Version 2.41 of the firmware is now out, it has been downloadable since July 8. This update featured various fixes for problems caused by version 2.40. Here are the changes:

• Various fixes for issues caused by update 2.40.
• Changed platinum trophy icon.
• New page added to profile of users under [Players Met] which shows the last game played with that user.

Everything should work smoothly for everyone. I was so fortunate that nothing wrong happened with 2.40. I got the XMB to work exactly as it was supposed to. I still like the new features a lot, and one of my favorites is still the clock. Today, I used the ability to send messages and friend requests while playing games, and that sure is useful. It was so annoying when you had to quit the game to read a message.

According to Wikipedia, Sony UK have said this about 2.41:

• With this update, we have fixed the problem that has prevented a limited number of PS3 systems from activating properly after updating to version 2.40, which was caused by certain system administrative data being contained in the HDD.
• For those users who have updated to version 2.40 and have experienced the problem that the PS3 Home Menu (XMB) is not appearing, or no images are displaying on the screen, please contact Customer Service.
• We have confirmed that for those users who have successfully updated to version 2.40 and are able to activate the PS3 system, this problem will not occur on your PS3

Joystiq reports that PS3 systems have been affected. People are not able to boot up their system properly. The only known solution is to take out the hard drive, format it, and then insert it. This should solve the problem, but the drawbacks are that you will lose all your save games, downloads and so on.

In this thread from the PlayStation message boards, people tell about their broken systems. Apparently the problems affects all PS3 versions. In response to the problems, Sony has taken the update down temporarily. They are working to find out what the problem is, and their are trying to find a solution. In the meantime, you will not be able to update to 2.40.

This is another good reason to back up your saved games and other files regularly.

That’s right. Blizzard announced that they are working on Diablo III earlier today. I’m pretty psyched. Gamer.no reports that the crowd went wild at the World Wide Invitational when Blizzard brought the news. Recently, I actually got a hold of both Diablo and Diablo II and the expansion packs. Unfortunately I haven’t played it that much yet, mostly because of work and of course CoD4. I do remember playing the Diablo games when they were released, but because of the fact that I was nine and twelve years old when they were released, I didn’t really play them that much. I enjoy both games far more now.

You might have heard about all the fuzz at Blizzards home page. They had a splash screen, which started out as solid ice, and cracked more open, until it was all opened and revealed that Diablo III was behind the ice. Blizzard surely know how to tease. Runes also appeared, and hidden images made the evil penguin when put together. Also the numbers from Lost appeared, which are the core numbers in the Valenzetti Equation, which “predicts the exact number of years and months until humanity extinguishes itself”. As you probably know, the theme in the Diablo series is rather dark. After all, The Prime Evils are after humanity.

It is also worth to mention that it was said that Diablo III will be released the day Hell itself freezes over. As you can see in the splash screens, it looks like something has frozen, and then Diablo comes. Blizzard obviously have thought a lot about the promotion.

At Blizzards Diablo III page you can read the faq, and see a cinematic teaser, a gameplay video and more. I must say that this game looks sweet! Wowinsider.com reports that the game will be will be a 3D hack and slash with an isometric view, as you probably have seen in the gameplay video. There will be seven classes, two of them can bee seen in the video. One of the new classes is the Witchdoctor, which I personally thought looked great. The release date is not set yet, hopefully it won’t be a too long wait. Also, since I just have a laptop at the time, I hope I will be able to run the game, though I too doubt that. No system requirements are announced yet.

Norwegian article on the subject from Dagbladet

I do want to run the program again, with the same number. I have also tried to make a similar program in C++, but unfortunately, that version of the program won’t even accept the input number to be that big. Anyway, I thought if I should run it again, I might want to do some thinking and try to figure out how much time my computer will use, and then I need the amount of FLOPS the computer is capable of. My CPU is a Intel Celeron at 1.60 GHz. I have tried to figure out how many FLOPS I can expect, but I haven’t found out anything clever. If anyone know how to calculate this, I would be grateful.

Anyway, with the number I typed in, I have found out that I need roughly 68 630 000 000 000 (could be wrong) floating point operations to be able to say that the number I wanted to check is a prime number. The CPUs in the PlayStation 3 runs at 218 GFLOPS (218 000 000 000 FLOPS), which would mean that the PS3 would need approximately 315 seconds, which is 5 minutes and 15 seconds. That’s right. And that is for the PS3, which is much faster than my computer! The PS3 is actually so powerful that the University of Bergen have bought five of them to use them in education and to to heavy calculations. They connected the five PS3s together, to make use of the power and have one machine capable of one teraFLOPS. Their last supercomputer was capable of 0.7 teraFLOPS.

Basically, I have found out that my computer will use an awful lot of time to finish the calculations, but I will do it. I’m actually pretty excited to find out how much time is needed.

The quadratic formula itself can be found in my post Solve quadratic equations with php. The difference between the solving in these two cases, is that the php-solver do not solve the equation if the solution is complex.

Until I figure out a smart way to display nice looking code in my posts, the code can be found here. If you are familiar with c++, you should understand quite easy. I don’t think it is to difficult if you are familiar with another programming language, or programming in general either.

Download the program. Don’t worry about it being and .exe-file, even though they potentially are dangerous. This one is perfectly safe to download and use. Show care when downloading from the Internet.

I use Code Blocks when programming in c++, both for editing and compiling.

Here you see the program in action. My computer have spent the last few hours trying to figure out if it is a prime or not. Yes, I know it is a prime, and therefore the program needs to do a lot more computing. After all, this is actually a quite big number. Even though it is a small program, with just 25 lines of code or so, it uses over 95 % of my CPU. Because of that, my computer is running a bit slow at the moment. Anyway, I will let the computer finish the calculations. I do wonder how much time it will need though.

I will keep you updated, and write a new post when the program gives me the answer. I will give you the code to, if anyone should be interested.

Update: The program have spent the last 22 hours trying to figure out if the number is a prime or not. I’m really beginning to wonder how much time is needed.

Update II: After about 25 hours, I logged in at my computer, and guess what? For some reason, the computer had decided to reboot. Not too happy about that. I actually suspect that the computer got overheated. Anyway, I will try again, but I might try on another computer. After all, the program uses a lot of resources, so I can’t really use the computer while running the program.

I have some problems with the formatting this article, I would appreciate any help.

To solve a quadratic equation with php, you need an input, and then the script produces the output. You can get input through a simple form, something like this:

<form action="/files/solvequadratic.php" method="post">
a:
<input type="text" name="a" size="15" maxlength="14" />
b:
<input type="text" name="b" size="15" maxlength="14" />
c:
<input type="text" name="c" size="15" maxlength="14" />
<input type="submit" value="Solve!" />
<input type="reset" value="Reset!" />
</form>

which turns into to this:

a:

b:

c:

What happens here, is that you enter three variables, a, b and c. These are stored as a, b and c. The form then sends the variables to the script solvequadratic.php located in the folder files for processing. So what is in solvequadratic.php?

<?php
$a = $_POST["a"];
$b = $_POST["b"];
$c = $_POST["c"];
$d = pow($b,2) - 4*$a*$c;
echo "You entered a = $a, b = $b, and c = $c. 

&#8220;;
if ($d < 0)
	{
	echo "The equation has no real solutions.";
	}
elseif ($a == 0)
	{
	echo "That is not a quadratic equation.";
	}
elseif ($d == 0)
	{
	echo "The equation has one solution. &#8220;;
	$x = ((-$b)+sqrt($d))/(2*$a);
	echo &#8220;X = $x&#8221;;
	}
else
	{
	echo &#8220;The equation has two solutions. &#8220;;
	$x1 = ((-$b) + sqrt($d)) / (2*$a);
	$x2 = ((-$b) - sqrt($d)) / (2*$a);
	echo &#8220;X1 = $x1 &#8220;;
	echo &#8220;X2 = $x2&#8243;;
	}
?>

For some reason, wordpress won’t let me use the

Anyway, if you are somewhat familiar with php, you should see what happens in the script. You are free to use this script for whatever you want, though I do doubt there is a need for this. However it is a good exercise to get to know php better, if you’re a beginner, like myself. As you might have noticed, you can try the script by using the form above. And yeah, I know the output page look like shit, but I’m to laze to do anything about it. This script can be expanded to solve quadratic equations with complex solutions as well, but I haven’t done that yet.

Danish scientists have studied 1 347 matches in Unreal Tournament 2004 where players are on either red or blue team. Guess what? The red team wins more often. The truth is that the red team won 55 percent of the matches. Mihai Moldovan of the University of Copenhagen believes that the reason is that red acts as a psychological distractor for men.

While this is really an interesting analysis, the notion of red team versus blue team has been ingrained in the Unreal Tournament series for years. We don’t anticipate any immediate changes to team colors.
Mark Rein, vice president of Epic Games

Apparently red players have an advantage in most activities. This did surprise me, I wouldn’t have guessed that the worn colors could matter. Isn’t the human mind fascinating?

A 2CD Age of Conan soundtrack has been announced by FunCom, and it will feature threes songs from the Nowegian band Turbonegro. Turbonegro also performed at the Age of Conan launch event. Lead singer Hank von Helvete claims to have read every Conan comic and is a huge fan of Conan. Fellow band member Happy-Tom, says Hank is one of Norways biggest Conan fans. CD1 of the soundtrack can be purchased at iTunes, while CD2 will be released during june.

It’s just perfect that Age of Conan is supported with a song from Turbonegro – the two hardest rocking pieces of entertainment to ever come out of Norway. As a huge Conan fan, I am proud to be part of this statement against modern life boredom and common life impotency. Heads must and shall roll.
Hank Von Helvete

As a fan of the great band Turbonegro, I think this is pretty cool. I have followed them and their music the last five years or so. If you haven’t allready listened to their music, I advice you to do so. It is worth to mention that Turbonegro are in my opinion of of the best, of not the best, live bands in Norway. They make a great show at every gig they do.

The band (Tubronegro) has been featured in numerous feature films and TV-series, most notably CSI, Jackass (MTV-series + both feature movies), Wildboyz (title song), Viva La Bam and Dirty Sanchez, as well as the game Rock Band II.

If we can believe FunCom, Turbonegro will appear at Rock Band II. I have played a lot of Guitar Hero, and I would love to be able to play Turbonegros songs. Wonder what song they will put in the game though, as they do have a lot of great tunes.

According to Gamer.no, Rune Grønn, who is Turbonegros manager, says that Turbonegro have been working to get songs ready for Rock Band, Singstar and Guitar Hero, and they hope that some of the songs will be included.

Norwegian newspaper Dagladet have an article on this sucject as well:
Turboneger kan bli kongene av musikkspill

Comparison screenshots are all over the web. A forum thread at GamesRadar have a lot of them, and the resemblance can be spotted quite easily. In fact, it’s not even resemblance, the screenshots are almost identical. The list of games Majestic Studios have stolen from is huge, according to Wikipedia, these are the games:
The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind, Unreal Tournament 2004, Unreal Tournament 2003, Diablo II, Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End, Thief: The Dark Project, Thief: Deadly Shadows, Crysis, Silent Hill 4: The Room, Return to Castle Wolfenstein, Painkiller, Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines, The Lord of the Rings: The Battle for Middleearth, Hexen and World of Warcraft.

It doesn’t stop here. Scenes from the movies Spawn and Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl have also been copied. One can see the resemblance with the main character of the game and Edward Norton in The Illusionist too. In this Neogaf thread the number of reported thefts is ridiculously high. Some people claim that the in-game cursor has been stolen from Black & White. Limbo of the Lost will probably be some kind of cult game, just like The Great Giana Sisters. Personally, I think Majestic Studios’ ripoff is hilarious. I mean, what were they thinking of? I imagine the development process were something like this:
-Hey, what do we do on the next level?
-I don’t have any ideas, why don’t we just copy-paste from some unknown game, I’m sure no one will notice.
-Okay, lets copy from Oblivion, or maybe Unreal Tournament 2004. Hardly any gamers have heard of those games.

Tri Synergy, the game publisher, claim that they had no knowledge of what had been going on at Majestic Studios. Tri Synergy have now stopped distribution of Limbo of the Lost.

The question is, is this actually for real or is it some kind of viral marketing trick? Well, who knows? It is not like Majestic Studios have tried to cover up their stealings. It is obvious that it isn’t their own work. It is so obvious that you really have to twist your brain inside out to figure out how on earth the developers will get away with this. If it were to be a hoax, it is extremely well carried out. I honestly don’t know what I think it is.

Quote from one of the forum users of Neogaf:
“I enjoy most of those games they stole from, so this game must be extra awesome to combine them together.”

And some quotes from reviews:
“Draws from the best of the best.”

“It’s like Oblivion meets Morrowind meets Diablo II meets Painkiller meets Unreal Tournament 2003 meets Enclave meets Unreal Tournament 2004 meets Black & White meets Thief: Deadly Shadows meets Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines meets Return to Castle Wolfenstein meets World of Warcraft.”

“Our frothing demand for this game increases.”

“There’s still some placeholder art but we’re sure the developer will have that squared away by release.”

Additional reading:
Interview with the developers
Limbo Of The Lost - An Astonishing Tale
Limbo of the Lost or Oblivion?