"Medal of Honor" Developer Danger Close and publisher Electronic Arts have announced that development is ongoing on a sequel to the first-person shooter Medal of Honor named as Medal of Honor 2, with the team saying that the focus will again be on portraying the experiences that individual soldiers go through on the battlefield.

A statement on the official blog of the developer says, “Since our launch last October, we've studied, listened and absorbed much of your feedback and are very excited to be marching forward on the next title. We can't wait to tell you more about it, so check back often to the website and the fan page on Facebook.

When Electronic Arts announced its results for the last quarter of 2010, which included the launch of Medal of Honor, it mentioned that the game managed to sell more than 5 million units all over the world.

Retailers and resellers are signaling low or completely depleted iPad stock in what is a clear indication that Apple is preparing to release its next-generation of tablet computers.

UK official reseller Carphone Wearhouse is now sold out of the 64 GB WiFi-only iPad, 9to5mac reports, with all 3G models being sold out.

Official iPad 3G carriers in Europe Orange and T-Mobile have both cut the prices to half on their 3G SKUs for customers who sign 2 year contracts. In other words, an iPad 3G is now available in Europe for 100 pounds.

Google has just unveiled its hugely anticipated, web-based operating system, Google Chrome OS. As expected, Google hasn't actually launched the operating system, but it has released the source code in its current state for developers to have a chance to start working on it. From now on, the code will remain open for third-party developers to build and modify. Google wants the actual operating system and the accompanying hardware to be ready for launch in time for the holiday season next year.

As Google stated when it first revealed that it was working on its very own OS, Chrome OS will be completely web-based. There will be no native apps for it, even the tools that will be built by Google and bundled with the OS will be web apps. In a simplified view, Chrome OS is just a specialized version of its browser Chrome running on top of an optimized Linux kernel.

Intel's plans for the future of personal computing include a 48-core processor that the Santa Clara, California-based chip maker has nicknamed “single-chip cloud computer.” The solution, revealed by the world's leading chip maker, is expected to enable a new perspective on the way computers are built and the way users will interact with future computers. Featuring 10 to 20 times the processing engines inside the company's current Core-branded processors, the new Intel chip is part of a research goal that will bring about an impressive number of scaling features.

More details were confirmed about the upcoming new Medal of Honor title, which is in development by Electronic Arts' LA Studio. The next Medal of Honor title, which the company claims will deliver the most authentic modern war experience, is slated for release in the fall of 2010 in time for the holiday buying season.

Microsoft has announced that Games for Windows Live will receive Games on Demand on December 15, essentially becoming a full-fledged game distribution platform. As implied by its name, Games on Demand will allow users to purchase and download titles from their PC.

While this concept is hardly new (think: Steam, D2D, Impulse), Microsoft said its offer won't just be a "cut-and-paste version of existing digital distribution services." Without citing any particular innovations, the company said it has worked to develop an integrated platform that "takes full advantage of the unique capabilities offered by the Live service."

Users of that hoary old web mail service Hotmail have a new reason to regret their devotion: Over the weekend, thousands of user names and passwords from the service were posted on a data-sharing service called Pastebin, with potentially hundreds of thousands of additional users at risk.

Over 10,000 accounts on Hotmail (still the largest web-based email service in the world) are immediately known to be affected.

That's the essence of the message from Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer this week, who made some remarkably candid comments (for Microsoft, anyway) about the failures of Windows Vista and his hopes for the future.

In new comments, Ballmer referred to the Vista debacle as having been an issue of "some uneven reception" because "we made some design decisions to improve security at the expense of compatibility."

After much anticipation and following a string of continuous leaked rumors and details, the Sunnyvale, California-based Advanced Micro Devices has announced the launch of its next generation of desktop graphics processing units, the Radeon HD 5800 series, specifically designed to enable a performance boost over the company’s previous generation of cards, but also to provide users with a couple of new features. The series includes the Radeon HD 5870, AMD's new flagship card, and the HD 5850, both of which have been designed to enable full support of Microsoft's DirectX 11 API, but also for AMD's own Eyefinity multi-display technology and ATI Stream technology.

“With the ATI Radeon HD 5800 series of graphics cards driven by the most powerful processor on the planet, AMD is changing the game, both in terms of performance and the experience,” said Rick Bergman, senior vice president and general manager, Products Group, AMD. “As the first to market with full DirectX 11 support, an unmatched experience made possible with ATI Eyefinity technology, and ATI Stream technology harnessing open standards designed to help make Windows 7 that much better, I can say with confidence that AMD is the undisputed leader in graphics once more.”

In terms of pure performance, the new Radeon flagship model, the Radeon HD 5870, is capable of delivering up to 2.72 TeraFLOPS of compute power, according to the chip maker. Built using a “2nd generation evolved 40nm process technology,” the new Radeon HD 5870 boasts a clock speed of 850MHz, coupled with 1GB of GDDR5 memory, clocked at 1.2GHz. With 1600 Stream Processing Units, double the number of the chip maker's previous generation of cards, the new Radeon HD 5870 GPU has been featured with a dual-slot cooling solution and is said to reach a maximum board power of 188 Watts, while in idle the card sits at 27 Watts, according to AMD.

As far as the HD 5850 is concerned, this card doesn't fall too far behind and is likely to become a favorite among technology enthusiasts. Built on the same Cypress GPU core, the card is clocked at 725MHz and is also featured with 1GB of GDDR5 memory, clocked at 1GHz. Its maximum power is rated at 151 Watts, while in idle, the HD 5850 sits at a comfortable 27 Watts.

By now, you probably know of the death of pop legend and superstar Michael Jackson at the age of 50, following a heart attack. Well, actually, you may not know that the news pretty much broke the Internet, taking down site after site and service after service.

First to go down was AOL-owned TMZ, which actually broke the news. The site has been experiencing several down-times since the story got out. After TMZ went down, people flocked to Perez Hilton’s highly popular celebrity blog, which couldn't handle the traffic either. As people moved on to the LA Times, which at the time was saying that he was only in a coma, the site also went down. Keynote Systems, a company that tracks website performance, reported that, for the 30 news sites the company monitored, their availability went down an average 14 percent, dropping to 86 percent, and the latency of most websites more than doubled. Sites affected include ABC, AOL, CBS, CNN Money, MSNBC, NBC, SF Chronicle, and Yahoo! News.