Xbox One will not be backwards compatible with Xbox 360 games or Xbox Live Games

I’m sure that backwards compatibility would have been high on the average consumers wish list with the Xbox One, but this isn’t a simple feature to implement. The Xbox 360 uses a completely different processor architecture. The Xbox 360 was based on a PowerPC architecture while the Xbox One uses an x86 AMD 64bit processor. Studying computer engineering has enabled me appreciate the problems that Microsoft would have to face attempting to convert the older games to run on the new platform.

The system is based on a different core architecture, so back-compat doesn’t really work from that perspective.
Microsoft Windows Live VP Marc Whitton

What’s the big deal with backwards compatibility?

 I can only see that the lack of backwards compatibility will slow a consumers adoption of the new Xbox and is certainly is not a disaster without it. I personally own very few console games, and the last thing I would want to do is play an old outdated game on the shiny new hardware.

Sony announced an interesting solution to overcoming backwards compatibility by allowing PS4 customers to play their PS3 game via the cloud. Who knows, a third party solution might become available for the Xbox One, although this is unlikely to be available at launch.

Is the lack of backwards compatibility causing you to delay or cancel any plans to purchase the Xbox One? Leave a comment below.

The post Will the Xbox One be backwards compatible? appeared first on MyTechBlog.

For some reason, one of the first thing people want to know is, what does it look like? After all it will be next to your TV for a number of years so you had better get used to it.

I’ll let you draw your own conclusions about the design. The important things happen in the box and from Microsoft’s announcement I gathered the following specs:

• 8-core x86 CPU made by AMD, based on the “Jaguar” core
• 8GB of RAM with 32MB SRAM
• 500GB HDD
• Blu-ray drive

The key new feature is the addition of the blu-ray drive. This is a big change that Microsoft mentioned very briefly. This is, of course, the same technology Sony has used since the PlayStation 3.

I got the feeling that Microsoft was trying to make the Xbox One the one device that you need connected to your TV. They have made some important additions including watching live TV. Before you start jumping up and down the joy, they haven’t announced the countries this will be available in outside of the US.

The user interface was very briefly displayed which showed huge similarities to Windows 8. The announcement also showed that the Xbox One could be controlled via three different types of input. Firstly, the good old fashioned controller, secondly Kinect with gestures and finally voice.

The Xbox Kinect has been redesigned and is now even powerful enough to measure a player’s heartbeat. The camera now has 1080p video recording, which can be used with Skype video calling.

Similar to the next the PS4 announcement, Microsoft featured a number of game studios, allowing them to show off there latest work. This included EA and the recently announced Call of Duty Ghosts. A short demo was shown of how the next generation games engine will improve the look and feel of these games. For a more detailed look at these games you will need to wait until E3.

To conclude, Microsoft has appeared to go down the entertainment route while Sony tried to create a more social environment. Microsoft made extensive reference to sports including a new partnership the NFL. Off the top of my head, I can’t remember any mention of sporting games or features with the PS4.

Now that we have seen the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, let the battles commence. Leave a comment below with your views. Will you be getting an Xbox or PS4?

The post Xbox One – What’s new? appeared first on MyTechBlog.

PeoplePerHour

This is by far my favorite freelancer website. There are thousands of talented members ready and waiting to work on your next job. The process of finding a freelancer is easy, simply post a job and within minutes you will start getting proposals from talented professionals. Compared to other freelancing sites the number of poor proposals is very small. The majority of the members are from the UK or US and prices can be at a premium. If you are looking for someone to work for a few dollars an hour, think again. The other amazing feature of PeoplePerHour is Hourlies. This is where freelancers advertise a small job that they can do within a few hours. For example, I can install WordPress on your server for £30. I love just searching through the hourlies and sometimes stumble across things that I would never think about.

Visit PeoplePerHour

99Designs

This website has the basic premise of being a contest between multiple freelancers on who can create the best design. You start by deciding what you want to be designed and giving a short design brief. This brief can include extra information, such as the values you want your design communicate. A contest is then posted on the website for freelancers to compete. Within a few days you will have dozens of designs to choose from. The cost of such a contest can be considerably higher than hiring a single freelancer (you want be able to get a logo for less than $250).

99Designs also has a logo store for cheaper, ready made logos all costing just $99.

Visit 99Designs

Freelancer

Although I have never directly had any experience using Freelancer I have heard great reviews. It has a diverse range of freelancers advertising on the site and is actually one of the oldest freelancing websites. At the time of writing this article there are over 7.5 millions freelancers registered with the site.

Visit Freelancer

Elance

Elance has a great selection of freelancers and some high paying companies have used the site before. It can’t really bring anything unique to the table but is certainly high on my list of places to search for freelancers.

Visit Elance

Do you have any experience using any of these sites? Leave a comment below.

The post Top Freelance Websites to look for talent appeared first on MyTechBlog.

Shared Hosting

This is the type of hosting that most businesses and websites use or at least started off using. It is where you (the customer) have your website hosted with multiple other people’s sites on a single server. This is ideal if you have limited expertise and just want a cheap, easy to use hosting solution. It is by far the cheapest type of hosting, starting from just a few dollars a month. It does, however, have a number of issues. Firstly, as you are sharing server resources with others who you don’t know or trust, they could be hogging all the servers resources. This would make your website slow, or even go offline if another person‘s website is attacked by hackers. With shared hosting, you usually get what you pay for so don’t just choose the cheapest option.

Virtual Private Server (VPS)

This is the next level up after shared hosting. It is where you still share a server with other users but have a dedicated allocation of resources. This means that even if another VPS on the same host server is attacked, you won’t even notice. Some types of VPS include a control panel eg. CPanel or Plesk. Alternatively you may wish to install one if you have little admin experience. The cost of a VPS is considerably more than shared hosting and is therefore a restricting factor for some uses. From my own personal experience I recommend using the hosting provider Linode. They are very good value for money and have a great support community.

Dedicated Server

This is where you rent a whole physical server. Obviously this is overkill for most sites and is very expensive. You are looking at a minimum of $100 a month. From my experience I would recommend Limestone Networks for this kind of hosting.

Cloud Hosting

This is a new type of hosting that isn’t very well defined. It takes VPS hosting a stage further. Typically you pay for the computing resources on an hourly basis. This allows your website infrastructure to scale at very short notice.

There are number of cloud computing companies on the market. These include Rackspace and Amazon Web Services.

Colocation

This refers to when you own your own hardware eg. servers, switches… You then pay for space in a datacenter and for the bandwidth you need. This type of hosting is usually only used by companies and can be very expensive. Prices usually start at hundreds of dollars a month. You then have the additional cost of running and maintaining your own hardware.

What type of hosting does MyTechBlog use?

MyTechBlog is hosted by Wheal Media (its parent company). Wheal Media uses a combination of the above hosting, including VPS and Cloud Hosting.

The post Types of Website Hosting appeared first on MyTechBlog.

Arduino Due

Input Voltage: 7-12V
System Voltage: 3.3V
Clock Speed: 84MHz
Digital I/O: 54
Analog Pins: 12
PWM: 12
UART: 4
Flash Space: 512KB

Full Details

Arduino Leonardo

Input Voltage: 7-12V
System Voltage: 5V
Clock Speed: 15MHz
Digital I/O: 20
Analog Pins: 12
PWM: 7
UART: 1
Flash Space: 32KB

Full Details

Arduino Uno R3

Input Voltage: 7-12V
System Voltage: 5V
Clock Speed: 16MHz
Digital I/O: 14
Analog Pins: 6
PWM: 6
UART: 1
Flash Space: 32KB

Full Details

Arduino Mega 2560 R3

Input Voltage: 7-12V
System Voltage: 5V
Clock Speed: 16MHz
Digital I/O: 54
Analog Pins: 16
PWM: 14
UART: 4
Flash Space: 256KB

Full Details

LilyPad Arduino 328 Main Board

Input Voltage: 2.7-5.5V
System Voltage: 3.3V
Clock Speed: 8MHz
Digital I/O: 14
Analog Pins: 6
PWM: 6
UART: 1
Flash Space: 32KB

Full Details

Arduino Fio

Input Voltage: 3.35-12V
System Voltage: 3.3V
Clock Speed: 8MHz
Digital I/O: 14
Analog Pins: 8
PWM: 6
UART: 1
Flash Space: 32KB

Full Details

Arduino Pro 5V/16MHz

Input Voltage: 5-12V
System Voltage: 5V
Clock Speed: 16MHz
Digital I/O: 14
Analog Pins: 6
PWM: 6
UART: 1
Flash Space: 32KB

Full Details

* The Arduino comparison is correct at the time of publishing.

If you have experience with any of these Arduinos or think that another one should be added to the list – leave a comment below.

The post Arduino Comparison appeared first on MyTechBlog.

In order to install the driver you will need to disable driver signature enforcement. To do this, open the charms bar and click Change PC Settings. Then go to General and under Advanced Startup and click Restart Now. This will obviously restart your computer so make sure you have saved any work.

When the computer starts up click Troubleshoot

Then Advanced Options

From the next menu select Startup Settings and then Restart

The screen displayed allows you to “Disable driver signature enforcement” by pressing key 7.

Wait for the computer to restart and follow through the Arduino’s instructions again. You will be presented with a security warning when installing the drivers.

Click Install this driver software anyway and the installation will continue.

You can now repeat the steps to re-enable digital sign enforcement if you really want to.

Continue with the installation and have fun using the Arduino.

Images courtesy of: Next Of Windows

The post Install Arduino Drivers on Windows 8 appeared first on MyTechBlog.

In a nutshell Amazon Simple Storage Server (Amazon S3) is an online storage facility. It is cheap (free for a limited time under AWS’s free usage tier), fast and easy to setup. It used by many large companies including Netflix, Pintrest and is even where Dropbox stores its data. You can therefore rest assured that it is reliable and secure.

Possible uses of S3

• Backups
• Transfer large files
• Image hosting for websites (I would recommend that S3 is used in conjunction with CloudFront)
• Many more…

Hopefully that list has whet your appetite and shown you some of the possible uses of S3. So how much does it cost?

Price

Amazon S3 has a ‘pay as you go’ pricing structure with no upfront costs. This sounds easy, right? Although Amazon’s pricing structure isn’t difficult to understand it does have a few costs that can catch you out. Firstly, you need to be aware that the price varies based on the region the data is stored in (for more information on regions take a look at the AWS Availability Zones & Regions article). The pricing is separated into the following:

• Storage – this is the obvious cost
  • Prices start at $0.095 per GB a month (US East Region)
• PUT, COPY, POST or LIST requests – you have to pay for each individual request you make to S3. It is therefore cheaper to store 1 large file compared to several smaller files
  • $0.01 per 1,000 requests
• GET requests – this is the cost per item that is retrieved from S3
  • $0.01 per 10,000 requests
• Bandwidth – you have to pay to transfer the data to and from AWS
  • Prices vary but are approximately  $0.120 per GB

*Prices correct at the time of writing

Hopefully all that information hasn’t put you off using S3. Don’t forget that Amazon offers a free usage tier for new customers that includes 5GB of storage and 20,000 GET requests per month.

I would certainly advise that you work out the costs prior to using S3. The pay as you go pricing model is very attractive but it can have its draw backs. For example if you use S3 for image hosting for your website you could easily spend $10 in a month on GET requests alone. I speak from personal experience when I say keep an eye on your bill.

Using S3

I am assuming that you have already got an AWS account setup. If not, head over to http://aws.amazon.com/ and signup for free (you will need to enter your credit card details).

When you have logged into the management console go to the S3 menu item.

In the top left of the window click ‘Create Bucket’. (A bucket is essentially a folder and contains objects).

For this example I will pretend that I’m setting up S3 as a store for some family photos. Every bucket must have a unique name eg. ‘familyphotos123’. Also select the region you would like to store the photos.

Next click ‘Create’.

With the bucket selected you can adjust the permisions and other settings.

When you are ready to upload files to the bucket double click its name. Then use the upload button in the top left to start uploading files.

Click ‘Add Files’ and select the desired files.

Then click ‘Start Upload’. This can obviously take some time depending on the number of files selected. If you need to download the files at some point in the future, right hand click on the desired file and click ‘download’.

You now know how to upload and download files stored in Amazon S3.

Supported Applications

If you would prefer to use a desktop application to manage your files in S3 there are a number of free and paid options available:

• Transmit – Mac only
• Bucket Explorer – Mac, Windows & Linux

Another option is to use S3cmd, a command line client for S3. This is particularly useful if you use Linux and want to setup a cron job to schedule an automated backup to S3.

I hope that you have found this guide useful. I haven’t been able to cover all the features of S3 but if you have any questions, or would like to request an article/guide, leave a comment below.

The post Getting Started with Amazon S3 appeared first on MyTechBlog.

Regions – located in separate geographic locations

Regions are easy to understand. They are completely isolated from each other and are in different parts of the world. At the time of writing this article there are 8 regions to choose from. They are shown with the orange dots below:

Image courtesy of Amazon Web Services

How do you choose which region to use?

Firstly not all services are available in all the regions. To find out if a service is available in a particular regions see http://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/globalinfrastructure/regional-product-services/. In most situations it is best to deploy your application as close to the end user as possible. For example, if most of your users are from the UK it would be best to use the EU (Ireland) region. Other things to keep in mind are legal requirements and cost (not all the regions are prices the same).

All the main AWS services (except Route 53 & CloudFront) allow you to select which region you would like to use. The US East (N. Virginia) is the default region. You can change the region by using the dropdown menu in the top right of the management console.

Availability Zones – isolated from failures in other availability zones

Although unusual, failures do happen. AWS therefore provides availability zones that are isolated from each other (they have low latency connections). Deploying your application across multiple availability zones makes you ready for unexpected outages. So if there is an outage with a particular availability zone your application stays online.

Edge Locations – used by content delivery network (Cloudfront)

Although you won’t have to worry about edge locations directly they are still an important part of the AWS infrastructure. There are currently 40 edge locations with more being added each month. They are located in most the major cities around the world and are used by CloudFront (CDN) to distribute content nearer to the end user.

To learn more about the services AWS offers take a look at AWS Services for Beginners

If this article has helped you or if you have a question, leave a comment below.

The post AWS Regions & Availability Zones appeared first on MyTechBlog.

EC2 - Virtual Private Servers

• Similar to standard VPS’s and are called instances
• Available in a variety of sizes (613MB to 64GB of RAM)
• All major operating systems supported
• Pay per hour

S3 - Cloud Storage

• Highly scalable (some companies have PBs of data)
• Highly available – data is stored in multiple data centers
• Pay per GB of storage and data transfer

RDS - Relational Database

• MySQL, SQL and Oracle databases
• Variety of sizes
• High availability available for an extra cost
• Read replication
• Scheduled backups
• Pay per hour and per GB of storage

Route 53 - DNS

• High availability
• Works well with other AWS services
• Fast and secure
• Pay per zone and million queries

CloudFront - Content Delivery Network

• Uses a number of global edge locations
• Fast
• Pay per GB of data transfer (prices vary on the region)

Glacier - Data Archiving

• Store data for a prolong period of time (years)
• Very cheap
• Data retrieval takes a few hours

DynamoDB - NoSQL Database

• High availability
• Data stored on SSDs for speed
• Pay for number of read/writes per second

ElastiCache - Memcache

• Cache database results
• Available in a variety of sizes
• Pay per hour

I hope that you now have some idea of the range of services that AWS has to offer. The services mentioned in this post are only some of the main ones and AWS has much much more to offer.

Leave a comment below with what services you use or are interested in using.

The post AWS Services for Beginners appeared first on MyTechBlog.