Brendon Morgan | KitGuru https://www.kitguru.net KitGuru.net - Tech News | Hardware News | Hardware Reviews | IOS | Mobile | Gaming | Graphics Cards Wed, 25 Feb 2015 21:11:11 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.4.3 https://www.kitguru.net/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/cropped-KITGURU-Light-Background-SQUARE2-32x32.png Brendon Morgan | KitGuru https://www.kitguru.net 32 32 1Tbps mobile data speeds could soon be a reality https://www.kitguru.net/lifestyle/mobile/brendan-morgan/1tbps-mobile-data-speeds-could-soon-be-a-reality/ https://www.kitguru.net/lifestyle/mobile/brendan-morgan/1tbps-mobile-data-speeds-could-soon-be-a-reality/#comments Wed, 25 Feb 2015 21:09:31 +0000 http://www.kitguru.net/?p=237626 Thanks to research currently being conducted at the 5G Innovation Centre at the UK's University of Surrey we could all be enjoying some incredibly fast mobile data connections, when 5G networks are rolled out. They have recently tested equipment that exceeds 1Tbps wirelessly with extremely low latency. This lab test handily beats any other tests, such as Samsung's …

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Thanks to research currently being conducted at the 5G Innovation Centre at the UK's University of Surrey we could all be enjoying some incredibly fast mobile data connections, when 5G networks are rolled out. They have recently tested equipment that exceeds 1Tbps wirelessly with extremely low latency.

This lab test handily beats any other tests, such as Samsung's recent 7.5Gbps results and also bring latency over the network down to around 1 millisecond, but it has so far only been tested over distances of 100 meters in laboratory conditions. Now that this has been validated, there are plans for real world field trials beginning next year, with public demonstrations of the technology planned for 2018.
Next_Generation_Mobile_Networks_(logo)
Professor Rahim Tafazolli from the 5G Innovation Centre said, “An important aspect of 5G is how it will support applications in the future. We don't know what applications will be in use by 2020, or 2030 or 2040 for that matter, but we know they will be highly sensitive to latency, we need to bring end-to-end latency down to below one millisecond so that it can enable new technologies and applications that would just not be possible with 4G.”

Obviously there is quite a lot to do before we get these speeds, with a totally new infrastructure upgrade needed as well as new handset technologies that can handle these kind of data rates. Even today many LTE (otherwise known as 4G) phones do not support some faster LTE speeds and another update to the standard, called LTE-Advanced is set to bring 1 Gbit/s downstream speeds for stationary receivers and 100 Mb/s to mobile users.

Discuss on our Facebook page, HERE.

KitGuru Says: Do we really need these kind of speeds? Maybe these new 5G wireless networks could finally replace our current wired and cabled broadband infrastructure. Would you be interested in having 5G broadband?

Source: Neowin

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Solar eclipses could soon become dangerous https://www.kitguru.net/channel/science/brendan-morgan/solar-eclipses-could-soon-become-dangerous/ https://www.kitguru.net/channel/science/brendan-morgan/solar-eclipses-could-soon-become-dangerous/#comments Wed, 25 Feb 2015 00:39:14 +0000 http://www.kitguru.net/?p=237399 Solar eclipses are probably not something that most of us humans have been scared of in a very long time, thanks to science and reasoning, but soon there may actually be a reason to be at least a little nervous. With our increasing dependence on energy drawn from the Sun in Europe, a morning solar eclipse could …

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Solar eclipses are probably not something that most of us humans have been scared of in a very long time, thanks to science and reasoning, but soon there may actually be a reason to be at least a little nervous. With our increasing dependence on energy drawn from the Sun in Europe, a morning solar eclipse could deprive us of 35,000 MW of solar energy.

While getting this energy and saving the planet at the same time is fantastic, when the Sun is gradually blocked from view across Europe on the 20th of March, this will cause the equivalent of nearly 80 medium size conventional generation units to fade out and then fade back on. European transmission system operators (TSOs) have been aware of this and have been working to evaluate and mitigate the risk for the last few years due to the fact that we can accurately predict events like this.
Solar-map-Europe
The European network of TSOs for electricity said, “Managing this event on the world's largest interconnected grid is an unprecedented challenge for European TSOs. Solar eclipses have happened before but with the increase of installed photovoltaic energy generation, the risk of an incident could be serious”

You may wonder why this is a problem when the Sun normally rises and sets every day. In this case the solar eclipse will occur much faster than the sun setting and rising, with the whole event lasting only a couple of minutes as it passes each area. This is like having 2 sunrises and two sunsets in the same day and having sun go down, right as it's needed during the mid-morning.

Also the fact that solar power covered 0.1% of all the electricity produced in Europe from renewable energy sources in 2002, but now this figure has risen to 10.5%, with Solar being at least 3% of total supply across the EU. As well as this the EU power network is the world's largest interconnected grid, so any fluctuations could affect countries that are not even reliant on solar. However countries like Cyprus and Malta which generate 62% and 36% respectively of their renewable energy from the Sun, will have to rely on others to provide them with power while the Moon does a good job of keeping us in the dark.

Discuss on our Facebook page, HERE.

KitGuru Says: Why are you doing this to us Moon? No more blocking the Sunlight or we will send some of us up there to stamp on your face, again! Get Buzz on the phone! (You might want to switch off your PC to be safe and get outside to see this solar eclipse.)

Source: entsoe, Gizmodo
Photo: Wikimedia

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Start10 the Windows 10 Start menu replacement from Stardock https://www.kitguru.net/gaming/operating-systems/brendan-morgan/start10-the-windows-10-start-menu-replacement-from-stardock/ https://www.kitguru.net/gaming/operating-systems/brendan-morgan/start10-the-windows-10-start-menu-replacement-from-stardock/#comments Tue, 24 Feb 2015 23:45:39 +0000 http://www.kitguru.net/?p=237382 While some of us have no problem navigating and customizing the Windows Start menu in Windows 8, there are a few who just cannot get to grips with it, or hate the changes that it brought. Seeing as things are not going to change all that much with Windows 10, Stardock are releasing a version …

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While some of us have no problem navigating and customizing the Windows Start menu in Windows 8, there are a few who just cannot get to grips with it, or hate the changes that it brought. Seeing as things are not going to change all that much with Windows 10, Stardock are releasing a version of their Start8 Start menu replacement for Windows 10, calling it Start10.

This software will replace the current start menu in Windows 10 and allow you to customise it, in styles resembling Windows 7, or an enhanced Windows 10 skin. Stardock founder and CEO Brad Wardell said, “The basic problem Microsoft faces is that they want their Start menu to be usable by both desktop users via a mouse as well as via touch. As a result, they give up a lot of the usability for people who are trying to do serious desktop work.”
start10_config
While having a start menu replacement was almost a requirement for some when using Windows 8, Windows 10 brings back a lot of the Start menu functionality, so it remains to be seen how well a replacement program like Start10 will actually do when Windows 10 is released.

Brad goes on to say that, while he doesn't think that Microsoft have gone far enough with the Start menu in Windows 10, he is looking forward to a lot of the work that has been done under the hood. “Windows 10 is much better at utilizing your CPU cores than previous versions of Windows…for a lot of users, Windows 10 will “magically” allow your devices to have much better battery life”

He also mentioned that the company has further plans for other Windows applications and “all the DirectX 12 stuff we've got going”, so maybe we will soon see another game in the Galactic Civilizations series. A beta for Start 10 has been released for Stardock customers who own the Windows customisation, Object Desktop suite ($49.99) and it will later be made available for $4.99 as standalone software.

Discuss on our Facebook page, HERE.

KitGuru Says: While I quite like the consistency of the Windows 8 and 10 start menu across different devices, I know that some people have trouble using it, with some not even knowing that you can just type and it will find what you need. If this is what these people need to use Windows 10, then I'm all for it. What do you think of this Start replacement?

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DirectX12 could bring AMD and NVIDIA together https://www.kitguru.net/components/graphic-cards/brendan-morgan/directx12-could-bring-amd-and-nvidia-together/ https://www.kitguru.net/components/graphic-cards/brendan-morgan/directx12-could-bring-amd-and-nvidia-together/#comments Tue, 24 Feb 2015 21:46:42 +0000 http://www.kitguru.net/?p=237363 In a pretty exciting rumor today there have been claims that the new DirectX standard coming with Windows 10, could allow you to use graphics card from both AMD and NVIDIA. The so called, Explicit Asynchronous Multi-GPU capabilities could bring all of the GPU power in a system into a pool so that all GPUs can …

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In a pretty exciting rumor today there have been claims that the new DirectX standard coming with Windows 10, could allow you to use graphics card from both AMD and NVIDIA. The so called, Explicit Asynchronous Multi-GPU capabilities could bring all of the GPU power in a system into a pool so that all GPUs can then work together on each frame.

Toms Hardware, who sourced this information say that “A source with knowledge of the matter gave us some early information about an “unspoken API,”” This is presumed to be DirectX12. They continue, “If you like Nvidia's GeForce Experience software and 3D Vision, but you want to use AMD's TrueAudio and FreeSync, chances are you'll be able to do that when DirectX 12 comes around.”
NvidiavsAMD
Of course if this rumor is correct, this is great news for us gamers, we would no longer have to decide between which graphics chip we want to stick with. If AMD cards are the best value for money we can buy one of them, then in a few months we can just slot in a new top of the line NVIDIA card as well.

This is something that has been tried previously to some extent on a few motherboards, for instance the MSI Fuzion Technology range has supported graphics cards from different manufacturers on the same board. The system that DirectX12 is using however, could even replace proprietary NVIDIA SLI and ATI Crossfire multi card systems, as they simply would no longer be required. It could also allow totally different generations of cards to be used together, something that SLI does not allow.

Discuss on our Facebook page, HERE.

KitGuru Says: This could be a massive deal if it is indeed true and isn't too hard for developers to implement. Having said that I can imagine that neither AMD nor NVIDIA are going to like this. The thought of their cards being used along side the competition doesn't sound like something either company would like. What do you think of this rumor?

Image Source: eteknix

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SteamVR hardware could finally soon be upon us https://www.kitguru.net/peripherals/monitors/brendan-morgan/steamvr-hardware-could-finally-soon-be-upon-us/ https://www.kitguru.net/peripherals/monitors/brendan-morgan/steamvr-hardware-could-finally-soon-be-upon-us/#respond Tue, 24 Feb 2015 00:42:40 +0000 http://www.kitguru.net/?p=237088 It's been a while since we have heard anything about Valve efforts to dip its toes into the virtual reality hardware market, but it seems that the wait may very soon be over. At GDC 2015 between March fourth and sixth they have officially announced that they will be showing off a, “previously-unannounced SteamVR hardware system” along …

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It's been a while since we have heard anything about Valve efforts to dip its toes into the virtual reality hardware market, but it seems that the wait may very soon be over. At GDC 2015 between March fourth and sixth they have officially announced that they will be showing off a, “previously-unannounced SteamVR hardware system” along with the refined Steam Controller and new living room devices.

It's been a long time coming this VR hardware, it was first going to be shown back in 2013, then last year one of the big names behind it moved over to work with Michael Abrash on the Facebook owned Oculus Rift. While the demos shown off at GDC will only be shown to other developers in private there is a chance that Valve will also have some demos for the rest of us, or failing that there might be some leaks so we know what they are up to.
Steam VR
While I think it's still too much to ask of Valve to be showing off these demos on the next version of the Source engine, we really have no idea what demos they have lined up for the lucky developers who are going to be attending. Maybe they will even get to see Half-Life 3…D.

Unfortunately we don't have any idea what the SteamVR hardware looks like, as the announcement posted no pictures of any new devices. Maybe it will be something along the lines of the newly announced Microsoft Hololens, or more traditional VR along the lines of the Oculus Rift which has yet to come to market with their DK2 model which has still not been released to the general public, despite only being months away from doing so towards the end of 2014.

Discuss on our Facebook page, HERE.

KitGuru Says: Considering the massive disappointment of Valves Steam Machines and their Steam Controller so far I won't be holding my breath for SteamVR, especially as they are only just showing it to other developers now. That probably means that for now even if it was released it would only work on Valve games. Give it a few years though and hopefully the VR marketplace will explode! Are you looking forward to it, do you like explosions?

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CITIZENFOUR wins an Oscar and Snowden does an AMA https://www.kitguru.net/gaming/security-software/brendan-morgan/citizenfour-wins-an-oscar-and-snowden-does-an-ama/ https://www.kitguru.net/gaming/security-software/brendan-morgan/citizenfour-wins-an-oscar-and-snowden-does-an-ama/#respond Mon, 23 Feb 2015 23:55:13 +0000 http://www.kitguru.net/?p=237080 CITIZENFOUR, the recently premiered documentary by Laura Poitras about the beginning of the Edward Snowden NSA revelations, has won an Oscar for “Best Documentary” at this year's Academy Awards ceremony. The film shows Snowden's efforts to expose the gross abuses of the US government's National Security Agency, along with the help of Laura Poitras and Glenn Greenwald. The project …

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CITIZENFOUR, the recently premiered documentary by Laura Poitras about the beginning of the Edward Snowden NSA revelations, has won an Oscar for “Best Documentary” at this year's Academy Awards ceremony. The film shows Snowden's efforts to expose the gross abuses of the US government's National Security Agency, along with the help of Laura Poitras and Glenn Greenwald.

The project first began back in 2013 when Poitras received an encrypted e-mail from a stranger who called himself Citizen Four. Then later that year herself, Greenwald and a colleague from the Guardian, Ewen MacAskill headed to Hong Kong to interview the mysterious Citizen Four, who as we now know, turned out to be Snowden. After Poitras and Greenwald collected the award (Snowden was unfortunately not present for obvious reasons) they, along with Snowden, have been answering questions on Reddit's /r/AskMeAnything subreddit.
snowden
After a bit of a shaky start due to some confusion over which Reddit account the NSA Snowden was going to be using, himself, Greenwald and Poitras got around to answering some pretty interesting questions in the short amount of time that they had. Snowden was a self-confessed Redditor before the leaks and even had time to display that he really is just one of us.
SuddenlySnowden
Other than that he answered a lot of questions about Moscow, where he is currently being forced to reside by the US government. He said that: “Moscow is the biggest city in Europe. A lot of people forget that. Shy of Tokyo, it's the biggest city I've ever lived in. I'd rather be home, but it's a lot like any other major city.”

He went on to talk about the effects that his leaks have had on everyone, some of these being pretty invisible, like Google and others encrypting data between their data centres and Apple doing full device encryption by default on new iPhones. He also mentioned more visible things, like individuals being careful what they say and post online and people who used to be called “NSA conspiracy theorists” are now taken very seriously.

Reddit have also made the logo of the site his proof drawing for today, which is almost better than being in an Oscar-winning film for a Redditor. If you want to have a look at all of the answers in the thread go here and start scrolling down.

Discuss on our Facebook page, HERE.

KitGuru Says: While there are some who seem to think that what Snowden did was treasonous, I can't help but think that these people seem to like living in the dark. Hopefully someday soon the US government will see the errors of its ways and Snowden will be repatriated, without having to go through the torture that the likes of Chelsea Manning is going though.

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Bing predicts 84% of this year’s Oscar winners correctly https://www.kitguru.net/channel/generaltech/brendan-morgan/bing-predicts-84-of-this-years-oscar-winners-correctly/ https://www.kitguru.net/channel/generaltech/brendan-morgan/bing-predicts-84-of-this-years-oscar-winners-correctly/#respond Mon, 23 Feb 2015 22:16:19 +0000 http://www.kitguru.net/?p=237072 The Bing prediction engine has been busy this last week getting to grips with the Oscars and trying to predict the winners for each category. While it didn't get all 24 predictions correct, it did manage to get 20 correct giving it an 84% success rate. At last year's Oscars it managed to get one …

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The Bing prediction engine has been busy this last week getting to grips with the Oscars and trying to predict the winners for each category. While it didn't get all 24 predictions correct, it did manage to get 20 correct giving it an 84% success rate.

At last year's Oscars it managed to get one more correct prediction, for 21 out 24 Oscar winners and it has also been pretty successful at predicting both the World Cup and the NFL. The Bing prediction engine is of course the way that Microsoft's Virtual Assistant, Cortana manages to guess the outcomes of events on Windows Phone and soon Windows 10.
Oscars
While the way that Bing predicts the Oscar winners has not been revealed yet, it has previously used advanced machine learning algorithms to take into account many factors when predicting sporting events. Looking at statistics like previous win/loss ratios of teams and players, where the match is being played, betting predictions and even things like the weather help Bing come to the final result.

The fact that we should soon be able to get these kind of results just by talking to Cortana on the desktop with Windows 10 is pretty exciting and the integration with Office as well could prove useful for looking up facts and statistics.

Discuss on our Facebook page, HERE.

KitGuru Says: Hopefully Bing's prediction engine will soon be widened so that it can be this knowledgeable on quite a few different subjects, not just a few big events every year. I mean with these kind of predictions rates it might be worth a trip to your local bookies!

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Y2k for the Linux world is the year 2038 https://www.kitguru.net/gaming/operating-systems/brendan-morgan/y2k-for-the-linux-world-is-the-year-2038/ https://www.kitguru.net/gaming/operating-systems/brendan-morgan/y2k-for-the-linux-world-is-the-year-2038/#comments Sat, 21 Feb 2015 01:49:11 +0000 http://www.kitguru.net/?p=236863 All computer systems rely heavily on clocks to perform almost any function and this is a problem when your computer OS, does not know how to count past a certain number. The year 2038 will be for Linux, much like the old  Y2k “Millennium Bug” back in 2000, where-by computers could not count past the …

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All computer systems rely heavily on clocks to perform almost any function and this is a problem when your computer OS, does not know how to count past a certain number. The year 2038 will be for Linux, much like the old  Y2k “Millennium Bug” back in 2000, where-by computers could not count past the year 1999 as years were encoded as two digits, and 2000 would appear as 1900. Only this time it has to do with how the date is stored.

This will only affect 32-bit Linux systems, as all 32-bit kernels store the time and date as a signed 32-bit number that counts up, from 00:00:00 on 1 January 1970. When these systems reach January 2038, they will go back to the date that they started counting from, as there is not enough space in a 32-bit integer to count any further. You can see an explanation of this here or in the animation below.
Linux2038
While you may think that this would not affect many systems in 2038, as there would not be that many 32-bit systems left by then, this would be an easy mistake to make, as even today a lot of embedded systems still use 16-bit or even 8-bit processors. A lot of so-called embedded systems use 32-bit Linux and these would all be affected. There is also no universal solution for the Year 2038 problem, but the good news is that the problem is being worked on, and several Linux developers and engineers are trying to encourage others to at least think about the problem.
Year_2038_problem
Long-time Linux kernel chronicler Jon Corbet has said, “The simple fact of the matter is that systems are being built and deployed now that will still be in service 23 years from now, Linux-based systems are being put into cars, into building control systems, into power plants, and into who-knows-how-many other places where they will just simply sit there and do their job until time_t runs out of bits. And then they won't work anymore.”

With embedded systems in use in so many critical situations and with them almost never being replaced once installed, this is a problem that needs to be dealt with years before it actually rears its head, otherwise it will be too late and it could even cost lives. Each year that developers produce software and devices that don't take the 2038 bug into account, the worse the problem will be. “If we continue to distribute software that has this problem in it, we are setting up problems for the future, and we don't want to do that,” Corbet said. “The time to fix it is now.”

Discuss on our Facebook page, HERE.

KitGuru Says: Much like Y2K this is a serious issue but since the year 2000, we have come to rely on technology a lot more and by 2038, this reliance will have grown exponentially. If Linux developers and engineers do not start to plan for this now and fix it, there may well be serious consequences. Do you remember any problems from the Y2K bug?

Source: The Register,

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A functional Halo helmet for bikers is here https://www.kitguru.net/gaming/brendan-morgan/a-functional-halo-helmet-for-bikers-is-here/ https://www.kitguru.net/gaming/brendan-morgan/a-functional-halo-helmet-for-bikers-is-here/#comments Sat, 21 Feb 2015 00:55:42 +0000 http://www.kitguru.net/?p=236856 If you are a Halo fan, the iconic helmet of Master Chief is forever etched into your brain, even if you are not a Halo fan you have most likely seen the helmet clad super warrior somewhere. You may see him soon (or his helmet at least) cruising down the road on a motorbike thanks to …

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If you are a Halo fan, the iconic helmet of Master Chief is forever etched into your brain, even if you are not a Halo fan you have most likely seen the helmet clad super warrior somewhere. You may see him soon (or his helmet at least) cruising down the road on a motorbike thanks to a new detailed replica of Master Chief's headgear that is a DOT-approved modular motorcycle helmet.

The helmet itself is just a regular motorcycle helmet underneath and unfortunately it seems that it will not be able to protect you from plasma rifle rounds in this version. It is going to be limited edition though, according necaonline who will begin to sell the replica in July. The below images are not final, but the finished product should be close enough to these.
halohelmet
If you are not going to use this as crash protection, then you may be better off looking for a replica on E-bay or Amazon for the moment as there are a few, slightly more accurate helmets around that may be cheaper but that do not offer any actual crash safety. Then again I can imagine how awesome it would feel to pull up next to someone on a bike while wearing this, it would bring a smile to the faces of most Halo fans.

The helmet is not the only bit of Halo gear that we have seen recently, with dart firing Needler showing up a few days ago and last year we had an energy sword. The helmet is part of a deal that NECA announced back in November of 2013 with Halo developer 343 Industries to produce Halo-themed products so hopefully this won't be the last thing we see from them.

At the moment no pricing information has been released for the helmet, but we do know that it will come in a variety of four sizes to accommodate different heads and while it won't protect you from plasma, it does come with a UV filter which is close enough. It also features modular design, an ABS shell and front and rear air vents to keep you cool and fog free.

Discuss on our Facebook page, HERE.

KitGuru Says: This would be pretty awesome to own and who knows it might even get you out of a few speeding tickets. Now if only we had a warthog to go with this, then we would be in business. Any bikers here interested in this helmet?

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Lenovo “messed up” with Superfish bloatware https://www.kitguru.net/lifestyle/mobile/laptops/brendan-morgan/lenovo-messed-up-with-superfish-bloatware/ https://www.kitguru.net/lifestyle/mobile/laptops/brendan-morgan/lenovo-messed-up-with-superfish-bloatware/#comments Sat, 21 Feb 2015 00:22:59 +0000 http://www.kitguru.net/?p=236831 Lenovo has recently been in hot water due to its use of Superfish, or what it calls “shopping aid” software, that it pre-installed on some of its laptops between September and January. It had originally said that the software was only being pulled temporally, while it waited for a new version from Superfish, that is now no …

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Lenovo has recently been in hot water due to its use of Superfish, or what it calls “shopping aid” software, that it pre-installed on some of its laptops between September and January. It had originally said that the software was only being pulled temporally, while it waited for a new version from Superfish, that is now no longer the case, with Lenovo CTO Peter Hortensius saying that they have learned from their mistake.

“We should have known going in that that was the case,” Hortensius said. “We just flat-out missed it on this one, and did not appreciate the problem it was going to create. We are taking our beating like we deserve on this issue”. The Superfish software used a signed certificate to intercept and monitor all web traffic, even HTTPS secure traffic, so that it could could then present deals to the end-user.
Lenovo
The problem here is that the signed certificate could be used to intercept any and all web traffic, including banking information and secure shopping sites. While this is not something that Superfish directly intended, security researchers have since used the signed certificate to demonstrate how an attacker could, not only intercept web traffic for anyone with the adware installed, but they could also use it to install malicious applications that would appear signed and safe to the user.

Lenovo no longer installs the software and it has now provided steps to remove it from affected laptops. Microsoft Defender antivirus is also actively removing the software and the offending security certificate. Hortensius went on to say that “We are not just curled up in a ball, we are taking real action to make this right with our customers.” Hopefully this action is not too late for the Lenovo customer affected by this.

Discuss on our Facebook page, HERE.

KitGuru Says: It's bad for the whole Windows ecosystem when a big laptop producer goes and does something stupid like this. Hopefully Lenovo have actually learned from their mistake and other PC manufacturers take note and stop installing bloatware that gives their computers a bad name. What is the worst experience you have had with bloatware?

Source: Recode.net

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Apple will continue to repair MacBooks with GPU fault https://www.kitguru.net/lifestyle/mobile/apple/brendan-morgan/apple-will-continue-to-repair-macbooks-with-gpu-fault/ https://www.kitguru.net/lifestyle/mobile/apple/brendan-morgan/apple-will-continue-to-repair-macbooks-with-gpu-fault/#comments Fri, 20 Feb 2015 01:19:00 +0000 http://www.kitguru.net/?p=236699 It seems that some MacBooks that were sold between February of 2011, until December of 2013 started to develop some pretty severe graphical issues when they were used. Back in 2014 a class action lawsuit was even brought against Apple, as it knew that the laptops were defective and failed to properly compensate customers. Now it seems it has …

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It seems that some MacBooks that were sold between February of 2011, until December of 2013 started to develop some pretty severe graphical issues when they were used. Back in 2014 a class action lawsuit was even brought against Apple, as it knew that the laptops were defective and failed to properly compensate customers. Now it seems it has seen the error of its ways and will be offering a new repair program, that will cover this defect until February, 2016.

The problem stems from a faulty soldering joint between the dedicated GPU and the mainboard and can lead to, “random bouts of graphical distortion, system instability, and system failures”. An online survey at the time of the class action suit garnered over 3,000 responses from 2011 MacBook Pro owners in a single week, so this was quite a widespread issue. The plaintiffs in this suit are asking Apple to acknowledge the defect and “reassess all prior warranty claims and pay the full costs of repairs and damages”.
Apple_Display
Apple initially tried to make the problem go away with a software update that it said would solve the issues, unfortunately it did not and it not admitted any fault until now, with the launch of the MacBook Pro Repair Extension Program for Video Issues. The site states that “Apple has determined that a small percentage of MacBook Pro systems may exhibit distorted video, no video, or unexpected system restarts.”

This isn't the first time that Apple has experienced an issue like this, with a very similar issue cropping up on 2008 model MacBooks and it also extended the warranty of these laptops as well for this fault. If you have a MacBook that is affected by the issues then you can check its coverage on the Apple support site or you can bring it into your local dealer so that they can check it. At this time however the extended warranty program is US and Canada only with support for other countries coming soon.

Discuss on our Facebook page, HERE.

KitGuru Says: The fact that Apple are only just admitting this issue at all seems incredible and that they tried to issue a software “patch” for a mechanical fault, is even worse. Has anyone come across this issue with their MacBooks?

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Would you pay for YouTube? Google think so https://www.kitguru.net/gaming/online/brendan-morgan/would-you-pay-for-youtube-google-think-so/ https://www.kitguru.net/gaming/online/brendan-morgan/would-you-pay-for-youtube-google-think-so/#comments Fri, 20 Feb 2015 00:36:38 +0000 http://www.kitguru.net/?p=236664 It's no secret that YouTube is the go to source for instantly watching online videos these days, with YouTube access being a consideration when people are buying anything from tablets and phones, to consoles and TVs, let alone PCs. But now that YouTube is in such a dominant position, as the internet video platform, it …

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It's no secret that YouTube is the go to source for instantly watching online videos these days, with YouTube access being a consideration when people are buying anything from tablets and phones, to consoles and TVs, let alone PCs. But now that YouTube is in such a dominant position, as the internet video platform, it seems that they are considering launching a subscription model for those who do not want to see adverts.

Obviously nobody wants to see adverts if they can avoid them, so maybe this subscription will be reasonably priced and will help drive advertisers away from advertising on YouTube. However it is far more likely that those who do not subscribe will be piled with even more adverts than they are at the moment, in an effort to encourage them to upgrade to the subscription service.
Youtube advert
Google have been “fine-tuning the experience” over the last few months according to Robert Kyncl, head of content and business operations for YouTube. They had previously experimented with some paid services on a per channel basis for subscribers and also for some specific media such as movies. With the new subscription service, we are not yet sure if this will apply to all YouTube videos or just a selected bunch of content or channels, it is not yet known when Youtube will announce the service either, so we'll just have to wait for now.

For now though there is always AdBlock or one of the many alternatives out there, that allow you to skip past or totally avoid most of the adverts on the site. Obviously this, in the end also harms the content creators, and many creators have been turning to Kickstarter and Patreon to fund some of their more ambitious projects. This way those that want to support the continued production of high quality, well produced videos can do so, while those that want to watch for free can generally also do so after a short exclusivity period for those that have paid.

Discuss on our Facebook page, HERE.

KitGuru Says: While I can appreciate that Google wants to start making some money from YouTube, for content creators who want to make money there are plenty of other platforms for them to use such as Vimeo which is almost as well supported on a wide range of devices. I guess we will have to wait and see what Google announce, do you have any expectations?

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Spies probably have the keys to your phone https://www.kitguru.net/lifestyle/mobile/brendan-morgan/spies-probably-have-the-keys-to-your-phone/ https://www.kitguru.net/lifestyle/mobile/brendan-morgan/spies-probably-have-the-keys-to-your-phone/#respond Thu, 19 Feb 2015 23:50:36 +0000 http://www.kitguru.net/?p=236642 Everything your phone transmits to and receives from your network providers phone tower is encrypted, so that only the network operator can receive your calls and data and route them as you request. This is all encrypted with a set of keys on the sim card inside your phone and another set held by the network provider, …

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Everything your phone transmits to and receives from your network providers phone tower is encrypted, so that only the network operator can receive your calls and data and route them as you request. This is all encrypted with a set of keys on the sim card inside your phone and another set held by the network provider, this should ensure that nobody can intercept and listen in to communications between your phone and the mobile phone tower. Unfortunately if anyone else has the network providers encryption keys, then this is no longer the case. The NSA and GCHQ have these keys.

In the latest Snowden leak (yes these revelations are still coming out) it seems that a joint task force made up of operatives from both the US NSA and the British GCHQ formed the Mobile Handset Exploitation Team (MHET) in April 2010. This team has done everything it can to totally undermine the security of the mobile infrastructure that we have in place today.
SIM
One of the main things listed in the top-secret documents provided to The Intercept by Edward Snowden is the fact that the MHET targeted a sim card company in the Netherlands that makes 2 billion SIM cards a year. They targeted Gemalto by spying on its employees, both sales staff and engineering teams and have boasted that “[We] believe we have their entire network”.

They also have the encryption keys, known as a “Ki”, for every sim produced and seem to have, or at least had access to the authentication servers that generate these keys. This means that they would be able to intercept and decrypt live calls on any network that was using Gemalto sim cards, some 450 wireless network providers around the world in 85 countries. This would be without any warrant needed and neither the user nor the network operator would be any the wiser. Christopher Soghoian, the principal technologist for the American Civil Liberties Union said, “The news of this key theft will send a shock wave through the security community.”

Discuss on our Facebook page, HERE.

KitGuru Says: The only silver lining here is that apps that pass encrypted data over these connections are still secure as far as we know. So the likes of TextSecure, SilentText, Signal and Whatsapp should still be out of the line of fire.

Source: The Intercept

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Want to buy 50,000 Bitcoins? https://www.kitguru.net/gaming/uncategorized/brendan-morgan/want-to-buy-50000-bitcoins/ https://www.kitguru.net/gaming/uncategorized/brendan-morgan/want-to-buy-50000-bitcoins/#comments Thu, 19 Feb 2015 01:45:00 +0000 http://www.kitguru.net/?p=236431 In a rare opportunity, thanks to the United States Marshals Service and Ross Ulbricht of Silk Road fame, you are now able to bid on 50,000 seized Bitcoins. These Bitcoins are currently worth around £7.7 million (or $11.9 million USD) and were seized from Ulbricht when the feds snatched his laptop away from him in a San Francisco library in October 2013. …

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In a rare opportunity, thanks to the United States Marshals Service and Ross Ulbricht of Silk Road fame, you are now able to bid on 50,000 seized Bitcoins. These Bitcoins are currently worth around £7.7 million (or $11.9 million USD) and were seized from Ulbricht when the feds snatched his laptop away from him in a San Francisco library in October 2013.

The Feds have already sold 29,655 of the Bitcoins belonging to Silk Road, to investor Tim Draper last year and at the time, this haul of Bitcoins was estimated to be worth around $19 million (only around $7 million now!), although we do not know how much was paid for them. Even after this second auction, there will still be around 94,000 Bitcoins left under Ulbrichts name as he has filed a claim on them. It is not known if these will also be sold off, but if they are, at today value they would be worth around £14 million (or $22 million USD).
Bitcoins sale
Obviously Bitcoin is still quite a volatile currency, with it just recently recovering from another dip and also recent security concerns regarding Bitcoin exchanges. Bitstamp recently had major security issues and lost around $5 million dollars worth of Bitcoins in the breach also the recent enough closure of the massive, Mt. Gox exchange after to was hacked into. All of this means that buying Bitcoin, especially this much of it could be a very risky proposition.

Having said that, there are now more places than ever to spend your future 50,000 BTC, whether you want to spend them in an Irish pub, the Microsoft store to buy some apps, CEX for some second hand electronics, Virgin Galactic for a trip to space or maybe even Overclockers UK, for some PC parts. There are definitely a lot of chances now as to where you spend your newly acquired fortune.

Discuss on our Facebook page, HERE.

KitGuru Says: Seeing as Bitcoins are on their way up in value again this could be a good investment, for the right price, but then again another big Bitcoin crash and suddenly you have lost millions overnight. Anyone who regularly uses Bitcoins have any insights into this for the rest of us?

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HTTP/2 is finished and will be coming to your browser soon https://www.kitguru.net/gaming/security-software/brendan-morgan/http2-is-finished-and-will-be-coming-to-your-browser-soon/ https://www.kitguru.net/gaming/security-software/brendan-morgan/http2-is-finished-and-will-be-coming-to-your-browser-soon/#comments Thu, 19 Feb 2015 00:46:20 +0000 http://www.kitguru.net/?p=236405 The Internet Engineering Task Force has just reached a consensus and finished finalising the next major update, to the HTTP standard that we all use every day. The specification  builds upon and is an alternative to, but does not obsolete, the HTTP/1.1 standard that was first introduced in 1999, that we currently use whenever we access web services. HTTP …

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The Internet Engineering Task Force has just reached a consensus and finished finalising the next major update, to the HTTP standard that we all use every day. The specification  builds upon and is an alternative to, but does not obsolete, the HTTP/1.1 standard that was first introduced in 1999, that we currently use whenever we access web services.

HTTP has obviously, until now, been a little neglected and as such has not been keeping pace with the internet's enhancements over the last 15 years. For instance, to load an average webpage on 5 years ago back in 2010, usually took around 70 requests from your browser to the web server and the total size of the transfer was around 700kB. Now it's a very different story, with browsers sometimes performing 100 or more requests per page load and transferring around 2000kB of data as a result.
HTTP2

There are several major changes in HTTP/2 from HTTP/1.1, firstly it is now binary rather than textual (human readable) so it is a lot more efficient, this also means that there is no transfer-encoding and as such there should be no parsing issues, or at least none related to encoding/decoding. Secondly it allows messages to be sent from the server to the client and vice versa, without confirmation of receipt (much like UDP) and as such, allows a single connection to be used for multiple requests, previously a browser could have opened as many as 30 different connections to a server, to allow to it request all of the required elements of the page and if one of these got delayed, it would delay the loading of the whole page.

The new protocol also uses header compression (HPACK) to reduce overhead, as sometimes HTTP/1.1 headers can almost be as large as the compressed content that they were carrying, this will dramatically reduce the size of HTTP headers. From a security point of view HTTP/2 defines a profile of TLS (Transport Layer Security) that can be used to make the connection secure, but it can also be used without TLS, using regular TCP connections. Many implementations though, are only supporting the TLS profile currently, making TLS the standard for all connections using them.

Finally HTTP/2 allows the server to actively push content to the client/browser cache, this means that if the browser is processing content leaving the connection idle, the server can go ahead and push what it thinks the browser will request next before the browser even requests it. This will be most useful for video streaming and preloading content that might be requested next, such as the next page in a multi-page article so that it loads instantly when requested.

While HTTP/1.1 will still be with us for a long time yet, it is likely that a lot of the web will move to HTTP/2 over the next few years due to the improvements it contains. There are also a lot of services we use that currently depend on HTTP/1.1 so trying to get rid of it completely in your browser would likely break large parts of the internet for you. Some level of HTTP/2 support is currently available in the latest dev versions of Firefox, IE and Chrome for testing, but for the most part you can just wait until normal version are updated, as it will take a while for web servers and sites to start supporting the final version of HTTP/2 and until then there isn't much point in testing it unless you are a really eager web developer.

If you have any other questions about HTTP/2 be sure to check out the Internet Engineering Task Force's HTTP/2 FAQ over on Github.

Discuss on our Facebook page, HERE.

KitGuru Says: It will take a while to become widely supported on both browser and server sides, but HTTP/2 is a much-needed and excellent improvement to what is mostly, an unseen fabric of the web as we use it today. Eventually we will see HTTP/3 as well, but this is still just a sparkle in the eyes of the Internet Engineering Task Force at the moment. Are you looking forward to using HTTP/2, do you think you will even notice it?

Source: ArsTechnica, IETF HTTP WG

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The best selling British computer is the Raspberry Pi https://www.kitguru.net/desktop-pc/brendan-morgan/the-best-selling-british-computer-is-the-raspberry-pi/ https://www.kitguru.net/desktop-pc/brendan-morgan/the-best-selling-british-computer-is-the-raspberry-pi/#comments Wed, 18 Feb 2015 21:00:11 +0000 http://www.kitguru.net/?p=236173 The low-cost and low power Raspberry Pi micro-computer has just crossed the five million sales marker, making its creators, the Raspberry Pi foundation, the biggest selling UK-based computer manufacturer ever. The Pi computer was originally intended to be used in classrooms to help kids learn to code, but it has found a lot of other markets since then …

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The low-cost and low power Raspberry Pi micro-computer has just crossed the five million sales marker, making its creators, the Raspberry Pi foundation, the biggest selling UK-based computer manufacturer ever. The Pi computer was originally intended to be used in classrooms to help kids learn to code, but it has found a lot of other markets since then from hobbyists and researchers, to business uses.

This five million units mark means that it has now surpassed sales of many older computer systems that were made in the UK, such as the Sinclair Spectrum and the BBC Micro. While both of these systems may not be widely known by the kids of today, at the time they were released they proved very popular. After selling more than a million Pi systems in the first year, in the last two years they have shifted four million more units and with the launch of their new Pi 2, the popularity of the systems is going from strength to strength.
Raspberry Pi Model A+
The sales feat was confirmed on the official Raspberry Pi twitter account with the company saying, “Just confirmed the big news we’ve all been waiting for: we’ve now sold more than 5 million Raspberry Pis.” Confirming that it had outsold any other UK manufacturer, it said: “We think that this means that in just under 3 years, we’ve gone from zero to being the biggest selling UK computer manufacturer ever. Yowza.”

One of the main selling points of the Pi is that it only costs around £26, so it can easily be a gift or an impulse buy if you decide you need a spare PC or a media centre/streaming PC. Also the new Pi 2 will be compatible with a version of Windows 10 that Microsoft announced recently and this will probably help the Pi sell even more units as until now the Pi has only been able to run several different versions of Linux.

Discuss on our Facebook page, HERE.

KitGuru Says: This is great news for the UK tech industry and the Pi foundation which is actually a charity created to educate kids and help them learn to program. Hopefully this will lead to many more years of low cost credit-card sized computing in classrooms around the world, educating future generations. As a proud Pi owner I couldn't be happier, any of you own a Pi?

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The Halo Needler is now a real dart gun https://www.kitguru.net/gaming/brendan-morgan/the-halo-needler-is-now-a-real-dart-gun/ https://www.kitguru.net/gaming/brendan-morgan/the-halo-needler-is-now-a-real-dart-gun/#comments Tue, 17 Feb 2015 00:51:51 +0000 http://www.kitguru.net/?p=235935 There are many iconic guns in the Halo series, but perhaps one of the strangest was the Covenants Needler (or Type-33 Guided Munitions Launcher as you may know it). It fired piercing needles that embedded into a target and then after a second or so each dart exploded with predictably bad results for the target. Now …

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There are many iconic guns in the Halo series, but perhaps one of the strangest was the Covenants Needler (or Type-33 Guided Munitions Launcher as you may know it). It fired piercing needles that embedded into a target and then after a second or so each dart exploded with predictably bad results for the target. Now as much fun as a real version of this would be, I'm not sure it would be legal at all, so we have to settle for the next best thing, a replica Needler that shoots foam darts at the target/co-workers/friends/Covenant.

The replica is being made by BOOMco, a subsidiary of Mattel. It was shown off at the 2015 New York Toy Fair and is a fully licensed product from the Halo series and while not an exact replica, it does fire foam darts and it won't cost you $600 and a lot of time and effort to put it together. So maybe we can cut it some slack, for not looking quite the same as the in-game version.
Needler
Sadly the darts from this Needler are also not going to hone in on enemy targets like the real Needler, but they will stick to some surfaces and probably surprise whoever or whatever they are fired at. If the specs are the same as BOOMco's other dart guns, such as the aptly named “Spinsanity 3X”, then this should be able to fling darts up to 70ft and dish out 10 round battery-powered clips at around the same rate as most Nerf guns.

While this hasn't been released on the market just yet it should be coming soon as the model on display was fully functioning and ready to go. The Spinsanity 3X as well, should be coming soon and as the name suggests, it features three battery-powered clips with 10 rounds in each, for a little extra firepower.

Discuss on our Facebook page, HERE.

KitGuru Says: In one of my previous workplaces there were various massive Nerf guns all around the offices and most Friday evenings involved large battles between different teams, fun times! One of these would probably go down pretty well there. Anyone else want to get their hands on one of these Needlers?

Source: Gizmodo
Image Source: Blaster Labs

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Computers are now better than you at recognising stuff https://www.kitguru.net/channel/generaltech/brendan-morgan/computers-are-now-better-than-you-at-recognising-stuff/ https://www.kitguru.net/channel/generaltech/brendan-morgan/computers-are-now-better-than-you-at-recognising-stuff/#respond Mon, 16 Feb 2015 22:27:45 +0000 http://www.kitguru.net/?p=235912 On average, us flesh sacks can recognise stuff in pictures pretty well, with an error rate of around 5.1% according to a recent study. Previously computers could come pretty close to that, getting around 6.66% of objects wrong. Now however, a new computer vision system from Microsoft Research is actually managing to beat humans at something that had, …

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On average, us flesh sacks can recognise stuff in pictures pretty well, with an error rate of around 5.1% according to a recent study. Previously computers could come pretty close to that, getting around 6.66% of objects wrong. Now however, a new computer vision system from Microsoft Research is actually managing to beat humans at something that had, up to a few years ago been something only we could manage.

The new image recognition system, by the team calling themselves PReLU networks (PReLU-nets), managed to achieve an error rate just marginally better than its creators at 4.94%. But this is a massive 26% relative improvement over the ILSVRC (ImageNet large-scale visual recognition challenge) 2014 winner GoogLeNet (Google) who managed an error rate of 6.66% and an even greater improvement over previous Microsoft research results of around 8%.
ILSVRC
The ILSVRC (ImageNet large-scale visual recognition challenge) is a computer vision challenge that is run every year with teams using the same set of images as each other and attracting some of the best talent from companies and research organisations around the world. The aim of this is to try to make breakthroughs in computer vision “[The] motivation is to measure the progress of computer vision for large-scale image indexing for retrieval and annotation“.

The team from Beijing managed this amazing result by using Parametric Rectified Linear Unit networks (hence the team name: PReLU-nets) and having the system analyse ImageNet's 2012 classification dataset, which contains over 1.2 million training images, 50,000 validation images and 100,000 test images. You can read a blog post from the team about how they go about this and their whitepaper here.

A lot of this technology is behind the recent improvements to OneDrive that now automatically tags photos by recognising the contents of the photos.

Discuss on our Facebook page, HERE.

KitGuru Says: Now that computers are better than us meat bags at most of the things we were traditionally good at it won't be long until Elon Musk and Bill Gates are saying “I told you so” from their moon fortress while our new AI gods enslave earth. Or you know, it might just be a nice AI and automatically tag all of our photos for us…

Source: UPI.com

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Dota 2 reaches over 1,000,000 simultaneous online players https://www.kitguru.net/gaming/brendan-morgan/dota-2-reaches-over-1000000-simultaneous-online-players/ https://www.kitguru.net/gaming/brendan-morgan/dota-2-reaches-over-1000000-simultaneous-online-players/#comments Mon, 16 Feb 2015 21:33:02 +0000 http://www.kitguru.net/?p=235901 One of the wonderful things about the Steam platform is that it is incredibly open with its statistics, showing how many people are playing different games and how many users are online at all times. This is something that is pretty unique amount digital distribution platforms and it allows us to see how many players each …

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One of the wonderful things about the Steam platform is that it is incredibly open with its statistics, showing how many people are playing different games and how many users are online at all times. This is something that is pretty unique amount digital distribution platforms and it allows us to see how many players each game has and hence how popular different games, even Valves own games are.

In this case the big news is that one of Valves own games, the free to play Dota 2, has reached the milestone of having over 1 million concurrent players playing (or at least running/waiting for Year Best). It is actually the first game in the history of Steam to do so, the next highest being Counter-Strike: Global Offensive which hasn't even broken half a million yet. This goes to show just how popular the successor to Dota is.
Steam dota2
Currently the peak is 1,149,341 concurrent players, but looking at the graph above you can see that this is trending heavily upwards every day. Having said that though, this boost of players could easily just be those looking to give the new Year Beast game mode a go. Also there haven't been less than ~350,000 players in the game for the last three days, this probably explains why matchmaking has been so quick recently.

There have been some reports of lagging and stuttering during the new event that is based around the Chinese new year, but it's quite hard to tell how serious these issues are, with lag being quite a complicated matter it can be difficult to figure out exactly where this is being generated.

Discuss on our Facebook page, HERE.

KitGuru Says: I've played a few of the Year Beast events myself and I have seen some odd lag when the bests are out. It's hard to say where it is coming from but as all players in the same game are reporting it, it sure seem like it might be a server-side thing. Any Year Beast players have similar issues?

Source: Steam DB twitter

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Water cooling in a super computer called Trinity https://www.kitguru.net/channel/science/brendan-morgan/water-cooling-in-a-super-computer-called-trinity/ https://www.kitguru.net/channel/science/brendan-morgan/water-cooling-in-a-super-computer-called-trinity/#comments Sat, 14 Feb 2015 02:32:24 +0000 http://www.kitguru.net/?p=235677 I'm sure your gaming PC is astonishingly powerful and some of you probably have some pretty incredible custom built water cooling solutions, but they don't stand a chance next to the water cooling system currently being installed at the Los Alamos' Strategic Computing Center for the new Trinity supercomputer. Previous supercomputers at the SCC have been air-cooled, so …

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I'm sure your gaming PC is astonishingly powerful and some of you probably have some pretty incredible custom built water cooling solutions, but they don't stand a chance next to the water cooling system currently being installed at the Los Alamos' Strategic Computing Center for the new Trinity supercomputer. Previous supercomputers at the SCC have been air-cooled, so this upgrade to the massive building needs to be in place before Trinity can start to be installed. Just be thankful you don't have to upgrade your house when you get a new PC.

In this case however the cost is a little more than what you might have paid for your gaming PC, with U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration paying $174 million, to US supercomputer hardware company Cray, to make a multi petaflop supercomputer system. According to the NNSA the supercomputer will be used to simulate “the safety, security, and effectiveness of the U.S. nuclear deterrent without the use of underground testing,” and when you put it like that, the $174 million bill suddenly doesn't look so bad.
Los Alamos Strategic Computing Center
Ever wanted to be a computer plumber?

The actual Trinity supercomputer, a next generation Cray XC machine, will be placed on top of all of those pipes and running through the pipes will be water from Los Alamos National Laboratory’s Sanitary Effluent Reclamation Facility (SERF) that has been cooled by a cooling plant. No fancy lights on this machine though, so your gaming rig wins that round, for now. Inside the machine itself is going to be a combination of an unknown number of future-generation Haswells (probably 14-18 cores) and future Knights Landing processors (probably 72 cores per chip and 3 teraflops of peak performance!), complemented by an 82 petabyte capacity Cray Sonexion, distributed storage system with a throughput of 1.7Tbps (terabytes per second).

“If this system were delivered today, it would be the fastest in the world” according to Barry Bolding, vice president of storage marketing at Cray. But there is at least a year before the supercomputer is delivered and installed, so by then there may be new competitors for the top spot in the world-wide supercomputer ranking, the so-called top500.

The internals however, should give it the power it needs to compete with, if not overtake, the world's fastest supercomputer, since June 2013, the Chinese Tianhe-2 at China’s National University of Defense Technology. This system currently delivers around 33.86 petaflop/s (quadrillions of calculations per second) and is mainly made up of Intel Ivy Bridge Xeon processors and Xeon Phi chips, with a total of 3,120,000 cores. The current number two is only a measly 17.59 petaflops.

Discuss on our Facebook page, HERE.

KitGuru Says: I really want to know where I can get one of those Knights Landing chips for my home PC, as I was reading about it my poor i7 4790K began to feel all kinds of inadequate with its 4 cores. I'm also excited to see if Trinity can get to the top spot in the top500 list, then again in a year who knows what other supercomputers might be under development, Skynet needs its brain after all.

Image source: Los Alamos National Laboratory

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Obama signs order to protect America’s computer networks https://www.kitguru.net/gaming/security-software/brendan-morgan/obama-signs-executive-order-to-protect-americas-crucial-computer-networks/ https://www.kitguru.net/gaming/security-software/brendan-morgan/obama-signs-executive-order-to-protect-americas-crucial-computer-networks/#respond Sat, 14 Feb 2015 01:00:29 +0000 http://www.kitguru.net/?p=235665 In a move to help protect American online businesses and help them coordinate with US authorities, Obama has signed an executive order that will make federal agencies set up a way of sharing data between technicians in these businesses and federal agents. This information sharing will go both ways, with companies tipping off the feds when they …

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In a move to help protect American online businesses and help them coordinate with US authorities, Obama has signed an executive order that will make federal agencies set up a way of sharing data between technicians in these businesses and federal agents. This information sharing will go both ways, with companies tipping off the feds when they are under threat or about more general threats and likewise federal agencies will publish an intelligence stream of incoming threats that companies might need to made aware of. This sounds a lot like a CISPA information sharing legislation and the EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation) are not very pleased with it, saying that “New cybersecurity legislation isn't needed and it wouldn't have stopped the Sony hack. Instead of proposing unnecessary privacy-invasive bills, we should be collectively tackling the low-hanging fruit. This includes encouraging companies to use the current information sharing regimes immediately after discovering a threat.” They point out that CISPA would allow “private companies new authorities to spy on users and broad legal immunity to share the information obtained with the government”, something that none of us want, not even Obama. White_House_lawn The main difference between this executive order and CISPA is that the latter would limit the liability of companies that share customer information with any government agencies, the executive order does not do this. The White House said the order is “paving the way for future legislation.”, so it looks as though this is more of a temporary bypass of CISPA than a way of killing it entirely. Quite a few companies have agreed to sign up to the cybersecurity framework drafted by the White House, with Apple, Intel, Sony, Microsoft and many antivirus and gaming companies all agreeing to participate. Apple CEO Tim Cook even attended the event that was held in Palo Alto, California and gave a short speech. He said that “If those of us in positions of responsibility fail to do everything in our power to protect the right of privacy, we risk something far more valuable than money, we risk our way of life.” All true but pretty unjustifiable when you are agreeing to use the federal government’s cybersecurity framework, at an event where the federal government announced it would start using Apple Pay. Interestingly Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer, and Google’s Larry Page and Eric Schmidt were all invited but declined to attend. Discuss on our Facebook page, HERE. KitGuru Says: Judging by what we know from the Snowden leaks the US government has access to pretty much whatever it wants, so hopefully this information sharing will mainly be from the government to the companies that are under attack. I don't see why this is needed however when as the EEF say, methods for sharing this information have existed since 2012. Source: The Register Photo source: Daniel Schwen

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The .blog gTLD is now owned by some guy from Panama https://www.kitguru.net/gaming/online/brendan-morgan/the-blog-gtld-is-now-owned-by-some-guy-from-panama/ https://www.kitguru.net/gaming/online/brendan-morgan/the-blog-gtld-is-now-owned-by-some-guy-from-panama/#comments Fri, 13 Feb 2015 23:43:24 +0000 http://www.kitguru.net/?p=235653 The number of Generic Top Level Domains (or gTLDs) has expanded rapidly since ICANN got around to opening up the bidding process, to allow people and corporations to apply for any gTLDs in 2012. After the application process had finished there were applications for 1,409 new TLDs. Some of these domains were auctioned off as there were …

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The number of Generic Top Level Domains (or gTLDs) has expanded rapidly since ICANN got around to opening up the bidding process, to allow people and corporations to apply for any gTLDs in 2012. After the application process had finished there were applications for 1,409 new TLDs. Some of these domains were auctioned off as there were many interested parties, one domain in particular, .blog was very highly sought after.

Although the auction was won back in January the purchase has not been officially announced as it is currently under confidentiality agreements. But we do know that the new owner, Gerardo Aristizabal and his company Primer Nivel paid an estimated $30m for the TLD, making it the most expensive new gTLD by quite a large margin. The next highest so far, is the $6.8m paid for the .tech gTLD by Dot Tech LLC.
ICANNLogo
Also in the running for the .blog domain was Google, who were given a warning as they were trying to seek “exclusive access to a common generic string that relates to a broad market sector”. Google also tried to grab several other gTLDs such as .app, .blog, .cloud and .search which it later said it would have shared with “relevant developer communities”. For instance .app domains would only be given out to applications developers who were developing apps for desktop, mobile or web use. In total Google applied for 101 new gTLDs and spent more than $18.6 million in application fees.

There are still several very sought after gTLDs whose ownership will be resolved by auction in the next few months, including .app, .taxi and .diy, any of these could break the .blog record for the price paid for a TLD. But at least Wales has its .wales and .cymru TLD's. If you are interested you can see a full list of all of the proposed new gTLDs here.

Discuss on our Facebook page, HERE.

KitGuru Says: It will be a while until we start seeing lots these new TLD in everyday use and some of them we will almost never use due to them being restricted in how they are used. Are there any TLD's that you would like to be able to use for any of your domains?

Source: The Register

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Peter Molyneux’s Curiosity indirectly makes a God https://www.kitguru.net/gaming/brendan-morgan/peter-molyneuxs-curiosity-indirectly-makes-a-god/ https://www.kitguru.net/gaming/brendan-morgan/peter-molyneuxs-curiosity-indirectly-makes-a-god/#comments Fri, 13 Feb 2015 02:17:23 +0000 http://www.kitguru.net/?p=235509 Peter Molyneux's Curiosity game that had thousands tapping away at big cube for months during 2013 trying desperately to reach the center and the final tap. In the end a young chap from Edinburgh called Bryan Henderson tapped the final block out of existence and was destined to receive the so-called “life-changing” prize for doing …

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Peter Molyneux's Curiosity game that had thousands tapping away at big cube for months during 2013 trying desperately to reach the center and the final tap. In the end a young chap from Edinburgh called Bryan Henderson tapped the final block out of existence and was destined to receive the so-called “life-changing” prize for doing so. Only thing is, it didn't really turn out that way, until now.

As a recent report published by Eurogamer states, nothing has really changed at all for Bryan in the intervening years and to make matters even worse he was still not a God as was promised by the perpetually over promising Molyneux, all he got was a t-shirt. But now, thanks to Nigel Lowrie of Devolver Digital, the developer behind Hotline Miami, Bryan will finally receive his God-like status. On a recent Youtube video Devolver have stated that “Bryan Henderson has been lost for years. He was promised he would become a God… Now, thanks to Not A Hero, he has,”
BryanTheGod
Developed by OlliOlli studio roll7 and published by Devolver Digital, Not A Hero now contains Bryan as a God, with fittingly God-like powers. The game should be up for release on PC, PS4 and PSVita sometime in the next few months and is a 2D cover-based indie shooter, which all sounds pretty fun. Bryan however will not be a playable character.
[yframe url='https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Ag_93F3_9E'] When asked for his thoughts on the situation by Polygon Bryan was pretty relaxed about the whole thing, saying “I didn't really know what to expect when I was waiting for the email from Devolver, so when I got asked to be a character in the game I just thought ‘Well this is pretty cool. I'm up for this.'” Well at least our new God is relaxed about the whole thing.

Discuss on our Facebook page, HERE.

KitGuru Says: Peter Molyneux's nasty habit of over promising and under delivering is really getting his reputation a beating. I've been at a few of his talks and he is very convincing in person, so it's easy to believe all he says at the time, I just wish he wouldn't over promise as the games he does end up making are often some of my favourites.

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China loves censoring the internet so much it wrote a song about it https://www.kitguru.net/gaming/online/brendan-morgan/china-loves-censoring-the-internet-so-much-it-wrote-a-song-about-it/ https://www.kitguru.net/gaming/online/brendan-morgan/china-loves-censoring-the-internet-so-much-it-wrote-a-song-about-it/#comments Fri, 13 Feb 2015 01:22:56 +0000 http://www.kitguru.net/?p=235489 In a very strange video that has leaked out, despite Chinese efforts to keep it off the internet (we all know that never works), officials from the Cyberspace Administration of China perform a song about how amazing internet censorship is. This seems a bit odd when it is coming from the very people who run and enforce …

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In a very strange video that has leaked out, despite Chinese efforts to keep it off the internet (we all know that never works), officials from the Cyberspace Administration of China perform a song about how amazing internet censorship is. This seems a bit odd when it is coming from the very people who run and enforce the Great Firewall. The performance was given at the Lunar New Year celebration, held by the Beijing Internet Association and many of the country’s leading media figures and Internet executives were present. The song apparently received a “warm round of applause“.

To give you a hint at the lyrics, here is the first verse in English:

Devotedly keeping watch over the space every day,
Taking up our mission as the sun rises in the east,
Innovating every day, embracing the clear and bright,
Like warm sunshine moving in our hearts.
Unified with the strength of all living things,
Devoted to turning the global village into the most beautiful scene.

censorship
You can read (or sing to yourself) the full lyrics over at The New York Times. Make no mistake this is some great propaganda, it's a good thing that Chinese citizens cannot get Youtube from inside the great firewall (GFW), otherwise they would be able to see this:
[yframe url='https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ehLjllO7txk']

Paul Mozur from The New York Times said: “Can China now claim to have censored the online celebration of its own Internet censorship agency?” As a line in the song goes “Internet Power! The Web is where glorious dreams are”, it's a shame that lots of these glorious dreams and beautiful scenes are walled off from Chinese citizens.

Discuss on our Facebook page, HERE.

KitGuru Says: The irony of the Cyberspace Administration trying to censor a video about censorship is not lost on me… Has anyone been to China and have you checked to see if KitGuru is censored by the GFW?

Image source: Wikimedia

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Windows 10 Technical Preview arrives on phones https://www.kitguru.net/lifestyle/mobile/brendan-morgan/windows-10-technical-preview-arrives-on-phones/ https://www.kitguru.net/lifestyle/mobile/brendan-morgan/windows-10-technical-preview-arrives-on-phones/#comments Thu, 12 Feb 2015 20:51:40 +0000 http://www.kitguru.net/?p=235430 A few hours ago Microsoft opened up the Windows 10 Technical Preview, to a few models of Lumia phones that are currently running Windows Phone 8.1. While on the surface this upgrade isn't a massive change for Windows phone 8.1 users, underneath the covers big changes have been made, to allow apps to more easily work …

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A few hours ago Microsoft opened up the Windows 10 Technical Preview, to a few models of Lumia phones that are currently running Windows Phone 8.1. While on the surface this upgrade isn't a massive change for Windows phone 8.1 users, underneath the covers big changes have been made, to allow apps to more easily work across both desktop and phone with very few changes by the developer.

This should lead to increased app development for the Windows platform, with universal apps now being able to be used on desktop, tablet, phone and soon Xbox environments. Today in a new blog post Gabe Aul, the Director of Program Management for the Windows Fundamentals team said “Since it is a shared codebase, you should expect that builds for PCs, tablets and phones will be generally timed to come out at the same time, but they may not always be the same day or same build number, since sometimes a bug will affect one but not the other and we may take another build to fix it.”
Windows10phone
There are quite a few known issues and it is being heavily stressed that this build should not be used on your main phone, as it may not be suitable for daily use. Gabe went on to say “We haven't bricked a single phone during all of our internal testing, but it is NOT IMPOSSIBLE, so you should be aware that there is some potential risk for you. In addition, bugs could prevent access to important features for you, including phone dialling and other core functionality.” So this really is a test build and unlike the current Windows 10 Technical Preview, this may not be suitable for most people.
[yframe url='https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ckzhX1O6Lto'] While the preview can be installed as a simple over the air update once you have the insider app installed and are registered, only a few Lumia models are supported at this time with more coming soon, they are the Lumia 630, Lumia 638, Lumia 635, Lumia 730, Lumia 636 and Lumia 830. High end Lumias such as the 1020, 930 and 1520 have all been shown running Windows 10, but due to some technical issues the preview has now yet been released for these devices.

Impressively the preview is available in 26 languages with more coming soon, but at this time Cortana is only available in those who set their region to English (US), this will be updating soon, following the same rollout plan as Cortana on the Desktop.

Discuss on our Facebook page, HERE.

KitGuru Says: While there are bound to be a lot of unhappy Windows phone fans out there who are not included in the first round of testing with their high-end devices, it is worth keeping in mind that there is a lot of work still to do and when we do get a build it should be that bit more stable from this initial rollout. Anyone using a Windows phone able to try this out?

Source: Gabe Aul

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NVIDIA posts record revenues for fiscal 2015 https://www.kitguru.net/components/graphic-cards/brendan-morgan/nvidia-posts-record-revenues-for-fiscal-2015/ https://www.kitguru.net/components/graphic-cards/brendan-morgan/nvidia-posts-record-revenues-for-fiscal-2015/#comments Thu, 12 Feb 2015 02:48:08 +0000 http://www.kitguru.net/?p=235288 NVIDIA has had a very good financial year over the last 12 months, finishing off with a record-breaking 4th quarter with revenue in Q4 of $1.25 billion, up 9 percent from the previous years quarter. GPU revenues for the quarter were 85.8 per cent of the total and climbed 13 percent to bring in over $1 billion. Altogether last …

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NVIDIA has had a very good financial year over the last 12 months, finishing off with a record-breaking 4th quarter with revenue in Q4 of $1.25 billion, up 9 percent from the previous years quarter. GPU revenues for the quarter were 85.8 per cent of the total and climbed 13 percent to bring in over $1 billion. Altogether last year the graphics card company made $4.68 billion, beating last year by 13 percent.

Jen-Hsun Huang, president and chief executive officer of NVIDIA said “Momentum is accelerating in each of our market-specialized platforms, driving record revenue in the quarter and full year. GeForce and SHIELD are extending our reach in the rapidly growing global gaming market. […]The success of these platforms highlights the growing importance of visual computing and the opportunities ahead for NVIDIA.”
Nvidia
This is surely a great sign that, those who predicted the death of PC gaming, were so very wrong. During Q4, NVIDIA launched the GTX 960 GPU, as well as the GTX 965M and these new cards combined with the GTX 980 , 970, 980M, and 970M have helped boost the fourth quarter for NVIDIA. This comes is despite the recent news that NVIDIA has lied about the specifications of the GTX 970, but it may be too soon to see how badly this will hit them financially, if it does at all, with most of the card return costs being absorbed by the 3rd party manufacturers of the graphics cards.

For Q1 FY 2016 NVIDIA does not expect to do quite as well as it did in this Q4, but even still, the predicted revenue of $1.16bn is 5.2 percent better than Q1 of 2015, and that is despite current battles with Qualcomm and Samsung.

Discuss on our Facebook page, HERE.

KitGuru Says: Despite the recent controversy over the GTX970, I'm still considering one due to the benchmarks and the good price point, at the end of the day the benchmarks don't lie and they are all that matter to me. Anyone thinking of upgrading their graphics card soon to an NVIDIA or AMD card?

Source: The Register

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Apple bans “bonded servitude” of factory workers https://www.kitguru.net/lifestyle/mobile/apple/brendan-morgan/apple-bans-bonded-servitude-of-factory-workers/ https://www.kitguru.net/lifestyle/mobile/apple/brendan-morgan/apple-bans-bonded-servitude-of-factory-workers/#comments Thu, 12 Feb 2015 01:35:45 +0000 http://www.kitguru.net/?p=235269 When a new Apple product is being made, production ramps up massively in factories that supply components and products to it, this obviously necessitates a large hiring spree by these factories. Until recently these workers could be charged more than a month's salary in recruitment fees by the agency that hired them, rather than passing this cost on to …

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When a new Apple product is being made, production ramps up massively in factories that supply components and products to it, this obviously necessitates a large hiring spree by these factories. Until recently these workers could be charged more than a month's salary in recruitment fees by the agency that hired them, rather than passing this cost on to the company that they are hired for. The good news is that Apple has finally got around to banning this practice by its suppliers.

Jeff Williams, Apple senior vice president of operations, said “That fee needs to be paid by the supplier and Apple ultimately bears that fee when we pay the supplier and we're OK doing that, we just don't want the worker to absorb that.” Why it has taken this long for the practice to be banned by Apple is another question and one that we unfortunately do not have an answer for.
Electronics_factory_in_Shenzhen
Williams also said that conditions are improving and they are not finished yet “Every year we raise our standards and we look for opportunities that will either make things simpler or, for places where we feel like we need to be, more rigorous.” He also mentioned that “It is in essence bonded servitude, the suppliers that hire them sometimes don’t know anything about this but the worker’s passport is sometimes held.”

Apple audits all of its suppliers and has done so since 2008, with this being the 9th report. This was started after the massive controversy over the findings in 2006 of major breaches of acceptable working conditions and was stepped up further after a series of worker suicides in 2010. Workers for some suppliers are now forced to sign an agreement stating that they will not kill themselves. These issues are still ongoing despite Apples reports as a BBC Watchdog investigation recently uncovered in 2014.

Discuss on our Facebook page, HERE.

KitGuru Says: I am shocked that this was not something that Apple suppliers were banned from doing since 2008. Then again judging by the recent undercover investigations by the BBC it seems that little has really changed and lots of Apples suppliers are still treating workers terribly.

Source: Bloomberg
Image source: Steve Jurvetson

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Facebook unveils its data centre scale open-source switch https://www.kitguru.net/professional/networking/brendan-morgan/facebook-unveils-its-data-centre-scale-open-source-switch/ https://www.kitguru.net/professional/networking/brendan-morgan/facebook-unveils-its-data-centre-scale-open-source-switch/#respond Wed, 11 Feb 2015 22:57:35 +0000 http://www.kitguru.net/?p=235208 Facebook might not be the first company that you think of when it comes to data centre hardware, but over the last few years hardware engineering is something that the social network has started to take very seriously, something that happens naturally when your company deals with 890 million daily active users. Today at its Networking@Scale event it is releasing …

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Facebook might not be the first company that you think of when it comes to data centre hardware, but over the last few years hardware engineering is something that the social network has started to take very seriously, something that happens naturally when your company deals with 890 million daily active users. Today at its Networking@Scale event it is releasing information on a data centre scale, open modular switch platform called “6-pack”.

Back in 2011 it launched the Open Compute Project scale its computing infrastructure in the most efficient and economical and share this information. It also shared a lot of information about how it was doing this, from rack and cooling designs and technical plans. This is not something that you see from many other companies that build their own server farms and is normally considered secret and proprietary information.
6-pack
Matt Corddry, director of hardware engineering at Facebook explained the reasoning behind 6-pack: “One of the things we saw in the network industry was that it wasn't open enough, it’s difficult to expand and grow our technology with commercial networking equipment. We didn't have enough visibility and control. A lot of the commercial approaches, they are closed, with software and hardware combined,” The new 6-pack switch is fully open-source and designs for it should soon be up on the opencompute.org site.

[yframe url='https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OyeoTPSn7b4′]

This follows on from the Wedge, top of rack switches that it released last year and should mean that it can now get rid of most of the remaining proprietary networking equipment from its data centre networks. The 6-pack unit itself packs in 16 x 40 Gbps ports facing the front and 16 facing the back and contains both an ASIC and OCP microserver.

Discuss on our Facebook page, HERE.

KitGuru Says: While you probably won't be able to build one of these at home (why would you need to) this should help make large data centres more efficient, which means less heat, less energy use and cheaper services. That doesn't just go for Facebook, which you obviously don't pay for, but other web-based services as well. Still, most web services have managed just fine until now, so maybe it won't be the sea changes that Facebook are hoping for. There is a good chance your Facebook comments however are going through one of these right now though!

Source: Facebook blog

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Atari announce Asteroids: Outpost an open-world survival MMO https://www.kitguru.net/gaming/brendan-morgan/atari-announce-asteroids-outpost-an-open-world-survival-mmo/ https://www.kitguru.net/gaming/brendan-morgan/atari-announce-asteroids-outpost-an-open-world-survival-mmo/#comments Wed, 11 Feb 2015 02:22:35 +0000 http://www.kitguru.net/?p=235055 When you think of the classic Atari game Asteroids, you might imagine that is about as far from any current MMO as one can go in a spectrum of PC games, but that's not what Atari think. Enter a new title bearing the original games name, Asteroids: Outpost, a PC exclusive, open-world, survival, MMO, where …

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When you think of the classic Atari game Asteroids, you might imagine that is about as far from any current MMO as one can go in a spectrum of PC games, but that's not what Atari think. Enter a new title bearing the original games name, Asteroids: Outpost, a PC exclusive, open-world, survival, MMO, where you are the asteroid miner trying to survive and prosper on a hunk of space rock.

“We're paying homage to the original Asteroids by incorporating classic features such as asteroid blasting capabilities, while introducing a completely new premise and gameplay,” said Atari CEO Fred Chesnais. “Asteroids: Outpost will appeal to both fans of the classic Asteroids as well as enthusiasts of immersive survival games and expansive MMOs.”
asteroids
Quite how any correlation between original Asteroids fans and this new reboot (is it really a reboot?) can be drawn I'm not sure, but they seem pretty certain. Players will apparently be able to mine, build and defend their base and grow their fortune as they go ‘from rocks to riches'. In many ways it sounds like a PC version of many mobile games such as Age of Empires: Castle Siege or Call of Duty: Heroes, it could equally end up being a FPS (I would have thought they might have mentioned that if it was), but at this time we don't know what the gameplay will be like.

Atari have also announced that they will soon be opening up early access to the game, but have not announced a date for this, so we will have to keep an eye on this to see when we can give it a go. It is currently in development by a new studio under the name of Salty Games who have some pretty experienced team members under their roof, but this is going to be the first game from the studio. Hopefully the game won't become another reason for Atari to open up a new landfill site in the desert.

Discuss on our Facebook page, HERE.

KitGuru Says: I guess we will have to wait for some game play footage until we really find out what Atari and Salty Games are up to, but expanding on this franchise seems to be grasping at straws a little, I'm sure that they could have launched this as a new IP. Are you looking forward to the return of “Asteroids” and did you play the original?

Source: Eurogamer

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Apple acquires $848m stake in Solar power plant https://www.kitguru.net/lifestyle/mobile/apple/brendan-morgan/apple-acquires-848m-stake-in-solar-power-plant/ https://www.kitguru.net/lifestyle/mobile/apple/brendan-morgan/apple-acquires-848m-stake-in-solar-power-plant/#comments Wed, 11 Feb 2015 01:42:42 +0000 http://www.kitguru.net/?p=235049 As part of his keynote address to the Goldman Sachs conference, Tim Cook has announced that Apple has purchased an $848m stake in a new solar plant, to be built in Monterey County, California by First Solar. For its stake in the new plant it will get 130 of the total 230 megawatts of renewable energy, under …

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As part of his keynote address to the Goldman Sachs conference, Tim Cook has announced that Apple has purchased an $848m stake in a new solar plant, to be built in Monterey County, California by First Solar. For its stake in the new plant it will get 130 of the total 230 megawatts of renewable energy, under a 25-year contract, enough to power Apple's California offices, the 52 Apple retail stores in the state, and the firm's Newark, California data center.

Joe Kishkill, Chief Commercial Officer for Firstsolar said “Apple is leading the way in addressing climate change by showing how large companies can serve their operations with 100 percent clean, renewable energy, Apple's commitment was instrumental in making this project possible and will significantly increase the supply of solar power in California.”
Solar
This should boost Apple up to 100 percent in the US EPA Green Power Ranking from its current 92 percent, bringing it up to the level of the two other US tech companies, Intel and Microsoft, who have achieved 100 percent sustainable power usage in this year's rankings. This leaves Google as one of the only big tech players who is nowhere near 100 percent sustainable, with only 32 percent of its energy coming from sustainable sources, but maybe the added pressure from Apple will help it change it's ways.

During Mr Cook's speech, the president of Goldman Sachs, Gary Cohn let the Apple CEO know that Apple had broken the $700bn market cap boundary and has become the first US firm ever to do so. This is a fantastic achievement and it sure makes the amount that it has spent on this solar plant look very, very small.

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KitGuru Says: Hopefully the three companies together, Apple, Intel and Microsoft can start to put pressure on Google to increase its measly 32% renewable energy use, as well as other companies who should really be doing better at using renewables.

Source: The Register

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