Software News

Two FBI agents part of the Hostage Rescue Team (HRT), a specialized counterterrorism tactical unit, have been killed in a training accident, The Guardian Express informs.

Further details on the incident, including the cause of death, will be released today, Monday, May 20.

The two agents were Christopher Lorek, 41, and Special Agent Stephen Shaw, 40. The Guardian Express says that a helicopter was also involved and that an investigation is now underway.

“We mourn the loss of two brave and courageous men, who like all who serve on the Hostage Rescue Team – whether training or on an operational mission – accept the highest risk, each and every day, in their commitment to keep our nation safe,” FBI Director Robert S. Mueller says in a statement.

“Our hearts are with their wives, children, and other loved ones who feel their loss most deeply. And they will always be part of the FBI Family,” Mueller adds.


Via: 2 FBI Agents Killed in Training Accident

SmartGit, a graphical client for the version control systems Git and Mercurial with optimized workflows for multiple platforms, is now at version 4.5.3.

SmartGit provides some very important features such as local working tree operations, push, pull, fetch for all protocols, tag and branch management, and much more.

Highlights of SmartGit 4.5.3:

• Various performance improvements have been implemented;
• Set Tracked Branch function now also allows to *change* a tracked branch;
• "ui.encoding" or "web.encoding" are now used for displaying file contents;
• "Delete" has been renamed to "Close";
• The ability to disable syntax coloring by setting "smartgit.textEditors.syntaxHiglighting=false" has been added;
• The ability to show executed commands by settings "smartgit.command.show=true" has been added;
• Help|SmartGit/Hg documentation has been made available for all platforms.

Check out the complete changelog for a list of bugfixes.

Download SmartGit 4.5.3 right now from Softpedia.

Via: Performance Improved in SmartGit 4.5.3

Google Translate is one of those things that everyone uses and no one thinks about. And by everyone we mean 200 million people who use Translate, in one form or another, each and every day for one billion translations.

The fact that they don't even notice it is not a bad thing necessarily, tools are supposed to get the job done and get out of the way.

Of the 200 million, plenty are using the automated translation feature in Chrome, which has proven very useful especially for those who don't speak English, the most popular language on the web. But that's still a lot of people.

Of course, Translate supports quite a lot more languages, over 70 at the last count. But Google is working on adding more, there are thousands of languages in the world after all.

The big problem is that machine translation, what powers Google Translate, requires data, the more data the better the translation. For languages with little representation online, this data is hard to get.


Via: Google Translate Is Used by 200 Million People Each Day

The review department of Softpedia Games has been pretty busy this week and delivers long-form evaluations for: Metro: Last Light, the post-apocalyptic narrative-driven shooter from 4A Games and Deep Silver; Anomaly 2, a new tower defense experience; Sanctum 2, a mix of shooter and tower defense, and Leviathan: Warships, a naval combat title.

We also have the usual Weekend Reading features: one dealing with the decision to put Gran Turismo 6 on the PlayStation 3 rather than the PS4, and another about next-gen consoles and E3.

The open beta period of the Neverwinter MMO from Cryptic means that we also have a set of Gamer Diaries associated with the experience.

Our EndWeekGame piece talks about how we plan to spend our gaming time, and we also have a selection of the most interesting news from the past week.

On Monday, a leak offered more information on the mechanics and DLC plans for Battlefield 4 while Blizzard announced that it would donate to charity all gold earned during a glitch in Diablo III.

Tuesday, Gearbox launched the Krieg character for Borderlands 2 and offered info on its skilltree, and 2K Marin talked about the way The Bureau will turn shooter lovers into tactics fans.

Wednesday, Valve added the Trading Cards feature to Steam and Gran Turismo 6 was finally revealed officially via a Silverstone event, set to launch on the PS3 in winter 2013.

Thursday, Metro: Last Light received an update to fix FOV issues and add more support for AMD, while Sony talked about the way GT6 will show off the power of the PlayStation 3.

On Friday, Rockstar delivered a number of new images for Grand Theft Auto V while Diablo III for the PS4 got another developer video focusing on controller changes.

Saturday, EA confirmed that it had no Wii U games in development, and rumors talked about a new dashboard being introduced ahead of the Xbox 720 launch.

Via: A Gamers Week: May 19

The video above was filmed at the National Zoo in Washington DC, and shows a sea lion being very much concerned about the wellbeing of a little girl who tripped and fell right in front of its tank.

Witnesses say that, before the little girl tripped and fell, she and the sea lion had been playing for over five minutes.

Thus, the girl kept running in front of the sea lion's tank, and the animal appeared to enjoy following her around.

Because of this, many claim that the sea lion was truly worried about his playmate's taking an unexpected tumble right in front of its eyes.

By the looks of it, the little girl suffered no injuries. Here's hoping it won't be long until she returns to the National Zoo and once again plays with the sea lion.

Via: Watch: Worried Sea Lion Turns to Check On Little Girl Who Trips, Falls

Firefox 23 has made it to the Aurora channel and, while it may not be rich on new features, there are a couple of interesting additions and changes. For one, Mozilla is continuing with the mixed content blocking experiment, the feature is now turned on by default.

The idea is to prevent pages served via encrypted connections to load resources via unencrypted HTTP. You can read more about this here.

It's easier to change search preferences, now, it's possible to do it straight from the search box. What's more, users can now change the preferences for awesomebar and the context menu search from the same place.

Mozilla has also started cleaning up the preferences dialog. The decision was made after it became clear that many options that have been around for a decade or more don't make any sense today and, what's more, they may actually make it possible for users to break the browser.

Firefox 23 Aurora removes some of the dangerous preferences, "Load images automatically", "Enable JavaScript", and Always show the tab bar."

Finally, perhaps the biggest change of all, symbolically at least, is remove of support for the <blink> element, a plague from a bygone era. As the name suggests, blink adds a blinking effect to text.

Blink was never a standard element, but it was supported by several browsers. In the web's early days, people went crazy with it and used it a lot more than they should have, which is never.

Google even named its new rendering engine for Chrome Blink. That's supposed to mean that the Blink engine will never implement useless, non-standard and annoying features like Blink.

This is becoming a naming tradition at Google, the name Chrome itself comes from browser "chrome," i.e. the UI. One of Google's big goals with Chrome initially was to minimize the UI, the chrome.


Via: Firefox 23 Aurora Drops "Blink", Removes Dangerous Preferences

The development team working on Europa Universalis IV is revealing the new scoring system that will be used for the grand strategy title, mainly in order to allow those engaged in multiplayer to assess the evolution of their nation.

The scoring system will use the newly separate categories of Administration, Military, and Diplomacy.

The team writes in a developer diary that “Every month you get points, depending on your rank in these three different fields. The top 10 nations in each field earns points, with the number of points dependent on your rank in each category.”

Those who are not in the top ten do not get any points but they are never penalized for failing behind the pack.

Elements like income, fleet power, vassal nations, alliances, armies, manpower, leader, and technology will be considered for the scoring system in Europa Universalis IV.

The game will launch in the fall on the PC.

Via: Europa Universalis IV Gets New Scoring System