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Total 35 articles, created at 2016-05-31 06:03 1 The Fable franchise lives on - as a card game (1.02/2) Lionhead Studios is gone, but Fable will keep going 2016-05-30 19:30 1KB feedproxy.google.com 2 Payday 2 is ditching microtransactions Following the next update, all safes will open for free. 2016-05-30 22:39 1KB www.pcgamer.com 3 2 has disappeared from Steam The game formerly known as Dead Island 2 is now 'SteamDB Unknown App 268150.' 2016-05-30 21:31 1KB www.pcgamer.com 4 Can't make it to E3? Catch Sony's press conference on the big screen Bring some popcorn to the presser 2016-05-30 21:20 1KB feedproxy.google.com 5 Qualcomm Launches New GigaDSL, 802.11ac Wave 2 Chipsets At Computex today, Qualcomm Atheros announced a few new chipsets, and it seems that as a part of their Ikanos acquisition they’ve entered... 2016-05-30 21:00 2KB www.anandtech.com 6 Blizzard hopes to improve Overwatch 'Play of the Game' highlights Lead Software Engineer Rowan Hamilton says Blizzard is 'constantly looking' at ways it can make the system better. 2016-05-30 20:04 2KB www.pcgamer.com 7 Build of the week: Tie P5 Advanced This week's mod shoots for the stars, and lands among the, uh, stars. 2016-05-30 18:00 1KB www.pcgamer.com 8 Total War: Warhammer Vampire Counts guide How to make the Empire’s baddest blood-drinkers not suck. 2016-05-30 17:11 16KB www.pcgamer.com 9 The incredible journey to build EVE Online's first Death Star How players quietly slipped EVE’s biggest, deadliest structure through a wormhole. 2016-05-30 16:34 14KB www.pcgamer.com

10 Asus Transformer 3-series are laptops in disguise At Computex this morning, Asus announced a new generation of its Transformer convertibles. The three models are denoted as Transformer 3 Pro ... 2016-05-30 16:00 3KB techreport.com 11 360 degree Hitman trailer shows off Marrakesh See if you can spot any bald men carrying piano wire. 2016-05-30 15:30 1KB www.pcgamer.com 12 5 ways wearables will transform the lives of the elderly It's not all about Apple - wearable tech is bringing radical change 2016-05-30 15:00 8KB feedproxy.google.com 13 This Half-Life 2 drone mod is scarily realistic Remain calm, citizens 2016-05-30 14:34 1KB feedproxy.google.com 14 Corsair announces liquid cooled GTX 1080, sticks LEDs on new DDR4 RAM Overclocking is the name of the day for Corsair this Computex, with a GTX 1080 and two RAM modules built for high speeds. 2016-05-30 14:31 2KB www.pcgamer.com 15 Elex, Piranha Bytes' 'science-fantasy' RPG, now has a website And with it, a load more details come to light. 2016-05-30 14:30 2KB www.pcgamer.com 16 Hideo Kojima's world tour: what do these clues tell us about his new game? Engine and design cues from the best in the business 2016-05-30 14:11 10KB feedproxy.google.com 17 The 6 best action cam videos you'll ever Double back-flips, terrifying free-climbs, and zombie chases 2016-05-30 13:00 5KB feedproxy.google.com 18 Cortex-A73 CPU and Mali-G71 GPU power up next-gen phones Computex 2016 - At its Computex press conference this morning, ARM announced two new pieces of mobile SoC IP that it believes will... 2016-05-30 12:21 3KB techreport.com

19 Asus arrives in your home with the Zenbo robot Google Home, on legs? 2016-05-30 12:14 1KB feedproxy.google.com 20 Asus pushes forward a modular gaming PC standard 'Rising Neo Gamers' 2016-05-30 11:03 2KB feedproxy.google.com 21 You can now read the whole Bible in emoji Scripture for millennials 2016-05-30 10:47 1KB feedproxy.google.com 22 The Asus ZenBook 3 slays the Apple MacBook in specs and price Eat your heart out Apple 2016-05-30 10:29 2KB feedproxy.google.com 23 Tech Jobs For Vets: Mobilizing The Movement Earlier this month, a two-pronged approach was made to increase tech jobs and technical training for veterans. 2016-05-30 10:06 4KB www.informationweek.com 24 Ibuki heading to Street Fighter V - here's a trailer Ibuki's stocked up on bombs for her latest appearance. 2016-05-30 10:00 1KB www.pcgamer.com 25 Here Are 8 Of The Thinnest Laptops On The Market Today Vendors such as Hewlett-Packard Inc., Lenovo and Dell are battling to have the thinnest laptop out there. Here's how they stack up. 2016-05-30 10:00 1KB www.crn.com 26 Indian minister holds out hope for Apple stores Apple may still get to set up wholly-owned stores in India, with the country’s Commerce Ministry promising to take up the matter with the Finance Ministry that had objected to the proposal. 2016-05-30 09:53 2KB www.itworld.com 27 Apple Watch 2 release date, news and rumors Predictions are pouring in for an updated Apple Watch this year 2016-05-30 09:39 8KB feedproxy.google.com

28 Venturer BravoWin 10KT review: This 10in Windows 10 tablet-laptop hybrid costs just £150, making it an excellent deal for students Even the cheapest Windows 10 laptops can be out of budget for many students, and a more affordable alternative might be a budget 2-in-1 tablet-laptop hybrid such as this £150 Venturer BravoWin 10KT. We find out exactly what you get in return for not a... 2016-05-30 08:00 9KB www.pcadvisor.co.uk 29 Facebook CEO, Mark Zuckerberg To Connect With Space Station Astronauts Via Facebook Live In a statement by National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), Facebook Co-founder and CEO, Mark Zuckerberg will speak with three astronauts currently living and working aboard the International Space Station (ISS) 12:55 p.m EDT (7:55 p.m EAT )Wednesday, June 1st... 2016-05-30 07:35 2KB pctechmag.com 30 PayPal set to discontinue Windows, BlackBerry and Amazon Apps PayPal is discontinuing its mobile app for Windows Phone, BlackBerry and Amazon Fire OS devices to focus its efforts on Android and Apple. As of 30 June, users of affected devices will no longer be able to access the PayPal app, the company said. The... 2016-05-30 07:13 2KB pctechmag.com 31 Asus X553SA review: A cheap budget laptop but at the sacrifice of performance We don't all have a huge budget for a new laptop but take a look at what the Asus X553 can offer for under £250. 2016-05-30 07:00 11KB www.pcadvisor.co.uk 32 How to make PivotTables in Excel: Make your data work quickly for you with the powerful PivotTable feature in Excel PivotTables allow spreadsheet data in Excel to be summarised in a number of ways, quickly and easily. Here we'll show you how to create a pivot table in a matter of minutes. 2016-05-30 07:00 5KB www.pcadvisor.co.uk 33 iPad Pro 2 release date and specs rumours: When will Apple launch a new iPad Pro Will the iPad Pro 2 simply match the specs of the current 9.7in model or will we get more? We investigate. 2016-05-30 07:00 3KB www.pcadvisor.co.uk

34 PIPEDA changes should prompt improved security stances and roadmap creation Businesses are data driven, and enterprises are challenged to both leverage data effectively and manage it. This includes securing it, but also 2016-05-30 18:52 6KB www.itworldcanada.com 35 NHL’s digital head on how the league is using the cloud to deliver ‘enhanced stats’ and a better fan experience Hardcore and casual fans alike know the National Hockey League’s (NHL) 2016 Stanley Cup playoff final kicks off on Monday with the 2016-05-30 18:52 5KB www.itworldcanada.com Articles

Total 35 articles, created at 2016-05-31 06:03

1 The Fable franchise lives on - as a card game (1.02/2) Lionhead Studios may have shut down , but a collectible card game will carry the torch for the Fable franchise. Players assume the role - and accompanying deck - of characters in Fable's world as they summon creatures, cast spells, and knock their opponent's life total to zero. Some unique mechanics have also been revealed, such as completing quests during the middle of a match, and using your character's morality to transform cards in your own hand into either good or evil variants. An in-progress look at Fable Fortune's PVP mode [Image Credit: IGN] Flaming Fowl's goals for the Kickstarter are to raise £250,000 (approximately $370,000) and put out a closed beta shortly after the fundraising is complete. An open beta for both PC and are planned for October, with the full game expected to be out in late 2017. Article continues below

Ex-Lionhead devs announce Fable Fortune, a free-to-play Fable card game pcgamer.com 2016-05-30 19:30 By Parker feedproxy.google.com

2 Payday 2 is ditching microtransactions There was a huge uproar among the Payday community last year when Overkill added microtransactions to Payday 2 in the Black Market update, despite a 2013 promise not to. Now that decision has been reversed: Overkill parent Starbreeze Studios announced today that it has acquired the full rights to the Payday franchise from publisher 505 Games, and said microtransactions will be removed from Payday 2 in the next update. “We are freeing up the black market,” Producer Almir Listo says in the video. “Starting with the next update in Payday 2, any old-generation safes in the loot drop will stop to drop. Any new-generation safe, going forward, will drop completely for free. You will still be able to trade all the old and new generation safes and items using the Steam Marketplace. Your prices [and] supply and demand will still continue to shape the Payday 2 marketplace. Any new generation safes that drop will be dropping completely for free, and will continue to have different rarities and qualities, depending on what kind of items you get. The only difference is, now you open them for free.” “Fuck that broke-dick piece of shit drill ,” he added. Starbreeze pledged to continue developing new content for Payday 2 for at least 18 more months, and while it was a safe assumption that it was going to happen anyway, the announcement also effectively confirms that Payday 3 is coming. The deal with 505 Games gives it a 33 percent cut of the net revenues on sales of Payday 3, capped at $40 million, after Starbreeze has fully recouped its development and marketing costs.

2016-05-30 22:39 Andy Chalk www.pcgamer.com

3 Dead Island 2 has disappeared from Steam It has not been smooth sailing for Dead Island 2. In April of 2015 it was delayed significantly , which is not all that terribly unusual, but then publisher gave the to , which most definitely was. expressed interest in resuming the , but that went nowhere; then, earlier this year, it came to light that had taken up the reins. But now the saga has taken another twist, noticed earlier today by NeoGAF : The Dead Island 2 listing on Steam has disappeared, and SteamDB now refers to it as simply “Unknown App 268150. " Naturally, this has fueled speculation that the game has finally been canceled, although as several commenters have suggested, it could also indicate that a “re-reveal” is coming. The Steam page was based on Yager's ideas for the game, after all, and since “ conflicting visions ” are what led to the split with Deep Silver in the first place, it's not unlikely that Sumo Digital's creation will differ dramatically from what we've previously seen. I've reached out to the appropriate people to find out what's going on, and I'll let you know what they have to say about it. In the meantime, remember: We may not have the game, but we'll always have this spectacularly goofy trailer.

2016-05-30 21:31 Andy Chalk www.pcgamer.com

4 Can't make it to E3? Catch Sony's press conference on the big screen Over 85 movie theaters in the US, Canada, and Latin America will livestream the event at 6pm PST on June 13. A full list of participating theaters is available on PlayStation 's official blog. In addition to the HD simulcast of PlayStation's latest announcements, entry to the event also includes digital swag and a novelty commemorative cup to fill up with fizzy sugar liquids before the the two-and-a-half-hour event. Sony first introduced the PlayStation E3 Experience in 2014, with the number of participating theaters more than doubling over the last two years. We guess people must've reeeeally liked those commemorative cups. Signup for tickets begins tomorrow, May 31 at 10am PST. Sony isn't charging for entry into the event, but space will be limited to a select number of available seats. While comfy chairs, Junior Mints, and a half-gallon of Mr. Pibb would certainly make Sony's press conference more enjoyable, we would still advise planning any future dinner-and-a-movie dates around an actual feature film. Article continues below

2016-05-30 21:20 By Parker feedproxy.google.com

5 Qualcomm Launches New GigaDSL, 802.11ac Wave 2 Chipsets At Computex today, Qualcomm Atheros announced a few new chipsets, and it seems that as a part of their Ikanos acquisition they’ve entered the wireline business in the hopes of solving capacity issues in the last mile. While fiber should be deployed where possible, in many cases it can be expensive and impractical to run fiber optic cable, such as older apartment complexes. As a result, a 10 Gbps connection can turn into a 100 Mbps connection when using POTS lines for the last few hundred meters depending upon channel conditions and run length. G.fast or GigaDSL attempts to bridge the gap here by using techniques like self far-end crosstalk cancellation and significantly increased transmission bandwidth to significantly improve channel utilization of existing POTS lines, and the QCO5700 and QCM5720 use these technologies to try and improve bandwidth at the last hundred meters. Unlike previously launched chipsets, these are really designed to enable drop-in replacement for existing VDSL equipment, and are squarely targeted at Asian ISPs that generally have an all-fiber network but may only have POTS in a building. The QCO5700 is designed for multiple dwelling deployments like apartment buildings, while QCM5720 is designed for customer premises equipment and both chipsets can support up to 1Gbps while coexisting with existing services that may also be using the POTS line. The other notable announcement here is on Atheros’ traditional wireless business, and as a part of trying to get better connectivity for the last few feet in the home. While MU-MIMO is nothing new at this point, QCA is releasing a new tri-radio platform for routers the QCA9886 2x2 802.11ac radio. With three radios, a single router with an IPQ40x9 SoC will be able to support simultaneous 2.4 GHz, 5 GHz, and a third 5 GHz radio for range extender use. The new GigaDSL chipsets should begin sampling in June, and companies like Sumitomo Electronics, NEC, and Wave Electronics are designing or building products that will utilize the QCO5700 and QCM5720. The new QCA9886 is already sampling to vendors, and should be in routers in the near future.

2016-05-30 21:00 Joshua Ho www.anandtech.com

6 Blizzard hopes to improve Overwatch 'Play of the Game' highlights In a recent column on the much-maligned transforming turret Bastion, Evan noted that Overwatch's Play of the Game system “sometimes celebrates mundane multikills as godlike feats of heroism.” It's an inevitable consequence of asking a machine to pick the pivotal moment in a competitive event comprised of thousands of them. Lead Software Engineer Rowan Hamilton touched on that point in a recent interview with GameSpot , in which he talked a bit about how the system works, and said that Blizzard isn't done with it yet. Variables that factor into Play of the Game honors include damage dealt, kills, and healing allies, and also less obvious things like the difficulty of making a shot: “A snipe of someone half a screen away who was just chilling out and waiting to be headshot won't be weighted as heavily as a Tracer zipping across, barely in sight that you manage to pick off,” Hamilton said. But he illustrated the difficulty of using hard numbers to determine subjective results with a story about Zenyatta, an offensive support hero. “I think at [one] point when we were tweaking it Zenyatta would almost always get Play of the Game every time he popped his ultimate, because he would just do this massive amount of healing and the algorithm would almost always freak out,” he said. “But it was just Zenyatta just sitting there floating.” Naturally, Blizzard has access to “a whole bunch of data” on what actions are leading to Play of the Game awards, and can fiddle with the relevant algorithms on internal systems to change the outcomes. “So it might've been Widowmaker getting three snipes, but I change the weighting on some other aspect that we take as important, and it could all of a sudden [be] Mercy resurrecting everyone on the point two seconds before the match ended,” he said. “It's going to be an ongoing process, and hopefully we continue to improve it.” That doesn't mean wholesale changes will appear right away, however: Hamilton said the focus for now is to get competitive play finished, and to ensure that performance doesn't suffer now that Overwatch is in full release.

2016-05-30 20:04 Andy Chalk www.pcgamer.com

7 Build of the week: Tie P5 Advanced This Star Wars themed build comes from Corey Gregory of Australia, who seems as gifted with case-modding as Luke is with the Force. I imagine Yoda as a message board and shop class hybrid creature, like a table saw with strong opinions. Despite its industrial, utilitarian design, the Tie P5 Advanced has some fairly green origins; it was inspired by a mountable plant manger. Gregory was out looking for green buddies with his fiance, when he noticed the manger’s quartered metal sphere could be cut and combined into a complete sphere. Spheres, music of the spheres, stars, Star Wars—it all checks out. After plenty of welding, drilling, plaster, and detail work, the Tie P5 Advanced looks like the real deal—call up mister G. Lucas circa 1977 and let him know! Gregory has yet to fill the Tie P5’s liquid reservoirs, but the final physical product is stunning. It’s a gorgeous homage to the the Tie Fighter design that doesn't sacrifice style for function. All the components fit in there just fine, and they’re pretty powerful too. For more on the Tie P5 Advanced, check out Gregory’s in-depth YouTube video log , his Facebook page , or the official build log for more information. 2016-05-30 18:00 James Davenport www.pcgamer.com

8 Total War: Warhammer Vampire Counts guide The vampires are the most unusual of the starting factions in Total War: Warhammer. On the battlefield and off, their living dead have an array of special rules which make them unusually hard to beat. Their basic troops never run away and can act as tarpits for much more powerful units —but they have no ranged units whatsoever. What they do have is an array of flying units, magic and powerful heroes to lay waste to the enemy. They also have a relatively safe starting position, in a corner of the Empire, backed up against The World’s Edge Mountains. Sure, like every Warhammer faction, they’re surrounded by enemies. And, sure those enemies see them as abominations that should be wiped off the face of the earth. But pacifying moves on the part of the vamps can neutralise that problem. Particularly, the Dwarfs should be no trouble in the early game, as the Greenskin hordes advance on them. You’ve no reason to even attack the Dwarfs, because you can’t take their lands. Your only real targets are the human lands—The Empire, Kislev, The Border Princes and Bretonnia if you can reach it. And you need to keep a weather eye on the North, because you’re located very close to where Chaos starts. Sylvania is backed up into the mountains, so its East side is mostly secure. It’s divided into two provinces, of which you only own one region at the start. However, once you’ve conquered all five other regions, you’re set for the game. These six regions have all you need to get every single one of your -tier units, as well as a very large income. For example, one of the towns literally has a gold mine. Another provincial capital has a special building that heavily reduces the cost of monstrous creatures including Terrorgheists. And your faction capital can build nearly all the top-end buildings that allow you the top-tier units. To get them to that state, you need to focus your buildings on growth first— which means a charnel pit or two in every province. Your secondary focus should be on money—whatever you can build to bump it up, do it—for example, Necromantic and Vampiric top end units produce a good lump of money, though it might take 20 turns to pay back the investment to build them. Your third focus should be on unit production buildings. And your final focus has to be on defensive military structures—which every Vampiric town has, from a Corpse Pile to a Ghost Wall—and which all give you large numbers of free troops when defending cities. Meanwhile, research should be focused on two of the four trees. The Lahmian Book of Blood is where all the best technologies are for the campaign map, so focus on that first. The Book of Arkhan makes your core undead troops much cheaper and more survivable, so when you’re thinking of military excursions, this should be your first choice. It’s quite plausible, by turn 100 on normal, to have maxed out both these provinces and moved a good way down the Vampiric tech trees. Then you’ll have a good income, heavily-defended settlements, and the top-tier units. When you’re planning to conquer neighbouring provinces, it can be worth building upgraded Braziers in your border towns. These spread vampiric corruption in your neighbours, which in turn increases the chance of undead rebellions in those areas. This is a great distraction to potential attackers. You can also spread corruption using some of your hero units. Vampiric corruption also increases public order in that province when you do eventually take control, meaning you have to spend less time with a giant army stack sitting in one place—crippling for a vampiric military campaign, given the cost of armies. And vampiric armies don’t suffer attrition in corrupted provinces, making them all the easier for takeover. Like the Chaos faction, the Vampires have a strong constraint on their army usage. Because of their ability to instantly and cheaply create large numbers of units in a turn using their Raise Dead ability an unrestrained vamp faction could field numerous full-stacked armies for short terms. Where Chaos armies aren’t allowed to stay near each other, the Vamps pay a hefty percentage extra for every army they have. That means, for most of the game, you’ll want to keep their number of armies down, to keep your income up. The best way to do that is to capture Sylvania and turtle, with two armies defending the area. If anyone attacks, you can use your Raise Dead ability to top up each army and/or recruit another lord and some units for him. It also means that, when you do attack, you need to be cautious. You can’t afford to be at war with lots of enemies simultaneously. You can’t project your power without bleeding money, and raiding just makes all your neighbours hate you more. It's best to wait for enemy factions to attack you first. If you’ve made Sylvania into a fortress, which you should, and kept your armies small, it’s not inconceivable that you have a crapload of 'money'— where money, in the vampires' case, is accumulated dark magic. This money is for two things—firstly, temporarily raising new armies for campaigns. Hiring a lord and getting a new full stack to back him up will absorb most of a fully-upgraded province’s income. By itself, that army should be able to take another weakly-defended province, at which point you can turtle and upgrade it again. The great tactic: bribe your enemies. dark magic magically translates into gold for any other faction, so you can pay them to stay away, or even be your friends. Three mid-sized bribes against the Dwarfs (who, again, it is utterly pointless fighting, because you can get nothing from it) might cost you 24,000 units of dark magic. That’s enough to turn them friendly (on normal difficulty) and get non-aggression pacts going. You also want to keep a big kitty spare, because the Vamps have special rules that mean they particularly benefit from having ready cash on hand. The most powerful vampire special rule is also one of the easiest to miss. When a large number of troops die in one location, a battle marker appears on the map listing the number of casualties. The larger stack of dead, the more likely that special vampire units can be recruited instantly here for much cheaper than normal. What does that mean? In my first Vampire campaign, I’d taken a northern city in a bloody battle early in the game, but had chosen not to push further north into Kislev as I wanted them to take the brunt of the inevitable Chaos invasion. Instead, I fortified the city until it had the maximum possible defences. That still wasn’t enough to defend against the two full stacks of Chaos armies, led by their special Lord of Change Greater Demon character. Thankfully, the one turn it took to reach the walls was enough warning for me to hire a lord and raise a top-tier undead army from that bloody battle. Without the corpse pile, it would taken multiple turns to raise that army, the same as any other faction. For that reason, Vampires want pitched battles to happen on their territory. However, especially in the early game, their units are too weak to take on other full stacks, so it pays to move them in pairs. Given the multiplying cost of having extra vampire armies, you’ll probably only have two armies anyway, so move cautiously, and concentrate on defense. Alternatively you can hold off until a settlement has been attacked by another large army ( a Greenskin Waaagh, perhaps), and then head in to raise hellish creatures from the remains of the enemy dead. The vamps have another cheap campaign tactic to watch out for. A fully- upgraded Vampire town can typically recruit six zombie units a turn, on top of any the province allows you to raise. That means you can have a super- cheap army of useless units in a couple of turns. These units are great for snatching razed cities—especially in the wake of a Chaos invasion. Everyone else has to either raise huge numbers of troops to resettle these cities, or pay through the nose to rebuild them—either way, it’s a great expense and it can weaken an army. Vamps can take that 20-stack army of zombies, and settle them. This massively reduces the rebuilding cost, and the zombies replenish quickly on the new Vampire territory. On top of that, the public order is good, because you’ve acquired the city from ruins rather than built it from scratch. It’s actually the best way to acquire new territory, scavenging from other’s leavings, rather than going through a costly invasion yourself. On the battlefield, Vampires face a different sort of problem. Their core units—skeletons and zombies—are basically awful. Their limited advantages are that they cause fear in the enemy and that they’ll never run away. However, if any undead unit starts losing, the unit will start to crumble causing extra casualties—this happens pretty fast with zombies. The Vampires also have no ranged units, so Dwarfs will blast them to pieces from range. That means their basic troops really need some help. That comes on four fronts, really. The nice range of armoured units; progressively larger monstrosities; ethereal units; and the great array of fast and flying units. Armoured units include Skeleton Spearmen, Grave Guards and Black Knights. They’re progressively-improved skeletons, basically, who can actually hold their own in combat (especially the higher-cost Black Knights with Barding). You’ll gradually replace your Skeletons and Zombies with Grave Guards as you play, but the Skeleton Spearmen are cheap and their shields, and competence against large units, prove useful throughout the campaign. By contrast, the two wraith units—Cairn Wraiths and mounted Hexwraiths— are very expensive and have pretty poor combat statistics. Their hidden advantage is that they’re ethereal, which gives them a 75% chance to resist any non-magical damage they receive and they cause terror. The combination of these two means that only heroes with magical weapons, wizards and the Bretonnian Grail Knights have a chance to hurt them quickly and seriously. Hexwraiths can also deploy beyond usual deployment zone restraints as vanguards, meaning they can sweep down on the enemy from any direction at the battle’s start. Finally, the Black Coach is meant to function as a chariot. I've had tremendously inconsistent effects from it and it’s so expensive that I’d simply not bother until it’s fixed up. Monstrous units—Crypt Ghouls, the Crypt Horrors and the giant Varghulf— are your heavy-hitters. Use them to hammer enemies once the tarpits of zombies, skeletons and Grave Guard have pinned them. They don’t have great leadership, so need heroes or lords nearby to keep them in line. More useful are the cheap fast and flying units. Fell Bats and Dire Wolves both fulfil the same harassing role in combat, but bats are much better at dealing with artillery and wizards, and wolves are better at acting as fast cavalry. The wolves also get to deploy as vanguards, meaning they can be placed hidden in a woodland somewhere out in the battlefield to really screw with the enemy’s plans. Much more important though, are the Vargheists, which are monstrous melee flying infantry, quite capable of breaking elite units and archers. Finally, the giant zombie bat called a Terrorgheist is perfect for taking down other large units (which includes cavalry) or other monstrous units. Beyond its simple strength, it’s got poisonous attacks that cripple enemies. Which lord should you take? Both Vampire Lords and Necromancer Lords are powerful spellcasters, whilst the Vampires are also pretty decent melee combatants. However, you really don’t want to be throwing them into combat. If they fall, then the army falls apart completely. For your Legendary Lord, it’s a hard call. Heinrich Kemmler reduces the cost of Raise Dead, which is very handy for cheap armies. He provides wonderful buffs in battle for his troops, but is poor in combat. Meanwhile Mannfred Von Carstein is a monstrous melee opponent and wizard, who gets access to two magic schools rather than just one. You get the other Lord pretty early in the campaign, so it’s fairly academic, but you probably want to start levelling up Von Carstein sooner, to get him riding that zombie dragon. Regarding heroes, it’s really not obvious what’s best for what role, as they can all be customised to fulfil almost any role. Banshees happily fulfil the role of assassins on the battlefield, given their speed and their huge ethereal defense against everything but magic and magic weapons. Necromancers can cast Vampiric spells that buff your units and debuff the enemy, but need to be kept back from combat. Vampires are strong melee fighters who can also cast the devastating Death magic. And Wight Kings are heavily armoured tanks, especially if you put them on a barded skeletal steed. Each has a different effect when deployed in a province. I've found that it’s essential to have a vampire and necromancer deployed at all times in core provinces, to reduce build costs. With that selection of units, your tactics in battle are relatively obvious. You send your infantry forward, buffing the key ones with Necromantic magic, and debuffing key enemies. Your fast and flying units eliminate the enemy artillery (fell bats), archers (dire wolves and vargheists) and cavalry (terrorgheists). Against the Empire and other vampires, these tactics work fairly well. The Dwarfs are a different story. They tend to sit in highly-defended positions, where it’s tough to unpick their missile troops and artillery from the infantry. And they’re brave enough to not care about fear and terror, mostly. With them, you keep your flying troops back until chinks appear in the dwarfen defenses, then pick off the ranged units. You need to advance with zombies in the front, to absorb their firepower, as fast as possible, and then get your better units into combat. If you’ve got a vampire with the Lore of Death magic, then the Purple Sun of Xereus is an excellent way to break up their formation. I almost never fought the Greenskins as Vampires—it’s easy to stay out of wars with them, given that the Dwarfs sit between you. The exception is the neighbouring Red Eye tribe, who have diplomatic weaknesses when dealing with Vampires. With them, Fear and Terror are hugely more important, so try to drive off the weaker goblins with your tarpit units, and use your flying units to pick off their ranged troops. If you have a Terrorgheist, drop it on their boar boyz. And target the giants and trolls with Grave Guards with Great Weapons, Crypt Horrors or Varghulfs, and hope they run when everything else runs away. The only faction to really worry about are top-tier Chaos armies. Their units rarely suffer from fear or terror, are lethal in combat, and heavily-armoured. They’re just better than your units, generally, all round. I always take two stacks into battle with them, if I can, and never let my armies travel alone. Given that chaos corruption interferes with vampiric corruption, you’ll often be moving in a raiding stance to stop attrition. So wars against Chaos are often slow, piecemeal affairs. In terms of magic, the key spell from the lore of Vampires is Vanhel’s Danse Macabre. This essentially makes a unit super-powered for a very short time —drop it on a Grave Guard unit and they can take down pretty much anything else. Combine it with a debuff (like Curse of Years) on their opponent and they’ll burn through them quickly. Raise Dead is another great spell, if you’ve got space in your army, to throw up another unit of zombies. And Wind of Death is a horror, if you work out how to aim it properly. The lore of Death is only possessed by vampire hero units and Von Carstein himself. The Spirit Leech spell is a great hero and giant killer— much better than the temperamental Gaze of Nagash. The Fate of Bjuna is good at devastating tough units. And the Purple Sun of Xereus is great at messing up large formations. So that’s the Vampire Counts. They’re fragile, sneaky and utterly deadly. They start from the weakest origin of all the factions, but can quickly reach an unassailable position. And they’ve got the fastest units in the game. When the terror and fear rules start working properly again, it’s likely they’ll need a big nerf. But until then, let the children of the night fly free!

2016-05-30 17:11 By Daniel www.pcgamer.com

9 The incredible journey to build EVE Online's first Death Star Few corporations in EVE Online will ever have a reputation like Hard Knocks Inc. More than just a group of elite soldiers, they routinely infiltrate alliances, blow up their most prized assets, and steal everything that isn't bolted down—and that's just on a Monday. Their ranks are made of brigands, thieves, scammers, and all the other refuse that slowly filters out of the more upstanding corporations of EVE. But instead of falling into chaos, Hard Knocks have become a weaponized nightmare. If EVE Online is a sandbox, these are the players who like kicking down all the sandcastles. And now they've just finished building the biggest sandcastle the galaxy of New Eden has ever seen. Last month, EVE Online released its latest update, Citadel, introducing indomitable new structures that pilots could build to better defend their space. Coming in three different sizes, these citadels are capable of dealing extreme damage against even the most coordinated invading fleet. Since Citadel's release, Hard Knocks have made EVE Online history three times. First, they built the first Fortizar-class large citadels. Then they celebrating by blowing up someone else's. And then, two weeks ago, they made history one more time when they announced the arrival of their Keepstar-class extra large citadel—the biggest structure in all of EVE Online at this time. Meet the Keepstar citadel (above), the first of its kind anywhere in New Eden. This monstrous fortress is 800,000 meters squared and is the only one in existence in EVE that we know of. It's so large that titans, the massive supercapital ships of EVE, can safely dock within its bays. Along its outer hull lies eight slots where anti-capital ship weapons are fitted, waiting to gut anything that gets too close. The crown jewel is a devastating weapon of mass destruction, one of EVE Online's "doomsday" weapons. With just the push of a button, Fort Knocks fires a beam of energy that bounces between ships, obliterating an entire armada in one fell swoop. Fort Knocks isn't just a weapon, it's practically an entire city, and it took Hard Knocks trillions of ISK (EVE's currency) and months of planning to build. We absolutely don't need one, this is just a penis-waving contest here. Jerzii Devil is a senior director within Hard Knocks, but he's also has a long history of corporate theft under his . When I ask him about why Hard Knocks felt like they needed an extra large citadel, he laughs. "We absolutely don't need one, this is just a penis-waving contest here," he says. "We just decided to build one because, why not? " He tells me that Hard Knocks' road to owning the first Keepstar citadel started all the way back in the spring of 2015 when EVE Online's developer, CCP Games, first announced it would be adding the new structures. Plans began in earnest in November of 2015 through to January of 2016, when more details on citadels were becoming public. With only months until they would be officially launched and available to the citizens of New Eden, the race to be the first was on. "Early on we decided money wouldn't be the issue. We have all these older members, and they're all very rich," Jerzii says. But that didn't stop the alliance from hesitating to drop the 700 billion ISK required to purchase the blueprint needed to manufacture the Keepstar. For reference, EVE Online's largest battle, The Bloodbath of B-R5RB , cost an estimated 11 trillion ISK. For an even better reference, EVE Online's monthly subscription can be sold in-game as an item for 900 million ISK and costs $20 USD. That implies that the estimated value of the Keepstar is around $15,000. If money wasn't a problem however, manufacturing sure was. Being some of the biggest badasses in EVE Online had its downsides, like not welcoming pacifistic industrialists that many alliances rely on for income and wealth. For the first time in their history, Hard Knocks either needed to become the pilots that they so mercilessly slaughtered or, as Jerzii tells me, they could just find someone to do it for them. "We had to find a builder," he says. "We had a few possible people who might be able to build it for us, and eventually we got referred to this one guy. It seemed legit at first. " That's when we found out that his plan was to basically dick us over and lead us on while he was building his own citadel. The arrangement was simple, Hard Knocks would pay this builder to create their Keepstar citadel for them, letting him handle the logistical nightmare of putting together EVE's equivalent of a Death Star while they stuck to what they were good at. It seemed like a good deal until a defector from the builder's group turned and had some interesting news for Hard Knocks. "The group he belonged to ended up imploding and we gained a few of their members. That's when we found out that his plan was to basically dick us over and lead us on while he was building his own citadel. That way he could stop us from building ours while he built his first. " Unwilling to trust anyone else, Jerzii and Hard Knocks knew that if they were going to build EVE Online's first Keepstar, they were going to need to do it themselves. They bought the Keepstar blueprint and made plans to start building. In a Reddit post , Hard Knocks member Noobman detailed the extensive effort required to gather the construction materials necessary: "I had 18 builders with 180-200 [construction jobs] needing [blueprint copies] every 3-4 days. I had 4-5 private [blueprint copy] makers producing constantly for me as well. " Hard Knocks was becoming an industrial powerhouse. But now they had a new problem: gathering the staggering amount of resources needed to even begin production. "It was about three months until Citadel launched at this point," Jerzii says. "We were never going to fill the kind of demand we had to build a citadel before they launch. " He tells me that himself, Noobman, and others placed characters within New Eden's most popular trade hubs, aggressively buying up all the materials they could. Elsewhere, other Hard Knocks pilots had given up their murderous ways to focus on aiding in other efforts, like manufacturing, hauling resources, and other logistical tasks. Hard Knocks began stockpiling resources and manufacturing on March 16th and by April 19th they had finally built the entirety of the components necessary for their Keepstar. On April 27th, when the Citadel update went live, Hard Knocks ferried hundreds of components and the blueprint to a station in high-security space, and began to assemble the Keepstar. Twenty days later, it was finished. But Hard Knocks now faced an even greater challenge. How the were they going to get the damn thing back home? Hard Knocks' home system is called "Rage. " This star system has no strategic or economic value. Its planets are mostly barren, its moons not abundant in valuable resources. It’s the kind of place that most wouldn't think twice about revisiting, and Hard Knocks has transformed it into the closest thing EVE Online has to hell—a bastion full of murderous thugs armed to the teeth and ready to tear apart any pilot that might stumble in. And even worse, no one even knows how to find Rage. In most cases, Rage finds them. In EVE Online, each star system is connected by stargates that lead to neighboring systems, forming a vast tangle of pathways players can use to travel the galaxy of New Eden. They are strategic chokepoints, and it's not uncommon for stargates to be the center of EVE's epic battles. But around 4,000 star systems aren't connected by stargates at all. Instead, unstable wormholes stitch them together with the known universe for brief periods of time before collapsing and reopening with a brand new connection. This is where Hard Knocks calls home. "Every day it's a new world," Jerzii Devil tells me. He describes life for a normal EVE pilot living in a region of space: "It's the same map, same enemies, same people passing through—it can get pretty stagnant. " In wormhole space, however, every day new connections are made and broken with any of the thousands of star systems of New Eden. And for one unlucky system, each day they wake up to find Rage on their doorstep. But right now, that unpredictable nature of Rage was a curse. "At one point we talked about building [the Keepstar] directly in Rage," Jerzii says. "But the directors were like, no way, we're not risking putting that much money in our system. " So instead they opted to build the Keepstar in the safety of high-security space where space stations couldn't be destroyed by anyone trying to stop them. Once the Keepstar was in transit, that was a different story. There was little they could do to prevent someone from blowing up one of their freighters if they were determined to do so. On May 17th, every pilot was hands on deck for the most important operation in Hard Knocks' history. The police force that patrols high-security space regions, called CONCORD, is reactionary at best. Like a real police force, their mission is to bring criminals to justice, not prevent the crimes from happening in the first place. In order to keep their Keepstar safe, Hard Knocks was going to have to plan a clever ruse when it came time to move it. On May 17th, every pilot was hands on deck for the most important operation in Hard Knocks' history. Because the alliance had been somewhat public about their intention of building the Keepstar, they had no guarantees that spies hadn't been carefully watching them for weeks now. Operational security was at its tightest. "We didn't tell our members what they were doing, where they were going, or how they were getting there," Jerzii says. "We had to keep everything close to the chest. Only the directors could see the maps we were using. " The plan was broken down into multiple initiatives that required every pilot to be on their best game. In the system of Paara, where the Keepstar was built, four pilots were chosen to fly freighters. Three would act as decoys to lure off any ambushes while one carried the Keepstar. Between the four freighters, an escort of almost 100 Tornado battlecruisers would accompany each vessel. "If anything comes at [the freighter], it's pretty much over," Jerzii says. "So we decided we didn't want anything to come at it. If we saw anything get near it or anything that even just looks like it might be an issue, we'd just destroy it. " But that was only one half of the operation. Back in Rage, pilots were ‘rolling wormholes’ like there was no tomorrow. Each wormhole connection in EVE Online degrades slowly over time, but can also be collapsed if enough mass passes through it. Using some hasty math, pilots can fly heavy ships through a wormhole repeatedly forcing it to collapse and automatically generating a new connection to a different part of New Eden. It's a brute force tactic, but if done enough times Hard Knocks stood a good chance at eventually getting a decent connection close to Paara. Meanwhile, another group of pilots were in covert-ops stealth frigates, using scanning probes to map networks of wormhole connections that might lead to a favorable route that way. Eventually, a winding connection of wormholes was found that would lead the fleet from Paara, in high-sec, to Rage, in wormhole space. When they managed to clear high-security space without incident and enter into infinitely more dangerous wormhole space, Hard Knocks had their first unpleasant encounter. Wrong Hole, an alliance of tough-as-nails wormhole dwellers like Hard Knocks were connected to the wormhole system they were passing through. If even one of their pilots caught wind of what Hard Knocks might be up to, the entire operation would end in disaster. Even if Wrong Hole didn't manage to destroy the freighter outright, Hard Knocks would never be able to safely set the citadel up in their system without worrying that half of the wormhole alliances were secretly waiting to get their revenge. "We needed to get that connection gone," Jerzii says. "We had a small group of battleships start rolling the hole while a PVP fleet went to assist them in case they tried anything. We told [Wrong Hole] straight up, we have a huge fleet, just let us roll the hole, and nothing bad will happen. We didn't tell them what was going on or why, we just told them not to mess with us. " In an instant, he was stranded millions of light years from the rest of his fleet in a star system full of embarrassed and angry pilots. Wrong Hole took the threat seriously and stood down, but as one Hard Knocks pilot went to roll the hole one last time, it collapsed behind him. In an instant, he was stranded millions of light years from the rest of his fleet in a star system full of embarrassed and angry pilots who were just forced to kowtow to a greater threat. He didn't last long. Once safely inside of Rage, the Keepstar was "anchored," a process that took 24 hours and ended with a 15 minute vulnerability window where the citadel could easily be destroyed by a determined force. While much of the fleet took a break to recharge before the 15 minute timer, a second fleet locked down the hole to make sure no one could get in. The move operation from Paara to Rage took 12 hours of planning and execution. The next day, the Keepstar came online without issue. Hard Knocks sent a tweet to a CCP developer, who soon after confirmed they were the first the build a Keepstar in EVE Online—a two month process requiring thousands of man hours, a trillion ISK, and one very nerve wracking escort mission. When I ask Jerzii how stressful the whole situation was, he shrugs. "It went too smoothly," he complains. "I was kind of hoping for some hiccup or someone to try something. " Now that Fort Knocks is fully operational, Rage went from being a system most would avoid to one that you'd have to be insane to ever assault. I ask Jerzii why Hard Knocks would ever spend months of their time and a trillion ISK building EVE Online's most defensible structure in a system no one would ever want to visit in the first place. He laughs at me and explains it was never done to make their home more defensible. "Nobody was invading us anyway," he says. "Maybe this will make them try harder. People say we've painted a huge target on our backs, and that's exactly what we want. "

2016-05-30 16:34 By Steven www.pcgamer.com

10 Asus Transformer 3-series are laptops in disguise At Computex this morning, Asus announced a new generation of its Transformer convertibles. The three models are denoted as Transformer 3 Pro , Transformer 3 , and Transformer Mini. The Transformer 3 Pro's styling falls in line with other professional-targeted convertibles, with its integrated kickstand and magnetic cover-keyboard. In contrast, the Transformer 3 uses its origami-folding cover keyboard as a stand. The Transformer Mini appears to be a smaller version of the Transformer 3 Pro, although Asus's information is light on details about that particular device. When Asus introduced the Transformer line in 2011, it was at the forefront of the two-in-one revolution. Things have changed significantly from those early days when Nvidia Tegras powered most devices. These days, the Transformer 3 and 3 Pro have roughly the same form-factor as its predecessors, but pack way more powerful Intel Core-series CPUs. Additionally, there's been some refinement on the design side, with integrated stands and colored keyboard covers that allow for a degree of personalization. The keyboard covers on the Transformer 3 and Transformer 3 Pro are very similar. Both keyboards have 1.4-mm key travel, LED backlighting, and a glass-covered touchpad with handwriting support, courtesy of the pressure- sensitive Asus Pen. Windows 10 aims to make computer security more user-friendly with passwordless unlocking, and both the Asus Transformer 3 and Transformer Pro leverage that feature with their dedicated hardware. The Transformer 3 packs a fingerprint sensor which will unlock the device with a finger swipe. On the Transformer 3 Pro, the front cameras and an IR sensor are used to power Windows Hello, which grants access to the machine when it sees your smug mug. The specs for the new Transformers are below. Asus hasn't released official specs for the Transformer Mini, so we relied on what little info GSMArena had on hand. The Transformer lineup also has some specialized accessories that ought to cover more specific usage patterns. For business users, Asus offers the Universal Dock, a small dongle that provides an SD card reader, VGA and HDMI video outputs, along with Ethernet, USB Type-A, and USB Type-C ports. Music lovers can grab the Audio Pod, a four-speaker omnidirectional Bluetooth speaker intended to fill a room with music for situations when the internal speakers aren't enough. Asus intends to let gamers make full use of their Transformer by pairing it with the ROG XG Station 2. The XG Station 2 is Asus' external graphics docking station, which allows users to tap into the power of a desktop graphics card. The station connects to the Transformers through a Thunderbolt connection, albeit limited to PCIe x4 speeds. The new Transformers are reasonably priced, starting at $799 for the Transformer 3, and $999 for the Transformer 3 Pro.

2016-05-30 16:00 by Raymond techreport.com

11 360 degree Hitman trailer shows off Marrakesh Until the travel industry wises up and makes Agent 47 the official mascot for international holidays/naughty murdering, Square Enix and IO's own trailers will have to do. Once again, they've created a tourist destination that looks absolutely lovely, and ripe for exploration, if you can live with the small caveat that a conspicuous bald man might murder you and steal your clothes at some point during your stay. The latest trailer for Hitman's Marrakesh-set episode ditches Agent 47 to focus squarely on that environment, implementing a fancy 360-degree camera that we can swivel about to admire it in all its beauty. Hitman: Episode 3 is out tomorrow—you can read all about it here .

2016-05-30 15:30 By Tom www.pcgamer.com

12 5 ways wearables will transform the lives of the elderly Most of us think of wearables in terms of smartwatches and fitness trackers, gadgets that can help us be fitter and more efficient. But for some people, they're far more important than that - these wearables are the difference between dependency and freedom. They might not hit the headlines as often as the shiny new wrist from Apple and Samsung, but wearables for older people are fast becoming an essential way to keep them safe, healthy and happy. It's early days yet, but already we're seeing some impressive technological innovation to improve the lives of those later in life - and the even better news is they'll be easy enough for even the most averse of technophobes to use safely and happily. Credit: Lively Everyone wants their loved ones to be safe, and in the case of older relatives and friends, the risks are more worrying, especially if you live a distance away. Wearables can help keep these people safe by connecting them to relatives or the emergency services in the event of an accident - even if they're unable to call for help themselves. The Kickstarter-funded KanegaWatch from UnaliWear - available for sale later this year - can detect falls and long periods of non-movement and raise the alarm. Working through voice control and without the need for a connected smartphone, the watch notices if the wearer has been immobile for a while and asks if they're OK. If there's no response, the device can contact designated people or the emergency services. It also records some location information so it can guide the wearer home if they get lost. There are no buttons - it's all done by voice, with the watch having a name set by its owner that it responds to. The wearable even offers medication reminders at appropriate times, reading out dosage instructions if the user asks for them. Similarly, the CarePredict wearable monitors sleep, personal care and daily patterns, alerting carers if something seems out of the ordinary: if the wearer used the bathroom more than usual last night, for instance, or got up later than they normally do. Lively's Safety Watch system goes a step further, using a home hub connected to a series of sensors around the home to check that medication's been taken, meals haven't been missed and the user is moving around as normal. If something's amiss, the watch will remind the wearer, then alert family members or carers if things don't go back to normal. The hub doesn't require a phone line or internet connection, and the activity sensors are designed to attach to household objects including pill boxes and fridge doors. Of course, the fact that the fridge door's been opened doesn't mean your relative's necessarily had a meal, but the hub can compare data over time to assess what seems normal for that person - and it's more useful than no data at all. Sadly, some older people are more at risk of wandering off due to conditions like dementia, which can lead to frantic searches and vulnerable patients unable to find their way home. The upcoming Proximity Button , invented by the daughter of a dementia carer, is designed to be an effective and affordable way to keep loved ones safe without intrusive tracking. Connecting to the carer's phone with Bluetooth, the button simply sends an alert when the patient goes out of bounds. Creator Natalie Price tells techradar that the design was a particular challenge in testing: "It's very common for people living with dementia to become upset with things that they aren't familiar with. "Those wearing the earlier bracelet prototype kept asking me if I wanted my watch back, or fiddled with the strap in an agitated way. The pendant prototype didn't cause any discomfort issues, but was too easily removed. "The badge prototype came out on top. Once attached, the person wearing the badge completely forgot it was there, and it stayed in place. The design has been tested and has proved totally successful; it's discreet and doesn't cause any discomfort. " The Proximity Button will begin crowdfunding this summer through Indiegogo. The inner workings of the ActiveProtective belt. Credit: ActiveProtective One of the biggest concerns for older people is the risk of falling over and breaking a hip, particularly as the injuries can be difficult to recover from in later life. One of the more radical ways tech firms are addressing this is by developing wearable airbags that automatically deploy when a fall is detected. While it might seem extreme to wear an airbag all the time, products by companies like Philadelphia's ActiveProtective and the Netherlands-based Wolk Company are worn as belts, making them less intrusive and noticeable. Packed inside the (admittedly quite thick) ActiveProtective belt is a folded airbag, a fall-detection system and a gas inflation mechanism to quickly open the airbag when the wearer is falling. Neither product has reached the mass adoption yet, but ActiveProtective's claim that 1 in 3 people over 65 take a fall every year suggests they won't be short of customers when they do. For people more at risk of falling because of conditions like peripheral neuropathy (where damaged nerves can make it difficult to walk) tech can help in a different way. California company WalkJoy has created a device that straps around the knees of people who've lost sensation in their feet, and replaces the signals their foot would usually send to the brain. This completes the circuit (known as a feedback loop) and allows them to walk unaided again. Credit: Triple W Some of the health problems that can affect older people aren't so easy to talk about. The Dfree website opens with the memorable words: "Two years ago I got sudden diarrhea and pooped my pants on the street. " While most of us would never speak of this again, in this case it led to the development of a device that claims to predict bowel movements, allowing users to plan ahead and get to a bathroom in time. Using an ultrasound wearable belted around your stomach, Dfree sends a push notification (no pun intended) to the accompanying app on your phone to let you know how much time you have. This could avoid the kind of incident that decimates older people's confidence and makes them less willing to leave the house. After some teething problems with skin irritation, Dfree is still in development but Japanese manufacturer Triple W received seed funding for the device earlier this year. Credit: Genworth It's easy to grasp the fact that we'll all be old one day, but significantly harder to imagine what that will actually be like. Many of us prefer to think the world will somehow have radically changed by the time we age, or that we'll be defiantly break-dancing in our own homes at the age of 90. To bridge the empathy gap, insurance company Genworth and innovation firm Applied Minds teamed up to create an 'ageing ' - a wearable in the most literal sense - that simulates some of the conditions associated with getting older. The adjustable exoskeleton can show you what it's like to live with cataracts, tinnitus, hearing loss, joint pain, arthritis and a range of other conditions, in a realistic and accurate way. Genworth CMO Janice Luvera told techradar, "Education through experience is the best way to build empathy and awareness, to engage and educate consumers in hopes of inspiring a conversation about growing older with loved ones. " That first-hand experience really seems to work. When techradar tried a similar ageing suit earlier this year, Editor Gareth Beavis commented, "my overwhelming feeling was one of frustration, my body and mind desperate to break out of the restrictions and just start running freely again. " Growing older isn't something you can really comprehend until you've experienced it, but tech like this moves us a lot closer to understanding what it's like. And that can only be a good thing for the next round of lifesavers for seniors. 2016-05-30 15:00 By Holly feedproxy.google.com

13 This Half-Life 2 drone mod is scarily realistic It's been a long, long wait for Half-Life 3 - a wait that might never end - but in the meantime fans of the series are busy making the game's technology a reality. Take a look at this amazingly realistic City Scanner drone mod from Russian Valentin Demchenko. Apparently made from scratch using carbon fibre and polystyrene, the drone is 80cm (31 inches) long and 55cm (22 inches) tall. It can stay in the air for a maximum of 11 minutes and you really do get the impression it's watching you. You can see some of the manufacturing involved in a separate video here. For those who haven't set foot in the Half-Life universe, these City Scanners were designed for all kinds of surveillance operations and helped to keep citizens in line. If our government ever gets more oppressive, it's reassuring to know the technology is now available to build something like this. We're seeing more and more drone mods like this and they're improving in quality all the time - take this Millennium Falcon drone mod from last year, which looks almost good enough to feature as a prop in the next Star Wars movie. Via Motherboard Article continues below

2016-05-30 14:34 By David feedproxy.google.com

14 Corsair announces liquid cooled GTX 1080, sticks LEDs on new DDR4 RAM The GTX 1080 Founders Edition cards may already be up for order, but if you're an overclocking fanatic (and fan of liquid cooling), watch out: Corsair has its own model of the 1080 to keep an eye on. At Computex on Monday Corsair announced the Hydro GTX 1080, with a Corsair closed-loop cooler attached to an MSI 1080. Since the card is scheduled for Q3 of this year, details were scarce: Corsair's press release states "the Hydro GFX pushes the GTX 1080 to the limit thanks to its greatly increased GPU core cooling capacity," but doesn't offer up any specific performance numbers or a price. We expect to see those closer to release. Corsair's other major new product for the show floor follows in the footsteps of RAM companies like Avexir with a new memory stick outfitted with RGB LEDs. The Vengeance LED will fill the prestigious position of Corsair's fastest DDR4 RAM "with specially selected Samsung ICs driving kits to 4,333MHz and beyond. " And, as the 'LED' in the name indicates, the Vengeance has a new heat spreader with LEDs built-in. Corsair's other new RAM module for Computex is a 'Special Edition' of the Dominator Platinum, with a couple new metal finishes (black and brushed aluminum) and selectively binned Samsung chips. If you're not fluent in the world of RAM, that essentially means the cream of the crop when it comes to performance, in the same way some CPUs can close in on 5GHz overclocks while others hit their limits at 4.3GHz. The Special Edition Dominators should be able to overclock to higher speeds than your average memory stick with less rigorously chosen memory modules. Corsair didn't offer a price or memory timings for the new RAM, either, but like the Hydro GFX 1080 they'll be available in the third quarter of 2016.

2016-05-30 14:31 Wes Fenlon www.pcgamer.com

15 Elex, Piranha Bytes' 'science-fantasy' RPG, now has a website By the looks of it, Piranha Bytes' Elex is pretty much Risen but with jetpacks. I'm sure there's more to it than that, many key differences to differentiate their latest RPG from the Risen/Gothic series, but that's enough to get me onboard. Risen but with jetpacks. Let's do this. OK, a few more details. Andy covered the announcement of Elex around a year ago , but since then the game has been lingering in that weird development period where developers insist on working on their games, but without shouting about it every sixteen seconds. Thankfully that is now over, and Elex has a proper website full of screenshots, concept art and juicy information. It's from this website I learn about the jetpacks, which feature in their "brand new, post- apocalyptic, Science- Fantasy universe where magic meets mechs". You can read about the backstory and setting yourself, because I generally find all that a bit boring, but here are few choice quotes about how Elex is going to play. "Thanks to the open world, you have access to all five regions of the game world right from the very start. Go where you want, choose your battles and your allies, the only thing in the world that will stop you, are the mutant creatures that live in Magalan’s Elex polluted landscapes. " "From swords and axes, to bows, crossbows and harpoons, Elex offers one of the widest selection of weaponry in the history of role-playing. Pick up a shotgun, power up a plasma rifle or unleash a flame thrower – there’s a weapon and combat style for every fighter out there. " "In Elex there is no traditional class system. Instead you must earn the trust of experienced teachers to develop the skills you select. But, skills alone won’t be enough to survive in this harsh and challenging world. Your attitude towards the people you meet will influence those around you. Will you make an ally or an enemy? Is now the time to show emotion or take the course of logic? Every choice will forge the future of your game. " That bit about there being no class system is pure Gothic/Risen, as is the stuff about factions, so if you enjoyed those games, you'll want to keep an eye or two on Elex. There's no release date yet, unfortunately, but given the sudden revamping of the website, an E3 showing seems likely.

2016-05-30 14:30 By Tom www.pcgamer.com

16 Hideo Kojima's world tour: what do these clues tell us about his new game? It's official: Hideo Kojima's widely reported world tour was a search for an engine and inspiration for his new game. The tour saw the Metal Gear Solid developer visit developers throughout the world, including studios owned by Sony, EA and Ubisoft. Kojima has yet to reveal what form his new game will end up taking, but the collective works of the various studios gives us some tantalising clues about what might be to come. What engine has he chosen to use? Which games have inspired him? Let us speculate. Naughty Dog is a studio that has set the bar for how story in big budget games should work. From The Last of Us' incredibly acted cutscenes to the incidental bits of dialogue that pepper every mission in Uncharted, the studio has consistently combined solid acting performances with excellent technical artistry. More than any other games designer, Kojima's games have been consistently remembered for their stories. At a time when most other games didn't even include full voice acting, Kojima's first Metal Gear Solid devoted hours to non-interactive cinematic cutscenes. If Kojima takes any cues at all from Naughty Dog, we hope it ends up being in the motion capture department. Quantic Dream, the French studio who are perhaps best know for Fahrenheit (titled Indigo Prophecy in the US) and PS3 thriller Heavy Rain. In a similar vein to Naughty Dog, Quantic Dream have made a name for themselves with story-heavy games that have been powered by some impressive motion-capture work, especially facial motion-capture. In fact the studio was so impressed with its facial animation that the loading screens in Heavy Rain were literally just closeups of the game's character's faces. We would be very happy to see characters even half as good looking as those in Heavy Rain make it into Kojima's next game. But please, don't let it include the same quick-time event heavy gameplay. For years, one simple question was the bane of PC gamers worldwide. "Does it run Crysis? " The question typifies what Crysis-developer Crytek is know for. Vast, technically impressive game engines that took a mammoth PC to run. Later Crysis games would end up coming to the low-powered consoles, but at its core the studio will always be known as the brains behind the highest of the high-end. Crytek wasn't originally on Kojima's list of studios to visit, but a tweet from Crytek's twitter account changed all that. Crytek's games have always existed in the middle ground between traditional corridor-based shooters and fully open-world games. Both Far Cry and Crysis featured wide-open levels that gave you the freedom to approach encounters in a variety of ways. Previous Metal Gear Solid games - up until 5, which moved towards a completely open world - would have suited Crytek's engine with their linear levels that were still open enough to offer a large amount of freedom. Kojima's games have never been a slouch in the graphics department, and if Kojima ends up using Crytek's engine this trend could continue into his next game. Just don't expect it to be open world if it does. In recent interviews Kojima appears to have been more taken with the staff of Media Molecule than their technology. "There are lots of women working there [at Media Molecule], for one thing. That's a strange feeling! But at the same time there's a feeling like it's family there. " Kojima said in an interview with Eurogamer. Kojima said that he'd like to achieve this same intimate family feeling in his own studio, which implies he might want to keep his studio small as opposed to the sprawling teams that worked on each Metal Gear Solid title. Reportedly two hundred people worked on the first MGS, and this number is likely to have risen as the games became bigger and more complex. But all this focus on staff should not detract from the fact that Media Molecule's Little Big Planet engine was enormously impressive, with a level editor that offered an amount of control that was previously unseen on consoles. Kojima's games have never previously included any user-generated content, but after leaving Konami anything's possible. "Media Molecule told me that the kitchen is crucial too," Kojima also said, so we know one solid idea he's taking to his new studio. Dice's games have been defined by their massive multiplayer matches, which normally result in half the level being... well... levelled thanks to Dice's strong emphasis on destructible environments. Kojima's later games such as MGS4 and Peace Walker began to include multiplayer elements, but they've never included anything even remotely destructible elements. It's always felt strange that although Kojima's games have often featured tanks in addition to giant mechanoid nuclear robots, the smallest wall will always work perfectly as an invincible shield against all incoming attacks. Destructible environments would also significantly change how any stealth gameplay works in Kojima's next game. Walls that could previously perfectly conceal the player might end up being reduced to rubble in the blink of an eye, forcing the player to adapt their route through the environment on the fly. Mojang is best known for creating the uber-hit Minecraft, which at this point is a game that needs no introduction. But similar to Media Molecule, Mojang's titles are about as far from Kojima's catalogue as it's possible to get. In fact, before Minecraft blew up it was primarily the product of just one man, Markus 'Notch' Persson. Notch doesn't work at Mojang anymore, after having left his company back when it was acquired by Microsoft in 2014, but that doesn't mean Kojima doesn't have anything to learn from the company. For one thing, Minecraft has perhaps the biggest YouTube following out of any game in the world. Every year thousands of video creators uploading tens of thousands of hours of footage of the game to their channels, and often these videos go on to generate millions of views. Kojima's games are not unknown on YouTube, but their comparative lack of user-created content means that they're less well suited to the kinds of videos that have served Mojang so well. We'd be surprised Kojima's next game ends up being user-generated to the same extent Minecraft is - although as we mentioned with Media Molecule, there could certainly be a bit - but we'd be equally surprised if it didn't include at least a cursory glance in the direction of YouTube. Massive Entertainment is the studio best known for this year's Tom Clancy's The Division after having helped out with development duties on Far Cry 3 and Assassin's Creed: Revelations. As previously discussed, Kojima's games have sometimes included multiplayer components in addition to their single-player campaigns, but these have often been very separate experiences. Metal Gear Online felt like a completely separate game from Metal Gear Solid 4, despite being included on the same disk. The Division, meanwhile, blends the two into a single cohesive experience. You can take your character from single player to multiplayer in a very seamless way. Kojima has previously explored this in Peace Walker for the PSP, but the feature has never appeared on one of his console games outside of the Peace Walker remake that made it to PS3. We loved Peace Walker back in the day, and the experience got even better when the game was ported to home consoles, even if the low-fidelity graphics betrayed its roots as a PSP game. If we could get a console-focussed Peace Walker, with a persistent character that you can train up offline before heading online to play alongside others, we'd be very happy indeed. Ok, we know J. J. Abrams isn't a development studio, but his film production company Bad Robot has recently been working with Infinity Blade and Shadow Complex's developer on a new game called SpyJinx. According to its website, Spyjinx will offer "a unique mix of action strategy gameplay, dynamic world building and RPG character development. " Kojima is famously a massive cinephile, which points towards his meeting with Abrams being more to do with the world of cinema than gaming. Kojima said he visited Abrams to "inform him about my new studio," but didn't indicate whether he'd taken any inspiration from JJ himself. Spyjinx has been described as a "live service product" that will run for many years, so if Kojima's next game is to take a similar approach, Abrams could have been a good person to draw inspiration from. Sucker Punch were historically one of Sony's more niche studios until they hit the big time with Infamous back in 2009. Infamous as a series has always been about setting you loose in a massive city and giving you a seemingly infinite amount of powers to get around. Scaling buildings, flight, and zipping along rail-lines. Meanwhile Kojima's games have historically seen you limited to running about by foot, and in fact most of the Metal Gear Series sees you crawling about on your stomach to minimise your chances of being spotted. Metal Gear Solid 5 changed this by giving you a horse and a variety of vehicles to travel around in, but more interesting transport options have always been limited to your enemies. MGS2 saw you fighting against a bomb-disposal expert on roller-skates, MGS3's The Fury chased you around with a jetpack, and Psycho Mantis from MGS1 could just straight up hover around the room. It would be great if cues from Sucker Punch lead Kojima to let his next protagonist jump, climb, and fly with the same grace as Infamous' Cole MacGrath. It's hard not to mention Guerrilla games without immediately thinking of the Helghast, the iconic enemies in the Killzone franchise. Their orange gas masks have come to define the dark industrial look of the series, the gameplay of which has often paled in comparisons to its visuals. It's hard to argue that Gorilla Games doesn't have some seriously impressive technology powering their games. However, engine aside, it's hard to know what design cues Kojima could end up taking from Guerilla Games, whose titles have always played it safe with the first person shooter formula. Every game needs an engine, and with Kojima having entered into a partnership with Sony, Guerrilla Games' in-house engine is as good a one to use as any.

2016-05-30 14:11 By Jon feedproxy.google.com

17 The 6 best action cam videos you'll ever watch Action cams can capture videos that other cameras can't. Their wide-angle lenses and lightweight bodies mean they can clip onto , chest harnesses, and sports equipment to produce dramatic point-of-view shots, allowing viewers to get inside the heads of the elite athletes that use them. As the quality of action cams has increased, so has the imagination of those using them. We've moved from grainy footage of a skier slowly carving down a slope to clips with high production values, booming background music, slick edits, and - most importantly - original ideas. In honour of the raised standards, we've pulled together six of the best action camera videos ever shot. From free-running from zombies across rooftops, to ski jumping over the whirling blades of a helicopter, these clips are nothing short of jaw-dropping - we recommend settling down somewhere to watch with a cup of coffee, and some paper towels ready for when you spit some of it out. When you think of zombies, you think of slowly shuffling creatures, arms outstretched, moaning deeply. You don't think of parkour. But when the developers behind 2015 video game announced their zombies were going to be fast and agile, it provided the perfect source material for filmmakers Ampsiound. At the request of the developers, the parkour fanatics made this three- minute video of a zombie chase from the point of view of a survivor. Naturally, an action cam was the perfect fit for the project. Ampisound's Scott Bass tells TechRadar that choosing the location, as well as preparing costumes and makeup for the zombies, took a month alone. Most of the shots took just one or two attempts, he says – impressive considering the choreography of the moves, and the timing of the actors. "I basically structured the film in a way that allows us to have a few 'jump scare' moments, some scary parkour itself and then finally up with a realistic and intense ending," he says. What really makes this video great is the sound – the anxious breathing of the protagonist, the gargled screams of the zombies, and the insistent music. It's genuinely tense. Channel: Ampisound In the third of a trilogy of progressively more insane videos, world-renowned freestyle skier Candide Thevoux pulls a 360 over the spinning blades of a helicopter, lands double backflips, smashes through the windows of a mountainside barn, and hijacks a horse – all without leaving his skies. Sharp editing, including slo-mo and seamless transitions, completes the package - it's one of those videos that feels like it's a collection of James Bond-style scenes all placed together in one long movie. In short, 'One of those days for Candide Thevoux' is up there with the best skiing videos you'll ever see. Channel: Candide Thevoux Flying in a wingsuit takes serious guts. When you're hurtling through canyons and over treetops at more than 100mph, one small mistake will very likely mean serious injury – or worse. But in 2014, Uli Emanuele took it to the next level. He base jumped with his wingsuit off of a mountain in Lauterbrunnen, Switzerland, aiming to pass through a cave little more than two metres wide that jutted out of the hillside. Insane? Maybe. Make sure you're not somewhere that yelping will be a problem when you watch this though... it's tough viewing. Channel: GoPro Get ready for sweaty palms just watching this. When daredevil climber James Kingston – famous for climbing landmarks like Wembley stadium and the Eiffel Tower with no safety equipment – says something is "mental", you perk up and listen. In this video, Kingston climbs a 101-storey skyscraper – Marina 101 in Dubai – as the sun rises in the distance. The video picks up Kingston as he reaches the top floor. It's nearly 500m above ground – but that's not high enough for him. Prepare to have your heart in your mouth as Kingston, chatting casually all the while, scales a huge, nearly vertical crane that is slick with grease, the Dubai skyline fanning out in the distance. Channel: James Kingston Do you think you could outrun the London Underground? That was the burning question that drove YouTube channel Epic Challenges to stage the capital's ultimate man vs machine race. The theory is simple: a man is on the tube with a chum. The doors open. He sprints off, the train pulls out of the station and the race is on to see who can get to the next station first. The stage is the stretch of road between Mansion House and Cannon street, a popular section of the English capital's streets, on the Circle Line. 380 metres, 75 steps, two ticket barriers, one tube stop. It comes down to the wire. Channel: Epic Challenges In 2012, Felix Baumgartner took a balloon ride up to the edge of space – and jumped. On his descent he broke several world records, and became the first man to break the sound barrier in freefall, reaching an eye-watering speed of 833.9mph. Handily, Baumgartner was wired with several GoPros. Even if you watched the jump live (and let's be honest, who didn't?), it's worth seeing it from his perspective, as he struggles to control a violent spin early in his descent. Channel: GoPro

2016-05-30 13:00 By Samuel feedproxy.google.com

18 18 Cortex-A73 CPU and Mali-G71 GPU power up next-gen phones Computex 2016 - At its Computex press conference this morning, ARM announced two new pieces of mobile SoC IP that it believes will drive the demanding applications that smartphone owners will want to run on next-generation devices. The company says 4K gaming, VR, and augmented reality will all increase the performance demands on mobile SoCs. ARM is rising to this challenge with the Cortex-A73 CPU and the Mali-G71 GPU. The Cortex-A73 CPU core is claimed to deliver 30% more performance than ARM's previous high-end core, the Cortex-A72, while improving power efficiency by up to 30% over the older design—at least, when it's fabricated on a 10-nm process. The A73 core doesn't deliver this improvement by becoming a wider machine. Indeed, ARM says the chip is a two-wide design, as opposed to the A72's three-wide front end. Instead, the company suggested that a blend of process and architectural improvements will let the chip hit higher peak clocks—up to 2.8GHz, as opposed to the A72's 2.5GHz—and extract more performance from features like an improved branch predictor. Where the A73 may really shine is in applications like games and VR that require sustained performance from the SoC. Past high-end mobile SoCs have been tailored to handle "bursty" workloads, where a user might run a demanding application for a short time and then perform less-demanding tasks the rest of the time. VR, AR, and gaming applications offer the chip no such relief: it has to run flat-out for long periods without overheating. The more-efficient A73 core is designed to specifically address this problem. One of ARM's slides suggests the A73 core has basically eliminated the delta between peak and sustained CPU performance in certain tasks. On a simulated Spec2K benchmark, a 2.8GHz, 10-nm A73 is claimed to deliver 1.3 times the peak performance of a Cortex-A72 and 2.1 times the peak performance of a Cortex-A57. The A73 also delivers this performance in a smaller die area than past ARM cores: just 0.65 mm 2. That small area makes room for SoC designers to add more resources like GPU cores to their chips. ARM has some new GPU IP for those chip designers to play with today, too. The Mali-G71 GPU core is claimed to deliver some impressive performance improvements over ARM's previous high-end GPU core, the Mali-T880. The company says the G71 is up to 50% faster than the T880, and it purports to deliver 20% better energy efficiency, 40% better performance density, and 20% more bandwidth than that older part even when it's fabricated on the same process. G71 is also more scalable than the T880. Implementations of this GPU can include up to 32 shader cores, up from 16 in the older part. The Mali-G71 is the first GPU to use ARM's next-generation Bifrost architecture. Bifrost gives the G71 support for the Vulkan low-overhead graphics API. It can also take advantage of a fully-coherent system interconnect to DRAM to enable heterogenous computing. From a chip- layout perspective, Bifrost also purports to reduce the number of "wirelets" needed to connect shaders, a move that ARM claims has a positive impact on performance, as well. ARM already has a number of partners signed up for the A73 and G71 IP, including Hisilicon, Huawei, Marvell, Mediatek, and Samsung. The company says we should expect to begin seeing SoCs with Cortex-A73 cores and Mali-G71 GPUs in devices around the end of this year or in early 2017.

2016-05-30 12:21 by Jeff techreport.com

19 Asus arrives in your home with the Zenbo robot We've already seen laptops and phones from Asus at this year's Computex event, but it wouldn't be a tech show without a curveball these days - and so enter the Zenbot, the friendly looking robot that Asus wants you to use to control your home. Yes, it's like Google Home or the Amazon Echo , except it walks and talks and has a few more social capabilities. From entertaining the kids to keeping elderly people company, it looks like an ambitious product from the Taiwanese company. Zenbo can read out emails, calendar events and recipes, make video calls, order items off the web, stream media, interact with other parts of your smart home and much more - or at least that's what the demo video suggests. Presumably developers are going to have to get on board to help Zenbo fulfil its potential. The robot can play games or read out stories for kids, as well as alert you if an elderly relative is in trouble. Asus says it learns over time too, becoming better attuned to your preferences and lifestyle thanks to some integrated AI smarts. Zenbo is also reminiscent of "social robot" Jibo , which first appeared on Indiegogo a couple of years ago. The platforms for all these functions are already in place, it's just a matter of creating a device that can pull them all together. Asus only just announced Zenbo so we're waiting on some of the details, but a price of $599 has been mentioned (roughly £410 or AU$835). How long it's going to be before you can order one of these friendly home robots remains to be seen. Article continues below

2016-05-30 12:14 By David feedproxy.google.com

20 Asus pushes forward a modular gaming PC standard At Computex 2016, 'ROG General' Derek Yu took the stage with a particularly flamboyant leather to announce a whole modular PC standard called standard called Project Avalon. Similar to Razer's Project Christine , Avalon takes your traditional desktop PC and makes every component plug and play for easy upgradability. This includes a plug-in SSD cage, modular IO systems and something even as unheard of as a cable-free PSU interface. The crux of the design is the motherboard and case are designed to a single entity. Instead of using traditional SATA ports to connect storage, power cables for the PSU or PCI-e bridges for the GPU, Project Avalon implements plug and lay logic boards. Asus claims it will revolutionize PC form factors with a user-friendly interface. The PC also isn't holding back features hardcore PC gamers expect including full support for liquid cooling. Beyond creating its own case, Asus also hopes to extend Project Avalon as a PC case standard other manufacturers will adopt and create their own cases. On top of announcing a new standard, Asus isn't ready to let go of its old form factors. The electronics firm also introduced the ROG G31 Edition 10 as a beefed up and updated version of the Asus ROG G20, while also being a special ROG 10th-anniversary gaming desktop PC Inside the compact, 20-liter chassis, asus managed to squeeze in two Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 graphics cards and an Intel Core i7 K-series processor for the ultimate 4K UHD gaming experience. To help cool it all, Asus has also integrated a 3D vapor chamber (first introduced in the Asus ROG G752 gaming laptop with dual air channels. Last but not least, Asus announced a follow up to its liquid-cooled GX700 gaming laptop with a new ROG GX800 model. The underlying chassis and external cooling system are pretty much the same, but the new version can be equipped with dual GPUs and Intel Core i7 K-series processors. Additionally, Asus gave the keyboard a major upgrade with new 'MechTAG' mechanical switches and individual RGB lighting. The craziest thing about this whole setup is it takes two 330-watt power supplies to run this thing, making the Asus ROG GX800 more power hungry than most desktop PCs. Article continues below

2016-05-30 11:03 By Kevin feedproxy.google.com

21 You can now read the whole Bible in emoji Quick, digital, easy to understand, pictorial: emoji really is a language made for the 21st century. It's the world's fastest-growing language and can be used everywhere from classic literature to movie blockbusters. Now there's a new emoji publication to enjoy (or turn your nose up at): The Emoji Bible. Covering all 66 books, from Genesis to Revelation, the book has been about six months in the making, its anonymous author told The Guardian. A computer program was used to automatically translate 200 corresponding words into 80 emoji characters. "I thought if we fast forwarded 100 years in the future, an emoji bible would exist," the writer (or illustrator) of the work says. "So I thought it'd be fun to try to make it... I wanted to make it similar to how you might text or tweet a Bible verse, by shrinking the total character count. " You'll have to cough up £2.49 (or $2.99 or AU$3.99) to get the whole of the good book but various snippets can be previewed via the official @BibleEmoji Twitter account. Apparently, the reception has been largely positive, the author says. Whoever is behind the Emoji Bible ("scripture for millennials") is also welcoming feedback and suggestions to improve the work. At nearly 3,300 pages in length, it's likely to take a long while to read, even with the visual shortcuts. Perhaps it could be a more effective way of engaging young people than trying to tempt them into church on a Sunday morning - the Emoji Bible author is certainly hoping so - but as yet there's been no official message of approval from the church. Article continues below

2016-05-30 10:47 By David feedproxy.google.com

22 The Asus ZenBook 3 slays the Apple MacBook in specs and price If you were a fan of the ZenBook UX305, you're going to love the ultra-thin ZenBook 3. Asus pulled the wraps off of its MacBook rival at Computex 2016, touting the Ultrabook weighs in at a scant 2 pounds and 11.9mm (0.46-inches) thick. By comparison, the Apple MacBook.51-inches (13.1mm) tall and tips the scales at 2.03 pounds (0.92kg). The weighting and thickness reductions are even more striking when you consider the previous ZenBook UX305 weighed 2.64 pounds and was 12.9mm thick (0.51-inches). Despite scaling down the weight and size of the ZenBook, the model 3 is a powerhouse thanks to an Intel Core i7 processor, 16GB of RAM and a 1TB PCIe SSD. Asus hasn't skimped on the premium built quality either. The 12.5-inch screen is covered by a big sheet of Gorilla Glass 4 and the body of the laptop itself is made from "aerospace-grade aluminum alloy," which the electronics firm claims to be 40 percent than most other laptops. As for making it so thin, Asus explains it developed the world's thinnest 3mm fan to keep the laptop's Core I-series processor cool while keeping it incredibly thin. Oh and it has a fingerprint scanner for good measure and letting users sign in with Windows Hello. The ZenBook 3 also utilizes a Thunderbolt 3/USB-C port for charging to top off an empty machine back to 60% in 49 minutes. What's more, Asus claims users can expect nine hours of usage. Surprisingly all of these premium features come with an affordable price tag. The ZenBook 3 starts at only $999 with an Intel Core i5 processor, 4GB of RAM and 256GB SSD. That said, the price goes up to a more significant $1,499 with the 512GB SSD upgrade. You can also get a richly specced machine with the added Core i7 processor, 1TB SSD and 16GB of RAM for $1,999. Article continues below

2016-05-30 10:29 By Kevin feedproxy.google.com

23 Tech Jobs For Vets: Mobilizing The Movement Veterans urged a Congressional economic opportunity subcommittee of the House Veterans Affairs earlier this month to assist veterans in landing innovative careers in technology fields through policy changes. That call at a May 17 hearing may go even further in boosting the results of the Joining Forces initiative, a five-year-old program launched by First Lady Michelle Obama and Vice President Joe Biden's wife Jill Biden. Earlier this month, Joining Forces announced that 40 companies pledged to hire or train more than 110,000 veterans and military spouses over the next five years. While unemployment among veterans is on the decline and is now below the national average, it was previously more than 12% in 2011, according to Joining Forces. But more can be done, according to veterans as well as tech companies. During the House hearing , "Veterans in Tech: Innovative Careers for All Generations of Veterans," one speaker, Bernard Bergan, a technical account manager at Microsoft and a former member of the Army, called on Congress to pass legislation that would support the use of veteran programs, such as the Microsoft Software and Systems Academy (MSSA) , either on or off military bases. As an example, Bergan noted that although technical training programs are offered for free to vets by some private employers, it can be difficult to gain the approval from a commanding officer to allow someone on active duty to spend weeks away from their military obligations in order to get the technical training they need to ease the transition out of the service and into the public sector. "Giving up a body is a difficult decision" Bergan said during the hearing , noting he was fortunate, however, to have a commanding officer to allow him to train in the MSSA program. "He was willing to lose 22 of his best servicemen...the exit out of the military was well planned, just as our entrance into the military was. " MSSA is an 18-week program to train active duty military members IT skills at bases throughout the US. Bergan recommended the Department of Defense encourage senior leaders to support this training for those who are transitioning out of the service. Brian Huseman, vice president of public policy at Amazon, made a similar request at the hearing. He advocated active-duty military members are trained in IT before they leave the service, in targeted in-demand areas like cloud computing. The online retailing giant, which operates its Amazon Warriors program, announced this month says it plans to offer more than $7 million in AWS training to 10,000 veterans, military members who are transitioning out of the service or to their military spouses. In addressing the sub-committee members and the speakers at the hearing, Brad Wenstrup, House subcommittee and chairman, said, "We need to figure out how to connect these (veterans) to companies, as well as get them into the necessary training programs to cover any skills gaps that may exist before they enter the tech field. There is a great potential between our nation's veterans and tech companies. " [See 10 Cloud Jobs In Highest Demand Now.] That sentiment was also shared by Joseph Kernan, senior vice president of corporate development and marketing for SAP National Security Services and a retired US Navy vice admiral. Kernan, who spoke at the hearing as chairman of NS2 Serves , an independent non-profit established by SAP National Security Services, said information technology is ideally suited for veterans, regardless of the occupation they were trained for in the military. He noted there are certain skills developed in the military that are transferable to tech positions, such as accountability for one's actions, commitment to the task at hand and responsibility. But he noted the transition is not an easy path when leaving the military. "Transitioning to the civilian workforce is often daunting, particularly for young enlisted service members," Kernan said during the hearing. "They don't want a hand out, but rather an opportunity for a fresh start in their post military lives. "

2016-05-30 10:06 Dawn Kawamoto www.informationweek.com

24 Ibuki heading to Street Fighter V - here's a trailer And the next character to be added to Street Fighter V is... Ibuki. The ninja was first introduced in SFIII:Third Strike, and returned for Street Fighter IV. Now, perhaps inevitably, she's being added to SFV— there's no release date given, but it will probably be fairly soon, if previous characters are any indication. Here's a trailer: Bombs! Bombs are the main difference to Ibuki's previous iterations, and who knows how they'll shake up her character. We do know how Guile reacts to these new throwables, however: by exploding, just a little bit. As with the other characters, you can either buy ibuki with 'Fight Money', earned through play, or you can shell out for the Season Pass to be given access immediately.

2016-05-30 10:00 By Tom www.pcgamer.com

25 Here Are 8 Of The Thinnest Laptops On The Market Today The Future Is Thin Solution providers take note: thin is in for the laptop world. While laptops as a whole are finding dimming prospects, interest from mobile workers in having a thin, ultra- portable device appears to be one bright spot. As a result, Windows laptop makers are working to out-do each other at having the thinnest new offering on the market, while even Apple is rumored to be working on a thinner version of its MacBook Pro. To give a sense of what's out there, the CRN Test Center has rounded up eight of the thinnest laptops on the market right now. The laptops were introduced (or refreshed) either some time in 2016 or toward the end of 2015. All are 0.6 of an inch or thinner, and we've ordered them by thickness, from high to low, in the slides that follow. We've also included the starting price and available processors for each model.

2016-05-30 10:00 Kyle Alspach www.crn.com

26 Indian minister holds out hope for Apple stores Apple may still get to set up wholly-owned stores in India, with the country’s Commerce Ministry promising to discuss the matter with the Finance Ministry that had objected to the proposal. Indian government rules require that foreign-owned, single-brand retailers source 30 percent of their products locally, but the Indian government had indicated that it could provide a waiver of that requirement for branded stores of retailers of high-tech products. Apple had hoped for such an exemption from the government. On Monday, Commerce and Industry Minister Nirmala Sitharaman said that her ministry did not oppose providing a waiver to high-tech companies like Apple and would discuss the matter with the Finance Ministry. Apple has decided to focus on India, where it saw 56 percent year-on-year growth in iPhone sales in the last quarter. Its revenue from China, its second largest market, fell 11 percent in the same period. To build its share in the Indian market, the company was hoping to sell low- cost refurbished phones in India. But that move came in for criticism from the environment ministry which is concerned that this could create a recycling problem, as the phones would be closer to end of life. Some of Apple’s rivals also opposed the proposal. Sitharaman said her ministry was not in favor of Apple's plans for the import of refurbished phones. India’s focus is to persuade mobile phone makers to make the devices in the country and it has been quite successful so far. Apple has not announced any plans to make its phones in India. But during a meeting this month between Apple CEO Tim Cook and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi in Delhi, the executive spoke of the “possibilities of manufacturing and retailing in India,” according to the country’s Press Information Bureau.

2016-05-30 09:53 John Ribeiro www.itworld.com

27 Apple Watch 2 release date, news and rumors The Apple Watch 2 release date is shrouded in so much mystery that not even Siri knows the answer, despite her advanced knowledge of the company's forthcoming WWDC 2016 conference dates. Asking my Apple Watch "When does the Apple Watch 2 come out? " only gets me to this message: "Apple.com should be able to answer that question. Continue on the iPhone. " There are two important things you should know about this answer. First, of course Apple's official website doesn't reveal such juicy information. I've checked. Everyday. Second, this is one of the many areas in which the Apple Watch throws you to the iPhone instead of handling tasks itself. There's plenty of room for improvement and a need for a sequel. Siri, apps and fitness tracking need a serious tune up, and more sensors and even greater waterproof guarantees should be added in Apple Watch for 2016. There's tangential evidence that such an iPhone-compatible smartwatch for 2016 is in development at the Cupertino company. Let's get into the latest rumors point-by-point. Although Siri didn't answer my question about the Apple Watch 2 release date, there are at least two distinct points in 2016 in which I could see the company's next wearable launch. Unsurprisingly, we didn't see next iPhone-compatible smartwatch announced on March 21, as some had previously thought. An annual cycle for the wearable is a bit overeager for even diehard Apple fans. Instead, iPhone SE and iPad Pro 9.7 graced the stage. Oh, yes, Apple Watch was there, too - and not just the white one on CEO Tim Cook's wrist. New Apple Watch and a lower price were all we got. That means the launch may happen either in a few days on June 13 alongside iOS 10 at Apple's WWDC 2016 event, or in September along with the likely iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus debut. Of the two release dates, the more cautious September launch sounds a lot like Apple's slow and steady approach to new product categories. However, a WWDC 2016 announcement would still go along with the Q2 2016 release date estimate that the chairman for Apple Watch supplier Quanta hinted at. Barry Lam from Quanta said in 2015, "Quanta and Apple are currently developing the second-generation of the Apple Watch, expected late next year in the second quarter. " A new report suggests that Apple Watch supplier Quanta will be responsible for all the production on the Apple Watch 2, as the company has lowered its order from its initial estimates. Sources from the upstream supply chain suggest the Apple Watch 2 will go into production in Q2, suggesting it'll be launched before the expected iPhone 7 launch in September. This would give Apple enough time to tinker with its smartwatch and not make early adopters feel too cheaped with a rigid 12-month-upgrade schedule. Whether it's a true reinvention for a incremental Apple Watch S upgrade remains to be seen. There may be some wiggle room with the Apple Watch price, considering US retailers had the iPhone smartwatch on sale for some time before the company recently lowered the official price. It launched at a hard-to-justify starting price of $349 (£299, AU$499), and the unofficial price drop during Black Friday took it down to $299 at some stores. Four months later, Apple made it official. Introducing the Apple Watch 2 at this new price from the get-go would put the gadget in more hands and on more wrists. Just don't expect the gold Apple Watch Edition price to budge from $17,000 (£13,500, AU$24,000). Apple CEO Tim Cook just teased that "you'll see the Apple Watch getting better and better," and he soon expects "people will say, 'How could I have ever thought about not wearing this watch?'" He could be hinting at an inevitable watchOS 3 software update, it'll take an Apple Watch 2 hardware announcement to meet those high expectations. Ipso facto, he just confirmed the new Apple Watch. Right now, plenty of people can live without the Apple Watch, and even Cook acknowledges this: "We're still in learning mode. We're learning fairly quickly, though. We know a lot more than we did a year ago. " There's a lot of promise behind these statements, even if the Apple boss doesn't distinctly mention the Apple Watch 2 by name. Watch OS 2 was a small step forward with improvements, like better native app support, tetherless Wi-Fi and the ability to watch videos, reply to emails and make FaceTime audio calls. New Apple Watch 2 features, coupled with a watchOS 3 update, are bound to let you do more directly from the smartwatch, too. The rumor of a GPS chip for running, without your phone in tow, persists. Most recently, we heard that the next Apple Watch will be thinner by measures of up to a 40% reduction in thickness. However, that could be meant for the Apple Watch 3. There's a good chance that the next Apple Watch won't mix things up much in terms of design. Or at all, if Ming-Chi Quo's insider knowledge ends up becoming truth. Apple wearable won't boast any visual changes to the design, according his sources as reported by to AppleInsider. A more significant Apple Watch refresh could happen some time after, possibly in 2017. While he suggests that the design might not change one bit in the next Apple Watch, the specs, as you'd imagine, will be getting a big boost. We're currently unsure of exactly which components will be improved upon, but it's relatively safe to assume we might see a bump up in screen resolution, onboard storage and battery life. A new wireless chipset is said to allow for basic communication tasks to be handled without a paired iPhone, and the same technology may also mean that lost Apple Watches could be found using Wi-Fi triangulation. A source talking to Phone Arena went on to claim that the Apple Watch 2 will have a video camera, allowing users to make and receive video FaceTime calls rather than just audio ones. New models might be launched too, providing users with more than just the standard, Sport and Edition versions available now. It's not clear exactly what form these new models will take, but new materials could be on the cards, such as titanium, platinum and perhaps even Liquidmetal. But if you're hoping the appearance will change or we'll see a circular smartwatch from Apple you might be out of luck, as another leak suggests that the Apple Watch 2 will have the same screen size, shape and resolution as the first Apple Watch - this is the way the Cupertino firm does things, after all. One thing which will apparently change according to the same source is the thickness of the screen, which will be made thinner to allow for a larger battery. Yet that clashes with previous rumors that the juice pack will be staying the same, albeit with possible software improvements to improve its life. It could also have a new breed of smart band to go along with it, as a recent patent application has been filed for a strap that has light fibres woven in, meaning you'll be able to get notifications from your wrist all the way around. Hopefully it won't flash or be too overt - simply function as a second screen that could give more information than the smaller screen could. Overall we're really not sure what to expect from the Apple Watch 2 just yet, and we're sure it will hold plenty of surprises and features beyond what we've heard so far and beyond what the original Apple Watch (which will be getting Watch OS 2) is capable of. While the March 21 Apple press conference didn't usher in the second coming of the Apple Watch, we'll be scanning the internet and reading between the lines of Apple statement (and the lines of iOS 9.3 code) for even the smallest suggest of the Apple Watch 2 and even a minor Apple Watch S upgrade.

2016-05-30 09:39 By Matt feedproxy.google.com

28 Venturer BravoWin 10KT review: This 10in Windows 10 tablet-laptop hybrid costs just £150, making it an excellent deal for students By Marie Brewis | 30 May 16 See full specs £149.99 inc VAT Even the cheapest Windows 10 laptops can be out of budget for many students, and a more affordable alternative might be a budget 2-in-1 tablet-laptop hybrid such as this £150 Venturer BravoWin 10KT. We find out exactly what you get in return for not a lot of money. Also see: Best budget tablets 2016 UK. This 10.1in Windows 10 tablet with magnetic docking keyboard is available in the UK through Amazon. It costs £149.99 with free standard delivery, while a slightly larger 11.6in model costs £199.99. At this price it’s roughly in line with the Chuwi HiBook , a Chinese hybrid tablet-laptop that dual- Android and Windows and costs £143.42 from Geekbuying. Performance is much the same, but the Chuwi has a significantly better build. The trade-off, of course, is the uncertainty of buying the Chuwi from a Chinese importer, and the fact you’ll have to pay extra for the keyboard and may incur a fee for import duty. The fact you can buy this Venturer from Amazon UK is a real advantage. It could be with you tomorrow (provided you choose one-day delivery), with no extra charges - and should something go wrong, getting hold of tech support should be easier. (We say should, because we didn’t require the services of tech support or customer services during our review of the BravoWin 10KT). Given that a copy of Windows 10 direct from Microsoft will cost you £99.99, this tablet with keyboard offers extraordinary value. See all budget tablet reviews. The Venturer BravoWin 10KT budget tablet is available in all black, all silver, or a combination of silver and black (reviewed here) or gold and silver. So far so good, then. Until you take the Venturer BravoWin 10KT out of the box. This Windows 10 hybrid has a lot of advantages, but decent design and build quality are not among them. This thing looks seriously cheap. The Venturer resembles the sort of computer you would have expected to buy five, maybe even 10, years ago. It’s made from black and silver plastic, and there has been no obvious attempt to produce something appealing to the eye. Nothing sits flush with anything, leaving cracks and crannies everywhere for grime to find its way inside. Chunky bezels framing a non-laminated screen finish off the budget look. Unlike most modern computers it has an oversized physical reset button, plus a volume button and speaker that bizarrely sit on the rear of the device. Usually you would find a Windows button on the front of a Windows 10 tablet serving as a Home button, but here it’s far too small and out of mind low down on the Venturer’s left edge. Thankfully there’s also a Windows key on the keyboard, providing you have it docked. And things get worse. When we test phones and tablets we tend to assert pressure to them in the hands to see whether they flex or show any other signs of weakness. The Venturer creaks as soon as you pick it up. Two silver-painted plastic end panels sit either side of the screen, screwed in place but perhaps not as tightly as they should be. It just doesn’t feel as though it’s going to withstand bashing much about in your school bag, which is odd, given that Venturer targets it at kids. Also see: Best Windows tablets 2016 UK. There’s even a DC input for power - which we thought might be the final nail in the coffin, until we realised that bizarrely this budget Venturer tablet can also charge over Micro-USB. A saving grace. It’s fair to say we’ve been pretty harsh on this Windows 10 tablet’s design so far, but there are some upsides, too. The keyboard, for a start, is far easier to use than that which is sold with the Chuwi, and it’ll lean back further to provide a more comfortable typing position. It’s large enough to be reasonably comfortable to use for long periods, and the floating scrabble tile keys - although a little noisy in use - are well spaced. We love the fact this budget Windows tablet comes with a UK keyboard, and even the trackpad is usable, a 90x40mm component with virtual left- and right-click buttons either side. If you don’t want to use it, you simply pull off the keyboard (which docks magnetically) and switch to tablet mode. The keyboard is a touch smaller than the screen, with just the silver plastic end overhanging it at either side. The screen has huge bezels and it isn’t laminated, with viewing angles that could certainly be improved, and rounded corners that don’t sit nicely against the tablet’s rectangular frame, but it is an HD IPS screen and it is a useful size at 10.1in. This panel doesn’t offer the deepest contrast or the brightest display we’ve ever seen, and working outdoors in direct sunlight could be problematic, but pushed up to its max it’s quite acceptable, and colours are realistic. The Venturer isn’t bad for ports and connections, given the price. As we mentioned earlier there is both a DC input and a Micro-USB port for charging, as well as a Mini-HDMI port and a full-size USB 2.0 port, plus 802.11b/g/n Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. Our only quibble is that all these ports sit on the left edge of the Venturer when docked, making them less easily functional for adding, for example, a USB mouse for right-handed users. Lefties should be in their element, of course, and you can always stick with the built-in touchpad and instead use this port for a USB drive or external hard drive. Also on this edge are a microSD slot for adding up to 64GB of removable storage (very useful, given that there’s just 32GB of internal storage) and a 3.5mm headphone jack. The Venturer BravoWin 10KT is fitted with front and rear cameras, both rated at 2Mp. That’s acceptable for video chat, but we don’t forsee you making much use of the rear camera - Venturer might as well have not included one. The best thing about this tablet’s build, though, is how easily portable it is. At 266x168x10.6mm and 600g it slipped right into my shoulder bag and didn’t weigh me down too significantly. Add the keyboard and it’s heavier, at 1080g, and thicker, at 23mm - but that’s still fairly portable for what is in essence a full Windows 10 laptop. The Venturer BravoWin 10KT runs the 32bit edition of Windows 10 Home on a 1.33GHz Intel Atom Z3735F processor and 2GB of RAM. It’s not a speed demon, but it’s perfectly up to the job of browsing the web, reading and replying to emails, checking out what’s happening on Facebook and even playing the odd streamed movie or YouTube clip. It will start to struggle if you try to do too much at once, but then again a 10.1in screen isn’t ideally suited to multi-tasking. If you need a bigger screen you can use the Mini- HDMI port to hook it up to a TV or monitor. Casual games are even a possibility, given the results of our GFXBench graphics test. Although the Venturer would run only the T-Rex component, it did so at 22fps. We run the onscreen version of this test, so here the only HD resolution would have helped it to perform. We also ran the PCMark 8 Home and Geekbench 3 general processing power benchmarks on the Venturer, and in both cases it scored on par with the Chuwi HiBook. We recorded 1105 points in PCMark 8 and 2205 in the multi-core component of Geekbench. Our final test is JetStream, which measures JavaScript performance in web browsing. The Venturer scored 35.341, which is a tad behind the Chuwi HiBook's 37.423 when running Windows 10, and better than many mid- range smartphones. Venturer doesn’t specify the exact battery capacity of this tablet, but says it’s good for eight hours life. Battery life is an incredibly difficult thing to judge, given that everyone uses their devices differently. We’ll update this review with our PCMark 8 battery test results as soon as they are completed. Also see: Best budget laptops 2016 . Follow Marie Brewis on Twitter. If you don’t mind what it looks like, the Venturer BravoWin 10KT is an ideal budget option for students. It costs just £150 and can be with you tomorrow, and that price includes a magnetic docking keyboard and a full copy of Windows 10. It’s easily portable and sufficiently capable, if not a speed demon. Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 vs GTX 1070: What's the difference between GTX 1070 and GTX 1080? A price… 1995-2015: How technology has changed the world in 20 years How to sell your artwork online as prints, iPhone & iPad cases, collectables and more Best hybrid charging docks for Apple Watch, iPhone and iPad: 6 great chargers that'll power up two…

2016-05-30 08:00 Marie Brewis www.pcadvisor.co.uk

29 Facebook CEO, Mark Zuckerberg To Connect With Space Station Astronauts Via Facebook Live In a statement by National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), Facebook Co-founder and CEO, Mark Zuckerberg will speak with three astronauts currently living and working aboard the International Space Station (ISS) 12:55 p.m EDT (7:55 p.m EAT )Wednesday, June 1st. The Earth-to-space call will be seen live on Nasa’s Facebook page , where users can also submit their questions to be answered. During the 20-minute Facebook Live video call with NASA astronauts, Tim Kopra, Jeff Williams, and Tim Peake (European Space Agency), Zuckerberg will ask questions submitted by Facebook users. In an announcement posted on Faceboook by NASA, gave an example of questions users may want to ask, “What is it like to live and work in microgravity orbiting the Earth? What sorts of out-of- this-world science is underway in the space station’s laboratories? How does the research in space help prepare to send humans on a Journey to Mars?” Earlier this month, the social media giants launched an interactive map for its Live Video feature, giving users a window into what’s happening in the world in real-time, from friends to topics to games and so forth, that you’re interested in. The feature is rolling out slowly across the globe and to access the interactive map, users need to visit the new Live Video app is available on the left navigation bar.

2016-05-30 07:35 Nathan Ernest pctechmag.com

30 PayPal set to discontinue Windows, BlackBerry and Amazon Apps PayPal is discontinuing its mobile app for Windows Phone, BlackBerry and Amazon Fire OS devices to focus its efforts on Android and Apple. As of 30 June, users of affected devices will no longer be able to access the PayPal app, the company said. The company claimed that by ending support for Windows, BlackBerry and Fire OS, it will be able to produce a better app experience for Android and iOS devices. Customers using older versions of the PayPal mobile app on Android and iOS will be required to upgrade to version 6.0 Starting on June 3 rd through June 30 th . Joanna Lambert, PayPal Vice President of Global Consumer Product and Engineering, stated, “It was a difficult decision to no longer support the PayPal app on these mobile platforms, but we believe it’s the right thing to ensure we are investing our resources in creating the very best experiences for our customers. We remain committed to partnering with mobile device providers, and we apologize for any inconvenience this may cause our customers.” PayPal is quick to point out that despite being left without a native app, affected users will still have full access to PayPal’s mobile website for account management and money transactions. There are other options, too; BlackBerry users can still send peer-to-peer payments with PayPal through BBM. And on the Windows side, Outlook.com users can enable the PayPal add-in to send payments right from the email app.

2016-05-30 07:13 PC Tech pctechmag.com

31 Asus X553SA review: A cheap budget laptop but at the sacrifice of performance By Andrew Williams | 30 May 16 See full specs £279.99 inc VAT | USD $265 Most people can’t afford to spend £1000 on a laptop. Workhorse budget laptops that make up that bulk of what you’ll find on high street shelves rarely get much attention, though. Today we’re here to ask: what does £280 get you in 2016? Here's our Asus X553SA review. See also: Best budget laptops 2016. The Asus X553SA is a cheap laptop , with a good great of entry-level features across the board in a ‘proper’ laptop frame. Asus would readily admit there are compromises at this point, but should they put you off a buy? Having spend a good while the laptop, there’s only one major issue here: performance. Intel has made amazing progress with its Core M series processors over the last 18 months, but the Celeron chipset used here is slow. Matched with a slow hard drive, you’ll need patience to get on with the Asus X553SA. Also see: Best laptops 2016 UK At £279, the Asus X553SA is not too far off as little as you can spend on a new, full-size 15.6-inch laptop that has a large hard drive rather than a tiny Chromebook-style wedge of solid state memory. It’s also available cut-price at £249 at the time of writing, clearly with its eye on the bargain hunter. View the Asus X553SA on Amazon here. A laptop with a shoestring budget, you’d hope the Asus X553SA wouldn’t make any silly design moves, and it doesn’t. This is a very normal-looking laptop with a plastic shell. In pure aesthetic terms it’s pleasantly simple. While the lid is plastic, there’s still a texture of concentric circles fanning across it, mimicking the brushed metal style Asus uses in its higher-end ZenBook laptops. Asus sent us the sober, all-black version. It’s a good look for those who want a low-key computer. However, there are colourful models too. It comes in pink, white and purple, each radically altering the impression they’ll make while changing nothing but the colour. Build quality isn’t too impressive, though. Press down on the keyboard and you’ll see flexing, a sign of a less-than-tough laptop. Little build issues like this are all the more grating now that tablets have made us expect expensive-feeling devices for similar money. The Asus X553SA’s size and weight are those of the ageing laptop archetype too. It’s 2.2kg and 26mm thick. As such it’s too heavy to take around for hours at a time without your shoulders complaining, but will fit into most larger record bags for the occasional trip out. The Asus X553’s features strategy is to offer plenty of breadth, but not all that much depth. It’s probably the right direction for a cheap laptop. It has both VGA and HDMI video connections, sure to please those who have old pre-HDMI monitors they are not quite ready to retire just yet. However, there are just two USBs. One is a USB 3.0 port, the other a USB 2.0. Other entry-level laptops tend to offer three USBs, but all the Asus X553SA’s connections are decked out on one side, which may make manufacturing cheaper. There are also headphone, Ethernet and SD ports. The Asus X553SA isn’t here to cater for the hardcore crowd, but there’s enough too satisfy many. On the connection-free side is the DVD multi-writer and Kensington lock port. Once you start adding up what the Asus X553SA, it starts to sound like a pretty good deal. The question is whether the deal will merit the sacrifices required. Its keyboard features one of these. At a glance it does a lot right. It has a standard layout, and even manages to fit in a NUM pad to the right. However, the flex-happy casing and entry-level keys leave it feeling springy, with a less well-defined action than a more expensive laptop. There’s plenty of key travel, but it seems vague compared with a taut chiclet design. The Asus X553SA’s trackpad is large, designed to work well with gestures. With a smooth-but-textured plastic surface it tries to emulate the feel of a glass-topped trackpad on a budget, and doesn’t do too bad a job. However, like a lot of Windows laptop pads, it comes with frustrations. It uses evenly-spaced buttons integrated into the pad itself, and as there’s a NUM pad, the left mouse button area is actually towards the left of the laptop. As such, the resting position of your left hand needs to be way over to the left, which may feel unnatural. The Asus X553SA will work best when used with a mouse, much as there are some good parts to the pad. You’re not going to get a stellar screen in a sub-£300 standard-design laptop. The Asus X553SA takes a few cues from the tablet school of display design, but this is ultimately a fairly uninspiring laptop screen. Given the price, that should not be a deal breaker. The Asus X553SA has a 15.6-inch 1366 x 768 pixel LCD screen. It’s not terribly sharp, this being the same resolution and pixel density laptops of 10 years ago. This isn’t an IPS screen either, meaning it only looks entirely ‘right’ seen front-on. Look at the display from above or below and it either looks washed out or shadowy, thanks to something called contrast shift. Asus’s stab at getting a modern look consists of using a glossy screen finish rather than a matt one. On the positive, this makes the colours look reasonably punchy even though actual colour performance of the screen isn’t great. Using our colorimeter, we found it hits 59.9 per cent of sRGB, 41.3 of 42.4 Adobe RGB and of DCI P3. These are the three most popular colour standards, and hitting just 60 per cent of sRGB means the display will look a little undersaturated. However, for the price it’s a fine performance. The issue with using a glossy display is that it’s incredibly reflection-prone, even among glossy laptops. Take it outside and the Asus X553SA will be virtually useless. The display goes up to a reasonable 283cd/m, but reflections are so severe that seeing what’s on-screen becomes a trial. A so-so screen and a springy-feeling keyboard are issues you can probably get used to if you need to stick to a very tight budget. The issue you need to take more seriously is performance. Most of the laptops we review have Intel Core series processors. All of these get you largely compromise-free day-to-day performance when matched with fast-enough storage. The Asus X553SA has a much lower-end Intel Celeron N3050 CPU. It’s a dual-core chipset clocked at 1.6-2.16GHz, and its performance is fairly dismal. See also: AMD vs Intel. It scores 1143 in PCMark 8, which is less than half of what a good Intel Core i5 might score, and 1558 points in Geekbench 3. That is the same sort of score we might expect from a £150 entry-level phone. Limited power is often a non-issue when you take a laptop from the abstract world of benchmarks and into the context of real use. However, here the low raw power is obvious. Rudimentary parts of Windows 10 can take a little while to load, like the Start menu apps display, and even browsing feels sluggish a lot of the time. This Intel Celeron processor has a higher TDP than the latest Intel Atom CPUs (which tells you how much heat they can generate, or how hard they can rev if you like) but actual performance is worse in some cases. It’s not all down to the CPU. The Asus X553SA also has a slow 5400rpm hard drive. Download over an ultra-fast optical connection (100Mbit Virgin Media is our test connection) and there’s a further knock to performance, and the system becomes almost difficult to use if it is installing a program at the time. Of course, in the trade off you do get 1TB storage. Just buying a 1TB SSD would cost you almost the whole price of this laptop. We’ve seen an awful lot of good stuff happening in laptop hardware over the last couple of years, but the Asus X553SA suffers from performance traits that might have annoyed in laptops 10 years old or more. The issue is that both the CPU and the hard drive are potential performance bottlenecks, and their choke point is within arm’s reach at all times. The Asus X553SA will still make a fine machine for basic office tasks, browsing and so on, but you do have to accept that some of these may feel slower than they do on your phone or tablet. Bargain hunters out there should consider looking for an older Core i3 machine, some of which are available at a similar price. It almost goes without saying that the Asus X553SA’s gaming performance is terrible. Even with visuals pared right back and the resolution dropped down to 720p, Thief is categorically unplayable, with an average frame rate of 5.8fps, dropping as far down as 2.6fps. Just for masochist satisfaction we also tried it at the native screen resolution (1366 x 768 rather than our usual 1080p) and it averages 2.9fps, dropping down to 0.4fps at points. The less demanding Alien:Isolation is unplayable too, averaging just 9.3fps with settings minimised and resolution at 720p. Theme Hospital (1997) should run fine, but don’t expect games from this era to shine. The problem ultra-affordable laptops like this face is in justifying their existence other than by virtue of their full-size keyboards. As we’ve seen, performance and screen quality do not impress. Battery life affords the Asus X553SA no comeback. Playing a 720p video on loop it lasts four hours 35 minutes. Even though the Intel Celeron CPU feels weak and slow, it does not appear to offer particularly good efficiency. The Asus X553SA is a lesson in the sacrifices you need to accept when buying a bottom-rung laptop. Parts of the build are basic, the screen has some issues and — the real kicker — it doesn’t feel fast. Cheap phones and cheap tablets can often feel almost as fast as their expensive relatives, but the X533SA is unmistakably slower than a Core-series laptop. Those who don’t need to buy on the high street would do better by searching online for a Core i3-powered laptop from an earlier generation. Haswell and Broadwell i3 laptops can often be found online at similar prices, and will get you much less compromised performance. At this price, buying ‘old’ is often better than buying new. Of course, much of this is not Asus’s fault. Considered among its peers, the Asus X553SA is a serviceable laptop whose design covers most low-end use bases, and its look happily swerves between serious and fun depending on which colour you go for. Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 vs GTX 1070: What's the difference between GTX 1070 and GTX 1080? A price… 1995-2015: How technology has changed the world in 20 years How to sell your artwork online as prints, iPhone & iPad cases, collectables and more Best hybrid charging docks for Apple Watch, iPhone and iPad: 6 great chargers that'll power up two…

2016-05-30 07:00 Andrew Williams www.pcadvisor.co.uk

32 How to make PivotTables in Excel: Make your data work quickly for you with the powerful PivotTable feature in Excel Excel has many powerful features, but one of the most helpful is PivotTables. We’ll show you how to create PivotTables quickly and simply in Excel using tools built into Microsoft’s Office suite. See also: How to label chart axes in Excel. You might also like our Microsoft Surface Pro 4 review , Windows 10 Review , and Microsoft Office 365 Vs Office 2013 While it might sound like an avant-garde piece of designer furniture, a PivotTable is a data summary tool that can display information about large data sets in a customisable tabulated form. In simpler terms, it’s a clever trick that shows you what you want to know about stuff you already have in your spreadsheets. Say you have a large data set that includes a range of information about your business, and you want to know how much a certain project has cost or which salesperson has performed the best over a set period? To find this out you can either try dabbling with several formulas to generate these results, which could be complicated and time consuming, or you could create a PivotTable which does the hard work for you. Although the use of PivotTables can be complex, depending on just how deep you want to go, creating one is actually very easy. The first thing you need is a spreadsheet with data already present. Before you can start it’s important to ensure that there are no empty fields, columns or rows, as the PivotTable will assume that the data to be included ends there. When you have everything ready click on a cell in the data you want to summarise, it doesn’t matter which one, then go up to the ribbon menu and select Insert. The first option on the left should be PivotTable. Click this and you’ll see that the data set has automatically been selected and a dialog box confirms the area that will be used for the PivotTable. Below the Table/Range box you’ll see the options for creating the table in either a new worksheet or an existing one. For this walk-through we’ll select New. Click OK and the PivotTable will be created. Initially it might look like things haven’t gone to plan, as the new worksheet is empty. This is meant to happen as one of the main advantages of PivotTables is that you can select which data fields you want to appear, and then change them as many times as you like to produce different reports. In the right-hand corner of the screen you’ll see a list of fields you can choose to include. As you tick each box the PivotTable will begin to take shape in the main part of the screen. When you add fields the PivotTable will order them into related areas which show the breakdown of the information. In our example we wanted to know the individual costs of the various assignments that our agents had undertaken, so by selecting those fields we quickly knew the exact amounts of each project and how much each agent had been awarded. That’s all well and good, but now we want to know how much revenue each client has generated. In a traditional spreadsheet this might take a while, but PivotTables work very quickly indeed to collate the information. There’s no need to create a new table, instead we untick the fields that we no longer need, and instead select the ones for the client, assignment, and amounts. Instantly the information is displayed in front of us. Very nice! As we said earlier, PivotTables can be very powerful if you dig deeper into the various options available in the ribbon menu. These advanced features would take up an article all of their own, so we won’t be covering them today, but there is one area that it’s worth exploring briefly – Design. At the top of the ribbon menu you’ll see the pink PivotTable Tools tab is highlighted. Directly underneath this are two more tabs – Options and Design – of which Options is currently selected. Click on Design and you’ll see a far simpler set of tools appear. In this menu you can shape how the information in the PivotTable is displayed. The first couple of options relate to whether you want Sub-Totals or Grand Totals in your table, but the one most people will want to start with is the Report Layout. Clicking this opens up a drop down menu with a few basic alternatives for the layout of the table. Again this is all dynamic, so you can click through each option without ruining your report, then return to your preferred design at the end. Try spending a few minutes experimenting with the settings, until you’re happy with the look and feel of your report. There’s plenty more you can do with PivotTables, but at least with these initial steps you can start exploring how they can be put to work for your own needs. You never know, there might even be a large sticky donut in store at the next office meeting as people gaze upon your techno-wizardry with wonder. Well, you can dream can’t you?

2016-05-30 07:00 Martyn Casserly www.pcadvisor.co.uk

33 iPad Pro 2 release date and specs rumours: When will Apple launch a new iPad Pro Apple recently launched the iPad Pro 9.7in following the original but when will a new model be available? Here we take a look at the possible and rumoured iPad Pro 2 release date and specs. See: Best new tablets coming 2016. For now we're calling it the iPad Pro 2 since that's the logical way to name it for now. However, Apple could well just call the tablet the new iPad Pro – we won't know until Apple makes it official but that's what we're going with for now to make it simple. There a few possibilities for the iPad Pro 2 launch but we're not expecting anything before this autumn, despite WWDC coming up shortly in June. With the original iPad Pro launching in September 2015 and the 9.7in following with a March 2016 launch date, it's September time this year when we expect to be the earliest for the iPad Pro 2 reveal. That would mean an upgraded model of the larger iPad Pro and probably the smaller 9.7in model getting a refresh in March 2017. While that makes total sense, there's a second possibility. Apple could wait until March 2017 to launch both iPad Pro 2 models at the same time. A third option would be to launch the iPad Pro 2 in two sizes this autumn but we think that's the least likely since the 9.7in wouldn't be old enough to warrant a new version. When it launched, the original iPad Pro didn't come in a 256GB storage capacity but Apple add it to the line-up with the introduction of the iPad Pro 9.7. We expect the iPad Pro 2 to come in the same storage options which are currently available. What we do expect is that the iPad Pro 2 to come in the latest Rose Gold colour which seems to be all the rage across Apple's other products including the iPhone and MacBook. It's fairly easy to predict that Apple will bring the specs of the iPad Pro 2 to at least match the 9.7in model. That means adding the True Tone display which automatically adjusts the white balance for a more realistic experience, the 12Mp iSight camera with Live Photos and 4K video recording and the 5Mp front FaceTime HD camera with a Retina Flash. Those changes would make the iPad Pro 2 level with the current 2016 iPad Pro but it wouldn't be Apple if there weren't some features not seen before on an iPad. This could simply come in the form of a new processor but we hope for more since the current A9X is more than dependable. This is all speculation on our part but as rumours emerge we'll add them here. We are perhaps a little too far away from the launch for anything juicy so check back soon.

2016-05-30 07:00 Chris Martin www.pcadvisor.co.uk

34 PIPEDA changes should prompt improved security stances and roadmap creation Businesses are data driven, and enterprises are challenged to both leverage data effectively and manage it. This includes securing it, but also understanding and complying with legislation. The Digital Privacy Act has amended some aspects of Canada’s Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA), including introducing a new data breach notification requirement that is not yet in force. Bernice Karn , a partner at Cassels Brock in Toronto, said the amendments of have been talked about for some time; consultations were due to wrap up at the end of May. PIPEDA was intended to be reviewed every five years since being introduced more than 15 years ago, but she said this is the first major review since its inception. Changes have already been made to address some of PIPEDA’s gaps, said Karn. For example, there had never been a proper way to deal with the handling of personal information business transaction, such as a customer list or employee information when a business is being sold. There were no provisions in PIPEDA on how to transition that information to the buyer, she said; now there are steps. One key element of PIPEDA being hammered are guidelines around breach notification and what forms regulations should take. (Alberta is currently the only province in Canada to have generally applicable mandatory data breach reporting requirements for all private sector organizations.) Even then, said Karn, it’s murky as the PIPEDA amendment is pretty broad. “It puts a lot of discretion in hands of the organization that was breached.” Organizations have to make significant judgement call, she said. “It’s a hard thing to figure out. Not every data breach is all that serious.” Regardless of the legislation is, Karn said organizations need to treat a breach like managing any other crisis. “You need a process in place to handle this that involves being able to identify when a beach happens, bring the right people to the table to contain the problem and mitigate the situation.” For most organizations, it’s not a question of if they will experience a breach, she said, it’s a question of when. The process they take should include a post mortem to they can learn from it. “It’s a loop. You repeat the loop every time.” And that loop may contain litigation, Karn said. A lot of organizations didn’t take PIPEDA seriously when it came out. “Fifteen years later, we are realizing there is value in personal data,” she said, and that means having a privacy policy and best practices in place is essential. “You have to play more than lip service than a plain vanilla policy.” Karn, who works in her firm’s IT contracting practice, said some organizations are minimizing their risk of a breach by limiting the personal information they collect if possible. “If they don’t have to see it, they don’t want to see it.” But in the world of social media, personal information is currency, she said, with the paradox being the general public is never happy with untoward use of their information, but willing to share reams of it online. For IT departments, the challenge is to have visibility at the board level of the organization, said Karn, and turning their minds toward issues around privacy and cybersecurity. Ideally, an enterprise should have a subcommittee established conversant areas related around privacy, and more broadly, employees to need have training around the handling of personal information. Kevin Lonergan, analyst with IDC Canada, also agrees that training is an important piece of the puzzle and that the best way for organizations to comply with PIPEDA and amendments to the Digital Privacy Act is to reduce the possibility of a breach. But most enterprises, he said, have ways to go. “In terms of IT security maturity, many organizations are not at the step where they have a response plan. Many don’t know they are being breached.” The research firm conducts an annual survey to understand the security maturity of organizations, said Lonergan, and while there are improvements year of year, many have a ways to go. The survey places organizations in four buckets, with the lowest in maturity dubbed “defeatists.” These are companies that know they have breaches, have low confidence in their security and need to spend more money but have budgets constraints. “They are kind of stuck.” “Denialists” are similar, but have a little more confidence and do spend money on security technology. “The problem they don’t have the training or best practices,” said Lonergan. “They don’t really have a risk management plan in place. They don’t have security roadmap in place.” Further up the ladder in terms of maturity are “realists,” who experience a less than average number of breaches, are spending and training more, but still don’t have a roadmap or plan going forward. At the very top are “egoists,” who have very high confidence in their security technology, have investment in training, and have a roadmap in place. Lonergan said more than half of organizations surveyed end up in the first and second bucket, and don’t have a risk management process in place. “Things are going in the right direction,” he said. “Each year organizations become more concerned about security.” That includes an increase of budgets. “One of the biggest drives, has been the media attention we’ve seen from high profile breaches.” That being said, breaches are becoming routine and not hitting home as much, said Lonergan, so hopefully the PIPEDA changes will spur enterprises to continue the security spending momentum and create roadmaps. “Organizations should worry about improving security stance,” he said. “If they lower the likelihood of being breached, the less likely they have to have to deal with PIPEDA.”

2016-05-30 18:52 Gary Hilson www.itworldcanada.com

35 NHL’s digital head on how the league is using the cloud to deliver ‘enhanced stats’ and a better fan experience Hardcore and casual fans alike know the National Hockey League’s (NHL) 2016 Stanley Cup playoff final kicks off on Monday with the Eastern Conference champion Pittsburgh Penguins against the Western Conference champion San Jose Sharks squaring off for hockey supremacy. But as excited as someone like Chris Foster is for the NHL finals, he’s already thinking about next season. Foster is the NHL’s digital business development director and is responsible for boosting fan engagement on digital channels including mobile apps and social media. “For me, playoffs planning ends in February,” Foster told IT World Canada . “What I’m focused on now is our Centennial that’s coming up.” Indeed, the coming 2016-2017 season officially represents NHL’s Centennial Celebration and Foster is currently heading up a project to capture the entire official statistical history of the professional league — including every box score dating back to the NHL’s inaugural 1917-18 season. When the NHL last year announced a multi-year North American partnership with enterprise application vendor SAP SE, it was with an eye on improving its cloud capabilities and also how it approached hockey statistics, said Foster. With more than a century of stats, the league required an enterprise relational database that was fast and able to conduct performance analysis in real-time to help better target its digital strategy initiatives. Specifically, the NHL is using the SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud service to enhance its hockey analytics site NHL.com/Stats , which has gone through several iterations to capture data points on a granular level. This includes using the open platform-as-a-service to provide a “personalized and interactive experience for fans” with real-time analytics around active player comparison tools, player performance prediction tools, team power indexes and “enhanced stats” around shot attempts (SAT), unblocked shot attempts (USAT), shooting plus save percentage (SPSV%) and more. Foster was at SAP’s 2016 Sapphire conference in mid-May to learn more about the SAP HANA cloud solution enhancements, including extensions for SAP S/4 HANA and also the SAP Digital Boardroom product that claims to deliver visual answers and analytics in real time. “As advanced as the HANA system is, there are some unique challenges when it comes to setup and integration,” he said, adding that overall he’s been happy with the platform and how it fits into the organization’s future plans. The SAP platform provides the back end technology that allows the NHL to focus on improving user engagement and the stats experience: “We couldn’t do that before.” Foster is as passionate about the game as he is about his job; he notes that this current project around the historical digitization of game sheets and back filling stats is something that all fans of the game will be interested in, including himself. He excitedly pulled up a digitized game sheet of a 1926 game between the New York Rangers and the Chicago Blackhawks on his laptop during the interview. The technology enables the NHL to create a box score for every game ever played; by capturing every power play goal and winning play —the platform will be able to backfill career records of every player who has ever donned skates in an NHL rink, he said. Enhanced hockey statistics are serious business for aficionados; Foster notes the evolving site is designed to grow its user base. Keeping hockey fans engaged on digital platforms represents unique challenges, Foster said. It’s about providing a consistent experience regardless of whether the team is U. S. or Canada based, an Original Six team or in a town not typically known for its deep hockey presence. “There is a challenge talking to different voices. Hometown fans love their teams, they are tribal and passionate…. We do want to have that one-on- one conversation where you are talking to different fanbases. We look at it on a macro level where we are promoting all of the players,” he added. Once the complete archives of the NHL’s statistics are fully integrated, new tools and functionality of NHL.com/Stats, including advanced filtering and visualizations, will be applied to the entire league’s history, Foster said. Looking at the future, the NHL has tentative plans to take advantage of the HANA platform to roll out sensor technology in player jerseys, including the power of HANA to collect new metrics including puck speed or distance traveled by players. So as the Penguins’ all-star captain Sidney Crosby gets set to face-off with Sharks’s vet centre Joe Thornton tonight, Foster offers there’s nothing like the NHL playoffs. And using enterprise technology, Foster is hoping that that deeper digital engagement ensures that it stays that way. “I truly believe that the NHL is the best live experience around, especially in the playoffs. There is nothing like it.”

2016-05-30 18:52 Ryan Patrick www.itworldcanada.com

Total 35 articles. Created at 2016-05-31 06:03