Tag: Beta

1 vs 100 on Xbox LIVE begins on Friday

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Microsoft has announced that the “largest interactive gameshow in the world” – 1 vs 100 – is to launch in beta this Friday.

Xbox 360 LIVE Gold subscribers, who are aged 18 or over, will have the chance to compete against thousands of other players to win real prizes including a Fiat 500 and Samsung Q210 notebook during the two-hour show.

The game, which is based on the Endemol gameshow which airs in the UK before the National Lottery draw will have a regular schedule for gamers to tune in for. Adam Valkin, Endemol’s global head of media and new business said: “Endemol is very excited to be working with Xbox LIVE to bring the global hit TV game show 1 vs 100 to a new audience. We’re also delighted that Microsoft has chosen a flagship Endemol format to launch its groundbreaking new platform, which takes interactivity and social gaming to a new level.”

Let us know how you get on if you play 1 vs 100 this Friday.

(via CasualGaming & Microsoft)

Paul Lamkin Gaming

Panda launching free cloud-based antivirus product

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If you want an antivirus product, but you’re not keen on having a weighty product bogging down your system, you might be interested in taking a peek at a new beta release from Panda Antivirus.

It uses proprietary technology that’s been developed over three years to identify new malware applications in as little as six minutes from their release into the wild. It also handles nearly 50,000 new samples a day. To improve performance, it scans executable files immediately, but the rest of your PC when it’s idle.

It’s free because Panda wants to use data from your computer to identify new threats. What Panda hopes will be ‘millions of users’ will send heuristics info to a central server that can crunch all the data nearly in real-time.

The program takes up 50MB on your hard disk, and just 17MB of RAM when in use. Panda hopes to get this down to 12MB by the time it’s officially released. Of course, if you’re not connected to the internet, you lose a certain amount of protection, but given that the internet is the source of most virus activity, that’s not such a big issue, really.

Panda Cloud Antivirus (via Cnet)

Duncan Geere Software

Windows 7 gets laundry list of changes

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Have you been testing out the Windows 7 beta, and clicking that little ‘feedback’ button in the top right of every Window? Well, Microsoft has been listening, and they’ve just announced a massive list of the changes they’ve made as a result of the feedback.

The full list is here, but there’s a few highlights that I’ll share with you if you can’t be bothered to read the whole thing. Firstly, there’s plenty of functionality for making things more obvious on the taskbar, along with keyboard shortcuts. There’s also a multi-touch onscreen keyboard (so you can shift-tap stuff).

There’s better format support too, and anything that can’t be played will be filtered out of Windows Media Player, so it doesn’t bother you. There’s also resuming video from sleep with actual files, like you would with a DVD, and some changes to what the Windows team call ‘needy windows’ – so you can see when a program wants your attention.

The full list is worth a look, because it’s got a lot more detail in. Most of this stuff we’re unlikely to see until release, though. Are you looking forward to it? Is there anything missing that you think needs changing? Let us know in the comments.

Duncan Geere Software, Windows 7

Apple makes available Safari 4 beta

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Safari, the default browser on Apple computers, has just been upgraded. The company claims the new beta is “the fastest and most inovating web browser for Mac and Windows PCs”.

Apple’s lifted some of the best features of other browsers – Chrome’s speed, Opera’s top sites, and tabs from Firefox (and everyone else, these days). They haven’t stolen anything from IE, but is there anything worth stealing there? They’ve also added a cover-flow style interface for browsing through your bookmarks too. Pretty, but a little pointless?

Interesting, Safari 4’s default UI on Windows looks like Windows, unlike previous versions where it looked like OSX. That’s a pretty significant change for a company that usually prides itself on its design.

If you want to try it out, it’s available from Apple’s website right now.

Safari 4 (via Tech Radar)

Duncan Geere Software