Tech Olive

According to Intel’s Q4 2009 report, the company reported $10.6 billion in revenue and a pure, cold-hard profit of $2.3 billion. That’s a tremendous 875-percent increase over that same time in 2008.

We’d say that was a pretty good quarter for the chipmaking company. Hopefully they can keep it up.

[Press Release]

Right now you can get an HP Envy 15 laptop that comes with USB 3.0. Cool, huh? All you have to do is configure your Envy 15 to include ATI 5830 graphics and the Core i7 processor, which means that USB 3.0 is only available for certain configs at the moment, but definitely expect more models to sport the new USB technology in the near future.

via [CNET]

According to video card manufacturers, Nvidia should expect to see its 65-percent market share of discrete graphics chips drop by 5-percent or even more. The heavy competition from AMD in 2009 put Nvidia in a tight stop and in 2010, this trend is expected to continue. Obviously, Nvidia says themselves that their market share will not drop, but grow more.

Nvidia is planning on launching its 40nm Fermi chip this March, but AMD has a leg up by already introducing several different variations of their 40nm chip.

via [DigiTimes]

After months of complaining about bugs, glitches and hackers. PC gamers finally get their first proper title update for Modern Warfare 2. Although the changelog seems small, it does address some important issues.

Fix for latest texture hacks

Fix to prevent players from getting inside geo

Fix to prevent players with illegally pirated copies of Modern Warfare 2 from matchmaking with legitimate Modern Warfare 2 players

Connection improvements for NAT-PMP routers

Fix for “elevator” glitch that allows players to get out of playable area

via [Shack News]

The CEOs of both Microsoft and HP (Steve Ballmer and Mark Hurd, respectively) announced earlier today that they would be forming a tight partnership with each other and will apparently surpass the already tight friendship that the two companies have had in the past. They plan on spending $250 million over the next three years on engineering, sales and marketing. The two execs were so excited to tell everyone about this super-awesome partnership, that they really didn’t give any meaty details except for the fact that Microsoft will basically blow off other manufacturers like Dell, IBM and Cisco and lead consumers over to HP. That’s what we’re basically seeing, at least. Thankfully, you can view a little more details about this over at Microsoft TechNet.

via [NYT]

Image Credit: Fox Business

Google has decided to make the https protocol a default in their Gmail service, a feature that has been an option since 2008. They have decided that implementing this protocol would make everyone better off and they felt it “was the right thing to do.” It’s not mandatory by any means. You can easily switch over to the old http protocol in the settings, but the login page will always be encrypted with the new protocol. Google didn’t directly state why they did this in their post, but it’s most likely due to the fact that Google was hacked by someone or a group of individuals from China.

[Official Gmail Blog]

This comes at no surprise, considering the game managed to shatter release week sales records when it pulled in an estimated $550 million, but to continue the pwnage on the video game market, Activision has announced that Modern Warfare 2 set further records by crossing the $1 billion mark in sales since its release last November.

“Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 has exceeded our expectations and shattered theatrical box office and video game records. There are only a handful of entertainment properties that have ever reached the $1 billion mark, which illustrates the power of the Call of Duty franchise and mass appeal of this game.” — Bobby Kotick, CEO Activision/Blizzard

[Press Release]

The fun-loving online multiplayer kart racing game from Nimblebit known as Zero Gear was released yesterday and to celebrate that, you can play the game entirely for free through Steam until Sunday. Sounds like quite the deal to us. If you end up enjoying the game, you can buy it for $15 it looks like or you can get four copies of the game for $30.

[Steam]

Out of the blue, an upcoming “AAA, FPS, Sci-fi, action and adventure [PC] game” has made itself known. Interstellar Marines seems to have flown under our radar, until now. The developers are taking an interesting approach to pre-game hype by releasing playable online content related to the game every few months. Most recently being ‘Bullseye,’ a Unity-powered, in-browser shooting range. It succeeds in being well polished and quite entertaining despite its restrictions. Go check out their site for more details on the upcoming game or head over to the shooting range!

“Bullseye BETA will close Friday 15th of January, 2010. BETA highscores become permanent. Public launch of Bullseye to be announced shortly.”

Try it out while you can and maybe when it releases properly, there will be even more content. Follow the break for the teaser trailer.

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You’d be lucky to see your high-end laptop today push out 3 hours on a single charge, but Asus says it has a laptop that can do 12 hours. The UL80JT can do numerous micromanagement tasks like switching between the Nvidia GeForce 310 and the Intel GMA graphics when needed, and the Core i7 can re-clock itself on a second-to-second basis. All this is done automatically to conserve power, which is why Asus thinks that this sucker can push out a half-day of battery life. We highly doubt that it actually gets that, but we’d bet that it runs a lot longer than most other high-end laptops.

via [Ars Technica]