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Microsoft Windows 10: What’s in it for Gamers

Windows 10 for gamers

 

Microsoft’s Windows 10 isn’t only about consumers, enterprises or professionals; it in fact has a lot to offer to gamers as well. Well, Microsoft seems to have done its homework in bringing the prowess of Xbox consoles to the PC environment. Microsoft has over two decades of experience in the PC gaming environment, which dates much before the start of Sony’s PlayStation consoles. However, equipped with higher end features like DirectX 12, Microsoft’s Windows 10 is all set to bring much higher end gaming to your homes. Here, the big talking point is how exactly?

The History of Gaming

Undoubtedly, Microsoft’s Xbox has had a very successful run in the market from the time it is released (in 2001). All this work put in to the gaming world started on the verge of MS-DOS. Eventually Microsoft managed to come up with this world class gaming console (Xbox).
Though they were late in bringing out their gaming consoles, their gaming endeavors in PC helped them dominate the gaming industry.

On one side we can all be thankful to Microsoft for its contribution to the gaming industry, which now employs thousands of people around the world. Intel’s latest figures sum up all the hardcore and casual gamers and reveal an astonishing 711 million users actively involved with the gaming industry. All credit to Microsoft.

DirectX 12 is more than a killer

Microsoft is all set to release the newest graphics API – DirectX 12 with Windows 10 only. This partly seems to be the reason Microsoft announced free upgrades to Windows 10 for the first year to Windows 7 and Windows 8 users.

It was actually a clever move by Microsoft and now it doesn’t really have to bother about the backward compatibility of DirectX 12. This is also one way of converting the huge Windows 7 user base to Windows 10 without much effort. On the other side, this move also encourages gamers to develop games making use of the DirectX 12’s API.

DirectX 12 is undoubtedly the best because of two main reasons, one being as it takes a lower level functionality that AMD’s Mantle already have. And the other is for making this functionality available to every GPU that can run Windows (say ARM, Nvidia and Qualcomm). It only means that users can now get better performance out of their GPUs and can more efficiently use their CPUs even with less system power.

Better PC friendly interface

Many of the Microsoft’s users, including PC gamers are stuck to Windows 7 for its friendly interference. Windows 8 and 8.1 were a class apart and partly failed for their poor functionality. Even these OSes weren’t so attractive or appealing for gamers. But now that Windows 10 is a package of the pluses from Windows 7 and the smoothness of Windows 8 and 8.1,

Microsoft can expect a lot more of users converting to the Windows 10 OS, making it a grand success. Anyways, Microsoft has already suffered the wrath for neglecting PC gamers and has learnt its lessons the hard way. So, we can expect Windows 10 to be more of a power packed PC gaming environment designed to impress gamers including enterprises and consumers.

Also Read: Everything You Need To Know About Microsoft Creators Update

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Tech News

Windows 10: The Biggest Talking Points

windows 10

Microsoft’s recent operating system Windows 8 and Windows 10 are totally different. It looks like Microsoft has learnt its lesson the hard way, after lapses in Windows 8 and Windows 8.1. One way of expression is that Windows 8 was a perfect example for excessive pride, greed and over confidence on Microsoft’s part. The entire design completely deviated from the Windows 7 approach, only causing more problems to users. If you’d ask someone who had spent some considerable time oh Windows 8, the response wouldn’t be so good. In contrast, though it is quite early to say, Windows 10 is quite a retreat to people who are frustrated with Windows 8.

windows 10

Now that Windows 10 comes as a free of cost upgrade facility to all Windows 7 and Windows 8 users, there could possibly be large sums of people interested to upgrade. That said, before actually going through with it, here’s where Windows 10 differs from the Windows 8 operating system.

 

Start Screen & Start Menu:

If there’s something most targeted in Windows 8, it was the Start Screen. Very soon after its release news about the not-so-appealing Start Screen spread like wildfire. It had the fluidity of the Live tiles the flexibility, but was severely lacking functionality.  Microsoft could say it was all aimed at the convertibles and tablets; desktop users found it only more annoying. Probably, not forcing Windows 8 onto all users could have been a far better idea, but somehow, people at Microsoft missed it by miles.

Anyways bad days come and go and with Windows 10 the Start button will make a grand entrance that too with some cool features. This supercharged start button will help you search and pin apps, contacts and websites to your Start menu.

 

Cortana moves to PC:

The other juicy inclusion into thee Windows 10 operating system is the super smart Cortana, which is claimed to get better with time. It’s this kind of digital assistant which can get you into conversations. Voice recognition, actually, is not everything about Cortana- the Windows Phone personal assistant; it constantly keeps you connected to the support staff, to better serve you.

Though Windows had a successful run integrating Bing into their devices, it came out bold once again in completely replacing the Bing Smart Search with the smarter Cortana. Certainly, we believe this replacement is one of the strongest plus points for Windows 10 in the years to come.

 

Windows 10 – Price and Availability:

Buy a new PC now and you’ll certainly get it with the Windows 8 (or even 8.1). In this process, the money you are putting out for the operating system is included in the amount you pay to the PC manufacturer. But if you actually plan for an upgrade to your OS, the Windows 8.1 Pro Student values up to Rs. 3,499 and the normal Windows 8.1 Pro license is fixed to Rs. 7,499.

On comparing, and now that Windows 10 is yet to release (hopefully by the next 5 months) you can expect a similar price tag. But before the actual release you can install the preview version and check out its cool features here. .

The other good news for users currently using Windows 7 or Windows 8/8.1 is that you can get a one year free update to Windows 10 directly. The details about the charges later on are yet to be disclosed, stay in touch with us to be the first to know of it. And bad luck Win XP users, you’ll have to purchase the licensed product no freebies for you.

 

Have you started using the Windows 10 Technical Preview yet? If so tell us your experiences with it. Do share this article with your friends on social media.

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Security Tech News Web Guides

The Story Of The Blooming Web Application Firewalls

what is firewall and how it works, web application firewall

We start our year long journey into 2015 with many technological enhancements in the field of Computers. Like any other revolutions of the past, the Information Revolution building up concretely based on the power of Internet is affecting each of our lives, whether we choose to accept or not.

 

The only downside is unlike the Industrial Revolution or the Agricultural Revolution, the Information Revolution is statistically destroying more lives than ever. With every year, there is greater percentage of computers being effected and lots of businesses taking the hit. All this, like we choose to put it is the unavoidable consequence of the Information Technology Development.

 

The Hackers, Crackers, Code Kiddies they are all there out in the wild trying to exploit any vulnerabilities they sense. The innovations in these black hat techniques have strongly brought in the need to develop software and systems with not just a 90 %or 99% efficiency, but also with the ability to foresee impending attacks. One step into building that perfect system is the blooming Web Application Firewalls.

Learn About: What a Firewall Actually Means

So what is an application firewall??

An application firewall sits on top of all the firewalls in the OSI layer, and grants or denies permissions to applications in accessing the operating system. It is way more sophisticated than the other firewalls which merely examine each packet and determine whether to forward it to the destination or not. Apart from doing just that, an application firewall also controls the execution of files.

 

This simply means, even if a hacker could get through the conventional firewalls, his act will be foiled at the application firewall level where any suspicious malicious code will not be executed without the users’ permission.

 

A Web Application Firewall does more than a computer’s application firewall. Generally, a Web Application Firewall is expected to offer extra protection as it has to deal with applications like Apache or WordPress where there’s a lot at stake. The Web Application Firewall achieves it by carefully analyzing all the data which passes through it and by verifying it with pre-set rules.

 

Though the functionality appears a lot similar to that of the application firewall, like mentioned the game is wide open when it comes to dealing with the aforementioned applications and there’s a lot at stake. So, it takes care of both the web users’ internal and public web applications.

 

The future with Web Application Firewalls

With the success rate in getting through complicated security systems is alarmingly increasing, there is a call for businesses to protect their websites from going down and their customers data being compromised.

 

With this primary objective in mind, web application firewalls are being developed to pave off any such unauthorized access and destructive attacks. For this the traditional in-depth inspection of packets is unfortunately not enough. There is a need for the Web Application Firewalls to dig deeper and that too far beyond the code. They need to actually evaluate the code, and check for any flaws just like a human being would.

 

With that in mind, the modern Web Application Firewalls are being deployed with the ability of risk evaluation and the tracking of visitor behavior. This intelligence will help shed any attacks even before they start. Also encompassing the abilities of integrating with other network securities across the internet, the efficiency of these systems will be something to watch out for in the days to come.

 

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Security Tech News

Everything About The Facial Recognition Systems You Need To Know

Increase Your System Security By Using Facial Recognition

Facial Recognition, as soon as you come across this word your mind starts visualizing some security system scanning a face and identifying him/her but that’s limited to the movies. The real world scenario is a little different than that. With time and technology, facial recognition has now been on a high more than ever. Like most of us think, it isn’t only used for security purposes, nowadays; it has spread to variety of applications as well.

 

In this article you’ll get to know a lot about facial recognition systems, the different classes of facial recognition software. First let’s take a look at each of them separately:

 

Most of the current facial recognition systems work completely based on nodal points. These software marks the human face with 80 nodal points each measuring some variable (say width of nose, distance between eyes, cheek bone shape and so on). This data from each nodal point is stored as a faceprint within the database. Many of such faceprints are analyzed with the data from faces in an image or video keenly looking for nodal point matches.

 

However, this facial recognition system suffers from few major drawbacks. This is because basically these systems are not so good in identifying faces like humans can, when the conditions aren’t favorable (say lighting conditions etc.), they may well do below par than an average human can. What can be said is that the level of accuracy these systems exhibit isn’t up to the mark. In other words, these systems are less reliable.

 

Obviously, a better facial recognition system was needed and researchers could just provide that with the emerging 3D model facial recognition system. This method makes use of the 3D sensors to capture information about the facial features and structures. This 3D facial recognition system means that more distinctive features can be identified and stored. One of the other notable advantages is that we no longer have to bother about the lighting conditions or identification from a variety of angles.

 

Parallel to this 3D modeling facial recognition system, there is another which is primarily based on the visual details of the skin (say, skin tone or skin texture). This is a higher level of mathematical application where the patterns, spots and lines of person’s skin are arranged in the mathematical space and there you go, the computer does the rest.

 

Well all that said, facial recognition systems are more advantageous when employed for facial authentication than for identification. This is simply because, its too easy to trick computers using masks or disguises etc.

Also See: How To Improve Your Systems Security With Facial Recognition

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PC Guides Tech News Technologies Web Guides

These Online Programming Competitions Are The Best

programming competitions

Internet in more than one ways has fast become the best tool for all class of people. Today, the web is a collection of almost everything; Entertainment, News, Study Resources you name it and it’s there online. This situation has almost developed a win-win situation for both companies and the masses.

Companies have already started taking advantage of online competitions to pick out the best among the crowd. There actually are a lot of websites these days where you can compete with pioneers in different fields, given you are eligible. This article highlights the best online programming competitions across the internet. So, if you are a programmer here’s where you get to check how good a programmer you are.

These Online Programming Competitions Are The Best

The Best Programming Competitions

 

  • ACM ICPC

The ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC) is the most prestigious programming competition for college students, sponsored by IBM. After years from when it actually started, the ICPC has developed into the best contest that helps programmers showcase their potential in computer science.

It is known as one of the toughest programming contests on earth. You can check out a lot more information on this contest in its official website:

http://icpc.baylor.edu/

Initially you start in the regional level and once you clear them, you get to participate in world finals held in different continents each year.

 

  • Top Coder

Top Coder is another such competitions which tests your mettle to the core. Considered to be a most sought out programming competition, Top Coder is one of the largest communities in itself. All the members of these communities work on industry related problems and win cash prizes and fame. There are a variety of fields you can compete in Top Coder, and win cool gift hampers and cash prizes.

The best and somewhat unique part about Top Coder is their rating system. Its members are constantly rated based on their success and the one best rated programmer is awarded as the best coder over time. So, simply with Top Coder the more you compete, the better placed you will be.

Check out more about Top Coder on its official website:

http://www.topcoder.com/

 

  • Google Code Jam

Of the many contests Google conducts every now and then, Google Code Jam is one prominent programming competition among them. It is a multi round competition and is open for all internationally. Google uses this competition to filter the most talented programmers and place them within its organization.

This competition is time based and the participants are expected to solve algorithmic puzzles and problems. Anyways, participants can use any programming languages, text editors and development software for their solutions. Most part of the competition is online but the finals is an onsite event, similar to the ACM ICPC.

The official website of this programming competition is:

https://code.google.com/codejam/

 

  • Microsoft Imagine Cup

Microsoft is not far beyond Google in picking out its employees through an international competition. This competition brings together programming minds from all corners of the world to find solutions for the toughest of problems. This competition is further divided based on fields and Software Design is one of the five major technology competitions.

This competition is a once-per-year event, while there are also monthly challenges, where participants are to write a given snippet of code using as less lines as possible.

Find out more about this competition on the official website:

http:// www.imaginecup.com/

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Tech News Web Guides

Beamforming: This Simplest Approach Makes Your Wi-Fi Connection Faster

netgear beamforming+ wireless routers work on beamforming technology

The Netgear R6300 AC1750 dual band gigabit 802.11ac router after one and half years from its launch, is now equipped with the latest firmware update (v1.0.2.68). This latest update means that this model (and the R6200, R6250 models) will now have improved wireless performance and a wider coverage area. Based on the Beamforming Technology, this update is capable of providing a 60% improved performance at a distance of 50feet (As per Netgear’s tests).

Beamforming: This Simplest Approach Makes Your Wi-Fi Much Faster

What Is Beamforming Technology?

Beamforming, is one of the most simplest approach where in which the router instead of broadcasting signals in all directions, does it in one specific direction. This means that there will no longer be any broadcasting hoping it would reach the target, but instead there will only be aiming the signal to a specific targeted device. Looks quite simple isn’t it?

Actually in the retail point of view it wasn’t. Due to this reason, the market was stuck with routers only capable of broadcasting in all directions, in spite of suffering several disadvantages like the RF interference and dead spots. Anyways, thanks to NETGEAR for already making it a reality. But let’s see how actually this Beamforming Technology could be implemented.

How Beamforming Works?

Firstly, take for instance a bulb which radiates light in all directions equally. And obviously as you move away from the bulb the intensity keeps on decreasing where at a point there is no light at all. This is the case every other router which doesn’t support Beamforming.

Now consider the light radiated is forced to travel along a particular channel, now a fixed point along the channel there is increased intensity than in the earlier case. This is basically how a device supporting Beamforming is expected to work.

To elaborate, the beamformer (the device that transmits) focuses the entire signal towards a beamformee (a client receiving device) thus enabling less interference thus establishing a stronger, faster and more reliable wireless communication.

What’s NETGEAR Beamforming+ About?

NETGAR has developed a full range of wireless routers and adapters based on the 802.11ac standard which come with the integrated BeamForming Technology. In the earlier routers Beamforming was offered as an optional feature but not much emphasis was given until all benefits surfaced.

This option could only be utilized when both the router and the client device supported beamforming. This anyway isn’t the case with the NEATGEAR Beamforming+ wireless routers, where the client device need not necessarily support Beamforming.

In a nutshell, Beamforming+ refers to the various products of NETGEAR which have implemented the Beamforming Technique; hence obtaining improved Wi-Fi performance across all the Wi-Fi devices specially designed to work in the 5Ghz band.

Netgear isn’t the only manufacturer which is implementing the Beamforming technique. It is now fast becoming a common feature being employed in almost all high-end routers.

Also See: Why your Wi-Fi is not as fast as expected.

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Here’s What The AMD Eyefinity Technology Has In Store For You [Tech Review]

Gone were the days when multiple displays were limited only to science fiction movies, oil and gas industries, medical industries where in which they are still a necessity. Now even you can set up a multi-display system at the comfort of your home but all you need is some information about the AMD Eyefinity Technology.

amd eyefinity technology

With AMD’s latest update into its arsenal of PC Graphics Technologies, you can connect upto 6 display units back to back and each of them can be independently configured with the AMD Catalyst Centre. Plus here the point to note is, you can do all this using just a single graphic card. That’s it!

So bingo you can now have 6 times the gaming experience, larger productivity, entertainment and multi-tasking at its peaks. All you have to do is research a little if your current graphic cards supports Eyefinity or purchase something that does.

A single graphic card is all you need and this could be anything amongst the AMD’s 5000 series graphic cards; all of which are likely to have the DisplayPort support which is a must. Initially, the upper 5000 series only supported a maximum of 3 displays but now 6 is the limit with the recently more debated Radeon HD 5970 graphic card.

If you’re running on a 4000 series or some earlier GPU, just to be clear; mates your graphic cards aren’t good for Eyefinity. You better move on now. Its simply because though individually they are so good, for them to mange 6 displays is really difficult. Given their low horsepower and display resolutions compared to the modern GPUs.

But with Radeon HD 5470 supporting 4 times the 2560×1600 pixels display; and the 5870 , 5770 , 5670 supporting a maximum resolution of 6 times the 2560×1600 pixels moving on to one of these from your older GPUs to exerience Eyefinity wouldn’t be so difficult; if you know what I’m talking about.

All The Eyefinity Benefits:

So lets quickly go through the benefits these products bring in. And here are a few of them listed out for you:

Gaming – A newer level of excitement

If you love racing, shooting or flying or whatever, surely you’ll play better when you see and feel better and that’s what this technology is all about.

  • Get the best view of all the action coupled with thrill and excitement of all the gameplay.
  • In first-person shooter games, feel the adrenaline rush and detect enemies faster and sharper.
  • Your love for racing is sure to get doubled or tripled.

Productivity – Maximize the use of time

There is no arguing the fact that your workplace will transform into some newer dimensions. With multiple monitors things get a lot easier and faster. As per a study, ulitple monitor setups are 29% more effective for regular tasks, with a 24% increase in comfort and a 39% better to move through the bulk of information [Source: Tomshardware].

  • Multi-task effectively and analyze more images and data across multiple screens.
  • Optimize your productivity with improved workspace and high speed data access.
  • Utilize time to the fullest with minimum mouse clicking and window switching.

Entertainment – The quality and the pleasure

Till now we are settled with the idea of having a big screen television or a home theatre PC (HTPC) but why stop there when can get a lot more,

  • Group all the monitors to form that one big screen and get the ultimate home theatre experience.
  • Watch multiple channels across different screens which mean football, music, news, movies, internet pages all at once

Conclusion:

AMD is now busy with enabling CrossFire Technology to Eyefinity Technology through which there is a scope for more bandwidth and much improved GPU performance. Hence with Eyefinity things are only going to get better.

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This Is Why The World Moved Onto UEFI From BIOS

Why BIOS Is The Past And UEFI Is The Future

Finally after over three decades of supremacy, IBM’s creation i.e. the Basic Input Output System (BIOS) is now at the end of its glory days. Featuring advanced and better resources, the UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface) is all geared up to cast its shadow over BIOS. It wasn’t that there was no UEFI earlier but the advantages it has over BIOS couldn’t be neglected for long. In this article we take you through the differences between UEFI and BIOS; hence helping you understand what the UEFI is all about.

The Basic Functionality Of BIOS And UEFI:

BIOS and UEFI are both firmware interfaces in computers. Their basic function is same, and involves making your computer hardware and software co-ordinate with each other. They help booting up your computer in almost the same way. But the thing is, how they do what they do differs. Here is a fact-file of all those differences:

The Start-Up:

BIOS (within its ROM) contains that small 16-bit code which has the information of the address of device from when the operating system is to boot-up from. Because of its size (16-bit) the amount of code executed at an instance is much less and is a bottleneck for the current age of computing.

The UEFI on the other hand, stores this system boot-up information in a .efi file. This file is present in the special hard drive partition, ESP (EFI System Partition). Additionally this partition is also includes the operating system’s boot loader programs. So the UEFI itself takes care of the boot loading tasks eliminating the need for an operating system boot loader.

The Size Issues:

BIOS uses the MBR (Master Boot Record) to store information about the logical hard drive partitions. Since BIOS has to load the initial boot program into this 32-bit sized entries table, the maximum storage space that can be addressed is only 2TB. It means that in no sense you can partition a hard drive of size higher than 2TB. Or simply put, the MBR is incapable of handling a partition of size above 2TB.

In UEFI, the hard drive information is stored in the GUID partition table (GPT) instead of the MBR. The main difference is the 64-bit entries size in GPT, which enables the UEFI to hold drives of much larger volumes than the 2TB mark with that too with any number of partitions( for MBR only 4 partitions can be handled).

Speed and Security:

Since UEFI is platform independent, it doesn’t depend on the operating system that’s installed in your computer. So the brighter side is that there is automatically an improvement in performance of your computer. It means that there is significantly an enhancement in the boot time and the overall system speed.

It’s not just a good performer but also the safest it can get. In BIOS there are chances for the malware to reside in the MBR thus being undetected by the operating system and eventually disturbing the structure of the MBR. But UEFI comes with the Secure Boot feature, which loads the boot loaders after they present their digital signature assigned by the kernel. It goes on till the control is completely shifted to the hands of the operating system, thus eliminating any malware intrusions.

These are few areas in which there is a notable difference between the BIOS and UEFI. Also the fact that, it has long been featuring in the Mac computers, make it more reliable. But a downside is that, in a computer running on UEFI the installation of other operating system is really difficult.