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Submission + - Battlefield 4 DRM Locking Part Of North America Out Of Its Release Date.

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: On the whole, Battlefield 4 had a reasonable launch. The have clearly learned from their past experiences with Battlefield 3 and, more notably, SimCity. Still, some customers are unable to access the game (until presumably October 30th at 7PM EDT, 39 hours after launch) because they are incorrectly flagged by region-locking. Do regional release dates help diminish all the work EA has been putting into Origin with their refund policy and live technical support? Should they just take our money and deliver the service before we change our minds?

Submission + - Battlefield 4 DRM Locking Part Of North America Out Of Its Release Date.

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: On the whole, Battlefield 4 had a reasonable launch. The have clearly learned from their past experiences with Battlefield 3 and, more notably, SimCity. Still, some customers are unable to access the game (until presumably October 30th at 7PM EDT, 39 hours after launch) because they are incorrectly flagged by region-locking. Do regional release dates help diminish all the work EA has been putting into Origin with their refund policy and live technical support? Should they just take our money and deliver the service before we change our minds?

Submission + - AMD Radeon R9 290X Fixes Pacing with New CrossFire

Submitted by Vigile
Vigile writes: AMD is releasing its fastest single GPU graphics card today, the $549 R9 290X based on a new, 6.2 billion transistor GPU called Hawaii. The brand new part has 2,816 stream processors and has a peak theoretical performance of 5.6 TFLOPS. PC Perspective has done a full round of testing on the card to see where it stacks up and it does in fact beat the GeForce GTX 780, a card that costs $100 more. In fact, it also compares well to the $999 GTX TITAN flagship. Maybe more interesting is the completely redesigned CrossFire integration that no longer uses a bridge and fixes the CrossFire + Eyefinity/4K pacing issues that have plagued AMD for some time. As it turns out, with this new hardware, 4K tiled display CrossFire appears to be corrected.

Submission + - AMD Radeon R9 290X Fixes Pacing with New CrossFire

Submitted by Vigile
Vigile writes: AMD is releasing its fastest single GPU graphics card today, the $549 R9 290X based on a new, 6.2 billion transistor GPU called Hawaii. The brand new part has 2,816 stream processors and has a peak theoretical performance of 5.6 TFLOPS. PC Perspective has done a full round of testing on the card to see where it stacks up and it does in fact beat the GeForce GTX 780, a card that costs $100 more. In fact, it also compares well to the $999 GTX TITAN flagship. Maybe more interesting is the completely redesigned CrossFire integration that no longer uses a bridge and fixes the CrossFire + Eyefinity/4K pacing issues that have plagued AMD for some time. As it turns out, with this new hardware, 4K tiled display CrossFire appears to be corrected.

Submission + - Next Gen Graphics and Process Migration: 20 nm and Beyond (pcper.com)

Submitted by JoshMST
JoshMST writes: So why are we in the middle of GPU-renaming hell? AMD may be releasing a new 28 nm Hawaii chip in the next few days, it is still based on the same 28 nm process that the original HD 7970 debuted on nearly two years ago. Quick and easy (relative terms) process node transitions look to be a thing of the past with 20 nm lines applicable to large ASICs not being opened until mid-2014. This covers the issues that we have seen, that are present, and that which will be showing up in the years to come. It is amazing how far that industry has come in the past 18 years, but the challenges ahead are greater than ever.

Submission + - Next Gen Graphics and Process Migration: 20 nm and Beyond (pcper.com)

Submitted by JoshMST
JoshMST writes: So why are we in the middle of GPU-renaming hell? AMD may be releasing a new 28 nm Hawaii chip in the next few days, it is still based on the same 28 nm process that the original HD 7970 debuted on nearly two years ago. Quick and easy (relative terms) process node transitions look to be a thing of the past with 20 nm lines applicable to large ASICs not being opened until mid-2014. This covers the issues that we have seen, that are present, and that which will be showing up in the years to come. It is amazing how far that industry has come in the past 18 years, but the challenges ahead are greater than ever.

Submission + - NVIDIA's G-Sync Is VSync Designed for LCDs (not CRTs).

Submitted by Phopojijo
Phopojijo writes: A monitor redraws itself top to bottom because of how the electron guns in CRT monitors used to operate. VSync was created to align the completed frames, computed by a videocard, to the start of each monitor draw; without it, midway through a monitor's draw process, a break (horizontal tear) would be visible on screen between the two time-slices of animation.

Pixels on LCD monitors do not need to wait for above lines of pixels to be drawn, but they do. G-Sync is a technology from NVIDIA to make monitor refresh rates variable. The monitor will time its draws to whenever the GPU is finished rendering. A scene which requires 40ms to draw will have a smooth "framerate" of 25FPS instead of trying to fit in some fraction of 60 FPS.

Submission + - Kid Outsmarts the TSA (cnn.com)

Submitted by HugeFatty
HugeFatty writes: A nine-year-old boy managed to get past the airport security checkpoint and onto a plane without a boarding pass. Yet more evidence of security theater instead of real security.

Submission + - AMD Radeon R9 280X, 270X, 260X Reviewed (pcper.com)

Submitted by Vigile
Vigile writes: Last month AMD publicly shared plans to release a new line of graphics cards including the R9 and R7 series of Radeon GPUs. Today is the first step in that product release with the Radeon R9 280X, R9 270X and R7 260X cards going on sale and being reviewed. PC Perspective has tested all three and compared them to the latest offerings from NVIDIA and found the 280X and 270X to be first class products that offer nearly unparalleled performance per dollar. The $299 Radeon R9 280X is often outperforming the $399 GeForce GTX 770 and the R9 270X at $199 bests the GTX 760 at $249 many times as well. Enthusiasts might be disappointed to learn that all three of these cards use existing silicon previously found in the Radeon HD 7900/7800/7700 series and they will have to wait a bit longer before the hyped AMD Hawaii GPU appears.

Submission + - Fusion milestone passed at US lab (bbc.co.uk) 1

Submitted by Bizzeh
Bizzeh writes: The BBC reports that Researchers at a US lab have passed a crucial milestone on the way to their ultimate goal of achieving self-sustaining nuclear fusion. Harnessing fusion — the process that powers the Sun — could provide an unlimited and cheap source of energy.

But to be viable, fusion power plants would have to produce more energy than they consume, which has proven elusive.

Now, a breakthrough by scientists at the National Ignition Facility (NIF) could boost hopes of scaling up fusion

Submission + - Abandoned City of Heroes Fans Kickstart Successor (joystiq.com) 1

Submitted by KingSkippus
KingSkippus writes: Last December 1, NCsoft shut down the long-running City of Heroes superhero MMORPG. Undaunted, a group of fans formed Missing Worlds Media, a new studio to develop City of Titans. The new game is a spiritual successor with original art, stories, and code. A Kickstarter project to raise funds for software and hardware for the mostly volunteer team of developers and artists reached its funding level less than six days later, and the total is currently approaching stretch goals. Missing Worlds Media is currently targeting a November 2015 release date for City of Titans.

Submission + - Since Snowden leaks, NSA's FOIA requests are up 1,000 percent (muckrock.com)

Submitted by v3rgEz
v3rgEz writes: A veritable FOIA frenzy ensued in 2013 following a series of leaks about NSA surveillance programs, recently released documents show.

From June 6 to September 4, the National Security Agency’s FOIA load increased 1,054 percent over its 2012 intake. In that three-month span, the agency received 3,382 public records requests. For comparison, the NSA received just 293 requests over the same period in 2012.

While a few have netted new details about NSA surveillance operations, such as a contract with French security firm VUPEN, the majority appear to have been rejected. MuckRock has a guide on filing with the NSA to maximize your chances of actually getting something back.

Submission + - New York Subpoenaed AirBnb for Its User Data (vice.com)

Submitted by Daniel_Stuckey
Daniel_Stuckey writes: The war between New York City and Airbnb is raging on, and the future of the hospitality business hangs in the balance.

The city is fighting the startup for breaking local laws against operating an illegal hotel out of your home, worried that hustlers are abusing the online service to turn a profit. To that end, New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman just slapped the company with a subpoena to hand over the user data of all New Yorkers who've listed their apartment on the site, the New York Daily News reported today. That's about 225,000 users.

Submission + - It's Time to Stop Lionizing Steve Jobs (slashdot.org)

Submitted by Nerval's Lobster
Nerval's Lobster writes: Steve Jobs died on Oct. 5, 2011 after a long battle with cancer. As seemingly everyone on the planet is well aware, Jobs started a quirky little company named Apple that eventually morphed into a massive technology behemoth. Apple helped popularize PCs as a home device, kicked off the current obsession with tablets and smartphones, and made investors very rich in the bargain. When he died, Jobs was lionized as the greatest chief executive of the past twenty years. In many ways, that hyperbole was justified: having returned to Apple in 1996 after a long absence, he took a company teetering on the edge of bankruptcy and gave it a renewed sense of focus, which in turn resulted in a series of market-defining products, including the iPod, iPhone, and iPad. But it pays to remember that, whatever his strengths, Jobs wasn’t a perfect CEO. Apple under his watch released some notable flops, including the Power Mac G4 Cube and MobileMe; throw in controversies over working conditions in factories producing Apple products, as well as Jobs' legendary temper, and it's clear that his veneration as something close to a Tech God may be premature. To make a rough sports analogy, he was more like a Major League baseball player with excellent stats who, every three to five years, managed to hit a 100-mile home run.

Submission + - Software Rendering Engine GPU-Accelerated by WebCL

Submitted by Phopojijo
Phopojijo writes: OpenGL and DirectX have been the dominant real-time graphics APIs for decades. Both are catalogs of functions which convert geometry into images using predetermined mathematical algorithms (scanline rendering, triangles, etc.). Software rendering engines calculate colour values directly from the fundamental math. Reliance on OpenGL and DirectX could diminish when GPUs are utilized as general "large batches of math" solvers which software rendering engines offload to. Developers would then be able to choose their algorithms for best suits their project, even native to web browsers with the upcoming WebCL.

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