digest-golf – Page 54

Intel closes AppUp, its PC app store (Intel had a PC app store?)

We’re apparently not the only ones who forgot AppUp was a thing—the store closes in March. Intel Intel’s AppUp store for Windows apps has been around since January of 2010, though you could be forgiven for forgetting about it. Intel apparently wants to forget, too: the company announced today that the AppUp store will be closing its doors on March 11, 2014, “after which no new content or apps will be available for download.” An extensive FAQ about the closing covers most of the important facts. E-mail support for AppUp apps will be available until June 15, 2014. The AppUp client application and some apps will continue to function after the store closes, but many applications “require communication with the AppUp client and may not work after May 15, 2014.” Apps purchased through AppUp will no longer receive updates once the store closes, nor will Intel be able to send product keys for keyed apps after March 11. If you want to download the AppUp client and install it now, you’ll either need to find it from another download source or contact Intel customer service. Intel is offering refunds for some paid apps here , but that page isn’t yet functional, and it’s not clear what criteria a purchase will need to meet to be eligible for a refund. Refunds will only be available between now and December 19, 2014. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Intel closes AppUp, its PC app store (Intel had a PC app store?)

Amazon mulling price hike for Amazon Prime shipping and streaming service

Amazon has just reported its earnings for the fourth quarter of 2013 . According to The Verge , Amazon CFO Tom Szkutak mentioned that the company is considering a price increase for its Amazon Prime customers in the US. The decision hasn’t been made, but high shipping costs could prompt a price increase of between $20 and $40 a year for the service. Prime began life as a service that offered free two-day shipping on many items for a flat, $79-a-year fee. As Amazon has branched out into tablets and streaming media, perks like the Instant Video service and Kindle Owners’ Lending Library have been added to sweeten the deal. The potential price increase would be the first since Prime was introduced in the US in 2005. Amazon reported income of $239 million on sales of $25.59 billion for the fourth quarter of 2013, lower than analysts had expected. The company’s guidance for the first quarter of 2014 projects sales between $18.2 and $19.9 billion and expects income to be somewhere between a profit of $200 million and a loss of $200 million. Read on Ars Technica | Comments

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Amazon mulling price hike for Amazon Prime shipping and streaming service

AT&T plan to shut off Public Switched Telephone Network moves ahead at FCC

PhotoAtelier On Thursday, the Federal Communications Commission is expected to take its first major step toward letting AT&T and other carriers replace the country’s traditional phone system with one that works entirely over Internet Protocol networks. AT&T has argued that the technology transition should be accompanied by deregulation that would strip the company of most of its monopoly-era obligations. AT&T likely won’t get everything it wants, though. FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler wrote in a blog post last November that he intends to “ensure the continuation of the Network Compact” with universal service for all Americans, consumer protections, public safety services, and competition.In other words, AT&T can’t stop maintaining the Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) without a plan to preserve current service levels. This is not as simple as just making sure phone calls get through, although solving the rural call completion problem by itself is a challenge. It also means maintaining access to 911 services, fire alarms, fax machines, medical alert systems, anything that relies on the phone network. Not everything is to be decided this week. The FCC vote is on an AT&T petition to launch customer trials of new IP-based networks. While AT&T’s petition is expected to be granted, the FCC’s proposed order is written to ensure continuation of the four values (universal service, consumer protection, public safety, and competition) as Wheeler emphasized, an FCC official told Ars on condition that he not be named. Read 10 remaining paragraphs | Comments

PlayStation Plus not required to play Elder Scrolls Online on PS4

You will need to pay $15/month to see vistas like this in The Elder Scrolls Online . Bethesda Softworks parent company Zenimax Media has confirmed that its upcoming MMO The Elder Scrolls Online won’t require a PlayStation Plus subscription to be played on the PS4. Xbox One players, on the other hand, will have to pay for an Xbox Live Gold subscription in order to play the game. All versions of The Elder Scrolls Online , including PC and Mac editions due for release on April 4, will require a $15 monthly fee, in addition to a purchase of the $60 base game. But Xbox One owners will also be required to purchase the $60-per-year Xbox Live Gold subscription that is generally required for all online games on the system. That subscription is also required to use entertainment apps like Netflix and Hulu Plus on the Xbox One, as well as services like Skype and Internet Explorer. Sony doesn’t require PlayStation Plus to use similar entertainment apps on the PS4. In a change from its policy with its previous consoles, Sony generally requires a $50-per-year PlayStation Plus subscription to play most online games on the PS4, though free-to-play MMOs such as Warframe and DC Universe Online have been specifically exempted from this requirement. Sony has also confirmed that the upcoming PS4 release of Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn also won’t require a PlayStation Plus subscription on top of that game’s $13+ monthly fee (that title is not coming to any Microsoft consoles). Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Drilling surprise opens door to magma-powered electricity

Gretar Ívarsson Can enormous heat deep in the Earth be harnessed to provide energy for us on the surface? A promising report from a geothermal borehole project that accidentally struck magma—the same fiery, molten rock that spews from volcanoes—suggests it could. The Icelandic Deep Drilling Project, IDDP , has been drilling shafts up to 5km deep in an attempt to harness the heat in the volcanic bedrock far below the surface of Iceland. But in 2009 a borehole at Krafla, Northeast Iceland, reached only 2,100m deep before unexpectedly striking a pocket of magma. The molten rock was intruding into the Earth’s upper crust from below at searing temperatures of 900 to 1000 degrees Celsius. This borehole, IDDP-1, was the first in a series of wells drilled by the IDDP in Iceland looking for usable geothermal resources. A special report in this month’s Geothermics journal details the engineering feats and scientific results that came from the attempt to harness the incredible geothermal heat. (The only previous case like this was in Hawaii in 2007, but that well was sealed in concrete.) Read 12 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Drilling surprise opens door to magma-powered electricity

Streaming comes to Steam: run on your gaming rig, play on your laptop

Valve is not done redefining itself yet. The gaming juggernaut added ‘operating system developer’ to ‘games studio’ and ‘digital media distributor’ with the introduction of SteamOS. And now it’s adding ‘streaming service’ to its repertoire. The service , currently in beta, allows users to stream game play from one PC to any other PC in their home. Invited users run a beta version of the Steam client on their computers and have settings for adjusting the amount of bandwidth the stream consumes. Though work is in progress to make streaming an option from OS X and Linux machines, the service is primarily aimed at Windows PCs to start. The Windows focus may, in part, be a result of the relatively larger library of Windows games on Steam. Valve’s Linux-based SteamOS has one big limitation compared with the full Steam experience: it can only run games compatible with Linux. That limitation may be mostly put to rest when a Steam Box is now paired with a Windows PC, allowing users to run any game in the Steam library either natively in the Steam Box or streamed. The other key benefit to the new streaming option is convenience. Graphically rich games often suffer when run on thermally limited notebooks. Decoding a video stream requires drastically less computing power than rendering a 3D environment, so gaming on a modestly specced laptop could become much more satisfying. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

FBI: US court websites went down due to “technical problems,” not DDOS

Flickr user TexasGOPVote.com While the rest of us were fretting about the Gmail outage on Friday , lawyers and those involved in the United States judicial system were concerned that uscourts.gov and other federal courts’ sites had been hit by a distributed denial-of-service (DDOS) attack. Also suffering an outage was pacer.gov , the “Public Access to Court Electronic Records” (PACER), a common way for lawyers and journalists to access court documents online. (That site, which normally charges $0.10 per page for documents, also has a free online mirror , known as RECAP.) Initially, a spokesperson for the Administrative Office of the US Courts told Politico on Friday that it was indeed a denial-of-service attack. A group calling itself the “European Cyber Army” initially also claimed responsibility on Twitter . Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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FBI: US court websites went down due to “technical problems,” not DDOS

Investigation of password crackers busts site feds say hacked 6,000 accounts

An international law-enforcement crackdown on paid password cracking services has resulted in at least 11 arrests, including the operators of an alleged cracker-for-hire site in the US that prosecutors said compromised almost 6,000 e-mail accounts. Mark Anthony Townsend, 45, of Cedarville, Arkansas, and Joshua Alan Tabor, 29, of Prairie Grove, Arkansas, ran a site called needapassword.com, according to court documents filed this week in federal court in Los Angeles. The site accepted user requests to hack into specific e-mail accounts hosted by Google, Yahoo, and other providers, prosecutors alleged. According to charging documents, the operators would break into the accounts, access their contents and send screenshots to the users proving the accounts had been compromised. The men would then send passwords in exchange for a fee paid to their PayPal account, prosecutors said. “Through www.needapassword.com, defendant and others known and unknown to the United States Attorney obtained unauthorized access to over 5,900 e-mail accounts submitted by customers,” a criminal information filed against Townsend stated. During the time of Tabor’s involvement, needapassword.com broke into at least 250 accounts, a separate charging document claimed. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Investigation of password crackers busts site feds say hacked 6,000 accounts

Amazon cuts cloud storage prices, Microsoft immediately follows suit

Yesterday, Amazon announced that it would be cutting the prices of both its S3 and EBS cloud-based storage. Today, Microsoft announced that it too was cutting the cost of its cloud storage. The software giant promised last April that it would match Amazon’s prices for commodity cloud services: storage, bandwidth, and computation. Amazon’s pricing varies from region to region, and the price cuts range from 6 percent if you’re storing between 1 and 50 terabytes of data, to up to 22 percent—though you’ll need to be storing at least 5 petabytes to take advantage of this. Microsoft says that not only is it going to match these prices, making cuts of up to 20 percent itself, but it will also charge the same amount in every region . This means that Azure storage will in some parts of the world as much as 10 percent cheaper than the Amazon equivalent. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Developer screenshots may show off Apple’s “iOS in the Car” progress

Steve Troughton-Smith One of the features Apple talked about when it unveiled iOS 7 at its Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC) back in June was “iOS in the Car,” a vehicle integration feature that would let drivers with supported vehicles talk to Siri, listen to and respond to text messages, use Maps, and perform other tasks without removing their hands from the wheel. That feature was absent from the original iOS 7 release, but rumors suggest it will be supported in the iOS 7.1 update that’s currently in beta testing. While Apple’s promotional page for iOS 7 shows some early screenshots of what iOS in the Car might look like, new screenshots pulled from developer Steve Troughton-Smith’s Twitter feed and published by 9to5Mac purport to show off a refined version of the interface. Apple Maps is the only usable app as of this writing, suggesting that the screenshots were taken in the iOS Simulator that shipped with the XCode developer tools rather than on actual hardware, but we can still see the basic UI changes that Apple has made since the original demo. There’s a left-aligned bar with the time, connection status, and a software Home button that appears to be persistent across all of the screenshots, and the rest of the interface’s graphics, fonts, and buttons closely mirror those used throughout iOS 7. A safety warning screen like the one used in most GPSs. Steve Troughton-Smith The list of apps should grow once the feature is actually released. Steve Troughton-Smith For most people, iOS in the Car’s biggest drawback will be that it requires a new car to support all of its features. Though Apple says a number of automakers (including Acura, Chevy, Ferrari, Honda, Hyundai, Infiniti, Jaguar, Kia, Mercedes-Benz, Nissan, and Opel) are interested in bringing the feature to some of their 2014 models, replacing a car to use a new feature is a bit more onerous than buying new cables or other accessories. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Developer screenshots may show off Apple’s “iOS in the Car” progress

Ken May

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