EA on the defensive, offering a free PC game to anyone who purchased SimCity
EA are in a world of hurt right now, so bad that they're now offering a free game to anyone who has purchased SimCity. They're doing this as an apology, with Maxis' boss, Lucy Bradshaw took to a blog post saying that anyone with a copy of the currently out of action sim game that was activated before March 18, will receive a free game from EA's catalog.
The full blog post is below:
SimCity debacle forces possible government intervention through petition
As a huge fan of SimCity, who pumped countless hours into as a kid, I haven't purchased it yet personally and I'm sure you know it's for good reason - the huge amounts of issues. We've posted many times about it, not just once, or twice, but even three, four, and now five times. There is now a petition against DRM, with a strong title of 'Institute an industry-wide return policy for video games that rely on remote servers and DRM to function properly.'
The petition states, in full:
Dishonored's level designer loves the PS4's RAM, calls 8GB a 'joy'
A famous quote in the tech world is "nobody will ever need more than 640kB of RAM." Obviously we've blasted through that amount of RAM with cell phones and even embedded devices having much more than that. Yet, for some reason, the PlayStation 3 came with just 512MB of RAM, forcing level designers to cut corners.
Dishonored's lead level designer Christophe Carrier:
Continue reading: Dishonored's level designer loves the PS4's RAM, calls 8GB a 'joy' (full post)
AT&T perfectly happy to unlock your smartphone provided you're out of contract
The White House and FCC aren't the only groups that are advocating for the legal unlocking of smartphones. AT&T has authored a post on their blog explaining that they are perfectly happy to unlock your device as long as the customer is paying his or her bills and they have fulfilled their service agreement commitment.
If you're an AT&T customer who meets the requirements above and have tried unlocking your device to no avail, let us know! We'd love to hear your story in the comments. If you'd like to read AT&T's full blog post detailing their unlocking policy, you can head over to AT&T's website.
Facebook's Poke barely affected Snapchat according to usage data
It looks like Facebook hasn't been able to dominate the destructible communication market. New active usage data suggests that Facebook's Poke app hasn't had much, if any, impact on the usage of Snapchat, the app that came onto the scene around a year ago.
According to active user data from Onavo, Snapchat's market share grew after the launch of Poke. In February, the data shows that roughly 12 percent of iPhone users in the United States opened Snapchat. This is compared to Poke, which the data shows was only opened by about 0.25 percent of users in February.
It just goes to show that Facebook can't be the best at everything. Sometimes it's better for a company to focus on just one or two main products. For Facebook, this is social networking.
Continue reading: Facebook's Poke barely affected Snapchat according to usage data (full post)
EA changes its mind about offering refunds for SimCity customers
The latest news surrounding the numerous problems plaguing the SimCity launch is that EA has changed its mind about refunds. A post authored March 5 by EA Global community manager Marcel Hatam said, "If you regrettably feel that we let you down, you can - of course - request a refund for your order at https://help.origin.com/contact-us."
Numerous Redditors have said that they were receiving refunds as late as yesterday afternoon. Currently users are reporting that Origin CSRs are saying that they cannot provide a refund. The original post, seen above, has been amended to point users to the return policy. Origin's Twitter account also tweeted the following:
Continue reading: EA changes its mind about offering refunds for SimCity customers (full post)
Piriform to release CCleaner for Android, says its hard at work making it now
CCleaner has been a staple in the PC file clean up game for years. In fact, I have been using the program since it first hit the market. Now the company behind CCleaner is gearing up to release it in Android form.
A post on CCleaner's blog stated:
Canonical's Mark Shuttleworth says he wants Ubuntu to appeal to the masses, has no interest in keeping things "leet"
Ubuntu, the user-friendly Linux distro, has seen a multitude of changes and transformations over the last few months. It has sprouted wings and became a fully functional multi-platform operating system. With these changes Canonical has taken a lot of flak and now founder Mark Shuttleworth is speaking out about how he feels.
Shuttleworth on his personal blog said that he has no interest in keeping Ubuntu "hard" for the "elite" crowd. He said that in the grand scheme of things unity, mobile processing and cloud applications are being focused on because that is where the common PC user wants things to go.
RumorTT: Apple could use Qualcomm Snapdragon in upcoming cheaper version iPhone
Apple's A series processors are nothing to joke about. They routinely smash the competition in graphics benchmarks and often win the power consumption war with rival chips. Unfortunately they are more expensive than off the shelf ARM SoC's.
Cost savings is a huge part of bringing a cheaper iPhone to market, and is why Apple could be considering an alternative for its cheap iPhone that is set to launch later this year. Rumors are circling through the tech media world that Apple may be eyeballing Qualcomm's Snapdragon as the replacement chip for the cheaper iPhone.
Much like Apple's A6, Qualcomm's latest Snapdragon features on-board LTE, custom cores and low power consumption. As it is designed to power a wide range of Android smartphones, there is an abundance of the chips available, which brings the price down considerably if you were looking to purchase a few million of them, as Apple no doubt would. In reality we are still unsure if the so-called "cheap iPhone" is even a real thing so as always, treat these rumors as such.
NVIDIA users experiencing performance issues in Tomb Raider, forces the company to make a statement
Crystal Dynamics' reboot of Tomb Raider has just been released, and being an AMD Gaming Evolved title, Radeon owners haven't been having an issue running it at all. GeForce users on the other hand? Well, you should read on.
GeForce users have been having huge problems with the game, so much so that NVIDIA's Andrew Burnes, the editor of the official GeForce.com website, wrote a three-paragraph statement regarding the performance issues of Tomb Raider on NVIDIA hardware: