A few months ago Epic Games released a tech demo on Apple's App Store called Epic Citadel to show off how their technology can run on an iPhone/iPad. Featuring bump offset mapping, normal mapped architecture, global illumination, real-time reflections, dynamic specular lighting with texture masks, the demo took everyone by surprise at just how incredible it looked.

Now it's been revealed that the demo will become a full game entitled Infinity Blade and will be released on the App Store sometime during the "holiday season 2010". In addition, the forthcoming game will feature Game Center compatibility. The price has not yet been announced.

If you have an iOS device and haven't already seen the Epic Citadel demo then fire up the app store and download it for yourself - it's absolutely free and you'll be amazed at just how good it looks.

Codemasters Online announced today that The Lord of the Rings Online (LOTRO) will be free-to-play across Europe on Tuesday 2nd November 2010.

With the new pricing model players will be able to download the game and play for free as well as purchase expansions, quest packs, items, and account services from the new LOTRO Store opening on Tuesday 2nd November 2010.

This major new content update includes Volume III, Book 2: Ride of the Grey Company which extends the game’s award-winning epic story and expands the world of Middle-earth with the new region of Enedwaith.

Source: Press Release

Will launch in Spring 2011


When Apple launched its iPhone 4 earlier this summer, the phone was supposed to be available in both black and white variants. Black models started shipping right away, while there was supposed to be a slight delay for the white models.

As time went on, however, Apple began to waver a bit when it came to a definite shipping time for the white iPhone. In late July, the company issued the following statement:

White models of Apple's new iPhone 4 have continued to be more challenging to manufacture than we originally expected, and as a result they will not be available until later this year. The availability of the more popular iPhone 4 black models is not affected.

Now it appears that the white iPhone 4 is going to be delayed even further -- until Spring 2011. John Paczkowski of the Wall Street Journal's Digital Daily says that he received official confirmation from Apple about the prolonged delay.

There has been plenty of speculation as to why the white iPhone has been delayed, but the general consensus is that Apple (actually, Steve Jobs) is so obsessed with perfection that the paint thickness/color matching on the white iPhone 4 has not been up to par. Specifically, Apple manufacturing partners are having problems matching the specific shade of white on the front of the phone with the white Home button according to Pocket-lint.

However, the question remains, will people even care anymore by the time Spring 2011 rolls around? Everyone who wanted an iPhone 4 is likely to have one by that point and the inevitable iPhone 5/iPhone 4G will be right around the corner.

Source
Apple Delays White iPhone 4 Till Next Year | John Paczkowski | Digital Daily | AllThingsD

Recently, X-istence determined that the hard disks on the OSNN server were failing and this was confirmed yesterday by The Planet, our hosts for the last 6 years.

We planned some downtime for this weekend, which would have involved downloading the entire contents of the server, starting afresh and reuploading all the data - but after some thought we have decided that it will be easier, more sensible and cheaper (!) to upgrade our 5 year old dual Xeon setup to something a little more cutting edge.

Over this weekend we will be moving from our dual Xeon, 1gig memory, dual 120GB IDE server running 32bit FreeBSD 6.2 to our shiny new 8 core (quad with HT) Xeon 3450, 4gig memory, dual 250GB SATA server running 64bit FreeBSD 8.1.

We are very excited to move to such a server, but it will take some time to setup, test and then ofcourse the site will be disabled while we move the files, database and updated various services. We want this work to all be done during the weekend and this server will cease to exist completely by the end of the month.

Goodbye defiant.osnn.net - hello iguana.osnn.net, this thread will be kept up to date with the latest developements.

They claim they will have more data available than AT&T does, I don't believe them .. But at least they are offering it ..

Verizon Wireless to Offer iPad Starting October 28