Wednesday in an interview with Joystiq, Bethesda VP of Marketing Pete Hines admitted that PC development can be a “headache,” especially when the team is trying to create a universal experience across multiple platforms. He states some of the obvious factors which have reportedly driven other developers completely (insane and) over to the console side, namely piracy and numerous hardware configurations.

“From a technical standpoint, yes, the PC is a headache,” he acknowledged. “It just is. A million different possibilities of hardware, drivers, etc. As you saw with Rage, all it takes is some bad video card drivers and years of hard work comes off as ‘buggy’ when in fact it’s a really solid, stable game.”

Naturally piracy is also a major factor to deal with in PC development. Other studios and publishers have claimed that services should be offered to convince gamers not to steal games while others force titles to remain connected at all times or come packed with heavy-duty DRM.

“Unless you decide not to make your games available for PC, it’s a problem and you have to deal with it,” he said. “So we do the best we can to protect it without resorting to Draconian measures, and we continue to enthusiastically support our PC fans with things like the Creation Kit and the ability to create and add unlimited amounts of mods and content to your existing PC game.”

Also during the interview, Hines was asked if he could see Bethesda developing anything else other than massive RPGs. He said that he’d like to see Todd Howard develop a modern NCAA football title because both men love the sport. Still, he would expect fan responses to be less-then lackluster given large-scale RPGs is what Bethesda does best.

“We do what we do best,” said Hines. “We make big, crazy RPGs, and fortunately for us the previous ones have done really well so there’s no reason for us not to keep making them. If that’s what we loved doing and nobody wanted to play them, we’d have a problem on our hands.”

Guess that means we’ll never see another Terminator title from the studio ever again? To read the full Joystiq interview, head here. The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim lands on store shelves tomorrow, November 11, 2011, for the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and Windows PC.

Netcraft has been publishing since February of 2003 and has given us a good indication of who is hosting the most sites and which is the preferred hosting software. Can you guess how many sites are out there?

Netcraft’s latest survey revealed 525,998,433 sites in total. However, not all of them are activy; only 172 million are in active use. These numbers compare to 463,000,317 sites and 170 million active sites just two months ago.

If we travel back in time, we find that there were just 35,863,952 in February of 2003 and just 105.2 million in December of 2006. As far as the plain number of sites is concerned, the web has about quintupled in less than five years. For 2011 alone, the Internet has almost doubled the number of its sites as Netcraft reported only 273,301,445 sites in January of this year.

Apache is, by a wide margin, the most popular web hosting software with a share of 65.0 percent. Microsoft IIS follows with 15.5 percent. Nginx has 8.5 percent and Google 3.37 percent.

SOURCE via Netcraft

Researchers at Stanford University have an idea how to overcome latency and performance bottlenecks of hard drive and solid state disk-based storage systems. According to a recently published paper, they believe that a RAM-based cloud system with about 1000 servers and a total RAM capacity of 64 TB can be built for about $4 million and is feasible today.

Compared to a disk-based system, a RAMCloud could have a 100-1000x lower latency than disk-based systems and 100-1000x greater throughput, the researchers said. The system would use replication and backup techniques to overcome the problem of volatility and data loss if the power supply is interrupted. The approach would provide enough performance for cloud systems to solve scalability issues for web applications, enable a “a new class of data-intensive applications” due to the extremely low latency of RAM and provide a growth path for small applications to grow into a large application on demand.

The estimate is that latencies of only 5 to 10 microseconds should be achievable by a measured RAMCloud system, which is about 1000x faster than the 5 – 10 milliseconds that is provided by disk-based systems for data that is accessed over a network. The researchers estimate that a single multi-core RAM server could support at least 1,000,000 small requests per second, while disk based systems are typically maxed out at 1000 to 10,000 requests.

Cost is the barrier for a broad use of such RAMClouds. However, the scientists noted that “the cost of DRAM today is roughly the same as the cost of disk 10 years ago ($ 10-30/GB)”, which, of course, does not help much considering the massive storage space requirements today.

SOURCE via Stanford University (pdf)

Microsoft filed a patent for “quantum computational systems” back in 2009 and received confirmation by the USPTO yesterday. What makes this patent interesting is not just the fact that Microsoft has begun covering its bases in quantum computing, which gives this field much more credibility, but its general nature to improve on “prior art” in topological quantum computing. Without a deep dive into quantum computing itself, much of the content covered by patent is confusing enough to make your head spin, but it is obvious that Microsoft is targeting quantum computing functionality in wide range of applications.

The Microsoft patent refers to specific quantum computing devices, including quantum computers, quantum cryptography systems, quantum information processing systems, quantum storage media, and special purpose quantum simulators, all of which are covered in this patent by themselves and in combination with traditional computing systems. Microsoft spends quite a bit of time on cryptography systems and states that “cryptography also would be revolutionized” if computers could “exploit quantum mechanical super-positions”.

In a cryptography application, Microsoft explains that “respective braids that correspond to the plain text and the encryption key may be defined. The key braid may be applied to the plain-text braid to generate an encrypted-text braid. To decrypt the encrypted text, the key braid may be applied to the encrypted text braid to re-establish the plain-text braid.” It is generally believed that quantum computing systems could deliver cryptography applications that are far more secure than today’s solutions

SOURCE via USPTO

GPS tracking gadgets aren’t exactly new, seeing as how there are plenty of apps, watches, bracelets and other random accessories out there designed to keep track of our loved ones, but the new GPS shoes from GTX Corp and Aetrex are a great addition to the batch. With increasing rates of Alzheimers in America, the GPS Shoe and similar gadgets will become an essential tool for real-time GPS tracking of those suffering from dementia.

Unlike watches or bracelets, it’s less likely that an individual will forget and leave the house without his or her shoes. In addition, shoe manufacturer Aetrex’s specialty lies in comfort, meaning the GPS Shoe will offer a comfortable design that is sure to please the elderly. With a specially designed miniature GPS chip and cellular device embedded in the sole, caretakers will be able to pinpoint the wearer’s location using a secure internet website or smartphone app.

With polycarbonate material protecting the transmitter in the sole of the shoe, GTX says the device should last the normal duration of the shoe, which is estimated at one to three years. With a price tag of $299, we would definitely hope for a longer lifespan, but the cost is certainly worth the peace of mind the GPS Shoe offers. For more information and availability, be sure to check out GPS Shoe’s page as the shoes are expected to go on sale there sometime this month.

NASA is gearing up to launch Curiosity, its next-gen Mars rover, on board a Atlas V rocket from Cape Canaveral on November 25. The organization said that the rover carries more scientific capability than any ever sent to another planet.

According to NASA, Curiosity is twice as long and five times as heavy as earlier Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity, which measured 5.2 feet long, 7.5 feet wide and 4.9 feet high. Curiosity is 7 feet tall. There are ten experiments on board, which weigh 15 times as much as its predecessors’ experiments, NASA said.

The 1-ton rover is scheduled to land on Mars in August 2012. NASA plans to use it for about two years to examine the Gale crater in a target area with a  size of 12.4 by 15.5 miles and “investigate whether environmental conditions ever have been favorable for development of microbial life and preserved evidence of those conditions.”

NASA said that the mission is “challenging and risky.” Other than its predecessors, Curiosity cannot land on Mars’ surface with the aid of an air-cushion. Instead, the rover will use more sophisticated rocket-powered descent stage, which will lower the rover “on a tether like a kind of sky-crane.” NASA’s Spirit Mars rover was active between 2004 and 2010; Opportunity is still operational and has exceeded its originally planned lifetime of roughly 90 times more than 30 times.

EA’s Battlefield 3 has only been on the market for a little over two weeks and the publisher is already talking about the fourth Battlefield installment. Heck, the first DLC isn’t even available and the publisher already has its dollar-sign sights set on an unannounced Battlefield 4.

According to Eurogamer, EA president Frank Gibeau confirmed the fourth installment during a keynote presentation at the University of California. The revelation isn’t shocking to say the least given that Battlefield 3 has already sold five million copies since its release. But his comment was tweeted by keynote attendees nonetheless.

“There is going to be a Battlefield 4,” he said.

Of course, an EA spokesperson performed a little PR cleanup immediately after the news escaped Twitter, saying that “Frank was speaking broadly about the Battlefield brand – a brand that EA is deeply passionate about and a fan community that EA is committed to.”

Weeks ago just before the launch of Battlefield 3, Swedish developer DICE said that it hoped to develop the fourth installment sometime in the near future. “This feels like day one now,” executive producer Patrick Bach said. “It’s exciting. The whole Frostbite 2 thing has opened up a big landscape ahead of us so we can do whatever we want.”

DICE claims that the new Frostbite 2 engine was designed to “future proof” the studio: meaning that the engine will even work on the next Xbox and PlayStation console thanks to its PC-based roots. “We know everything about multi-threading now,” Bach added. “We know everything about multi-graphics card solutions now. If someone built a console where the specs are that or more, we have the technology to do something. We could port the game to that console tomorrow.”

Does that mean we might see Battlefield 4 as a launch title for Xbox Next/720/Loop in 2013? Even more, will gamers be able to save the game on one Microsoft platform and resume on another (Microsoft platform)? Now that would be cool.