brides-cond – Page 34 – Tech Today w/ Ken May

GTA V’s new console/PC re-release to add optional first-person view

Since its launch as a top-down, sprite-based crime simulator in 1997, the Grand Theft Auto series has always taken place strictly from a third-person perspective. That’s set to change on November 18, as the previously announced re-release of Grand Theft Auto V hits the Xbox One and PS4 with a series-first optional first-person perspective. The new first-person mode goes a lot farther than unofficial mods that have tried to add a behind-the-eyes perspective to GTA games in the past. “You have to change pretty much everything,” GTA V animation director Rob Nelson told IGN in a promotional interview talking about the new feature. “I mean, if you want to do it right. We have a very solid third-person animation system, but you don’t just put the camera down there and expect to see the guns, aim, and shoot. All those animations are new when you switch to first-person, because it all has to be animated to the camera, to make it feel like a proper first-person experience that I think people would expect. All the timings have to be re-evaluated.” Other little details added for the benefit of the new view include recoil on weapons, view-restricting goggles and helmets when piloting certain vehicles, and a cell phone menu that your character now actually holds in front of his face. The official trailer for the new mode seems to show the perspective automatically swiveling around to view important story and character moments. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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GTA V’s new console/PC re-release to add optional first-person view

FTC fines online dating service $616,000 for using “virtual cupids”

More and more people are becoming familiar with the joys—and frustrations—of online dating. A recent Pew study found that 10 percent of the US public is using online dating services, and a full 38 percent of those people say they are “single and looking.” There’s enough money to be made as an Internet matchmaker that it’s apparently sparking some companies to push the boundaries of what’s legal. Yesterday, the Federal Trade Commission disclosed that it reached a settlement with JDI Dating Ltd. , a UK company that runs 18 dating sites that it claims have over 12 million members. The sites include CupidsWand.com, FlirtCrowd.com, and FindMeLove.com. JDI will have to pay $616,165 in redress, and it must stop business practices that were said to violate both the FTC Act and a newer law that regulates recurring billing online. JDI’s dating sites would make fake profiles, which the company called “virtual cupids,” and have them send computer-generated messages to new users who had created profiles but hadn’t yet paid. On JDI’s websites, users received an e-mail notifying them that another user sent them a “wink” within minutes of joining. Then they got additional winks, messages, and photo requests, supposedly from other members in their geographic area. Read 10 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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FTC fines online dating service $616,000 for using “virtual cupids”

One week later, Google algorithm change hits streaming, torrent sites hard

One of Project Free TV’s domains has dropped in traffic since Google’s algorithm change. se Video streaming and torrent sites have dropped precipitously in Google rankings after the company altered its algorithm last Monday, according to reports from Searchmetrics. One of Project Free TV’s main operating domains, free-tv-video-online.me, fell 96 percent in Searchmetric’s rankings, one of the biggest drops alongside torrentz.eu and thepiratebay.se. Google committed to fighting piracy by decrementing search results that allow users to access illegal streams or torrents back in 2012. The first round of changes didn’t help much, according to interested parties like the Recording Industry Association of America and the Motion Picture Association of America. Google complies with takedown requests, of which it received 224 million in the last year, according to its own report. The company responded to these within six hours on average, but industry parties pushed for Google to make content sites less visible overall. Even with its new solution, Google notes that this won’t be the same as removing domains from search entirely: “the number of noticed pages is typically only a tiny fraction of the total number of pages on the site,” the company said. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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One week later, Google algorithm change hits streaming, torrent sites hard

Leader of “most sophisticated cybercrime ring” sentenced to 11 years

An Estonian man who US authorities said was a leader in one of the world’s “most sophisticated” illegal hacking organizations was handed an 11-year prison sentence in connection to a scheme that got away with $9.4 million from ATMs across the globe. The sentence handed to Sergei Nicolaevich Tšurikov on Friday is among the largest ever given a hacker in the US. The biggest term , 20 years, was first given to Albert Gonzalez in 2010 for being the ringleader of the hack of retail outlet TJX . “A leader of one of the most sophisticated cybercrime rings in the world has been brought to justice and sentenced,” United States Attorney Sally Quillian Yates of Atlanta said about Tšurikov’s sentencing. “In just one day in 2008, an American credit card processor was hacked in perhaps one of the most sophisticated and organized computer fraud attacks ever conducted.” Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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A huge Halo: Master Chief Collection clocks in at 65GB

Microsoft reportedly scrapped its original plans to ship Master Chief Collection in a “car full of 5.25″ disks” format. Lenore Edman About a year ago, we had to quickly get used to 50 GB download sizes for console games like PS4 launch title Killzone: Shadow Fall . Game size inflation hasn’t exactly stopped since then, as evidenced by word that the upcoming Halo: Master Chief Collection will take up a whopping 65 GB on Xbox One hard drives next month. Buried in Friday’s official “gone gold” announcement was word that the Xbox One’s remastered edition of the first four Halo games, which is currently available for pre-loading, would actually be bigger than a standard 50GB Blu-ray disc. Rather than splitting the 65GB across two discs for the retail edition, Microsoft has decided to include 45GB of data in the box and require players to download a 20GB day one “content update” to access “some features and multiplayer content.” Players will be able to play the bulk of the single-player content while the 20GB content pack is downloading and installing, Microsoft says. Why make even retail buyers download so much data? “The game is designed to run as a single, unified product,” 343 Industries Franchise Development Director Frank O’Connor explained on gaming forum NeoGAF over the weekend . “Digital is seamless obviously, but we also wanted disc users to have the same experience, without swapping discs. Since the bulk of [the download] is [multiplayer] or MP related, the logic is sound.” While it may have been feasible to simply install a single, unified game to the Xbox One hard drive from two discs, O’Connor elaborated that such a solution “simply wasn’t practical for this product, this year in this timeline.” Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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A huge Halo: Master Chief Collection clocks in at 65GB

First major update to Windows 10 Preview, delivered through Windows Update

We’ve written before about Windows 10’s new updating policy, and today we’re seeing the real-world result for the first time. The Windows 10 Technical Preview, build 9849, is being updated to build 9860. That update will roll out automatically to members of the Windows Insider program, and it will be delivered through Windows Update. The operating system upgrade is a little more heavyweight than a regular hotfix; systems will need to reboot to finish installation, and Microsoft says that the reboot will take longer than normal. The major feature of the new build is that it contains the first iteration of Windows 10’s notification center. At the moment, it’s a simple collection of historic notifications. Microsoft says that future builds will add more capabilities to the notification center, such as the ability to take actions in response to notifications. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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First major update to Windows 10 Preview, delivered through Windows Update

New chips will “power the gigabit era of DSL,” Broadcom claims

Broadcom today unveiled DSL chips that use the new G.fast standard to deliver up to 1Gbps broadband over copper phone lines. That doesn’t mean everyone who has DSL will suddenly get a huge speed upgrade. G.fast, a standard from the International Telecommunication Union , is intended for fiber-and-copper networks in which fiber delivers data close to homes and copper takes it the rest of the way. These networks are cheaper to build than fiber-to-the-home because they reuse existing copper, but thus far they haven’t been able to match the gigabit speeds of fiber-only service. Alcatel-Lucent’s Bell Labs and the British telecom company BT are both testing G.fast, with the latter using Huawei technology . Broadcom is now joining the party with technology it plans to sell to Internet service providers, who would then roll it out to their customers. The chips will power both the back-end technology needed to deliver high speeds as well as home gateway systems for Internet users. Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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New chips will “power the gigabit era of DSL,” Broadcom claims

The north pole moved to the North Pole in a single human lifetime

Leo Reynolds Geology rewards an active imagination. It gives us a lot of tantalizing clues about very different times and places in Earth’s history, leaving us to try to answer “Man, what would that be like? ” One of the things that’s tough to image involves changing something that most of us never give a second thought—the fact that compasses point north. That’s plainly true today , but it hasn’t always been. What we call the “north” magnetic pole—the object of your compass’ affection—doesn’t need to be located in the Arctic (it noticeably wanders there, by the way). It feels equally at home in the Antarctic. The geologic record tells us that the north and south magnetic poles frequently trade places. In fact, the signal of this magnetic flip-flopping recorded in the seafloor was the final key to the discovery of plate tectonics, as it let us see how ocean crust forms and moves over time . That the poles flip is interesting in itself, but “Man, what would that be like? ” Does the magnetic pole slowly walk along the curve of the Earth over thousands of years, meaning your compass might have pointed to some part of the equator for long stretches of time? Do the poles weaken to nothing, disappearing for a while before re-emerging in the new configuration? Do they somehow flip in the blink of an eye? Given the number of species that use the Earth’s magnetic field to navigate—especially for seasonal migrations—this is more than an academic curiosity. Read 9 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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The north pole moved to the North Pole in a single human lifetime

Microsoft “loves Linux” as it makes Azure bigger, better

Wait, what happened at this thing?!? Microsoft In San Francisco today, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said something that was more than a little surprising: Microsoft loves Linux. The operating system once described as a “cancer” by Nadella’s predecessor, Steve Ballmer, is now being embraced (if not extended) with open arms, at least when it comes to Redmond’s Azure cloud platform. Nadella told us that some 20 percent of VMs on Azure use the open source operating system. The San Francisco event served dual purpose. First, it was an opportunity for Microsoft to tell the world just how much Azure had grown—Microsoft may not have been first to the cloud computing scene, but a ton of investment and development means that the company is now credible, and, if Gartner’s magic quadrants are to be believed, world-leading. Second, the event served to introduce new features and partnerships. Microsoft’s major sales pitch for Azure is essentially a three-pronged argument that Microsoft is the only company that can really do cloud right. Read 10 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Latest Xbox One update adds MKV support, quicker voiceless commands

Quick-snap! Now, Kinect-less Xbox One owners can do a few more cool system functions on the fly. Microsoft’s near-monthly streak of Xbox One updates continued on Wednesday with a substantial October update . The console maker had already teased the update’s most intriguing feature in August when it announced a media-player app set to handle a staggering number of codecs—particularly the MKV container—and DLNA streaming from other devices on a home network. XB1’s new media player, like the system’s Blu-ray player, must be loaded as a separate app. We were able to test it during a beta period, and it worked as advertised, meaning it allowed us to watch all of our favorite, legitimately acquired TV shows and films in crisp MKV format. The update’s other major addition, a quick-snap menu, can be accessed with a double-tap of the controller’s home button. It focuses largely on functions that were formerly locked to voice control, including quick loads of previous games and apps and the ability to record your last 30 seconds of gameplay—which should make it easier for players who snapped up a cheaper, Kinect-less XB1 to multitask with the system. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments