asdasdads Prince
BannedEverything posted by asdasdads Prince
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Back in September, I met with Valve’s Robin Walker ahead of the company’s grand Steam Machine launch spree and he said something crazy: “What does a mod of the Steam Controller look like? I don’t know. But I think in a year we will know, and it’ll be awesome.” Modding a controller? Such a strange idea. And yet here we are. Yesterday Valve officially released the Steam Controller’s CAD geometry, allowing you to hypothetically mod away. From the news post: “We are releasing the mechanical CAD geometry for the Steam Controller and are eager to see the accessories and variations that come from your creativity. We are making available, under Creative Commons licensing, the geometry of all externally visible parts. This allows you to create and share to your heart’s content, but you’ll need to get in touch with Valve if you want to sell your creations.” Notice Valve doesn’t actually rule out selling new designs. You just need Valve’s permission. How long do you think it takes until a hardware marketplace shows up on Steam? Anyway, free designs are fair game and Valve actually kicked things off with a solution to one of my personal pet peeves: A rear controller panel/battery door that lets you store the Steam Controller’s wireless USB dongle inside. That would’ve been handy on the stock controller. This is obviously a pretty niche pursuit—limited not just to those few who want to tinker, but to those who have 3D printers capable of fabricating the designs. Good on Valve for getting around to it though. I’ll be keeping an eye out for interesting ideas, and counting down the days years (this is Valve, after all) until Steam Controller version 2.0 comes along.
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In this tutorial you will learn how to improve Computer's Performance (with steps) Step 1 - Deleting Unwanted Files (Temporary Files) - %temp% Step 2 - Msconfig.exe Step 3 - Disk Cleanup Step 4 - Creating RAM.vbe (you can open it only if your PC is lagging) For 128 MB of RAM : mystring=(80000000) For 256 MB of RAM : mystring=(160000000) For 512 MB of RAM : mystring=(320000000) For 1 GB of RAM : mystring=(655000000) For 2 GB of RAM : mystring=(1000000000) For 3 GB of RAM : mystring=(1655000000) For 4 GB of RAM : mystring=(2000000000) Step 5 - Clear folder "Prefetch" Step 6 - Disk Defragment Step 7 - CCleaner (Clear Full PC + Registrar errors) Thanks for your time! Hope it will be helpful.
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Radovan Karadzic listened intently as the verdict and sentence was read out Former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic has been convicted of genocide and war crimes in the 1992-95 Bosnian war, and sentenced to 40 years in jail. UN judges in The Hague found him guilty of 10 of 11 charges, including genocide over the 1995 Srebrenica massacre. Karadzic, 70, is the most senior political figure to face judgement over the violent collapse of Yugoslavia. His case is being seen as one of the most important war crimes trials since World War Two. He had denied the charges, saying that any atrocities committed were the actions of rogue individuals, not the forces under his command. The trial, in which he represented himself, lasted eight years. The current president of the Bosnian Serb Republic, Milorad Dodik, condemned the verdict. "The West has apportioned blame to the Serbian people and that guilty cliche was imposed on all the decision-makers, including in this case today... Karadzic," he said at a ceremony to commemorate the anniversary of the start of Nato air strikes against Yugoslavia in 1999. "It really hurts that somebody has decided to deliver this verdict in The Hague exactly today, on the day when Nato decided to bomb Serbia... to cause so much catastrophic damage and so many casualties," Mr Dodik added. Radovan Karadzic had said no reasonable court would convict him. But listening to Judge Kwon, it was hard to see how any reasonable court could not convict him. Mr Karadzic listened intently, the corners of his mouth pulled down in a look of permanent disgust and, just perhaps, disbelief. By the end of an hour and 40 minutes, it was obvious what was coming. There's a strong sense of satisfaction here that one of the chief architects of Bosnia's bloody dismemberment has finally been found guilty. The court's work is almost done. But all eyes now will be on the fate of Karadzic's main general, Ratko Mladic. His name came up a great deal during Judge Kwon's summation, particularly in regard to the massacre of Srebrenica. It will be astonishing if Gen Mladic doesn't face a similar verdict and sentence. Meanwhile, some relatives of victims expressed disappointment at the outcome. "This came too late," said Bida Smajlovic, whose husband was killed at Srebrenica. "We were handed down a verdict in 1995. There is no sentence that could compensate for the horrors we went through or for the tears of only one mother, let alone thousands," she was quoted as saying by Reuters news agency. Karadzic's lawyer said he would appeal, a process that could take several more years. Many Bosnians have been following the trial closely "Dr Karadzic is disappointed and astonished. He feels that he was convicted on inference instead of evidence and will appeal [against] the judgement," Peter Robinson told journalists. Karadzic faced two counts of genocide. He was found not guilty of the first, relating to killing in several Bosnian municipalities. But he was found guilty of the second count relating to Srebrenica, where Bosnian Serb forces massacred more than 7,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys. "Karadzic was in agreement with the plan of the killings," Judge O-Gon Kwon said. The massacre happened in July 1995 when Srebrenica, an enclave besieged by Bosnian Serb forces for three years, was overrun. The bodies of the victims were dumped in mass graves. Karadzic was also found guilty of crimes against humanity relating to the siege and shelling of the city of Sarajevo over several years which left nearly 12,000 people dead. The judge said he had significantly contributed to a plan which emanated from the leadership and whose primary purpose was to spread terror in the city. Charges Genocide: Count 1 - genocide (in municipalities of Bratunac, Foca, Klyuc, Prijedor, Sanski Most, Vlasenica and Zvornik) - not guilty Count 2 - genocide (in Srebrenica) - guilty Crimes against humanity: Count 3 - persecutions - guilty Count 4 - extermination - guilty Count 5 - murder - guilty Count 7 - deportation - guilty Count 8 - inhumane acts (forcible transfer) - guilty Violations of the laws or customs of war: Count 6 - murder - guilty Count 9 - terror (in Sarajevo) - guilty Count 10 - unlawful attacks on civilians (in Sarajevo) - guilty Count 11 - taking hostage of UN observers and peacekeepers - guilty Mr Karadzic was also found guilty of orchestrating a campaign known as "ethnic cleansing" of non-Serbs from the territory of the breakaway Bosnian Serb republic, in which hundreds and thousands were driven from their homes. He would only be expected to serve two-thirds of his sentence. His time spent in detention - slightly more than seven years - will count towards the total. Top UN human rights official Zeid Ra'ad al-Hussein welcomed the verdict as "hugely significant". He said the trial "should give pause to leaders across Europe and elsewhere who seek to exploit nationalist sentiments and scapegoat minorities for broader social ills". At least 100,000 people in total died during fighting in the the Bosnian war. The conflict lasted nearly four years before a US-brokered peace deal brought it to an end in 1995. Gen Ratko Mladic, who commanded Bosnian Serb forces, is also awaiting his verdict at The Hague. Radovan Karadzic in August 1995 Karadzic Timeline 1945: Born in Montenegro 1960: Moves to Sarajevo 1968: Publishes collection of poetry 1971: Graduates in medicine 1983: Becomes team psychologist for Red Star Belgrade football club 1990: Becomes president of Serbian Democratic Party 1990s Political leader of Bosnian Serbs 2008: Arrested in Serbia 2009: Trial begins at The Hague 2016: Guilty verdict, sentenced to 40 years
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Tuesday's terrorism attacks in Brussels were met almost immediately with outpourings of emotion and displays of solidarity online. The word "Brussels" in various languages dominated Twitter's list of top worldwide trends. Under the French word for the city - Bruxelles - the most widely shared image was one drawn by Plantu, a cartoonist for the French newspaper Le Monde. It explicitly linked the November attacks in Paris to Tuesday's bombings: Plantu also drew one of the most widely shared images after the Charlie Hebdo attacks in January 2015. "Pray for Belgium", "Pray for Brussels" and "Je Suis Bruxelles" were among the most po[CENSORED]r Twitter slogans, all used tens of thousands of times in the hours after the attacks. A po[CENSORED]r set of memes used adaptations of the famous Belgian cartoon character Tintin and many people posted images incorporating the black, yellow and red of the Belgian flag: Other tributes incorporated Brussels landmarks such as The Atomium - a huge building based on a model of an atom originally constructed for the 1958 World's Fair - and Manneken Pis, a famous statue of a urinating small boy. This tribute includes a drawing of the Atomium "A little message for the terrorists" Outside the city's stock exchange, people chalked messages on the pavement in an apparently spontaneous tribute to the victims: Inside Belgium, a cluster of hashtags offering help including "Brussels lift", "open house", "ik wil helpen" ("I want to help") and "porte ouvert" ("open door") started trending as people offered assistance to those left stranded by the closing of the airport and the city's transport network. For further updates on the attacks.
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In this tutorial you will learn why you should care about ISO files and how to mount them in Windows 7 using freely available tools. Introduction you must know how to work with ISO files and how to gain access to them. In this article, I will cover why you should care about ISO files and how to mount them in Windows 7 using freely available tools. Want to install any major software application, operating system, or access any virtual CD/DVD disk? If so, you need to know what an ISO file is and how to access it. What is an ISO File and why do I need to access it? An ISO file is a disk image file format defined by the International Standards Organization (ISO). Thus, the file format is named after the organization that created it. Likely, any time that a CD or DVD image is stored on a hard drive (instead of an optical disk), it is stored as an "ISO file". These files end in the extension of ".iso". For example, if you download Windows 7, Windows 2008 R2, or Microsoft Office, all of those will be in the .ISO file format. Also, desktop and server virtualization software is able to mount these .ISO files in the virtual DVD drive of the virtual machine. If you are using VMware Workstation or Microsoft Virtual PC, both of these mount .ISO files to install the operating system or applications. Still, there are times when you just need a single file out of an ISO image. Or, there are times when you want to mount an ISO image on your local computer (without a virtualization solution) to install an application. In Windows 7, if you double-click on an .ISO file, you will be prompted to burn it to a CD/DVD disk, like this: Besides the built-in Windows 7 software, 3rd party CD/DVD burning/authoring applications will all burn these images to a CD or DVD and create physical media for you. Sure, this is no problem. However, Windows cannot show you what is in that file and you cannot retrieve files out of that .ISO file. And, while those CD/DVD authoring tools will burn the image to an optical disk, they would not allow you to retrieve files out of the .ISO file. Thus, all you could do is to burn the optical disk, stick it in your drive, then explore it to get a file out of it. What you need is an application to mount .ISO files on your local computer and you should not have to pay for it. Free Tools you can download to mount ISO files Fortunately, there are a number of free tools out there to mount .ISO files in Windows. However, not all of them are compatible with Windows 7 so BE CAREFUL. In fact, I have even heard that if you perform an upgrade with some of those tools installed, they would not work after the upgrade and an upgrade for the tool would not install. So, make sure that the tool you are using with Windows 7 is Windows 7 compatible. I have always relied on one particular tool for mounting .ISO images and that is Daemon Tools (which I will cover in the next section). In doing research for this article, I have found that there are a number of other ISO tools that are Windows 7 compatible. One of the applications I like that acts like a compression tool (like a ZIP program) and doesn't mount ISO files as virtual disks is the free and open-source 7-Zip. I tried it on Windows 7 and it works fine: Here is a list of some other ISO mounting applications that say that they are Windows 7 compatible: Magic ISO Virtual CloneDrive PowerISO (can read ISOs for free but free version has limitations on creating and editing ISO files) Finally, keep in mind that the "Microsoft Virtual CD-ROM" tool you might find on the web is not compatible with Vista or Windows 7. How to Install the Free Daemon Tools Lite in Windows 7 As I said above, my favorite ISO tool is "Daemon Tools" and it has been for a long time. Today, the version with the feature-set I am used to using is called the "Lite" version and there is a commercial version with more features. Still, even the Lite version allows you to emulate 4 CD, DVD-ROM, HD-DVD, or Blu-Ray drives. With this, you can mount ISO images and access the files inside. Daemon Tools also allows you to create ISO images and even create passwords on those ISO image files. You may find on the web that "daemon tools is not compatible with Windows 7" but that is not true if you use version 4.35.5 or later. Daemon Tools Lite works by installing software (reboot required) that allows you to mount ISO files as a drive letter. From there, you can get started mounting ISO files or creating ISO files using a daemon-tools tool that will appear in your taskbar. Installing Daemon Tools Lite is easy. Download the 8MB file from here (make sure that you download it from that site on the web, not some site who copied it and posted an old version on their site). I ran the installer and took the default of English as the language. I clicked Next and then accepted the license agreement. From here, I chose to install the Free Version instead of the paid license. You can choose to install whatever components you choose (the minimal required components will do the job) but I chose to install the start menu shortcuts, the Windows sidebar gadget, and the integration with Windows Explorer. I opted not to change my browsers start page and the installation started. I had to accept the security warning on the sidebar gadget. When done, I rebooted my PC. After reboot, I had my new Windows 7 desktop gadget and I could run daemon-tools from the start menu (I could have used the desktop gadget but I am just used to running daemon tools from the start menu). Either method allows me to mount the ISO image and access it. To do that, I clicked on the Virtual Devices, my new Virtual CD drive "drive E:", and then Mount Image. I specified the path to my ISO file from there and, the ISO file was mounted as virtual CD/DVD drive "drive E:". From here, I could go into My Computer, to Drive E:, and browse this DVD image. By the way, Daemon Tools Lite supports a lot more image types than just ISO. Thanks for your time ! Hope it helped you
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Lenovo is looking at new hardware designs, lower costs and software partnerships to expand in server market A Lenovo rack server. A few years ago, Lenovo toppled rivals HP and Dell to become the world's top PC maker. It now wants to do the same in servers. It hopes to do so through the newly formed Data Center Group, previously known as the Enterprise Business Group. The group is getting more financial resources, expertise and flexibility to chase new hardware designs and software partnerships. Lenovo became a major player in servers almost overnight after completing the $2.3 billion acquisition of IBM's x86 server business in 2014. Lenovo today is the world's third largest server vendor behind Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Dell. From a barebones server maker, Lenovo is adding versatility to its product lineup with hyperconverged systems like Converged HX servers running on software from Nutanix. The integrated servers pool storage and computing resources, which can be managed and provisioned through a virtualized environment. Lenovo also continues to build servers for hyperscale environments that drive mobile and cloud services. It has supplied servers to Baidu, Tencent and Alibaba, which are building mega data centers in China. More changes are on the way as the company looks to capture a larger share of the server market, said Gerry Smith, president of Lenovo's Data Center Group, in an interview. Servers with ARM processors are being tested out at European sites, and all-flash storage arrays are being researched for use in servers, Smith said. But a big part of Lenovo's growth hinges on partnerships, and the company will tie up with more hardware and software companies to build its integrated server offerings. The company has already partnered with Juniper to bring networking equipment to its servers. It has also partnered with software companies like SAP to build integrated servers to handle specific applications. Lenovo's approach to converged systems is a route also being taken by HPE and Dell. But Lenovo offers better value, Smith said, with the ability to build servers with similar or better technologies at lower cost. Some of those cost advantages come from Lenovo's ability to make servers in its home base in China. Google and Facebook, which are among the world's largest server buyers, design their own servers and then send them to China or Taiwan to be manufactured more inexpensively than they would be in the U.S. That cuts out server middlemen like HPE and Dell, which are based in the U.S. Lenovo didn't say whether it makes servers for Google and Facebook, but said it has Tier 1 and Tier 2 worldwide as contract manufacturing customers. Lenovo also has a presence in Mexico, where it can build servers for U.S. customers. Servers sold by Lenovo are based on x86 processors, but the company is "agnostic" about chip architectures, Smith said. As workloads shift, the company will make decisions on what chips to offer in its servers. Right now Intel chips dominate the market. But there is a growing interest in ARM architecture, especially for cloud applications, and IBM is pushing its Power architecture aggressively in China. Smith didn't comment on whether the company would support Power, which was retained by IBM and not sold to Lenovo during the 2014 x86 server acquisition transaction. Smith also didn't comment on whether Lenovo would acquire companies to supplement its server business, which has been the strategy of HPE and Dell. Lenovo would rather partner and retain flexibility in its server offerings than tying customers up to specific technologies, Smith said. Lenovo still doesn't have as wide a range of server offerings as HPE, which offers mission-critical servers and systems like Moonshot for hyperscale environments. Lenovo also lacks a full-fledged consulting unit to serve customers. Dell and HPE are also emerging more as software companies, with servers acting as a front to sell applications, which generate better margins. Servers with x86 chips are commodity parts, and it remains to be seen whether Lenovo can squeeze huge profits from them. But Smith believes Lenovo's best days in servers are ahead. "We've always thought this business was fantastic," Smith said.
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Apple today announced advancements to the open source ResearchKit framework that bring genetic data and a series of medical tests typically conducted in an exam room to iPhone apps. Medical researchers are adopting these new features to design targeted studies for diseases and conditions that affect billions of people around the world and to gather more specific types of data from participants. "The response to ResearchKit has been fantastic. Virtually overnight, many ResearchKit studies became the largest in history and researchers are gaining insights and making discoveries that weren't possible before," said Jeff Williams, Apple's chief operating officer. "Medical researchers around the world continue to use iPhone to transform what we know about complex diseases, and with continued support from the open source community, the opportunities for iPhone in medical research are endless." ResearchKit turns iPhone into a powerful tool for medical research by helping doctors, scientists and other researchers gather data more frequently and more accurately from participants anywhere in the world using iPhone apps. Participants enrolled in these app-based studies can review an interactive informed consent process, easily complete active tasks or submit survey responses, and choose how their health data is shared with researchers, making contributions to medical research easier than ever. By delivering ResearchKit as open source, any developer can quickly design a research study for iPhone. They can also build on the available software code and contribute their tasks back to the community to help other researchers do more with the framework. Using a new module just released to the open source community, researchers are now able to incorporate genetic data into their studies in a seamless, simple and low cost way. Designed by 23andMe, the module allows study participants to easily contribute their genetic data to medical research. Researchers are also working with the National Institute of Mental Health to deliver "spit kits" to study participants based on a series of survey results. "There's so much we still need to learn about postpartum depression and it may be DNA that provides the key to better understanding why some women experience symptoms and others do not," said Samantha Meltzer-Brody, MD, MPH, director of the Perinatal Psychiatry Program at the UNC Center for Women's Mood Disorders. "With ResearchKit, and now the ability to incorporate genetic data, we're able to engage women with postpartum depression from a wide geographic and demographic range and can analyze the genomic signature of postpartum depression to help us find more effective treatments." "Collecting this type of information will help researchers determine genomic indicators for specific diseases and conditions," said Eric Schadt, PhD, the Jean C. and James W. Crystal Professor of Genomics at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, and Founding Director of the Icahn Institute for Genomics and Multiscale Biology. "Take asthma, for example. ResearchKit is allowing us to study this po[CENSORED]tion more broadly than ever before and through the large amounts of data we're able to gather from iPhone, we're understanding how factors like environment, geography and genes influence one's disease and response to treatment." ResearchKit studies incorporating genetic data: Postpartum Depression: PPD Act is a new app-based study that will use genetic testing to better understand why some women are impacted by postpartum depression by examining the genetic makeup of those with the condition. Led by the University of North Carolina School of Medicine and the international Postpartum Depression: Action Towards Causes and Treatment Consortium, PPD Act will offer study participants access to a "spit kit" from the National Institute of Mental Health. Cardiovascular Disease: Developed by Stanford Medicine, the MyHeart Counts app will use genetic data from existing 23andMe customers to help determine predisposition to heart conditions and measure how a participant's activity and lifestyle relate to cardiovascular health. By studying these relationships on a broad scale, researchers hope to be able to better understand how to keep hearts healthy. Asthma: The Asthma Health app, designed to track symptom patterns in an individual and identify potential triggers for these symptoms, will use genetic data from 23andMe customers to help researchers better understand ways to personalize asthma treatment. Asthma Health is designed by the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and LifeMap Solutions. Researchers continue to adapt ResearchKit and build on the framework by contributing new modules that bring exam room medical tests to iPhone apps. Key contributions include the ability to study tone audiometry; measure reaction time through delivery of a known stimulus to a known response; assess the speed of information processing and working memory; use the mathematical puzzle Tower of Hanoi for cognition studies; and conduct a timed walk test. ResearchKit studies continue to expand internationally and are available in Australia, Austria, China, Germany, Hong Kong, Ireland, Japan, Netherlands, Switzerland, the UK and the US. ResearchKit apps are available on the App Store for iPhone 5 and later, and the latest generation of iPod touch.
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Welcome to CsBlackDevil. Enjoy your stay & have fun !
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LEGOs and dinosaurs: somehow it's taken well over three decades for those two great childhood pastimes to join together in an interactive on-screen adventure. Life finds a way, however, and the two elements are together in a package that may not be the best LEGO-branded adventure, but one that still brings enough to entertain over the course of four fast-but-fun campaigns. The format of this puzzle-focused adventure is as old as dinosaurs -- developer TT Games has used this formula more than 20 times since 2005’s LEGO Star Wars -- but like the pre-historic creatures themselves, there's still a ton of charm. Anything in the world that's made out of LEGO bricks that isn't one of the 100-plus playable characters can be broken into studs to be spent on bonuses or rebuilt within the environment to progress further in the world. Anyone who's uttered a line in a Jurassic Park movie can be unlocked eventually, from Ian Malcolm and that annoying kid at the raptor dig site to the dino-wrangling, motorbike-riding Owen Grady and, awesomely, Mr. DNA himself. Unlike most LEGO adventures where characters have distinct weapons or superpowers, LEGO Jurassic World's suite of skills are a little more subdued; paleontologists can dig, zoologists aren't afraid to dive into piles of dino-dung, and hunters can set off targets from afar. It's mostly well balanced, though it's weird to see the meek husband-and-wife couple who funded Jurassic Park III's expedition using a grappling hook and gymnastic moves. Also, why are the only characters with scream-based powers women? There’s been plenty of screaming men in Jurassic Park films. Another distinguishing feature is that LEGO Jurassic World leans far less on combat than most of the previous LEGO-licensed adventures, which makes sense: the movies are mostly about humans trying to avoid dinosaurs. That makes the few fights actually meaningful -- whether it's a throwdown between rival camps in Lost World or the brutal T-rex vs spinosaurus battle in Jurassic Park III, almost every fight has some dramatic flair... unless there are compys involved. Even though the diminutive dinos only appear in the third Jurassic Park film (Edit: oops, the second one too), the species is in every chapter of LEGO Jurassic World, and they never get any less frustrating. They'll swarm in packs, immediately requiring your full attention due to their overpowered health-sapping skills, and their size and speed make them tough to hit. Sometimes there's just one pack nearby, sometimes there's two, and sometimes there's an infinite supply that won't stop attacking you until you cover up the source of the stream. Frankly, I would have just rather had a compy-free experience, since the species makes any stage it infects just a bit less enjoyable than the puzzle-solving, block-breaking norm. LEGO Jurassic World is an all-inclusive series package, and each of the four movies is broken up into five lightning-fast stages that run two to three segments each. In the space of 30 minutes, I went from saving Lex and Tim to traversing a tree to reach a crashed jeep, to throwing flares in a T-rex's mouth during a tense car chase. Any time I started to get antsy or annoyed about a certain story or set of characters, I knew something I enjoyed would be around the corner. Sure, the gymnastic escape scene at the end of Lost World might have been a bit disappointing, but I was just one level away from seeing Academy Award nominee William H. Macy in LEGO form! Ironically, the enjoyment I had with the people and creatures of LEGO Jurassic World didn't quite extend to the actual parks. Sure, the levels were mostly a joy, but the overworld is a bit of a mess, especially when I had to explore the islands to find the entrance to a new level. Another weird quirk; while you can play the original Jurassic Park and the newly released Jurassic World right from the start, The Lost World and Jurassic Park III can only be played after completion of the preceding movie's adaption. Fast travel is also iffy, as most of the icons on the map automatically load objectives. Since I wanted to explore the area to find new stages, I'd have to scan each icon until I found the one connected to each section's kiosk, which became so tedious that I'd usually just walk through the interconnected movie hubs to get to my destination. Much like a real theme park, you'll have fun on the attractions but dread getting there. What keeps the compy troubles and overworld woes from becoming too unbearable? That patented LEGO charm. For the first three movies, voice clips are used sparingly and sight gags help add some spice to what should be a line-by-line retellings. Instead of the cowardly investor getting eaten alive on a porta-potty, he stays in the T-Rex's mouth for a few scenes, cleaning the creature's chompers with a toilet brush. When dinosaurs need medical attention they require candy bars and ice pops instead of a tense scene of humans operating on puppets. Also, there's a bit more story being told directly in Jurassic World, so be forewarned that many of the movie's twists will be revealed along the way.
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Intel has released new graphics drivers that add support for Vulkan 1.0 beta Intel's Skylake chip. Windows games have mostly been defined by DirectX 12 tools, but a competitive API is coming to PCs running on Intel chips. Intel is releasing graphics drivers that support the Vulkan 1.0 API for chips running Windows 7, 8 and 10 PCs. The drivers, specifically, add "new beta support for the Vulkan 1.0 API for 6th Generation Intel Core and related processors," the Intel driver page says. Most games for Windows are written using Microsoft's DirectX 12 programming tools. The Vulkan 1.0 API, however, provides an alternative set of game development tools. Vulkan 1.0 was introduced last month by industry consortium Khronos Group and replaces the aging OpenGL, which was first introduced in 1991 by Silicon Graphics. It improves graphics on PCs, mobile devices, VR headsets, robots and other devices. Vulkan is tuned to exploit the latest features on modern hardware, like powerful GPUs and multicore CPUs, so games have more life-like images and higher frame rates. With the new drivers, developers will be able to exploit features on Intel GPUs, like the Iris Pro, that are integrated in chips alongside CPUs. Intel's rival AMD has alreadyreleased Vulkan drivers for Radeon graphics processors. Much like DirectX 12, Vulkan 1.0 provides close access to hardware, which reduces the processing and power overhead in drawing up images. Developers can define, with better access to specific hardware features, how they want graphics rendered. That's an improvement over OpenGL, which had abstraction layers that made hardware virtually invisible. Graphics quality would also degrade when trying to port games from Windows to the OpenGL standard -- unlike DirectX, OpenGL runs on Linux machines. But with Vulkan, quality of games remains mostly intact when porting from DirectX, said Jason Ekstrand, a developer at Intel, during a talk. Vulkan 1.0 APIs will also work with Linux-based PCs like Steam Machines. Intel has made available open-source Vulkan drivers for Linux PCs running on chips code-named Broadwell and Skylake.
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New processor, new keyboard, new price. For the most part it’s the usual incremental hardware advances. Last year’s i7-4720HQ is now an i7-6700HQ. SATA M.2 drives have given way to speedier PCIe drives. The old Intel wireless card has been replaced with a Killer Wireless card. The Nvidia GeForce 970M graphics chip is...still a 970M, though now with 6GB of onboard VRAM. And Razer’s sticking with the same 16GB of RAM configuration introduced last year, but now it's using DDR4 memory. The other changes are pretty predictable, too. The new and improved Razer Blade sports per-key Chroma (RGB) lighting, and if you didn’t see that one coming then you’re probably too blind to appreciate those 16.8 million colors anyway. As always, the usual disclaimer: Is RGB lighting necessary? No. Do people love it? Some do! Do people buy it? Yes. The Blade will also charge by way of USB-C, the same as the Blade Stealth. And following logically from that, it will be compatible with Razer’s new Thunderbolt 3 graphics amplifier, the Razer Core, whenever it’s released. Pair the two and you could run apowerful desktop graphics card at home for enhancing gaming performance and still have the decently robust 970M as a fallback on the road. But this is all secondary to what is—without doubt—the most important change to the Blade in 2016: Price. The new Blade will start at $1,999 with a 256GB SSD, or $2,199 for a model with a 512GB drive. Last year's models listed for $2,399 and $2,699, respectively. Shaving off $400 doesn’t exactly make the Blade affordable, but it’s definitely more in line with what I’d expect for a 970M/4K screen/aluminum chassis.
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This is not the place where you can request for addons. You must have added your server in this community and to make an topic ( Here ) or find here what you need. T/C
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Good stealth-assassination games involve cool, calculated setups, tense waiting games, and the eventual thrill of a successful hit. Alekhine’s Gun seems to understand that formula: you’re given a few objectives, dropped into a level full of roaming guards, and forced to make do with a limited selection of tools. But thanks to terrible AI, awkward controls, and loads of performance issues, Alekhine’s Gun fails to execute. Alekhine’s Gun’s potentially exciting Cold War-era backdrop places you in the role of a KGB operative turned CIA spy, which sounds like an enticing setup for a stealth action game – except poor delivery dampens the appeal right from the start. Characters are bland and performances weak. Static-image cutscenes play between missions, with badly recorded dialogue carrying the story along. The plot, which jumps around between World War II and the 1960s, has the potential to be interesting, weaving threads of anti-government conspiracies, Nazis, the Mafia, and more into a tale that may have been compelling if delivered right. It isn’t – the flatness of its delivery prevents Alekhine’s Gun from elevating all this political intrigue and historical drama beyond just a backdrop. "NPCs almost immediately forget any wrongdoing once you leave their line of sight." Outside the dull cutscenes and walls of text at the start of missions, Alekhine’s Guns levels drop the ball especially hard on the storytelling front, missing out on some great worldbuilding opportunities. Levels are absurdly large, but not in the right ways. The awkward scale is akin to older games, where rooms appear disproportionate to the furnishings and characters occupying them, giving each level in Alekhine’s Gun a distinctly fake feeling. Its spaces may be large, but they are also largely empty. They lack both the density of interactive objects and characters to make them engaging to navigate and the details to ground them in the eras they explore. In the few levels that don’t exude this artificiality, other factors like poor lighting, weak ambience, and awkward NPCs prevent them from feeling like real or interesting spaces to occupy. Short Term Memory That makes the exploration that plays a big role here feel weak, too. Whether you’re rescuing journalists in Texas biker bars or assassinating Nazis in World War II flashbacks, most of Alekhine’s Gun’s missions rely on the genre-defining template of sneaking around, memorizing map layouts, learning NPC movement patterns, and setting up ploys to take out enemies. Agent Alekhine sneaking up on an unsuspecting target. Getting the right disguise is a vital part of this routine, allowing you to access restricted areas without raising the alarm, but the value of the disguise system weakens when you realize how comically inept and forgiving the AI is. "Wonky physics allow you to get away with even more." It’s easy to figure out how suspicious other characters are of your behavior by triggering the handy Instinct Mode, which lights up NPCs white if they don’t suspect you of anything, yellow if they’re aware of you, and red if they’re starting to sense something’s not right. Pair this with the alert meter that slowly builds up at the top of the screen if you’re caught in an area you don’t belong, or seen doing something especially suspect, and determining your current status is a quick and convenient process. Despite this handy system, NPCs almost immediately forget any wrongdoing once you leave their line of sight. Even if they attempt to follow you, closing a door in their face is often enough of a deterrent to throw them off your trail. It isn’t uncommon for AI in stealth games to act like pieces in a puzzle rather than real human beings, with strict patrolling patterns and routines you can easily track and exploit, but Alekhine’s Gun takes this to a whole new and often tragically comic level. Sneaking up on a Nazi scientist. There were several instances when an enemy attempted to engage me in combat over my suspicious behavior and just as quickly dropped the matter when I ran in a room and closed the door. In one level, I stabbed a Nazi scientist to death in the center of a facility crawling with guards, who somehow took no notice. Only when I started to carry the body away did the alert meter slowly begin to build, as guards began to catch on to what I was doing, but once I dropped the body on the floor, the alert meter disappeared. The guards only cared about the supposedly very important and now definitely very dead scientist when I was actually in the act of dragging him off. And yet, in another level, I accidentally punched at the air while dressed as a hotel waiter, dropping a tray of wine in the process, and a restaurant full of goons in fedoras opened fire on me. Kill a scientist? No problem. Drop the wine? Party foul. Defying the Laws of Physics Usually, they’re oblivious. But in the cases where they’re not, wonky physics allow you to get away with even more, including failed assassination attempts going completely unpunished. Circling around a guard with a rag of chloroform doesn’t have to be a stealthy affair when they’ll just as easily rotate in place, gun drawn, trying to get a hit on you as you whip around their peripheral. Weird collision made literally pushing NPCs around as I snuck by them a common strategy, and I was definitely saved on more than one occasion by a door that smoothly clipped through bodies – both alive and dead – as I shut it in another NPC’s face. It’s not that it’s too easy to exploit Alekhine’s Gun’s AI and physics – it’s that it’s difficult not to. I actually found myself having some mild fun pushing these boundaries to their limits, seeing just how broken this game really is, but these moments weren’t nearly fun or funny enough to make up for the truly frustrating ones that dominated the rest of my experience. "Then there are the bugs." Clumsy, unresponsive controls are to blame for a lot of Alekhine’s Gun’s unpleasantness. For example, you can’t scroll through your weapons while moving, turning smooth assassination attempts into ungraceful affairs of jerky, halting movements. Using keyboard shortcuts or just switching out for a gamepad aren’t great options either, because slow response times and stiff animations give everything from movement to combat an uncomfortably heavy quality in either case. Agent Alekhine stuck in the ground. Then there are the bugs. In my roughly 12 hours with Alekhine’s Gun, I encountered glitchy shadows, got stuck behind a bookshelf, boarded a magical elevator with disappearing doors, fell halfway into the ground, fell completely out of the map, and had to restart because of constant crashes. That includes one that occurred every time I quit out, which would also freeze my PC in the process. The Verdict Like the chess move it’s named after, Alekhine’s Gun puts its pieces in the right places, but then it fails to follow through with any quality or grace. It’s hard to feel accomplished after pulling off a clean kill when the targets lack the competence to even defend themselves.
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Beyond Dimensions is a quirky action-adventure roguelike shooter where a variety of artistic styles, gameplay mechanics, and even dimensional planes intersect. The result is a chaotic moshpit of fun and discovery which will never fail to leave you on the edge of your seat. Save A Dying World Years ago, magic disappeared. The preeminent technological conglomerate, Magitech, recently claimed that they might have found a solution to restore it. You are that solution. Defend yourself with the spells Magitech gives you and learn to master them to turn yourself into a force to be reckoned with. Use your newfound skills and power to bring magic back into your world and save everything you know. A Unique Experience Every Time With a veritable smorgasbord of dynamic procedural content, Beyond Dimensions is sure to give every single player a different and individualized experience.
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Once upon a time, when Windows was home to the vast majority of applications, and most of them were written in C++ or Visual Basic, Microsoft’s Visual Studio toolset was king. Most developers had an MSDN subscription and used a variety of Microsoft tools. The Visual Studio IDE (integrated development environment) became one of the most powerful ever built. Now that far more effort is being invested in non-Windows applications than previously, far more development is done using a wide-varieties of IDEs — many of them based on the open-source Eclipse system. Microsoft has now acknowledged and embraced this fact in a big way, by making Eclipse a full-fledged option for those developing for Microsoft’s Azure services or using Visual Studio’s team development features. Microsoft’s Eclipse-based tools Microsoft has been shipping a number of Eclipse-based tools already, including an Azure Toolkit for Eclipse and a Java SDK for Azure. Its Team Explorer Everywhere already allows Eclipse developers to access Visual Studio’s Team Services from within Eclipse — build, test, and source code control, for example. What’s new is Microsoft has now integrated its offering with Codeenvy’s tools — which are in turn built on the new Eclipse Che platform. Using Codenvy’s Visual Studio Team Services extension, developers using Microsoft’s tools will be able to create Codenvy workspaces. Microsoft is also adding a pre-configured Codenvy VM to its Azure offerings. Microsoft and the Eclipse Foundation Microsoft has worked with the Eclipse Foundation for a long time, but has now officially joined as a Solutions member — timed to coincide with EclipseCon. Even though this won’t mean that Microsoft is embracing the Eclipse IDE as its primary development environment, it is very much in line with Microsoft’s newish “embrace and extend” approach to other po[CENSORED]r tools and environments. Ironically, perhaps, at the same time Google has moved to distance itself from Eclipse, by ending support for its Android development plug-in for Eclipse in favor of its own Android Studio offering. As part of joining the Eclipse Foundation, Microsoft is open sourcing its Team Explorer Everywhere plugin for Eclipse through Github, as well as Azure IoT support through Kura, and Azure Java WebApp support through the Azure Toolkit for Eclipse. What this means for developers Microsoft doesn’t seem to be backing away from its commitment to the Visual Studio IDE — it just shipped R-language extensions for the Visual Studio IDE recently, for example — but is instead reaching out to allow those using the Eclipse IDE to be full members of Microsoft-centric development efforts. This is perhaps best typified by the title of one of the sessions Microsoft is giving at EclipseCon, “Integrating Different IDEs with a Common Set of Developer Services.”
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Apple has accused the US Justice Department of trying to "smear" the company with "desperate" and "unsubstantiated" claims. It followed the DoJ's latest court filing over its demand Apple create software to unlock an iPhone used by an attacker in a mass shooting last year. The DoJ said Apple's stance was "corrosive" of institutions trying to protect "liberty and rights". It also claims Apple helped the Chinese government with iPhone security. Apple's general counsel Bruce Sewell told reporters on a conference call: "The tone of the brief reads like an indictment". He said: "Everybody should beware because it seems like disagreeing with the Department of Justice means you must be evil and anti-American, nothing could be further from the truth." Prosecutors claim Apple's own data shows that China demanded information from Apple regarding more than 4,000 iPhones in the first half of 2015, and Apple produced data 74% of the time. But Mr Sewell said the new filing relies on thinly sourced news reports to inaccurately suggest that Apple had colluded with the Chinese government to undermine [iPhone] buyers' security. 'Shoddy' The US government has been fighting Apple over access to information on the iPhone used by one of the San Bernardino killers, Rizwan Farook, in December. Apple says the demands violate the company's rights. The DoJ claimed in its court filing that Apple had attacked the FBI investigation as "shoddy", and tried to portray itself as a "guardian of Americans' privacy". This "rhetoric is not only false, but also corrosive of the very institutions that are best able to safeguard our liberty and our rights: the courts, the Fourth Amendment, longstanding precedent and venerable laws, and the democratically elected branches of government," the DoJ said. In February, the FBI obtained a court order to force Apple to write new software that would allow the government to break into the phone. The FBI wants the software to bypass auto-erase functions on the phone. Support for Apple Apple has argued that the government is asking for a "back door" that could be exploited by the government and criminals. The tech giant has filed its own court request that the ruling be overturned, arguing that the order violated the company's constitutional rights UN human rights chief backs Apple Apple boss hits back at FBI conduct McAfee offers to unlock iPhone for FBI "This case is about the Department of Justice and the FBI seeking through the courts a dangerous power that Congress and the American people have withheld," Apple said. The iPhone maker has received support for other tech giants including, Google, Microsoft, and Facebook. The FBI says Farook and his wife, Tashfeen Malik, were inspired by Islamist militants when they killed 14 people at a party on 2 December. The couple later died in a shootout with police and the FBI said it wants to read the data on Farook's work phone to investigate any links with militant groups. A hearing into the case is scheduled for 22 March in a California federal court. Apple chief executive Tim Cook has said he is willing to take the case to the Supreme Court.
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The 3D Xpoint memory technology will be compatible with NVMe, used for storage in MacBooks Intel's been quiet about its super-fast Optane memory and SSD products, but a few emerging details may hint at how they could be used in products like Apple's MacBooks. Optane is a brand name for a new type of memory and SSD based on 3D Xpoint, a technology jointly developed by Intel and Micron that can be 10 times denser than DRAM, and 1,000 times faster and more durable than flash storage. The soon-to-be-released 3D Xpoint technology will be compatible with NVMe, a super-fast storage protocol that could help Optane achieve its blistering speeds. Some MacBooks already have NVMe-based SSDs, and Optane could provide a further speed boost. Apple is among the first vendors to implement the latest laptop technologies and may jump at the chance at putting Optane in its MacBooks. Apple was the first to implement Thunderbolt and processor technologies from Intel. The first Optane products will likely be SSDs and reach enthusiasts' PCs next year, then spread to other desktops and mobile products. Optane memory DIMMs, which can be plugged into existing memory slots, are also coming. Some Windows laptops also have NVMe storage, but most still rely on the older and slower SATA interface. Enthusiast desktop users like gamers are early adopters of new technology, and many will likely move over to Optane. Optane products will be initially based on Intel's Skylake architecture. If Intel ships memory DIMMs, they will need to be compatible with the DDR3/4 DRAM bus that is in most PCs today. Optane's compatibility with NVMe was revealed during a session focused on Lightning, an open-source storage design, at the OCP U.S. Summit in San Jose, California. Lightning, developed by Intel and Facebook, provides flexible storage in which capacity can be cranked up depending on processing needs. Optane could drive changes in server designs and in application processing. Servers could have more capacity for in-memory applications like SAP HANA or 3D Xpoint memory, and SSDs could be decoupled into separate boxes. Separating storage, memory and processing resources could help reduce data center costs. Intel has a data-center architecture called Rack Scale that focuses on decoupling those resources. With 3D Xpoint technology, memory cells sit in a three-dimensional mesh. The structure allows data to be written in small sizes and at much faster speeds.
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NTU's tiny microchip for radar imaging embedded on a PCB board (small square chip on the upper right) Scientists at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore (NTU Singapore) have developed a chip that allows new radar cameras to be made a hundred times smaller than current ones. With this NTU technology, radar cameras that usually weigh between 50 kg and 200 kg and are commonly used in large satellites can be made to become as small as palm-sized. Despite being small, they can produce images that are of the same high quality if not better compared to conventional radar cameras. They are also 20 times cheaper to produce and consume at least 75 per cent less power. Developed over the past three years at NTU, the promising technology has already secured S$2.5 million in research funding from Singapore government agencies. The radar chip has attracted the attention of several multinational corporations, and is now being researched for use in Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) and satellite applications. Assistant Professor Zheng Yuanjin from NTU's School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering who led the research, said that the size and effectiveness of the chip will open up new applications not possible previously. "We have significantly shrunk the conventional radar camera into a system that is extremely compact and affordable, yet provides better accuracy. This will enable high resolution imaging radar technology to be used in objects and applications never before possible, like small drones, driverless cars and small satellite systems," said Asst Prof Zheng. Advantages over current technology NTU Asst Prof Zheng Yuanjin and his team has developed one of the world's smallest radar cameras for us in UAVs, driverless cars and microsatellites Current radar camera systems are usually between half and two metres in length and weigh up to 200 kg. They cost more than US$1 million on the market and can consume over 1000 watts in electricity per hour, the energy equivalent of a household air-conditioning unit running for an hour. Known as Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR), these large radar cameras are often carried by large satellites and aircrafts that produce detailed images of the Earth's surface. Objects longer than a metre, such as cars and boats, can be easily seen by the radar camera mounted on an aircraft flying at a height of 11 kilometres. Unlike optical cameras which cannot work well at night due to insufficient light or in cloudy conditions, a radar camera uses microwaves (X-band or Ku-band) for its imaging, so it can operate well in all weather conditions and can even penetrate through foliage. These detailed images from radar cameras can be used for environmental monitoring of disasters like forest fires, volcano eruptions and earthquakes as well as to monitor cities for traffic congestions and urban density. But the huge size, prohibitive cost and energy consumption are deterrents for use in smaller unmanned aerial vehicles and autonomous vehicles. In comparison, NTU's new radar chip (2mm x 3mm) when packaged into a module measures only 3cm x 4cm x 5cm, weighing less than 100 grams. Production costs can go as low as US$10,000 per unit, while power consumption ranges from 1 to 200 watts depending on its application, similar to power-efficient LED TVs or a ceiling fan. It can also capture objects as small as half a metre which is twice as detailed as the conventional radar camera used in large aircrafts or satellites. Potential applications of the new radar chip Asst Prof Zheng said that when mounted on UAVs, it can take high quality images on demand to monitor traffic conditions or even the coastlines for trespassers. "Driverless cars will also be able to better scan the environment around them to avoid collisions and navigate more accurately in all weather conditions compared to current laser and optical technologies," he added. "Finally, with the space industry moving towards small satellite systems, such as the six satellites launched by NTU, smaller satellites can now also have the same advanced imaging capabilities previously seen only in the large satellites." Large satellites can weigh up to 1,000 kg, but microsatellites weigh only 100 to 200 kg. Recognised internationally with strong market interest NTU's new radar chip was presented and published at the prestigious International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) 2016. Commonly referred to as the "Olympics of Integrated Circuits Design", ISSCC is the world's top forum for presenting advances in solid-state circuits and systems and is attended by major industry players. The chip was developed by Asst Prof Zheng's team of five at NTU's VIRTUS IC Design Centre of Excellence. The group was the first from Singapore to publish in ISSCC and is also the most published local group, with seven papers to date. NTU's new technology has attracted the attention of many multinational corporations, such as US aerospace company Space X; Netherlands semiconductor company NXP; Japanese electronics giant Panasonic, and French satellite maker Thales. The next phase will be research in space applications to be carried out at the Smart Small Satellite Systems - Thales in NTU (S4TIN), a joint laboratory between NTU and Europe's largest satellite manufacturer Thales Alenia Space. Game changer for Singapore Associate Professor Low Kay Soon, Director of NTU's Satellite Research Centre, said the new radar chip will be a game changer in the space industry, which will bolster Singapore's growing reputation as a satellite building nation. "Monitoring the environment with a clear image using a traditional optical camera is always very challenging due to clouds and changing light conditions," said Assoc Prof Low. "This is especially the case for the tropics where the sky is always cloudy. With a miniature radar-on-chip system, it cuts down the required weight and size of the payload that a satellite needs to carry. "More significantly, the lower power consumption makes it very suitable for microsatellites such as the X-SAT or VELOX-CI which NTU has launched. For small satellites, there is a limited area to mount the solar panels, which limits its power generation. Consequently the conventional SAR systems cannot be used due to its high power requirements." Asst Prof Zheng says it will take another three to six years before NTU's new radar chip is ready for commercial use. He is now working with NTU's innovation and enterprise company, NTUitive to find industry partners to license the technology or to spin off a company. Director of VIRTUS, NTU Professor Joseph Chang added: "Singapore is one the very few select countries in the world with advanced technical capabilities to design complex microchips for space applications." "NTU professors associated with VIRTUS have received research funding of over S$5 million from Singapore and various countries like the United States, to design microchips for space applications. Recently, two patents have been filed for the novel design of these microchips." VIRTUS filed ten patents in the last year alone, for various innovative microchips with applications ranging from image processing to computing. According to Markets and Markets global forecasts and analysis, the global market for radar systems is estimated to grow to US$24 billion by 2020.
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Konrad Jamrozik, Andreas Zeller and Philipp von Styp-Rekowsky are protecting smartphones and more. With Boxmate malicious programs have no place left to hide. No matter how well-tested our software may be, hackers keep on finding vulnerabilities to exploit or control systems at will. "The attackers are always one step ahead," says Andreas Zeller, professor of computer science at Saarland University and researcher at the Center for IT Security, Privacy and Accountability (CISPA). "The core problem of existing security systems is that the attack needs to have been observed at least once to be able to recognize it the next time - and then, you have to update everything again and again." This threat is particularly prominent in the upcoming "Internet of Things", where hundreds and thousands of devices can become potential targets. A new approach called "Boxmate" is now set to prevent other programs from surreptitiously changing their behavior, as this would be part of or a result of a hidden attack, or a backdoor exploit. Developed by Zeller together with graduate students Konrad Jamrozik and Philipp von Styp-Rekowsky, Boxmate systematically generates program inputs in order to investigate the program's regular behavior. "During this automatic testing, we log which critical data - say locations or contacts - and which critical resources - microphone or Internet access - the program is accessing to perform these tasks," Zeller explains, "and the test generator ensures that all visible features actually are exercised." During production, the program then gets placed into a "sandbox," an automated watchdog which oversees the operation of the program in question - and which raises an alarm whenever some data is being accessed that was not already accessed during testing. If the program is compromised or exhibits previously unseen malicious behavior, the sandbox will catch and prevent the attack. The nicest feature of Boxmate, says Zeller, "is that malicious programs no longer have a place to hide." Indeed, if a program wants to use certain kinds of data later on, it will already have to access it while being tested by Boxmate - and thereby expose what it is doing. "Any hidden functionality will be disabled by the sandbox," says Zeller, "and this will make it hard for attackers". But wouldn't the sandbox also raise alarms during normal usage? "Our test generator explores behavior so well that during regular usage, we normally have no alarms at all," says Zeller, who has already tested Boxmate on more than a hundred different apps with his team. Modern mobile systems request authorizations for every access to sensitive data like the camera, contacts, and the microphone. "With Boxmate, we already know from testing that these are being used, and how," says Zeller. The current implementation of Boxmate protects apps on Android smartphones. However, the concept can equally be applied on the desktop, servers, or embedded systems, and it requires no changes to existing programs. Zeller has already applied for a worldwide patent for the technology underlying Boxmate, so licensing is already possible. To permanently establish Boxmate as a comprehensive security tool for industry and commerce, Zeller's research group has now joined forces with industry partner Backes SRT. This Saarland University spin-off has developed, for instance, the "SRT AppGuard" app, a security program available as a free app and already downloaded more than one million times. "Boxify," the extended, commercial version of AppGuard, works together with Boxmate and will also be presented at Cebit.
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Seagate Technology today unveiled a production-ready unit of its fastest single solid-state drive (SSD) demonstrated to date, with throughput performance of 10 gigabytes per second (GB/s). The early unit meets Open Compute Project (OCP) specifications, making it ideal for hyperscale data centers looking to adopt the fastest flash technology with the latest and most sustainable standards. The 10GB/s unit, which is expected to be released this summer, is more than 4GB/s faster than the previous fastest-industry SSD on the market. It also meets the OCP storage specifications being driven by Facebook, which will help reduce the power and cost burdens traditionally associated with operating at this level of performance. "Your data is only as good as how easily you can access it and put it to use," said Brett Pemble, Seagate's general manager and vice president of SSD Products. "Seagate is committed to providing the full spectrum of technologies to help meet the diverse needs of organizations so they can unlock this value. Whether for consumer cloud or business applications, this SSD will help improve on demands for fast access to information, where split seconds drive incremental value gains." The technology would work with any system that supports the Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe) protocol, which was developed by Seagate and other consortium vendors to replace the legacy Serial AT Attachment (SATA) standards and eliminate informational bottlenecks. NVMe helps reduce layers of commands to create a faster, simpler language between flash devices. Organizations that would most benefit from this solution include those processing data for object storage or in real-time, where speed matters most for results, such as large-scale cloud providers and web applications, weather modeling, or statistical trends analysis. The unit could be used in an all-flash array or as an accelerated flash tier with hard-disk drives (HDDs) for a more cost-effective hybrid storage alternative. "Technology advancements continue to stretch the limits of SSD speed and performance due to growing enterprise demands that require fast data processing at scale," said Gregory Wong, founder and principal analyst, Forward Insights. "Seagate has effectively rewritten the rules for performance with this latest SSD unit. Based on our latest analysis, Seagate is already the leading provider to the emerging PCIe OCP market." In addition to the 10GB/s SSD technology, which accommodates 16-lane PCIe slots, Seagate is finalizing a second unit for eight-lane PCIe slots, which still performs at the industry-leading throughput of 6.7GB/s, and is the fastest in the eight-lane card category. The eight-lane solution will provide an alternative for organizations looking for the highest levels of throughput speed but in environments limited by power usage requirements or cost.
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Google provided developers with a "work in progress" build of Android's "N release" in hopes of getting feedback critical to improving their devices. Google on Wednesday let developers have an early look at the next version of Android in a move that could get the software into a wider variety of devices. The US Internet colossus behind the world's most popu-lar mobile operating system broke from its tradition of releasing new versions of Android at its annual developers conference, which will take place in May this year. "We're doing something a little different this year by releasing the preview early... really early," Google vice president of engineering Dave Burke said in a blog post. "By releasing a 'work in progress' build earlier in development, we have more time to incorporate developer feedback." The developer preview of the "N release" of Android, versions of which have historically been named after sweet treats, should help Google have it ready for device makers by the middle of the year, according to Burke. New features touted by Google included the ability for applications to launch split-screen modes on smartphones or tablets. "In addition, activities can also go into picture-in-picture mode on devices like TVs, and is a great feature for apps that play video," Burke said. Android is also continuing to invest in Project Svelte, which aims to reduce the amount of memory space required so it can run on a broader range of devices. An updated software developers kit allows for testing on Google-branded Nexus 6, Nexus 5X, Nexus 6P, Nexus Player, Nexus 9, and Pixel C devices. "As we get closer to a final product, we'll be inviting consumers to try it out as well," Burke said. Google makes Android software available free to device makers. The latest version known as Android 6.0 Marshmallow began rolling out late last year.
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Cozmin Gușă a subliniat faptul că în dosarul "Microsoft" există un tratament pe care procurorii îl oferă, susținând că activitatea judiciară din acest caz aduce mai mult a negociere. "Tot acest scandal care a fost iscat de CCR are la baza, sigur, și zâmbete și o anumită automulțumire a lui Traian Băsescu, care pe fondul acestei lipse de inițiativă guvernamentală cu un guvern de tehnocrați, a lipsei din viața activă decizională a României a președintelui Iohannis, recuperează și, într-un fel extrem de sofisticat, comparativ cu calitatea clasei politice românești care este una slabă, domnul Băsescu acționează pe mai multe planuri. Astăzi, în premieră în instanță, atât Dorin Cocoș cât și celebrul Pinalti au recunoscut că banii din Microsoft au ajuns în campania prezidențială a lui Traian Băsescu. O afirmație foarte gravă, sugerată de fostul ministru de la Ploiești, fostul ministru al Comunicațiior, dar care astăzi a fost confirmată. Ceva care ne spune nu numai de campania Monicăi Macovei, cum a sugerat doamna Udrea, dar mai ales de campania lui Traian Băsescu a avut legătură cu acest scandal Microsoft care se apropie de final. Și atenție, în premieră, acest scandal a avut astăzi din partea procurorilor un tratament în care s-a cerut pedeapsă cu executare, dar nu s-a spus cât să execute fiecare. Parcă s-ar sta într-un fel de negociere, deși dosarul se află în faza pronunțării", a spus Gușă. Consultantul politic este de părere că Traian Băsescu este de acord cu decizia dată de CCR în privința interceptărilor din dosare, mai ales, potrivit acestuia, că unii dintre membrii CCR sunt apropiați ai fostului președinte. "Și acum venind în paralel cu ceea ce se titrează, Băsescu este mulțumit de această decizie a CCR, care aruncă un mare vector de degringoladă asupra sistemului pe care îl acceptasem până acum și cu care eram de acord, în care se discuta despre lupta anticorupție și un binom pozitiv SRI-DNA. Băsescu este de acord cu această degringoladă declanșată, punându-se în prim plan drepturile omului, sau a anumitor oameni din jurul lui. Și să ne reamintim că această decizie a CCR a fost iscată de plângerile unor turci, kurzi, care au fost prinși la marginea drumului făcând evaziune fiscală și care au generat această excepție de neconstituționalitate. De remarcat faptul că o anumită majoritate de la CCR este formată din oameni fideli lui Traian Băsescu, ca în filmul “Toți oamenii președintelui”, sau o parte din oamenii președintelui", a susținut Cozmin Gușă. "Și dacă ar fi să provoc, aici ar trebui să ne oprim să discutăm dacă Basescu a devenit întradevăr atât de activ, de ce a devenit atât de activ, dacă prezența lui Darren White în România are legătură cu Basescu, dacă anumiți oameni care sunt în campania lui Traian Băsescu de la Mișcarea Po[CENSORED]ră agită aceste două subiecte pe două niveluri: pe nivelul Curții Constituționale și pe nivelul denigrării DNA-SRI", a continuat acesta. Potrivit consultantului politic, susținerea lui Traian Băsescu față de decizia CCR este datorată și faptului că, în urma interceptărilor efectuate de SRI, oameni apropiați lui au avut de suferit, în principal Elena Udrea. " Aceste lucruri ne spune nouă că domnul președinte nu mai e mulțumit cu mandatul dânsului , pentru care dorea să-l apreciem atât de mult, și dorește acum să-l reconsidere de la sine, prin fel de fel de lovituri de palat în anumite instituții pe care dânsul le-a format. Curtea Constituțională actuală este și expresia deciziei dânsului, așa cum atât SRI și DNA sunt, de asemenea, expresia deciziei dânsului și nouă ni se pare acum că n-ar mai fi de acord cu ce a făcut timp de 10 ani dintr-un simplu motiv că una dintre femeile pe care le consideră foarte puternice, mă refer aici la Elena Udrea, are de suferit și oameni din jurul dânsului au de suferit, și atunci întoarcem România pe dos și ce a fost bun acum nu mai e bun", a conchis Cozmin Gușă.
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Epic's Unreal Tournament 3, actually the fourth version of the series on PC, represents a blend of progressive and old-school elements. It's a nod to fans of the original UT, released in 1999, with the return of weapons like the impact hammer and enforcer, which replace bits of the arsenal from UT 2004 like the shield gun, lightning gun, and assault rifle. Moving beyond the ballistic loadout, we see Epic pushing forward their most distinct draw, the warfare mode, an augmented version of UT 2004's onslaught. While so much of this game will feel familiar to series veterans, particularly in the deathmatch and team deathmatch modes, it's with the vehicular, large-scale combat that UT 3 makes its largest strides forward, though it still doesn't move that far ahead. Mostly, it's about delivering to fans what made the series so good to begin with: insane, ultraviolent combat, gorgeous graphics, and the most nerve-searing, vein-throttling action around. You get six modes, not including campaign, with UT 3: deathmatch, team deathmatch, capture the flag (CTF), vehicle capture the flag (VCTF), warfare, and duel. You'll notice that's not the same list as UT 2004's modes, since it's noticeably missing assault, something I'm not too bent out of shape about. When outside of any vehicle-related modes, gameplay proceeds much as you'd expect it to. Deathmatch maps are, with a few more spacious exceptions, confined, twisted industrial complexes full of flak fire, perilous drops, and the occasional Redeemer pickup. Everyone's wall-jumping, side-dashing, double-jumping, and firing simultaneously, making for a ludicrously action-packed experienced that's always entertaining, at least up until the point where you start getting burned out. I know that happens to me, which is why I appreciate all the other modes. In CTF you get a translocator device to quickly warp around a map, and when vehicle are added to the mix in VCTF or warfare you get a hoverboard. Hopping onto the floating slab happens quickly with a tap of the Q key, letting you not only move more quickly, but also tag onto the back of friendly vehicles for a boost, an ability you can and often must use to your advantage in VCTF matches since you can't pilot a vehicle with a flag. The risk comes with getting shot while riding, which smashes you to the ground, stunning you for a few precious seconds, and dropping whatever you're carrying, be it a flag in VCTF or orb in warfare. While I had a great time with deathmatch, I couldn't help but feel it dragged a little, one of the downsides of releasing a slightly altered but largely identical shooter over and over again. Though there have been minor changes over the years, with weapon speeds, damage outputs, and player movement seeming slightly adjusted for this one, and brilliant new coats of paint, it's nearly a decade now and we're still playing roughly the same game. That being said, it's still an amazingly fluid experience. If you've never played UT before in any capacity, you really have to. Using WASD double-taps to dodge around, the way the character movement feels, the sense of weight behind the weapons and the way they're balanced against each other, it's all exceptionally well done and has a distinctive style. The vehicles, though, are the most dynamic element, evident in warfare mode. It's based on the same node capture principles as onslaught, yet warfare features some significant changes, the most prominent being a small, glowing ball. It's called an orb, and can be carried to nodes to either provide protection for your own or instantly capture the enemy's. This makes a significant difference in how a game flows, since not only do you have to keep track of where the enemy is focusing their attack, but also where the node carrier might be. A simple strategy would be to have the bulk of your forces head over to one node while simultaneously sending the orb to another, meaning you could, theoretically, capture both at the same time (assuming, of course, one was linked and the other unlinked.) What's more, once an orb carrier is killed, the orb hits the ground and a counter begins. When zero is reached the orb resets, but in the meantime anyone can swoop in and bring it ever closer to instantly capturing a node. Enemies in the vicinity can prevent such a catastrophe by sacrificing their lives to destroy the orb, forcing the other team to make the entire journey again, and possibly giving you enough time to get your own orb carrier to the right spot to advance your team's position on the field. It's another layer of depth that makes warfare a better mode than onslaught, allowing for an even more unpredictable experience as situations shift as rapidly as an air hockey puck. In addition, you'll find more types of nodes. Countdown nodes, if captured and held, can damage an enemy core without having to lower a shield. Others perform more specific functions, like lowering bridges, affecting the position of enemy cores, spawning special vehicles, and more. UT 2004's rides return, including the Manta, Hellbender, Goliath tank, monstrous Leviathan, and speedy Scorpion, among others. A few function slightly differently. The Scorpion, for instance, no longer fires a charged energy ribbon, but little explosive spheres, and its secondary fire razor mandibles are now front-mounted instead of back-mounted. The most notable additions to the vehicles are the new Necris machines. The Darkwalker dominates the landscape with tall, spidery legs, capable of traversing mountains and steep walls, and possesses massively powerful laser cannons, which are balanced by their slow-to-adjust aiming. There's a Viper hoverbike with the ability to perform a suicide attack, hurtling itself forward at a node or core for tremendous damage as you eject safely into the air. A stealth tank, called a Nightshade, can prowl the battlefield setting time-distortion fields, spider-mine traps, and energy shields. If you've got an irrational fear of spiders, you may even be repulsed by the utilitarian Scavenger, which quickly scampers around on three short, spindly legs. Its central sphere can rocket forward with legs spinning like razors on all sides, hop into the air, or propel forth an energy orb. Then there's a new air unit, the Fury, with its own laser cannons, as well as a Necris tank, called a Nemesis, which blasts forth energy streams and can rear up to a raised position, losing land speed but gaining a more rapid rate of fire. Epic made sure to include maps with specific Necris versions, including a Necris type of the po[CENSORED]r Torlan map from UT 2004. VCTF is just as frantic, since instead of merely concerning yourself with players teleporting in front of you while you escape with the flag, you have to deal with Mantas squashing you under their rotors, Scorpions shredding you to bits, or Vipers running you through. And imagine what kind of improved flag defense you can muster with a few Darkwalkers strafing its position. The best experience I had with this mode was on Sandstorm, named for the blinding sandstorms that periodically burst into existence, severely limiting visual range and providing an excellent opportunity to dart in and steal the flag. As the storm subsides, it's simply a matter of getting around a horde of Darkwalkers, Scavengers, and Vipers wheeling toward you with deadly intent. No easy task, to say the least. Or you could just grab the jump boots and pop up over the middle partition. For anyone who feels the prospect of online play to be too daunting, there are customizable bots and even a single-player story mode to pass the hours. Bots are, as you might expect, next to useless on the easiest difficulty setting, but quite a challenge higher up. They did seem to have a few problems when it came to piloting vehicles and capturing flags, however. The plot is nothing to get excited about. A cookie-cutter Epic alpha male character named Reaper and his armored skirt seek revenge against Akasha, a rogue inquisitor of the Necris alien race. Aside from a few moments when characters poke fun at the notion of respawners and the lunacy of the tournament in general, it's a generic tale. You get a few cut-scenes, voice-overs during loading screens, and some game-altering card rewards to mask what's otherwise a sequence of team deathmatch, CTF, VCTF, and warfare matches against bots. You can, however, host your campaign matches online and have others join up, but then again, if you're the type that plays UT offline, such a feature won't matter. In a frustrating turn of events, even with such a limited story, there's still a cliffhanger ending. This trend with games really needs to stop, particularly with you, Epic. You did it with Gears, now you've done it with UT3. For shame. Even if the story doesn't make any sense, even if the characters are as endearing as a toothpick, at least give use some sense of closure, instead of leaving us with an all-too-obvious wait for the next installment setup. Aside from the frenetic online action and single-player mode, UT has always been known for its comprehensive feature set. If you're a series veteran, this is something you've come to expect, but it's worth noting for any newcomers. UT has statistic tracking, full bot support, an enormous number of maps tailored to each game mode, and dedicated servers as well as plenty of little extras like game-altering mutators, character model customization, and UI tweaking options. Community is a large part of what makes this game so successful, so expect it to be supported with more maps and mods as time goes on. Then there are the graphics, which are practically without fault. They're done up in the traditional UT style - heavily armored, muscular characters running across industrial sci-fi settings, only now you get even more of an alien look with the Necris stages, vehicles, and character models. The game's graphical prowess serves to make more satisfying the crux of UT 3's appeal - its moments. Leaping off a stone ledge only to get smashed in the teeth by the leading edge of a Manta. Circle strafing a deployed Leviathan in a Scorpion as AVRiLs pour in from all sides. Blasting flak around a corner for a kill, executing a perfect shock core explosion, gruesomely detonating another player with your impact hammer, getting a non-scoped sniper headshot, or firing Vipers into nodes - they're such satisfying moments, made all the more impressive by the amazing visuals whirling around your constantly shifting reticule and, of course, the announcer. The Verdict At its core, Unreal Tournament 3 offers exactly what its predecessors (specifically UT '99 and '04) did to make it so po[CENSORED]r: preposterous action at blindingly fast speeds. It's all over the top, soaked in blood, nonsensical (hoverboards and stealth tanks?) and bathed in an electric light. Warfare mode is an excellent addition to the series, proving to be a deeper version of onslaught, and the additional Necris vehicles make both it and VCTF all the more worthwhile and enjoyable. Then there are all the smaller scale but still very much significant changes, like the hoverboards, warfare orbs, and slight variations to weapon functionality that work to keep the game from getting stale. Deathmatch, however, still feels very similar, and is therefore less of a draw for me. If you've been playing the series all along, expect the same sort of thing only with a sparkling graphical luster. If you've never played this game before, do so immediately. It's still one of the best shooters on the market, even if it seems to be bumping against the boundaries of its potential. Keep in mind if you've never particularly liked UT, this version will do absolutely nothing to sway you.