A phalanx in Ryse: Son of Rome

Occasionally, people ask me why Ars sometimes covers the relative sales performance of various consoles. "Who cares which console is 'winning'?" the argument goes. "I just want to play games." And my response is generally that relative sales performance has a direct impact on what games actually get made for the various consoles.

Case in point: troubled Ryse developer Crytek talked to Eurogamer recently about the potential for a sequel to its Xbox One launch exclusive, and the company expressed concern that there just weren't enough sales of the Microsoft console to make a sequel worthwhile.

"We have a good relationship with Microsoft. We are constantly looking at what we can do together," Crytek CEO Cevat Yerli said. "We are not 100 percent happy with Xbox One sales right now. So we want to wait 'till the current-gen and next-gen catches up. For Ryse 2, we aren't saying it's canceled. It's our IP. It just has to wait for the right timing. And the right timing means higher installed base across next-gen."

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Another kind of blackout: the field goes dark during a 2011 NFL game between the 49ers and Steelers. NFL

The National Football League (NFL) is trying to convince the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to preserve 39-year-old blackout rules that prevent games from being televised locally when tickets remain unsold. Last season, two games were blacked out locally in the regular season, while several blackouts were narrowly averted in the playoffs.

The FCC considered a proposal to eliminate its blackout rules last November, with then-acting Chairwoman Mignon Clyburn saying that the rules are outdated. Today, the rules aren’t actually responsible for the majority of blackouts, and they "have little relevance for sports other than professional football, because the distribution rights for most of the games in these sports are sold by individual teams, rather than the leagues,” the FCC said.

But they do matter to football. Naturally, the NFL wants to keep the rules in place—and argues that they are good for fans. Despite being the richest sports league in the country with more than $9 billion in annual revenue, the NFL said in an FCC filing that sports blackout rules are a “critical contributing factor” to its “ability to maintain its ‘free TV model.’”

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Aurich Lawson August isn’t the top time of year for thinking about tech policy. For many, it’s vacation time, a month when Americans are more focused on hacking a path to the nearest beach than hacking their computers.

Congress just left for vacation too, heading home last week for its traditional August recess. When it returns to Washington, election season will be in full swing, which means that betting on the passage of any bold legislation later this year is a long shot.

In light of that, now (and not December) is when we can look back at what activists, companies, and lawmakers were hoping to accomplish in the 113th Congress—compared to what actually happened. Which is to say "not much."

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Glenn Campbell meets Boring residents of a town in America that has a special relationship with Dull people in Scotland.

This screen appears when the City of London police seize your site.

The Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit (PIPCU) has arrested a 20-year-old man in Nottingham on suspicion of copyright infringement for running a proxy server providing access to other sites subject to legal blocking orders.

The man was questioned by police but has been released on bail. The arrest was made after police—with the support of the Federation Against Copyright Theft (FACT)—found evidence relating to the creation of a proxy server that provided access to 36 other websites that had been blocked for hosting illegal or infringing content.

The proxy server in question is Immunicity, run by the Torrenticity Group—as first highlighted by TorrentFreak—which was designed to unblock both torrent sites and proxies. It required users to make a simple change to their browser settings—adding a Proxy Auto Configuration file (PAC)—which could then instruct your browser to send your Web traffic through different proxies depending on the URL you are looking for. This means that you could access sites that had been blocked by UK ISPs following High Court orders, such as The Pirate Bay, KickassTorrents, HEET, ExtraTorrent, YiFY, and EZTV. Immunicity and similar services therefore fall foul of anti-circumvention provisions within UK copyright law.

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The World Health Organization in Geneva is expected to announce new measures to combat the Ebola virus, which has now claimed over 900 lives in West Africa.

A couple of weeks back, Western Digital updated their NAS-specific drive lineup with 5 and 6 TB Red drives. In addition, 7200 RPM Red Pro models with 2 - 4 TB capacities were also introduced. We have already looked at the performance of the WD Red, and it now time for us to take the WD Red Pro for a spin. In our 4 TB NAS drive roundup from last year, we also indicated that efforts would be taken to add more drives to the mix along with an updated benchmarking scheme involving RAID-5 volumes. The Red Pro gives us an opportunity to keep our word. Read on for our comparison of 10 different 4 TB hard drives (both consumer NAS-specific, as well as nearline units) targeting the NAS market.

President Barack Obama says he has authorised targeted airstrikes against Islamic militants in northern Iraq, if they threaten US interests.

With just two years to go, Julia Carneiro sat down with Mayor Eduardo Paes to discuss what impact the 2016 Olympic Games will have on the city.

While the original SHIELD Tablet review hit most of the critical points in the review, there wasn't enough time to investigate everything. One of the areas where there wasn't enough data was gaming battery life. While the two hour figure gave a good idea of what to expect in terms of the lower bound for battery life, it didn't give a realistic amount of time for battery life

One of the first issues that I attempted to tackle after the review was battery life performance in our T-Rex rundown when capping FPS to ~30, which was still enough to exceed the competition in performance, and avoid any chance of throttling. This also gives a much better idea of real world battery life, as most games shouldn't come close to stressing the Kepler GPU in Tegra K1.

By capping T-Rex to 30 FPS, the SHIELD Tablet actually comes quite close to the battery life delivered by SHIELD Portable with significantly more performance. The SHIELD Portable also needed a larger 28.8 WHr battery and a smaller, lower power 5" display in order to achieve its extra runtime. It's clear that the new Kepler GPU architecture, improved CPU, and 28HPm process are enabling much better experiences compared to what we see on SHIELD Portable with Tegra 4.

The other aspect that I wanted to revisit were temperatures, I mentioned that I noticed skin temperatures were high, but I didn't know what they really were. In order to get a better idea temperatures in the device, Andrei managed to make a tool to log such data from on-device temperature sensors. Of course, the most interesting data is always generated at the extremes, so we'll look at an uncapped T-Rex rundown first.

In order to understand the results I'm about to show, this graph is critical. As ambient temperatures were lower (15-18C vs 20-24C) when I ran this variant of the test, we don't see much throttling until the end of the test where there's a dramatic drop to 46 FPS.

As we can see, the GPU clock graph almost perfectly mirrors the downward trend that is presented in the FPS graph. It's also notable that relatively little time is spent at the full 852 MHz that the graphics processor is capable of. The vast majority of the time is spent at around 750 MHz, which suggests that this test isn't pushing the GPU to the limit, although looking at the FPS graph would also confirm this as it's sitting quite close to 60 FPS throughout the run.

While I was unable to quantify skin temperature measurements in the initial review, battery temperature is often quite close to skin temperature. Here, we can see that battery temperatures (which is usually the charger IC temperature) hit a maximum of around 45C as I predicted. While this is perfectly acceptable to the touch, I was definitely concerned about how hot the SoC would get under such conditions.

Internally, it seems that the temperatures are much higher than the 45C battery temperature might suggest. We see max temperatures of around 85C, which is edging quite close to the maximum safe temperature for most CMOS logic. The RAM is also quite close to maximum safe temperatures. It definitely seems that NVIDIA is pushing their SoC to the limit here, and such temperatures would be seriously concerning in a desktop PC, although not out of line for a laptop.

On the other hand, it's a bit unrealistic for games not developed for Tegra K1 to push the GPU to the limit like this. Keeping this in mind, I did another run with the maximum frame rate capped to 30 FPS. As even the end of run FPS is over 30 FPS, showing the FPS vs time graph would be rather boring as it's a completely flat line pegged at 30 FPS. Therefore, it'll be much more interesting to start with the other data I've gathered.

As one can see, despite performance near that of the Adreno 330, the GPU in Tegra K1 sits at around 450 MHz for the majority of this test. There is a bit of a bump towards the end, but that may be due to the low battery overlay as this test was unattended until the end.

In addition to the low GPU clocks, we see that the skin temperatures never exceed 34C, which is completely acceptable. This bodes especially well for the internals, which should be much cooler in comparison to previous runs.

Here, we see surprisingly low temperatures. Peak temperatures are around 50C and no higher, with no real chance of throttling. Overall, this seems to bode quite well for Tegra K1, even if the peak temperatures are a bit concerning. After all, Tegra K1 delivers immense amounts of performance when necessary, but manages to sustain low temperatures and long battery life when it it isn't. More importantly, it's important to keep in mind that the Kepler GPU in Tegra K1 was designed for desktop and laptop use first. The Maxwell GPU in NVIDIA's Erista SoC is the first to be designed to target mobile devices first. That's when things get really interesting.

The BBC's James Reynolds reacts to an explosion as fighting resumes in Gaza following the end of a three-day truce on Friday morning.

Wyre Davies reports from the blockaded border crossing between Israel and Gaza.

The summer months are usually some of the quietest in the tech world, however motherboard manufacturers seem to be keen to release preview images of the upcoming X99 platform. Next in line is GIGABYTE with its X99 Gaming G1 WIFI. As GIGABYTE’s new gaming line is still gaining a foothold, synchronizing the GPU and Motherboard gaming ranges, the color scheme is a combination of red, black, white, grey and some green for audio.

The X99 Gaming G1 WIFI looks like it comes in at the top end of the range, featuring a full 4-way PCIe layout with 8 DIMM slots. We see 10 SATA 6 Gbps ports, two of the SATA with SATA Express which is complemented by the M.2 slot in the middle of the PCIe slots. The M.2 area also houses a mini-PCIe slot which contains the WiFi module, with the antenna connected via the rear panel next to the rear audio. It looks like that the M.2 and WiFi modules can be used at the same time along with GPUs however we might test if we get the motherboard in. The heatsinks are all connected via heat-pipes low to the motherboard to avoid conflict with other devices.

While we cannot see the rear IO, the bottom of the motherboard contains two USB 3.0 headers, two USB 2.0 headers and a thunderbolt header. The audio looks like a Sound Core 3D combined with filter caps, PCB separation, an EMI shield on the codec, an audio gain switch and a switchable op-amp. The top right of the motherboard houses several buttons and switches for dual BIOS/selectable BIOS functionality, along with voltage read points, a power switch and a two-digit debug. The extra power for the PCIe slots is provided by SATA power next to the SATA ports.

I would imagine the Gaming G1 WIFI to be nearer the top of GIGABYTE’s X99 launch range, but we will have to wait until launch day to see some full specifications and pricing.

Source: GIGABYTE Tech Daily

Malaysia's state investment firm Khazanah Nasional has proposed a "complete overhaul" of troubled national carrier Malaysia Airlines.

Ancient Japanese art inspires researchers to design self-folding robots that behave like "real-life transformers".

Ancient Japanese art inspires researchers to design self-folding robots that behave like "real-life transformers".

Roads outside Bearsden Academy in Glasgow have become so busy that the children have been resorted to checking-up on their parents.

Version:next-20140808 (linux-next) Released:2014-08-08

Turkey will hold a presidential election on Sunday - the first time in the country's history that the position will be chosen, not by parliament, but by the Turkish public.

Danish sports scientists are calling on authorities around the world to help the homeless play football, after studies showed it improved their health and well-being.