Month: April 2016

All other issues aside, weaving through the canyons and waterfalls of Corneria city is still pretty great.

During my waning years as a Nintendo-only fanboy (just before I bought my first Sony PlayStation in 1998), Star Fox 64 was the rare Nintendo 64 exclusive I could point to with pride. That game’s tight controls helped support simple-but-satisfying fly-forward-and-shoot-what-moves gameplay, with strong, truly cinematic-level design. But that simplicity concealed hidden depth in an elegant, branching mission structure and a skill-based scoring system that encouraged multiple playthroughs.

Star Fox Zero recaptures Star Fox 64’s satisfying simplicity at points, but it spends too much time getting in its own way with half-baked ideas and unneeded complexity. Nearly 20 years after the formula was laid down almost perfectly, Star Fox Zero just can’t seem to avoid mucking up the lessons of the past.

Tilt-based annoyance

The most readily apparent change to the Star Fox 64 formula in Star Fox Zero is the Wii U GamePad and its tilt-based motion controls. While the targeting reticle still moves as you move your ship with the analog stick, it now also moves independently as you tilt the GamePad. The idea is to let you fly your ship in one direction and fire in another without require you to fly directly toward your target.

(credit: Andrew Williams)

Due to the vagaries of how OEMs configure and market PCs in different parts of the world, there is some variation between the specs of default 7000 Series laptops sold in the US and UK. That said, it is possible to use Dell's configuration tool to come up with with identical specs.

Once a gimmick, the hybrid 2-in-1 has rapidly become the default design for a high-end portable laptop—or rather, Microsoft's take on the the hybrid 2-in-1 has become the default design for a high-end portable laptop. For all its faults, the Surface Pro is a fine piece of hardware design, and everyone from the likes of HP to Lenovo has come up with its own iterative take on the concept. Dell has had a few bashes at it too, with varying degrees of success. (What was it thinking with the wacky, horizontally spinning screen of the old XPS 12?)

The Latitude 12 7000 (actual model number 7275) is decidedly less out there, and not just because it hails from Dell's stuffy business PC range. It's very much a take on the Surface design, albeit with a different—though not necessarily better—case and keyboard, as well as an austere, yet attractive soft-touch body. Dell's design chops have come on leaps and bounds over the past couple of years, and the Latitude 12 7000 is no exception; business types and clean-cut consumers will have no problem whipping one out in a meeting, or at a local Starbucks.

(credit: Casey Johnston)

To keep up with competitors like Paramount and Lionsgate, Universal Pictures Home Entertainment (UPHE) will start releasing movies in 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray this summer. According to Variety, Jason Bourne, Lucy, The Huntsman: Winter’s War, Warcraft, Everest, and Lone Survivor will be among the first titles to hit shelves.

UPHE will progressively roll out titles as the summer goes on, but the start date and pricing details have yet to be unveiled. The company plans to make titles available in 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray disks and digital formats, and it will include some IMAX films as well.

"4K Ultra HD represents a giant leap forward in movie-watching,” UPHE President Eddie Cunningham told Variety. "The format’s stunning resolution and peak luminance, combined with its deep bench of industry support, enables us to deliver to the consumer a truly differentiated viewing experience, one that has the capability to power the future of home entertainment."

(credit: An-d)

New research into the "Rowhammer" bug that resides in certain types of DDR memory chips raises a troubling new prospect: attacks that use Web applications or booby-trapped videos and documents to trigger so-called bitflipping exploits that allow hackers to take control of vulnerable computers.

The scenario is based on a finding that the Rowhammer vulnerability can be triggered by what's known as non-temporal code instructions. That opens vulnerable machines to several types of exploits that haven't been discussed in previous research papers. For instance, malicious Web applications could use non-temporal code to cause code to break out of browser security sandboxes and access sensitive parts of an operating system. Another example: attackers could take advantage of media players, file readers, file compression utilities, or other apps already installed on Rowhammer-susceptible machines and cause the apps to trigger the attacks.

As Ars has previously reported, Rowhammer exploits physical weaknesses in certain types of DDR memory chips to reverse the individual bits of data they store. By repeatedly accessing small regions of memory many times per second, code can change zeroes to ones and vice versa in adjacent regions. These changes occur even though the exploit code doesn't access, and doesn't have access rights to, the adjacent regions. The bug took on the name Rowhammer, because when the code figuratively clobbers one or more rows of memory cells, it causes bitflips in a neighboring cell.