Microsoft Universal Mobile Keyboard

It’s like cats and dogs sleeping together

Microsoft has long been criticized for using an “embrace, extend—and extinguish” strategy across its business. You know, embrace a standard, extend it by adding new proprietary standards, and then extinguish the competition that can’t use the proprietary standards.

Well, we’re truly through the looking glass with Microsoft’s new Universal Mobile Keyboard, folks. This mobile Bluetooth keyboard is what you’d expect: rechargeable through micro-USB with a decent action but a little too compressed. There’s also a very clever cover that does double duty as a stand for your tablet, with two different viewing angles supported. The keyboard has the typical volume controls, multimedia buttons, and a compressed cursor layout as other mobile keyboards do. So far it’s a snore, right? What’s so unusual? Well, it’s clear that someone at Microsoft wearing an evil Mr. Spock goatee had a say in the design.

Game Streaming 101

Everything you need to know about game streaming and what it means for the PC. By Marco Chiappetta

Game streaming is huge. It accounts for epic amounts of web traffic and is even an integral part of some companies’ survival strategies. Look no further than Nvidia’s GRID and GameStream technologies, plus the meteoric rise of Twitch.tv’s traffic— it’s now the fourth largest peak traffic producer on the Internet, just behind Apple and ahead of Hulu—to know that game streaming is big business.

Billions of dollars are spent on games every year and being able to access them in some form from virtually anywhere, and on any device, is appealing to almost all gamers. Developers are keen on the technology, too, because they can make their game for one platform and stream it to almost any other.

The State Of Play

The gaming industry is booming, but could it be heading for a crash?

On 26 April 2014, a team of documentary makers turned up part of an unlikely story in the arid expanse of the New Mexico desert: a trove of some 700,000 buried Atari cartridges. The discovery of this 8-bit burial ground, assumed for many years to be little more than an urban legend, was a reminder of the near-destruction of the videogame industry in the early 1980s.

A number of factors led to the spectacular crash. The industry was flooded with poor quality consoles, and the home computer was emerging in the form of the Apple II, the IBM 5150, and the Commodore 64. Consumers were becoming interested in a piece of hardware they could upgrade, rather than one with features rigidly set in stone by its manufacturer.

Are Online Communities Killing Tech Support?

Mark Oakley asks whether traditional technical support has been usurped by the online space

"iTunes is currently unavailable. Try again later."

So for the tenth time or so of trying, my Apple TV refused to load my latest iTunes movie purchase. I had intended to spend the evening watching a film that I'd missed when it was showing at my nearest multiplex. The kids were asleep, my wife was out for dinner with a friend and I had a good stash of chocolate by my side. I was all set, but the last piece of the puzzle refused to play ball. Apple had let me down.

Google Chrome Tweaks

There's usually more to your bog standard internet browser than it may first appear, and unless you spend some time looking through the preferences, you may miss out on some useful setting that can help you get more out of your online experience. This is especially true when it comes to security. Recently, we looked at Internet Explorer and found a whole heap of security features that many users may miss if they simply use the browser 'out of the box'. With Firefox, we uncovered a mass of hidden options, some of which we took a closer look at. These options can be used to tweak all aspects of the browser, freeing the software's shackles for those who want to really push its limits.