http://www.pcworld.com en-us Fri, 02 Jan 2015 00:50:21 -0800 Fri, 02 Jan 2015 00:50:21 -0800 Thu, 01 Jan 2015 19:50:00 -0800 Tim Hornyak Tim Hornyak If you got a PlayStation 4 for Christmas but network outages spoiled your fun, Sony wants to make it up to you. Sony Computer Entertainment America will offer 10 percent off PlayStation Store purchases including games, TV shows and movies as a gesture of thanks for users' patience following an outage of several days caused by denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks. In addition, PlayStation Plus members who had an active membership or free trial on Dec. 25 will receive a membership extension of five days, Eric Lempel of Sony Network Entertainment wrote in a blog post. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here Netflix's simplistic interface may be well-intentioned, but sometimes you need more powerful tools to find the best streaming movies and TV shows. Now that Netflix has shuttered its public API, the number of useful apps and sites for sorting through Netflix video has thinned. But there are still several tried-and-true methods for finding the good stuff, along with a few tools and settings from Netflix that everyone should know about. Here are 10 tips for making the most of a Netflix streaming subscription: Netflix's catalog of movies and shows is massive, but you might only scratch the surface with its basic apps and website. When you're really trying to scratch a particular itch, use AllFlicks.net, which lets you search within specific genres, filter movies and TV shows, narrow down a date range, and sort by rating. (InstantWatcher has a similar tool without as many sorting options, but it does include a handy synopsis view.) To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here Did you spend Christmas mildly annoyed because you bought a new console, only to find that Xbox Live/ PlayStation Network had been downed by a "nefarious" group known as Lizard Squad? Yes, I know it sounds like a bad episode of 24, but at least now you can revel in a bit of Schadenfreude: Two alleged members have been arrested this week. Lizard Squad came to prominence in 2014 after taking down (or at least claiming to take down) the online presences of numerous gaming companies, including Blizzard, Activision, and Sony. Oh, and perpetrating a bomb threat against a Sony executive in August. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here We all love to spend time (some would say waste time) fooling around on Facebook, Twitter, and other services. We also use these sites for serious, professional reasons. But like almost everything else on the Internet, they're inherently dangerous. Hackers can use social media to discover your private information and to deliver spam or malware. You can be stalked and bullied through social media. It can ruin your reputation, your career, and your life. So you need to protect yourself. Follow these rules and your online social life won't become anti-social. Of course, you should never give anyone else your password to a social network. And you shouldn't let them steal it, either. Use a long, strong password containing upper- and lowercase letters, numbers, and punctuation. And use a unique password for every site. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here Norm Arlt asked "How do I stop the How-To video from automatically starting in my browser when I click on an article?" I sympathize. We all deal with this annoyance. In fact, I'm willing to bet that everyone reading this article who hasn't already solved this problem knows exactly what I'm talking about. Most of these videos run on Shockwave Flash, so I'm going to concentrate on that technology. The trick isn't to block Flash entirely, but to make it work only with your permission. How you do this varies with each browser. So I'll offer instructions for the three most popular ones. Christopher Breen of Macworld offered these alternative fixes as well. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here If that rectangular present under the tree or boxy bulge in the stocking turned out to be a new Android phone, then congratulations: We hope that it's the flagship (or at least stellar mid-range) device of your dreams. But if that is the case, then you need to do right by your old companion—assuming you don't want to keep it around as a backup. That means first making sure that your personal data is inaccessible to whoever might have the phone next, and then figuring out the best way to part with it: selling, donating, or recycling. And yes, that includes broken phones. None of this is particularly difficult, but it does take a little bit of time. We'll save you the research and hassle so you can obsess over your new phone. Here's what to do with the old one. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here Android Lollipop may bring with it tons of neat new features and aesthetically pleasing visual changes, but its rollout has been bumpy. Google's been working out the kinks, however, as evidenced by a recent thread in the AOSP bug tracker. One particular fix, for rampant use of RAM, is reportedly slated to show up in the next Android update. The issue tracker mentions a memory leak that causes apps either to run slowly or to crash without any warning. Android 5.0.1 apparently takes up as much as 1.3GB of RAM, which is particularly detrimental to devices that top out at 2GB. There are even a few Reddit threads devoted to complaints about this particular issue. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here When Samsung's 65-inch curved LCD smart TV powers on, an angelic choir hums a joyous tune in the background and a glowing aura shines forth into the darkening winter sky. Okay, I'm exaggerating. All it really does is make that typical fuzz-buzz sound that every other TV does. But I'm convinced that 65 inches is the ideal size for most home-entertainment environments, unless you have the room and the money to convert your den into a movie theater. Everything on Samsung's UN65HU9000 looked absolutely glorious. You could watch a porcupine waddle into a swamp on this set and find it totally appealing. Like LG's 55-inch curved OLED ( model 55EC9300), the edges of Samsung's display bend toward the viewer just a bit (being larger than the LG, the Samsung's curve is slightly more aggressive). The curve also helps reduce glare a bit. I've read some reports that claim curved screens distort the displayed image, but I never noticed that problem. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here Welcome to 2015: A brand new year and a great time for a fresh start. Instead of shooting for nebulous, unrealistic goals in the New Year, start off 2015 with vows to improve your digital life. (You weren't really going to go to the gym every day or be nicer to your siblings anyway.) Most of the suggestions below aren't hard to achieve and some are even the set-it-and-forget-it kinds of resolutions. But you, your PC, and your data will be much better off once you've hit these technological high points. Conventional wisdom says you should have three copies of your data: the "original" on your PC, a backup at home, and a backup off-site. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here Nearly all of the roughly US$370 million in bitcoin that disappeared in the February 2014 collapse of Mt. Gox probably vanished due to fraudulent transactions, with only 1 percent taken by hackers, according to a report in Japan's Yomiuri Shimbun newspaper, citing sources close to a Tokyo police probe. Of the 650,000 bitcoins unaccounted for—worth about US$208 million today—only about 7,000 appear to have been purloined by hackers, the newspaper reported on New Year's Day, adding that investigators have yet to identify who was responsible. That conflicts with the explanation by Mt. Gox, which blamed a bug in the Bitcoin system when it filed for bankruptcy on Feb. 28. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here Microsoft will stop selling the original Kinect for Windows in 2015 now that the second generation of the motion-based controller platform is available. In a blog post, Microsoft advised enterprises that need large numbers of the old systems for existing applications to contact the company as soon as possible. "We will do our best to fill your orders, but no more original sensors will be manufactured after the current stock sells out," the Kinect for Windows Team wrote in the post. The phase-out of the original product doesn't come as a surprise, since Microsoft introduced the Kinect for Windows v2 and a second-generation software development kit, SDK 2.0, earlier this year. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here "MMOs are dead." I feel like that's been a truism for years now—longer even than the fabled massively-multiplayer online games were considered a dominant force in the industry. For many people massively multiplayer online gaming begins and ends with World of Warcraft. Most others would say it's either EverQuest or Star Wars Galaxies or nothing. But don't tell developers that the MMO isn't viable, because apparently they're not going to listen no matter what you say or how strenuously you say it. Don't quote me on this, but I'm pretty sure 2014 saw the launch of more "important" MMOs than any year in history, plus expansions for a bunch more. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here The stars finally seem to be aligning for the launch of AMD's FreeSync monitor technology, which forces the refresh rate of your graphics card and your display to synchronize, eliminating ugly screen tearing and reducing stuttering issues. After months of teasing the tech, AMD rolled out FreeSync support in its sweeping, feature-packed Catalyst Omega driver, shortly after Samsung announced a line of FreeSync-compatible 4K monitors. Now, LG's poised to launch a FreeSync display that seems tailor made for gamers: A 34-inch model with an ultrawide 21:9 aspect ratio. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here Dropping into Linux on your Chromebook just became a whole lot easier. You've been able to use Linux in Chromebook virtual terminals for a while now with the help of Crouton, but now an extension by Google hardware engineer (and Crouton developer) David Schneider allows you to run Debian or Ubuntu in a window right within the traditional Chrome OS interface. You can see Linux in a Chromebook window in the screenshot above. While Schneider's extension will certainly make the experience of using Linux alongside Chrome OS more pleasant, the setup process still isn't for the faint of heart. You'll need to be in developer mode, download the Crouton extension from the Chrome Web Store and the Crouton tool itself (warning: that's a direct download link), and then play with hidden terminal commands in Chrome OS—all before you even get around to actually installing your Linux distribution of choice. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here When The Sims 4 was released in 2014, some people who eagerly snatched up a copy soon found themselves perplexed by an apparent bug: The entire game eventually became blurry and pixelated, with the effect beginning as a way to obscure nude Sims and blossoming out from there. Did a major error slip through EA's playtesting? To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here Yes, there was plenty to get excited about in 2014, but not all the tech news from the past twelve months was good. This year we saw Bitcoin's biggest early star disappear, Facebook manipulate its users, Amazon enter the smartphone market with a resounding thud, and many, many more facepalm-worthy moments. These are the 13 biggest tech flops and fails of 2014. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here This year was all about the messaging app, and for good reason: Social networks behaved abysmally in 2014. Sharing information and photos privately with friends is a compelling alternative to social networks with their ads, weird research experiments, and harassment. That's not to say anyone is abandoning social media, but more and more users are pressuring companies to be better and more honest about how data is used and what is being done to make networks like Facebook, Twitter, and new anonymous social apps safer spaces. No other network can challenge Facebook in terms of active users (1.35 billion and still growing), but when the company deleted the accounts of well-known San Francisco drag performers, a new kid on the block welcomed the influx of users with open arms. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here While 2014 didn't bring much in the way of revolutionary technology, it was a great year for refinement. The products and services we've relied on for years became cheaper and more accessible, while once-difficult concepts like virtual reality and mobile wallets starte to look a little more practical. And if you look hard enough, you can even find some examples where the government didn't screw everything up. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here Samsung is trying to smash the status quo in PCs with a new all-in-one desktop computer that has a curved screen. The idea for the Ativ One 7 Curved came partly from Samsung's TVs, which already have curved displays. Samsung has already been offering laptops and Chromebooks, and the 27-inch all-in-one will be its first desktop computer. The all-in-one looks like a 27-inch curved TV, with all the PC components at the back of the monitor. As with TVs, the curved display could provide a more immersive gaming and entertainment experience than conventional monitors, said David Ng, product manager at Samsung. But Ng acknowledged that the PC's unusual shape could catch potential buyers off guard. He said the screen's curved contours will grow on desktop users, Ng said. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here Samsung's Milk VR video app, announced Tuesday, marks a tantalizing step forward for virtual reality. The app will let you run full-motion, 360-degree video on the Gear VR headset. Not a movie in a simulated theater environment, like we've seen with Oculus Cinema demos, but a video beamed right to your eyes, bringing VR users ever closer to a real-life experience. After an interminable year of private alphas and betas and gammas(?), Elite: Dangerous is finally out. That makes it the first of the three massive space games (Elite, Star Citizen, and No Man's Sky) to officially release, and thus I've spent quite a few hours recently holed up with a HOTAS, a glass of eggnog, and my trusty spaceship. I don't think it's appropriate to smack a score on Elite: Dangerous yet, in the same way I wouldn't smack a score on any MMO. It's early days for the game, and I don't think the full scope of what Frontier has planned is even close to realized despite the 1.0 status. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here Control systems at South Korean nuclear plants have not been harmed by recent attacks by hackers, but nevertheless Korea Hydro and Nuclear Power is increasing its security efforts to defend against a possible additional attack, the company's CEO Cho Seok told legislators on Tuesday. An investigation had found traces of a low-risk worm that had been removed from PCs and portable devices connected to the nuclear plant's control system, but no malicious code linked to a cyber attack was found, according to the country's Energy Ministry. The government began the investigation last week after an anti-nuclear-reactor group threatened to launch a cyber attack after leaking a batch of the company's internal documents. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here Times New Roman, Calibri, and many other popular fonts are created by Microsoft and can't be included with Linux. If you open a Word document or another Microsoft Office document in LibreOffice or OpenOffice, you'll need Microsoft's fonts installed on your Linux system to see the documents as they were intended to look. You can also use Microsoft's fonts to create documents of your own, so you can compose a document in Calibri or Times New Roman and save it as a DOCX or DOC file for maximum compatibility with Office. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here Advanced Micro Devices wants its chips in more laptops, and is devising a new strategy to reverse a free fall it has endured in the PC market over the last few years. The chip maker is reshaping the way it supplies chips and components with the hope that more PC makers will use its upcoming Carrizo processors in laptops. At the center of the strategy is a plug-and-play component approach that will make it easier to plug any Carrizo chip into any laptop, regardless of size or price. AMD will supply just one motherboard that will support a wide range of Carrizo and Carrizo-L laptop chips. The new approach will provide PC makers the flexibility of using a range of Carrizo chips in any laptop. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here IT services company CSC will pay US$190 million to settle a case brought by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission over four-year-old charges that it violated U.S. antifraud, reporting, and books-and-records laws. The company did not admit guilt, but has promised not to violate those laws in future. The charges concerned accounting entries relating to CSC's activities in Australia and Denmark, and to the company's contractual relationship with the U.K National Health Service (NHS) over the failed National Program for IT (NPfIT), the company said. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here The last few years in the world of Android news have been kind of a snooze fest. Sure, we had the usual barrage of software updates and gadget releases, but nothing seemed truly worth a standing ovation. What's worse: it felt like Android was no longer in Google's control, and that companies like Samsung were actually the ones that were ruling the pack. It was hard to tell who to root for. But this year Android underwent a metamorphosis of sorts—one that was long overdue. To commemorate this event-filled year, we rounded up some of the year's biggest news stories that helped contribute to the transformed Android ecosystem we see today. The 64-bit mobile processor was a big announcement for Android. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here The highest praise I can muster for Nvidia GRID is that I sometimes forgot I was even using it. That's no small feat for a cloud gaming service that streams high-end games to low-powered devices over remote servers. Other efforts, such as OnLive, constantly remind you of the journey its games must take from server to client, with rampant stutters, slowdowns and resolution drops. Nvidia GRID rarely has those problems—at least when the conditions are right. Nvidia has been beta-testing GRID with Northern California residents for about a year, but in November the service opened up to anyone in North America and Western Europe with an Nvidia Shield handheld or Shield Tablet. From now until the free preview ends on June 30, 2015, users can access GRID at no charge. While there are only 30 games currently, Nvidia has been adding at least one new game every week (though usually two). To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here LG's 55-inch OLED HDTV (model number 55EC9300) is a stunner, with a slight curve that brings the right and left edges of the screen ever so slightly closer to your eyes. And while its $3500 price tag will give most consumers pause, especially considering its resolution is limited to 1080p, that's really not such a terrible shortcoming. There's very little 4K content to be had today, and that situation will improve only marginally in 2015. What makes the 55EC9300 so interesting—in addition to the curve, of course—is its use of OLED technology (the acronym stands for organic light-emitting diode). OLED panels are naturally emissive, which means they radiate their own light. The backlights that LCD panels require can result in uneven brightness and contrast (the difference between the darkest and lightest images the TV can produce). To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click hereUse better browsing tools
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http://www.pcworld.com en-us Fri, 02 Jan 2015 00:50:21 -0800 Fri, 02 Jan 2015 00:50:21 -0800 Thu, 01 Jan 2015 19:50:00 -0800 Tim Hornyak Tim Hornyak If you got a PlayStation 4 for Christmas but network outages spoiled your fun, Sony wants to make it up to you. Sony Computer Entertainment America will offer 10 percent off PlayStation Store purchases including games, TV shows and movies as a gesture of thanks for users' patience following an outage of several days caused by denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks. In addition, PlayStation Plus members who had an active membership or free trial on Dec. 25 will receive a membership extension of five days, Eric Lempel of Sony Network Entertainment wrote in a blog post. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here Netflix's simplistic interface may be well-intentioned, but sometimes you need more powerful tools to find the best streaming movies and TV shows. Now that Netflix has shuttered its public API, the number of useful apps and sites for sorting through Netflix video has thinned. But there are still several tried-and-true methods for finding the good stuff, along with a few tools and settings from Netflix that everyone should know about. Here are 10 tips for making the most of a Netflix streaming subscription: Netflix's catalog of movies and shows is massive, but you might only scratch the surface with its basic apps and website. When you're really trying to scratch a particular itch, use AllFlicks.net, which lets you search within specific genres, filter movies and TV shows, narrow down a date range, and sort by rating. (InstantWatcher has a similar tool without as many sorting options, but it does include a handy synopsis view.) To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here Did you spend Christmas mildly annoyed because you bought a new console, only to find that Xbox Live/ PlayStation Network had been downed by a "nefarious" group known as Lizard Squad? Yes, I know it sounds like a bad episode of 24, but at least now you can revel in a bit of Schadenfreude: Two alleged members have been arrested this week. Lizard Squad came to prominence in 2014 after taking down (or at least claiming to take down) the online presences of numerous gaming companies, including Blizzard, Activision, and Sony. Oh, and perpetrating a bomb threat against a Sony executive in August. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here We all love to spend time (some would say waste time) fooling around on Facebook, Twitter, and other services. We also use these sites for serious, professional reasons. But like almost everything else on the Internet, they're inherently dangerous. Hackers can use social media to discover your private information and to deliver spam or malware. You can be stalked and bullied through social media. It can ruin your reputation, your career, and your life. So you need to protect yourself. Follow these rules and your online social life won't become anti-social. Of course, you should never give anyone else your password to a social network. And you shouldn't let them steal it, either. Use a long, strong password containing upper- and lowercase letters, numbers, and punctuation. And use a unique password for every site. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here Norm Arlt asked "How do I stop the How-To video from automatically starting in my browser when I click on an article?" I sympathize. We all deal with this annoyance. In fact, I'm willing to bet that everyone reading this article who hasn't already solved this problem knows exactly what I'm talking about. Most of these videos run on Shockwave Flash, so I'm going to concentrate on that technology. The trick isn't to block Flash entirely, but to make it work only with your permission. How you do this varies with each browser. So I'll offer instructions for the three most popular ones. Christopher Breen of Macworld offered these alternative fixes as well. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here If that rectangular present under the tree or boxy bulge in the stocking turned out to be a new Android phone, then congratulations: We hope that it's the flagship (or at least stellar mid-range) device of your dreams. But if that is the case, then you need to do right by your old companion—assuming you don't want to keep it around as a backup. That means first making sure that your personal data is inaccessible to whoever might have the phone next, and then figuring out the best way to part with it: selling, donating, or recycling. And yes, that includes broken phones. None of this is particularly difficult, but it does take a little bit of time. We'll save you the research and hassle so you can obsess over your new phone. Here's what to do with the old one. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here Android Lollipop may bring with it tons of neat new features and aesthetically pleasing visual changes, but its rollout has been bumpy. Google's been working out the kinks, however, as evidenced by a recent thread in the AOSP bug tracker. One particular fix, for rampant use of RAM, is reportedly slated to show up in the next Android update. The issue tracker mentions a memory leak that causes apps either to run slowly or to crash without any warning. Android 5.0.1 apparently takes up as much as 1.3GB of RAM, which is particularly detrimental to devices that top out at 2GB. There are even a few Reddit threads devoted to complaints about this particular issue. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here When Samsung's 65-inch curved LCD smart TV powers on, an angelic choir hums a joyous tune in the background and a glowing aura shines forth into the darkening winter sky. Okay, I'm exaggerating. All it really does is make that typical fuzz-buzz sound that every other TV does. But I'm convinced that 65 inches is the ideal size for most home-entertainment environments, unless you have the room and the money to convert your den into a movie theater. Everything on Samsung's UN65HU9000 looked absolutely glorious. You could watch a porcupine waddle into a swamp on this set and find it totally appealing. Like LG's 55-inch curved OLED ( model 55EC9300), the edges of Samsung's display bend toward the viewer just a bit (being larger than the LG, the Samsung's curve is slightly more aggressive). The curve also helps reduce glare a bit. I've read some reports that claim curved screens distort the displayed image, but I never noticed that problem. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here Welcome to 2015: A brand new year and a great time for a fresh start. Instead of shooting for nebulous, unrealistic goals in the New Year, start off 2015 with vows to improve your digital life. (You weren't really going to go to the gym every day or be nicer to your siblings anyway.) Most of the suggestions below aren't hard to achieve and some are even the set-it-and-forget-it kinds of resolutions. But you, your PC, and your data will be much better off once you've hit these technological high points. Conventional wisdom says you should have three copies of your data: the "original" on your PC, a backup at home, and a backup off-site. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here Nearly all of the roughly US$370 million in bitcoin that disappeared in the February 2014 collapse of Mt. Gox probably vanished due to fraudulent transactions, with only 1 percent taken by hackers, according to a report in Japan's Yomiuri Shimbun newspaper, citing sources close to a Tokyo police probe. Of the 650,000 bitcoins unaccounted for—worth about US$208 million today—only about 7,000 appear to have been purloined by hackers, the newspaper reported on New Year's Day, adding that investigators have yet to identify who was responsible. That conflicts with the explanation by Mt. Gox, which blamed a bug in the Bitcoin system when it filed for bankruptcy on Feb. 28. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here Microsoft will stop selling the original Kinect for Windows in 2015 now that the second generation of the motion-based controller platform is available. In a blog post, Microsoft advised enterprises that need large numbers of the old systems for existing applications to contact the company as soon as possible. "We will do our best to fill your orders, but no more original sensors will be manufactured after the current stock sells out," the Kinect for Windows Team wrote in the post. The phase-out of the original product doesn't come as a surprise, since Microsoft introduced the Kinect for Windows v2 and a second-generation software development kit, SDK 2.0, earlier this year. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here "MMOs are dead." I feel like that's been a truism for years now—longer even than the fabled massively-multiplayer online games were considered a dominant force in the industry. For many people massively multiplayer online gaming begins and ends with World of Warcraft. Most others would say it's either EverQuest or Star Wars Galaxies or nothing. But don't tell developers that the MMO isn't viable, because apparently they're not going to listen no matter what you say or how strenuously you say it. Don't quote me on this, but I'm pretty sure 2014 saw the launch of more "important" MMOs than any year in history, plus expansions for a bunch more. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here The stars finally seem to be aligning for the launch of AMD's FreeSync monitor technology, which forces the refresh rate of your graphics card and your display to synchronize, eliminating ugly screen tearing and reducing stuttering issues. After months of teasing the tech, AMD rolled out FreeSync support in its sweeping, feature-packed Catalyst Omega driver, shortly after Samsung announced a line of FreeSync-compatible 4K monitors. Now, LG's poised to launch a FreeSync display that seems tailor made for gamers: A 34-inch model with an ultrawide 21:9 aspect ratio. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here Dropping into Linux on your Chromebook just became a whole lot easier. You've been able to use Linux in Chromebook virtual terminals for a while now with the help of Crouton, but now an extension by Google hardware engineer (and Crouton developer) David Schneider allows you to run Debian or Ubuntu in a window right within the traditional Chrome OS interface. You can see Linux in a Chromebook window in the screenshot above. While Schneider's extension will certainly make the experience of using Linux alongside Chrome OS more pleasant, the setup process still isn't for the faint of heart. You'll need to be in developer mode, download the Crouton extension from the Chrome Web Store and the Crouton tool itself (warning: that's a direct download link), and then play with hidden terminal commands in Chrome OS—all before you even get around to actually installing your Linux distribution of choice. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here When The Sims 4 was released in 2014, some people who eagerly snatched up a copy soon found themselves perplexed by an apparent bug: The entire game eventually became blurry and pixelated, with the effect beginning as a way to obscure nude Sims and blossoming out from there. Did a major error slip through EA's playtesting? To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here Yes, there was plenty to get excited about in 2014, but not all the tech news from the past twelve months was good. This year we saw Bitcoin's biggest early star disappear, Facebook manipulate its users, Amazon enter the smartphone market with a resounding thud, and many, many more facepalm-worthy moments. These are the 13 biggest tech flops and fails of 2014. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here This year was all about the messaging app, and for good reason: Social networks behaved abysmally in 2014. Sharing information and photos privately with friends is a compelling alternative to social networks with their ads, weird research experiments, and harassment. That's not to say anyone is abandoning social media, but more and more users are pressuring companies to be better and more honest about how data is used and what is being done to make networks like Facebook, Twitter, and new anonymous social apps safer spaces. No other network can challenge Facebook in terms of active users (1.35 billion and still growing), but when the company deleted the accounts of well-known San Francisco drag performers, a new kid on the block welcomed the influx of users with open arms. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here While 2014 didn't bring much in the way of revolutionary technology, it was a great year for refinement. The products and services we've relied on for years became cheaper and more accessible, while once-difficult concepts like virtual reality and mobile wallets starte to look a little more practical. And if you look hard enough, you can even find some examples where the government didn't screw everything up. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here Samsung is trying to smash the status quo in PCs with a new all-in-one desktop computer that has a curved screen. The idea for the Ativ One 7 Curved came partly from Samsung's TVs, which already have curved displays. Samsung has already been offering laptops and Chromebooks, and the 27-inch all-in-one will be its first desktop computer. The all-in-one looks like a 27-inch curved TV, with all the PC components at the back of the monitor. As with TVs, the curved display could provide a more immersive gaming and entertainment experience than conventional monitors, said David Ng, product manager at Samsung. But Ng acknowledged that the PC's unusual shape could catch potential buyers off guard. He said the screen's curved contours will grow on desktop users, Ng said. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here Samsung's Milk VR video app, announced Tuesday, marks a tantalizing step forward for virtual reality. The app will let you run full-motion, 360-degree video on the Gear VR headset. Not a movie in a simulated theater environment, like we've seen with Oculus Cinema demos, but a video beamed right to your eyes, bringing VR users ever closer to a real-life experience. After an interminable year of private alphas and betas and gammas(?), Elite: Dangerous is finally out. That makes it the first of the three massive space games (Elite, Star Citizen, and No Man's Sky) to officially release, and thus I've spent quite a few hours recently holed up with a HOTAS, a glass of eggnog, and my trusty spaceship. I don't think it's appropriate to smack a score on Elite: Dangerous yet, in the same way I wouldn't smack a score on any MMO. It's early days for the game, and I don't think the full scope of what Frontier has planned is even close to realized despite the 1.0 status. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here Control systems at South Korean nuclear plants have not been harmed by recent attacks by hackers, but nevertheless Korea Hydro and Nuclear Power is increasing its security efforts to defend against a possible additional attack, the company's CEO Cho Seok told legislators on Tuesday. An investigation had found traces of a low-risk worm that had been removed from PCs and portable devices connected to the nuclear plant's control system, but no malicious code linked to a cyber attack was found, according to the country's Energy Ministry. The government began the investigation last week after an anti-nuclear-reactor group threatened to launch a cyber attack after leaking a batch of the company's internal documents. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here Times New Roman, Calibri, and many other popular fonts are created by Microsoft and can't be included with Linux. If you open a Word document or another Microsoft Office document in LibreOffice or OpenOffice, you'll need Microsoft's fonts installed on your Linux system to see the documents as they were intended to look. You can also use Microsoft's fonts to create documents of your own, so you can compose a document in Calibri or Times New Roman and save it as a DOCX or DOC file for maximum compatibility with Office. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here Advanced Micro Devices wants its chips in more laptops, and is devising a new strategy to reverse a free fall it has endured in the PC market over the last few years. The chip maker is reshaping the way it supplies chips and components with the hope that more PC makers will use its upcoming Carrizo processors in laptops. At the center of the strategy is a plug-and-play component approach that will make it easier to plug any Carrizo chip into any laptop, regardless of size or price. AMD will supply just one motherboard that will support a wide range of Carrizo and Carrizo-L laptop chips. The new approach will provide PC makers the flexibility of using a range of Carrizo chips in any laptop. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here IT services company CSC will pay US$190 million to settle a case brought by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission over four-year-old charges that it violated U.S. antifraud, reporting, and books-and-records laws. The company did not admit guilt, but has promised not to violate those laws in future. The charges concerned accounting entries relating to CSC's activities in Australia and Denmark, and to the company's contractual relationship with the U.K National Health Service (NHS) over the failed National Program for IT (NPfIT), the company said. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here The last few years in the world of Android news have been kind of a snooze fest. Sure, we had the usual barrage of software updates and gadget releases, but nothing seemed truly worth a standing ovation. What's worse: it felt like Android was no longer in Google's control, and that companies like Samsung were actually the ones that were ruling the pack. It was hard to tell who to root for. But this year Android underwent a metamorphosis of sorts—one that was long overdue. To commemorate this event-filled year, we rounded up some of the year's biggest news stories that helped contribute to the transformed Android ecosystem we see today. The 64-bit mobile processor was a big announcement for Android. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here The highest praise I can muster for Nvidia GRID is that I sometimes forgot I was even using it. That's no small feat for a cloud gaming service that streams high-end games to low-powered devices over remote servers. Other efforts, such as OnLive, constantly remind you of the journey its games must take from server to client, with rampant stutters, slowdowns and resolution drops. Nvidia GRID rarely has those problems—at least when the conditions are right. Nvidia has been beta-testing GRID with Northern California residents for about a year, but in November the service opened up to anyone in North America and Western Europe with an Nvidia Shield handheld or Shield Tablet. From now until the free preview ends on June 30, 2015, users can access GRID at no charge. While there are only 30 games currently, Nvidia has been adding at least one new game every week (though usually two). To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here LG's 55-inch OLED HDTV (model number 55EC9300) is a stunner, with a slight curve that brings the right and left edges of the screen ever so slightly closer to your eyes. And while its $3500 price tag will give most consumers pause, especially considering its resolution is limited to 1080p, that's really not such a terrible shortcoming. There's very little 4K content to be had today, and that situation will improve only marginally in 2015. What makes the 55EC9300 so interesting—in addition to the curve, of course—is its use of OLED technology (the acronym stands for organic light-emitting diode). OLED panels are naturally emissive, which means they radiate their own light. The backlights that LCD panels require can result in uneven brightness and contrast (the difference between the darkest and lightest images the TV can produce). To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click hereUse better browsing tools
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