Software-Programming

Gamers will soon be able to play Maxis's SimCity offline – despite the company's earlier insistence that the game absolutely had to be connected to the internet to work.

The turnaround was announced by Maxis studio manager Patrick Buechner in a blogpost on Sunday. He said Update 10 for the latest installment of the long-running urban modeling game series will include an exciting feature known as "Offline Play." This revolutionary technology lets a game work without a connection to the cloud!

About a year and a half ago, I engaged on an admittedly quixotic project to build my own laptop. By I, I mean we, namely Sean “xobs” Cross and me, bunnie. Building your own laptop makes about as much sense as retrofitting a Honda Civic with a 1000hp motor, but the lack of practicality never stopped the latter activity, nor ours.

Following reports by Surface Pro 2 customers of excessively fast battery drain after applying last week's firmware updates, Microsoft has pulled the update.

"To ensure the best experience for our customers during the holiday season we have taken steps to remove the update for Surface Pro 2 that was previously published through Windows Update on December 10th, 2013. We are working to release an alternative update package after the holidays," confirmed a Microsoft spokesperson.

Facebook has named New York University Professor Yann LeCun the director of a new laboratory devoted to research in artificial intelligence and deep learning.

LeCun, a professor at NYU’s Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, is a pioneer in this growing field. In the 1980s, LeCun proposed one of the early versions of the back-propagation algorithm, the most popular method for training artificial neural networks.

It is that holiday season! Google's Chromebook is one of the hottest gift ideas under $300 (e.g., Samsung Chromebook priced at $229 from Amazon). While some of you may dismiss Chromebook as an incapable barebone laptop, the matter of fact is that sales of Chromebooks continue to soar while the rest of PC sales are plummeting.

If you want to try out Google's Chrome OS powered Chromebook without purchasing Chromebook hardware, you can actually test-run Chromium OS as a virtual machine (VM). In this tutorial, I will explain how to install and run Chromium OS on VMware Player.

OK, so this isn't the first in-browser emulator we've seen, but we thought you might get a kick out of it anyway. Using Chrome's Portable Native Client (PNaCl), Google developer Christian Stefansen has the Universal Amiga Emulator (UAE) running within the browser.

Mozilla is out today with its latest milestone Firefox release, this time providing security fixes as well as new functionality in the open-source Web browser.

The Firefox 26 release first entered beta in early November. From a security feature perspective, the big change that Firefox 26 introduces is the concept of "click-to-play" plug-ins. Prior to Firefox 26, plug-ins such as Java would just load inside the browser whenever required by a given Website, and without the need for any specific user interaction.

Today, we were contacted by the Google Play Support team to say that our CyanogenMod Installer application is in violation of Google Play’s developer terms.

They advised us to voluntarily remove the application, or they would be forced to remove it administratively. We have complied with their wishes while we wait for a more favorable resolution.

For years the U.S. military operated pirated copies of logistics software that was used to protect soldiers and shipments in critical missions. Apptricity, the makers of the software, accused the military of willful copyright infringement and sued the Government for nearly a quarter of a billion dollars in unpaid licenses.

In a settlement just announced, the Obama administration has agreed to pay $50 million to settle the dispute. In recent years the U.S. Government has taken an aggressive stance towards copyright infringement, both at home and abroad.

It was a cloudy Seattle day in late 1980, and Bill Gates, the young chairman of a tiny company called Microsoft, had an appointment with IBM that would shape the destiny of the industry for decades to come.

He went into a room full of IBM lawyers, all dressed in immaculately tailored suits. Bill’s suit was rumpled and ill-fitting, but it didn’t matter. He wasn’t here to win a fashion competition.