls the second lightsaber to him, we?re given a moment to consider the great duel that?s about to ensue.

Even the cutting and pacing between the personal fight between Jedi and Sith and the action on the not-Millenium Falcon is so reminiscent of The Empire Strikes Back that it can?t fail to make Star Wars fans happy. The trailer even conveys emotion brilliantly ? Malcus exudes rage as he stalks towards the Jedi master and bats away his defence, while you can read the thoughts of his Padawan perfectly well after his death.

So please, can we just have the cinematics to watch, and leave the MMO to WoW deserters? Please?

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California Governor Vetoes Budget

The veto means that the governor will have to reopen negotiations with the Legislature to try to get his plan to close a $10 billion gap approved. In order to pass that plan, which relies on extending some taxes that were set to expire this year, Mr. Brown needs votes from two Republicans in each house, support that has so far been elusive.

Mr. Brown, who has railed against budgetary maneuvers that the state has relied on for years to balance its budget, placed the blame on Republicans and commended lawmakers from his party for their ?tremendous efforts? to balance the budget, but said that the plan approved Wednesday was not balanced.

He said the budget contained ?legally questionable maneuvers, costly borrowing and unrealistic savings,? and that it would not meet the state?s financial obligations.

?A balanced budget is critical to our economic recovery,? he said in his veto message. ?I am, once again, calling on Republicans to allow the people of California to vote on tax extensions for a balanced budget and significant reforms.?

He added: ?If they continue to obstruct a vote, we will be forced to pursue deeper and more destructive cuts to schools and public safety ? a tragedy for which Republicans will bear full responsibility.?

While many lawmakers said that they had expected the governor to continue to negotiate with Republicans, few expected him to veto the budget entirely.

Among the reasons legislators scrambled to pass the stop-gap budget plan by Wednesday?s deadline was that state law called for them to have a full day?s pay docked for every day the budget was late. Since they passed a budget by the deadline, their pay will continue unimpeded, despite the governor?s veto.

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Source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=1775a3ba2cdda2e2e954598f079f57ca

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