General Gaming Article

General Gaming Article

Microsoft's 5 Greatest Successes and Failures

Posted: 05 Jul 2013 01:30 PM PDT

Microsoft: The good, the bad, and the ugly

Microsoft has made many successful products over the years, but unfortunately they've also made a lot of mistakes as well. With Windows 8.1 coming out on the horizon, we've decided to compile a list of the company's five biggest successes and blunders.

The chronological list starts off with Microsoft's five greatest successes and is followed by its worst failings. How many of the products below have you used? Let us know in the comments!

Column: Wiretapping's Overreach

Posted: 05 Jul 2013 11:25 AM PDT

wiretapping

How wiretapping is an invasion of our privacy

CALEA is an 18-year-old wiretapping law that's meant to give law enforcement access to communications. Of course, in 1994, most of us weren't on the net yet, and Congress had just discovered that their secretaries were talking into the telegraph machines. Tapping was a simple affair. All the calls came into one centralized point: the telephone company. The FBI could present the telephone company with a warrant and listen in.

Calea mostly left the Internet alone, but then in 2004, the FBI requested it be expanded to cover services like VoIP and broadband. They got their wish. But of course, there's a problem, and it's not just when random FBI agents decide to ruin the careers of promiscuous generals who haven't committed any crimes. With a service like VoIP and other Internet tools, there's no central office to show up to, no one to install your taps. Insisting on making decentralized Internet software easy to wiretap means only one thing: installing backdoors in software—intentional security vulnerabilities that allow a remote attacker to get your data.

Here's the funny thing about doors, back or otherwise. People go in them. Different kinds of people. Software can't tell if you have a warrant or not. It can't eye your badge suspiciously and call into an office. It can't even tell if you're a human or a piece of exploitation software fuzzing it. Because of this, making the Internet Calea-compliant is one giant insecurity measure. It is American law enforcement demanding the world not only give up a great deal of its potential privacy, but become inherently insecure. And forget about open source, where you could just find backdoors. After all, open source communication tools don't make any sense to American law enforcement; their backdoors are supposed to be their nasty little secrets.

Newegg Daily Deals: All Graphics Card Edition

Posted: 05 Jul 2013 09:58 AM PDT

Sapphire Radeon HD 7870 GHz Editionnewegg logo

Top Deal:

Don't let those pixels push you around. The best way to push back when gaming starts to slow down is with a GPU upgrade, and we have a bunch of special offers today, including our top deal for a Sapphire Radeon HD 7870 GHz Edition 2GB graphics card for $215 with free shipping (normally $240; additional $15 mail-in-rebate and free Crysis 3 game with purchase).  It's fast, supports quad HD (4K), and comes with a free game!

Other Deals:

PowerColor AX7950 Radeon HD 7950 Boost State 3GB GDDR5 Video Card for $270 with free shipping (normally $300; additional $20 mail-in rebate)

Sapphire Radeon HD 7850 1GB GDDR5 Video Card OC Version for $155 with free shipping (normally $180; additional $15 mail-in rebate)

HIS iCooler Radeon HD 7770 GHz Edition 1GB GDDR5 Video Card for $105 with free shipping (normally $130; free Far Cry 3 Blood Dragon & Far Cry 3 game with purchase)

PNY GeForce GTX 660 Ti 2GB GDDR5 Video Card for $245 with free shipping (normally $280; additional $25 mail-in rebate and free Metro: Last Light game with purchase)

HTC's Profits Sink Like the Titanic, Down 83 Percent in Q2 2013

Posted: 05 Jul 2013 09:46 AM PDT

HTC OneHow low can you go?

HTC was once a mighty vessel sailing the mobile seas, and like Leonardo DiCaprio in the movie Titanic, the company must have felt it was the king of the world. We all know how that movie ends, and just as the real Titantic was doomed to sink, things aren't looking so well for HTC. The Taiwanese phone maker saw its profits plummet 83 percent in the second quarter of 2013.

Its total revenues for the quarter reached NT$70.7 billion ($2.35 billion), resulting in profits of NT$1.25 billion ($41.63 million). On the plus side, HTC's profits in the second quarter trumped Q1, but they're down compared to the same quarter a year ago.

Like every other mobile player, HTC is having a bear of a time competing against Samsung in the Android space and Apple in the mobile space. That's in stark contrast to the early days of Android, of which HTC was a pioneering force. More recently, HTC said it would begin offering fewer handsets so that it can concentrate on a handful of quality devices rather than taking a shotgun approach.

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Samsung Closes Boxee Acquisition for $30 Million

Posted: 05 Jul 2013 09:21 AM PDT

BoxeeLow risk sale with potential for big rewards

Well, it's official. You may have heard that Samsung Electronics had scooped up Boxee, makers of the self-named cross-platform freeware HTCP software, news of which was first reported by Israel business site The Marker. The initial report spread through the web and went unconfirmed until now. On its website, Boxee gleefully announces that its team will be joining Samsung.

"We started on this journey six years ago, and have been at the forefront of the changing TV and video landscape. We believe that over the next few years the video market will change even more than it has in the past few decades," Boxee said. "Joining Samsung means we will be able to work on products that marry the best hardware and software in the TV space, products that will be used by tens of millions of people and will help to shape the future of TV."

Boxee insists that the buyout will have little impact on current devices, though its beta Cloud DVR functionality will end up a causality; it's slated to go offline July 10.

According to reports, Samsung is paying $30 million to box up Boxee. That's a relatively modest sum that Samsung can afford to absorb if things don't pan out, but if they do, the rewards could be tremendous. Samsung is likely to integrate Boxee's technology into its smart product line (TVs and Blu-ray players), and could end up offering a branded set-top box as well.

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Haswell-E Will Have Hidden Cores

Posted: 05 Jul 2013 08:31 AM PDT

Intel InsideCore overload

Haswell has already landed, and if you're building a new rig today, you might as well jump on the new platform. At the same time, Intel clearly put a great deal of focus on mobile friendly features, so even though Haswell is a step up from Ivy Bridge, it's not the end-all-be-all that some where hoping for. Haswell-E, on the other hand, brings the desktop back into focus and will offer 8 processing cores and 16 threads. That's not all.

According to our sister site TechRadar, Haswell-E is likely to wield hidden cores. Specifically, it will have 14 cores sitting underneath the hood. Imagine what you could do with all that processing power! Now stop imagining, because you won't have access to it.

Don't be too bummed, it's not as though the majority of applications out there can take full advantage of the processing power that's currently available, never mind a 14-core chip. And let's not forget that we're still waiting on Ivy Bridge-E parts, which will likely top out at 6 cores.

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LibreOffice Teams Up with AMD to ‘Accelerate’ Spreadsheets

Posted: 05 Jul 2013 12:16 AM PDT

LibreOffice

AMD joins the likes of Google and Intel on the Open Office Foundation's advisory board

Users of open-source productivity suite LibreOffice, which forked away from OpenOffice.org in 2010, will soon be able to make the most of their GPUs when using the Calc spreadsheet app, courtesy of a partnership between Open Office Foundation (the outfit behind LibreOffice) and chipmaker Advanced Micro Devices.

AMD is now a member of the Open Office Foundation's advisory board, the latter said in a press release Wednesday. The GPU maker plans to make its presence felt immediately by using its expertise to help optimize the LibreOffice spreadsheet app for GPUs.

"It is great to work on LibreOffice with The Document Foundation to expose the raw power of AMD GPUs and APUs, initially to spreadsheet users,"  Manju Hegde, corporate vice president, Heterogeneous Solutions at AMD, was quoted as saying in the press release. "Bringing the parallelism and performance of our technology to traditional, mainstream business software users will be a welcome innovation for heavy duty spreadsheet users, particularly when combined with the compute capabilities of the upcoming generation of AMD Heterogeneous System Architecture (HSA) based products."

Although those with AMD APUs will benefit the most, other users of LibreOffice, which has traditionally struggled with larger data sets, can also look forward to faster, better spreadsheets.

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Dell Mulling Entry Into Wearable Computing Market

Posted: 04 Jul 2013 09:04 PM PDT

Wearable Computing

PC giant is currently 'exploring ideas'

Dell's CEO Michael Dell is convinced that if the ailing PC giant is to embark on the long, hard road to recovery, it needs to go private and use the ensuing absence of market scrutiny to freely shift its focus to enterprise products, cloud computing and smart devices. While the fate of Michael Dell's massive $24.4 billion proposed buyout offer still hangs in the balance, the likes of Sam Burd, Dell's global vice-president of personal computing, are eagerly looking forward to the "transformation."

Burd told the UK's Guardian that the company is quite keen on venturing into the world of wearable computers, an incipient market that is currently headlined by Google's Glass head-mounted system, which itself is a $1500 prototype. The wearable computer market is set to explode in the near future, with many big names likely to launch head-mounted displays and smart watches of their own.

Despite insisting that the PC business is still important to his company, Burd underlined the need for transformation. "The view is that we can get ourselves out of the quarterly reporting process [by going private] where you can't make hard decisions to speed up that transformation."

"Looking ahead five years, we expect devices and form factors to continue to change. There will still be a need for 'static' computing on desktops, but there will be a real need for mobile devices," he told the Guardian. "There's a lot of discussion about how that fits into wearable devices like we've seen with Google Glass and watches. We're looking at a world of lots of connected devices."

On the poor adoption of Windows 8 and tablets running the OS among businesses, he had this to say: "Businesses are slow to adopt a new operating system. But tablets really need Windows 8 to sell well. Still, it is encouraging to see some businesses deploying Windows 8 and tablets. It's going to take some time, and the jury is still out. IDC's numbers says that Windows 8 on tablets is still far smaller than the iPad, but there are successes. Maybe in a few years when we get to Windows 8 tablets being a third or 40% of tablet volume we can feel it's happening. Tablets are definitely an important piece of the computing business."

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Posted by Shri Krishna

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