Category: Technology

Is Creative Labs in Trouble?

Ars Technica has an article up about Creative’s current financial situation in which they point out that the company has $396 million of inventory for the quarter, a number that is up from $184 million last year.

According to one of the company’s own reports, their total sales for the quarter were US$305.4 million, which if I’m understanding correctly, means that they’ve got more than a full quarter’s worth of product sitting in inventory slowly depreciating in value.

I have to wonder, then, just how much of an impact the number of quality motherboards available now that include on-board sound is having on Creative’s bottom line. My only real evidence is anecdotal, but it seems like the more people I talk to, the more I hear are simply sticking with their “sounds good enough” on-board sound.

I also have to wonder if Creative’s ability to buy out potential competitors and shelve their technology is causing a downswing in add-on sound card interest. While this business tactic obviously makes them the biggest name in the field, it also means that there’s no real competition to drive news items or reviews to keep the community interested in new product.

In many ways, I believe the competition between AMD and Intel or Nvidia and ATI keep interest in all their new developments high among consumers.

Battlefield 2: 1GB or 2GB?

SA Forums member “Therapy” ran a few tests recently to discover how much of a difference 1 GB or 2GB of ram made when it comes to running Battlefield 2.

Battlefield 2 Performance With 1GB and 2GB of Ram

As you can see, there is a difference between the average frame rates that can be as much as 17%. While that may not seem like a large amount to justify the expense of an extra gigabyte of memory, consider that most reported problems that gamers are complaining about are due to their minimum frame rate numbers being low. While the average numbers may not show a large performance difference, having 2GB of ram will significantly increase your minimum frame rate, causing fewer instances of stuttering.

WordPress Google Sitemap Plugin

If you’re a WordPress user interested in taking advantage of the new Google Sitemaps service in order to improve your coverage in Google’s index, you may want to try Arne Brachhold’s Google Sitemap Generator plugin.

The plugin also has the ability to include other non-Wordpress pages on your website, making it a very useful tool. Installation was easy, consisting simply of adding it to your wp-content/plugins directory and activating it in your Plugins menu. About the only change I made to this process was creating a separate sitemap directory in order to provide the full read-write access the script needs, without changing the security permissions on my journal’s main directory.

XBox 360 Release Date and Price Rumor

TVG is among the hundreds of video game news sites passing along unconfirmed reports from Walmart employees that Microsoft’s XBox 360 will be in stores on November 4th, 2005.

According to the rumors, the console itself will be $299, though consumers will no doubt be forced to purchase the units in a number of “bundles”,with mandatory included accessories and games, driving the out-the-door price up a possible $100 more. The supposed leaks also make the claim that most release-day games will be priced at $59.99.

Of course, like most hot items, these numbers and date have been repeated on many gaming sites without a single secondary source to give any real credibility to the story, so take that as you will.