NewSaurus

The Chromebook Pixel comes with a 12.85-inch high resolution IPS display (2560×1700), equal to 239 PPI, at a rather unorthodox 3:2 aspect ratio.
Under the hood is an Intel Core i5 Ivy Bridge processor with Panter Point PCH, along with 4GB of DDR3 RAM. There’s only 32GB of storage via an SSD, but that’s bolstered by 1TB of additional cloud storage through Google Drive.

Jealous yet? We are.

 Source :- www.thenextweb.com

Via: www.cnbc.com, www.bgr.com

Source: Anonymous [1], Anonymous [2]

Facebook has just acquired Parse, marking its entry into a whole new business category: paid tools and services for developing mobile apps.
The company is buying the mobile-backend-as-a-service startup (yes, the industry acronym is mBaaS) in a deal that we’ve heard is worth $85 million. [Update: And we're hearing that excludes retention.] Neither company is commenting on the size of the deal, except that Facebook said it’s not “material.”

Parse was founded about two years ago by a small group of seasoned Googlers and Y Combinator alums who got together to build a useful set of back-end tools for mobile developers. They originally called their back-end service, the “Heroku” of mobile in a homage to what was one of YC’s biggest exits to date — the $212 million sale of Heroku to Salesforce.com. They offer services that help mobile developers store data in the cloud, manage identity log-ins, handle push notifications and run custom code in the cloud.
Facebook won the deal amid what we’ve heard was a competitive process with many of other Valley’s other biggest potential buyers. Parse CEO and co-founder Ilya Sukhar said that he chose Facebook over other suitors — without naming names — because the company was a better cultural fit.
“I don’t think any of the other conversations created anywhere near the excitement level that we had for Facebook,” he said in an interview.

Why Parse? Facebook is in a big push to become more relevant than ever to mobile developers. It doesn’t own its own mobile OS like Apple or Google. It doesn’t make its own devices.
Instead, it’s a horizontal social and identity layer that runs through thousands of apps of iOS and Android, in deep custom integrations in devices made by hardware makers like HTC, and in its latest project, Facebook Home.

In that sense, Facebook has to prove value to mobile developers in other ways. Facebook integrations can make apps stickier when users add friends, and the company’s mobile app install ads help developers acquire new users.

Now through the Parse deal, the company will be able to offer back-end services for data storage, notifications and user management. This is a brand new kind of revenue stream for Facebook, as the company is keeping Parse’s freemium revenue model. Parse currently has over 60,000 apps and roughly the same number of developers. They focus on monetizing the top 10 percent of their clientele.
“This fills out one of the pillars of Facebook platform that we’ve been thinking about for awhile,” said Facebook’s Director of Product Management Doug Purdy. “Since 2007, the Facebook platform has been about being an identity mechanism with sharing. But over the course of the last six months, we’ve been thinking about how we can help applications get discovered and how they can be monetized.”

He added, “In order to provide the best experience possible, developers also need to build a whole host of infrastructure. Parse is a natural fit. They’ve really just abstracted away a lot of the work necessary to get an app up and running.”

The deal is a big exit for Parse, which had raised just $7 million to date from investors including Ignition Partners, Start Fund, Google Ventures, Menlo Ventures, SV Angel, Data Collective, Yuri Milner, Aaron Iba, Garry Tan, Justin Kan, Chris Fanini, Sean Knapp, Don Dodge and David Rusenko.

As for Parse users, the company says apps won’t be affected in any way, that developers won’t have to integrate Facebook and that existing contracts will be honored. Parse has a freemium model with a basic free version for up to 1 million requests or pushes per month and a limit of 20 bursts per second. A lowest paid version is $199 a month with 15 million requests a month, 5 million pushes per month and a burst limit of 40 per second. Then there’s an enterprise version where the rates are negotiable.

In the long-run, by getting closer to the development process Facebook could increase the likelihood that third-party apps integrate with them and buy their ads. When added to the direct fees Facebook will collect from Parse subscribers, the acquisition could become a critical part of how Facebook earns money from the burgeoning app economy.

Parse has come a long way. In just under two years, we’ve gone from a rough prototype to powering tens of thousands of apps for a very broad spectrum of customers.
Some of the world’s best brands trust us with their entire mobile presence, and a growing number of the world’s brightest independent developers trust us with their next big thing. We couldn’t be happier.
As stewards of a good thing, we’re always thinking about the next step in growing Parse to become a leading platform in this age of mobile apps.
These steps come in all sizes. Most are small and incremental. Some are larger. Today we’re excited to announce a pretty big one.
Parse has agreed to be acquired by Facebook. We expect the transaction to close shortly. Rest assured, Parse is not going away. It’s going to get better.
We’ve worked with Facebook for some time, and together we will continue offering our products and services. Check out Facebook’s blog post for more on this.
Combining forces with a partner like Facebook makes a lot of sense. In a short amount of time, we’ve built up a core technology and a great community of developers. Bringing that to Facebook allows us to work with their incredible talent and resources to build the ideal platform for developers.
We think this is the right way to accomplish what we set out to do. We’re excited about the future of Parse!
Ilya, Kevin, and James

And here’s Facebook’s statement from Director of Product Management Doug Purdy:

Last week, we hosted our first Mobile Developer Conference, where we launched several new products to help mobile developers integrate Facebook: Open Graph for mobile, better Facebook Login, and new developer tools. Today, we’re making it even easier to build mobile apps with Facebook Platform by announcing that we have entered into an agreement to acquire Parse, a cloud-based platform that provides scalable cross-platform services and tools for developers.
By making Parse a part of Facebook Platform, we want to enable developers to rapidly build apps that span mobile platforms and devices. Parse makes this possible by allowing developers to work with native objects that provide backend services for data storage, notifications, user management, and more. This removes the need to manage servers and a complex infrastructure, so you can simply focus on building great user experiences.
We’ve worked closely with the Parse team and have seen first-hand how important their solutions and platform are to developers. We don’t intend to change this. We will continue offering their products and services, and we’re excited to expand what Facebook and Parse can provide together.

The buy seems largely motivated by Facebook's continued interest in conquering mobile, an effort that recently culminated in the release of Facebook Home. Parse provides the social network with a new way to go about its mobile-first mission; it offers the company instant access to a pool of mobile developers who might be more motivated to weave Facebook hooks into their applications. Facebook also will, by continuing to sell and manage Parse's backend services, pick up an entirely new revenue stream and become a service provider of a different kind.

Parse offers a free plan for developers with smaller application audiences, but sells a paid service that starts at $199 per month.

Source :- www.developers.facebook.com, www.techcrunch.com, www.news.cnet.com

Hackers associated with the group Anonymous earlier this month demanded that North Korean leader Kim Jong Un step down from power and adopt democracy. The demands went unanswered and the group has subsequently launched a variety of attacks aimed at North Korea’s online properties. Hackers defaced social media accounts and other websites belonging to Pyongyang and mocked Kim Jong Un with images associating him with a pig. Now, for the second time in less than two weeks, Anonymous members have taken down nearly a dozen new North Korean websites.

In an earlier attack, Anonymous hackers were able to seize control of North Korea’s Twitter and Flickr accounts, although the latter has since been deleted. Members have continued to post on the Twitter account, however, suggesting that North Korean officials have not yet regained control.

Central news and information site Uriminzokkiri has once again been taken offline, as well as English language news sites minjok.com, jajusasang.com and paekdu-hanna.com. A handful of other North Korean websites were also defaced with the photoshopped image of Kim Jong Un used in earlier attacks.

Anonymous members perviously claimed to have stolen more than 15,000 passwords from Uriminzokkiri users. In an earlier statement, the group revealed that it was working with “operatives” inside North Korea who are aiding in its attacks. As tensions between the U.S., South Korea and North Korea reach an all time high, the hacking collective has vowed to initiate additional cyberattacks in the coming weeks.

Source :- www.bgr.com

 As Tomb Raider begins, Lara is more an academic than an adventurer. But when she's shipwrecked on an island full of ancient secrets and deadly cultists, she has little choice but to learn how to survive. Lara endures a great deal of punishment early in the game, and though no small amount of that anguish is physical, it's an unpleasant moment in which a man tries to force himself on her that's most harrowing. But as unpleasant as it is, it marks an important turning point in Lara's understanding of just how hard she has to fight to survive. Rather than crumbling under the weight of her physical and emotional struggles, she emerges from them a stronger person. 

It's empowering to witness Lara's journey from the understandably fearful individual she is when she first arrives on the island to the justifiably confident survivor she becomes. Later in the game, when she has proven to the resident cultists that she's not the easily cowed person they mistook her for, she turns the psychological tables on them, letting loose battle cries to strike fear into their hearts. Aspects of the story that fall outside of Lara's character arc aren't as strong; there's a twist of sorts that occurs late in the game that you see coming hours ahead of time, for instance, and the central villain offers little in the way of nuance. But as an introduction to the legendary Lara Croft, Tomb Raider's tale is a success; she emerges as a strong, charismatic and human figure, and you're left eager to see what the future holds for her.

You'd better get used to killing fast, Lara. You're gonna be doing a lot of it.

Lara's origin story deserves an extraordinary setting, and the island where Tomb Raider takes place does not disappoint. Centuries ago, it was home to a kingdom called Yamatai. Many shrines, temples, statues and other remnants of that history remain, and often, you just want to take in these places, slowly advancing through the darkness, eager to discover what's just outside the light of your torch. The island is a beautiful place, but not every discovery is a pleasant one; Yamatai's dark history is vividly communicated in piles of bones and far more grisly things. On the PC, the lovely sights are even lovelier and the horrifying sights are more horrifying than on consoles. The PC port was handled by Nixxes, and just as their PC release of Sleeping Dogs improved significantly on the visuals of the console versions, the sharp textures in Tomb Raider's PC release make it the definitive way to experience this game. 

The ancient structures of Yamatai now coexist alongside bunkers built during World War II, the wreckage of planes brought down by the storms that surround the island, and the shantytowns and makeshift machinery of the island's current inhabitants. It's a fascinating hodgepodge of the beautiful and the utilitarian; the buildings are believably nestled in their rough natural surroundings, and appear appropriately weathered, damaged, and rusty. The island really feels like a place where people have lived and where great and terrible things have happened. It's a place with many facets; it has claustrophobic caverns and breathtaking vistas, and phenomena like gentle snowfalls, torrential downpours, and fierce, howling winds make it alternately seem like a tranquil place, and a brutal one.

You can enable TressFX if you want to see Lara's hair behave in mysterious ways.

 It's immediately clear that one thing the island is not is safe, so it's a good thing that Lara soon gets her hands on a bow. You acquaint yourself with using it by hunting animals; Lara doesn't have hunger levels you need to manage or any such thing, but the deer, rabbits, crabs and other creatures that call the island home make it feel much more alive. For reasons of their own, the cult that currently occupies the island doesn't exactly welcome you with open arms, so it's not long before you need to turn that bow (and, soon, a pistol, rifle, and shotgun) on humans. Combat is varied and suspenseful; some situations give you the opportunity to take a stealthy approach, sneaking up behind enemies to perform silent kills, or firing arrows into walls to distract them and picking them off from a distance with well-aimed arrows while their comrades aren't looking. During one particularly tense battle in a fog-shrouded forest, patrolling foes hunt you with flashlights; if you can manage to stay unseen, you can shift from prey to predator, using their cones of light to pinpoint their positions and eliminating them one by one. 

Then, there are the all-out firefights. When your presence is known, enemies are smart and aggressive about flushing you out from cover with grenades and Molotovs, which forces you to keep moving and act boldly. Many enemies attack from a distance while others get in close, so you need to be constantly on your toes, switching between your weapons on the fly and evading foes who attack with melee weapons. Dodging and countering melee attacks is easy, but the savage animations of Lara's counters make eliminating those foes who make the mistake of getting too close to you consistently satisfying.

 Source :- www.wikipedia.com, www.asia.gamespot.com,

The character action genre hasn't been this stylish or crazy in a good long while

There's enough combat variety here to support multiple playthroughs.

The reborn Devil May Cry from Ninja Theory exemplifies what it is to really get down in the dirt and reimagine a hallowed franchise from the ground up, bringing back only the broadest character traits and relationships but leaving behind everything else about the old that gets in the way of creating a singular, cohesive new. Names like Dante, Vergil, and Mundus return, but the world they inhabit and the roles they play out are only passingly similar to what you knew of them before. Everything in this new game exists in service of making it a great game in its own right, not in stoking your nostalgia for the games you played over the last decade. As a character action game, it hits all the notes--fast, robust action, marvelous visual style, and a tremendous sense of attitude--you could want in this type of game.
To be fair, on paper, everything about Devil May Cry sounds like the tritest video game pap: a bloody war between angels and devils, endless hordes of demonic enemies straight from your favorite '80s heavy metal album art, and all of it punctuated by Scandinavian "hellektro" outfit Combichrist's thudding soundtrack. And then there's Dante, remade in the image of a club-kid layabout who's so sneeringly self-satisfied he defies any attempt you might make to identify with him. I pretty much went into the game consciously expecting to hate all of this, or at least view it as the sort of eye-rolling embarrassment video games are usually so good at delivering.
Then, oddly, I started feeling a guilty pleasure at how much I was actually enjoying the spectacle. Then later I gave up the guilt and just flung myself wholeheartedly into the cyclone of nonsense. I think it became easy to like Devil May Cry because it seems somewhat aware of itself; the game is so damn committed to having fun with its absurdity, you can't help having fun along with it. Dante may be a smirking wiseass, but his lines are witty enough and delivered with so much panache, you quickly grow to like him anyway. And he makes a great foil for his brother Vergil, who's more of an uppity, refined ideologue fighting the good fight against the demons. Dante talks a constant stream of shit to Vergil and just about anyone else who gets in his way, and there's something uncomfortable and a little dissonant about a 50-foot ancient grub-demon screeching "FUCK YOOOOOUUUUU!!!" right back at him. The best sort of dumb fun is the kind that knows how dumb it is, and I consistently got the sense from Devil May Cry knew that the entire time I was playing it.

When acting is required, it's amazing how effective real actors can be.

The game also knows when to rein it in, though. After the dramatic triumph of Ninja Theory's last game, Enslaved, it shouldn't surprise you that I'm back to devote another paragraph to the characters' performances in this game, which do so much to sell what, again, probably should have been a complete joke of a storyline. Where Enslaved had a lot of heart, Devil May Cry offers an equal amount of middle finger, but it still manages to lend an appreciable level of gravitas and some occasional poignance to its tale of saving the world from demons who have enslaved the human race with... soda. As before, the success at selling you on the plot simply comes down to all the subtle eye movements and shoulder shrugs and skilled line reads that add up to real, believable performances, the kind of thing you get when you go into a performance-capture facility and fill it with people who can, you know, act. That the characters here do so much to uplift Devil May Cry's ridiculous premise is a testament to both the capability of performance-capture technology and Ninja Theory's use of it.
Lest we forget this is also a video game: Devil May Cry is in fact a greatly entertaining character action game, as fast-paced and diverse as I could have wanted. The game starts you off with Dante's familiar sword and dual pistols, but you quickly start to collect angel and demon weapons, which fill light and heavy attack categories respectively. Switching between melee weapons, and the three firearms you end up with, just takes a tap of the d-pad. You only have a single attack button which wields your sword by default, and you switch to the equipped angel or devil weapon instantly by holding the left or right trigger and hitting that same button. The game finds a lot of interesting ways to make you stay on your toes, with enemies that only fully coalesce when one type of weapon is equipped, or floors that will hurt you if you aren't holding the same-colored weapon. More importantly, if you're quick enough, it's possible to involve three, four, or five different weapons in a single combo, and the game is constantly running a tally on the side of the screen rating how stylishly you're fighting, all the way up to triple-S.
The more style you rack up, the more new abilities and moves you can unlock (from a list of dozens), and since you lose a couple of letter grades every time you get hit, you're really incentivized to play as cleanly as possible. The combat isn't overwhelmingly hard on the default difficulty, though it isn't a cakewalk, but if you're really serious about this kind of game, play it on hard from the outset. There are another four difficulty levels waiting for you to unlock them after that. The game is built to be replayed repeatedly; you can jump back into any mission on any difficulty whenever, and there are plenty of places you just can't access without the right abilities the first time through. All of your completion totals get rated and slapped onto leaderboards if you want to keep up with how your friends are doing. In short, the between-mission trappings, the glue that holds the levels themselves together, feel thoroughly modern in this game.

The inventive visual and level design just keeps on coming.

Since all the action takes place in a demonic mirror world called Limbo, the designers get to go wild with the sorts of places you're fighting in, and the game is constantly turning your expectations (and the levels) upside down by placing you in skewed, exploded, or otherwise deconstructed versions of city streets, mansions, night clubs, and a few more unlikely environments I'll leave to you to discover. While this sort of level design has started to feel a little played out since games like American McGee's Alice made it popular ages ago, I was constantly surprised and delighted by the sheer, over-the-top inventiveness of the levels in this game. There's also a degree of grappling-hook-style traversal, and a few creative moments that emphasize the relationship between Limbo and the real world, that make the game feel like more than a constant stream of enemy encounters. And the game is absolutely awash in dazzling visual presentation. I won't go too deep into that, because it's better absorbed firsthand, but the broad and ever-changing color palette, the ways the level geometry explodes and deforms around you, the titles and overlays that pop up on the screen to enhance the action, all combine to make this game a great venue for its artists to display their talents.
I brought no personal baggage to Ninja Theory's take on Devil May Cry, having played and enjoyed the original game way back when but then steering clear of the series after its poorly received second entry. Whether you're a longtime fan (with an open mind) or a total newcomer just looking for a solid character action game, it's hard to imagine anyone feeling overly dissatisfied with this new game. It's almost wholly successful at what it tries to do, and seems like the start of a promising new direction for what was otherwise a nearly forgotten franchise.

Source :- By Brad Shoemaker on ww.giantbomb.com, www.wikipedia.com

Microsoft is today putting an end to the vulnerability found in old versions of Internet Explorer (6-8) that allowed an attacker to execute harmful code in a target computer, if the user was tricked by a specially crafted website.

Soon after the security hole was found, the software giant quickly made available a temporary workaround in a form of patch that they call “Fix it”. However, the security update released today should permanently close the door, for good, to this issue.

The company reports that only a small number of users have been affected by the exploit, but acknowledges that if could potentially affect more users in the future. Because of its future impact the update has been labeled as “Critical” and it will be installed automatically to all those users who have Automatic Update enabled. Microsoft also is advising users to upgrade to IE9 and 10 when possible to stay even more protected from this particular security hole.

Note that if you previously installed the “Fix it”, you don’t need to uninstall it before applying the new update, but you may want to uninstall the patch after, as it could slowdown IE start-up time.
If you prefer to manually install the Security Update (2799329), you can download it here.

Please watch the video below for an overview of this security update, and you can find more information on the Microsoft Security Bulletin summary webpage.

http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/showcase/details.aspx?uuid=8d179378-a767-40cd-bbfa-3203f2bba2e6

Source :- www.pureinfotech.com, www.blogs.technet.com

Internet Explorer Logo

Today in a quick response to the matter, Microsoft is rolling out two security updates to resolve the security flaws on Internet Explorer. In this Windows Update the software giant is releasing two patches: The first patch 2744842 (described in Microsoft Security Bulletin MS12-063), permanently fixes the vulnerability on IE7, IE8 and Internet Explorer 9 on Windows XP, Windows 7 and Vista respectively.

The security hole discovered late last weekend, as we mentioned before, could allow malicious users to harm Windows machines by means of spacial design of Flash animation.

The second security update (described in Microsoft Security Advisory 2755801) is to fix the Flash exploit found on Windows 8′s IE10. This was a security issue that could cause Adobe Flash to crash, while allowing unauthorized to the computer. Even though the operating system hasn’t been released, there are already many companies and people developing software with the Release to Manufacture or RTM version — Microsoft plans to make Windows 8 available to the public on October 26th, right after the launch event the day before in New York City.

The patches are now available for Windows 8, Windows 7, Vista and Windows XP via Microsoft’s Windows update service.

Source :- www.pureinfotech.com , Microsoft Security Bulletins

INTERNET EXPLORER LOGO

Days after the newly discovered weakness in Internet Explorer (versions 9, 8, 7 and 6) that could potentially put at risk a massive number of Windows PCs, Microsoft has made available a temporary resolution for the problem in form of a Windows Fix it (kb2757760), also an update scheduled to be released this Friday to permanently path the issue.

The exploit, discovered during the weekend, could allow a malware to bypass security protocols via Flash and affect XP, Vista and Windows 7 machines. In a new article the company stated that there is a fix now for it and it is easy to apply: “This is an easy, one-click solution that will help protect your computer right away. It will not affect your ability to browse the web, and it does not require a reboot of your computer.”

While the fix it (Microsoft Fix it 50939 and 50938) delivers a protection against the security hole, Microsoft recommends to IE users that it is highly important to install the forthcoming security update set for Friday via Windows Update. To get all the steps on how to install Microsoft Fix it for Internet Explorer follow these instructions.

Source :- www.pureinfotech.com