This year, the Evolution Championship Series is giving nine fighting games the chance of a lifetime. The game that raises the most money for Make-a-Wish International (a non-profit organization dedicated to making the dreams of children with life-threatening conditions reality) will earn a spot during the prestigious…
Source: Kotaku – The Vote Over Evo 2017’s Ninth Fighting Game Is Reopening Old Wounds
Today Google announced that the code behind Chrome for iOS will now be accessible as part of the Chromium project. The desktop browser has long been based on open-source code but the complexity of the iOS version kept it separate, until now. That and more in today’s news.
Source: LifeHacker – Remains of the Day: Google Chrome for iOS is Now Open Source
Apple has reported strong financial results for the first quarter of 2017. According to CEO Tim Cook, the “holiday quarter results generated Apple’s highest quarterly revenue ever, and broke multiple records along the way.” The company took in $78.4 billion in revenue and sold 78 million iPhones. The Verge reports: Apple reported a profit of $17.8 billion, and said its earnings per share were boosted by the high demand for the larger models of its iPhones, which have higher margins. On the earnings call, Chief financial officer Luca Maestri said that customer satisfaction with iPads, and the new iPad pro, was very high. He predicted strong growth in that category. But the sales figures don’t reflect that optimism, with unit sales and revenue from iPad both down around 20 percent year over year. With over a billion iOS devices active around the world, Apple has been able to shore up its flagging hardware sales growth with an increase in revenue from services to those devices. This includes money from Apple Pay, iCloud storage, Apple Music, and App Store sales. It was by far the fastest-growing segment of Apple’s revenue this quarter, climbing 18 percent to $7.17 billion since the same period last year. Cook said Apple is aiming to double service revenue over the next four years. Maestri said Apple’s App Store had double the revenue of Google’s Play Store in 2016. Apple has more than $200 billion in cash parked overseas. Cook said on today’s call that he was optimistic about tax reform in the U.S. happening this year, and that this might allow Apple to bring a lot of that money back home. “With our toe in the water, we’re learning a lot about the original content business,” Cook said, hinting at one way Apple might deploy all that capital.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot – Apple Sets a New Record For iPhone Sales
You knew Coin’s payment tech wasn’t long for this world when Fitbit bought the company in 2016, and now the end is at hand: the Coin team is shutting down its payment services on February 28th. ITs signature universal credit card devices will keep w…
Source: Engadget – Coin shuts down its payment services on February 28th
The second installment of Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare’s Zombies mode arrives today on PlayStation 4, trading the colorful ‘80s fun park of Zombies in Spaceland with the ‘90s vibe of Rave in the Redwoods. The Crystal Method makes some excellent undead-slaying music. I guess I didn’t know.
Source: Kotaku – The Latest Call Of Duty Zombies Had Me At The Crystal Method
Epic Games founder Tim Sweeney. (credit: Epic Games)
The rumor that Microsoft is building a version of Windows 10 that can only install apps from the Windows Store has drawn criticism before it’s even official. Epic Games founder Tim Sweeney took to Twitter to attack the operating system. Although its real name is named Windows 10 Cloud, he’s dubbing it “Windows 10 Crush Steam Edition.”
Sweeney is convinced that Microsoft wants to exercise total control over the Windows platform and destroy Valve’s Steam. Last year, Sweeney attacked the Universal Windows Platform API. He claimed (incorrectly) that third-party stores such as Steam would be unable to sell and distribute UWP games, leaving them at a disadvantage relative to Microsoft’s own store. He followed this statement with the claim that Microsoft would systematically modify Windows so as to make Steam work worse and worse, such that gamers grow tired of it and switch to the Windows Store.
A version of Windows 10 that can only use software from the Windows Store, as Windows 10 Cloud is believed to be, would certainly be bad news for Steam. Steam can’t be found in the Windows Store, and, due to the way it works, it’s unlikely that it ever will be.
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Source: Ars Technica – Tim Sweeney dislikes Windows 10 Cloud rumors, calls OS “Crush Steam Edition”
Forget pro skaters and their grassroots campaigns. Forget EA’s own community reps tweeting #skate4 and getting people’s hopes up. The publisher just said on an earnings call that it is “not presently making Skate 4″.
Source: Kotaku – Forget pro skaters and their grassroots campaigns.
Today Servethehome is taking a look at the updated Drobo 5C, and it seems like they quite like the device. Drobo have certainly made a name for themselves as RAID devices for people who don’t like to mess around with RAID.
If I weren’t the type to want to build my own, and I wanted to buy a Drobo, this would certainly be the one to get. This 5 disk model supports dual disk redundancy, a must in my opinion, as well as relatively high transfer speeds of almost 240MB/s via its single C type USB3 connector. It really stands out by having an internal battery backup allowing it to save in-process writes to disk in the case of a power outage, a feature that is usually reserved for higher end enterprise gear.
We will go through the eight pages here for reference, but it really boils down to inserting your drives, plugging it in, connecting your USB cable and installing the Drobo DashBoard software. It is very simple and straightforward.
Discussion
Source: [H]ardOCP – Drobo 5C Self-Managing USB-C Storage Solution Review
Making your voice heard by your government reps is now more important than ever. 5 Calls shows you who to call about which issues, and even gives you a script to follow.
Source: LifeHacker – 5 Calls Makes Calling Your Government Representatives as Simple as Possible
After 11 years online, Disney’s kid-friendly social network Club Penguin will shut down at the end of March, to be replaced by a new mobile-only version called Club Penguin Island. The site originally launched in 2005 before Disney bought it up two y…
Source: Engadget – Disney’s kid-friendly Club Penguin will shut down in March
President Trump was scheduled to sign an executive order on cybersecurity today, following a “listening session” with cybersecurity experts. That signing was abruptly canceled, with no reason given.
Source: Gizmodo – Trump Decides the Cyber Will Be Fixed Another Day
schwit1 shares with us a report on a 11-part series led by The Intercept reporter Cora Currier: Secret FBI rules allow agents to obtain journalists’ phone records with approval from two internal officials — far less oversight than under normal judicial procedures. The classified rules dating from 2013, govern the FBI’s use of national security letters, which allow the bureau to obtain information about journalists’ calls without going to a judge or informing the news organization being targeted. They have previously been released only in heavily redacted form. Media advocates said the documents show that the FBI imposes few constraints on itself when it bypasses the requirement to go to court and obtain subpoenas or search warrants before accessing journalists’ information. The rules stipulate that obtaining a journalist’s records with a national security letter requires the signoff of the FBI’s general counsel and the executive assistant director of the bureau’s National Security Branch, in addition to the regular chain of approval. Generally speaking, there are a variety of FBI officials, including the agents in charge of field offices, who can sign off that an NSL is “relevant” to a national security investigation. There is an extra step under the rules if the NSL targets a journalist in order “to identify confidential news media sources.” In that case, the general counsel and the executive assistant director must first consult with the assistant attorney general for the Justice Department’s National Security Division. But if the NSL is trying to identify a leaker by targeting the records of the potential source, and not the journalist, the Justice Department doesn’t need to be involved. The guidelines also specify that the extra oversight layers do not apply if the journalist is believed to be a spy or is part of a news organization “associated with a foreign intelligence service” or “otherwise acting on behalf of a foreign power.” Unless, again, the purpose is to identify a leak, in which case the general counsel and executive assistant director must approve the request.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot – Secret Rules Make It Pretty Easy For the FBI To Spy On Journalists
Adequate Man What Is The Worst Bodily Fluid To Clean Up? | The Slot Did Paul Ryan Just Call This Press Conference a ‘Waste of My Fucking Time’? [Updated] | Gizmodo First Genetic Results From Scott Kelly’s Year In Space Reveal DNA Mysteries | The Root Why the Muslim Ban Matters to Black People |
Source: Kotaku – Adequate Man What Is The Worst Bodily Fluid To Clean Up?
Jalopnik This Disturbing Theory Explains Pixar’s Cars | io9 The Fellowship of the Ring Is Still Ready to Take on a Cave Troll | Kotaku Batman: Arkham Knight: The Kotaku Re-Review | Lifehacker Alleviate Anxiety With This Do-Anywhere Grounding Exercise |
Source: Gizmodo – Jalopnik This Disturbing Theory Explains Pixar’s Cars | io9 The Fellowship of the Ring Is Still Read
Google’s Chrome browser has been open source from the get-go (through the Chromium project), but not on iOS. Apple demands that browsers use WebKit instead of their own rendering engines, so Google couldn’t just use its typical code base and call it…
Source: Engadget – Google opens the code for Chrome on iOS
BioWare’s new IP sure sounds like a Destiny competitor, based on EA’s financial call this afternoon. The game, which EA says will be out in FY18 (aka: by March 2018), is set in a brand new world but will fuse “the great RPG character development and story progression that BioWare is known for” with a new…
Source: Kotaku – BioWare’s new IP sure sounds like a Destiny competitor, based on EA’s financial call this afternoon.
Enlarge / iPhone growth helped propel Apple to a much-improved Q1 of 2017. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)
Apple has just released its earnings report for the first quarter of fiscal 2017, which runs from the beginning of October to the end of December. Things are off to a solid start after a weak 2016—total revenue, iPhone sales, Mac sales, and services all did well, and Apple CEO Tim Cook claimed it was the Apple Watch’s best quarter ever as well. Profit, iPad sales, and sales in China were all down, but they’re the only dim spots.
Apple made $17.9 billion in profit and $78.4 billion in revenue, compared to $18.4 billion in profit and $75.87 billion in revenue in Q1 of 2016. The company’s gross margin was 38.5 percent. These results beat Apple’s guidance for the quarter, which predicted revenue between $45.5 billion and $45.7 billion and a profit margin between 37.5 and 38 percent.
The company predicts that it will make between $51.5 and $53.5 billion in the second quarter of fiscal 2017, with profit margins between 38 and 39 percent. These numbers compare favorably to the $50.6 billion the company made in Q2 of 2016, though they’re still below the $58 billion that Apple made in Q2 of 2015.
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Source: Ars Technica – Apple sets revenue and iPhone sales records in Q1 of 2017
This is the Nintendo controller bandolier/belt created by Etsy shop 1UpForge ($95). It includes nonfunctional (well, you can still push the buttons and joysticks) NES, SNES, N64, Game Cube and Wii controllers to let everybody know you are the ultimate Nintendo fan. Or pretending to be. Or that you just like Nintendo a little but were drunk-shopping online for a new bandolier and already have more than enough Chewbacca ones hanging in your closet. Hanging in my closet? “Nothing but skeletons.” Yep, undead warlock casual, it’s practically all I wear.
Keep going for the coolest belt since Batman’s.
Source: Geekologie – The History Of Nintendo Controllers Bandolier/Belt
As part of my usual CES vendor visits, I caught up with Synology and took a look at the new products and DSM features that had been announced around the show’s timeframe. The most interesting product was their second generation Wi-Fi router – the RT2600ac. A few business-oriented NAS products were also on display. The new DSM 6.1 (beta at CES, now in the final release candidate stage) and some value additions were also seen at the booth.
A follow-on to the Broadcom-based RT1900ac launched in 2015, the RT2600ac makes the move to a Qualcomm Atheros platform. The AC2600 platform has been around since 2015. Synology has again opted not to ship a cutting-edge hardware platform. While the first set of AC2600 routers used a Qualcomm Atheros QCA9980 radio along with a 1.4 GHz IPQ8064 SoC for network processing duties, Synology’s 2017 entry has allowed them to go for a slightly more modern platform. The radio is the QCA9984 – it sports specifications similar to the QCA9980 (4×4:4 802.11abgn+ac), with the primary difference being support for 160MHz-wide channels. Note, however, that the maximum data rate possible is still only 1.7 Gbps because the radio doesn’t support four spatial streams in the 160MHz mode. The network processor is the IPQ8065 – a higher-clocked version of the IPQ8064 used in the first set of AC2600 routers. The IPQ8065’s dual-core Krait CPU and the network accelerator blocks operate at 1.7 GHz and 800 MHz respectively (compared to the IPQ8064’s 1.4 GHz and 730 MHz).
The RT1900ac was praised mainly for its operating system / user experience / add-ons, rather than the Wi-Fi performance. For the RT2600ac, Synology has further fine-tuned the SRM OS (Synology Router Manager). It is also playing up the VPN capabilities. Many Synology NAS owners have taken advantage of the VPN features of the Synology NAS. However, that requires setting up port forwarding in the router, and some challenges related to the subnet configurations that can be accessed from an external network. Placing the VPN server in the router / gateway is the logical solution to the problem, and Synology is aptly promoting their VPN Plus server package for advanced VPN configurations.
Other than the VPN features, Synology also supports dual WAN capabilities in the RT2600ac. Readers interested in the detailed specifications can peruse the datasheet (PDF).
Synology’s DSM is one of the few NAS operating systems to support both btrfs and ext4 for the internal volumes. This allows them to support different business requirements. Their business lineup has benefited quite a bit from this dual file-system support. In order to capitalize further on this aspect, Synology has launched a number of high-end systems targeting SMBs and SMEs.
Amongst the new business-oriented NAS products on display was the FS3017 (PDF) – a 24-bay 2U rackmount NAS equipped with two Xeon E5-2620 v3 CPUs and 64GB (expandable to 512GB) of DDR4 ECC DRAM. There are two 10GBASE-T ports, with spare PCIe slots to integrate 10GbE / 25GbE / 40 GbE network cards. Both 2.5″ SATA and SAS drives are supported, with the primary focus being delivery of high IOPS for performance-sensitive applications.
The DS3617xs (PDF) is a Xeon D-based tower form-factor NAS with 12 bays. The Xeon D-1527 used in the system is a 4C/8T model. It is complemented by 16GB of DDR4 ECC DRAM (expandable to 48GB). The system also supports two DX1215 expansion chassis (with Infiniband connections). There are only four 1GbE LAN ports, though a PCIe 3.0 x8 slot is available (for installation of 10GbE cards, if needed).
The RS4017xs+ (PDF) is a Xeon D-1541 (8C/16T)-based 3U rackmount with 16 3.5″ bays. It ships with 8GB of DDR4 ECC RAM (expandable to 64GB). There are two native 10GBASE-T ports and four 1GbE ports. Two PCIe 3.0 x8 slots are available to add more high-performance LAN interfaces. The system can scale up to 40 bays with two RX1217(RP) expansion chassis.
The RS18017xs+ (PDF) is a Xeon D-1531 (6C/12T)-based 2U rackmount with 12 3.5″ bays. It ships with 16GB of DDR4 ECC RAM (expandable to 128GB). There are two native 10GBASE-T ports with four 1GbE ports, as well as two PCIe 3.0 x8 slots for additional network interface cards. The 12-bay unit can pair with up to 7 expansion units (RX1217sas for 84 bays, and RX2417sas for 168 bays) over its single SAS expansion slot.
It is interesting to see that Synology is mainly using the Xeon D SKUs for their rackmounts, compared to QNAP and Netgear’s primary push using the tower form factor. The support for multiple expansion chassis with huge bay counts differentiates Synology’s Xeon D offerings from the rest of the vendors. It is not clear if IT administrators might prefer a more powerful CPU (like the Xeon used in the FS3017) to handle large number of physical drives, though dedicating some of the bays for cold storage might make Xeon D an attractive solution.
The next version of the Disk Station Manager (DSM 6.1) is slated to come out around mid-Febraruary 2017. At CES, Synology was showing off some of the new features such as Universal Search (couldn’t help drawing similarities to QNAP’s QSirch). Surveillance Station 8.0 has also been released, and the native Windows client support (also available in a portable version) definitely improves usability. The traditional web view is still supported – so, it is overall a welcome addition.
DSM 6.1 also has some features that work exclusively with the Seagate IronWolf drives for better health monitoring than what is done with just S.M.A.R.T alone. The Seagate IronWolf Health Manager (IHM) takes advantage of the hardware sensors and firmware features that are present in the new IronWolf drives.
Synology also played up their frequent security and feature updates to DSM. Having recently set up the testbed to evaluate the software features of various COTS NAS units, I can say that Synology units are the ones that prompt me to upgrade most frequently. I would prefer avoiding the associated reboots, but, there is definitely some peace of mind in knowing that Synology is being proactive in handling security threats. Given the Synolocker issue that affected some Synology users back in 2014, it is good to see the company taking efforts to prevent the recurrence of any similar attacks.
Synology had a number of interesting announcements before and after the show, with the CES booth allowing us to take a look at the products and software features in person. Frequent OS updates and focused hardware launches bode well on the NAS side. On the consumer router side, the shipping of the RT2600ac MU-MIMO Wi-Fi router with a focus on Synology’s strengths (VPN and other value additions) shows that the company is in the highly competitive market segment for the long haul.
Source: AnandTech – Synology at CES 2017 – RT2600ac Wi-Fi Router, DSM Value Additions, and New Business NAS Units
Pixel art can often feel nostalgic, hearkening back to those bygone days of cathode ray tube monitors and floppy disks. It’s easy to think of modern pixel art as stuck in the past, a mere retro inspired throwback. But that’s giving the form a disservice. There’s more to pixel art than pure nostalgia, as I argue in…
Source: Kotaku – An Appreciation Of Pixel Art, Gaming’s Most Beautiful Style
