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The British government has reportedly signed a milti-million pounds deal with Microsoft to continue using Windows XP in public services across the island.

Windows XP SP3 officially reaches its end of support on Tuesday, April 8, thirteen years after the operating system first launched. After April 8, XP users are strongly recommended to either get a new PC, upgrade to a newer Windows OS, switch to Linux or find a more limited, offline usage for the operating system.

The British government has no plans to rush to upgrade systems across its public services however, and has reportedly signed a £5.548 million deal with Microsoft to continue support through the Redmond giant's "custom support" program.

Brits are not the only ones paying for continued support either; the Dutch are also reportedly using Microsoft's custom support options for over 30,000 computers still running the XP operating system.

The U.S. government also reportedly has hundreds of thousands of systems still running the ageing operating system, for which it will require its own deal with Microsoft.

To be fair to Microsoft, the company has been warning about the EOS for Windows XP for years.


Sources and Recommended Reading:
Dutch, British governments pay to keep Windows XP alive: www.arstechnica.com/

Users of Microsoft's Xbox Live service who had trouble with an outage on March 11 are being credited with one week free Gold membership from Microsoft.

According to IGN, Xbox LIVE users who couldn't connect to the service on March 11 have been receiving messages through the Xbox Live Messaging system notifying them of a free week of Gold membership for the trouble they experienced.

"We know you experienced an issue signing in on your Xbox One on 3/11/2014. We apologize and will soon give you 7 days of Xbox Live Gold for your inconvenience," the message reads.

March 11 was also the launch date of Titanfall for Xbox One, which lead some to link the Xbox Live connection issues with the release of the multiplayer, online-only title. That link has since been dismissed, however.

Source: IGN

Insomniac Games has reminded PS3 owners that its Resistance trilogy will no longer have online play from Tuesday, April 8.

Last year, Sony had warned that the Resistance titles would lose online play sometime in early 2014, and that date has since been set to April 8, so if you want one last blast at Resistance online you only have the rest of the weekend and Monday to do it.

There are also no Resistance games currently in development for PlayStation platforms, which makes this online blackout a little bit more significant for fans of the series.

Whether online functionality for PS Vita's Resistance: Burning Skies will also stop on April 8 is unclear for now.

Source: Joystiq

Hundreds of old school gaming fans got a treat yesterday when they were able to play Tetris on the side of the 29-story Circa Center in Philadelphia.

Images of the giant, colorful Tetris shapes were created by the building's embedded LED lights in its external glass facade.

Anyone looking to play used joysticks to maneuver the giant lights. The game was part of the citywide series of events dubbed Philly Tech Week.

Tetris was also chosen to celebrate the upcoming 30th anniversary of the game. Frank Lee, an associate professor of digital media at Drexel University, oversaw the project. "This project began as a personal love letter to the games that I loved when I was a child - Pong last year, Tetris this year. But it ended up as a way of uniting the city of Philadelphia," Lee added.

Lee, who is already the Guinness World Record holder for the world's largest architectural video game display, made a similar stunt by playing Pong last year on the Circa Center.

Nintendo is bringing Game Boy Advance titles to the Wii U Virtual Console throughout April, including some titles that will be instantly familiar to GBA gamers.

The first wave of GBA games heading to the Wii U includes Advance Wars, Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga and Metroid Fusion. Those three titles will be launching on April 7, and priced at $7.99 each.

On April 10, Nintendo will also offer Kirby & The Amazing Mirror and WarioWare, Inc., while F-Zero: Maximum Velocity ($6.99) and Golden Sun will be available from April 17.

Yoshi's Island: Super Mario Advance 3 will be available from April 24.

Nintendo will also offer Super Mario Bros. 3 on Wii U and Nintendo 3DS for $4.99 from April 17, bringing back one of the most celebrated Super Mario games in the history of the franchise.

More details from: Nintendo.com

The Xbox 360 version of Titanfall has already been on sale for a couple of days from some retailers, though the copy will be useless until launch day.

Titanfall is an online-only multiplayer game, so unless you are connected to the servers while playing there is nothing you can really do with it. While some retailers broke the street date for the game by a few days already, customers will be disappointed when the put the disc in an Xbox 360 console and find that the servers won't be online until Tuesday, April 8.

The Xbox 360 version of Titanfall was supposed to be released in early March, but EA pushed back the launch until April 8.

On Xbox One and PC, Titanfall is developed by Respawn Entertainment, while the Xbox 360 version is developed by Bluepoint Games. The developer and publisher are promising as good an experience as possible on Xbox 360. It requires a 1GB install on Xbox 360 consoles with a HDD.

Sony Pictures has filed a DMCA takedown against 'Sintel', a 2010 short film released by the Blender Foundation with all materials available under a Creative Commons Attribution License.

The Blender Foundation develops and promotes the open source 3D graphics program Blender. It is a non-profit organization, funded by donations with the stated goal of providing the Internet community with access to 3D technology.

To showcase what you can do with Blender, the Blender Foundation has released several movies since 2006 that were developed with the system.

The latest movie is Sintel, which was released in 2010 and has been available on YouTube ever since, until now. Trying to view the video on YouTube now results instead in a notification that the video contains content from Sony Picture Movies and Shows.

Of course, there is one slight problem; Sony Pictures does not own the film or anything in it. All the materials used to make the short film were original materials, and have been licensed as Creative Commons Attribution 3.0, so you can freely share the material.

Twitter, in their ongoing efforts to monetize the platform and bring in revenue, will be introducing fifteen new types of advertisements and better ways to target specific users.

The ad products will roll out over the next six months, and the first few will be available within the month. One of the first new ads will let users click a button to download apps directly via Twitter and then through their respective app stores. They are then returned to Twitter after the download begins.

Twitter's ad revenue, which accounts of nearly all of their current earnings, doubled in the Q4 YoY, to $219.6 million. The company is not profitable. The company is now beta testing a mobile app install ad unit, following in Facebook's footsteps.

Facebook offers a similar mobile advertising product and Facebook users downloaded over 245 million mobile apps after seeing those ads in their news feeds. Many gaming companies prefer to use Facebook due to the popularity of those packages of ads.

Ads have been found in user's timelines since 2010, but top executives have always suggested that they do not want to inundate streams with ads.

According to a new report, at least five important executives have left Samsung's US mobile business in the last two months, a strange and alarming turn of events.

Samsung Telecommunications America (STA) is in charge of mobile devices in the U.S. including smartphones, tablets and smartwatches.

Among those that have left are the head of national sales, the mobile devices product chief, a lead engineer for the Gear smartwatch, the vice president of retail and channel marketing and the director of human resources. The company is in current patent-infringement suits with Apple, and the previous trials have forced STA executives to be witnesses, provide evidence or provide testimony. This may not sit right with current executives.

Samsung was asked for comment on the departures and left a generic statement. "As our US business continues to diversify and expand, we will continue to build an industry-leading organization with people who will contribute to even greater success for Samsung. Some have left voluntarily to pursue other opportunities, and we thank them for their service."

The ongoing Apple vs. Samsung wars have provided some interesting tidbits of information about the companies, including emails from late Apple founder Steve Jobs.

One such newly released email reveals that 2011 was set to be the year of the "holy war" against Google, and how Jobs and Apple were planning to fight.

At the time, the company was working on the iPhone 4S ("plus iPhone 4") and the iPhone 5, looking to have an LTE version of the iPhone in 2012. Additionally, the company was looking to build a low-cost iPhone model to replace the aging iPhone 3GS. All of the goals were hit with the exception of the low-cost replacement, which eventually became somewhat of a reality with the iPhone 5c.

The full 2011 strategy via the document:

- "plus" iPhone 4 with better antenna, processor, camera & software to stay ahead of competitors until mid 2012
- have LTE version in mid-2012
- create low cost iPhone model based on iPod touch to replace 3GS
- Business & competitive update
- show Droid and RIM ads
- Verizon iPhone
- schedule, marketing, ...
- iPhone 5 hardware
- H4 performance
- new antenna design, etc
- new camera
- schedule
- CONFIDENTIAL
- cost goal
- show model (and/or renderings) – Jony

On Thursday, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (only known as NASA), will release a full list of many software projects it has been running over the last forty years including how to gain access to the open-source code behind the projects.

Among the code being made available is software for PCs, robotics, climate simulators, running rocket guidance systems and much more.

The master list will include over a thousand projects with instructions to obtain the code. NASA wants developers and budding entrepreneurs to push the software in new directions, or to use the code as foundations for new software and ideas. A lot of the code will be hard to obtain (for example, the rocket guidance system will not be given to just anybody), but if you are approved, you can use it free of charge and without royalties. You can even adapt it into commercial projects.

After the list is released, NASA will build a searchable database for all the projects. By next year, the code will be hosted in its own online repository.

NASA has been offering up their code for some time now, but never on this scale and never with such ease to find. The code that has been available has already been used in many different projects outside of space, including helping to identify endangered animals and "our design software has been used to make everything from guitars to roller coasters to Cadillacs. Scheduling software that keeps the Hubble Space Telescope operations straight has been used for scheduling MRIs at busy hospitals and as control algorithms for online dating services."

As part of Windows 8.1, Microsoft is adding its own sliding/swiping text input, dubbed "Word Flow," which it promises will be the fastest such software available.

The virtual keyboard for Windows Phone has always been well accepted by critics and consumers, but the addition of a Swype-esque input should certainly make it more convenient. Android has native swiping input, but Apple does not.

Says Microsoft:

Microsoft has unveiled prototypes for an upcoming Windows interface built for cars that mirrors your Windows Phone and Metro-based devices.

Last month, Apple unveiled their CarPlay interface for autos, bringing the iOS experience you are used to on your mobile devices to your car. iPhone 5, 5C and 5S users can use CarPlay to control phone calls, use Maps, play their music, and have messages dictated to them.

Similarly, Microsoft's new system will use the connectivity standard known as Mirrorlink to sync your Windows devices to the in-car entertainment system. Volkswagen, Honda, Toyota, and Citroen have all confirmed they are working on new cars with Mirrorlink support, and car radio manufacturers Alpine and Pioneer are also on board.

As of writing, the prototypes are just barely usable, and Microsoft's demo at BUILD even crashed at one point when it was being unveiled. Developers will be open to build apps designed for the car, and the Windows Store marketplace will make its way over, as well. Just like Windows 8 and Windows Phone, you can swipe between different tiles and sections.

Fans of Reddit most certainly know about the image-sharing site Imgur, as do millions of others, but a new funding round should help make the site an even more household name.

Imgur sees 130 million unique monthly visitors, 1.5 million images uploaded daily and 1.3 billion images viewed.

Despite the massive popularity, the site is infamous for being "bootstrapped," and run as lean as possible by its founder. The founder jokes that the only investment he or others have made to the site was registering the domain name for $7.

As of this week, tech investment firm Andreessen Horowitz has raised $40 million for the site, the first step in a potential long road to going public. "Being bootstrapped is great," added Alan Schaaf, the founder and chief executive of Imgur. "You own 100 percent of it. But the downside is that you aren't able to move as fast as you want."

"We've talked with over a dozen VCs and angel investors over the years," he noted. "But we've never clicked with any of them until Andreessen. During our initial meeting, we were bouncing ideas around about where Imgur could go."

The company will use the funds to hire more salespeople and engineers and eventually move to a larger office. Additionally, the company will build new mobile apps.

Will.i.am, famous for his time with the Black Eyed Peas and more recently as a major producer and tech investor, has shown off a new smartwatch that does not need a separate phone to be useful.

The project was unveiled on the Alan Carr show, and will.i.am himself funded and founded the project.

Via his own Twitter, the producer says the device should be available on sale by July.

"I don't carry my phone anymore. This is my phone," will.i.am said on the show. The device can make phone calls, can hold music, has Twitter/Instagram/Facebook integration and can be linked up with Bluetooth headphones.

The device is certainly intriguing, but there is a lot left to the imagination here.