Tech Olive

Since the game’s release, Bad Company 2 has become notorious for making ATI users wait over a minute for a single map to load, when Nvidia users would be done loading in around 10-20 seconds. Today, ATI released Catalyst 10.4 beta drivers that fixes this problem on Radeon 5-series cards, with fixes coming next week for the Radeon 4800 series. If you’re running a 5-series card and wanna try the fix yourself, head here and grab it.

via [ShackNews]

Approximately 55 million tweets are sent through Twitter each and every day, and the social networking site announced on their blog yesterday that the United States Library of Congress will be storing every one of your public tweets.

“It is our pleasure to donate access to the entire archive of public Tweets to the Library of Congress for preservation and research. It’s very exciting that tweets are becoming part of history. It should be noted that there are some specifics regarding this arrangement. Only after a six-month delay can the Tweets will be used for internal library use, for non-commercial research, public display by the library itself, and preservation.”

For “preservation and research,” eh? I understand preserving and researching historical documents and the like, but tweets?

[Twitter Blog]

Image Credit: Seansie

After yesterday’s reports of Infinity Ward losing more staff, Kotaku reports that even more Infinity Ward veterans have left the studio today. According to reports, lead developers Steve Fukuda and Zied Reike resigned today along with programmer Rayme Vinson and lead artist Chris Cherubini. Despite these reports, Activision stated in an interview with Gamasutra that Infinity Ward is running at full capacity and they “look forward to continuing to work with Infinity Ward’s deep bench of proven talent on exciting new projects.”

via [Kotaku]

Epic Vid of the Week is a new weekly series that showcases an awesome video that we or our readers discover. Some you may have seen before and others you may have not. If you’ve discovered any videos that are worthy of an Epic Vid of the Week title, let us know!

This week’s Epic Vid features a matchup including two of the most prominent characters in the history of gaming. Sonic the Hedgehog and Pac Man go head-to-head in Pac Man’s own game. Unsurprisingly, Sonic wins in under 15 seconds, which is why this whole thing is so damn funny.

Remember the HD-capable Eee PC 1005PR we told you about last month? It’s finally up on Amazon for pre-order. For $400, you can get a netbook capable of playing HD video, thanks to the Broadcom Crystal HD decoder and the 1366×768 display. No official word yet on when the 1005PR will begin shipping, but B&H Photo, who also has the 1005PR up for pre-order, says that its approximate arrival is this month, which means we should see it anytime.

via [Netbooked]

Last month, Activision fired long-time Infinity Ward veterans of the CoD series Vince Zampella (CEO of Infinity Ward) and Ethan West (COO of Infinity Ward). The pair just recently announced the opening of their new studio, Respawn Entertainment, which will be backed by Electronic Arts, a fierce rival of Activision.

Now, it seems Activision is feeling the sting of this move as programmer Jon Shiring, senior animator Bruce Ferriz and MW2 lead designer Mackey McCandlish have announced their resignation and Todd Alderman and Francesco Gigliotti announced earlier this month that they had left the studio.

It’s hard to see a developer like Infinity Ward fall apart and it makes you wonder about the future of the Call of Duty series. Perhaps Treyarch will take a much larger role in the future.

via [IGN]

As of today, Microsoft has quit supporting Windows Vista with no Service Packs a.k.a. Windows Vista RTM. It is recommended to upgrade to Windows 7 or at least install Service Pack 2 for Vista.

I doubt any of you are running the RTM version of Vista (let alone Vista itself), but we just wanted to send out a friendly reminder anyway.

via [Windows Team Blog]

Because of an embarrassing mistake on my part, we had to create a new YouTube account. Please subscribe to it HERE and unsubscribe from the old account. Our old account’s channel is still accessible and the videos can still be watched, but we just don’t have admin access to it anymore, so this is why we have created a new account. If you have any questions, comments, concerns, epiphanies, etc., please let us know in the comments. Thanks for your cooperation. That is all.

Seagate announced today that they have teamed up with Paramount Pictures to deliver a small selection of pre-loaded movies onto 500GB FreeAgent Go ultra-portable drives. So far, 21 movies come pre-loaded on the drives, but only the new Star Trek film can be activated for free. The other 20 movies must be activated/unlocked for a fee before you can enjoy them. All you have to do is register the drive online and then you’ll receive a free activation key for Star Trek, as well as the opportunity to purchase activation keys of the other movies.

We’re currently trying to get more information from Seagate about this and we’ll hopefully have a quick hands-on for you guys so you can see what the activation process is like. Full PR after the break.

[Product Page]

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After a few weeks of giveaways, we have decided to stop, as the reader response and participation was very disappointing. While we still have quite a bit of stuff to throw at our loyal readers, it seems you guys aren’t interested enough to even make the effort to win some of this awesome stuff. So, for the time being, we’re putting the giveaways on hold. We covered this topic in our latest OliveCast, so please listen to that if you want more details, but that’s the summary of it.

This isn’t the end of free stuff from us, but it may be the end for at least a little while until we see a little more user and community participation on the blog.

Sorry, folks.