ReportWire

Tag: Microsoft Windows

  • Call Of Duty: Black Ops 6 Jacks Up XP Rewards In First Update

    Call Of Duty: Black Ops 6 Jacks Up XP Rewards In First Update

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    Screenshot: Activision

    Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 is a game about shadowy organizations causing geopolitical turmoil and well-timed headshots. It’s also an RPG about making the progress meters fill up. When it comes to the latter, Black Ops 6‘s first patch is already increasing XP rewards for certain modes to keep the level-ups flowing.

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    An October 26 update for the game listed a handful of changes and bug fixes, including a series of map exploits, a problem with matches quickly replacing players that leave, and various glitches in Black Ops 6‘s well-received Zombies mode. The changes that are most noteworthy were to XP, though. Four modes will now get boosted rewards.

    Increased XP and Weapon XP rates for modes that were awarding less XP than expected

    • Team Deathmatch
    • Control
    • Search & Destroy
    • Gunfight

    “Our team is closely monitoring XP rates for all modes to ensure players are progressing as expected wherever they play,” the development team wrote. XP earned and other rewards often start out a little stingier at launch since it’s always easier to increase them later once the data from millions of people playing comes back, rather than the reverse.

    There are already lots of different strategies for optimizing XP gain in multiplayer. Obviously, playing better—landing headshots, chasing objectives, and unloading killstreaks—all accrue rank-ups faster. Some players also recommend playing Hardpoint instead of Domination because players in that mode are more likely to actually play objectives. Others suggest grinding out all of those camo challenges. And, of course, no new Call of Duty launch is complete without sickos crushing cases of Monster Energy for double XP.

    Black Ops 6 players had latched onto one easy trick for getting bonus XP by exploiting the decoy grenades for guaranteed kill assists. Treyarch nerfed that one in the above patch as well, though.

         

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    Ethan Gach

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  • A 30-Year-Old Menu In Windows Was Meant To Be Temporary, Actually

    A 30-Year-Old Menu In Windows Was Meant To Be Temporary, Actually

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    It turns out that a small but useful menu inside your modern Windows PC was designed and built in one day in 1994. It was meant to be a temporary stopgap until something better was created to replace it. That never happened, and now, 30 years later, the guy behind that original menu has revealed the story behind it.

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    If you’ve used a Windows PC in the last 20+ years and had to format a storage drive, you’ve likely encountered the “Format Disk” menu box. It’s a nondescript, simple, barebones, but totally usable menu that lets you reformat drives using different options. The various options are laid out vertically and use drop-down menus. There’s also a start and close option and…uh, that’s it. And this functional but basic menu hasn’t changed in over three decades, according to longtime Microsoft programmer Dave Plummer.

    On March 24, Plummer posted a lengthy but interesting tweet explaining the history behind the Format dialog box and why it looks like that and has those features laid out in that vertical manner. According to Plummer, he wrote up the design of this Format menu on a rainy Thursday morning at Microsoft back in late 1994. The famed programmer says he and the team were at the time porting a “bajillion” lines of Windows 95 user interface code to Windows NT. When it came time to create a UI for Windows NT’s Format feature, the two operating systems were just “different enough” that Plummer had to come up with some new, custom UI.

    “I got out a piece of paper and wrote down all the options and choices you could make with respect to formatting a disk, like file system, label, cluster size, compression, encryption, and so on,” explained Plummer in his tweet.

    “Then I busted out VC++2.0 and used the Resource Editor to lay out a simple vertical stack of all the choices you had to make, in the approximate order you had to make. It wasn’t elegant, but it would do until the elegant UI arrived.”

    Here’s the thing: That better, “elegant” UI option never arrived. 30 years later, Plummer says the dialog option seen in modern Windows is still the same one he designed and created on that day in 1994. “Be careful about checking in ‘temporary’ solutions,” added Plummer.

    What’s funny is even a lack of consistency in the menu’s colons—some options have them, others don’t—was kept in the final version and remains in the Format Disk box to this very day. However, Plummer hinted (jokingly) in a follow-up reply that this “bug” might finally get fixed. (Oddly, the colon consistently is correct in the German version of Windows 11. Huh!)

    Oh, and according to Plummer, he was the one who decided on constraining the format size of a FAT volume to 32GB. And that decision was a totally “arbitrary choice” he made that same rainy morning.

    “So remember… there are no ‘temporary’ check-ins,” concluded Plummer.

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    Zack Zwiezen

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  • Death Comes For Us All: Steam No Longer Supports Windows 7

    Death Comes For Us All: Steam No Longer Supports Windows 7

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    The fated day has come: If you are still using Windows 7, 8, or 8.1 you might need to upgrade to Windows 10 or 11 soon, as Valve’s massively popular digital storefront, Steam, no longer officially supports those older operating systems.

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    Valve first revealed that it would drop support for older Windows versions in a support page posting last March. The message explained that as of January 1, 2024, Steam users on Windows 7, 8, and 8.1 will no longer receive new client updates of “any kind,” including security fixes. As a result, Valve is warning users of these operating system to upgrade “sooner than later” to avoid malware and other malicious attacks.

    In the post, Valve also explained that Steam Support will no longer offer technical support for issues related to these older versions of Windows. Valve also can’t guarantee that Steam will remain useable on these older OSs moving forward.

    However, to be clear, Valve isn’t flipping a switch and killing Steam on Windows 7. It’s just saying that things might start to break soon, and if they do, they won’t get fixed.

    “We expect the Steam client and games on these older operating systems to continue running for some time without updates after January 1st, 2024,” Valve wrote. “But we are unable to guarantee continued functionality after that date.”

    Why Steam is ending support for Windows 7

    Valve says one main reason for it cutting off support for Windows 7, 8, and 8.1 is due to Google Chrome no longer supporting these older operating systems. That’s a problem for Valve, as Steam relies on an embedded version of the browser. The company behind Half-Life and Portal also mentioned that future versions of the Steam client will “require” Windows features and security updates only found in Windows 10 and 11.

    Valve ended its post encouraging players to upgrade to Windows 10 or 11 soon.

    “Computers running these [older] operating systems, when connected to the internet, are susceptible to new malware and other exploits which will not be patched,” Valve warned. “That malware can cause your PC, Steam, and games to perform poorly or crash. That malware can also be used to steal the credentials for your Steam account or other services.”

    While some folks might now be forced to upgrade or even buy a new PC to keep playing on Steam, it seems reasonable for Valve to move forward and leave behind Windows 7, which was released all the way back in 2009. That’s a hell of a long time when it comes to technology, and Valve supporting that OS for nearly 15 years is impressive.

    However, if you do upgrade to Windows 10, get ready to upgrade again soon as Microsoft is winding down security support for that OS in October 2025. As someone holding on desperately to Windows 10, I’m counting the days.

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    Zack Zwiezen

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  • Let’s Go Down The Latest Spotify ‘Fake Artist’ Rabbit Hole

    Let’s Go Down The Latest Spotify ‘Fake Artist’ Rabbit Hole

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    Recently, Spotify’s “fake artist” problem, first spotted as far back as 2017, has been a topic of conversation yet again, with a playlist of 49 virtually identical songs from different artists making the rounds on the internet. And no, this isn’t a snarky jab about how all pop music is built on the same general concepts; these songs appear to be similar versions of the same piece of poorly produced music, each differentiated by random changes in pitch.

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    Between its gargantuan size and anemic royalty payouts, Spotify has rarely been without controversy. As a veritable kingmaker operating, allegedly, by the invisible hand of the music marketplace, attempts to mine the service for money are nothing new. Sometimes large corporations are suspected of such behavior, including Spotify itself (which it staunchly denies). Clever artists have also deployed tongue-in-cheek stunts to try and game the system, which is widely seen as being brutally unfair to indie musicians. Recently, songs from no-name artists have been found to bear striking similarities to one another. They’re clearly the same piece of music, starting the same way and using the same melodic motifs, though the album art, artist name, and base pitch of each version varies.

    On Twitter, media producer Adam Faze shared a strange discovery, collating 49 seemingly identical songs into a public Spotify playlist titled “these are all the same song.”

    One quick listen and, yeah, there are shades of difference, mostly in terms of pitch. But these are undeniably all the same song.

    As many pointed out in Faze’s replies, it all sounds like the product of low-effort generative music techniques or even AI productions—and, no, not the more respectable, exploratory kind that composers, electronic musicians, and visual artists have experimented with for years.

    Another odd quirk of the songs found in Faze’s cursed playlist is that each track features similarly styled, bizarre,stock images for the album art.

    It would also seem that this phenomenon is not exclusive to Spotify. As musician Zoë Keating discovered, Apple Music also seems to have pitch-shifted renditions of classical music attributed to faux artists.

    Kotaku has reached out to Spotify and Apple for comment.

    While just about anyone can upload music to streaming services with something like a Distrokid account, Universal Media Group has recently called on Spotify to take a stance against AI-generated music that lifts the likeness of established artists to create new music. As with AI-generated visual art, however, these problems aren’t likely to fade away.

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    Claire Jackson

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