General Gaming Article

General Gaming Article

Newegg Daily Deals: Corsair Gaming Strafe Mechanical Keyboard, Dell 27-Inch Monitor, and More!

Posted: 03 Mar 2016 10:27 AM PST

Corsair Strafe

Top Deal:

Do you or a loved one suffer from membrane keyboard syndrome? It's a horrible affliction, one that affects every person still using a membrane keyboard, but they don't have to suffer. There's a better way to type, and it begins with a mechanical plank. There are copious cures out there, including today's top deal for a Corsair Gaming STRAFE Mechanical Gaming Keyboard - Cherry MX Red for $80 with free shipping (normally $100). For a modest investment, you can rid yourself of that squishy plank and replace it with one that uses Cherry MX Red key switches for a superior typing experience. Your fingers will thank you.

Other Deals:

Dell S2715H Black 27-inch 6ms HDMI Widescreen LED Backlight LCD Monitor IPS 250 cd/m2 DCM 8,000,000:1 (1000:1) Built-in Speakers for $220 with $1 shipping (normally $270)

EVGA GeForce GTX 970 04G-P4-2978-KR 4GB FTW GAMING w/ACX 2.0, Silent Cooling Graphics Card for $320 with free shipping (normally $360; additional $10 Mail-in rebate; Free game: Bombshell with Registration, ends 3/15)

Mediasonic NSO1-SU3 USB 3.0 2.5-inch / 3.5-inch Hot-Swappble SATA HDD UASP Docking Station for $15 with $2 shipping (normally $20; additional $11 Mail-in rebate)

Asus VP247H-P Black 23.6-inch 1ms HDMI Widescreen LED Backlight LCD Monitor 250 cd/m2 100,000,000:1 Built-in Speakers for $145 with $3 shipping (normally $200)

Six Flags to Bolster Roller Coasters with Virtual Reality Headsets

Posted: 03 Mar 2016 10:15 AM PST

Seeking more thrills

Six Flags Roller Coaster

Imagine that you're strapped inside a topless fiberglass train as it traverses a full mile of track starting with a drop of 221 feet before reaching a top speed of 77 miles per hour. It goes over multiple hills, through tunnels, and makes a series of sharp, fast turns. Pretty thrilling, right? Apparently not thrilling enough, as Six Flags will look to up the ante of this and other roller coaster rides using virtual reality.

"This will blow people away," Brat Petit, Senior VP, marketing and sales for Six Flags, tells USA Today.

The aforementioned experience is the Superman ride at Six Flags New England in Massachusetts. Some consider it one of the best steel roller coasters in the land, and Six Flags aims to make it more exciting by having riders strap on a VR headset. Instead of seeing their nearby surroundings, they'll be traveling through Metropolis.

"This will be the first opportunity that people will have to virtually fly with Superman," adds Sam Rhodes, corporate director of design for Six Flags.

It's a unique approach to VR. There are other rides that use VR technologies to simulate the experience, like Star Tours, but what Six Flags wants to do is combine the virtual world with the thrills of a real roller coaster. The environment will simulated, but the speed and drops, they're all real.

Superman is one of two VR experiences Six Flags plans to roll out this season. The other one is a futuristic fighter plane experience called New Revolution. Similar to the movie Independence Day, riders will take on a huge mothership filled with angry aliens.

This is just the tip of the iceberg. Six Flags has VR plans for other coasters, like Ninja at Six Flags St. Louise in Missouri, and Goliath at La Rounde In Montreal, Canada.

Riders won't have to just sit there and passively experience the visuals, they'll have controllers that will allow them to fire off virtual guns and other weapons, too.

It all sounds pretty ambitious, and potentially awesome, though we wouldn't want to be put in charge of logistics. Figuring out a way to ensure that headsets don't go flying off heads while also keeping the line moving at a decent pace are two potential problems. Technical glitches could also damper the fun, and who knows if this might lead to an increase in vomit.

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U.S. Department of Defense is Inviting Hackers to Hack the Pentagon

Posted: 03 Mar 2016 09:36 AM PST

By invite only

Pentagon Paper

Today's battles aren't always fought on the ground, air, and sea, they take place over the Internet, too. To help ensure that it's equipped to fend off sophisticated cyber attacks, the U.S. Department of Defense is inviting vetted hackers to come "Hack the Pentagon."

This is a first for the U.S. government. You can think of it as a bug bounty program, only not everyone is invited to come root out vulnerabilities. Under the pilot program, only qualified individuals are being invited to look for bugs on the government's public webpages.

"This project is a demonstration of my continued commitment to drive the Pentagon to identify new ways to improve DoD's security measures as our interests in cyberspace evolve. Bringing in the best talent, technology, and processes from the private sector not only helps us deliver comprehensive, more secure solutions to the DoD, but it also helps us better protect our country," said Ash Carter, Secretary of Defense.

As you can imagine, this is a highly controlled program. Those invited must register and submit to a background check. Once they've been fully vetted, they'll go to work rooting out bugs in a "controlled, limited duration program" on specific targets.

The government's more sensitive networks, like weapons programs, won't be part of the pilot program. Whether or not the program expands to include deeper access to more critical corners of the government's online presence remains to be seen.

"I am confident this innovative initiative will strengthen our digital defenses and ultimately enhance our national security," Carter added.

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Samsung Dangles Massive 15.36TB SSD in Front of Enterprise Customers

Posted: 03 Mar 2016 09:08 AM PST

Size matters

Samsung PM1633a

Sometimes it's the enterprise segment that gets access to the coolest new technology, and so it goes with Samsung's new hugely capacious 15.36-terabyte solid state drive, the PM1633a.

It's a rather boring name for what qualifies as the industry's largest SSD. We're sure enterprise buyers won't hold that against Samsung because all that really matters here is all that storage space, which is packed in a 2.5-inch form factor chassis and outfitted with a 12Gb/s Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) interface. What that means for Samsung's customers is the ability to cram twice of many of these things in a standard 19-inch, 2U rack (compared to a 3.5-inch drive).

Samsung managed to stuff 15.36TB of storage into a single drive by combining 512 of its third-generation 256Gb V-NAND flash memory chips. These chips are stacked in 16 layers to form a single 512GB package, with a total of 32 NAND flash packages comprising the 15.36TB drive.

According to Samsung, it's not just about increasing capacity, but customers should expect a performance bump over the drive's predecessor as well. Specifically, Samsung rates the PM1533a SSD's random read and write speeds at up to 200,00 and 32,000 IOPS, respectively, along with sequential read and write speeds of up to 1,200MB/s.

Performance is further aided by the inclusion of 16GB of DRAM, an advanced controller unit that supports the 12Gb/s SAS interface, and specially designed firmware that allows the drive to access large amounts of high-density NAND flash concurrently.

In terms of reliability, Samsung says its 15.36TB monster supports 1 DWPD, or drive write per day. It also boasts a metadata protection mechanism in addition to featuring a data protection and restoration software tool in case of a quick power outage.

If 15.36TB is too much, Samsung will also offer the PM1633a SSD line in 7.68TB, 3.84TB, 1.92TB, 960GB, and 480GB.later this year.

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No BS Podcast Special 243: 3D VR Audio

Posted: 03 Mar 2016 01:05 AM PST

Oculus Studio Talks Content Launch, Dragon Front, and VR Controller

Posted: 03 Mar 2016 12:00 AM PST

Oculus VR recently invited us to an event to cover its new VR collectible card game Dragon Front, and while we were there, we got to interview some folks from Oculus Studio.

Dragon Front Screenshot 1.0

In our video interview below, we spoke with Oculus Studio's Jason Rubin. He addressed concerns about VR input fragmentation, since the Rift will be shipping with an Xbox controller as opposed to its motion-tracked Oculus Touch VR controllers. Surprisingly, in our discussion, Rubin said, "We don't know which control is going to be the control people want to play with," in regard to VR input. He added, "I'm pretty sure after 30 years of making games that people are going to want to play with different types of controls." Making the argument to ship with an Xbox controller, he stated, "If you wanna play a game for hours, if you want to sit around and explore a massive world, being on your feet, having hand-tracked controllers is probably not the way you're going to do that for the same reason most people don't get up and hike every day; it's tiring. There's a real reason to have a gamepad."

For those unfamiliar with Oculus Studio, the subset of the company is responsible for ensuring that Oculus has high-quality content across the board, whether that pertains to movies, games, or VR experiences. When I asked them what they saw in Dragon Front that made them want to make it an exclusive launch title for the Rift, they asserted that it's not only fun, but social as well. While Rubin once again admitted that he doesn't "know which controller spec is going to be the controller that most people play on" in VR, he is confident that the social aspect of VR will be huge moving forward.

Delving deeper into Dragon Front, we conducted a follow-up interview with High Voltage Studio's Eric Nofsinger, who is the developer's Chief Creative Officer. The game is a CCG that features a grid movement–based system, but there's also a champion in addition to your deck. The game also has your and your opponent's avatars head floating over the board, so that you can see where your opponent is looking. This is a nice little touch that only VR can provide.

High Voltage also wanted to incorporate a rubber-banding effect so that when one player is losing, they'll be able to cast abilities for less MP. Aesthetically, Nofsinger says they tried to get the game to look like a mixture of WWII meets Diesel Punk plus high fantasy. It definitely evokes those themes from the 20 or so minutes we played of it.

In the interview, Nofsinger also talks about what VR adds to the game and some of the design challenges that come along with it.

Dragon Front is set to release in Q2; Nofsinger says they're entertaining the idea of releasing the game as a free-to-play title with micro-transactions. 
Posted by Shri Krishna

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