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Comment: Re:Criticizing behavior takes time (Score 1) 532

by tepples (#46759635) Attached to: Microsoft Confirms It Is Dropping Windows 8.1 Support

Video games are trivial to get published.

It really depends on the genre because the more locked-down platforms handle some genres better than PCs. Party games, fighting games, and cooperative platformers really need two to four players holding gamepads and looking at one screen. A PC can technically do those, but in practice, desktop or laptop PC's monitor isn't big enough for more than one person, and I'm told few people are aware that they can use virtually any HDTV as a PC monitor. The touch screen that ships with a mobile device makes certain genres hard to control as well, as I discovered when I repeatedly failed to make a certain jump in the demo of Pixeline and the Jungle Treasure on my first-generation Nexus 7 tablet.

ObMicrosoft: Look at the drama surrounding updates to Fez .

+ - Retired SCOTUS Justice Wants to "Fix" the Second Amendment-> 1

Submitted by CanHasDIY
CanHasDIY (1672858) writes "In his yet-to-be-released book, Six Amendments: How and Why We Should Change the Constitution, John Paul Stevens, who served as an associate justice of the Supreme Court for 35 years, believes he has the key to stopping the seeming recent spate of mass killings — amend the Constitution to exclude private citizens from armament ownership. Specifically, he recommends adding 5 words to the 2nd Amendment, so that it would read as follows:

“A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms when serving in the Militia shall not be infringed.”

What I find interesting is how Stevens maintains that the Amendment only protects armament ownership for those actively serving in a state or federal military unit, in spite of the fact that the Amendment specifically names "the People" as a benefactor (just like the First, Fourth, Ninth, and Tenth) and of course, ignoring the traditional definition of the term militia. I'm personally curious as to what his other 5 suggested changes are, but I guess we'll have towait until the end of April to find out."
Link to Original Source

+ - Microsoft Brings Office Online to Chrome OS

Submitted by SmartAboutThings
SmartAboutThings (1951032) writes "While we are still waiting for the official Windows 8.1 touch-enabled apps to get launched on the Windows Store, Microsoft went and decided that it’s time to finally bring the Office online apps to the Chrome Web Store, instead. Thus, Microsoft is making the Web versions of its Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote apps available to users through the Chrome Web Store and also improving all of them with new features, along with several bug fixes and performance improvements."
Government

Intuit, Maker of Turbotax, Lobbies Against Simplified Tax Filings 346

Posted by timothy
from the rent-seeking-right-on-the-surface dept.
McGruber (1417641) writes "Return-free filing might allow tens of millions of Americans to file their taxes for free and in minutes. Under proposals authored by several federal lawmakers, it would be voluntary, using information the government already receives from banks and employers and that taxpayers could adjust. The concept has been endorsed by Presidents Obama and Reagan and is already a reality in some parts of Europe. Sounds great, except to Intuit, maker of Turbotax: last year, Intuit spent more than $2.6 million on lobbying, some of it to lobby on four bills related to the issue, federal lobbying records show."

+ - So much for Scroogled: Microsoft makes it easier for Chromebooks to use Office->

Submitted by mattydread23
mattydread23 (2793761) writes "Yesterday, barely mentioned and buried at the very end of an announcement about some new features coming to Office Online, Microsoft said that most Office Online apps are now available in the Chrome App Launcher. It's another example of how Microsoft under Satya Nadella is willing to embrace platforms other than Windows. It also belies Microsoft's Scroogled ads that portrayed Chromebooks as unsuitable for "real" work."
Link to Original Source

+ - Not Everyone Needs Probiotics, Suggests Study of Hunter-Gatherer Guts->

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit (1205606) writes "After taking an antibiotic or catching an intestinal bug, many of us belt down probiotic drinks to restore the “natural balance” of organisms in our intestines. Probiotics are one of the fastest growing products in the food industry, now added to yogurts, drinks, and baby food. Yet, not everyone needs them to stay healthy. A new study of the gut bacteria of hunter-gatherers in Africa has found that they completely lack a bacterium that is a key ingredient in most probiotic foods and considered healthy. What’s more, the Hadza don’t suffer from colon cancer, colitis, Crohn’s, or other diseases of the colon that are found in humans eating modern diets in Western nations."
Link to Original Source

+ - PowerVR "Wizard" GPU Is First Mobile Gaming GPU With Hardware Ray Tracing->

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes "Imagination Technologies, the people who make the PowerVR line of mobile GPUs, have unveiled a new mobile gaming GPU ("Wizard") that does realtime ray tracing in hardware, at gaming frame rates. It has long been predicted that 3D games would eventually begin to employ true ray tracing to create computationally expensive visual effects like realistic reflections, refractions, shadows and lighting in realtime games. The PowerVR "Wizard" GPU is the first mobile GPU that can do just that in hardware. It remains to be seen how many commercial game engines, game development studios and mobile games will decide to make use of this new interesting new hardware capability. The question whether rival GPU manufacturers like Nvidia or AMD will also jump on the ray tracing bandwagon and put hardware ray tracing units in their future GPUs is also open at this point. If the hardware ray tracing trend catches on, however, and the hardware needed for it becomes mainstream, and more powerful in time, it could make for interesting virtual experiences like "true photoreal VR" when used in conjunction with a VR headset like the Oculus Rift for example."
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Security

OpenBSD Team Cleaning Up OpenSSL 235

Posted by timothy
from the devil-you-say dept.
First time accepted submitter Iarwain Ben-adar (2393286) writes "The OpenBSD has started a cleanup of their in-tree OpenSSL library. Improvements include removing "exploit mitigation countermeasures", fixing bugs, removal of questionable entropy additions, and many more. If you support the effort of these guys who are responsible for the venerable OpenSSH library, consider a donation to the OpenBSD Foundation. Maybe someday we'll see a 'portable' version of this new OpenSSL fork. Or not."

+ - Does Heartbleed Disprove 'Open Source is Safer'?->

Submitted by jammag
jammag (1021683) writes ""Almost as devastating is the blow Heartbleed has dealt to the image of free and open source software (FOSS). In the self-mythology of FOSS, bugs like Heartbleed aren't supposed to happen when the source code is freely available and being worked with daily. As Eric Raymond famously said, 'given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow'...Tired of FOSS's continual claims of superior security, some Windows and OS X users welcome the idea that Heartbleed has punctured FOSS pretensions. But is that what has happened?""
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