Tag: linux

Crytek USA Collapses, Sells Game IP To Other Developers

MojoKid (1002251) writes Game developer Crytek’s problems have been detailed recently from various source, and it’s now clear that it wasn’t just the company’s UK studios that were affected. Crytek announced today that it has officially moved development of its F2P shooter Hunt: Horrors of the Guilded Age to a German developer, ignoring the fact that the majority of the US team had apparently already quit the company. The problem? Just as in the UK, the US employees weren’t getting paid. In a separate announcement, Crytek also declared that development of the Homefront series had passed entirely to developer Deep Silver. The company has stated, “On completion of the proposed acquisition, the Homefront team from Crytek’s Nottingham studio would transfer their talents to Koch Media in compliance with English law and continue their hard work on upcoming shooter, Homefront: The Revolution. Both parties hope to finalize and implement a deal soon.” It’s hard to see this as good news for Crytek. The company can make all the noise it wants about moving from a development studio to a publisher model, but Crytek as a company was always known for two things — the CryEngine itself, adapted for a handful of titles and the Crysis series. Without those factors, what’s left? Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Crytek USA Collapses, Sells Game IP To Other Developers

Smoking Mothers May Alter the DNA of Their Children

sciencehabit (1205606) writes “Pregnant women who smoke don’t just harm the health of their baby—they may actually impair their child’s DNA, according to new research. A genetic analysis shows that the children of mothers who smoke harbor far more chemical modifications of their genome — known as epigenetic changes — than kids of non-smoking mothers. Many of these are on genes tied to addiction and fetal development. The finding may explain why the children of smokers continue to suffer health complications later in life. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Smoking Mothers May Alter the DNA of Their Children

Do Apple and Google Sabotage Older Phones? What the Graphs Don’t Show

Harvard economics professor Sendhil Mullainathan takes a look in the New York Times at interesting correlations between the release dates of new phones and OSes and search queries that indicate frustration with the speed of the phones that people already have. Mullainathan illustrates with graphs (and gives plausible explanations for the difference) just how different the curves are over time for the search terms “iPhone slow” and “Samsung Galaxy slow.” It’s easy to see with the iPhone graph especially how it could seem to users that Apple has intentionally slowed down older phones to nudge them toward upgrading. While he’s careful not to rule out intentional slowing of older phone models (that’s possible, after all), Mullainathan cites several factors that mean there’s no need to believe in a phone-slowing conspiracy, and at least two big reasons (reputation, liability) for companies — Apple, Google, and cellphone manufacturers like Samsung — not to take part in one. He points out various wrinkles in what the data could really indicate, including genuine but innocent slowdowns caused by optimizing for newer hardware. It’s an interesting look at the difference between having mere statistics, no matter how rigorously gathered, and knowing quite what they mean. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Do Apple and Google Sabotage Older Phones? What the Graphs Don’t Show

GOG.com Announces Linux Support

For years, Good Old Games has made a business out of selling classic PC game titles completely free of DRM. Today they announced that their platform now supports Linux. They said, We’ve put much time and effort into this project and now we’ve found ourselves with over 50 titles, classic and new, prepared for distribution, site infrastructure ready, support team trained and standing by … We’re still aiming to have at least 100 Linux games in the coming months, but we’ve decided not to delay the launch just for the sake of having a nice-looking number to show off to the press. … Note that we’ve got many classic titles coming officially to Linux for the very first time, thanks to the custom builds prepared by our dedicated team of penguin tamers. … For both native Linux versions, as well as special builds prepared by our team, GOG.com will provide distro-independent tar.gz archives and support convenient DEB installers for the two most popular Linux distributions: Ubuntu and Mint, in their current and future LTS editions. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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GOG.com Announces Linux Support

Dropbox Head Responds To Snowden Claims About Privacy

First time accepted submitter Carly Page writes When asked for its response to Edward Snowden’s claims that “Dropbox is hostile to privacy”, Dropbox told The INQUIRER that users concerned about privacy should add their own encryption. The firm warned however that if users do, not all of the service’s features will work. Head of Product at Dropbox for Business Ilya Fushman says: “We have data encrypted on our servers. We think of encryption beyond that as a users choice. If you look at our third-party developer ecosystem you’ll find many client-side encryption apps….It’s hard to do things like rich document rendering if they’re client-side encrypted. Search is also difficult, we can’t index the content of files. Finally, we need users to understand that if they use client-side encryption and lose the password, we can’t then help them recover those files.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Dropbox Head Responds To Snowden Claims About Privacy

Intel Launches Self-Encrypting SSD

MojoKid writes: Intel just launched their new SSD 2500 Pro series solid state drive, the follow-up to last year’s SSD 1500 Pro series, which targets corporate and small-business clients. The drive shares much of its DNA with some of Intel’s consumer-class drives, but the Pro series cranks things up a few notches with support for advanced security and management features, low power states, and an extended management toolset. In terms of performance, the Intel SSD 2500 Pro isn’t class-leading in light of many enthusiast-class drives but it’s no slouch either. Intel differentiates the 2500 Pro series by adding support for vPro remote-management and hardware-based self-encryption. The 2500 Pro series supports TCG (Trusted Computing Group) Opal 2.0 features and is Microsoft eDrive capable as well. Intel also offers an administration tool for easy management of the drive. With the Intel administration tool, users can reset the PSID (physical presence security ID), though the contents of the drive will be wiped. Sequential reads are rated at up to 540MB/s, sequential writes at up to 480MB/s, with 45K – 80K random read / write IOps. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Intel Launches Self-Encrypting SSD

MicroxWin Creates Linux Distribution That Runs Debian/Ubuntu & Android Apps

An anonymous reader writes VolksPC who developed MicroXwin as a lightweight X Window Server has come up with their own Linux distribution. Setting apart VolksPC’s distribution from others is that it’s based on both Debian and Android and has the capability to run Debian/Ubuntu/Android apps together in a native ARM experience. The implementation doesn’t depend on VNC or other similar solutions of the past that have tried to join desktop apps with mobile Android apps. This distribution is also reportedly compatible with all Android applications. The distribution is expected to begin shipping on an ARM mini-PC stick. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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MicroxWin Creates Linux Distribution That Runs Debian/Ubuntu & Android Apps

More Forgotten Vials of Deadly Diseases Discovered

schwit1 (797399) writes FDA officials now admit that when they discovered six undocumented vials of smallpox in a facility in Maryland they also found 327 additional vials that contained dengue, influenza, and rickettsia. “FDA scientists said they have not yet confirmed whether the newly disclosed vials actually contained the pathogens listed on their labels. The agency is conducting a nationwide search of all cold storage units for any other missing samples. Investigators destroyed 32 vials containing tissue samples and a non-contagious virus related to smallpox. Several unlabeled vials were sent to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for testing and the remaining 279 samples were shipped to the Department of Homeland Security for safekeeping.” The FDA’s deputy director is quoted with what might be the understatement of the year. “The reasons why these samples went unnoticed for this long is something we’re actively trying to understand.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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More Forgotten Vials of Deadly Diseases Discovered

US Marines Demonstrate Ultra Heavy-Lift Amphibious Connector Prototype

Zothecula writes In a recent demonstration carried out during RIMPAC 2014, the US Marines displayed and tested a fully-functional, half-scale prototype of its new amphibious transport vehicle. The proposed full-size version of the Ultra Heavy-Lift Amphibious Connecter (UHAC) is designed to power across the water with a payload of nearly 200 tons at up to 20 knots and be capable of driving up on to the shore and over the top of obstructions up to 10ft high. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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US Marines Demonstrate Ultra Heavy-Lift Amphibious Connector Prototype

Breaches Exposed 22.8 Million Personal Records of New Yorkers

An anonymous reader writes Attorney General Eric T. Schneiderman issued a new report examining the growing number, complexity, and costs of data breaches in the New York State. The report reveals that the number of reported data security breaches in New York more than tripled between 2006 and 2013. In that same period, 22.8 million personal records of New Yorkers have been exposed in nearly 5, 000 data breaches, which have cost the public and private sectors in New York upward of $1.37 billion in 2013. The demand on secondary markets for stolen information remains robust. Freshly acquired stolen credit card numbers can fetch up to $45 per record, while other types of personal information, such as Social Security numbers and online account information, can command even higher prices. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Breaches Exposed 22.8 Million Personal Records of New Yorkers