Square Enix to Launch Updated Final Fantasy IX for PC, iOS, Android

If you're a big Final Fantasy fan, then Square Enix just made your day: The popular FInal Fantasy IX game is going to be released on the PC, iOS, and Android at some point in 2016. While Square Enix didn't specifically say that the game is being launched in North America, it stands to reason that it'll arrive there at some point as well. We're most happy about the game's official website having an English translation, which certainly looks like a little bit of a tease for a wider release of the game.

That said, we don't know exactly when Square Enix will launch the game in Japan, nor what the time delay will be (if any) between that launch and the North American / European launch. We also don't know all of the changes coming to the game with its remake, but we do know a few: Square Enix is going to be updating the game's graphics and adding in a few more modern conveniences, like autosave and high-speed modes.

It'll also come with achievements, for those who like showing off everything they do in a game, and various other "game boosting features," reports PC Gamer.

If you're looking for more clues from the remake's first trailer, good luck: It's mostly cutscenes, with a slight highlight of visual differences for the game's combat system—nothing major is changing to the raw mechanics as far as we can tell, but it does look a bit better.

Interestingly enough, Square Enix has seemingly decided to skip any kind of remake for FInal Fantasy VIII at the moment—having last announced the much-anticipated update to Final Fantasy VII in June of 2015.

We're not sure why Square Enix decided to overlook the title (especially since this writer particularly enjoys it), and we haven't heard any rumors that the developer might go back and revisit this one at some point, but it's certainly possible.

The Final Fantasy IX remake will require iOS 7.0 or Android 4.1 at minimum—and Square Enix warns that the game might not run on certain Android devices. (It neglected to specify, which is fair given just how many Android devices there are.) You'll need at least an iPhone 5s, fourth-generation iPad, iPad Mini 2, or sixth-generation iPod Touch to play on iOS.

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Valve explains Steam’s Christmas Day implosion

 

 

 On Christmas Day, Steam users woke to a bewildering series of problems. Users reported seeing wish lists, game libraries, and personal account information that wasn’t their own. Email addresses, partial credit card numbers, and phone numbers were all shared, with no explanation of why or how. Steam has published an update on what happened, and explained the bizarre behavior.

First, Valve wants to reassure users that while an estimated 34,000 people found themselves with someone else’s account, none of the details that leaked were enough to allow someone to either steal an account or to complete transactions with the available credit card information. The concern here would be that addresses or other forms of personally identifiable information (PII) could be harvested from Steam and then matched against other databases of stolen personal data. Hacking groups have proven adept at finding and exploiting such opportunities.

Steam Winter Sale + DDoS? Bad idea.

Imagine that you use three different services, all of which are hacked. Hack #1 exposed your username and an encrypted form of password that can be cracked with sufficient effort. Hack #2 leaks your billing address, while Hack #3 leaked credit card information and a name associated with the account. Individually, all three are annoying. Combine them, and an attacker can do serious harm. Given that we’ve seen large corporations wait weeks or months before disclosing the extent of a data breach, it’s possible for your personal data to be compromised long before you’re aware to even look for a problem.

So what went wrong?

Here’s Valve explanation in its own words:

“Early Christmas morning (Pacific Standard Time), the Steam Store was the target of a DoS attack which prevented the serving of store pages to users. Attacks against the Steam Store, and Steam in general, are a regular occurrence that Valve handles both directly and with the help of partner companies, and typically do not impact Steam users. During the Christmas attack, traffic to the Steam store increased 2000% over the average traffic during the Steam Sale.

“In response to this specific attack, caching rules managed by a Steam web caching partner were deployed in order to both minimize the impact on Steam Store servers and continue to route legitimate user traffic. During the second wave of this attack, a second caching configuration was deployed that incorrectly cached web traffic for authenticated users. This configuration error resulted in some users seeing Steam Store responses which were generated for other users. Incorrect Store responses varied from users seeing the front page of the Store displayed in the wrong language, to seeing the account page of another user.”

Once Valve realized it was under attack, it shut the Steam Store down and manually configured a new caching configuration, tested it, and purged all of the previous data before bringing Steam back online. The company has promised to reach out to everyone affected by the problem and to continue investigating to ensure no critical information was leaked.

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AT&T Killing Off Two-Year Contracts

 
Farewell, phone subsidies. AT&T is killing off two-year contracts beginning Jan. 8.

Engadget, which first reported the news, got its hands on an internal memo sent to employees this morning outlining the change. After the first week of January, new and existing customers in need of a new phone will either have to pay the full price of the device upfront, or in monthly installments with an AT&T Next plan.

In its memo, AT&T calls the move a "pricing simplification effort." In a statement to PCMag, the carrier said most of its customers already opt for Next plans, which divide the price of a smartphone into monthly installment payments.

"With $0 down for well-qualified customers, the ability to upgrade early and down payment options available with even lower monthly installments, our customers are overwhelmingly choosing AT&T Next," the company said. "Starting January 8, AT&T Next will be the primary way to get a new smartphone at AT&T."

The change does not apply to business customers under a qualified wireless service agreement, AT&T added. According to Engadget, it will affect all AT&T phones—even flip phones and smartphones with keyboards—but it's unclear at this time whether it will apply to wearables and tablets.

The move isn't all that surprising, given that AT&T in June stopped offering contracts for smartphones sold through third parties like Best Buy and Apple. In addition, the nation's top wireless carrier—Verizon—ditched two-year contracts in August. T-Mobile got things started in 2013, while Sprint reportedly has plans to do the same soon.

With AT&T Next, you can opt to pay for your device in 30, 24, or 20 monthly installments and upgrade after you pay 24, 18, or 12 installments, respectively. Or, if you pay 30 percent of the device upfront, the remainder is divided into 28 installments and you can upgrade after 12.

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Storms that wreaked Christmas havoc across the US now supercharged, headed for the North Pole

 

 

 If you live on the East Coast, Christmas 2015 was one of the most bizarre on record. Temperatures were in the 60s and 70s across the Midwest and in the major coastal cities, with dozens of high temperature records broken across the United States. From December 21 – 28, at least 68 tornadoes were reported across 15 states, and the US collectively experienced more tornado deaths in December than in the entire rest of the year combined.

This is a dandelion in my front yard. Photo taken the evening of December 23, in Buffalo NY. Average temperature on that day is 28F.

The warm air that drove these events has moved on, moving over the Atlantic. As it shifts, it’s dragging more warm air from Spain and the Mediterranean northwards, creating one of the most massive North Atlantic storms on record. The image below shows the forecast temperature of roughly 33.8F (1C) at a time when the average temperature at the North Pole is -18F (-28C).



That huge surge of warmth hit the North Pole this morning, but the storm traveling behind it is expected to strike both Iceland and the already flooded areas of Northern England. Storm Frank is also expected to qualify as a “bomb cyclone” (a storm with a drop in pressure of 24mb or more within 24 hours).

Unprecedented warming

What makes this heat surge truly unusual is the total lack of sunlight at the North Pole. From late September to late March, the sun is completely below the horizon and the pole is shrouded in darkness. There’s a twilight period of approximately two weeks before the sun appears or disappears, but we’re deep in polar night right now, only days past the Winter Solstice.

According to Slate, winter temperatures have only crept above freezing during the Arctic winter once, and never between December and early April (winter begins when the sun falls below the horizon in late September).

If you’re familiar with air currents and weather patterns at all, you’re probably aware of the polar-night jet stream, which forms at 30,000 – 39,000 feet. These air currents shape weather in the northern and southern hemispheres; the East Coast deep freeze of 2014 was caused when the northern jet stream dipped much farther south than is historically normal, blanketing the eastern half of the United States in arctic air. This type of event has become more common in recent years; the jet stream’s course around the planet is wobbling more than it used to.

According to climate blogger Robert Scribbler, El Nino years typically reinforce the jet stream and would work to prevent this kind of storm from pushing warm water so deep into the North Atlantic, but that’s not the case this year. As always, the question of whether any single storm or event is “caused” by climate change is impossible to answer — but there’s no arguing that we’re seeing increasingly erratic winter weather. This week’s storm is just the latest example of how the old rules of what we considered “normal” increasingly do not apply.

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Transcend announces ‘SuperMLC’ as an SLC NAND alternative

 

 

 Transcend Information has announced a new type of SuperMLC (multi-level cell) NAND that it believes can satisfy the needs of enterprise customers who prize both speed and reliability, while offering the lower price points and mass manufacturing advantages that characterize conventional MLC memory.

Modern NAND flash can hold one, two, or three bits of information per cell. Single-bit NAND is called SLC (single-level cell), two-bit NAND is MLC, and three-bit NAND is TLC (triple-level cell). While the exact specifications and reliability ratings for each type of flash vary from company to company, SLC NAND is the fastest and most durable, followed by MLC, followed by TLC.

The graph below shows how this plays out in terms of programming voltage for MLC vs. SLC NAND.



Note that when writing, the voltage to write each cell has to be precisely calibrated for MLC, whereas SLC can happily swing across the 1V – 3V range. I couldn’t find an equivalent graph for TLC, but imagine eight distinct voltage squeezed into the same space as MLC’s four curves, and you’ve got the idea. It takes longer to program TLC cells, and the cells themselves degrade much more quickly.

As for endurance, the graph below shows how TLC, MLC, and SLC stack up. The EM-MLC line is for a specific company’s product, and isn’t necessarily relevant to this discussion without knowing a great deal more about what Transcend is implementing.



SLC NAND is very fast, very durable, and extremely expensive, MLC NAND is the middle-of-the-road consumer option, and TLC still offers significant performance improvements compared to conventional HDDs, but is unsuitable for heavy professional use or enterprise deployments.

Over the last 24 months, a number of companies have introduced hybrid drive management schemes to leverage the capabilities of SLC and the cost-effectiveness of either MLC or TLC. Samsung’s 840 EVO and 850 EVO drives use a slice of each TLC NAND chip as SLC, greatly improving performance. Crucial and several other companies also dynamically allocate part of their drive as SLC, adjusting this cache as required depending on how full the drive is.

What Transcend is doing is binning high-quality MLC, then treating it like SLC. In theory, this provides 4x the write performance and up to 30,000 program/erase cycles. That’s not identical to what the graph above illustrates, but it’s close enough for our purposes — specialized MLC-as-SLC can offer better performance and endurance than standard MLC, but at lower costs. Combine this approach with the additional reliability and performance we’ve seen from 3D NAND ,and manufacturers may soon be able to offer MLC-as-SLC products with capabilities that fully rival conventional 2D planar SLC.

For now, Transcend is confining this capability to its industrial hardware. But if the concept proves sound, we’re almost guaranteed to see it deployed in a high-end consumer drive. NAND flash technologies tend to debut in enterprise or industrial settings first, so the fact that Transcend isn’t jumping to push this tech into consumer hardware doesn’t mean we won’t see that happen within a year.

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