| Newegg Daily Deals: WD My Passport Ultra Metal Edition 2TB, Crucial MX100 512GB SSD, and More! Posted: 11 Nov 2014 11:50 AM PST |
| Microsoft Bundles Work and Play Subscription Services for $199 Per Year Posted: 11 Nov 2014 11:37 AM PST  Microsoft's top services all bundled up
Just ahead of the holidays, Microsoft today unveiled its new Work & Play Bundle, a collection of four premium consumer services packaged up and offered together for $199 per year. Specifically, The Work & Play Bundle includes subscriptions to Office 365 Home, Xbox Live Gold, Xbox Music Pass, and Skype Unlimited World + Wi-Fi, plus associated goodies like 1TB of OneDrive online storage (comes with Office 365 Home). If you were to purchase each one separately, the combined cost would come out to $450 per year, so you're saving over 50 percent by going the bundled route. On that basis, it's a great deal, and another valiant attempt by Microsoft to hook people into its broad ecosystem. This is also a bit of a test for Microsoft, in that it wants to see how many consumers would be interested in all four services at a discount. If you're on the fence, you have a bit of time to decide -- the offer runs until January 4, 2015 or while supplies last. It's also worth mentioning that the offer is only available to purchase at Microsoft Stores in the U.S. Find out more on Microsoft's Work & Play Bundle page. Follow Paul on Google+, Twitter, and Facebook |
| Spotify CEO Shows Taylor Swift the Money, Says Service Paid Labels $2 Billion to Date Posted: 11 Nov 2014 11:11 AM PST  Spotify responds to Taylor Swift's decision to yank her albums
Taylor Swift, the country-turned-pop music star decided to pull all of her songs off of Spotify right as she released 1989, her first pop-only album. In doing so, she called the streaming service a "grand experiment" and voiced other disparaging opinions about the service and streaming model in general. In response, Spotify CEO Daniel Ek pulled a Jerry Maguire and showed Swift the money. As in, more than $2 billion. That's the amount Ek claims Spotify has paid out to labels, publishers, and collecting societies for distribution to songwriters and recording artists to date. Another figure he threw at Swift is zero, which is how much piracy pays music artists. "When I hear stories about artists and songwriters who say they've seen little or no money from streaming and are naturally angry and frustrated, I'm really frustrated too. The music industry is changing – and we're proud of our part in that change – but lots of problems that have plagued the industry since its inception continue to exist," Ek explained in a lengthy blog post. "As I said, we've already paid more than $2 billion in royalties to the music industry and if that money is not flowing to the creative community in a timely and transparent way, that's a big problem." As for Taylor Swift specifically (as well as top artists like her), Ek said that she was on track to exceed $6 million this year and $12 million next year, before she pulled her album. In the meantime, users can listen to her songs for free on sites like YouTube and Soundcloud, "and sure enough, if you looked at the top spot on The Pirate Bay last week, there was 1989..." Summed up, Ek says that Spotify's interests are "totally aligned" with music artists. Follow Paul on Google+, Twitter, and Facebook |
| Kill Time Playing New Unreal Engine 4 WebGL and Maxwell Apollo 11 Demos Posted: 11 Nov 2014 10:38 AM PST  Playing with Unreal Engine 4
Epic Games made the decision earlier this year to offer up its Unreal Engine 4 to anyone and everyone for $19 per month (plus 5 percent of gross revenue resulting from any commercial products you build using UE4), affording game developers of any size and budget a chance to play with a complete and popular game engine. Wondering what you can do with it? To get a taste, there are two new UE4 demos available, one for HTML5 and the other for Nvidia's Maxwell GPUs. Starting with the HTML5 demo, it's a tower defense game exported from UE4 to the web. It was ported utilizing Emscripten, a tool that helps developers bring fully native applications to the web by compiling them to asm.js, a highly optimizable subset of JavaScript. In short, it's a fun way to kill some time when the boss isn't around, and it's leaps and bounds more advanced than Minesweeper. You can check it out at Mozilla's Demo Studio. The second demo is only for people running one of Nvidia's new Maxwell-based GeForce GTX 980 or GTX 970 graphics cards. It's a downloadable demo powered by UE4 and intended to show how light from the moon's surface illuminated Aldrin, which in turn Nvidia says proves the authenticity of photos taken from the moon landing. "View the scene with direct and indirect lighting; toggle on Armstrong to see how his spacesuit affects the play of light; shift the position of the sun or the camera; and adjust the camera exposure," Nvidia says. You can download the 470MB demo file here. Follow Paul on Google+, Twitter, and Facebook |
| AMD Catalyst 14.11.1 Beta Driver Now Available to Download Posted: 11 Nov 2014 10:00 AM PST  Beta driver boosts performance in Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare and Assassin's Creed Unity
AMD Radeon graphics card owners had to sit back and watch as Nvidia released not one, but two WHQL certified driver releases in less than a week, one of which included performance tweaks for Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare and the other adding Assassin's Creed Unity optimizations to the mix. If you've pitched a tent in AMD's camp, you can stop pounding sand now -- AMD's Catalyst 14.11.1 beta driver is now available with performance enhancements for both titles. The standard disclaimer applies -- this is beta software we're talking about, so it could be buggy. If you game on a mission critical machine or otherwise have an aversion to even small risks, sit back and wait for the gold driver release, it shouldn't be far behind. For everyone else, Catalyst 14.11.1 beta is supposed to net up to a 30 percent performance increase in CoD:AW with FXAA and lower game resolutions, as well as introduce a CrossFire Profile update for improved performance when running multiple GPUs. And in Assassin's Creed Unity, single GPU performance gets a performance bump, along with a CrossFire Profile of its own. If you've been noticing occasional corruption in CoD:AW while running CrossFire, Catalyst 14.11.1 beta should help with that as well. Driver Download
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| Asus ROG Introduces Gladius Gaming Mouse with Customizable Click Resistance Posted: 11 Nov 2014 09:02 AM PST  An ergonomic rodent for right-handed gamers
We can't say we've ever felt the need to adjust the click resistance on our mouse buttons, but at the same time, we won't begrudge Asus Republic of Gamers (ROG) for implementing the feature in its new Gladius gaming mouse -- heck,we'll try just about anything once. The Gladius makes use of Omron mouse switches that are good for 20 million clicks, and should you ever reach that, Asus ROG built an easy-swap socket to make replacement a breeze. If you prefer a different feel than the out-of-box experience, Asus ROG also included two Japanese-made switches so you can personalize the click response. Moving on, the 116-gram rodent sports an "advanced" 6400 DPI optical sensor capable of tracking up to 200 inches per second and up to 50g acceleration at lift-off distances of 1.5mm. Polling rate is customizable up to 2GHz, and there's a DPI switch that switches between two different settings on-the-fly. There are half a dozen programmable buttons in all, along with two programmable slide-to-press side switches. Once you have everything dialed in, you can save your settings to a profile courtesy of the built-in flash memory. Finally, the Gladius has two tails -- one is a 2-meter braided USB cable for desktop use and the other is a regular 1-meter USB travel cable for use at LAN parties. Either cable detaches with the press of a button. The Gladius is available starting today at $69 MSRP. Follow Paul on Google+, Twitter, and Facebook |
| Microsoft's Lumia 535 Smartphone is First to Shed Nokia Branding Posted: 11 Nov 2014 07:02 AM PST  A new era for Lumia handsets
When Microsoft acquired Nokia's smartphone business for $7.2 billion earlier this year, part of the negotiated deal was that Microsoft could continue to use the Nokia branding for the next decade. Now just two months after officially closing the deal, Nokia is dead to Microsoft, now just a reminder of where it doesn't want to be in terms of market share. With that said, meet the budget-focused Microsoft Lumia 535, the company's first branded handset. Other than the absence of Nokia's branding, it's not a particularly exciting device -- Microsoft traded excitement for affordability. It's not even headed for the U.S. Instead, the Lumia 535 will sell for about 110 euros (around $135 in U.S. currency). Microsoft is billing it as a 5x5x5 device, which refers to the 5-inch display (960x540) and 5-megapixel cameras on the front and back. It also features a 1.2GHZ Qualcomm Snapdragon 200 quad-core processor, 1GB of RAM, 8GB of internal storage, microSD card slot, 802.11n Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 4.0, and Windows Phone 8.1 running the show. This is a handset that could do well in emerging markets, though from a marketing standpoint, we're not sure this was the best way to go for Microsoft's first post-Nokia Lumia device. Follow Paul on Google+, Twitter, and Facebook |
