Windows 8.1 Update 1 leaks: Boots to the Desktop by default, allows Metro apps to be minimized

The latest build of Windows 8.1 Update 1 has leaked, revealing many of the changes that Microsoft hopes will make Metro less painful for desktop users. The biggest change appears to be that Windows 8.1 Update 1 will boot straight to the Desktop interface by default, reducing Metro to its rightful role as a full-screen Start menu. This, of course, would be a complete 180 from the original release of Windows 8, which defaulted to the Metro interface and lacked an easy way to see the Desktop after logging in.

Other notable changes in the leaked build of Windows 8.1 Update 1 are the addition of apower button to the Metro interface (no longer must you swipe in from the right-hand side!), and the option to “minimize” Metro apps, strongly hinting that Metro apps will be usable on the Desktop. (One of the screenshots shows the Windows Store icon on the taskbar, too.) Apparently, if you have a Windows tablet that’s smaller than 8.5 inches, the power button won’t be present, preventing you from accidentally turning your tablet off.

Microsoft slashes prices on Windows 8.1 tablets, achieves near-parity with Android devices

We’ve known since IDF that Intel intended to put pressure behind Bay Trail’s sales volume by aggressively positioning the tablets across both Windows 8.1 and Android, but it seems Microsoft doesn’t want to be left behind — or undercut. The company has made significant slashes to prices on multiple devices in the Microsoft Store — the 32GB Dell Venue Pro has dropped from $299 to $229, while the 32GB Lenovo Miix 2 and Toshiba Encore (also 32GB tablets) have fallen to $249, from $299.
Dropping the Venue Pro to $229 actually puts Microsoft in the unusual position of going head-to-head against the $229 Google Nexus 7 (2013), but offering twice the storage (32GB versus 16GB). While Windows 8 has been roundly chewed up for offering far less than maximum capacity once the OS and restore files are accounted for, the 32GB Dell Venue 8 will still have 4-6GB more practical storage available than the Nexus 7 device.
The tablets themselves are powered by the Intel Bay Trail Z3740D, the same chip inside the Asus TransformerBook T100. While more expensive, the T100 also sports a larger screen (10.1 inches), a removable dock, and up to 64GB storage). Having used it extensively, I can say that the performance of this solution is surprisingly good — it far outstrips Clover Trail, and the integrated GPU is capable of handling many tablet games.
No, the Venue Pro 8 doesn’t have the Nexus 7′s 1920×1080 screen, but the 8.1-inch display on the Venue Pro still hits a PPI of 186. That’s higher than a conventional desktop monitor, even if it isn’t quite “Retina” quality (though as always, that’s a relative term and depends on viewing distance).

Microsoft is clearly trying to boost the visibility of its own Store (it’s selling the Dell Venue 8 Pro for a lower price than Dell itself). Still, this move also aligns with some of Intel’s priorities. The chip manufacturer has stated that its goal is to dramatically drive new tablet adoptions in 2014 with strong offerings in both the Windows 8 and Android ecosystems. If prices like this stick around, we’ll see Windows selling at head-to-head parity with Android throughout the year, at least at the upper end.

Microsoft to boost Xbox One GPU performance by making Kinect optional

The Microsoft Xbox One and Sony PlayStation 4 have a lot in common when it comes to hardware. In fact, the specs are almost identical, save for the GPU where the PS4 holds the clear advantage. When these consoles were still the “next generation,” it was debatable how much impact that difference would have. Now that the next gen has become the current one, Sony looks to be in a very good place — some of the cross-platform launch titles look better and are running at higher frame rates on the PS4. Microsoft is reportedly swinging into action with a patch to give the Xbox One’s graphics a little boost at the expense of Kinect.
At the heart of both the PS4 and Xbox One is a semi-custom AMD APU. This 28nm part features an 8-core Jaguar CPU and a Radeon 7000-series GPU. The Xbox’s GPU is similar to the Bonaire core from the Radeon HD 7790, an entry-level PC graphics processor. The PS4, meanwhile, is rocking the mid-range Pitcairn core like you’d find in a Radeon HD 7870. Even though the Xbox One GPU is clocked a little higher, it can’t keep up with the PS4 in terms of raw power.
To make matters worse, game developers working on the Xbox One are coding with one hand tied behind their backs. Microsoft requires that all games reserve 10% of the GPU’s capacity for the Kinect, even if the game doesn’t use it. That’s split up into 8% for the Kinect video features and 2% for Kinect voice. In an effort to give a boost to its console, Microsoft is expected to issue a system patch that removes the requirement that games save that 8% for Kinect video.
By reducing the horsepower dedicated to Kinect, Microsoft might be able to realize frame rate improvements immediately after the system is patched. In one recent embarrassment, the frame rate of the new Tomb Raider title was found to be only 30 fps on the Xbox, but 60 fps on the PS4. This is something that an 8% bump in GPU power could help with.
Since frame rate is an average measurement, the Xbox One might only be hitting 20 frames for a short time when heavily taxed, but could shoot up to 40 or 50 fps when there’s less going on. Those times when the frame rate drops will stand out because it gets close to the edge of what our brains perceive as fluid movement. The PS4, way up there at a 60fps average has considerably more breathing room. Even squeezing just 8% more out of the GPU could help the Xbox keep the frame rate out of the danger zone.

NOKIA LUMIA 1520 What's your story?

A six-inch, 1080p full HD display with excellent outdoor readability and redesigned start screen lets you make the most of the extra spaceWith a six-inch, super-sensitive, full HD display and great readability in sunlight, the Nokia Lumia 1520 is the perfect canvas to tell your story on.Take amazing photos with a 20 MP PureView camera and let Nokia Storyteller organise them into stories using interactive HERE maps.

The Nokia Lumia 1520 is a powerhouse of productivity. Built-in Microsoft Office means you can view and edit Word, Excel and PowerPoint files without losing any original formatting. Save documents to SkyDrive and return to them whenever it suits you.Tell a different story by reframing and recropping high-resolution photos. Add captions and explore a whole range of creative effects and filters with exclusive photo editing tools.Capture a world of sound like never before with the Nokia Lumia 1520. With Nokia Rich Recording and 4 built-in microphones, you not only get distortion-free, immersive directional stereo recording, but also highly improved sound clarity for the sound you want to capture.The Nokia Lumia 1520 comes with all the exclusive features of Windows Phone 8, like Live Tiles and People Hub. And they're all optimised for the big screen, making your Windows Phone 8 experience even better.

• Display

  • Display size: 6 ''
  • Display technology: ClearBlack, IPS LCD 
  • Display resolution: Full HD (1920 x 1080) 
  • Touch screen technology: Super sensitive touch 

• Photography

  • Main camera sensor: 20 MP, PureView 
  • Flash type: Dual LED flash 

• Power management

  • Maximum talk time (2G): 27.4 h
  • Maximum talk time (3G): 25.1 h
  • Maximum music playback time: 124 h

• Processor

  • Processor name: Qualcomm Snapdragon™ 800 
  • Processor type: Quad-core 2.2 GHz                                                                                       If you want to know more about Nokia Lumia 1520(CLICK HERE)

Carmack claims the PS3 and Xbox 360 have tons of life left, but developers say otherwise – who’s right?

In a recent interview with Wired, id Software founder and CTO of Oculus, John Carmack, gave a rather startling opinion on the current state of the PS3 and Xbox 360. According to Carmack, he’s often struggled with leaving the low end of gaming behind, even when he decided that Doom would require a VGA adapter and a 386.

“[T]here’s so much you can still do on the previous console generation. The 360 and PS3 are far from tapped out in terms of what a developer could do with them, but the whole world’s gonna move over towards next-gen and high-end PCs and all these other things,”Carmack told Wired. ”Part of me still frets a little bit about that, where just as you fully understand a previous generation, you have to put it away to kind of surf forward on the tidal wave of technology that’s always moving.”

That’s a little surprising to hear, given that Naughty Dog — creators of the hugely successful and gorgeous PS3 game, The Last of Us,” have said that they pushed the PS3 to 110% to create the title. According to Lead Designer Jacob Minkoff, “With The Last of Us, we are as efficient as we can possibly be. It’s just squeezing every last drop of power out of the system. And it’s a system we know really, really well. We know its constraints, so we can push it to the edges and play it really fast and loose because we know what the system can handle.”

Xbox One costs more to make than the PS4 : Thanks to ESRAM and Kinect

If you bought an Xbox One for $500, rest assured that you got a good deal: It cost Microsoft $471 to make the Xbox One, new Kinect, and everything else in the box. After the retailers’ cut, Microsoft loses money on every Xbox One sold. At $471, the Xbox One costs about $90 more than the PS4 — a cost difference that is almost entirely down to the new Kinect, which costs around $75 to make.
This data comes from IHS iSuppli, which reported its bill-of-materials teardown analysis of the PS4 last week, and then the Xbox One today. The cost of making an Xbox One mostly boils down to the APU ($110 from AMD), 8GB of RAM ($60 from SK Hynix), and the Kinect ($75). The cost of the console itself comes to around $332, with the Kinect, power brick ($25), gamepad ($15), and headset making up the remainder.

Bill Gates: Here’s My Plan to Improve Our World — And How You Can Help

I am a little obsessed with fertilizer. I mean I’m fascinated with its role, not with using it. I go to meetings where it’s a serious topic of conversation. I read books about its benefits and the problems with overusing it. It’s the kind of topic I have to remind myself not to talk about too much at cocktail parties, since most people don’t find it as interesting as I do.

But like anyone with a mild obsession, I think mine is entirely justified. Two out of every five people on Earth today owe their lives to the higher crop outputs that fertilizer has made possible. It helped fuel the Green Revolution, an explosion of agricultural productivity that lifted hundreds of millions of people around the world out of poverty.

These days I get to spend a lot of time trying to advance innovation that improves people’s lives in the same way that fertilizer did. Let me reiterate this: A full 40 percent of Earth’s population is alive today because, in 1909, a German chemist named Fritz Haber figured out how to make synthetic ammonia. Another example: Polio cases are down more than 99 percent in the past 25 years, not because the disease is going away on its own but because Albert Sabin and Jonas Salk invented polio vaccines and the world rolled out a massive effort to deliver them.

Thanks to inventions like these, life has steadily gotten better. It can be easy to conclude otherwise—as I write this essay, more than 100,000 people have died in a civil war in Syria, and big problems like climate change are bearing down on us with no simple solution in sight. But if you take the long view, by almost any measure of progress we are living in history’s greatest era. Wars are becoming less frequent. Life expectancy has more than doubled in the past century. More children than ever are going to primary school. The world is better than it has ever been.

 Dan Winters

But it is still not as good as we wish. If we want to accelerate progress, we need to actively pursue the same kind of breakthroughs achieved by Haber, Sabin, and Salk. It’s a simple fact: Innovation makes the world better—and more innovation equals faster progress. That belief drives the work my wife, Melinda, and I are doing through our foundation.

WE WENT ON A SAFARI TO SEE WILD ANIMALS BUT ENDED UP GETTING OUR FIRST SUSTAINED LOOK AT EXTREME POVERTY. WE WERE SHOCKED.

Of course, not all innovation is the same. We want to give our wealth back to society in a way that has the most impact, and so we look for opportunities to invest for the largest returns. That means tackling the world’s biggest problems and funding the most likely solutions. That’s an even greater challenge than it sounds. I don’t have a magic formula for prioritizing the world’s problems. You could make a good case for poverty, disease, hunger, war, poor education, bad governance, political instability, weak trade, or mistreatment of women. Melinda and I have focused on poverty and disease globally, and on education in the US. We picked those issues by starting with an idea we learned from our parents: Everyone’s life has equal value. If you begin with that premise, you quickly see where the world acts as though some lives aren’t worth as much as others. That’s where you can make the greatest difference, where every dollar you spend is liable to have the greatest impact.

I have known since my early thirties that I was going to give my wealth back to society. The success of Microsoft provided me with an enormous fortune, and I felt responsible for using it in a thoughtful way. I had read a lot about how governments underinvest in basic scientific research. I thought, that’s a big mistake. If we don’t give scientists the room to deepen our fundamental understanding of the world, we won’t provide a basis for the next generation of innovations. I figured, therefore, that I could help the most by creating an institute where the best minds would come to do research.

Via: WIRED

PS 4 Launched

The PlayStation 4 debuts today, sparking a new round in the battle over your attention span, thumb endurance and, ultimately, checkbook. But despite all the fanfare over Sony’s latest release, the PS4 will only enjoy a week alone in the spotlight, with Microsoft set to launch its own next-generation console, the Xbox One, on Nov. 22.

Here’s a breakdown of some of the details you'll want to know about Sony's new console:

$399.99: The launch price of the PS4, a significant drop from the PS3’s much-maligned opening price of $499.99 for the 20-GB model and $599.99 for 60 GB. More important, that price point places the device $100 below the opening cost of the Xbox One, reversing the price advantage the Xbox 360 held over the PS3.

3 million: The estimated total of consumer sales for the PS4 by the end of the year, according to Sony. By March 2014, following the console’s launch in Japan, the company expects to sell an additional 2 million. During the same length of time, the PS3 sold 3.5 million units.80 million: The number of PS3 units shipped as of Nov. 2, 2013 , an impressive figure given the Xbox 360’s yearlong head start and 79.4 million shipped as of Sept. 30, 2013 . But given the success of the PS2, which from 2002 to 2012 has sold 155 million units worldwide , it’s no surprise that Sony has aggressively sought  to crush its closest competition, Microsoft.

26: The number of launch titles accompanying the PS4's debut. At the forefront are big-budget exclusives including “Killzone: Shadow Fall” and “Knack,” but the majority of the games are either ports of PS3 titles, such as “Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag” and “Battlefield 4,” or downloadable titles, such as “Trine 2” and “Resogun.”

$49.99: Though it launched at a higher price than the Xbox 360, the PS3 boasted an entirely free online multiplayer suite, while Microsoft required a $50 annual fee from users wishing to play online.

Later on in the PS3’s life span, Sony introduced PlayStation Plus, an equally priced online subscription service offering occasional deals and monthly free games. But PS+ and that subscription fee are now mandatory for anyone who wants to take their PS4 games online.

x86: Much of the PS3’s initial marketing was focused on the Cell Processor, a supposed miracle with which PlayStation creator Ken Kutaragi hoped to revolutionize not just video game consoles but many consumer electronics , allowing them to communicate with each other to increase processing capabilities.

For the PS4, Sony has dropped Cell for Intel’s x86, which is used by the Xbox One and PCs, making cross-platform development significantly easier. The reason? Building games for the unique Cell architecture presented a hurdle for developers, a problem that hampered many early PS3 titles.

1080p: The new gold standard in resolution. Just look at the reaction to the news that the latest “Call of Duty” would run at 720p on the Xbox One, identical to the Xbox 360 version. The PS4 version hits 1080p, and the difference is dramatic. But that advantage won’t last forever: Xbox Onehas its own 1080p titles . So expect the average game to look significantly sharper than you’re used to on the PS3 or Xbox 360.

The Xbox One Is Enormous In Comparison To The PS4

Both the Xbox One and Playstation 4 are essentially repackaged PC parts at this point. Unlike the PS3, Sony’s new console uses standard X86 architecture and fairly standard components. This should allow for an easier development path and quicker adoption among studios down the line.

That’s why I was so surprised when I saw this image on the German gaming publication PC Games of the two next-gen offerings side-by-side. The Xbox One is so big!

Maybe it’s just me, but I don’t believe I’ve seen any shots of them together in one image, as each one has been handling its press events separately, obviously. We have a PS4 in the labs for testing and I was at the Xbox event earlier this year and saw the console in person. It didn’t look all that big, roughly the size of the old Xbox 360′s (before the slimdown) overall. But, when compared to the PS4, the size difference is crazy. But until the Xbox One makes its way into reviewer hands (and is allowed to be shown publicly) we won’t be seeing comparisons.

Add to that the fact that the PS4 has a slight edge over the Xbox One in pure processing power and it’s even more puzzling. Developer Patrick McCarron posits it might be the slimmer Blu-Ray drive in the PS4, or perhaps fan size. Primate Labs’ John Poole conjectures that the Xbox One’s system on a chip might actually be much bigger than the PS4′s. One possibility could be more aggressive attention to thermal properties by Microsoft this time around, after overheating and cracking solder caused the ‘red ring of death’ fiasco which cascaded into a major PR issue.

Here’s the Xbone next to a slim Xbox 360:

And that size differential is even more nuts when you consider that the Xbox One has an external power brick, and the PS4 does not. Its power supply is internal to the device itself, and it plugs directly into the wall.

For a look inside the PS4, you can check out Wired’s video of Sony engineering director Yasuhiro Ootori tearing it down here.

The site has a bunch more comparison images between the two consoles including controllers and more. Head on over there to check them out.

Via: TechCrunch

Tablets Vs Tabs Vs iPads (Graphs)

Microsoft cyber crime center

 The maker of the most popular computer operating system in the world is launching a new strategy against criminal hackers by bringing together security engineers, digital forensics experts and lawyers trained in fighting software pirates under one roof at its new Cybercrime Center.

Microsoft (MSFT.O) Corp's expanded Digital Crimes Unit inside the 16,800-square foot, high-security facility combines a wide array of tactics that have worked the best: massive data gathering and analysis, gumshoe detective work, high-level diplomacy and creative lawyering.

The new approach, to be launched on Thursday, is the latest attempt to close the gap created in the past decade as criminal hackers innovated in technology and business methods to stay ahead of adversaries mired in the slow-moving world of international law enforcement.

Already, many of the biggest victories against organized online criminals have come when private companies have worked together to seize control of the networks of hacked computers, called botnets, that carry out criminal operations. Though it is at times derided for the security shortfalls in its own products, Microsoft has led more of those seizures than any other company.

PS4 vs. Xbox One

For the first time in the history of video game consoles, it’s actually possible to do an almost direct comparison of the hardware inside the PS4 and Xbox One. In almost every one of the seven preceding generations, game consoles were outfitted with highly customized chips and CPUs featuring niche, specialized architectures that could only really be compared very generally (bits, flops) or in the very specific (number of on-screen sprites, MIDI instruments, etc.) The PS4 and Xbox One, however, are very similar consoles. With an x86 AMD APU at the heart of each, the Sony and Microsoft consoles are essentially PCs — and their hardware specs, and thus relative performance, can be compared in the same way that you would compare two x86 laptops or ARM Android tablets.

Vine for Windows (Download Link)

Vine has finally hit the Windows store! Those of you who had been seeing a lot of Vine videos on social networking sites or on their friends smartphone (iOS and Android), would be happy to know that Vine app has finally arrived on the Windows Store. Those of you with Windows phones can now download Vine for their respective devices. The download link for Vine for Windows phone has been inserted below.

Download Vine Windows Phone

Vine a very popular app from Twitter, let’s you record seven second videos, while giving you the ability to pause and to start from where you left of. Due to this ability people have created some stunning videos – some really funny while others just plain boring.

Well whatever you might want to use Vine for, the good news is that you can now downloadVine for Windows phone (finally!).

Those users with Windows phone were left out as initially Vine was available for the iPhone and then later for Android. It has taken Twitter quite a long time to bring Vine to Windows phone. But we are not really complaining here, are we?

Well without wasting anytime. The download link for Vine for Windows phone is below. Get downloading !

Download Vine Windows phone