Crysis was, and is the most graphical and resource intense game that has ever been released. Thanks to the folks over at InCrysis, there is now some credible screen shots and a spoiler (if you dare) of Crysis 2. The ultimate benchmarking tool is back. The screenshots came from PCGamer’s Top 10 games of 2010 (PDF), and the high-resolution scans from German PC Games.

Follow the sources to find more screenshots and high-resolution scans, as well as the spoiler.

Microsoft Earnings Saved By Windows 7, Its "Fastest-Selling Operating System in History"

Microsoft made a record revenue numbers last quarter, but only its Windows division did substantially better than last year. In fact, practically every other aspect of Microsoft's business did worse.

Don't get me wrong, revenue of $19 billion is extremely impressive. But other than the Server business—which was basically flat—all of the growth came from sales of Windows 7. And I'd be willing to bet that a large percentage of that growth came from netbooks. Bing must have been especially disappointing for Ballmer, with online advertising revenue actually decreasing 2% in the same time period when Google saw its revenue increase 17%.

To date, Windows 7 has sold 60 million copies, making it the fastest-selling operating system in the company's history. Of course, a large part of the reason for Windows 7's success is that so many businesses and individuals decided to pass on Vista. Microsoft's essentially been picking up two refresh cycle's worth of business here.

We'll listen in on the earnings call, and will let you know if there are any more interesting details or fun Ballmerisms ahead.

Stay tuned for more updates!

This isn't the first time we've seen changes to the "new" Firefox 4.0 theme. The new iteration of Strata has recently received an updated mockup, and it's likely that it isn't the last either. DeviantART member and Strata40 theme developer SpewBoy recently discovered PSDs lurking about the Internet, and released them for all to see as nice, non-PSD images. Read on to see the refreshed mockups!

While it does not incorporate any completely new features, it's good to see Mozilla make progress with the next version of the popular web browser.

Tabs on bottom:

Tabs on top:

The two images clearly show the fairly new Firefox button in the top left corner, which replaces the previous Page/Tools buttons, along with refreshed graphics, a new Help icon, and a generally shorter tab bar. Plus, it incoroporates a refreshed version of the site's verification feature, and a colored URL beside it.

The mockups were later released by Mozilla here, though these do not include the bookmarks bar in the mockup images. As noted earlier, these mockups are likely to change. You can also expect SpewBoy to update his wonderful Strata40 theme for Firefox to match the new mockups.

Days away from the supposed launch of the Apple tablet, we know almost nothing about it. While we can't say for sure which rumors are true, we can definitely say which, over the past decade, were just plain dumb.

If you think galleries are dumb, too, click here for a single page.

Joining very few titles such as Guitar Hero III and World of Warcraft, Call of Duty MW2 has also hit the billion dollar mark. Activision’s game made an estimated $550m in its first five days and sold more than 4.7 million copies in its initial 24 hours of release.

Previously the original Call of Duty Modern Warfare sold around 14.4 million copies in 2007, MW2 has surpassed this figure already with over 15 million sales.

According to industry body ELSA, the success of COD : MW2 has meant the game has won the best-selling videogame of 2009.

“The phenomenal success of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 was undoubtedly one of the leading entertainment stories of the year and firmly established videogames as one of the leading forms of entertainment in the UK,” said Michael Rawlinson, of the Entertainment and Leisure Software Publishers Association

It's no secret that Google, Microsoft, Apple, and Yahoo are always expanding their reaches, slowly but surely adding new products and services into their line-ups. The New York Times's Nick Bilton took a step back and surveyed their empires.

It doesn't come as much of a surprise to see how much these four behemoths overlap, and I doubt anyone will be surprised when these companies continue to fill in this grid in 2010.

Looking at the empty spaces reveals where we might look for these companies to grow. There have been grumblings of a Google music store for a while, and it seems entirely possible that Apple's Tablet will at least in part emphasize its capabilities as a gaming device.

As the companies stretch and grow, some of their endeavors will prove more successful than others, but until then this chart is an interesting reminder of how vast their reaches already are. [New York Times Bits]

James Cameron's Avatar is unstoppable: It topped the U.S. box office for the fifth straight weekend in a row, raised its domestic take to about $491.8 million, and overtook Star Wars as the third-highest-grossing movie of all time domestically.

The Associated Press estimates that the sci-fi epic will top $500 million domestically by the end of the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday on Monday.

Globally, Avatar's total is now an estimated $1.6 billion, second only to Cameron's Titanic ($1.8 billion).

The first Star Wars movie took in $460.9 million domestically in its original run and several reissues over the years. (Star Wars is still ahead of Avatar in terms of tickets sold.)

Meanwhile, The Book of Eli opened strongly in second place, with about $31.6 million domestically.

According to BusinessWeek, Microsoft and Apple have been undergoing talks that could have Apple replacing Bing with Google as its default search engine. According to ZDNet's Rachel King, these talks were brought upon by Google's Nexus one being a direct competitor to the iPhone 3GS.

Presumably, the default search mechanism within the iPhone browser would be replaced with the Bing API, and the default search app in the dashboard would be replaced with Microsoft's new Bing iPhone App.

Last week, some enterprising fans created a visual guide to the Apple Tablet rumors. Today, the French website Nowhere Else has done something similar for the next generation iPhone. The image highlights the various rumors surrounding the next version of the iPhone (the iPhone 4G if you will) into one annotated graphic.

An OLED display, 5-megapixel camera and a release date between May and July appear to be the most likely rumors (and we agree that those all sound like very distinct possibilities). Also ranking high are rumors of a front-facing camera, dual-core processor with more RAM and a touch-sensitive case.

As for the removable battery rumor, 60% likely or not, we don’t see that happening. Apple has moved its portable line to built-in batteries; it seems unlikely to us that they would add a removable battery to the iPhone.

You can check out a larger version of the image directly at Nowhere Else. What do you think of this roundup? What features would you like to see in the next iPhone? Let us know!

[source: mashable]

Today, Apple finally got with the program (nearly a month late) and released an update for their Bootcamp software. Bumping the version number up to 3.1, this update provides full Windows 7 compatibility. Supporting both x86 and x64 platforms, this update has full support for the Home Premium, Professional, and Ultimate versions of Windows 7.

Included in the update are “fixes” for the trackpads on their Macbooks, and their new wireless keyboard and Magic Mouse. Windows 7 drivers for all of the hardware in the relevant iMac and Macbook models are also available. The update and the included fixes add up to a 381MB download for the x86 version, and 275MB for the x64 version.

There are a couple of catches, however, to installing and using this update with Windows 7. First, you must be running either Windows XP or Windows Vista inside of Bootcamp to install the update. A second requirement is that you download and run the “Bootcamp Utility for Windows 7 Upgrade” which will safely un-mount the read-only Macintosh partition from Windows Vista, prior to upgrading.

After running the above utility and upgrading your version of Bootcamp, you can safely and easily upgrade from Windows Vista to Windows 7 with full support for all of Apple’s hardware. It’s a bit late, but late is better than never.

Source: [AppleInsider]

Realtime Singlish is a free, highly customisable transliteration software for MS Windows. All you should do is to type according to the scheme that is provided.

For more

Birth of an AVATAR from Peter Ammentorp Lund on Vimeo.

Last night at the CES 2010 keynote, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer announced that Windows 7 has become the fastest selling operating system in history. Craig Beilinson, the Director of Marketing for the company’s Entertainment and Devices Division, also agrees. Neither Ballmer nor Beilinson shared actual unit sales numbers, but Beilinson did have evidence to back him up.

PC sales nearly jumped 50% during the week of Windows 7’s launch over the week before; Black Friday also brought the numbers as PC sales were up 63% over last year’s shopping holiday; and for 2009’s holiday season, there were more than a 50% increase in PC sales in comparison to 2008’s holiday season.

According to Fast Company , Beilinson also boasted about the diversity of the Windows 7 operating system. The operating system is available on 1,700 PCs, but also 11,000 Windows 7-compatible devices and components. Keep in mind, however, with the World using more and more technology, there are more PCs in existence than when Vista and XP hit the market.

Fellow geeks and enthusiasts might agree that Microsoft is loosing its edge, but one thing is certain: we are still seeing Microsoft technology in every aspect of our World: Netbooks and Tablets (also the recently revealed HP slate), Windows Mobile 6.5 in a variety of smartphones, with Microsoft even extending its technology into the car industry.