General Gaming Article

General Gaming Article

Microsoft is Cleaning up Windows Store, Removes 1,500 Copycat and Fraudulent Apps

Posted: 28 Aug 2014 06:02 PM PDT

Windows 8 LogoCleaning is good for the Store

It's easy to be overwhelmed when searching for applications on the various platforms out there. If it is not due to various apps having similar names then it is the ones that are copycats or even fraudulent. Well, Microsoft announced that it has removed 1,500 apps from its Windows Store in an attempt to make finding things easier and provide better quality and choice. 

To this end, Microsoft has modified its Windows Store app certification requirements. Some of the changes made involves the name of an app. An app's name will need to "clearly and accurately reflect the functionality of the app." Developers will also need to make sure that apps are properly categorized and icons must be different from other apps so that consumers will not mistake one for another. The policies are being applied to both new and existing apps for Windows and the Windows Phone Store.

Windows Store general manager Todd Brix wrote of Microsoft's progress on the official blog saying, "These revised policies are being applied to all new app submissions and existing app updates for both the Windows and Windows Phone Store. We've also been working on titles already in the catalog, conducting a review of Windows Store to identify titles that do not comply with our modified certification requirements. This process is continuing as we work to be as thorough and transparent as possible in our review. Most of the developers behind apps that are found to violate our policies have good intentions and agree to make the necessary changes when notified. Others have been less receptive, causing us to remove more than 1,500 apps as part of this review so far."

Brix goes on to say that this is still an ongoing process and that the company is increasing resources to speed up the process. 

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No BS Podcast #231: AMD and Origin PC Settle Past Dispute on the Show

Posted: 28 Aug 2014 01:37 PM PDT

Plus: AMD's commitment to high-end CPUs, DDR4, 5-way GPU support, 20nm GPUs, and more!

In a bit of a surprise to us, AMD and Origin PC wanted to come into the podcast room together for episode 231 of the No BS Podcast. As you may recall, this pairing is kind of surprising considering that last October, Origin PC's co-founder and CEO Kevin Wasielewski announced that the company would be dropping AMD graphics cards from its systems, stating, "This decision was based on a combination of many factors including customer experiences, GPU performance/drivers/stability, and requests from our support staff." He then later added, "Based on our 15+ years of experience building and selling award winning high-performance PCs, we strongly feel the best PC gaming experience is on Nvidia GPUs."

Well, not only did we get Wasielewski in the room, but we also got AMD's VP of Global Channel Sales Roy Taylor and AMD's Director of Public Relations Chris Hook to come on. In the show, the two parties settle their past dispute with Taylor suggesting that AMD is now committed to giving hardware partners like Origin PC more support and communication. In the podcast, he outlines some of the strategies to do so. Wasielewski also confirmed that you can now get AMD video cards in Origin PCs again and shot down any rumors that Nvidia was compensating Origin PC to slander AMD late last year when the announcement came about.

Taylor also asserts that AMD's graphics drivers have gotten a lot better over the past year, but admits this wasn't always the case and that the company is still getting burned by that bad reputation. 

While Gordon was away on vacation, he did submit several questions for the rest of the crew to ask on the air, and in the show we cover a ton of ground from topics that range from:

  • The possibility of 5-way GPU support
  • AMD's renewed commitment to battling Intel at the high-end CPU market
  • AMD's plans to start using DDR4
  • Origin PC and AMD's thoughts on Valve's upcoming Steam Machine initiative
  • AMD's take on the Oculus Rift/VR
  • Freesync monitor availability
  • Why AMD is getting into the SSD market
  • AMD's presence (or lack thereof) in the laptop/gaming notebook segment
  • 20nm GPUs
  • And then we of course top it off with your fan questions! 

The old format isn't going away, and Gordon's rants will return, but in the meantime, give this episode a listen, and let us know what you think!

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Civilization: Beyond Earth Hands-On

Posted: 28 Aug 2014 11:43 AM PDT

We play through the first 100 turns of Firaxis' next Civ game

We're still a couple months away from the retail release of Civilization: Beyond Earth (C:BE), but publisher 2K Games couldn't hold back the horde any longer. We've been eager to try it out because it's Civ, but also because it feels like a spiritual sequel to Alpha Centauri, which itself dealt with a nagging question from earlier entries in the series: What happens when you win the game by launching an interstellar ship into space? Where do those people go? At first glance, C:BE looks like a sci-fi Civilization V with an exotic color palette, but a number of new layers unfolded during our time with it.

Most Civ games begin with selecting your starting conditions (unless you like to live on the edge and randomize all your choices). Your options include the usual things like world size, continent shape, and faction leader characteristics. In the build that we played, we could choose from three randomly generated planets. We could also let the game randomly choose one of those three for us, or we could tell C:BE to roll the dice and generate three new worlds. If that's not your cup of tea, we could also go to the "Advanced Worlds" menu and choose from about ten worlds with scripted conditions. 82 Eridani e, for example, has no oceans and little water. Or we could choose Archipelago, which was basically the opposite. Eta Vulpeculae b, meanwhile, has one large continent and an abundance of resources and wildlife.

Six of the worlds that are accessible from this menu come from the Exoplanets Map Pack, which you get by pre-ordering the game before October 24th. Each of these planets will randomize its geography each time you play, leading to an additional layer of replayability. We were not able to dig up a menu that allowed us to fine-tune specific map or gameplay attributes (such as disabling neutral factions or hostile wildlife), but this was not a final build.

Then you can also choose to begin the game with a soldier or worker unit, instead of an explorer. Or you could have a clinic installed in your first city automatically. This building improves the city health stat, which indicates population growth and the happiness of your citizens. You will also choose what ship type you want to use to arrive on the planet. This determines bonuses like starting with 100 energy (the currency of C:BE); the initial visibility of coast lines, alien nests, certain resources; and the size of the fog of war around your first city.

Then you choose your colonist type. For example, the Refugee type adds +2 food to every city, which promotes growth. Engineers give you +2 production in every city, which decreases the time it takes to construct buildings. Scientists, unsurprisingly, give you +2 science in every city, which increases the speed at which you research new technology. Lastly, you designate your sponsor, which determines who your faction leader is. There are no historical leaders this time, like George Washington or Ghandi. This new gang consists of fictional characters set in a speculative future. We had eight sponsors to choose from. Going with the African Union grants us +10% food in growing cities when their Health rating is 1 or greater. With the Pan-Asian Cooperative, you get a 10% production bonus for Wonders, and 25% faster workers.

So after agonizing over all of those branching decisions, you can finally drop into the game. If you're familiar with the last couple Civ games, the interface should be pretty familiar. Your resources appear in the upper right-hand corner, with positive and negative numbers indicating gains or losses per turn. Hovering the cursor over each one gives you a detailed breakdown of where the resources are coming from, and how they're being consumed. Your lower right-hand corner is for notifications and to run through your list of available actions The lower left-hand shows you your selected unit (if any) and its abilities.

Page 2: Exploration, affinities, and virtues

But while the UI should be familiar, this is definitely an exotic planet, with unfamiliar formations like canyons and craters, clouds of poisonous gas, alien critters used for resources, and other alien critters that are actively hostile. It's definitely dangerous terrain for a fledgling civilization. But you'll find resource pods dotted throughout the landscape, which usually contain caches of energy or satellites. Satellites are launched into orbit and extract energy from the planet's surface, though it's not clear how. They stay up for a limited time, though, so you'll need to keep finding them, or produce them on your own. You'll also encounter stations, which behave similarly to city-states in Civ V.

And your explorer (scout) unit can excavate native ruins and giant animal bones to grant more bonuses, like free technology. He can only carry one of these excavation kits at once, though, and he needs to return to a city to get more. It also takes five turns to excavate something. This slower pace maintains the unit's viability for a longer stretch than in previous games, and compels you to make more agonizing decisions. Competing factions also don't like it when you excavate something that's closer to their territory than to yours. So you have to balance your desire for discovery against your long-term political risks.

Meanwhile, you'll be conducting research on new buildings and units. Instead of going left to right and hitting up pretty much everything along the way, you begin from a central point on the research map and must choose between different branches, each of which contains "leaves" or individual research choices. Each branch has a theme, usually divided into cultural, military, and scientific categories. You can try focusing on one theme, or it might be better to balance as many as you can. Since we were limited to 100 turns, we weren't able to see which turned out to be the better strategy. The things you encounter on the map, the things you build, and the tech you research will frequently trigger binary choices. At one point, the game made us choose between two stations to conduct business with. One station specialized in converting military equipment for civilian use, while another could increase our science score. Both choices have effects on your relationship with the planet's flora and fauna, and you have three affinities to balance: Harmony, Supremacy, and Purity.

Each choice grants you a mix of experience points in each affinity, and enough points in one will move you up a level and grant you a bonus. Hovering your mouse over each affinity (located in the upper left-hand corner) tells you what different levels will do. Level 1 of Harmony, for example, reduces the aggression level of the native creatures. Eventually you'll actually gain health from the poison clouds (called "miasma"), and the highest level of your primary affinity grants a critical element for one of the five available victory conditions. At the same time, you'll eventually be at odds with the factions that have different affinities than yours. You can attempt to smooth over relations by establishing lucrative trading routes, engaging in joint military actions, and good old-fashioned bribery. Or you can attempt to wipe them off the map, if you're not into the whole diplomacy thing.

And let's not forget about the Virtue system. These operate like Civ V's social policies, but this time there are four of them with nine tiers, so there's more focus and depth to your choices here. On top of that is a grid of synergies, designed to encourage the exploration of multiple virtues. Activating the first tier of each virtue, for example, gives you a bonus activation of your choosing.

Eventually, the 2K staff gently ushered us out the door, and we were reluctant to leave. Beyond Earth has a more layers of faction evolution and political intrigue than we're used to seeing in Civ, and we were eager to see the choices that the game would present us with next. We also wanted to build more stuff, of course, and establish more trade routes, explore more of the map, investigate the critters, and maybe start a war or two. Thankfully, we only have about eight more weeks until the game launches into orbit.

Newegg Daily Deals: AMD FX-6300 Vishera, Samsung 840 Pro Series 512GB SSD, and More!

Posted: 28 Aug 2014 10:38 AM PDT

Visheranewegg logo

Top Deal:

All the talk is CPU-ville these days is Haswell-E this and Haswell-E that. Hey, we're excited about Intel's next chip release too, but lets not forget there's another player in the field. We're of course talking about AMD, and if you're looking to build a low cost system, then take a look at today's top deal for an AMD FX-6300 Vishera 6-Core CPU for $100 with free shipping (normally $110 - use coupond code: [EMCPBHB22]). The FX-6300 runs at 3.5GHz (4.1GHz Turbo), has 8MB of L3 cache, and a 95W TDP.

Other Deals:

Samsung 840 Pro Series 2.5-inch 512GB SATA III MLC Internal Solid State Drive for $300 with free shipping (normally $360 - use coupon code: [EMCPBHB23])

G.Skill Ripjaws X Series 8GB (2 x 4GB) 240-Pin DDR3 1600 (PC3 12800) Desktop Memory for $72 with free shipping (normally $80 - use coupon code: [EMCPBHB24])

Asus GeForce GTX 780 3GB 384-Bit GDDR5 PCI Express 3.0 for $436 with free shipping (normally $480 - use coupon code: [EMCPBHB26]; Additional $20 Mail-in Rebate)

Toshiba 3TB 7200 RPM 64MB Cache SATA 6.0Gb/s 3.5-inch Internal Hard Drive for $100 with free shipping (normally $120 - use coupon code: [EMCPBHB25])

HTC Launches Desire 510 Smartphone, Keeps Mum on 64-bit Capabilities

Posted: 28 Aug 2014 10:26 AM PDT

HTC Desire 510HTC doesn't seem to care that its Desire 510 rocks a 64-bit chip

You can add the Desire 510 to HTC's family of smartphones. HTC announced the LTE device, which sports a 4.7-inch display powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 410 processor. In case you're not familiar, the Snapdragon 410 features four Cortex A53 CPU cores clocked at 1.2GHz and an Adreno 306 GPU. It's a speedy chip, but perhaps what's most interesting is that it's a 64-bit capable part, though you wouldn't know it from reading through HTC's press materials.

Though the Snapdragon 410 is both 32-bit and 64-bit capable, HTC isn't making any noise about the latter. It's probably of little benefit in the grand scheme of things (this is a budget phone, after all), which is likely the reason why HTC isn't celebrating the phone's 64-bit goodness, though it's also a bit odd since it's the first 64-bit Android smartphone.

In any event, the HTC Desire 510 also features 1GB of RAM, 8GB of internal storage, microSD card slot, 4G LTE radio, 3MP front-facing camera, 5MP front-facing camera, 802.11n Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 4.0, USB 2.0, 2100mAh battery, and Android 4.4 KitKat covered with Sense 6.

The HTC Desire will begin shipping in September in the U.K. for £149 (around $245). It will ship to other parts of the world, including the U.S., sometime later.

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Study Reveals Nearly 70 Percent of IT Workers Battle Phishing Attacks Every Week

Posted: 28 Aug 2014 10:05 AM PDT

FishPhising has become the top network security concern for enterprises

Hewlett-Packard sponsored a study conducted by research organization Ipsos Observer that shines a light on the number one concern for enterprises today. According to the study, almost 70 percent of IT professionals experience phishing attacks at least once a week, with customer data cited most often as the type of data attacked. After that, phishers are most interested in financial information.

Digging deeper, the study found that 7 out of 10 attacks generated within the network perimeter are the result of a malware-infected host. This underscores the importance of applying a layered approach to security.

"Organizations are increasingly challenged to protect their networks from advanced targeted attacks, in fact, it is likely that most environments have already been breached with systems infected by malware," said Frank Mong, vice president, Solutions, Enterprise Security Products, HP. "It's important that IT professionals understand how attackers are trying to break through the network, and have confidence in their ability to mitigate attacks when every second matters."

China emerged as the site where most external network attacks originate, followed by Russia and the United States. However, IT workers seem most concerned with what users are doing on their PCs that aren't work related.

Some 85 percent of survey respondents said they're concerned about illicit file sharing and non-work related applications; 63 percent indicated concern with employees visiting adult-only websites on the corporate network, and 7 out of 10 view social media as a type of abuse occurring on the network.

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T-Mobile Confirms HTC One M8 for Windows is Coming to Un-Carrier

Posted: 28 Aug 2014 09:40 AM PDT

HTC One M8 Windows T-MobileHTC One M8 for Windows will land at T-Mobile this fall

It came as a bit of a surprise when Microsoft and HTC announced a cloned version of the One M8 handset running Windows Phone 8.1 software. After all, it's HTC's flagship Android smartphone, and by porting it over to Windows Phone 8.1, HTC claims it marks the first time that an iconic flagship device has been offered on multiple operating systems. But what about multiple carriers? Well, you can add T-Mobile to the list of wireless carriers getting the One M8 for Windows.

"The rumors are true. HTC One M8 for Windows is coming this fall," T-Mobile posted to Twitter.

T-Mobile didn't offer up a specific release date or pricing information, though with wireless carriers currently engaged in a price war of sorts (it's more of a data war with increasing data caps), especially T-Mobile and Sprint, things could get interesting by the time fall is in full effect. In the meantime, you can pre-register here.

As for other carriers, AT&T also recently confirmed it's getting the One M8 for Windows, however like T-Mobile, AT&T didn't announce specific pricing and availability.

For now, Verizon is the exclusive carrier of the ported device, which it's selling for $100 with a two-year service agreement, or $30 per month via Verizon's Edge program.

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Determined Developer Resurrects Windows XP with Unofficial Service Pack 4

Posted: 28 Aug 2014 09:18 AM PDT

Windows XP LaptopLetting go is hard to do

Diehard Windows XP fans are having a hard time bidding the legacy operating system farewll -- by the numbers, it's estimated that some 15 percent (StatCounter) to just under 25 percent (Net Applications) of desktops are still running Windows XP. Save for businesses that pay a fee, Microsoft killed off support for Windows XP back in April, though one developer is determined to keep it alive with a new (and unofficial) Service Pack.

Known as "harkaz" on on the RyanVM.net discussion board, he's been working on the Service Pack since September of last year. It contains official Windows XP security updates and patches intended for ATMs and POS systems running a specialized version of XP. You may recall that earlier in the year, it was discovered that XP users could continue to receive such updates via a registry hack -- the unofficial SP4 releases applies the hack by default and installs all of the fixes released up to this point.

Naturally Microsoft cautions against installing these updates on regular versions of Windows XP, saying that they're "intended for Windows Embedded and Windows Server 2003 customers and do not fully protect Windows XP customers." They also haven't undergone testing on Windows XP. Instead, Microsoft advises that Windows XP users upgrade to Windows 7 or 8.1.

Should you decide to throw caution to the wind -- bear in mind we know nothing about this developer, his coding skills, and how much testing he's done on XP machines -- you can grab the unofficial Service Pack here.

Image Credit: Flickr (Alan Levine)

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Samsung’s 3D TSV DDR4 Modules Sport Quad Stacked Memory Dies

Posted: 28 Aug 2014 06:07 AM PDT

Samsung DRAMIndustry's first 3D TSV-based DDR4 modules go into mass production

The desktop isn't the only place you'll find interesting things happening with double data rate-4 (DDR4) memory. Samsung this week said it has begun mass producing what it claims is the industry's first 64GB DDR4 RDIMMs using three dimensional "through silicon via" (TSV) package technology intended for enterprise servers, cloud-based applications, and other data center solutions.

Sounds pretty fancy, right? Let us break it down. The new RDIMMs employ 36 DDR4 DRAM chips, each of which consists of 4-gigabit (Gb) DDR4 DRAM dies. They're built using Samsung's 20nm-class and 3D TSV package technologies, the latter of which marks a new milestone in memory technology.

Following in the footsteps of 3D Vertical NAND (V-NAND) that uses high-rise vertical structures of cell arrays inside a monolithic die, 3D TSV is a different type of structure that vertically interconnects stacked dies. To build a 3D TSV DRAM package, the DDR4 dies must first be ground down as thin as just a few micrometers, then pierced with hundreds of tiny holes. Electrodes pass through the fine holes to vertically connect the dies.

According to Samsung, its new 64GB TSV module performs twice as fast as a 64GB module using wire bonding packaging, and consumes around half the power to boot.

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