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Long overdue, Lightroom 5 adds an automatic distortion and perspective correction tool.

(Credit:
Lori Grunin/CNET)

Adobe’s latest iteration of its raw-editing and management software, Adobe Lightroom 5, enters a public beta today with a modest set of enhancements that will make some photographers very happy but a large number of others shrug and choose to skip it. The biggest news: support for proxy editing of disconnected images, a feature dubbed Smart Preview. Other highlights include an overdue distortion and perspective correction tool, Upright; reusable custom page layouts and page-numbering tweaks in the Book module; a radial filter; the expansion of the spot healing/clone tool into a full-blown healing brush; and the ability to insert playable videos into slideshows. Plus, there are the usual myriad small updates.

What’s not here: still no face recognition or tagging, HDR editing, panorama stitching, or expansion of the video capabilities. And as far as I can tell, performance hasn’t improved; in fact, it seems a little slower on my system, though that may be beta overhead that will be tuned out before it becomes final. It took about four and a half minutes to import in place 11850 files (on a 2.2GHz Core i7 system with 8GB RAM equipped with a 2GB nVidia Quadro 2000M and running 64-bit Windows 7).

While dropping support for Windows Vista will likely pass without a whimper, abandoning support for OS X 10.6.x may prevent some folks from jumping to LR5 — the last estimates I found indicate that about about 30 percent of OS X users have resisted the call of the wilder, sticking with Snow Leopard rather than moving to newer, sleeker cats. I’m still waiting to hear from Adobe about what this means for camera codec updates for people who decide to stick with Lightroom 4.4 once LR5 formally ships.

If you’re contemplating installing the beta, keep in mind that if you’re a current LR user you’ll end up with a schism in your workflow. As with previous Lightroom beta programs, LR5 beta can’t import LR4 catalogs, so you’ll either have to start fresh with a new catalog and hope that when LR5 ships you’ll really want to buy it, or end up duplicating your work in both versions to keep your LR4 catalog current. You can keep side-by-side installations of the two versions, though I’ve found LR 4.4 occasionally becomes unstable and crashes when jumping back and forth. The beta will expire on June 30, 2013, but it’s free to all, and you can provide your feedback here.

So, onto the new features. Anybody out there remember proxy editing? Back when systems couldn’t handle large image files without grinding to a halt, software would sample images down to smaller, lower-resolution versions that you’d work on, then it would apply the transformations and adjustments in the background. Well, Adobe has taken that idea and applied it to working with images stored on disconnected drives. Called Smart Previews, LR5 can selectively or automatically generate roughly 2,560×1,596-pixel (size depends on original aspect ratio), 1.5MB (or smaller) versions of images which it stores in its lossy DNG format. You generate them via a globally applied check box on import, select to generate them individually on already-imported files, or set a global preference for it. They can also be selectively discarded. It took about 45 minutes to generate the SPs for a little more than 6,000 images.

When a drive is disconnected, you can work on these proxies; when you reconnect the drive, the application automatically syncs the changes. You can also export from the Smart Preview. The SP files reside in a separate, Smart Previews catalog that lives in the same folder as the main LR catalogs. Since they’re regular DNG files, you can even open them in Photoshop, which is nice, though the folder structure is annoyingly discrete, creating a separate folder for each file. SPs for 5,615 files took 5.7GB of disk space (in contrast, the LR5 catalog of 9,652 files with minimal previews took only about 4.5GB).

Smart Previews worked seamlessly for me. If you have images scattered across multiple storage devices that you have to retrieve periodically, this may come in quite handy. But the catalog bloat may require that if you have a smallish SSD, you’ll have to use another storage device for your Lightroom catalogs. You can filter by Smart Preview for quick purges; other new filter criteria include file size, bit depth, number of color channels, color profile and PNG file type (you can now import PNG files).

This version grows the spot healing tool into a brush for noncircular fixes and gains an opacity slider for fine tuning.

(Credit:
Lori Grunin/CNET)

Another universally welcome new capability is the expansion of the spot healing/clone tool into a brush to work on irregularly shaped areas. It’s not without its glitches, perhaps because it’s unused to finding matches for larger areas — while trying to fix a large under-eye area it drew from the lips, which is not a good look — but it’s certainly a useful feature extension. Also, Shift+Q will toggle you between clone and heal.

There’s also a new option for healing, Visualize Spots, which I found rather hit and miss. It renders a black and white edge-detection view with a sensitivity slider so that you can presumably see errata better. I wish it were smarter and knew how to filter out elements that obviously aren’t spots, or at least give you a way to scribble over areas to ignore like in the Touch apps.

Visualize Spots provides an edge-detection view.

(Credit:
Lori Grunin/CNET)

The new Radial Filter operates exactly like the Graduated Filter to apply circular masked adjustments, and I think it will prove to be a quick replacement for some retouching I’ve been handling with local adjustment brush operations. It also provides a workaround for applying vignette effects off center or in multiple locations, which you can’t do with post-crop vignetting. Adobe has tweaked the Graduated Filter and Adjustment brush with the ability to duplicate the mask (Alt+Ctrl+drag or Option+Cmd+drag on the mask) — that’s really nice for applying adjustments both inside and outside the mask.

Another feature I think will please lots of folks is Radial Filter, which is essentially a circular version of the Graduated filter.

(Credit:
Lori Grunin/CNET)

While you could always correct lens distortion with the lens tools and straighten manually via Crop and Straighten, Lightroom has long needed a more automated but lens-independent way of handling distortion and perspective correction. It now offers Upright, which can automatically level an image, as well as adjust vertical perspective correction, with or without cropping to the resulting image area.

It works pretty well, and you can use the automatic adjustments as a jumping-off point to fine-tune with the manual controls. It would be nice if the automated results iterated back into the manual settings sliders, though.

Upright works well most of the time…

(Credit:
Lori Grunin/CNET)

…but gets confused on occasion. Oops.

(Credit:
Lori Grunin/CNET)

If you want to insert videos in your slideshows — not just grabbing the first frame, as in LR4, but videos that play upon loading — now you can. And if, like me, you want to strip the audio track out, the new ability to balance the audio between an attached music file or audio track is a welcome if kludgy solution.

Finally, on the major-update front, you can now create custom page layouts, save them, and apply them in subsequent projects. There’s also new controls over page numbering.

More feature tweaks include (in no particular order) grid overlays in loupe view; the ability to geotag photos by dragging a saved location to photos or drag photos to a saved location in My Locations, plus the addition of a direction field in the EXIF metadata; support for Windows HiDPI; aspect ratio control in manual lens corrections; and some more. One I like is an aspect ratio overlay that you can enable in crop mode.

While there aren’t any glamorous new features in this version, Smart Previews and the Graduated Filter are meat-and-potatoes features for some photographers. And trying the beta is a free way for current nonusers to figure out if Lightroom is a better solution than what they’re using now.

Article source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/cnet/pRza/~3/auYPY0G1kcQ/4505-3513_7-35663423.html

Long overdue, Lightroom 5 adds an automatic distortion and perspective correction tool.

(Credit:
Lori Grunin/CNET)

Adobe’s latest iteration of its raw-editing and management software, Adobe Lightroom 5, enters a public beta today with a modest set of enhancements that will make some photographers very happy but a large number of others shrug and choose to skip it. The biggest news: support for proxy editing of disconnected images, a feature dubbed Smart Preview. Other highlights include an overdue distortion and perspective correction tool, Upright; reusable custom page layouts and page-numbering tweaks in the Book module; a radial filter; the expansion of the spot healing/clone tool into a full-blown healing brush; and the ability to insert playable videos into slideshows. Plus, there are the usual myriad small updates.

What’s not here: still no face recognition or tagging, HDR editing, panorama stitching, or expansion of the video capabilities. And as far as I can tell, performance hasn’t improved; in fact, it seems a little slower on my system, though that may be beta overhead that will be tuned out before it becomes final. It took about four and a half minutes to import in place 11850 files (on a 2.2GHz Core i7 system with 8GB RAM equipped with a 2GB nVidia Quadro 2000M and running 64-bit Windows 7).

While dropping support for Windows Vista will likely pass without a whimper, abandoning support for OS X 10.6.x may prevent some folks from jumping to LR5 — the last estimates I found indicate that about about 30 percent of OS X users have resisted the call of the wilder, sticking with Snow Leopard rather than moving to newer, sleeker cats. I’m still waiting to hear from Adobe about what this means for camera codec updates for people who decide to stick with Lightroom 4.4 once LR5 formally ships.

If you’re contemplating installing the beta, keep in mind that if you’re a current LR user you’ll end up with a schism in your workflow. As with previous Lightroom beta programs, LR5 beta can’t import LR4 catalogs, so you’ll either have to start fresh with a new catalog and hope that when LR5 ships you’ll really want to buy it, or end up duplicating your work in both versions to keep your LR4 catalog current. You can keep side-by-side installations of the two versions, though I’ve found LR 4.4 occasionally becomes unstable and crashes when jumping back and forth. The beta will expire on June 30, 2013, but it’s free to all, and you can provide your feedback here.

So, onto the new features. Anybody out there remember proxy editing? Back when systems couldn’t handle large image files without grinding to a halt, software would sample images down to smaller, lower-resolution versions that you’d work on, then it would apply the transformations and adjustments in the background. Well, Adobe has taken that idea and applied it to working with images stored on disconnected drives. Called Smart Previews, LR5 can selectively or automatically generate roughly 2,560×1,596-pixel (size depends on original aspect ratio), 1.5MB (or smaller) versions of images which it stores in its lossy DNG format. You generate them via a globally applied check box on import, select to generate them individually on already-imported files, or set a global preference for it. They can also be selectively discarded. It took about 45 minutes to generate the SPs for a little more than 6,000 images.

When a drive is disconnected, you can work on these proxies; when you reconnect the drive, the application automatically syncs the changes. You can also export from the Smart Preview. The SP files reside in a separate, Smart Previews catalog that lives in the same folder as the main LR catalogs. Since they’re regular DNG files, you can even open them in Photoshop, which is nice, though the folder structure is annoyingly discrete, creating a separate folder for each file. SPs for 5,615 files took 5.7GB of disk space (in contrast, the LR5 catalog of 9,652 files with minimal previews took only about 4.5GB).

Smart Previews worked seamlessly for me. If you have images scattered across multiple storage devices that you have to retrieve periodically, this may come in quite handy. But the catalog bloat may require that if you have a smallish SSD, you’ll have to use another storage device for your Lightroom catalogs. You can filter by Smart Preview for quick purges; other new filter criteria include file size, bit depth, number of color channels, color profile and PNG file type (you can now import PNG files).

This version grows the spot healing tool into a brush for noncircular fixes and gains an opacity slider for fine tuning.

(Credit:
Lori Grunin/CNET)

Another universally welcome new capability is the expansion of the spot healing/clone tool into a brush to work on irregularly shaped areas. It’s not without its glitches, perhaps because it’s unused to finding matches for larger areas — while trying to fix a large under-eye area it drew from the lips, which is not a good look — but it’s certainly a useful feature extension. Also, Shift+Q will toggle you between clone and heal.

There’s also a new option for healing, Visualize Spots, which I found rather hit and miss. It renders a black and white edge-detection view with a sensitivity slider so that you can presumably see errata better. I wish it were smarter and knew how to filter out elements that obviously aren’t spots, or at least give you a way to scribble over areas to ignore like in the Touch apps.

Visualize Spots provides an edge-detection view.

(Credit:
Lori Grunin/CNET)

The new Radial Filter operates exactly like the Graduated Filter to apply circular masked adjustments, and I think it will prove to be a quick replacement for some retouching I’ve been handling with local adjustment brush operations. It also provides a workaround for applying vignette effects off center or in multiple locations, which you can’t do with post-crop vignetting. Adobe has tweaked the Graduated Filter and Adjustment brush with the ability to duplicate the mask (Alt+Ctrl+drag or Option+Cmd+drag on the mask) — that’s really nice for applying adjustments both inside and outside the mask.

Another feature I think will please lots of folks is Radial Filter, which is essentially a circular version of the Graduated filter.

(Credit:
Lori Grunin/CNET)

While you could always correct lens distortion with the lens tools and straighten manually via Crop and Straighten, Lightroom has long needed a more automated but lens-independent way of handling distortion and perspective correction. It now offers Upright, which can automatically level an image, as well as adjust vertical perspective correction, with or without cropping to the resulting image area.

It works pretty well, and you can use the automatic adjustments as a jumping-off point to fine-tune with the manual controls. It would be nice if the automated results iterated back into the manual settings sliders, though.

Upright works well most of the time…

(Credit:
Lori Grunin/CNET)

…but gets confused on occasion. Oops.

(Credit:
Lori Grunin/CNET)

If you want to insert videos in your slideshows — not just grabbing the first frame, as in LR4, but videos that play upon loading — now you can. And if, like me, you want to strip the audio track out, the new ability to balance the audio between an attached music file or audio track is a welcome if kludgy solution.

Finally, on the major-update front, you can now create custom page layouts, save them, and apply them in subsequent projects. There’s also new controls over page numbering.

More feature tweaks include (in no particular order) grid overlays in loupe view; the ability to geotag photos by dragging a saved location to photos or drag photos to a saved location in My Locations, plus the addition of a direction field in the EXIF metadata; support for Windows HiDPI; aspect ratio control in manual lens corrections; and some more. One I like is an aspect ratio overlay that you can enable in crop mode.

While there aren’t any glamorous new features in this version, Smart Previews and the Graduated Filter are meat-and-potatoes features for some photographers. And trying the beta is a free way for current nonusers to figure out if Lightroom is a better solution than what they’re using now.

Article source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/cnet/pRza/~3/auYPY0G1kcQ/4505-3513_7-35663423.html

The patch for a security flaw in the Windows kernel has been found to crash Windows 7 systems, and has been withdrawn from Windows Update until a fix can be found.

Microsoft has withdrawn one of the security updates it released on Tuesday, following reports of crashes on Windows 7 systems.

Patch MS13-036/2823324, a fix for a critical-rated security flaw in the Windows file system kernel-mode driver ntfs.sys, was part of a bundle of software updates released by Microsoft earlier this week as part of its regular ‘Patch Tuesday’ scheduled update cycle. Unfortunately, it seems the cure is worse than the disease: while the hole it patches may or may not ever be exploited on your system, the chances are good installing the patch will crash your computer hard.

With the patch installed, affected systems – thus far seemingly limited to Windows 7 machines – will crash on reboot, with some reports claiming that the system will see the hard drives as uncleanly mounted and run CheckDisk on every boot. While this is not thought to put any data at risk, it’s certainly annoying – and doubly so when the crashes continue to mount, causing delays as you wait for yet another disk check to complete.

Microsoft has confirmed that there is something seriously awry with the update, posting a knowledge base entry claiming it is investigating the issue. ‘Systems may not recover from a restart, or applications cannot load, after security update 2823324 is applied,‘ the company admitted in the posting. ‘We recommend that customers uninstall this update.‘

To prevent any further mishaps, Microsoft has removed the patch from Windows Update until a fixed version can be released – but with most users installing updates as soon as they are released by the company, the damage is likely already done. For those who do uninstall the patch, or who never installed it in the first place, the race is now on for Microsoft to release a fixed version before ne’er-do-wells take advantage of the opportunity to attack systems through the vulnerability.

This most recent Patch Tuesday is doubly embarrassing for the software giant: as well as releasing a broken patch, it also failed to fix a major security hole highlighted at the Pwn2Own event earlier this year, leaving its customers vulnerable to attack.

Article source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/bit-tech/news/~3/RWbkcjo7E0A/1

Article source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/GamingRipplesWeb/~3/qf6wzXOs_M0/

Windows XP is officially serving its twelve month notice, with security updates to cease on the 8th of April 2014.

Microsoft has reiterated its plans to kill off Windows XP – the operating system that just won’t die – stating that support for the platform will come to an end exactly one year from today.

While Windows XP had its detractors at launch, largely thanks to a colourful user interface that saw it dubbed the FisherPrice My First Operating System, it has proved a persistent presence in the market. By market share the operating system commands an impressive 38.73 per cent – beaten only by Windows 7, with Windows Vista, Windows 8, OS X, Linux and the enigmatic ‘other’ making up a mere 18.3 per cent combined. This despite it being three full releases out of date and an impressive eleven years old.

It’s not a platform Microsoft particularly likes supporting, however. The company has made numerous moves to kill it off in the past, officially phasing it out in 2007 only to change its mind following the poor reception of Windows Vista. Its support lifetime, originally planned to expire on the 30th of June 2008, was boosted to April 2014 – a date which is now drawing worryingly close for those who still rely on the platform.

Microsoft has done much to convince businesses and home users to make the move to a more modern operating system, introducing business-friendly features – including a virtualised Windows XP mode for otherwise incompatible legacy applications – to Windows 7 as a way of making up for the flop that was Vista. More recently, it’s been going on something of a PR offensive: back in 2012 the company claimed that Windows XP was costing companies millions that could be saved with a switch to Windows 7.

For the third of the world that’s still using Windows XP, however, the 8th of April 2014 marks a major deadline: after that date, Microsoft will make good on its threats and cease to publish security updates for the operating system. While it has long since stopped offering new features for the OS – you can’t get DirectX 11 on Windows XP, for example, or Internet Explorer 10 – it still publishes security updates and bug-fixes, but that will stop dead next year.

That is, unless the company changes its mind. With more than a third of the internet still sticking with Windows XP, the company would leave a lot of clients high and dry with a complete cessation of patching – and while it’s eager to convince people to pick up a copy of Windows 8, it’s less eager to be seen as the reason why worms, viruses and other malware suddenly exploded in April 2014. Officially, this deadline is the very last for Windows XP – but, then again, we’ve heard that before.

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The new Desktop HDD is the first desktop hard drive from Seagate with the new naming scheme.

(Credit:
Seagate)

Seagate announced today the shipment of its 4TB Desktop HDD 3.5-inch internal hard drive for general consumers. While this is not the first 4TB hard drive on the market, the company says it’s the first that uses the 1TB-per-platter design. Basically, on the inside, the Desktop HDD comes with four platters (disks), each offering 1TB of storage space.

The Desktop HDD is also the first desktop internal drive from Seagate that uses the new streamlined naming convention. Seagate’s consumer-grade hard drives were formerly called Barracuda. Earlier this year, the company also shipped the first hybrid drive of the same naming scheme, the Laptop Thin SSHD.

The new Desktop HDD comes with 64MB of cache memory and supports the latest SATA 3 (6Gbps) standard. It also works with previous versions of SATA, including SATA 2 (3Gbps) and SATA (1.5Gbps). Unlike the previous Barracuda drives that spun at 7,200rpm, the new Desktop HDD spins at only 5,900rpm and consumes about 35 percent less energy. Seagate says that the drive will still offer fast performance with a sustained writing speed of about 145MBps.

According to Seagate, the new drive is designed for both desktop computers and external storage solutions, such as NAS servers or external hard drives. Generally, hard drives of 2TB or larger require a modern operating system (Windows 7 or later) and UEFI BIOS to work, but the Desktop HDD comes with DiskWizard software that allows it to work with Windows XP. To use it as a boot drive, however, UEFI BIOS is needed.

To put things in perspective, 4TB is equivalent to about 500 hours of HD video, 1 million MP3 songs, or 800,000 digital photos. The 4TB Desktop HDD is about 800,000 times larger in capacity than the first desktop hard drive Seagate introduced back in 1979, but the physical size has remained about the same.

The 4TB Desktop HDD is available now and costs about $190, which is much lower than its competitors.

Article source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/cnet/pRza/~3/Kx7NR3TL7pw/

The InFocus BigTouch melds a Windows 8 PC with a pretty hefty 55in touch-screen display, but is anyone likely to buy it?

While Microsoft may have done work on ensuring its Windows RT and Windows 8 Modern UI would play well with large-screen devices, starting with its work with Samsung on the original Microsoft Surface right the way through to internal testing of large-format touch-screen wall-mounted displays – but nobody was likely to predict the launch of a commercially-available 55in all-in-one (AIO) PC.

Nevertheless, that’s exactly what has happened over in the US: InFocus has announced the BigTouch, a 55in touch-sensitive display packing a PC running Windows 8 with its divisive tile-based Modern UI. With a somewhat disappointing 1,920×1,080 resolution – proof, if proof were needed, that the display portion is a repurposed HDTV panel with added touch-sensitivity – the large-format system also includes a bundled wireless keyboard and mouse fo those who prefer interacting with the system in a more traditional manner.

‘Imagine interacting with virtually any content you want on a beautiful 55-inch high definition touch display,‘ crowed Robert Detwiler, InFocus product manager, at the launch.’The BigTouch is the ideal product for many customers including educators who are using education software, software companies that want to demonstrate their applications on a large scale, or even digital signage companies looking for a display with an integrated PC. Ultimately, the BigTouch is for anyone who wants the Windows 8 touch experience on a large PC display.‘

Anyone, that is, who doesn’t need the latest and greatest hardware. While some aspects of the BigTouch, including its two gigabit Ethernet ports, are pretty high-end, its use of a Sandy Bridge-era Core i5 processor is slightly disappointing – although the company claims to be planning to update the product to support Ivy Bridge chips in the future, hopefully before Intel releases the fourth-generation Haswell architecture. Full specifications have not been released, but the system appears to be based in large on the company’s existing Windows 7 MondoPad ‘Giant Touch Tablet’ product, which features a Core i5-2520M processor, 4GB of DDR3 memory, and 2.4GHz 802.11a/g/b/n Wi-Fi.

The BigTouch also includes six USB ports, a 120GB solid-state drive, and a casing that demonstrates InTouch’s slight abuse of the ‘all-in-one’ concept: the computer hardware itself is mounted on the rear of the display in a separate case, which connects to the touch-screen through a proprietary connection. While this, in theory, makes it easier to upgrade and maintain, it also takes away one of the biggest selling points of an all-in-one: the fact that it’s all-in-one. If customers are happy with the hardware being functionality separate to the display, there’s little to stop them just buying a 55in Full HD multi-touch display and mounting something like the Intel NUC on a VESA bracket at the rear.

Thus far, InFocus has not confirmed plans to release the device outside the US, where it is to retail for an impressive $4,999 (£3,306 excluding taxes) – a price that will keep it firmly out of most people’s living room.

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Microsoft’s Windows Blue, the next-generation operating system due to replace Windows 8 later this year, has leaked ahead of schedule thanks to a clumsy partner.

A disk image purporting to be an early version of Windows Blue, Microsoft’s upcoming operating system refresh, has leaked ahead of schedule via file-sharing sites, offering a glimpse at the company’s planned direction.

Courtesy of an incautious French partner, Microsoft’s next-generation Windows Blue operating system can now be downloaded and installed from a 2.63GB DVD ISO – to which we will, naturally, not be providing a link. Believed to be a feature-complete of the operating system, which heralds a claimed move to an Apple-like annual release cycle for Microsoft’s Windows platform, the ISO provides confirmation of what earlier leaks have been suggesting.

First, the more important details: as claimed, the Windows Blue ISO does ship with a point-revision to the Windows Kernel, a move normally reserved for full operating system releases: Windows XP had an earlier kernel version than Windows Vista, for example, and Windows 7 incremented the kernel version again prior to the launch of Windows 8 with yet another new kernel. The inclusion of an incremented kernel version in Windows Blue marks the release as more than just Windows 8 Service Pack 1 – for all that Microsoft is thought to be releasing the software as a free upgrade for users of Windows 8.

Other changes are more aesthetic: the number of accent colours available in the personalisation options has been boosted over Windows 8, while it’s now possible to alter the tile sizes on the Start screen in either direction. For touch-centric devices – Microsoft’s clear target for the Modern UI – new gesture controls have been implemented, including the ability to swipe downwards to access applications quickly and easily.

The biggest change to the tile-based user interface previously known as Metro, however, comes in the form of rudimentary multi-tasking: rather than taking over the entire display, apps running in the Modern UI are now able to run side-by-side with each taking up half of the screen space. That might seem like a pretty basic feature to be headlining in an operating system due for release in 2013, but it marks a clear admission from Microsoft that perhaps the Modern UI is a little too streamlined for everyone’s taste.

With no details offered as to the under-the-hood improvements, it remains to be seen whether Windows Blue improves upon Windows 8′s performance. The leak also comes without confirmation that Windows Blue indeed marks Microsoft’s move to a more rapid development cycle, offering annual updates for its operating system at a low upgrade cost – much like rival Apple does for its OS X platform.

With Microsoft expected to release a public preview of the operating system shortly, ahead of a rumoured August launch, it looks like Windows Blue is shaping up as an evolution, rather than revolution, for the company’s flagship operating system.

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(Credit:
Stelulu)

Snickers come easily when dealing with a product like the Stinky Footboard, to be announced later today. It has a corny name. The idea of a specialized foot-based input device for PC gaming seems spectacularly niche and nerdy.

Then you use it, and you recognize its benefits almost immediately.

The Stinky Footboard, from a new Canadian company called Stelulu Technology, makes the most sense for PC games with complicated input schemes. World of Warcraft, any modern military shooter, and competitive strategy games like League of Legends all require players to master in some cases dozens of keyboard commands. The Stinky board exists to give gamers an easier time managing those controls.

Your foot sits comfortably on the Stinky Footboard. It can take your weight, too, thanks to its steel-framed interior and sturdy plastic shell. Four Cherry MX key switches (like you’ll find on many mechanical keyboards) sit under your toe, your heel, and on the sides of the board. Simply lean your foot back and forth or, less naturally, rock your ankle from side to side to trigger the switch.

(Credit:
Stelulu)

You need
Windows 7 or
Windows 8 to use the Stinky Footboard, as well as a USB input. A simple software interface lets you program 4 different commands into the Stinky Footboard, although you can extend it to 16 commands if you toggle modifiers via the Alt, Ctrl, and Shift keys. Onboard memory also makes it possible to save profiles to the device itself, useful for those who move between PCs often.

How you assign the key commands is up to you, of course. Stelulu suggests that it’s particularly well suited for situational commands, like throwing a grenade, using a melee attack, or using some less frequent spell or skill that might otherwise require you to take your finger away from your primary keyboard controls.

During a demo of the Stinky Footboard used while playing the Battlefield 3 single-player campaign, I tried the preassigned controls that Stelulu had set up, with the toe key assigned to the “sprint” command, and the heel set to lob a grenade. I wasted all of my grenades quickly while I got acclimated, but pushing down with my toe to sprint became automatic after just a few minutes.

You can customize the amount of resistance via an Allen wrench and a set of screws on the bottom of the board that adjust the tension for each of the four input points, but I found the front and back settings sufficiently responsive without having to make adjustments.

The side-to-side motion on the Stinky Footboard is less intuitive, but I can imagine getting used to it with practice.

(Credit:
Stelulu)

What I especially liked about using the Stinky board is that it lent a smoother, more automatic flow to my gameplay. I didn’t have to think about where the sprint key was. For more obscure commands on more obscure keys, you can also save yourself from taking your eyes off the action. Pressing down with my foot for the most part felt surprisingly natural. If virtual-reality headsets like the forthcoming Oculus Rift ever take off, gamers won’t have the ability to look down at their keyboards. In that event, a no-look product like the Stinky Footboard might even become essential.

For now, the Stinky Footboard may seem like a goofy extravagance. It will cost $119 when it launches in June, with an accompanying Kickstarter campaign to help the company fund production. I can imagine people making lots of easy jokes about the Stinky Footboard, but I also expect it’s one of those products that will benefit once serious PC gamers try it and start preaching its merits. If I were a competitive gamer, I would certainly give the Stinky Footboard a try.

Article source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/cnet/pRza/~3/tmGAW-ZgWVo/

The Pwn2Own contest, a regular event at the CanSecWest conference, has revealed serious security flaws in Chrome, Internet Explorer and Firefox.

The annual Pwn2Own contest, a regular feature of Vancouver’s CanSecWest security conference in which hackers and crackers compete to be the first to breach the security on up-to-date computers, has its first results – and they’re not good news for users of Chrome, Firefox or Internet Explorer.

Each year, Pwn2Own puts major cash prizes up for those who can breach the security of fully-patched consumer systems, including Windows 8, Windows 7, and OS X, by exploiting vulnerabilities in the systems’ web browsers or relevant plugins. As well as cash – up to $100,000 for the top-tier Google Chrome or Microsoft Internet Explorer 10 targets – winners take home the hardware on which the software was running, hence the name of the event.

It’s a popular event, and one which typically unveils flaws in each browser – and hopefully before the hordes of ne’er-do-wells that haunt the internet know about them. In 2010, the event saw fully-patched installations of Apple’s Safari browser on OS X, Internet Explorer 8 and Firefox exploited by security researchers, along with an iPhone that had its private data sucked up by a previously unknown vulnerability in its stock web browser.

This year, the prizes are bigger than ever: the first hacker able to crack fully-patched versions of Google Chrome on Windows 7 or Internet Explorer 10 on Windows 8 can pick up a cool $100,000, while Internet Explorer 9 on Windows 7 gets a still-impressive $75,000. Mozilla Firefox, running on Windows 7, gets a security type $60,000 for their trouble, while Apple’s Safari browser on a fully-patched OS X Mountain Lion install gets $65,000. Additionally, those who use browser plugins to exploit the system – rather than attacking a vulnerability in the browser directly – can pick up $70,000 from Adobe for a flaw in Flash or Reader XI, while Oracle is fronting $20,000 for anyone who finds a previously unknown vulnerability.

So far, the hackers are winning: in the first day of the contest, Chrome, Firefox and Internet Explorer 10 all fell to the researchers attacks. VUPEN, a company which has been criticised in the past for selling vulnerability code to the highest bidder, was able to secure the prizes for Internet Explorer 10 on Windows 8, Firefox on Windows 7 and – to nobody’s great surprise, given the software’s track record – Oracle’s Java. In a break with tradition, the company also agreed to report the vulnerabilities to each software house so the flaws could be fixed – although it did not state outright that it would not also be adding the zero-day exploits to its price list for others to buy.

Chrome running on Windws 7, patched just days before the security conference began, fell to a researcher from MWR InfoSecurity which found two zero-day vulnerabilities which allowed it to bypass in-built protections. As the rules of the competition require, details of these vulnerabilities have been passed on to Google for patching.

The only tested to remain standing was Apple’s Safari running on an up-to-date OS X Mountain Lion system. That’s a surprise: in past events, Safari has typically been one of the first to fall. However, it’s not a necessarily a reflection of the security of Apple’s browser product: out of the software on trial, no researchers picked Safari as their target – meaning that the software has not actually proven itself against an active attack at the event. Meanwhile, the second day of the competition saw both of Adobe’s products – Flash and Reader – fall to attacks.

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Internet Explorer 10 for Windows 7 won’t install on machines with hybrid graphics, with Microsoft pointing the finger of blame firmly away from itself.

Microsoft has coughed to an embarrassing issue marring the launch of its next-generation Internet Explorer 10 web browser on the last-generation Windows 7 operating system: it doesn’t work properly if you’re using hybrid graphics.

Previously a Windows 8 exclusive, Internet Explorer 10 became available for Windows 7 late last week, bringing with it a host of improvements including security and privacy enhancements, better adherence to established web standards like HTML5, and DirectX hardware acceleration for improved performance. It’s this latter feature, in fact, that appears to be at the root of an issue that is stopping some laptop users from being able to install the software at all.

Users on certain laptops, all-in-ones and a much smaller number of desktops have reported errors attempting to upgrade to Internet Explorer 10 on Windows 7 with the installer rather confusingly reporting that ‘Internet Explorer needs an update before installing‘ before abandoning the process entirely. Nothing appears to issue, while similar systems install the software without issue.

The problem, Microsoft has discovered, lies in the software’s interaction with hybrid graphics systems. Developed as a means of giving laptop users access to high-performance gaming graphics on demand without sacrificing battery life, hybrid graphics systems – Nvidia’s Optimus and AMD’s equivalent – allow systems to switch between integrated graphics and a discrete GPU on-the-fly, using the integrated graphics during light-weight processing tasks to conserve battery life and firing up the discrete GPU only when extra performance is required or the device is running from a mains power source.

It’s a neat idea, but one which Microsoft had apparently not tested for compatibility issues. According to the company’s support statement, users with hybrid graphics in their laptops will find that Internet Explorer 10 simply won’t install. Worse, Microsoft is putting the onus on the graphics card makers to resolve the problem.

‘This issue occurs because some computers have hybrid video cards that are not yet compatible with Internet Explorer 10 for Windows 7,‘ Microsoft admits, before going on to brazenly state:-’Internet Explorer 10 will not install on these computers until updated hardware drivers are available for these video cards.‘ While the company claims to be ‘working with device manufacturers to provide updated software to resolve this issue,’ the company has not yet provided a release schedule for the hardware drivers or a fixed installer – leaving those who want up-to-date security features in their web browser turning to third-party packages like Opera, Firefox or Chrome.

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