Xi3 Piston available for pre-order

Xi3 Piston, the minimalist computer for video games, is now available for pre-order. It will hit the market late this year, but if you want to have a $ 100 discount, you will need to order right now.

Piston is the first device that fits in the category of "Steam box" but is not an official product made ​​with Valve. The Xi3 Company tries to offer top performance in a very small package, appealing to a unique design. The entire computer is modular, and various internal components can be changed over time to always run the latest games.

Unfortunately, the hardware offered now, at $ 999 is a bit high. Even after reducing the pre-order price at $ 899, is not really justified. But we know now that in the aluminum housing there is a 3.2 GHz AMD Trinity, a Radeon 7000 series graphics chip, a 128 GB SSD and 8 GB of DDR3 memory.

Piston Xi3 was presented live at the SXSW and so we can see the first small computer interface, which is now referred to by the nickname "console". Obviously, the operating system is Windows, which received a custom interface. Below you can find the official video presentation with a video interface.

Electronic Arts SimCity defies their users problems

The new SimCity is a great game whose quality was threatened by problems from Electronic Arts’s servers that host them.

The internet is full of disappointed SimCity players that they can’t play a game that they paid tens of dollars. The scenario is similar to that encountered by Blizzard on the release of Diablo 3. Since we are talking about a game that requires a constant online connection to EA servers, they couldn’t handle the large number of players, so most of the shoppers can’t enjoy it. Sadder still is the fact that those who fail to connect, have problems of stability with the connection.

In a normal world, that frustration would reflect a return call to Electronic Arts demanding a full refund. Although such a principle exists when it comes to purchasing physical games from EA, distributed over a period of 14 days, those who bought the digital version SimCity are not as fortunate. In general   they don’t refund the money for digital purchases of games. So simple was the company's official response to a tweet on the subject. Basically, it left no room for doubt and no trace of hope in the hearts of their customers of getting their money back.

In a time when big companies are striving to improve their image to customers, with such actions, Electronic Arts is in the lower end of the list.

Microsoft has second thoughts about its Office 2013 license

Many Microsoft Office users have been upset on hearing that a license of Office 2013 is tied to a single PC, it seems that's not the case.

After announcing a few weeks ago that Office 2013 licenses will not be transferable, Microsoft seems to have second thoughts. For all those who agreed to purchase a license to the new Office it seemed absurd that such licenses to be tied to a single hardware configuration. In a new post on the official Microsoft Office blog, Redmond announced their policy change. Therefore, from now on, it will be accepted to transfer the license from one PC to another when the old one failed or you simply bought a new computer.

Changes described by Microsoft will be immediately put into practice, while scripting of the licensing document will be implemented in the next update to the Office suite. To make things sound too good to be so simple, Microsoft announced some restrictions about the license moving. Further, you can’t use an Office 2013 license on two different PCs. If you plan to jump from PC to PC with the new Office suite, the company will limited you to install on another system one every 90 days. In principle there is an exception to this rule, if a PC has encountered a hardware problem you might spend some time on the phone with Microsoft customer service to prove the event.

Samsung director shatters Windows 8

Is neither the first nor the last to complain about Windows 8, Dong-Soo Jun unfortunately from Samsung is a director whose opinion counts.

Division memory chip President of Samsung, Dong-Soo Jun takes long term decisions related to power production dedicated RAM for desktops, laptops or smartphones. In an era where PCs lose more and more popularity, Dong-Soo doesn’t hesitate any second in a guilty finding.

In an interview with reporters in South Korea, Jun was very drastic in saying that PC were  not positively impacted by the release of Windows 8, because it isn’t better than the previous Windows platform Vista. "To leave no doubt in his statements, general manager of Samsung has insisted on the same line. He said that at this time we don’t see an explosion in the rate of adoption of ultra-books because of the uncompetitive Windows platform".

Because of the position they occupy, things are very simple, Dong-Soo Jon easily solved the problem caused by Microsoft. Moved his attention almost entirely from memory chips to the classic smartphones and tablets. The sad thing is, regardless of the number of complaints of Microsoft's latest operating system, the Redmond will never change direction of development of operating systems.