Well, I can’t just tell you that the game has been delayed without giving some valid reason, right? Apparently, Blizzard are having some problems determining how the newly implemented Battle.net Tag feature will function in conjunction with the Battle.net system in general. There are other underlying issues that are causing the release date to be pushed back until what was said to be “late July”.

Why should anyone believe this at all? Honestly, I can’t blame anyone for assuming this entire post is completely falsified. It’s been done before and will probably be done again up until Diablo III’s official release announcement. I highly urge all the Diablo fans around the world to remember one thing that will give this information some solid weight, and it’s that Blizzard will not release a product until it is finished. I don’t mean, “Hey, it’s a small bug! We can fix it later, right?” No. I mean completely done. Diablo III’s Game Director would not have described it any better himself.

While all the information you’re reading is accurate, please don’t make the mistake of taking this information and sharing it with the rest of the world all the way up until July. If you’ve ever known or spoke with a video-game developer, they would tell you that one day a game can be set to be released in a month, then the next day it could change to six months, and vice-versa. This is just how the industry works.

All we can hope for at this point, is that Blizzard will work things out quickly, but not so quick to devastate Diablo III’s reputation on release. Either way, I’ll see you Sanctuary!

This photo was later to be confirmed real by a Best Buy employee stating that the store did indeed have an apparent midnight release for Diablo III. This is great news, except… what does Blizzard have to say about their own game announcement? The answer was absolutely nothing — until now. Just moments ago, Bashiok announced via Twitter that “Diablo III does not have a release date. Any store or person claiming otherwise is guessing.”

It is still unclear when Diablo III will be released, although Soon™ is always a good estimate for Blizzard games. No official response from Jay Wilson on the Diablo III launch has emerged either, leaving Diablo fans in the dark. This isn’t the first time we’ve seen a company like Best Buy doing something like this in order to get pre-orders. Gamestop did the same thing over a year ago, and thousands attempted to pre-order the game. That promotion has since been taken down by Gamestop, but Best Buy doesn’t seem to be the only one announcing the February release. Target has also jumped aboard this idea of a February release.

As for all the hardcore fans of the Diablo series, we all knew better than to believe such shenanigans but the light of a possible Diablo III release was just what many of us wanted to hear. After all the rumors of Diablo III’s delays being blamed on the delayed release into Korea, we needed something. The wait continues…

First Sun – Fire on a Stick by First Sun

Feel free to share this with everyone you know, and if you’re feeling extra cool, you can take the time to subscribe to me on YouTube , click that “Follow Me” button to your top-left to get my Twitter updates, and like First Sun on Facebook! Thank you, everyone, for all the support you’ve given me thus far. I hope the music you hear makes your day better!

Torrent: http://www.demonoid.me/files/details/2677106/33649716/

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Consider it as a “Thank You” for supporting what I’ve done in the past and in the present. I could not have done it without you all. Much love.

Head over to the Minecraft project page to get the new address or simply use: minecraft.n00bfest.com as the new host. It is no longer minecraft.electricimpulse.net. This also means there’ll be much less lag on the server. Hope you guys enjoy it. We’re also working on getting iConomy running full speed, and updating the bukkit build. I’ve been keeping a close eye on the plugin versions to update them, but there’s no updates so far. I’ll update them as soon as I see a new version come out. Once we get bukkit updated, new plugin versions updated, and iConomy working, we’ll start looking into new plugins or mods that seem feasible to the server. I’ll have another update soon.

Although the big thrust with the D9 and Comdex demos were multitouch integration into the OS (most likely to capitalize on the buzz surrounding Android and iOS) the real take away from these demos is that Microsoft is unifying their interfaces. Since WIndows XP, Microsoft’s included what they refer to as a ’10 foot experience’ with their OS’s in the form of Windows Media Center. MCE is a very powerful platform. Coupled with a supported remote control, MCE will turn your monitor (or an external TV display as I use) into a full fledged Media hub, complete with DVR, Internet TV… the works.

The problem with MCE is that most people ignore it outright. There’s a ton of reasons for this, arguably the main one is that since it’s been largely ignored by 3rd party developers since it’s not front and center in the Windows world. This isn’t completely MCE’s fault, especially since 3rd party consumer developers have left Windows with a reckless abandon for the greener apple fields and android pastures.

With Win8, we’re seeing Microsoft put this full screen MCE-like immersive experience front and center. They’ve glossed it up with some Metro like Windows Phone UX, and like OS X Lion, they’re overhauling the entire desktop OS with smartphone-like touches.

Micorosoft’s also throwing another curve ball at us, they’re saying that Windows 8 will also ship with ARM flavors. This is huge news, Windows has traditionally been developed around the x86 architecture. In the early aughts, Microsoft briefly supported Intel’s Itanianum instruction set to usher in 64 bit computing, but the industry quickly settled on AMD’s x64 extensions and Microsoft followed suit shortly thereafter.

ARM is a completely different beast from x64 and x86 and it’s thought that Microsoft had to practically rewrite the OS to support this new change. ARM generally handles power consumption better than it’s x86/64 brethren, however it does that by sacrificing computational power and (in the case of the current gen devices) the OS agnosticism of PC platforms, meaning that an Android based ARM device has very little shot of ever running MeGoo or Windows 8.

Windows 8 on ARM will have some limitations. For example, it won’t have a Rosetta like translation layer to run legacy programs. Meaning that traditional Windows 7 apps won’t run on your new 8 based tablet. From what I’ve been able to gather, they’re going to have the Explorer Shell with Windows 8 ARM (the traditional windows desktop) however we’re still a long ways out and that seems a little left-field to me.

So what’s the game plan for Microsoft? It’s no secret that Google and Apple have taken over the consumer electronic space with their device platforms. I own both an Android phone and tablet and they’ve fundamentally changed my relationship with my PC and technology in general. Microsoft hasn’t had any real response to this, so obviously this is MS’s answer to Apple circa 2007.

Clearly, the idea is that they want one OS to rule them all. They haven’t mentioned smartphones specifically with Windows 8, but I wouldn’t be surprised if Windows Phone 8 devices didn’t all have a Mini HDMI and USB port and were billed as portable Windows desktops. Microsoft obviously intends for Win8 to be a legitimate Android/iOS competitor (and it looks like it might just be one) all the while bringing these same inovations to conventional laptops and desktops.

The question then becomes one of scale. Your typical android distro is around 200MB, while a Windows 7 installation balloons out to like 10GB. Microsoft’s going to have to shrink that number considerably if they hope to reach Android like performance on these ARM devices.

In the Windows Vista days, there was a lot of talk about the pillars of Longhorn (Avalon, Indigo, WinFS, etc) which were all PR-speak for Microsoft’s goal of weaning us from the NT codebase. The thinking was that if they started to replace high-level services and subsystems of Windows with better stuff, down the line they’d be able to replace the kernel and low-level systems with better stuff without destroying their existing ecosystem.

Obviously this is all conjecture. We won’t know anything substantive until we get our hands on some of the Windows 8 milestones later on this year. One thing’s for sure, Microsoft’s out of their Longhorn funk and they’re trying to get the ball back. Now let’s watch as Apple eats their lunch again.

Things I already know:

Instabreak is currently broken.

MagicCarpet “jump” is hitchy.

The music from my wall posts. Think of this like when your favorite artists used to take over MTV for a day and play all their favorite music videos.