Latest News - Page 2886

During Gabe Newell's AMA on Reddit, the Valve boss confirmed that Counter-Strike: Global Offensive is coming to Linux. Newell said: "It's being worked on but we don't have an ETA".

Counter-Strike: Global Offensive was released in August 2012, on Windows, Mac, PlayStation Network, and Xbox Live Arcade. It was the first version of Counter-Strike to land on consoles, which included updates to classic modes and maps from the original Counter-Strike, as well as a slew of new content.

A Linux-capable version of Counter-Strike would make sense, as SteamOS is built from the groundwork of the open-source OS. Newell was of course asked about Half-Life 3, but was very coy about it, he said: "When we announced our products years in advance in the past and then were really late delivering them, it was pretty painful for both us and the community. We'd rather not repeat that".

It looks like AMD is forging through with plans to dominate the desktop in emerging markets, where the chipmaker has just announced its new AM1 chipset. The AM1 chipset is a system-on-chip (SoC) for the developing market.

The AM1 part is a sibling of the Kabini family of chips, something that AMD launched last year with both dual- and quad-core CPUs and GPUs on the same chipset. This is similar to what was baked into Sony's PlayStation 4, and Microsoft's Xbox One. Kabini was developed mostly for portables, but AMD wants to see the new AM1 take on the low-cost, expandable desktop market.

Where AMD has it in the bag is the price, which starts at just $60 for the chipset and motherboard combined. We should see AM1 limited to just 25W maximum power draw from the chipset, but a restriction of PCIe 2.0. AMD has taken some swings at Intel, comparing it to Intel's Bay Trail platform, which AMD says AM1 beats with higher memory speeds, 16GB memory support, an upgradeable socket, and Windows XP support. AMD declares: "Avoid a dead-end platform and choose AMD".

Things are not looking up for Bitcoins much these days and the cryptocurrency was dealt yet another blow today when Flexcoin announced that it has ceased operations and closed its doors for ever. Flexcoin was the first Bitcoin "bank" that operated much in the same manner as traditional banks do. Flexcoin announced today that on Sunday, March 2nd hackers breached the company's security and managed to steal 896 Bitcoins, valued at more than $620,000 USD.

Not all accounts at Flexcoin were compromised though, and it appears that only the hot wallet was breached, leaving thousands of bitcoins in cold storage untouched and safe due to them not being connected to the network. Customer's who chose to store their coins in cold storage payed an additional 0.5-percent for the added security and it looks like it paid off.

Bitcoin's disappearing or being stolen is quickly becoming the norm these days. Another firm named Polonix has also announced that 12.5-percent of its stored bitcoins were stolen by hackers, but said that it would be replacing the coins with those from its own reserve. With major failures of big names in Bitcoin, can the cryptocurrency remain a viable and trustworthy digital currency solution? If it were me with millions tied up in bitcoins, I would sell the majority of them as fast as possible and run far away from Bitcoins as possible.

About 95% of U.S. banks are using Windows XP for ATMs. That could be troubling as Microsoft plans to shut down tech support for this operating system on April 8. Microsoft will no longer provide security updates for Windows XP.

U.S. Banks and ATM experts are taking this seriously. If banks are unable to complete upgrading all of its ATMs with the newer Windows OS by April, customers might be at risk of being exposed to any kinds of patch holes if any security flaw was found after Microsoft axes its support. This will be a good opportunity for hackers to exploit many ATMs, so its a race against time for a majority of banks.

For now, U.S. banks are trying to make a deal with Microsoft to get OS support extension for Windows XP, till the time they are done migrating all ATMs to the new Windows platform. JPMorgan one-year extension package and plan to start upgrading ATMs to Windows 7 by July. Citibank and Wells Fargo will also be upgrading its ATMs as well.

Peggle was one of those games that you could not just spend a few minutes playing. I remember many nights spent trying to top my high scores and making the pegs disappear with as little balls as possible. The game grew to be so popular that entire websites popped up with hints and guides on how to beat it with as few moves as possible. When Microsoft announced that Peggle was returning during its Xbox One launch event, I was one of millions who instantly became excited.

Today Electronic Arts announced that Peggle 2 would be headed to the Xbox 360 on May 7th of 2014. The game will include Peggle Masters as well as a Duel mode in which players can challenge their friends in a heads up dual to see who can clear their pegs first. "With all the excitement from our fans in December at launch we knew we wanted to continue growing the Peggle universe starting with more content and then expand onto the Xbox 360," said John Vechey, General Manager at PopCap Games. "By offering the addition of Duel Mode, our fans will be able to challenge their friends continuously to find out who is the ultimate 'Peggle Master'."

HBO GO has finally appeared on PlayStation 3. The online video service app from HBO was available for Xbox 360 and other devices for a very long time, but it look a very long time to make its app service available for for Sony's older game console.

Phil also pointed out that they are 'working diligently' with HBO to make the app available for Sony PlayStation 4.

Sony's Phil Rosenberg said via a blog post,"Watch every episode of every season of the HBO's best shows, including True Detective, Boardwalk Empire and Game of Thrones. Speaking of Game of Thrones, with the season 4 premiere airing on April 6th, you've got more than a month to get caught up on the first three amazing seasons. If you haven't seen the latest season 4 trailer, click here to check it out."

Sharkoon has just added yet another ATX gaming chassis to its lineup of PC gaming hardware and accessories. The all new Sharkoon BD28 is a beefy PC case that features an acrylic side panel, internal cable management options, as well as USB 3.0 ports located in the front of the case. The BD28 comes in two colors, Black or Gunmetal, with LED accent lighting available in Red, Blue, and Green.

The case's motherboard tray is also color coded to the chassis's LED lighting scheme which is not something we see very often in the PC chassis market. The case is able to house tower-style air coolers up to 179mm in height while VGA cards up to 325mm are supported as well when all HDD cages are installed, while cards up to 415mm are able to fit if the HDD cage is removed.

Room for up to three 3.5-inch and four 2.5-inch storage drives is present while up to 3 cooling fans can be fitted to the chassis. Sharkoon felt it necessary to include room for two 5.25-inch devices as well, meaning those of you who still own an optical drive have room for your CD burning activities. Water cooling the BD28 is possible but a fully custom system with 240mm radiators or larger would be a tight fit, and I suggest looking at AIO liquid coolers if you chose to go with this case. The Sharkoon BD28 is available now and retails for about $60 USD.

The FCC was not too happy when they found out that the Emergency Alert System was used in a Movie trailer 'Olympus has Fallen' about an attack. Viacom, NBC Universal and ESPN was slapped with a $1.9 million fine for running this trailer. The trailer was aired on multiple channels with the two-tone emergency signal. Because of the trailer being shown in more than one channels, people felt that it was misleading and were not happy about it.

One the complaints read,"This is misleading and had our entire family running to the TV to find out what was going on, only to find it was a commercial". FCC added that 'Frivolous, casual, or other uses of EAS Tones for reasons other than their defined purpose can desensitize viewers to the tones and thereby undermine the effectiveness of the system in the event of an actual emergency.'

All the three companies have acknowledged that they have approved the video since it was consistent with its guidelines. FCC pointed out that the companies have revised its guidelines that it will ban material which contains real or simulated alert tones, but FCC is imposing a fine as the violations was done multiple times at the same time. NBC Universal needs to cough out $530,000, and ESPN will be fined for $280,000. Viacom will have to pay a fine of $1.12 Million.

A new report has been published by TechCrunch that suggest that Facebook is in acquisition talks with solar-powered drone manufacturer, Titan Aerospace. Facebook is considering the acquisition as an affordable way to bring internet to countries with little useful infrastructure and would be part of its Internet.org initiative.

Titan Aerospace makes small aerial drones that are capable of up to five years of non-stop flight thanks to their extreme efficiency and solar power source. The report says that Facebook would used these drones to blanket the world with free Wi-Fi and would start with 11,000 of the Solara 60 models flying high over Africa to bring internet access to those with no hope of having access anytime soon. The deal is reportedly worth about $60 million, which is pocket change when you consider that Facebook just recently purchased WhatsApp for $16 billion.

One interesting aspect that I could see the drones being used in is inside countries where the government has restricted access to the internet, or where the countries infrastructure has been compromised due to rioting, fighting or war. With the smaller Solara 60 drones being cheaper, there is no reason that a company with deep pockets such as Facebook could not deploy 100,000 of them within just a few years, and give the entire world cheap or free internet access.

The Hangar Module for Star Citizen launched late last year, but the dogfighting module was delayed, disappointing fans. The creator of the game, Chris Roberts, has announced that the dogfighting module for the game will launch after PAX East.

Star Citizen's dogfighting module was due in December last year, but was delayed at the last minute. The module will appear at a premiere event just before PAX East for a special "citizens-only" event. Roberts wrote: "As I write this, the Star Citizen team is all around me hard at work on the dogfighting module. The team is scurrying to take care of thousands upon thousands of necessary details: variable damage states, HUD detailing, weapons cameras, engine sounds and countless other things that go into creating an immersive space combat experience. At this point, we can now regularly dogfight here in the office".

It looks like Star Citizen's servers backend was the biggest problem, where Roberts explained: "We have high hopes that the solution will be ready in time for launch ... and that that solution will stand up to the hundreds of thousands of citizens waiting to battle it out. The very success that Star Citizen has had in building such a large community so early in its development is also one of its most challenging - launching the [dogfighting module] will be akin to launching a major online game".

Judging by a job listing at Microsoft Careers (now taken down), it looks like the company wishes to create an open source framework that is lightweight, extensible and scalable across multiple platforms, specifically naming the mobile platforms from Apple and Google. Since Xbox Live is integrated with its Windows Store and Windows Phone already, it looks like Microsoft wishes to do the same with iOS and Android.

Reports point out that Microsoft is also trying to win the hearts of game developers by working to provide improved tools for Xbox Live integration. Reports also indicate that Microsoft may ease up on restrictions and provide greater access to the necessary tools.

It could be a win-win for both sides. If Microsoft plays its cards properly, it can attract a good number of developers. Since Xbox Live will be present on almost all mobile platforms, the game achievements, scores and even ability to play games with their friends can be crossed over/shared/ played irrespective of the mobile OS. Though iOS and Google have Game Center and Google Play which shares scores and game achievements, its uncertain how does Microsoft plan to get ahead of its competition.

XMBC recently made an announcement about its BETA 1 edition of the new media center software: V13.0 codenamed "Gotham". The team says that they have worked hard on this project and made improvements since the release of the older 12.0 release.

The new XMBC interface comes with a lot of features based on the user's feedback and requests. Some of those features are Android Hardware Decoding, Rasberry Pi and Android speed improvements, Stereoscopic 3D Rendering better touchscreen support, better audio engines and other setting improvements. The team assured that this version of XMBC should run on Android 4.0 and higher for ARM and x86 architectures. Users required this software to run smoothly on Rasberry Pi and Android, of which the team was able to work on it and make improvements. More specifically: opening and browsing libraries, loading images and initial starting of videos. For 3D lovers, XMBC now supports SBS, TAB, anaglyph and interlaced.

However, XMBC wasn't able to provide support for 3D Blueray and provide hardware acceleration for FullSBS/TAB movies.

Today Sapphire unveiled two new GPUs that fill the gap between its R9 270 and R9 290 models of discrete GPUS. The new R9 280 is based on AMD's GCN architecture and features the company's Dual-X cooler. The Dual-X cooling solution featured twin aerofoil fans and graduated heat pipes to ensure cooling of the GPU is efficient and quiet as possible.

The R9 280 also features 3GB of GDDR5 clocked to 1250MHz and a GCN core that features 1792 stream processors. The core is clocked to 850MHz and can reach a clock speed of 940MHz when boost is enabled. Support for DirectX 2 and AMD's mantle is also on board with the card being able to push 4K video to displays using HDMI 1.4a or DisplayPort v1.2. Sapphire also released a new version of its successful R9 280x that features the company's exclusive Vapor-X cooling Solution. The new R9 280x features an enhanced GCN core, with 2048 stream processors, and a 1GHz core clock.

Giant single celled organisms that thawed out from arctic ice and took over mankind use to be a thing only heard of in low-budget, b-grade movies from the 60's and 70's, but the reality is that large viruses frozen in permafrost is a very real reality. Recently, scientist thawed out a block of 30,000-year old permafrost and allowed any viruses that survived to infect the cells of amoebas.

The amoebas used in the study were also a strain found in 30,000 year old permafrost that were reanimated by researchers. When combined with the viruses, the amoeba cells burst, or what is called cellular lysis. When inspected, the burst cells contained a virus that was one of the largest ever discovered and is very similar to a previously discovered ancient virus named Pandoravirus. Due to the similarities and its jug like shape, the new virus was named Pithovirus after a type of amphora used by Pandora.

The Pithovirus contains a genome of just 600,000 DNA bases which is small in terms of modern-day viruses. Extra space inside the virus is consumed by proteins that are needed for the virus to begin replication. Additionally the Pithovirus is only able to encode 467 proteins which is much less than any other giant virus ever discovered.

With Batman: Arkham Origins nearing its next DLC launch date, Warner Bros. has just announced the next title in the franchise. Batman: Arkham Knight will be the fourth installment in the blockbuster series that chronicles the efforts of the efforts of Bruce Wayne to cleanse the streets of Gotham City from the criminal scum that plague its streets.

Warner Bros. says that this will be the highest-detailed, and fully realized version of Gotham the series has seen, and the Batmobile will be derivable this time around as well. The game will arrive in late 2014 on the PS4 as well as the Xbox One, and PC. No word was given on an exact launch date and pricing was not mentioned either. Box art for the game has popped up on Reddit though.

The use of social media with real-time capability could one day be used to track drug and medical issues, hopefully able to prevent medical outbreaks. Using Twitter analytics and linking the collected information with drug use and geographic data, for example, could allow big data to provide another good tool for medical researchers.

"Ultimately, these methods suggest that we can use 'big data' from social media for remote monitoring and surveillance of HIV risk behaviors and potential outbreaks," said Sean Young, David Geffen School of Medicine assistant professor, in a statement.

There is growing interest among university researchers and the private sector teaming up to monitor medical risk behavior - and to try and predict where a medical outbreak might occur next - though it's still a complicated matter. Of 550 million tweets collected from May 26 to Dec. 9, 2012, researchers found 8,538 tweets related to sexually risky behavior - and more than 1,300 implying stimulant drug use.

Augmented reality isn't a new technology, but its growing emergence has given developers and retailers an innovative manner to approach customers.

Startup companies such as Blippar, Daqri, Layar, Sayduck, and Waygo are developing niche augmented reality apps and services - and bigger companies are dumping more research funds into seeing how to integrate AR into customer offerings.

Moving forward, the regular augmented reality market is expected to grow 30 percent year-over-year during the next four years - and the mobile augmented reality will top $1 billion annually by 2015 - as consumers, developers, and companies willing to try using augmented reality.

U.S. electronics store RadioShack announced it plans to close up to 1,100 of its stores in the United States, as the company continues to struggle in a fight for survival.

RadioShack has a large retail footprint in the United States, with 90 percent of US shoppers located within a few minutes of at least one store.

"Our focus on the brand, our operations, and the in-store experience has been unfolding in parallel with a strategic review of our store footprint," said Joseph Magnacca, RadioShack CEO, in a press statement. "Over the past few months, we have undertaken a comprehensive review of our portfolio from many angles - location, area demographics, lease life and financial performance - in order to consolidate our store base into fewer locations while maintaining a strong presence in each market."

If you are a fan of outrageous exotic sports cars, you will be familiar with the Lamborghini name. Lamborghini has been making some of the coolest high performance cars since the 60's and its latest offering is a replacement for the Gallardo called the Huracan. The car is all-new and has a very slick digital dashboard.

The digital dash inside the car replaces old-fashioned analog gauges and is powered by NVIDIA. The digital dash uses a 12.3-inch TFT display offering a resolution of 1440 x 540. The graphics for that dash are powered by a Tegra 30 chip from the Tegra 3 series.

The digital muscle behind the dash lets the virtual tachometer work at 60 fps so it can keep up with the engine without causing difficult to read lag. The digital dash can be configured to show what the driver wants to see with three modes. The Full Drive mode offers an analog style tachometer with smaller displays for fuel level, temperature and a digital speedo. Mixed mode frees up half that display for a navigation screen.

If you have been around long enough to remember a world when most people didn't have mobile phones and we relied on a home phone and an answering machine to stay in contact, you will appreciate a new patent Apple has been granted. One of the things that people liked about answering machines is that you can listen to the messages being left as a way to screen calls. That is one thing you can't do on a smartphone.

Apple has been granted patent by the USPTO that is a patent acquired via the Rockstar Consortium when it purchased Nortel patents a while back. The patent shows a way that the smartphone user can listen in to a caller leaving them a voice mail in real-time.

The system covered in the patent shows a way that a conference call is set up on-the-fly between the caller, voice mail server, and the phone owner. The user's phone mic is muted to keep the listening in on the down low.