Planet Lowyat

The baneling is a creature so bloated with fluid-filled sacs that it can barely walk; instead, it moves itself by tucking into a tight ball and rolling. However, this ungainly appearance belies the fact that the baneling is an extremely dangerous organism, one of several new zerg specialists recently seen on the battlefield. When a baneling gets close enough to an enemy, the creature triggers a reaction within its volatile chemical payload that causes it to explode with devastating force and shower the immediate surroundings with searing acid. The baneling is destroyed in the explosion, which is very likely to inflict a huge amount of damage.

These living bombs are highly effective against both structures and ground forces; in fact, a clutch of them is capable of wiping out a group of vehicles and infantry in the blink of an eye. The banelings’ lethality is further enhanced by the zerg predilection for burrowing. An apparently safe area can soon turn into a deathtrap as these monstrosities emerge and roll into the midst of their foes, giving them virtually no time to react.

At first the baneling was identified as an unstable zerg mutation of an unspecified genus. Subsequent observations have revealed it to be a morph of the zergling, the most numerous zerg subtype. Zerglings have been seen entering a brief chrysalis phase before emerging in their new form. This alarming development has demonstrated the advanced ability of the zerg queens to manipulate their offspring. Although the baneling is chemically volatile and unstable enough to explode at any time, the queens have engineered a morph that can contain its energies until just the right moment. By creating the baneling out of the most basic of zerg fighters, the queens have also ensured that an inexhaustible supply of raw materials is available for the task.

Terran commanders now train their troops to watch for these abominations. In the meantime, scientists are desperately trying to develop chemical rounds that will cause banelings to detonate before they reach terran lines.

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Finally Asus Eee Desktop have an official name EBOX.

The system is due to be unveiled at the major Computex show on June 3rd and will buck the Eee PC’s past use of flash memory for storage: the stock model will carry a 160GB hard drive that provides it six times as much capacity as the 20GB Eee PC 900. The EBOX will also hold 2GB of RAM, or twice as much as the newer Eee notebooks.

The company has previously mentioned that it plans to price the computer between $200 and $300, and in leaks is known to be selling the system in black and white colors. No mention has yet been made of offering a Windows version.

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For a prospect customer there’s nothing better than a real-world implementation to realize the potential or a certain technology. And this is very true in an almost unexplored technology like virtualization.

Microsoft, which eats its own dog food since the Virtual Server 2005 era, just announced the complete migration of both MSDN and TechNet, two of the most popular web sites in the world, on virtual machines.

Microsoft kept the back-end database on physical boxes, but moved 100% of its IIS7 frond-ends on Hyper-V RC0 VMs with 4 virtual CPUs and 10GB RAM. The virtualization hosts (no mention of the brand obviously) are powered by 2 Intel quad-core CPUs and 32GB RAM (2GB are reserved for the Windows Server 2008 parent partition).

The performance report after this migration is very interesting:

• Hyper-V CPU overhead (as measured by the parent partition utilization) was 5% to 6% with linear progression as the number of requests increased.
• CPU over subscription (three four-processor VMs on an eight-processor physical server) resulted in 3% lower overall performance per physical server based on overall requests per second per 1 percent CPU.
• Requests per second per 1% CPU performance of MSDN over the previous physical server platform improved. This demonstrates to us the viability of efficient consolidation from dedicated older physical servers to shared virtualized platforms.
• Physical MSDN handled 21% more requests per second per 1% CPU than virtualized MSDN.

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Are you a loyal Windows Home Server users? A fix for that completely obnoxious data corruption bug is on the way. Microsoft has detailed its plans to release a public beta of its Windows Home Server Power Pack.

The update will include a fix for the data corruption issues that have plagued the OS since its release.

In a message to potential testers the company said:

“Due to the nature of the shared folder data corruption bug (KB #946676) a broad beta test program with sufficient time for feedback is required. The time line for a final release will depend on this feedback and testing, in order to deliver a fix of the highest quality. To meet our goals for the beta test we need the number of beta testers who are actively using and testing the Power Pack 1 beta to ramp up very quickly”

The company is asking for anyone currently using Home Server to sign up to the beta to ensure the data corruption issue is fixed.

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Capcom’s latest entry in the Resident Evil franchise will sport drop-in, drop-out online cooperative play throughout the entire campaign, GamesRadar has revealed. Expected at some unspecified point in 2009, Resident Evil 5 (PS3, 360) pairs series lead Chris Redfield with an unnamed female mercena as they investigate the root of all zombie-kind.

When another player is not present, the other character will be AI-controlled. The game will separate the duo at points, a la Gears of War, and sport more open areas than previous RE titles.

The preview further confirmed that the Mercenaries mini-game, a challenge mode first featured in Resident Evil 3 and refined in the fourth title, will return in RE5.

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