Steam Offering Mod Downloads

According to this news item, Steam will be offering mod downloads starting this week. The mods now take advantage of Steamworks, which provides stat tracking and will be free to owners of any Source game.

As a part of our continuing efforts to support the MOD community, we will begin hosting selected MODs directly on Steam starting next week. The first five MODs to ship on steam will be Age of Chivalry, D.I.P.R.I.P., Insurgency, Synergy, and Zombie Panic. As always, owners of any Source game will be able to download and play all of these MODs for free.

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Intellectual Property Bill Passes in the House

The Intellectual Property Bill has passed in the House, the very same bill that the White House said it opposed last week. It will definitely be interesting to see what happens next.

The bipartisan legislation passed in the House 341-41, with dissenters on both sides of the aisle. The measure has received wide support from the business community, including from groups like the Recording Industry Association of America and the AFL-CIO, but it is opposed by public interest groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Public Knowledge.

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[H]ardware Round-Up

Cases & Modding

Lian-Li XB-01 Xbox 360 Case @ techPowerUP!

ETC.

Seagate FreeAgent|XTreme 1TB External HDD @ Bit-Tech

Memory

Corsair DHX 4GB DDR2-800MHz @ Phoronix

Motherboards

EVGA 790i SLI FTW @ Overclockers Club

Video

HIS Radeon HD4850 IceQ4 TurboX @ Overclocker Café

Apple Selling Unlocked iPhone 3G

Apple is now selling unlocked iPhone 3Gs…too bad you have to live in Hong Kong to get one. Wow, how did the Chinese go so lucky?

The “iPhone 3G purchased at the Apple Online Store can be activated with any wireless carrier,” the site states. “Simply insert the SIM from your current phone into iPhone 3G and connect to iTunes 8 to complete activation.”

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Art Lebedev Does Kitchen Magnets

The crew at Art Lebedev are famous for their uber-expensive keyboards but they make other stuff too….like kitchen magnets. As much as I hate to say it, I’d buy a set of these just for the total nerd factor of having them on my fridge.

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Fold With Us For A Cure

[H] Folding team member "Xilikon" has put all the Folding guides that a person could possibly need into one easy-to-find location so that you can get the right client and be up and folding in no time at all. So what are you waiting for? Join Team #33 and start Folding with us today!

Welcome to the [H]orde guides page. You will find the guides you need to setup a Windows SMP (both MPICH and DEINO versions), linux SMP or Windows GPU, including a multi-GPU guide. This is 99% identical to the official guides which can be found on the Folding@Home official site at http://folding.stanford.edu/English/Guide.

Solenoid Steel Band

This is cool on so many different levels, the time and effort this guy put into this is amazing and the music isn’t bad either! Thanks to “mountainman” for the link.

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Walmart To Pull Plug on DRM Servers

WalMart is shutting down its DRM servers on October 9th 2008. If you bought copy protected music from WalMart before February of this year, you’ll need to back it up or you will not be able to transfer your songs to other computers or access your songs on the original PC in the case of a reformat / OS install.

If you have purchased protected WMA music files from our site prior to Feb 2008, we strongly recommend that you back up your songs by burning them to a recordable audio CD. By backing up your songs, you will be able to access them from any personal computer. This change does not impact songs or albums purchased after Feb 2008, as those are DRM-free.

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NVIDIA Offers Settlement In Price Fixing Lawsuit

Sharp eyed [H] reader Dave A. noticed that NVIDA had filed a Form 8k with the Securities and Exchange Commission outlining a proposed settlement in that ongoing price fixing lawsuit. Obviously this is just a proposed settlement and it is still subject to court approval. Hit the link for more details.

The Agreement calls for NVIDIA to pay $850,000 into a $1.7 million fund to be made available for payments to the certified class. We are not obligated under the Agreement to pay plaintiffs’ attorneys’ fees, costs, or make any other payments in connection with the settlement other than our payment of $850,000. The Agreement is subject to court approval and, if approved, would dispose of all claims and appeals raised by the certified class in the Action against NVIDIA.

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Apple Faces iTunes Test Case In Norway

Norway's top consumer advocate is taking Apple to court to try to force the company to open iTunes to all music players. This ought to be interesting, I am not familiar with the laws in Norway but if they are successful, you can bet other countries will follow suit.

Norway is leading a European campaign that began two years ago to get Apple to make its iTunes online store compatible with rivals' digital music players. "We discussed this at a meeting two weeks ago, and decided that Norway will do the test case," Consumer Ombudsman Bjoern Erik Thon said by telephone. "This could have international consequences."

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Microsoft Announces SQL Server 2008 Experience

On Monday, Sept. 29, Microsoft is launching the SQL Server 2008 Experience online at http://www.SQLServerExperience.com. With more than 500 short videos in 11 different languages, the SQL Server 2008 Experience is a Web site that helps Microsoft’s global customers and partners learn more about SQL Server 2008, Microsoft’s recently released data management and business intelligence platform. SQL Server 2008 provides a trusted, productive and intelligent data platform for business-critical applications. The launch of the SQL Server 2008 Experience kicks off a worldwide readiness outreach that will reach over 350,000 customers, partners and community members through in-person events over the next year.

Largest Known Prime Number Found

Mathematicians at UCLA have discovered the largest known prime number, which is 13 million-digits long. This discovery was made using a network of 75 PCs running GIMPS (Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search) on Windows XP and was verified on a different system with a different algorithm. "Hi, I'm a PC and I just found the largest known Mersenne prime."

Mersenne primes — named for their discoverer, 17th century French mathematician Marin Mersenne — are expressed as 2P-1, or two to the power of "P" minus one. P is itself a prime number. For the new prime, P is 43,112,609.

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