The original Sniper: Ghost Warrior games on PC, Xbox 360 and PS3 enjoyed a reasonable degree of commercial success, particularly in Europe, even despite a somewhat lukewarm critical reception, to put it politely. This success has inspired Polish developer Vivid Games to bring the franchise to Apple's iPhone and iPad early next year.
"We're proud and excited about this project, and we will use our best effort and knowledge to deliver the very best elite military experience in the mobile market to date," said Remigiusz Koscielny, president of developer Vivid Games.Watch out for the portable version of the game in the first quarter of next year, releasing alongside the official sequel to the original PC and console games.
Carol Bartz has been fired from her job as Yahoo CEO and replaced on an interim basis by the company's chief financial officer, Tim Morse, according to news reports Tuesday.Yahoo has confirmed that Bartz is no longer CEO but no further details were immediately available, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal's All Things D blog.Bartz sent a brief e-mail to employees saying that she'd been fired by Yahoo's chairman, according to the TechCrunch website.
"I am very sad to tell you that I've just been fired over the phone by Yahoo's Chairman of the Board. It has been my pleasure to work with all of you and I wish you only the best going forward," Bartz wrote to employees, according to TechCrunch.The struggling search company has created an "executive leadership council" to help Morse run the company and to conduct a "comprehensive strategic review" aimed at getting Yahoo back on a growth track. The council
includes Yahoo co-founders Jerry Yang and David Filo.
They're a bit late, but Android tablets with quad-core processors are coming this year, according to Jen-Hsun Huang, Nvidia's chief executive. The chipmaker expects Android tablets supercharged with quad-core chips to hit shelves in time for Christmas, according to a Wall Street Journal report, but smartphones powered by these chips are unlikely to show up until next year.
Nvidia's quad-core chips, first announced in February, are meant to be twice as fast the company's Tegra 2 processor, currently found on about two-thirds of Android tablets from Motorola, LG, and Toshiba. The new breed of tablets was supposed to arrive this summer, but Nvidia's chief executive said manufacturers are taking their time "getting the industrial design as wonderful as possible, and some of it is related to tuning and performance."
However, there is another reason why quad-core Android tablets are late to the game. Most Android tablets manufactures are faced with meager sales compared to Apple's iPad. They are already struggling to match the iPad's pricing and battery life while incorporating current dual-core chips; using a more powerful (and probably more expensive and more power-hungry) processor would make achieving their goal even more difficult. Manufacturers have yet to announce any quad-core products.
In the smartphone market, where Android models dominate the iPhone, quad-core processors were supposed to arrive by Christmas of this year, but Huang didn't say whether Nvidia is still on track with that schedule. Qualcomm and Texas Instruments, which make competing chips for smartphones and tablets, expect their quad-core chips to be featured in devices hitting shelves early next year.Huang also revealed that Nvidia's chips would power some Windows 8 tablets and PCs later next year. Microsoft is set to showcase Windows 8 next week, and--according to Huang--the new OS will be able to run applications developed for its Windows Phone 7 OS as well.
