Technology - Google News

Samsung gaming hub adds Google Stadia, Nvidia GeForce Now to TVs at CES 2022 - CNET
Alienware’s Concept Nyx aims to cast your PC games to any screen you own - The Verge
Microsoft issues a fix for Exchange Y2K22 bug that shut down company emails - The Verge

Samsung gaming hub adds Google Stadia, Nvidia GeForce Now to TVs at CES 2022 - CNET

Posted: 02 Jan 2022 06:00 PM PST

samsung-gaming-hub-landing-page-cannot-be-published-in-stories-posting-after-jan-15 — Samsung's new gaming hub for 2022 TVs offers easy access to cloud and console games.
Samsung

This story is part of CES, where CNET covers the latest news on the most incredible tech coming soon.

The most popular way to game on a nice TV is with a dedicated console like a PlayStation 5 or Xbox Series X, but cloud gaming services -- which stream playable games over the internet, no console required -- are getting better all the time. At CES 2022, Samsung unveiled a new feature on its latest televisions that caters to cloud and console gamers alike.

Dubbed the gaming hub, it's a dedicated section of Samsung's new smart TV menu system launching later this year on select Samsung 2022 smart TVs. The full cloud gaming libraries of Google Stadia, Nvidia GeForce Now and Utomik will be available at launch "with more to follow," according to Samsung's press release. Users will be able to pair third-party controllers to the TV for instant play, no console or other hardware required. The hub will also allow access to YouTube gaming to follow streamers.

Built-in cloud gaming support on smart TVs isn't new. LG supports both Stadia and GeForce Now (currently in beta) on select TVs, Stadia is available on Google TV and Android TV models from TCL, Hisense and others, while select Amazon Fire TVs support Luna. Of course you can always connect a dedicated cloud gaming device, such as a Chromecast with Google TV for Stadia, a Fire TV Stick for Luna or an Nvidia Shield for GeForce Now or Stadia, to any TV.

Samsung's gaming hub also includes buttons that allow quick access to any attached consoles, and Samsung is adding a few new gaming-specific extras to its new TVs. There's a new version of the game bar first introduced last year, with more information available on things like refresh rate or VRR mode. There's also a zoom mode that can expand things like mini-maps and even the ability to pull up a YouTube video alongside a game -- a boon if you get stuck and need a tutorial.

New for 2022, select TVs will have a 144Hz variable refresh rate -- a feature designed to take advantage of the hastiest video output from high-end PC gaming cards. Note that consoles like the Xbox Series X and Sony PlayStation 5 max out at 120Hz, so they won't take advantage of this feature, and in any case, the extra smoothness should be subtle.

CNET asked which 2022 TVs would get the gaming hub, and whether it would make its way to 2021 or earlier models, but Samsung didn't reply by press time.

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Alienware’s Concept Nyx aims to cast your PC games to any screen you own - The Verge

Posted: 02 Jan 2022 09:01 PM PST

For CES 2022, Alienware is showing off its Concept Nyx, which imagines a future when loading and playing games on a variety of screens can happen as instantaneously as streaming music and TV shows. The idea is simple on its face (though undoubtedly complex underneath the veil): through the Nyx software, all of your PC games would be available to stream wirelessly to a variety of screens at home, regardless of where you bought them.

Imagine you're playing Cyberpunk 2077 on your PC display, but you want to move over to the living room couch and play on a big TV. The idea is that you'd be able to tap a button in an app, and the game would wirelessly swap displays, letting you hog the TV all to yourself or have your game squeeze next to another in a split-view mode. Alienware is working to make it possible to stream up to four games at once. Alienware demoed Nyx to The Verge with repurposed Concept UFO controllers that we last saw at CES 2020 attached to a Switch-like tablet.

In the conceptual phase, Nyx requires a machine that's powerful enough to run multiple games at once, with networking chops to handle distributing low-latency streams. It's unclear whether Alienware intends to release its own hardware, when that might be, how much it might cost, and whether what Nyx aims to do will be a paid service. There are clearly a lot of questions for which Alienware needs to provide answers.

But compared to the likes of Google Stadia and Amazon Luna, Concept Nyx seems built to make accessing and playing your already-owned PC games even easier, with a similar level of device compatibility and, perhaps, fewer compromises in terms of visual quality. In a way, it's remarkably similar to what Valve is already doing with its Remote Play Anywhere feature — for free, to boot. Though, where Nyx intends to differentiate itself is with handling more streams at once and pulling in games from multiple platforms.

It was encouraging that Alienware was actually able to pull off the Nyx demo for us successfully, swapping between multiple displays with just a few seconds in between the pass-off from screen to screen. But we'll need to try it at home and not in a controlled environment to see if it's ready for the real world.

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Microsoft issues a fix for Exchange Y2K22 bug that shut down company emails - The Verge

Posted: 02 Jan 2022 02:32 PM PST

If you woke up on January 1st, 2022, and found that your work email's inbox was unusually empty, you aren't alone. Microsoft rang in the New Year with a bug that prevents Exchange servers from sending emails, but fortunately, a fix has since been issued, as detailed in a report by Bleeping Computer.

"The problem relates to a date check failure with the change of the new year and is not a failure of the AV engine itself," Microsoft explains in a post on its Tech Community forum. "The version checking performed against the signature file is causing the malware engine to crash, resulting in messages being stuck in transport queues."

Microsoft outlines the solution to the problem in its post, requiring administrators to either implement the fix manually or apply an automated script. The post also contains a detailed FAQ, noting that the solution "will take some time" for administrators to implement. And depending on how many emails are stuck in the queue, it may take a while for the messages to land in their intended recipients' inboxes.

Problems started cropping up at midnight on January 1st, with an Exchange administrator on Reddit calling attention to the issue. As explained by Bleeping Computer, administrators began noticing error messages in the Exchange Server's Event Log, such as "The FIP-FS Scan Process failed initialization. Error: 0x8004005. Error Details: Unspecified Error" or "Error Code: 0x80004005. Error Description: Can't convert "2201010001" to long."

Administrators were forced to come up with alternate solutions during the time it took for Microsoft to address the issue, but now that the company has released an official fix, it looks like the Y2K22 crisis is over.

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