Download Call of Duty: Black Ops Annihilation DLC for Xbox 360

Call of Duty: Black Ops has just received the third downloadable content pack, in the form of the Annihilation map pack, which is now available for download on the Xbox Live online service for the Xbox 360 console.

Call of Duty: Black Ops is one of the best-selling games of last year, and continues to command a loyal following on all platforms, from the PC, to the PlayStation 3 or Xbox 360.

Now, in order to attract even more players, a brand new downloadable content pack has been released for Black Ops, in the form of the Annihilation map pack.

Just like the previous DLCs, the First Strike and Escalation packs, Annihilation brings four new maps for the competitive multiplayer mode, and one new scenario for the Zombies cooperative one.
Check out the official details on the new levels below.

"Take the fight to "Hangar 18," located in the iconic military base Area 51, complete with experimental weapons labs, the SR-71 test hangar, and a disturbingly mysterious autopsy room. Pull up and get cozy with "Drive-In," a close quarters slugfest through a 60's American drive-in theater, classic arcade, and old school snack shack.

"Battle through the construction of a massive secret Soviet missile site in the multilevel "Silo," and then take off to a coastal golf course fit for a dictator in "Hazard," set on the cliffs of Cuba where stocked clubhouses and manicured fairways meet sand traps perfect for setting up ambushes.

"Zombies return with vengeance in the mysterious land of "Shangri-La," a legendary shrine lost in an exotic jungle. Never before seen undead creatures lurk within a treacherous labyrinth of underground caverns. Step carefully through deadly traps and solve the dark secrets buried within the shifting walls of a long last land."

The Annihilation DLC for Call of Duty: Black Ops is now being rolled out on the Xbox 360 console, and is available for purchase and download on both Xbox Live as well as the internal DLC store from the game, for the traditional 1200 MS Points ($15).

It will be released at the end of next month or beginning of August for other platforms like the PC or PlayStation 3, while a Double XP weekend will start later this week to celebrate the release of the DLC.

Download KDE SC 4.7 RC and GCC 4.6.1

The KDE team has announced on June 25th Release Candidate version for the upcoming KDE Software Compilation 4.7. This morning, the Free Software Foundation released GCC 4.6.1 with lots of interesting changes.

We are announcing that on June 25th, the KDE developers announced KDE Software Compilation 4.7 RC (Release Canidate), a version that is focusing on fixing last-minute bugs and finishing the required documentation and translations.

KDE Software Compilation 4.7 will be released this summer and it will bring various exciting features, such as support for OpenGL-ES 2.0 on KWin window manager, major improvements on Dolphin file manager, support for GRUB2 bootloader on KDM (KDE's login manager), and support for offline address search on Marble.

This is how KDE Software Compilation 4.7 will look like when it will be released, on July 27, 2011. For a complete list of changes brought by KDE SC 4.7 RC please take a look at the official changelog.

Today, June 27th, we are announcing that the Free Software Foundation unleashed version 4.6.1 of the famous GCC open-source compiler, a release that brings regression fixes, bug fixes, and documentation updates.

The new GCC 4.6.1 compiler brings general optimizer improvements, compile time and memory usage improvements, new languages and language specific improvements, new targets and target specific improvements, documentation improvements and some installation changes.

Good news for Android apps developers, as GCC 4.6.1 now provides support for the Bionic C library, offering an easy way of building native Android applications and libraries.

For a complete list of changes that are present in GCC 4.6.1, please take a look at the official changelog.

While the developers are working hard to bring you all the good stuff in GCC 4.7, the next maintenance update, GCC 4.6.2, will be available worldwide somewhere in late September or early October 2011.

Download KDE Software Compilation 4.7 RC sources right now.

Download GCC 4.6.1 sources right now.

Download VirtualBox 4.0.10 for Mac OS X Lion

The free, open source virtualization solution from Oracle, VirtualBox has added support for Apple’s upcoming major revision of the Mac OS, Lion.

VirtualBox is a good alternative to pricey virtualization solutions like VMware Fusion and Parallels.

It can hold various guest operating systems ranging from Windows, and Linux to Solaris and Open BSD.

VirtualBox 4.0.10 is now here with the usual bag of fixes and enhancements, starting with a GUI tweak, which fixes disappearing settings widgets on KDE hosts, then moving onto Storage.

In this particular area, Oracle mentions the following changes:

- fixed hang under rare circumstances with flat VMDK images
- a saved VM could not be restored under certain circumstances after the host kernel was updated
- refuse to create a medium with an invalid variant

For Snapshots, the developers say that “none of the hard disk attachments must be attached to another VM in normal mode when creating a snapshot.”

A couple of USB fixes are mentioned, one of which allows for proper device detection on RHEL/OEL/CentOS 5 guests. This, however, is labeled as a partial fix.

Two Mac-specific changes are mentioned.

For those using a Mac as the host of VirtualBox, Oracle is proud to confirm that the new version further strengthens compatibility with OS X 10.7 Lion simply by fixing a bunch of known bugs.

The other fix available for Mac OS X hosts is related to GNOME 3, according to those maintaining the software. The remainder of the changelog continues below:

 · ACPI: force the ACPI timer to return monotonic values for improve behavior with SMP Linux guests
 · RDP: fixed screen corruption under rare circumstances
 · rdesktop-vrdp: updated to version 1.7.0
 · OVF: under rare circumstances some data at the end of a VMDK file was not written during export

VirtualBox calls for an Intel-based Mac, over 2GB of RAM (if you want a decent experience), around 100MB of storage for the program itself, and additional storage (by the gigabyte) for the operating systems you plan to install.

Download VirtualBox for Mac OS  X (Free)

Download Opera 11.50 Final for Linux

A few minutes ago, June 28th, Opera Software proudly unleashed the new, improved and highly anticipated Opera 11.50 web browser for Linux, Macintosh and Windows platforms.


Dubbed Swordfish, the new Opera 11.50 web browser brings lots of new exciting features, overall improvements, code cleanup, and thousands of bugfixes, which makes it the fastest and most stable Opera browser ever!

“Opera 11.50 introduces a new and novel type of browser extension: Speed Dial extensions. Instead of handy thumbnails and links to your top sites, you can embed your Speed Dial with extensions that keep you updated—instantly—on what is happening around the Web. Take weather updates, for example.”
“Why click through to a website when you can get the current conditions live at a glance? Or, why not be the first to know the hot news of the day just by opening a new tab? We think Speed Dial extensions are a smarter way of getting to the content you want and need.” – was stated in the press release.

Highlights of Opera 11.50:
· Live Speed Dial extension;
· Passwords synchronization;
· Bookmarks synchronization;
· Safer passwords;
· A brand-new sleek and lightweight design;
· Adobe Flash Player auto-detection and installation;
· Oracle Java auto-detection and installation;
· HTML5 support;
· Faster browser engine;
· Faster software graphics engine (with support for CSS and SVG rendering);
· Session History and Navigation;
· W3C File API;
· classList and element support.

“We’re excited about the work that has gone into Opera 11.50,” said Jan Standal, VP of Desktop Products, Opera Software. “Before we challenge Lady Gaga though, we’ve got to surpass the Tom Selleck moustache fan page on Facebook and the number of forum posts Opera fan Tamil has written. We think Speed Dial extensions are amazing enough to do the trick, but we didn’t stop there.”

Download Opera 11.50 Final for Linux.
It is available for many operating systems, such as Ubuntu 11.04, Debian 6, Fedora 15, Red Hat Enterprise Linux or Slackware.

Google make search more personal...

Have a play with the rather fun "What do you love" variant of the search engine.  Nice touch using the heart for the "search" button. 

Doesn't say much about either the algorithms they've applied to this exercise though if the results that come up for sailing products are nil though...., either that or possibly the search engine optimisation of the products pages of the sailing technical gear experts like Musto and Henri Lloyd need some serious work!

Click to enlarge

Download uTorrent 3.0 with Instant Streaming, Remote Web Control

After many months of waiting, or testing as the case may be, uTorrent 3.0 is finally here. The popular BitTorrent client comes with plenty of new features for power and casual users alike. Among the most touted new features are media streaming before finishing the download, a simple web interface for remote control and drag and drop sharing.

"µTorrent 3.0 is officially live," BitTorrent, the company behind uTorrent, announced. "First, many thanks to the 4+ million µTorrent users who pitched in and tested the beta. Your feedback was a significant contribution to the final product. We all really appreciate it," it said.

The first uTorrent 3.0 Alpha surfaced last summer and the first beta a couple of months ago.

Many of the new features have been in the works for quite some time but have only now reached maturity, being stable enough for the many tens of millions of people that use uTorrent.

Instant video and music streaming

Streaming is perhaps the best example, it's been around since December 2009, but has only now become a standard feature of the stable release.

"Watch videos within seconds with our progressive downloads – no need to wait for the entire file to download. This feature is especially great for previewing a file before committing to the full download," BitTorrent explained.

"To use this feature, simply click the streaming button when it appears in the Playback column within the Torrents tab," it added.

uTorrent remote control

Another great feature making its debut is a new web service from BitTorrent enabling users to control their uTorrent app from any computer or device, by visiting remote.utorrent.com, without the need of setting up a local server or anything of the sort.

Ratings and comments

uTorrent 3.0 is also trying to make the whole process of peer-to-peer sharing more social, not only on a technical level, but enabling actual interactions and conversations between users.

The latest stable release enable users to rate torrents to let others know to stay clear or to grab a quality release. Comments do pretty much the same.

uChat, P2P chat app

Speaking of social interactions, uTorrent 3.0 also introduces an interesting new feature, still in beta, uChat, available as an optional app for the BitTorrent client. As the name implies, it enables users to chat with each other via a distributed P2P network.

There's plenty more to like about uTorrent 3.0, including a refreshed interface, and the possibility of creating new torrent files by simply dragging what you want to share over an area in the app. You can hit the download link below to find out for yourself.

uTorrent 3.0 is available for download here.

Dell Venue Pro Firmware Update: T-Mobile Mid-July, Unlocked Devices This Week (Updated)

Some would have probably assumed that Dell would wait on that promised firmware update until the Mango release comes around the bend. You know, they've been promising and promising to get this update out for the phone for months now and, while we've heard amazing things about it, Dell hasn't exactly shown that their ecstatic about their Windows Phones. But if you're a disgruntled Dell Venue Pro owner, your cynicism is about to get turned around. Well it won't be right away, but it appears the company has finally figured out a real time-frame for the release: next month!

But there's a tiny caveat: Lionel Menchaca of Dell has stated this update is for T-Mobile device owners only. So if you picked up one of those (admittedly tempting) AT&T Dell Venue Pro's a while back, it looks like you'll be sitting at your current version for a while longer. Hopefully we'll learn more about each soon, as Menchaca has promised to write up a blog post about the firmware update at the Direct2Dell blog so we'll keep an eye out for that.

Update: Lionel has delivered and here is that promised blog post. He reconfirms that the T-Mobile and global customers will receive their updates in mid-July, but if you have an unlocked device your update will arrive beginning this week. To actually see the update, your phone must have NoDo installed beforehand. He also addresses exactly what has been going on with the DVP's Wi-Fi issues:

The main fix in the updated firmware is that it addresses the Wi-Fi and lockup issues. Here’s what was going on: the Wi-Fi and the user memory storage area both use the same DMA channel. So, if you downloaded a lot of data via Wi-Fi (like a game or other Marketpace app, or even a YouTube video) while the phone was trying to write to the user memory storage location, you sometimes see lockups due to a DMA conflict. In other words, lockups could occur when Wi-Fi data downloading conflicted with writing to the user memory storage location.

Via: PocketNow
Source: Twitter (@LionelatDell), Direct2Dell