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Xbox One Officially Announced

Milosh — Sat, 25 May 2013 19:24:52 +0000

After all the speculation about Durango, Xbox 720, Infinity or the many other names we heard associated with the console – the next Xbox is here, and is called the Xbox One.

Now before you get too confused, the Xbox One’s name isn’t about it being the “first”, it’s about it being the “one and only” console you need, and how it is supposed to be the one device you need to take your multimedia experience to the next level.

Honestly, the Xbox One is really more of a super-powered multimedia device than a console, in that media seems to be just as (if not more) important for the X-One!

So what else do we know? First, here’s the brief bit we know about the specs: it has an 8-core CPU, 8GB RAM, a Blu-ray drive, a 500GB HD, built-in Wi-Fi, and HDMI In/Out ports.

The real beef is in the multi-tasking and multimedia aspects, though. The system is designed to work with live TV, easily pulling up all your channels from right within the Xbox. In fact, you can browse channels like MTV just by saying “turn to MTV”. Voice control and gestures are a huge part of the Xbox One experience – in fact the console not only includes the 2nd-gen Xbox Kinect, it is required for the console to work.

The new Kinect has an 1080p camera and is considerably more accurate on how it reads people than ever before. Speaking of Kinect, it also recognizes you when you ask it to turn on, and it automatically loads up your profile quickly, without the need for you to manually log on.

Now moving on to multi-tasking, ever wanted to watch a TV show or movie while browsing the net, all on just your TV? Easy enough with the Snap Mode feature (similar to Windows 8′s modern UI snap feature). Here you can put up Internet Explorer and TV all at once.

There are also a hell of a lot of gestures like pinching, zoom and more. Want to control moving around on the interface with your tablet or smartphone? Done.

Of course the Xbox controller is also there (and presumably the only option for gaming, besides perhaps Kinect for some games) with a slight redesign.

There are plenty of other great features, but that gives you a pretty good overview.

Now here’s a big question: are the rumors about always-on connectivity and the inability to get/sell used games true?

Always On and Used Games

The Microsoft Xbox One WILL require an internet connection. That said, it will be possible to access the system ‘offline’ for single player games, movies and other online activity. The system does push internet connectivity and cloud features wherever possible, and even pushes game saves to the cloud.

In other words, it isn’t always-on, but it is pretty close.

As for used games? Microsoft requires all discs to be installed onto the drive. Afterwards, you can archive away the disk, as the game is tied to an Xbox Live account. Want to link a game to more than one Xbox Live account? You will have to pay a fee. Who knows how this will work for multi-gamer households.

Microsoft also says that selling a game is possible, though again it might require some kind of fee from the sounds of it.

Wondering if your old Xbox Live content and 360 games will work? In a word, they won’t. No backwards compatibility of any kind here.

What about the games?

Not much in the way of game information was released at the event, with much more Xbox One stuff expected at E3. Here’s the list of games announced however:

Forza 5
Battlefield 4
Destiny
Call of Duty: Ghosts
Thief
Quantum Break
NBA Live 14
FIFA 14
Madden NFL 25
EA Sports UFC

Microsoft promises will we see 15 new exclusive and 8 new Ips at E3, so there is plenty more to come.

Summing it all up…

Bottom-line, the Xbox One has a lot of great features going for it. Unfortunately, it also has some potential negatives – such as its online requirements and used games fees.

What do you think of the Xbox One: impressed, excited, disappointed or indifferent? No matter how you feel right now, remember that E3 is coming soon enough and we will learn quite a bit more at that time, both about the Xbox One and the Sony Playstation 4.

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Microsoft reportedly to take cut on used Xbox One game sales

Milosh — Sat, 25 May 2013 14:37:00 +0000

Microsoft’s policy concerning used Xbox One games has proven a bit confusing, but a new report may have spilled more concrete details.

Citing information from “retail sources,” gaming news site MCV claims that Microsoft and gaming publishers will take a bite out of the sale of each used Xbox One game. In the process of selling a used game, original owners would also see the game wiped from their online accounts so they no longer can play it.

Microsoft has already confirmed that Xbox One users who install a game on the console’s hard drive will no longer need the disc as the game is then tied to their online accounts.

To deal in used games, retailers will reportedly have to agree to Microsoft’s terms and use Microsoft’s online Azure-based pre-owned system. After the used game is registered through Microsoft as having been sold, the seller’s access to that game is then removed. That final step may shed some light on a comment from Microsoft corporate vice president Phil Harrison that the Xbox One needs to check in with Microsoft servers once every 24 hours.

Retailers can sell the used game at any price they choose but with the understanding that Microsoft and the game’s publisher will each share in the proceeds. MCV cited unconfirmed reports from U.K. Web site ConsoleDeals that the retailer’s cut of the action could be a little as 10 percent.

The same reports also claim a customer in the U.K. would pay a total fee of 35 pounds to buy and activate a used game. Those 35 pounds translate into around $52, which seems a hefty price to pay for a used game, assuming the same cost would apply in the U.S.

Microsoft has been mum about specific details regarding used games and has said only that Xbox One customers would be able to trade in and resell games at retailers. CNET contacted Microsoft for comment and will update the story with any further information.

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How Xbox One opens the door for the next Apple TV

Milosh — Sat, 25 May 2013 12:14:25 +0000

It’s 2014. Apple has gathered everyone together for a special event. As Tim Cook presents, he says, ”Today we’re introducing three revolutionary new products. The first one is a cable box. The second one is a revolutionary streaming-media device. The third is a new way to play games on your TV. So, three things: a cable box, a streaming box, and a game console. Are you getting it? These are not three separate devices. This is one device. And we’re calling it iTV.”

The next Apple TV, that long-fabled product, doesn’t exist yet. But it could. And it should. And it’s not too late, not by a long shot. In fact, the future-of-TV transformation has yet to be settled, or even determined. It’s a mess right now. The door is open. Apple can seize the moment.

If you think the Xbox One jams up Apple’s plans, think again. The Xbox One is Apple’s best friend. Apple needs the emerging TV landscape to be tackled, and whatever mistakes are made, Apple can improve upon them, and show everyone why that strategy was mistaken. This is the Apple Way. The iPhone was built on old smartphones, the iPad on failed tablets. The landscape now is littered with half-good, half-bad solutions: TiVo, Wii U and TVii, Google TV, Roku, Xbox 360, PS3, even the current Apple TV. None of them truly replaces your cable box. None of them is the true, absolute future of TV.

Yet.

More content: Open up the App Store
One of the iPhone’s big keys to success was — and is — its massive App Store, with more than 800,000 apps and counting. Compare that with the Apple TV, which currently boasts just 18. (And that’s being generous — I’m counting “Settings” and “Computer Home Sharing.”) The current Apple TV lacks any sort of an App Store, by design.

Of course, few people remember that the iPhone had just around 16 apps for its entire first year, before iPhone OS 2.0 ushered in third-party apps in 2008. Like the iPhone, Apple TV’s current handful of native apps — including Netflix, Hulu Plus, YouTube, and Podcasts — show the box’s potential. But at some point, Apple TV needs more apps.

Opening the floodgates at long last to great applications — games, video-streaming apps, even more quasi-competing services like Amazon Instant Video — will make the Apple TV’s ecosystem feel as essential as the iOS App Store. It’s time.

Keep the Apple design influence
Nothing listed above is totally new or original; the Roku and Xbox 360 already offer live TV services from Comcast, Fios, Time Warner, HBO, Epix, and others.

But the Apple TV’s content needs to look better than those apps.

Apple’s first apps made for the iPhone did a marvelous job taking data from places like Google and Yahoo and knitting it into fantastic-looking software. The first iOS Maps app presaged where Google Maps eventually evolved. Similarly, taking an active hand with cable and video apps on an Apple TV could help lay the landscape for the look of TV apps going forward, and help Apple TV app developers get an idea of where to shoot for.

The result would be a consistent look and feel across all of the video apps — something sorely lacking on, say, the Roku.

Be the one box
I love some of the current streaming-video products, but mostly as single- or dual-use devices. I need to swap between them: I use my 360 for Netflix, or an Apple TV for iTunes purchases, or a DVR for all the rest of the recorded stuff. And that doesn’t even count the regular live TV, which the Xbox One doesn’t clearly even seem to handle without, essentially, an HDMI-in passthrough.

To be the ultimate box, you don’t need to do everything, you just need to do all the things people want to do most in a way that takes over the roles of multiple gadgets. Of course, some features may not carry over; disc support, for one, seems like the first thing Apple would cast aside on a future Apple TV. I’d be sad about that, but the Roku doesn’t have a Blu-ray/DVD drive, either.

Convergence was the iPhone’s strategy. That should be the Apple TV strategy. And Microsoft seems to be catching on to the same dream by calling its new console the Xbox One. Whether the Xbox One really is an all-in-one product remains to be seen; for Apple, it’s the best hope for cementing a place in a living room that’s suddenly in a state of tech flux. The Xbox One’s starting the “one box” conversation once again, and Apple should be thankful for the conversation starter.

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Google Integrates Google+ Photos Into Search

Milosh — Fri, 24 May 2013 20:55:03 +0000

Now, one can search for his photos on both Google+ and Google search, by searching for them directly from the Search bar.

Google Product Manager Matthew Kulick wrote in his blog post that Google is using computer vision and machine learning to help recognize ‘more general concepts in your photos such as flowers, food and sunsets’.

The new feature would help users to search for Google+ photos such as a friend’s wedding photos or pictures from a recent concert.

User will have to be signed into Google for activating this feature. The user can then type the prefix ‘my photos of’ in the search box, followed by the subject of the photo that he is looking for.

A powerful query then searches visual content from user and his friends on Google+ and then returns the results as part of the general results page.

Matthew Kulick in his blog indicated: “Your photos represent some of your most important memories and life events, yet they are increasingly difficult to manage as you build up your photo library, accumulate new devices and make new friends. In many cases, searching for your photos can be challenging because the information you’re looking for is visual”.

One can tag some timeframes while using the new features. For instance, queries for “my photos from last year,” “my photos from two years ago,” “photos from this week”, would work quite well.

It appears that the search results do not come on tags, captions, or other ways to see what is available on a given photo. Google has indicated it is actually analyzing the content of all the particular user’s photos and picks for the user which it feels is relevant to his search.

The new feature has intelligence to search term for extra clues and is capable of making sense of temporal deixis.

However there could be some privacy concerns. Further users may not be sure on the availability of their content. Google has tried to address the problem by making the personal results visible only to the searcher and not the general public.

Currently the new feature is restricted to only search items from Google’s own products such as Google+ and Picasa.

It is felt the new search addition from Google is a part of its master plan to own social.

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Nvidia GeForce GTX 780 Review: Titan’s Baby Brother Is Born

Milosh — Thu, 23 May 2013 15:03:27 +0000

I get a kick out of looking back at what I wrote about certain pieces of high-end hardware. When Nvidia launched the GeForce GTX 680, AMD was still asking something like $550 for the Radeon HD 7970, and the GK104-based board kicked it right in the tail. It was faster, cooler, quieter, and smaller than AMD’s flagship.I recommended the 680 without hesitation. And until Nvidia launched its almost-as-fast GeForce GTX 670 for even less, the 680 was a great choice.

Today, 7970s are down to $400 or so. Meanwhile, the GTX 680s are selling for roughly $460. What a reversal, right? After some serious driver work, AMD’s Radeon HD 7970 is notably faster than the GeForce board and it costs less. You have to put up with more noise and higher power use, but the Tahiti-based card also gives you great compute horsepower to match its gaming alacrity. So long as you stay away from multi-GPU configurations, the Radeon HD 7970 is a smart buy.

The next step up is going to cost you a cool grand. Be it the GeForce GTX Titan, the GeForce GTX 690, orAMD’s Radeon HD 7990, single-card performance doesn’t get any better than a Radeon HD 7970 unless you spend twice as much. And that’s where AMD and Nvidia lose a lot of gamers otherwise down to drop big bucks on graphics. Stepping up from $500 to $1,000 is rough.

GeForce GTX 780 is Nvidia’s attempt to do a little something about that gaping maw of a price delta between GTX 680 and the crazy-expensive stuff. Given its name, you might think the 780 centers on a new piece of silicon. But it’s really a derivative of GeForce GTX Titan and the gargantuan GK110 GPU.

Of course, the GK110 that Nvidia uses on GeForce GTX 780 is necessarily trimmed to keep it from showing up the potent Titan. We already know that a complete GK110 GPU plays host to 15 Streaming Multiprocessors, each with 192 CUDA cores and 16 texture units. GeForce GTX Titan pares the chip back to 14 SMXes, totaling 2,688 CUDA cores and 224 texture units. GeForce GTX 780 sees GK110 further cut down to 12 SMXes. The result is 2,304 CUDA cores and 192 texture units.

Depending on the card you get, GeForce GTX 780’s 12 SMX blocks are either spread between four or five Graphics Processing Clusters. Composed of 7.1 billion transistors, GK110 is a massive chip. Manufacturing it isn’t easy. And along the way, different parts of it show up with defects. So, Nvidia can’t guarantee the exact configuration of each GeForce GTX 780’s GK110. It’ll only say that, across the GPU, 12 SMXes are enabled.

Nvidia’s incisions are effective enough in dictating performance that tweaks to the board’s clock rates are very minor. GeForce GTX 780 bears an 863 MHz base frequency, just like Titan. But its rated GPU Boost clock rate is 900 MHz, whereas Titan is officially spec’ed at 876 MHz.

GK110 retains its complete render back-end, including six ROP partitions able to output eight 32-bit pixels per clock, adding up to what the company calls 48 ROP units. Further, a sextet of 64-bit memory interfaces yield the same 384-bit aggregate pathway. But whereas Nvidia armed GeForce GTX Titan with 6 GB of GDDR5 memory, GTX 780 sports 3 GB operating at 1,502 MHz. Do the math and you get the same 288.4 GB/s of peak bandwidth.

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