Code Retard

BioWare’s Dragon Age II was released earlier this year to mixed reactions.
Image courtesy BioWare

NEW YORK — The next entry in the fantasy role-playing Dragon Age series will draw inspiration from both of its predecessors as well as open-world games like The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, developer BioWare said.

Speaking to Wired.com in Manhattan on Tuesday afternoon, BioWare CEO and co-founder Dr. Ray Muzyka said the company has been listening to its fans and learning from the strengths and weaknesses of both Dragon Age II, the latest entry in the popular series, and other games that are on the market today.

“[The next Dragon Age] is gonna have the best of features from the prior Dragon Age games, but it’s also gonna have a lot of things I think players are gonna find compelling from some of the games that are out now that are doing really well with more of an open world feel,” Muzyka said.

“We’re checking [Skyrim] out aggressively. We like it. We’re big admirers of [Bethesda] and the product,” he said. “We think we can do some wonderful things.”

Dragon Age II, which BioWare released earlier this year for PC, Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, drew polarized reactions from both critics and fans. While some lauded its character development and writing, others, including Wired.com, criticized the game for feeling rushed and disjointed.

Muzyka acknowledged that polarization, saying that although he is proud of the Dragon Age II team and the innovations it brought to the table, he is listening closely to fan reactions for the next game in the series.

“How do we combine the new innovations we brought in Dragon Age II with the experience people were looking for in Dragon Age: Origins?” Muzyka said.

The story of Dragon Age II took place across a decade-long span in the city of Kirkwall, allowing players to see how the city and characters evolved over the years. Muzyka hinted that the next Dragon Age game could take that narrative structure and apply it to a variety of areas, rather than a single city.

Muzyka also addressed the common criticism that players could not equip their party members in Dragon Age II, saying BioWare took that feedback to heart.

“We realize that’s important to the players,” he said.

Though BioWare has not yet officially announced the next Dragon Age game, rumors have been swirling about a possible multiplayer mode that could feature playable dragons.

“Our goal is to surprise and delight our fans,” Muzyka said. “I’ve seen something in the last couple of weeks that is really the future of that franchise that is so compelling, I am so looking forward to being able to announce it.”

Muzyka would not elaborate on this tease, though BioWare VP and co-founder Greg Zeschuk chimed in with a joking suggestion of his own.

“The most realistic beards ever in videogames,” Zeschuk said.

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Another PS Vita freezes up on its user. Time for another firmware update Sony…

The PS Vita is Sony’s newest piece of hardware, its release was faster than many expected. Maybe too quick as some Japanese users have discovered. Many users are reporting, software issues. The unit freezing up on them, unable to turn off the Vita and unresponsive touch screens. Some even have hardware OLED screen issues. (I’ve only seen one case so far) Its seems normal this age for new hardware and software to have minor teething issues. Its odd that Sony’s beta testers never struck these software issues and that they would have been patched before its release. But I guess they didn’t have 350,000+ beta testers units running like now.

PS Vita with a bad OLED screen. Quality control failed. But 1 in 360,000 isn’t too bad!

It seems to be a small number of users that are having many issues reading various Japanese online news source. However it all too common it seems that the PS Vita can lock up and freeze on people. So we can expect to see a firmware update in the next couple of days. PS Vita Firmware 1.51 anyone?

When the machine is in its regular operational state, if you press the power button, the Vita should shutdown. If it does not shutdown then, Sony’s PS Vita help page said to try the following: keep holding the power button for 20 seconds until the front screen goes dark. Then, press the power button for five seconds to turn it back on. That apparently should work, and according to the Rocket News writer, it powered down his Vita. However, he repeatedly experienced the bug while playing Shin Sangoku Musou Next online.

These aren’t the only issues, though. Online, some PS Vita owners are also reporting that they cannot boot up their PS Vitas, even though the handhelds have a full charge. There could be an explanation for this, and Rocket News has a walkthrough, that consists of questions to determine if the PS Vita owner held down the power button long enough or if the handheld is simply in standby mode.

The good news from all this? By the time the PS Vita is released outside of Japan to the rest of the world it should be bug free. Sony have two months to get the firmware and software bug free.

And here is a few user video examples of issues. Just search on Youtube there are many more!

Source: RocketNews, YouTube and Jin115

Similar Posts:

• F1 2011 to make Feb 22 PS Vita launch
• PS Vita unboxing video from Japanese release
• PS Vita Firmware extractor Released – xTractor
• PSV originally planned for December 3

We are proud to announce the availability of the Matrix Glitcher II.
Thanks to the hundreds of feedbacks we received from our distributors and testers around the world, we decided to release an updated version of the Matrix Glitcher.

Some of the new features include:
* Preprogrammed with a brand new and advanced Matrix Glitching code.
* Compatible with all Xbox360 SLIM and FAT models (except Corona and Xenon motherboard)
* On board switch to quickly select console type and model.
* Future-proof updateable with external USB programmer (not included).
* After-installation fine tuning of glitch timings to better fit each different console (external USB programmer needed)
* Unique Serial code identification for each Glitcher II verifiable online.

Last year, we introduced our Top 10 Downloads of the Year lists, presenting the most popular Windows and Mac software on Download.com.

In 2011, we’ve taken the honors up the proverbial notch with the Top 11 Downloads of 2011, featuring the 11 most popular software apps each for the Windows and
Mac platforms, along with the 11 most popular programs in each of the 11 most popular categories in Windows and in Mac.

Security Software is unsurprisingly the most downloaded software by Windows users; Mac users, perhaps also predictably, elevate the MP3 Audio software category to the top slot; and everybody on both sides of the aisle loves a good utility app.

The most popular categories for Windows software are:

1. Security Software
2. Utilities Operating Systems
3. Internet Software
4. Video Software
5. MP3 Audio Software
6. Networking Software
7. Communications Software
8. Digital Photography
9. Web Browsers
10. Games
11. Business Software

The most popular software categories for Mac are:

1. MP3 Audio Software
2. Internet Software
3. Utilities Operating Systems
4. Browsers
5. Business Software
6. Digital Photography
7. Communications Software
8. Games
9. Networking Software
10. Desktop Enhancements
11. Video Software

While AVG Anti-Virus Free (Windows) and VirtualDJ (Mac) maintained their top spots as leaders of their respective download platforms, several products such as TeamViewer and RealPlayer made noticeable headway up the overall charts.

These Top 11 of 2011 lists are defined by the highest number of downloads for one product for the entire calendar year. Unlike the CNET editorial awards, there is no subjectivity in these lists; the products on these lists are determined solely by the number of downloads for each software program from January 1, 2011, to December 13, 2011. In other words, they are selected by you, our users, en masse. (Thanks for downloading!)

To learn what the top software products overall in Windows and Mac are, click through to the Top 11 Downloads of 2011 landing page; to browse through the most popular products for a specific platform, visit the Windows or Mac category pages. Find out where your favorite download ranks against the rest, or discover some great new software that might be new to you.

(As for the question of why 11, well, it’s one higher, isn’t it?)

Feeling lonely this holiday season? Try Xsnow. This little app will let it snow on the Unix / Linux desktop. Santa and his reindeer will complete your festive season feeling with moving snowflakes on your desktop, with Santa Claus running all over the screen.

I first installed this 13 or 14 years ago. It was was originally created for Macintosh systems in 1984. You can install it as follows:

Install xsnow

Debian / Ubuntu / Mint users type the following command:
$ sudo apt-get install xsnow
Freebsd users type the following command to install the same:
# cd /usr/ports/x11/xsnow/
# make install clean
OR, try to add the package:
# pkg_add -r xsnow

A Note About Other Distros

1. Fedora / RHEL / CentOS Linux desktop users may find the package using rpmfusion repo.
2. Gentoo user try Gentoo portage i.e. emerge -p xsnow
3. OpenSuse Linux user try Yast and search for xsnow.

How Do I Use xsnow?

Open a command-line terminal (select Applications Accessories Terminal), and then type the following to starts xsnow:
$ xsnow
Sample outputs:

Fig.01: Snow for your Linux and Unix desktop systems

You can set the background to a blue color and lets it snow white, type:
$ xsnow -bg blue -sc snow
To set the maximum number of snowflakes and runs as fast as possible, type:
$ xsnow -snowflakes 10000 -delay 0
Do not display the trees and Santa Claus running all over the screen, enter:
$ xsnow -notrees -nosanta
For more information about xsnow and other options, please see the manual page by typing man xsnow from the command line:
$ man xsnow

Recommended readings:

• Download Xsnow from the official site.
• Please note that MS-Windows and Mac OS X version attracts one time shareware fee.

This blog post is 3 of 4 in the “Linux / Unix Desktop Fun” series. Keep reading the rest of the series:

Battlefield 3’s Wake Island is buried in Easter Eggs. First, users find dinosaurs hidden all over the place (likely a tongue-in-cheek reference to fans wishing for a BF3/Jurassic Park mash-up), and now one intrepid gamer has discovered another, more telling Easter Egg, in the form of “2143” painted on a in-game structure.

Check it out:

Now, this could be mere set dressing, or it could be in place to stir up the rumor mill, but either way it brings questions to light – primarily, is DICE working on a sequel to Battlefield 2142? After all, almost nothing you find in a video game environment is there by accident, so the developers definitely went out of their way to print the numbers where they are. Then again, it could just be an elaborate troll on the part of developers known for having a little fun with their user base.

There’s really no way to tell what’s going on, and DICE has been silent on the issue. Basically, this is just one for the rumor mill until we hear otherwise. Or, we could just use our brains. Why wouldn’t DICE make a sequel to one of its most popular games? It’s not like they’re going to drop Battlefield 4 next year, right?

Right?

[PC Gamer]

Comodo Internet Security 5.9 detects new Wi-Fi connections and asks if you’d like to begin a VPN connection.

(Credit:
Screenshot by Seth Rosenblatt/CNET)

An on-demand Virtual Private Network and a better “quick scan” take their bows in Comodo Internet Security 5.9 (download), released today. Along with the new features, a Comodo Security Solutions spokesman had some tough words for the competition.

Comodo Internet Security 5.9, which despite following the security industry naming convention for paid suites is actually the name of Comodo’s free suite, now supports the company’s TrustConnect VPN service. TrustConnect uses 128-bit encryption to provide addition Wi-Fi protection, although it doesn’t anonymize your traffic like Hotspot Shield does. The TrustConnect integration will automatically detect unsecure Wi-Fi networks and offer to activate the VPN.

The inclusion of support for TrustConnect in Comodo Internet Security does not make the VPN free. Users can pay for the tunnel access on demand, starting at $3.99 for a 24-hour pass, a monthly unlimited subscription for $8.99 a month, or a yearly unlimited subscription for $99.95.

Other changes in Comodo Internet Security 5.9 include a new “quick scan” engine, called Smart Scan. It replaces the Critical Scan option. Comodo’s director of Desktop Security Products Egemen Tas says that Smart Scan is based on the company’s Autorun Analyzer Technology, although it hasn’t released numbers on how much faster users ought to expect Smart Scan to be.

There have also been tweaks to malware removal, some options have moved from the generic Preferences section to the settings panes for the features that they related to. Comodo has also added a download link to Comodo Dragon, the company-branded, security-minded free remix of the Chromium source code that powers Google Chrome. A pop-up window for Comodo’s Geekbuddy tech support that appeared in the beta version of version 5.9 was removed, said Comodo spokeswoman Sarah Thomas, because it was “too aggressive.”

Criticizing competitors
Tas didn’t mince his words when asked about how Comodo differs from its competition. “Other antivirus companies want you to get infected,” he told me in a phone interview on Friday. He compared Comodo to an insurance company, which protects you against financial loss, whereas the competition he said is, “like a pharmaceutical company,” making money off of selling you a product you must have to survive. He also noted that Comodo has offered a $500 guarantee to customers if they get infected after installing one of Comodo paid products.

“We care about detecting,” Tas said, “but it’s not the first line of defense. The industry is switching to a more protection-based approach,” something he says Comodo has been doing for a long time.

Some of Comodo’s competition disagreed that they want customer’s PCs to get infected. Representatives from several security suite vendors, including Avast, Kaspersky Lab, Bitdefender, and AVG said that the guarantee was a marketing ploy and pointed to the fine print of the guarantee, which clarifies that Comodo will only pay if the computer can’t be repaired “to an operating condition.”

Tony Anscombe, a representative from AVG, said in an e-mail, “The comment that most AV companies want consumers to have a breech is just marketing hype that makes for sensational news stories and advertising content.”

“There are people who believe the ‘conspiracy theory’ that security vendors allow malicious software to exist for the benefit of their own business. Kaspersky Lab categorically rejects this notion. Furthermore, we believe it is completely irresponsible for a security vendor to reinforce these kinds of lies,” Greg Sabey, senior technology PR manager for Kaspersky Labs, said in an e-mail. “Suggesting that some vendors intentionally allow malicious infections is absurd – trust and reputation make up the foundation of the IT security industry. In fact, Kaspersky Lab has a long track-record of working with international law enforcement agencies to disrupt cyber-crime organizations,” he concluded.

In regards to Comodo’s payout, Tas wrote in an e-mail to me that, “No one has ever claimed it.”

One person who requested anonymity said Comodo is known for being provocative and pointed to a challenge by Comodo CEO Melih Abdulhayoglu to prove that Symantec was better than Comodo. According to the results of the that test, Symantec bested Comodo.

And Andrew Storms, the director of security operations for the security consulting company nCircle, added that while it was doubtful that security suite makers wanted customers to get infected, they probably wouldn’t mind if their customers are attacked by known viruses that can be blocked. “After all, anti-virus users experience real return on investment when anti-virus software finds and protects their computer against an some new attack.”

Results from independent testing organizations such as AV-Test.org shows that while Comodo ranges between acceptable and very good at offering protection, it’s not at the top of the field. AV-Test last looked at Comodo Internet Security 5.3 and 5.4 for its Q2 2011 test in June 2011. Comodo did not receive certification. Nor did Comodo submit to testing by AV-Comparatives’ whole product test, whereas many of its competitors do. The most recent Comodo version checked by West Coast Labs’ Checkmark certification was Comodo AntiVirus 4.0, more than a year ago. While it’s true that some independent organizations such as Matousec rate Comodo’s firewall very highly, it’s safe to conclude that the suite’s overall performance at stopping threats has either been inadequately tested publicly, or could be much improved overall.

The company has also been in the news this year for a digital certificate security breach. While not directly connected to the security suite, it does call into question some of the company’s security procedures.

Tags: PS Vita, PS Vita Firmware, PS Vita Firmware xTractor, SKFU

Posted in PS Vita Firmware

Overview – What it does
- This is a frontend/GUI for xeBuild, what it does is make it easy for you to select most options that you might need, such as Motherboard, SMC hack for freeboot, image type etc. etc.
- It is able to check what SMC hack you have previously used for JTAG it’s also able to tell you what SMC version you have, and if it’s a JTAG, Clean/Retail, Glitch or Cygnos patched SMC :)
- If you put any of these files next to the executable it’ll use them
automaticly:
SMC.bin – Custom SMC of your choice; ONLY USE THIS OF YOU KNOW WHAT
YOU ARE DOING!!!!
Xell.bin – Custom Xell of your choice; ONLY USE THIS OF YOU KNOW WHAT
YOU ARE DOING!!!!
cpukey.txt – It’ll read the first line of this file as CPUKey
flashdmp.bin – It’ll load this as source nand ;)
Default.xml – It’ll load any preset settings from this file ;)
options.ini – It’ll load any custom settings from this (for xeBuild)
launch.ini – Settings for Dashlaunch, if you choose to use this setting it’ll include this file in the built image ;)

What’s new/fixed (v1.1):
- Added: Function to prepare a USB memory stick for updating your console with the AVATAR support (Update downloader)
- Fixed: Copying of Cygnos360 V2 SMC now works…
- Fixed: Some Xenon SMC’s didn’t show previous hack properly… works now :D
- Fixed: Sometimes the app will recognise your SMC as Cygnos whiles it’s JTAG, the app will now show you it’s JTAG if it can see that it’s JTAG patched aswell instead of fooling you by saying it’s a cygnos 360 patch…
- Changed: The app no longer asks if you want to clear the log after autosaving, instead it asks if you want to Close the app, Clear the log or just leave the way it is :)
- Added: Reading cpukey/ldv from fuse.txt or downloading it from xell now also saves both CPUKey and DVDKey (if available) to keys.txt :)

Maybe you’re constructing a portfolio, or maybe you just want to reduce file clutter.

Joining PDFs is handy now and then, but for those of us who haven’t shelled out the bucks for Acrobat, it was previously out of reach. Now we can use PDFBinder, a free Windows app on the Google Code site that works admirably. Here’s how to use it:

1. Install PDFBinder here. 
   

   Step 1 – Download PDFBinder.

2. Launch PDF Binder. 
   

   Step 2: Launch PDFBinder.

3. Drag and drop PDF files into PDFBinder or click Add file to select PDFs to join. 
4. Select a PDF file and click the up and down arrows to position it correctly. 
5. When they’re in the right order, click Bind! to begin the joining process. You will need to select a name for the final PDF. 
   

   Step 5: Bind PDFs.

The process doesn’t take long, and the results look great. 

Thanks to Guiding Tech for the tip!