Hot News Of The Week: Dec. Week 2

According to the FCC, Blizzard’s extremely popular World of Warcraft, is one of the biggest causes of college dropouts.

WoW is played by more than 11 million people now, and the recently-launched Wrath of the Lich King expansion helps to solidify WoW’s dominance in the MMORPG field.

Over the last few years, there have been reports of ruined marriages and relationships, job losses, and even deaths due to a lack of self control when it comes to the game.

News hit the Internet today alleging that the company behind the EFiX EFI-enabler device was going to start selling its own line of Apple Mac clones. While it is true that EFiX lets users install retail versions of Leopard on their PCs, selling pre-built PCs was something that Davide Rutigliano, the company’s CEO, did not have in mind.

Rutigliano, who is the CEO of Art Studios Entertainment, heads the firm responsible for engineering and producing the modules. Rutigliano told us today that EFiX-USA, an affiliate company that launched the clone initiative did not get authorization from Art Studios.

The initiative was short-lived however, as Rutigliano and Art Studios stepped in to can the entire project. According to his conversation with us, Rutigliano indicated that his device is not for companies to go out and compete with Apple or build clone machines. He stresses that the EFiX allows installation of EFI operating systems, which include Windows Vista, some Linux distributions and Apple OS X Leopard.

Nikon is in promotion mode now for the holiday season. And who could blame it for trying to come up with eye-catching advertisements?

And sure enough, Nikon did not hold much back.

A new ad for Nikon’s S60 high-end point-and-shoot camera went live this week, depicting two females on a bed together, nearly naked. The ad also shows several people outside the bedroom window from an opposing apartment building, peeping at the two girls.

The magic? The S60 automatically detects all the faces in the picture frame, and ensures that all are in focus. Even the guy behind the curtains couldn’t escape.

Are ads going too far these days? Or do you feel they’re doing just fine? Let us know in the comments.

In some exciting chip news this week, it could be possible in the near future to see processors based on photonics—that is, using optics to send data within the chips themselves.

While the technology is still a long way away from making it into mainstream desktop processors, the potential is huge. Using light paths to process and transmit data has many advantages over using copper interconnects, one of which is speed.

Check out the full article here on the future of Intel’s chips.

Like Guitar Hero? Like arcades? Well, your favorite music franchise is about to hit the arcade halls thanks to an initiative between Activision and Konami.

Even though Konami dominates the arcade scene and competes with Activision, the deal came through because there’s a lot of potential in the arcade scene for music games. Look at how popular music games are on the consoles, it’s no wonder Activision would want pursue every possible avenue.

Milking the cow for all it’s worth? Absolutely says Activision’s CEO.

Check out the full details here.

This week we took a detailed look at AMD/ATI’s side-port memory. Essentially a memory chip that directly attaches to the integrated graphics chipset over a 64-bit bus, side-port is supposed to reduce bottlenecks associated with using system memory.

We take a look at how effective it really is in an in-depth review. The results may surprise you.

So you want to run your AMD graphics in CrossFire mode, but you know that it means having to purchase another graphics card, and increase costs. So how can you ensure that you’re going to get the best bang for the buck and receive a significant improvement?

One of the most important things to consider is how well the technology scales. If you’re putting in two cards, one would expect some significant performance increases.

Check out our full breakdown of CrossFire scaling here.