‘Far Cry 4’ isn’t on Steam anymore because EA wants to sell it directly
What happened not too long ago with Electronic Arts and its Origin platform appears to be happening with Ubisoft too. As Kotaku has noticed, Ubisoft’s trio of tentpole releases for this fall — Assassin’s Creed Unity, Far Cry 4 and The Crew — are no longer available on Valve’s game store, seemingly disappearing overnight. Curiously, older entries in each respective franchise are still available (and reasonably priced) on Gabe Newell’s one-stop PC-gaming shop. Even weirder yet? VG247 has spotted that ACU and FC4 are now listed on Origin. No, it doesn’t make a lot of sense especially considering Ubisoft has its own digital storefront. We’ve pinged the outfit’s PR team for details about what’s up and will update this post should we hear back.
Filed under: Gaming, Home Entertainment, HD
Via: VG247
[VIDEO] A sneak peek at Android Lollipop on the Samsung Galaxy S4
SamMobile has already gotten exclusive sneak peeks at Android Lollipop running on the Galaxy S5, and continuing in this vein of leaks, they’ve managed to get Android Lollipop on the Samsung Galaxy S4 in hand as well. Check out the video that they put together which demoed it below:
As they mention in the video, this is an early build of the Lollipop update, emphasized by the lack of operational Wi-Fi which means SamMobile won’t be making the build available to try out. What is clear from the video is that the Galaxy S4’s update to Android Lollipop will be incredibly similar to the Galaxy S5’s, with plenty of common screens and menus that we have seen in the previous preview. Obviously, many of the stock Lollipop aspects are hidden below Samsung‘s TouchWiz UI, though it’s unclear if Samsung has managed to get rid of the lag and performance issues that have given it a reputation. All the same, it’s good to see that Samsung is hard at work at updating its phones, no matter how close they are to the end of their 18 month update window.
What do you think of Android Lollipop on the Samsung Galaxy S4? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below.
Source: SamMobile via Phandroid
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Half of the stars in our universe live in the space between galaxies
Hubble’s deep field imagery is breathtaking, but what lies between those thousands of spiral-arm galaxies? More stars, of course. Data collected by CIBER rockets (Cosmic Infrared Background ExpeRiment)show that as many as half of the stars in the universe are orphans — suns that spun out of their home galaxies in the wake of celestial events that tore universe in twain. These stars live in the dark space between galaxies, bathing the universe in the dim “intra-halo” light that the CIBER rockets picked up.
Although the light from these stars is readable using modern instruments, they are extraordinarily distant. “The night sky on a planet around such a star would be profoundly boring and black to human eyes,” explains Caltech experimental astrophysicist Michael Zemcov. “No other stars, or at least very few, no Milky Way band, only distant galaxies.” It may not be the brightest area of the universe, but it’s good to know that the space between galaxies is more than an empty void.
Filed under: Misc
Source: Motherboard, Reuters
Nexus 6 gets ready to drop in 12 more countries, should be coming before Christmas
While the saga of limited availability continues in the US, the rest of the world is wondering when they’ll even be able to pre-order the Nexus 6. As it turns out, it could be quite soon. Google has added an additional 12 countries to join the US on the “Country availability” page on their support website which includes the likes of Australia, the UK, and Sweden. If you happen to reside in one of these countries, you should be able to see the Nexus 6 page on Google Play now which should simply have “Coming Soon” emblazoned below the localized pricing of the Nexus 6 – when this will change to allow you to actually buy the phone is anyone’s guess.
When we reached out to Google about the availability of the devices (here I used Australia as an example), they were careful not to give a specific timeline for when the devices would become available, however did specify that the devices would be available before Christmas. Whether this means devices could be received by Christmas remains to be seen, but I wouldn’t hold my breath in case more supply issues hit these other markets as well.
The full list of countries includes:
- Australia
- Belgium
- Canada
- France
- Germany
- India
- Italy
- Japan
- Netherlands
- Spain
- Sweden
- United Kingdom
What do you think about the availability of the Nexus 6? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below.
Source: Google Support, Google Play Store (Nexus 6)
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TalkAndroid Daily Dose for November 7, 2014
With hectic schedules, it can be hard to keep track of everything in your news feed. That’s why we created the TalkAndroid Daily Dose. This is where we recap the day’s hottest stories so you can get yourself up to speed in quick fashion. Happy reading!!
Reviews
Motorola DROID Turbo review: What the Moto X could have been
Android TV
Nexus Player supports Ethernet through USB-OTG
Apps
Facebook is giving you better News Feed controls
Carriers
Verizon will carry the kid-friendly LG Kizon smartwatch
Verizon launches the Ellipsis 8: another low-end, self-branded tablet
Verizon Offers Football Leather Moto X
Google has a guide on how to achieve success with the Play Store
Google adds 7 additional countries to its list of supported Play Store Merchants
Hardware
Rolling display could be portable large screen
Phones
LG trademarks multiple names for possible future smart phones
Unannounced Motorola smartphone shows up in benchmark test with surprising specifications
Verizon Offers Football Leather Moto X
Galaxy S 6 could sport a curved dual-edged display
Test build of Android 5.0 leaks for the Galaxy S 4
Project Ara
Vsenn enters the modular smartphone market
Smartwatches
Verizon will carry the kid-friendly LG Kizon smartwatch
ASUS Zenwatch to launch in the United States this Sunday, November 9
Streaming Sticks
Walmart to launch Chromecast competitor for VUDU video service
Tablets
Verizon launches the Ellipsis 8: another low-end, self-branded tablet
Updates
Test build of Android 5.0 leaks for the Galaxy S 4
Come comment on this article: TalkAndroid Daily Dose for November 7, 2014
Apple Adds Genius Bar Reservations to Product Support Options [Mac Blog]
Apple has updated its Support website, adding the option for users to schedule Genius Bar appointments at their local Apple retail stores within the Support site. Previously, users had to navigate to their local Apple Store’s page to make appointments.
The new option, first spotted by 9to5Mac, is presented after a user defines what kind of problem they’re having with a particular product. Users are then prompted to enter their location and are given a choice of what Apple Store they’d like to visit. However, the option isn’t available for all issues. For example, users having battery issues with an iPad can make a Genius Bar reservation while users looking for help manually syncing their iPad to iTunes cannot.
In the last year, Apple has been overhauling its online support infrastructure, revamping its AppleCare website and chat interface. This is the latest move in the company’s efforts to streamline its support and make it as simple as possible for customers to seek solutions for potential problems.
Miramagia: A Free Magical Farm Game for Everyone
Playing an online game is not only a solution to kill time but also a solution to relieve stress and boredom. When people feel excited, their stress and boredom is gone. One thing to consider before playing a game is to choose the most suitable game. There is a huge selection of games these days, giving game lovers an ability to find a favorite game more easily. As for folks who love farming, planting trees and raising animals, they can choose a farm game. Many online farm games are free, allowing game lovers to play their favorite game without spending a penny.
Amongst the many free online farm games, a fairy game like Miramagia is a better choice. It is a free magical farm game for everyone. Unlike conventional farm games that allow players to plant conventional plants and to raise conventional animals, Miramagia gives players an opportunity to plant fantasy plants and to raise fantasy animals. If you have been looking for a game that allows you to raise cute dragons, you need to choose this magical farm game. Players also have the ability to create new spells in their laboratory and then cast magic spells to get a special benefit. As an example, players can cast a magic spell to make rain in which the water can be used for gardening.
Further, eye catching graphics, special creatures, beautiful plants and a great storyline are what the game actually offers. The colors are beautiful and the graphics are detailed. Whether Miramagia is played on a desktop computer or compatible mobile device, its colors and graphics are captivating. Miramagia is truly a fairy farm game for everyone because the storyline fits kids and adults. Game lovers will soon love the game because through basic lessons that are provided at the beginning, they can easily know how to perform jobs and have fun with all magical plants and animals.
Director James Marsh talks time and truth in ‘The Theory of Everything’
To encapsulate any person’s life into a 90 minute film is no mean feat, but when that person is one of history’s most brilliant minds? That’s a real toughie – and one that director James Marsh was eager to take on with The Theory of Everything. The thing you as a viewer have to remember is that this movie isn’t so much a story about the sheer genius of Stephen Hawking (played with care and integrity by Eddie Redmayne) as it is the story of a loving relationship thrashed by tragedy and success.
It very quickly becomes clear that Hawking’s mostly-steadfast wife Jane (a fantastic Felicity Jones) has grown to feel trapped by the growing demands of his illness and intellectual clout, which makes the emotional roller coaster that follows worthy of a few hours of your weekend. Need more? We briefly picked Marsh’s brain to learn more about what made him take the plunge, the limits of truth in filmmaking and how Hawking’s musings on time influenced how the movie ebbs and flows.
Warning: The following may contain spoilers, so watch the movie and come back if you’re concerned.
Engadget: First things first, why did you want to make The Theory of Everything?
James Marsh: Well, I was obviously aware of his life story. He’s a well known public figure, particularly in the UK, but when I was sent the script, I was under the impression that it was going to be a biography of Stephen Hawking. It wasn’t – it was a portrait of two people in a relationship which is tested in all sorts of ways that relationships aren’t normally tested. I was given this surprising perspective of Jane and Stephen being equal characters in the story, and that drew me in to what became an emotionally very complicated undertaking.
Engadget: Did you find it hard to balance how you portrayed him as Hawking, titan of science and Hawking, tragic lover and man?
JM: The emphasis in the screenplay was indeed the latter, but that offers its own perspective on his scientific ideas and the progression of the appalling illness he suffers from. An interesting tension arises between three elements – his marriage and his relationship with Jane, his scientific career and the increasing importance of that, and indeed his inexorably progressing illness which puts a different kind of stress on the marriage. We [the crew] look at Stephen’s career though that lens, if you like, and we showed some of the ideas he’s best known for and how we came upon them in broad strokes. I’m not sure that a feature film is really the best place to be discussing the abstractions of theoretical physics, so I envisioned myself as the audience, and I assumed that we’re all as smart as each other or as dumb as each other when it comes to the science stuff.
Engadget: Even as the relationship between Stephen and Jane becomes stressed in ways neither of them ever expected, Hawking continues to spend much of the film trying to understand time itself. Did his musings on the nature of time influence how you put everything together?
JM: There’s a fluidity to how we let time slip forward in the film. What I did was bring interludes of intimate home movie footage that would allow a sense of time passing as they do, home movies that suggest both nostalgia and time having passed in a certain kind of way. I brought that idea in to punctuate the film, so we could progress the story by a few years and you join the home movie footage and you see the extent of Stephen’s illness… which is the great marker of time in our film, oddly enough. It had to be a linear film — that illness is progressive, inexorable and it’s own sort of drama, if you like. That marks time for you very significantly, but you quickly understand that Stephen has gotten worse and is more disabled each time.
Still, there’s a playful aspect to the use of time in the film, which comes to its fruition at the very end when we reverse time in a way that people speculate would happen in a black hole. We see Stephen’s life play out in reverse, that allowed me to give him back what we’d taken in the course of the narrative, so we’d end up with an able-bodied Stephen, an innocent Stephen at the very end of the film.
Engadget: You’re just as well known for your documentaries as you are for your narrative films. Stephen Hawking himself said he felt the film was “broadly true” — what does that mean to a filmmaker like you?
JM: It’s about as good as you can get, to be honest. Stephen’s a very smart man, and he knows you cannot tell an accurate, precise, day-by-day account of his life for 25 years in a film. To say something is broadly true, that feels broadly true to him in its emotions is about the best you can hope for.
I think he was more surprised by the film than pleased, actually. He was pleasantly surprised that it wasn’t just awful. He said he felt it broadly true, and I’ve had documentaries where people have not said that about the story that’s absolutely based on their words. I’ll take that as the best kind of compliment one could hope for. He actually wrote to the production to tell us that he thought he was watching himself on screen toward the end of the story when Eddie becomes the Stephen Hawking of the iconic public imagination.
Engadget: This isn’t the first time you’ve tackled scientific topics in your films. What’s the most effective way express the complexities of science into a big film like this?
JM: I remember from my school days Archimedes jumping into his bath and displacing water and coming up with his famous principle, and of course Isaac Newton being hit on the head with an apple. In other words, this realm of human knowledge – which is mathematical, essentially – can have a playful visual element to it. Those two I remember vividly, despite being a not-particularly-good science student. It struck me that this was the level I could offer it: as uncomplicated, visual images. I’m not trying to get you to follow the mathematics, which I couldn’t follow any more than most people could. What was more valuable was trying to visualize in very simple ways some of the enormous, complicated ideas Stephen’s dealing with. That’s the sort of level that could work best for an audience, using things like beer on a table or peas and potatoes – very simple everyday objects – to somehow give you access to the nature of what he’s thinking about. The film doesn’t have a huge amount of science in it, and that was one of Stephen’s observations: he wished there was more.
Vsenn enters the modular smartphone market
Thus far the modular smartphone market has yet to manifest itself with actual products that consumers can buy. Google is getting very close with Project Ara and appears to be on track for a 2015 release. Google may get some competition from a new entrant to the yet to be established market. A new company called Vsenn has launched a web site indicating they are working on a modular smartphone.
The web site that surfaced for Vsenn claims the company was co-founded by a former program manager from the Nokia Android X project. Equally lacking in detail are specs for the device that is being worked on. Vsenn does indicate three modules will be swappable – the camera, battery, and processor/RAM combo. Along with the internal hardware, the company says they will offer a variety of back covers to customize the looks of the device.
Two other key concepts have been released by Vsenn. For security purposes, they will use triple layer protection to protect data on the device. A free VPN service will also be available for device owners as well as a secure cloud service. Vsenn also says they will install a vanilla version of Android on the device and they are committing to keeping it up to date for at least four years.
source: Vsenn
via: AndroidCentral
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Rolling display could be portable large screen
Samsung and LG both brought devices with curved screens to market as proofs of concept and more recently Samsung launched the Galaxy Note Edge that incorporates a curved display along one edge of the device. These efforts only scratch at the surface of what may eventually be possible with flexible displays. A new product from RollRR hopes to bring a display to market that takes full advantage of flexible display technology as well as providing a solution to real world problems.
The device RollRR is developing takes the form of a projector screen or perhaps a auto sunshade. This means the screen can be transported in a relatively small tube whose unwieldiness is determined by the length needed to accommodate the screen contained therein. The screen itself in a prototype developed by RollRR is made of e-paper, but the company hopes to eventually use full-color flexible OLED materials.
RollRR is also considering embedding touch technology into the screen so input capabilities could be added to the device. Eventually RollRR thinks a screen the size of a large flat screen television could be hauled around in a device that is roughly the size of an umbrella.
As far as uses, the use of e-paper makes the prototype, which measures 10.7-inches wides, mostly suitable for displays of textual information. However, it is easy to see how the RollRR could also be used for things like displaying architectural or engineering drawings.
RollRR hopes to launch a crowdfunding campaign in the next few months to be able to produce enough of the devices for developers to get some units and develop more uses for them. That would be followed by a full launch for the consumer market.
Would you be interested in something like the RollRR screen?
Click here to view the embedded video.
source: Engadget
Come comment on this article: Rolling display could be portable large screen
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