General Gaming Article

General Gaming Article

China to Microsoft: You Have 20 Days to Explain Compatibility Problems

Posted: 01 Sep 2014 09:01 AM PDT

Microsoft SignMicrosoft must issue a written statement to China within 20 days

Around the same time China banned Windows 8 from government use over concerns that there could be built-in spying mechanisms, authorities also began investigating Microsoft for antitrust violations. The latest in China's antitrust probe over Microsoft's business practices has the State Administration for Industry and Commerce giving the Redmond outfit 20 days to issue a written explanation. What for, you ask?

The agency wants Microsoft to explain "problems like incompatibility and other issues caused by a lack of released information about its Windows and Office software," according to The Wall Street Journal's translation of the SAIC's online notice. That's an incredibly vague task, though the agency issued the 20-day deadline during a meeting with Microsoft, in which further details were likely given.

Citing state media reports, Reuters says Microsoft's use of verification codes led to complaints by Chinese companies. Interestingly, verification codes could be one of the ways Microsoft supposedly violated China's anti-monopoly law, though if that's the case, it puts Microsoft in a tough spot. Software piracy in China is a big problem for Microsoft, and it's difficult to see how verification codes could run afoul of antitrust laws.

Microsoft isn't China's only foreign target when it comes to anti-monopoly concerns. There are dozens of other companies being investigated, including Qualcomm, which China accuses of overcharging customers for its patents.

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Scholar Feeds Over 12 Million Historic Photos to Flickr

Posted: 01 Sep 2014 08:20 AM PDT

St. NicholasBrowse millions of copyright-free images spanning hundreds of years

The Internet is a wonderful place filled with text, videos, and images. Lots and lots of images. In fact, Yahoo's popular Flickr photo sharing service is the lucky recipient of millions of historical images plucked from 600 million library book pages scanned in by the Internet Archive. The project is spearheaded by Kalev Leetaru, who began work on the massive undertaking while researching communications technology Georgetown University as part of a fellowship sponsored by Yahoo.

One thing that always bothered Leetaru was that digitization projects tend to focus on words while leaving out the pictures. What he's doing is the exact opposite. Leetaru went so far as to write his own software to sidestep the way books had originally been digitized.

According to BBC, the Internet Archive used an optical character recognition (OCR) program to analyze all 600 million scanned pages and turn the image of each word into searchable text. The software could detect which parts of a page were pictures, and it would discard them.

Leetaru's software taps into the process by taking that information and focusing on parts that the original OCR ignored. Each one was then saved as a separate JPEG picture. His software also copied the caption for each image.

The end result will be a searchable database of more than 12 million historical copyright-free images available on Flickr. At present, Leetaru has uploaded more than 2.6 million pictures, all of which you can browse here.

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Dell Readies 34-inch Curved Display for Holiday Season

Posted: 31 Aug 2014 11:54 PM PDT

Dell 34-inch Curved Monitor

Earlier this month, LG had unveiled a similar offering

The Alienware Area-51 gaming PC is not the only product that Dell will try and woo gamers with during the upcoming holiday season. The PC vendor is also readying its first curved monitor. Announced alongside the Haswell-E powered Area-51, the Dell UltraSharp U3415W is a 34-inch curved display that will be available in China in November and the rest of the world in December.

The U3415W has an ultra-wide 21:9 display with a WQHD 3440x1440 resolution, according to a press release issued by Dell Friday. Further, the 34-incher, whose price hasn't been revealed as yet, packs "HDMI 2.0, MHL, DisplayPort and Mini DisplayPort connectivity, dual integrated 9 watt speakers, 60Hz performance and, when it's set up in multi-monitor configuration, a virtually borderless cockpit view across multiple screens thanks to its ultra-thin bezels."

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Netflix: VHS-level Streaming Quality Forced Us Into Deal with Comcast

Posted: 31 Aug 2014 11:20 PM PDT

Netflix

Netflix sheds light on circumstances that lead to 'interconnection' deal with Comcast

Currently undergoing regulatory review, the proposed merger between Comcast and Time Warner Cable isn't something Netflix is excited about. The Los Gatos, California-based company views the deal as a potential threat to online video distributors (OVDs), according to the "Petition to Deny" (PDF) it recently filed with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC).

Netflix, which has, of late, been busy entering into costly agreements with Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to ensure smooth delivery of its video streaming content to customers, fears that an ISP as large as the resulting entity would enjoy unduly large bargaining power "over an OVD in negotiating such access fees because failure to reach an agreement with a terminating access network that accounts for a very large portion of an OVD's customers could have a devastating effect on the finances of the OVD."

To make its point, the company cites the example of its February 2014 "interconnection" deal with Comcast and the exact circumstances that lead to it. Apparently, the deal came about because, in the two months immediately preceding it, the quality of the company's service over the latter's network had deteriorated to such a degree that customer support calls quadrupled and Netflix began losing customers.

"Comcast subscribers went from viewing Netflix content at 720p on average (i.e., HD quality) to viewing content at nearly VHS quality. For many subscribers, the bitrate was so poor that Netflix's streaming video service became unusable," the petition reads."The fact that the height of the congestion occurred in December and January is significant. December is one of Netflix's busiest times because members spend more time at home over the holidays and therefore request more streaming video from Netflix and other OVDs. It became clear that Comcast would continue to allow congestion across its network to negatively affect its subscribers' online video streaming experience."

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Posted by Shri Krishna

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