Team Bondi has confimed that Whore of the Orient will be a next-generation IP.
The official blurb reads as follows:
“Shanghai, 1936. Whore of the Orient. Paris of the East. The most corrupt and decadent city on the planet, where anything can be had or done for the right price. Plaything of Western powers who greedily exploit the Chinese masses. Boiling pot of Chinese nationalism, with the Kuomintang ruthlessly trying to suppress Communism and the labour movement. Home to the International Police Force, a group of Western cops hopelessly trying to keep the lid on and keep the peace.
“From the development team who brought you LA Noire and The Getaway, along with the Academy Award winning film production team of Kennedy Miller Mitchell comes a completely new and original IP being developed for next generation games consoles and PC.”
We’ve seen plenty of games that seemingly are in development for next-gen machines (Watch Dogs, Star Wars 1313) although Bondi has become the first studio to come out loud and proud about its development plans.
The announcement reinforces two notions.

1. That the next-gen consoles are very close now
2. That the industry is becoming impatient with Sony and Microsoft’s unwillingness to announce them

Don’t be surprised to see other developers to follow where Bondi is seemingly leading.

http://www.mcvuk.com/news/read/la-no...orient/0102061 ...

Future Publishing's independent Nintendo-focused magazine Nintendo Gamer printed its final issue today.
Nintendo Gamer will continue to run its website but the magazine will cease to exist.
The magazine's editor Nick Ellis wrote a farewell note in the final issue stating that the move "draws the curtain on 20 years of independent Nintendo mags from Future Publishing".
Future Publishing's independent Nintendo magazines began in 1992 with the launch of Super-Play. It continued to publish Nintendo magazines including N64 Magazine, NGC and NGamer before rebranding to Nintendo Gamer.
"After careful consideration we've taken the decision to close Nintendo Gamer magazine. However, with Future's ongoing strategy to drive digital growth across its international, digitally-focussed brand business, the website, Nintendo-Gamer.net will continue as excitement builds ahead of Nitnendo's Wii U launch," said Nintendo Gamer's publisher Lee Nutter.
Online editor Chris Scullion added: "There will always be a place for Nintendo Gamer – it's just in a different medium now. Over the next few months we'll be sharing the best features and issues from the Nintendo Gamer vaults, dating all the way back through the magazine's 20-year history.
"On behalf of everyone who's ever written a word, designed a page, checked some text, written a caption or reviewed a game for Nintendo Gamer, thank you so much for reading the magazine. Please do buy the final issue when it's released on September 6th, and we hope you'll continue to stick around the website as it continued to evolve".
Nintendo Gamer launched in 2006 and retained an average circulation of 7,745 in 2011. Future will continue to publish Official Nintendo Magazine.

http://www.mcvuk.com/news/read/futur...aining/0102066 ...

We think [Brian Delacruz] latched on to a good idea with this photo printer project. Instead of building a big photo booth for his party he developed a Raspberry Pi based WiFi photo printer. Right now it’s a prototype that lacks the kind of polish necessary to make a true user-friendly device. But the idea is solid and just waiting for you to improve upon it.
In addition to the RPi he’s using a quality photo printer and a small wireless router. The router simply provides WiFi capabilities for the RPi which is running a web server, mySQL, and FTP. This provides a wide range of upload options which he can work with. Watch the video after the break to see him print a smart phone photo wirelessly.
This can be simplified by using a package like hostapd to use a USB WiFi dongle as an access point. Or if the venue already has Internet access a server could be set up with a QR code to guide people to it. The party starts off with an empty bulletin board and guests would be invited to print and hang their own photos which will go into the host’s guest book/scrap book to remember the event.

http://hackaday.com/2012/08/29/party...-raspberry-pi/ ...

Improvements in processing power really hit home when you see . Sure, we’re talking about a system which launched more than 15 years ago (the original PlayStation launched way back in 1995), but this is a $99 device which seems to be playing the games at full speed!
[Sean] wrote in to share the project with us. After rooting the device he installed System 7 (aka Mac OS 7) using Mini vMac for Android. He uses Free PlayStation Emulator (FPSE) to run the games. There is an Android version which provides the touch-screen controls you see above. We figured the graphics would be awful, but the video after the break proves us wrong. Other than being in black and white we think the graphics are fantastic. Just one hack was necessary to make this happen. [Sean] uses NoRefresh to keep the Nook from refreshing the screen which is what causes the film-negative type of flashing after several page turns.

http://hackaday.com/2012/08/30/plays...-simple-touch/ ...

Assassin's Creed III, the cover star of E245, is no mere sequel with a new setting, according to the team who've spent the past three years working on Ubisoft's biggest-ever project. Instead, it's intended as a reinvention, rather than mere iteration, of the multimillion-selling series.
Whereas previous Assassin's Creed games have built upon an existing foundation, adding new mechanics and ideas but keeping to a broadly similar scope, the third game proper is rebuilt from the ground up - starting with brand new engine AnvilNext.
"When we started Assassin's Creed III, right after Assassin's Creed II, we knew Brotherhood was starting, and Brotherhood was a much more direct iteration on [the series]," lead design technical director Marc-Antoine Lussier tells us. "[The Brotherhood team's] guideline was, 'don't reinvent too much, use everything we know, and use the fact that we know how it works to make it even better, but faster'.
"Whereas our challenge was, 'reinvent everything, if possible'."
It's a daunting task. The Assassin's Creed series has hardly lacked ambition over the years, and nor has it held back in terms of the technical demands it placed on the current generation of consoles - a generation that's beginning to creak under the weight of ever larger, and more elaborate, worlds.
"The final product had to be revolutionary," Lussier continues. "On the same consoles, on the same hardware, we had to make sure that we had the power we needed. Also, the fact that we knew the team would be much bigger, that's another aspect - we had to make sure that [AnvilNext] was solid enough and efficient enough to be used by a much larger team."
The engine not only has to survive being pushed and pulled in various directions by hundreds of development staff, and draw the game's 18th century America environments at a decent lick, but also handle an uncommonly expressive protagonist - placed back to back, the 5,000 new animations for Assassin's Creed's main character Connor Kenway would take an hour to watch.
"And there's no cinematic in that - it's just the behaviour when you play," Lussier enthuses. "So there's a lot of new stuff. Everything's changed."
Productions of such scale are becoming increasingly rare, with more developers turning to simpler, more lithe development projects - the charge led, perhaps, by Curiosity, Peter Molyneux's first 22Cans experiment - and the industry becomes ever-more polarised. It's a fact not lost on creative director Alex Hutchinson.
"We're the last of the dinosaurs," he says. "We're still the monster triple-A game with very large teams [and] multiple studios helping out on different bits. There are fewer and fewer of these games being made, especially as the middle has fallen out."

http://www.edge-online.com/news/assa...ent-everything ...

Amazon has released a rather bizarre bit of news today. The Kindle Fire has completely sold out. You can no longer buy one, and the wording of the press release suggests there won't be any more manufactured. In nine months on sale Amazon claims to have secured 22 percent of tablet sales in the U.S.. With that in mind, Amazon will definitely be selling more Kindle Fires, however, the next one you'll be able to buy will probably have a '2' at the end of the name. Jeff Bezos said that the Kindle Fire is Amazon's most successful product launch so far and that there's 'an exciting roadmap ahead.' He also confirmed Amazon will continue to offer hardware, but there's no detail beyond that.

http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/1...ld-out-forever ...

"There seems to be an interesting side-effect of the flawed jury verdict of last Friday — Samsung sales have surged. Even with the approach of the launch of Apple's new iPhone, the Galaxy SIII is sold out in many stores, and there is a measurable increase in sales, according to Trip Chowdhry, the managing director of equity research at Global Equities Research, cited in Forbes. Maybe Apple really managed to convince its customers that Samsung phones are equivalent or better, so they are being overcharged? Or is it a rush to buy the currently best smartphone in the market in case there is an injunction on its sale in the U.S. any time soon?

http://apple.slashdot.org/story/12/0...es-for-samsung ...

Earlier this week I installed the final version of Windows 8. And it is awesome. That's not a joke. Windows 8 is absolutely, unequivocally stellar. And yet, at the end of the day, I am right back to using Linux. Why is that? What is it about Linux that makes me so excited to use it — even while enjoying another operating system that I view as, in all seriousness, a work of art? Why do I not simply install Windows 8 on every machine I own and be happy with it? For me, it's the ability to slowly chip away and remove items from your user interface until you are left with only want you want, and nothing more. The option of looking at an item on the screen, right clicking on it, and declaring to said item 'Listen up, mister Thing-On-My-Screen. I don't want you anymore. Be gone!' Panels, bars, docks, launchers, widgets, gadgets – whatever is on your screen, there is probably a way to send it to whatever form of the afterlife is reserved for unwanted Desktop Crud. And, I'll tell you this right now – as great as it is,you don't find a whole lot of 'Right click, Remove Panel' in Windows 8."

http://linux.slashdot.org/story/12/0...t-its-no-linux ...

Developer Josh Begley, a student at Clay Shirky's NYU Media Lab, created an application called Drones+ that allows users to track U.S. drone strikes on a map of Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia. Far from innovative, the app in question merely relays and positions strikes as available from the U.K.'s Bureau of Investigative Journalism. First Apple rejected the application claiming it was 'not useful or entertaining enough,' then it was rejected for hiding a corporate logo. And the latest reason for objection is that Begley's content is 'objectionable and crude' and 'that many audiences would find [it] objectionable." Begley's at a loss for how to change information on a map. He's not showing images of the drone strikes nor even graphically describing the strikes. From the end of the article, 'The basic idea was to see if he could get App Store denizens a bit more interested in the U.S.' secretive, robotic wars, with information on those wars popping up on their phones the same way an Instagram comment or retweet might. Instead, Begley's thinking about whether he'd have a better shot making the same point in the Android Market.'"
http://apple.slashdot.org/story/12/0...one-strike-app ...