With so many productivity apps around, time management should be easy. But the reality can be very different, as key areas of your life -- email, calendar, lists -- are often split across several tools. Handle is a free Chrome extension and iOS app which takes a different approach, combining gMail, to-dos and your calendar in a single view. By default Handle stays out of your way, and you can browse the web or check your inbox as normal. If an important email arrives, pressing "t" turns it into a to-do. There are options to add reminders, text notes and… [Continue Reading]
Read the full article here by BetaNews
Wednesday, 30 September 2015
Tuesday, 29 September 2015
Monday, 28 September 2015
Sunday, 27 September 2015
New Trailer for Unreal Tournament Pre-Alpha Season
The Pre-Alpha season for Unreal Tournament started over the weekend and Epic Games hosted a live exhibition tournament at their studio and also released a brand new trailer for the pre-alpha season.
Read the full article here by 80lvl
Read the full article here by 80lvl
Friday, 25 September 2015
Thursday, 24 September 2015
How to Create an Elastic SVG Progress Loading Bar
Codrops has published a tutorial of how to create an elastic SVG progress loader based on the Dribbble shot “Download” by xjw and implemented with SVG and TweenMax. The button starts as an icon with an arrow and once it’s clicked, it animates into a fun little wire and a label that indicates the download […]
The post How to Create an Elastic SVG Progress Loading Bar appeared first on WebAppers.
Read the full article here by WebAppers
Ethics in Engineering: Volkswagen’s Diesel Fiasco
Every so often – and usually not under the best of circumstance – the field of engineering as a whole is presented with a teaching moment. Volkswagen is currently embroiled in a huge scandal involving emissions testing of 11 Million diesel cars sold in recent years. It’s a problem that could cost VW dearly, to the tune of eighteen Billion dollars in the US alone, and will, without a doubt, end the careers of more than a few Volkswagen employees. In terms of automotive scandals, this is bigger than Unsafe at Any Speed. This is a bigger scandal than …read more
Read the full article here by Hackaday
Capture, record and share your ideas with Microsoft’s Snip
Microsoft’s Garage division has released Snip, a simple tool for capturing, annotating and sharing screenshots. There are plenty of similar tools around, and Snip doesn’t begin to compete with the best of breed freeware, but it still has a few features you might find very interesting. The program is very easy to use. An auto-hiding toolbar lives at the top of the screen, and has three main buttons: one to capture your screen, another takes a webcam photo, the third displays a blank whiteboard. Screen capture types are very limited. There’s no scrolling windows or anything else advanced, just options… [Continue Reading]
Read the full article here by BetaNews
Read the full article here by BetaNews
Photorealism in Metal Gear Solid V
In a panel at GDC, Hideki Sasaki the CG Art Director of Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain talks about how to get physically accurate assets, techniques for lighting, and photorealism.
Read the full article here by 80lvl
Read the full article here by 80lvl
Wednesday, 23 September 2015
Tuesday, 22 September 2015
Unity’s Cloud Build is coming to PC, Mac, and Linux — features now free for all
Unity is using the cloud to help game development. Cloud Build is a continuous build distribution service for the game-making engine Unity. It detects changes to projects and automatically delivers them to everyone in a development team via a cloud, speeding up development. Patrick Curry, Unity’s director of Cloud Build, announced during the Unite 2015
Read the full article here by Full Circle Magazine
Read the full article here by Full Circle Magazine
Jobs, Gates and Al Pacino on "Me & My Other Me" Series of Illustrations
An artist from Colombia, called Fulvio Obregon, created a funny series of illustrations showing some celebrities in the past and the present, side by side. But not just that, he puts all his talent to bring style and fun to every single piece.
This project is a series of illustrations of celebrities, where each occupies the same place in the 'I' past with its present 'I', each character has some detail of what has been essentially along their respective career, life or profession."
Don't forget to check more about Fulvio Obregon's work on Behance.
Read the full article here by Abduzeedo Design Inspiration - Design Inspiration & Tutorials
Lattice – Running Containerized Workloads on a Cluster
Lattice is an open source project for running containerized workloads on a cluster. Lattice bundles up http load-balancing, a cluster scheduler, log aggregation/streaming and health management into an easy-to-deploy and easy-to-use package. The scheduler balances the allocation of container process resources across the infrastructure. The algorithm uses a distributed auction model based on the resource […]
The post Lattice – Running Containerized Workloads on a Cluster appeared first on WebAppers.
Read the full article here by WebAppers
MariaDB, database cifrati senza costi aggiuntivi
Il sistema di database MariaDB, fork di MySQL, è quasi pronto per la pubblicazione della release 10.1, una versione che avrà tra le sue novità principali la possibilità di cifrare i dati in maniera nativa e senza conseguenze negative sul fronte delle performance.
Attualmente disponibile sotto forma di Release Candidate 1 e attesa all’arrivo della versione definitiva a ottobre, MariaDB 10.1 includerà infatti la tecnologia crittografica sviluppata e usata internamente da Google per codificare in maniera trasparente i database.
Nessuna necessità di sacrificare le prestazioni o di spendere risorse economiche aggiuntive per procurarsi estensioni di terze parti, promette …
The post MariaDB, database cifrati senza costi aggiuntivi appeared first on Edit.
Read the full article here by Edit
Monday, 21 September 2015
Sunday, 20 September 2015
Facebook takes Relay JavaScript framework open source
InfoWorld: Company engineers see the community potentially extending it beyond its links to React JavaScript technology
Read the full article here by Linuxtoday.com
Saturday, 19 September 2015
Jim Keller Leaves AMD, Again
While AMD's forthcoming Zen CPU architecture has high hopes and was made more exciting when Jim Keller joined back AMD to work on its design, this successful CPU designer has left AMD once more...
Read the full article here by Phoronix
Read the full article here by Phoronix
Volkswagen Group must recall 500,000 diesel cars for cheating on smog tests
Some models had “defeat devices,” which selectively turned on emissions controls.
Read the full article here by Ars Technica
Read the full article here by Ars Technica
Konami calls it quits on AAA console games, reports say
Konami is shutting down much of its AAA console-game development for the foreseeable future, according to a report on French site Gameblog (as translated by Eurogamer). The only two franchises on Konami's AAA plate are Metal Gear Online and Pro Evolution Soccer 2016. Otherwise, there are no plans to develop additional Metal Gear, Silent Hill, Castlevania or other AAA games at Konami, the site says. An additional report on Gameblog claims that Konami Worldwide Technical Director and head of the studio's Fox Engine, Julien Merceron, has left the company. We've reached out to Konami for clarification. These reports play into recent rumblings of unrest at Konami and a shift toward mobile-game development, following a series of odd events at the studio.
One of the first signs of turmoil at Konami came when it canceled Silent Hills, a game that received a ton of positive hype after the release of its teaser, PT, in 2014. It was a collaboration between famed horror-movie director Guillermo del Toro and Metal Gear creator Hideo Kojima, starring The Walking Dead's Norman Reedus. Konami never officially announced the cancelation, though del Toro and Reedus have both said it's canned.
Second, Kojima himself appears to be on the outs at Konami and he's expected to cut ties with the studio now that Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain is out. Kojima's name was removed from the box art for Metal Gear Solid V along with the logo for his studio, Kojima Productions. Plus, it seems that Metal Gear Solid V was originally intended to include a third chapter and more content in general. Konami has recently pledged to focus on mobile development, which ties into the "no more AAA" reports this week.
Read the full article here by Engadget
Google's codebase is ludicrously huge for good reason
Google's codebase -- the programming instructions that run every one of its services from Gmail to Slides -- span a whopping 2 billion lines of code that stretch across 1 billion files and require 86 terabytes of storage, according to Google engineering manager Rachel Potvin. She recently disclosed those figures at the @Scale engineering conference. She also noted that this massive collection of data is mirrored and continually updated in ten data centers peppered around the globe. "Not only is the size of the repository increasing," Potvin explained during her lecture, "but the rate of change is also increasing. This is an exponential curve."
There's a solid reason behind keeping all that code in a single, monolithic base: it makes updating everything much easier. That's because the codebase is available to 95 percent of Google's engineers and changing any line of code in one service updates that same line of code in any other service that shares it. Some 15 million lines of code in 250,000 thousand of those files are modified weekly. "When you start a new project," Potvin told WIRED, "you have a wealth of libraries already available to you. Almost everything has already been done."
Via: BGR
Source: Wired
Read the full article here by Engadget
Friday, 18 September 2015
Thursday, 17 September 2015
Instrumenting meetings at Facebook
Data from calendars, motion sensors, and videoconferencing allows us to analyze how meeting space is utilized so employees get the resources they need.
Read the full article here by Facebook Code
Read the full article here by Facebook Code
'Fruit Ninja' studio removes 'designer' as a role
Fruit Ninja studio Halfbrick recently fired its final two designers, as reported by Kotaku Australia on Monday. This marks a structural shift for the company: Halfbrick doesn't plan on hiring new designers and instead wants its artists, programmers and other employees to work on game design together, Chief Marketing Officer Nicholas Cornelius tells Engadget. "The roles were made redundant and not laid off," he says. "This is because of a change in the way teams will work at Halfbrick."
Cornelius continues, "As per our CEO, our teams are being empowered to contribute to design rather than design being in its own silo. To add to this, we have a design coach to guide the teams on achieving this goal. Halfbrick's focus remains on creating new mobile games while expanding on its core brands (Fruit Ninja and Jetpack Joyride)."
Fruit Ninja was a massive success when it launched in 2010 and Jetpack Joyride kept Halfbrick's mobile mojo rolling when it hit iOS in 2011. The studio has released successful games since, though none have garnered the same fever pitch of popularity as Fruit Ninja or Jetpack Joyride.
One game, 2013's Fish Out of Water, demonstrated Halfbrick's experiments in monetization and gameplay mechanics in real-time. It started out as a $1 app, but within the final six months of 2014 alone, its price fluctuated between free and $2 (the free version featuring a fresh injection of ads and other interruptions, of course).
This week, Halfbrick CEO Shainiel Deo told Kotaku Australia that the studio's latest shake-up -- making games without designated designers -- doesn't mean the studio will lack design altogether.
"Halfbrick remains a design-focused company and this change will empower everyone in our teams to contribute to design rather than concentrate design control in the hands of a few. Great ideas can come from anywhere and we want to create an environment that fosters this notion."
Via: Kotaku Australia
Tags: FruitNinja, halfbrick, HalfbrickStudios, hdpostcross, JetpackJoyride
Read the full article here by Engadget
9th Grader Arrested, Searched for Building a Clock
A 14-year-old in Dallas, Texas has been arrested for bringing a clock to his school. [Ahmed Mohamed] could be any one of us. He’s a tinkerer, pulling apart scrap appliances and building projects from the parts. He was a member of the his middle school robotics team. The clock was built from a standard four digit seven segment display and a circuit board. [Ahmed] built the circuit inside a Vaultz hard pencil case like this one. He then did what every other experimenter, inventor, hacker, or maker before him has done: He showed off his creation.
Unfortunately for [Ahmed] one …read more
Read the full article here by Hackaday
Hacking the Inner Ear for VR—And for Science
Galvanic vestibular stimulation is a centuries-old technique for tricking the brain.
The post Hacking the Inner Ear for VR—And for Science appeared first on WIRED.
Read the full article here by WIRED
Tuesday, 15 September 2015
Moto X Play review
Motorola’s Moto range for 2015 includes two variants on the standard Moto X. The Moto X Style is focussed on how it looks, and this phone the Moto X Play is aimed at providing a good entertainment experience. To that end it has a large 5.5-inch 1080p screen, a standard version of Android and a 3,630 mAh battery that promises plenty of use between charges. There’s a 1.7 GHz octa-core processor, 2GB of RAM, 16GB of onboard storage (a 32GB version is available too), plus 21 MP rear and 5 MP front cameras. Naturally it’s 4G and has dual-band Wi-Fi.… [Continue Reading]
Read the full article here by BetaNews
Read the full article here by BetaNews
Monday, 14 September 2015
Sunday, 13 September 2015
'Metal Gear Solid V' was supposed to have a third chapter
Many will tell you that Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain comes across as rushed at times. While there's a lot to do, it's light on story -- a sharp contrast with earlier Metal Gear games, which are notorious for their epic-length cutscenes. However, there's now evidence suggesting that the original plan was for a much larger, more substantial game. Players on the Facepunch forums have discovered files in the PC version of MGSV which show that the title was supposed to have not only more prominent characters (such as The Boss), but an entire third chapter. It's not clear exactly how much is missing, but the released game's abrupt end hints that the third section was going to bring the story to a proper conclusion.
It's not shocking that there's missing content -- studios frequently cut material from games, whether it's to make looming ship dates or simply to scrap elements that didn't pan out. However, the sheer scope of what was cut, combined with Konami's attempt to divest itself of Metal Gear creator Hideo Kojima, doesn't exactly paint a pretty picture. It hints that the publisher wanted to get MGSV (and its relationship with Kojima) finished as quickly as possible, even if it involved making some big sacrifices. The overall warm response to the shipping game shows that you didn't lose too much of the core experience, but it's all too tempting to wonder what might have emerged if Konami had more patience.
Filed under: Gaming
Via: GamingBolt, Windows Central
Source: Facepunch
Tags: gaming, HideoKojima, KojimaProductions, konami, metalgearsolid, metalgearsolid5, metalgearsolidv, MetalGearSolidVThePhantomPain, ThePhantomPain, videogames
Read the full article here by Engadget
Do you want to know what NVIDIA states about DX12?
I am writing this article just to expose my point of view about the "Asynchronous Compute" fiasco by Nvidia.
Asynchronous Compute is a feature which is exposed by DirectX 12 API.
The "problem" surfaced thanks to the first tests of a DX12 game, "Ashes of the Singularity" by Oxide.
TL&DR
- The game is in alpha and DX12 are not publicly available
- So the test is valid, but let's wait for more official news
- Tests highlight that the "Asynchronous Compute" feature is well managed by AMD cards (the workload is executed in parallel), while NVIDIA cards seem just to support the API call, but then perform the job serially (or in parallel but seriously impacted by a global lock)
- NVIDIA mocked the support in the drivers?
- The Asynchronous Compute feature is not a key feature of the DirectX API, nor it is required to run a game (it strongly depends on how the developers implement the game/application)
- Indeed, it can be helpful in some usage scenarios
- NVIDIA made no official statement (11 September 2015)
- The silence will probably stay until more and more DX12 games will come out
- The market will somehow risk to split the customers: those who buy "AMD friendly" and those "NVIDIA friendly" games/game engines
- See more below...
In the meanwhile, let's take a look to the NVIDIA GTX 970 Specification page, available here.
WOW! What an incredible technical detail about DirectX 12 support!
12 API with Feature Level 12_1
There is still some missing information: the Resources Binding Tier, which for NVIDIA Kepler, Maxwell 1&2 is Tier 2.
But... Look how the NVIDIA GTX 970 Specification page looked on the 16th of April 2015 (thanks to the WA Wayback machine).
Did you spot any difference?
To be continued...
BlocksCAD is Browser-Based 3D Modeling that Teaches You CAD
Considering all of the projects the Raspberry Pi is used for now, the fact that it was originally envisioned to be an educational tool is sometimes forgotten. One of the tools commonly available with it is Scratch, a programming language that is easy to learn and can be seen as a gateway into other computer science realms. Building on this principle, MIT has come up with a new block-based educational tool called BlocksCAD.
BlocksCAD is essentially Scratch combined with OpenSCAD and allows the user to use blocks (similar to Scratch) to build a 3D model. The interface is fairly intuitive, …read more
Read the full article here by Hackaday
Saturday, 12 September 2015
Google Releases Open Source Plans for Cardboard v2 Viewer
Google released the second version of their Cardboard VR viewer back in May. Sticking to their commitment to make the design of the handheld HMD completely open for third-party manufacturers, the company has now released the complete design specification for Cardboard v2.
Also: Kit For Google Cardboard 2 Now Free To Download
Read the full article here by Tux Machines
Friday, 11 September 2015
7,600 Infinity Blade assets now free for UE4 developers
Epic has made 7,600 Infinity Blade assets free on the Unreal Engine marketplace.
The content will ship in eight different packs that are available for any developer to access and use in their game. Most of the released assets come from the cancelled Infinity Blade: Dungeons.
Assets available include audio files, sound cues, melee weaponry, numerous visual effects and game locations such as a castle with flowing lava and a wintery fort set within a glacial enclave,.
Altogether the assets are said to represent $3 million worth of investment in art and sound design.
You can view all the available content below. The packs can be downloaded on the Unreal Engine marketplace.
- Infinity Blade: Grass Lands is the earthy citadel adorned with stone set pieces and beautiful props.
- Infinity Blade: Ice Lands is the wintery fort set deep within a glacial enclave.
- Infinity Blade: Fire Lands is the radiant castle interior laced with unforgiving paths, dramatic props and flowing lava.
- Infinity Blade: Warriors includes loads of assets for crafting fierce heroes.
- Infinity Blade: Adversaries has even more content for a making wide variety of rivals.
- Infinity Blade: Effects gives you visual effects ranging from fire and smoke to lightning and magical reactions.
- Infinity Blade: Sounds includes thousands of raw audio files and sound cues.
- Infinity Blade: Weapons presents a vast array of melee weaponry, including never-before-seen swords and axes and also a few Infinity Blade fan favorites.
Read the full article here by Develop Feed
Thursday, 10 September 2015
Tuesday, 8 September 2015
VirtualBox 5.0.4 Has Linux 4.2 Support, Many Fixes
Oracle's German team in Munich has announced the release of VirtualBox 5.0.4...
Read the full article here by Phoronix
Read the full article here by Phoronix
Monday, 7 September 2015
Sunday, 6 September 2015
Epic Games’ Showdown VR Experience Released for Free
Epic Games has released its Showdown cinematic VR experience for free.
Read the full article here by 80lvl
Read the full article here by 80lvl
Saturday, 5 September 2015
Friday, 4 September 2015
Four short links: 2 September 2015
There Are Only Two Hard Problems in Distributed Systems — the best tweet ever. (via Tim Bray) Building LinkedIn’s New Engineering Bootcamp — transmitting cultural and practical knowledge in a structured format. Soul-Searching in TV Land Over the Challenges of …
Read the full article here by O'Reilly Radar - Insight, analysis, and research about emerging technologies
Read the full article here by O'Reilly Radar - Insight, analysis, and research about emerging technologies
Google, Microsoft and Netflix team up on free video formats
It's no secret that many tech companies hate video formats that are closed, cost money or both -- enough so that they'll drop popular standards and develop their own codecs. There hasn't been a concerted attempt to tackle this problem, however, which is why several industry giants have just launched the Alliance for Open Media. Founding members Amazon, Cisco, Google, Intel, Microsoft, Mozilla and Netflix are working on a future video format that should be royalty-free, open to anyone and playable on just about any modern device. It's still extremely early (the group hasn't even said how others can join), but you should hear more about their efforts later this year.
While it's not stated, the Alliance is effectively trying to make an end run around MPEG LA, the group that licenses big video formats like H.264 and H.265. If the Alliance can create a standard that catches on, it'd eliminate one of the common costs for offering video playback on devices and through the internet. However, that's a big "if." The tech industry is notorious for developing formats that either take ages to arrive or quickly fizzle out. Also, Apple isn't one of the founders. Unless the Alliance can convince Apple to hop aboard, it may have trouble reaching the widest possible audience -- just look at what happened when Cupertino refused to support Flash on its mobile hardware.
[Image credit: Shutterstock]
Filed under: Home Entertainment, Internet, HD, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Intel
Via: TechCrunch
Source: Alliance for Open Media
Tags: allianceforopenmedia, amazon, cisco, google, hdpostcross, intel, internet, microsoft, mozilla, mpeg-la, mpegla, netflix, streaming, video, web
Read the full article here by Engadget Full RSS Feed
Thursday, 3 September 2015
Moto X Pure Edition Review: This Phone Does Android Better Than Google
If you’re looking for the absolute best value Android smartphone out there: Yep. Yep, you should. The only hesitation you should feel in your heart is that Google will most likely be announcing two Nexus smartphones possibly by the end of the month. A Google Phone means two devices very similar to the Moto X, definitely getting upcoming Marshmallow update first, and ones that could even be a part of Google’s new Project Fi wireless service.
But what Nexus most likely won’t have is a look tailored specifically to you and legitimately useful Moto apps you’ll want to use. Pull the trigger or wait—it’s a win-win.
Read the full article here by Tux Machines
Netflix Sleepy Puppy XSS flaw detection tool goes open source
Wednesday, 2 September 2015
Microsoft's Project Sonar: Malware Detonation As A Service
According this article, Microsoft's 'Project Sonar' service may soon be available to users outside the company. Codenamed "Project Sonar," the service "dynamically analyzes millions of potential exploit & malware samples in VMs (virtual machines) and collects terabytes of data during that analysis every day," according to a recent Cloud and Enterprise Group job posting describing the service. From the job posts about Sonar, it's not clear to me if Microsoft will allow customers to run Sonar and then amass and analyze the data collected, or if Microsoft will run Sonar and allow users to analyze the data gathered. Comments
Read the full article here by [H]ardOCP News/Article Feed
Read the full article here by [H]ardOCP News/Article Feed
Tuesday, 1 September 2015
Four short links: 1 September 2015
End-to-End People Detection in Crowded Scenes — research paper and code. When parsing the title, bind “end-to-end” to “scenes” not “people”. Statistical Patterns in Movie Ratings (PLOSone) — We find that the distribution of votes presents scale-free behavior over several …
Read the full article here by O'Reilly Radar - Insight, analysis, and research about emerging technologies
Read the full article here by O'Reilly Radar - Insight, analysis, and research about emerging technologies
Lack of Async Compute on Maxwell Makes AMD GCN Better Prepared for DirectX 12
It turns out that NVIDIA's "Maxwell" architecture has an Achilles' heel after all, which tilts the scales in favor of competing AMD Graphics CoreNext architecture better prepared for DirectX 12. "Maxwell" lacks support for async compute, one of the three highlight features of Direct3D 12, even as the GeForce driver "exposes" the feature's presence to apps. This came to light when game developer Oxide Games claimed that it was pressured by NVIDIA's marketing department to remove certain features in its "Ashes of the Singularity" DirectX 12 benchmark.
Async Compute is a standardized API-level feature, which allows an app to better exploit the number-crunching resources of a GPU, by breaking down its graphics rendering tasks. Since NVIDIA driver tells apps that "Maxwell" GPUs supports it, Oxide Games simply created its benchmark with async compute support, but when it attempted to use it on Maxwell, it was an "unmitigated disaster." During to course of its developer correspondence with NVIDIA to try and fix this issue, it learned that "Maxwell" doesn't really support async compute at the bare-metal level, and that NVIDIA driver bluffs its support to apps. NVIDIA instead started pressuring Oxide to remove parts of its code that use async compute altogether, it alleges.
Read the full article here by techPowerUp!
Async Compute is a standardized API-level feature, which allows an app to better exploit the number-crunching resources of a GPU, by breaking down its graphics rendering tasks. Since NVIDIA driver tells apps that "Maxwell" GPUs supports it, Oxide Games simply created its benchmark with async compute support, but when it attempted to use it on Maxwell, it was an "unmitigated disaster." During to course of its developer correspondence with NVIDIA to try and fix this issue, it learned that "Maxwell" doesn't really support async compute at the bare-metal level, and that NVIDIA driver bluffs its support to apps. NVIDIA instead started pressuring Oxide to remove parts of its code that use async compute altogether, it alleges.
Read the full article here by techPowerUp!
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