burners
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New burner missions scrap nearly 20,000 EVE Online ships, CCP happy with results
CCP is "extremely happy" with the positive player reception of EVE Online's new burner missions that came in Hyperion. The studio said that the high level of difficulty in these missions was intentional in order to challenge the playerbase, and cited a bloodbath of 19,962 destroyed player ships as of September 14th as proof. The cost of the lost ships has topped 870 billion ISK so far. Due to the embrace of these missions, CCP is prepping a new batch of burner missions for September 30th. These new burners, believe it or not, will be even tougher than the current ones, working in teams of three against players. CCP will be putting these missions on the test servers later this week.
HP to launch desktops with Blu-ray / HD DVD combo writers?
Regrettably, there's not a lot to go on just yet, but DigiTimes has it that HP will soon be launching "next-generation PCs with a Blu-ray / HD DVD dual-format burner." The announcement was reportedly issued at a product presentation held in Singapore, and while no model numbers were doled out, we can purportedly expect the two-faced machines to land in Europe and America sometime next month. Notably, HP has hemmed and hawed between formats in the past, but we're all for a rig that burns (and reads) both.[Via TG Daily]
Pioneer planning BDR-103 HD DVD/Blu-ray combo drive
Samsung got our hopes up and then dashed them. Same with LG. But ever since Ricoh announced its "smart" blue laser diode that can recognize what type of disc has been inserted and adjust the beam accordingly, we've been cautiously optimistic that someone, somewhere would release a drive and / or player that reads / writes both Blu-ray and HD DVD discs, effectively mooting the so-called format war. Well, folks, it seem that glorious day may be close at hand, as Pioneer announced plans at Berlin's IFA to manufacture the BDR-103 combo drive (followup to its BDR-101 and upcoming, CD-writing BDR-102 Blu-ray-only burners). So far the company has released little information beyond this product's model number and its hybrid capabilities, but frankly, that glimmer of hope is all we really need to sustain us. We salute you, dear Pioneer, for attempting what so many others have tried and failed to do before; and if in fact you succeed, you will be remembered forever as the savior of HD lovers worldwide.[Via cdfreaks]
TDK reveals 6x BD-R disc
Even though the fastest Blu-ray burner you can buy today maxes out at just a 2x write speed, media manufacturer TDK is already looking towards a wonderful future filled with 4x and faster drives writing 200+GB of data to 8-layer discs. Now that they're gotten the capacity part down, the company is hard at work on discs that won't take five hours to burn, and the first fruit of this labor -- a 25GB platter rated at 6x -- was recently unveiled at Japan's Eighth Data Storage Expo -- although don't expect it to hit stores until next year. They were also showing off that 100GB quad-layer BD-R we heard about awhile back but never got the chance to peep, so make sure to follow the Read link to check out that plus many more exciting shots from what we hear was a pretty happening storage conference.[Via HDBeat]
HD optical disc burners at Computex
Adding to the growing list of Blu-ray burners we've seen so far from Philips, Pioneer, Samsung, and BenQ is a new unit from ASUS that was being shown off at Computex. This BD-R/RE/ROM burner, whose model number remains a mystery, is capable of writing to Blu-ray discs at two times speed, while burning to standard dual-layer DVD+R and DVD-R platters is accomplished at 2.4x and 2.0x speeds, respectively. Also on display was one of the first HD-DVD-R units we've seen, the 12.7-millimeter thick SD-L902A from Toshiba, which appears to burn data at what we're hoping is just a first-gen speed of 1.0x. As with many products introduced at the Taiwanese trade show, pricing and release plans for both of these burners are still up in the air.[Via HDBeat]
