The rumor mill has been on full speed this week churning out news surrounding the potential announcement of a sequel to the Marvel vs Capcom series at the Capcom Cup finals this weekend during the Playstation Experience event. Fans have been anticipating a sequel with bated breath since Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom’s release in November of 2011 but had low expectations due to Disney creating Marvel-themed video games for a few years – most of which were not met with high praise. Recently, Disney put the license for Marvel games back out in the world and abandoning their in-house game development projects, paving a path for Capcom to create another sequel. Let’s re-cap some of the news items that have popped up over the last few days. First, images surface detailing a logo and some shots similar to Marvel’s new cinematic opening for their logos as they’ve shown in movies such as Doctor Strange, but with some of the iconic MvC characters in it. Until this point, rumors about Marvel vs Capcom 4 have been just that – rumors. There hasn’t been any form of content published anywhere other than some users on forums saying “I heard from a very reliable source that Marvel vs Capcom 4 is happening.” I’d even heard similar tales myself – at Evo 2016 this year (the Fighting Game Community (FGC)’s biggest and most prestiguous tournament event), mutterings of “Marvel vs Capcom 4 is happening according to my very reliable source” definitely made their way through the grapevine. With nothing more than words and no official source, I for one couldn’t report on it, nor could anyone else at the time. Between the buzz surrounding a potential announcement and the event coming up, the images really struck a chord with the...

Squad – the developer behind Kerbal Space Program – has had a bit of a rough year. Their media director ‘PDtv’ was fired in May of this year. Afterward, he revealed the working conditions of himself and his co-workers at the studio on 4Chan and imgur. Citing long, up-to 16-hour days and unlivable salaries ($2,400 USD/year), once free of NDA he took to the tubes to set the record straight. Below is an excerpt of PDtv’s venting. You can see the full degree of his frustrations here. Several of his co-workers and colleagues corroborated many of his claims on reddit, which you can see here in both the OP and the top comments by /u/r4mon, a modder who worked closely with many of the developers at Squad. Yesterday, several of the developers at Squad have opted to quit, making their announcement over on the Kerbal Space Program subreddit. While there’s no official statement as to their reasoning, one can gather it’s in no small part due to the conditions raised by PDtv earlier this year. On the bright side, /u/larkin-richards of NASA appears to have extended them job offers. On to bigger and better...

On September 10th, Microsoft announced the official release date for Office 2016 as September 22, 2015. According to a blog post by Julie White Julie White, general manager of Office 365 technical product management, Office 2016 will be “broadly available” starting Sept. 22 and Organizations with volume license agreements, including those with Software Assurance, have been able to download the new version since Oct. 1. Office 365 Home office and Personal edition will be able to manually update starting September 22, and automatic updates for these editions started on October 1st. These release dates do not leave much time for organizations to prepare to be updated. The new version boost of new features and changes that can have some administrators scrambling to attempt to control the nest.f What’s new? Office 2016 takes on the new update process of Windows 10, with the updates through the concept of branches. For organizations that currently control how their Office 365 deployments are updated, using an internal source, this will need to determine which branch they will use. The three update options: Current Branch – Monthly updates pushed out by Microsoft’s Content Delivery Network. The default setting for Office 2016 installation is to use Current Branch. Current Branch for Business – Provides updates 4 times a year. This is for organizations that are not bleeding edge and need to have some control on when updates are installed and take some time testing compatibility with other products. First Release for Current Branch for Business – Monthly patches that provide the ability to test patches before the rest of production users are updated. Some additional enhancements to the new version of Office 365 is the support for Background Intelligent Transfer Service (BITS). BITS helps control network traffic when updates are...

Work in IT for long enough and you’ll eventually end up with monitoring notification overload. Once you move into a DevOps or Managed Services environment, the level of level of notifications to deal with can bog down or tie up your entire team. Each of us deal with this overload in our own way. Some create unique email addresses and have all notifications sent there. Some have them sent to their own email and filter them out. Others will even delegate them to a junior colleague and wash their hands of them. Regardless of how you choose to handle the flood of daily notifications, it’s far too easy for the really important business-breaking ones to get lost in the haze. This is where BigPanda comes in. Turn That Cloud Upside Down A cloud-based service that purports to be able to help you cut through the noise, BigPanda integrates with the monitoring tools that you already have. Using data science to help automate and scale the incident management process, BigPanda is designed to be smart enough to create a baseline for your environment and let you know when something happens that isn’t part of that regular baseline. BigPanda aggregates alerts from all your monitoring systems and normalizes them into one consistent data model. It then leverages powerful algorithms to automate the slow and non-scalable tasks of the incident management process. BigPanda intelligently groups alerts into incidents based on host, cluster and application or even by custom tags that you specify yourself. It then correlates incidents with code deployments and infrastructure changes that may have caused them. By helping to teams to detect root causes faster and easier than ever before it can help to mitigate or even eliminate software upgrade nightmares. I took a quick...

Liquidware Labs unveils version 5.7 of its Stratusphere FIT and UX solutions.  The pair of solutions marketed under the Stratusphere umbrella provide greater diagnostics and more in depth visibility into remote work solutions such as VMware View or Microsoft’s RDSH.  Stratusphere FIT and UX also add the ability to peer into the browser of an endpoint as well as a new API aimed at extending the usefulness and applicability of user experience data. In a press release from the company today, CTO Jason Mattox  stated “More than ever, the design, monitoring and diagnostics of next generation desktop and application delivery platforms requires a level of visibility and access to in-guest metrics to ensure an optimal user experience. The platforms and infrastructure to support services such as virtual desktop and application publishing are often heterogeneous and shared amongst several services. Gaining access to a composite metric—like the one we offer in Stratusphere—to quantify the user experience is the only way to meet end users’ expectations.” With the release of version 5.7, Stratusphere UX now offers a visual alerting, diagnostics and monitoring overview of user, application and other contributing infrastructure components via a new Sparkline and mini-table Overview dashboard. These views provide for faster remediation allowing IT staff to keep users online and productive. Stratusphere 5.7 now provides also provides visibility into the browser, with metrics and information to support domains, hosts and URLs being accessed by users. This release of Stratusphere will support Google Chrome, with other notable browser support being added over the next few months. This release also greatly extends visibility through the Stratusphere API. Customers with existing network operations center monitoring tools can feed the granular user, machine and application metrics from Stratusphere into the framework of their choice via a simple...

Last week at the VeeamON conference, Veeam announced the release of their new product, Veeam EndPoint Backup Free. What’s included in Free? Veeam EndPoint Backup Free is a standalone product that can back up your Windows-based desktop or laptop. Endpoint protection products are not new, and competitors have had similar products for some time now. The disruptive thing about Veeam’s offering is the price; competitors charge for the same function. Some key features of Veeam Endpoint Backup Free: Supported for Windows 7 or higher operating systems as well as Windows Server 2008 and Windows 2012. Backup to internal or external hard drive, a NAS (network attached storage) share or a Veeam backup repository Can integrate with Veeam Backup & Replication if one is present in the environment Ability to restore to the same or different hardware, a volume-level restore, or a file-level restore Getting physical (or not) In a first glance at Veeam Endpoint Backup Free you might think Veeam has done a 180 degree turn and is entering the physical server space. Look deeper into the naming of the product – and the price point – and you can see signs of a bigger strategy. A commenter on Veeam’s blog questioned Veeam’s support of physical machines and was corrected by a Veeam employee. This is more evidence that it’s all in the wording. In a prepared statement, CEO Ratmir Timashev says “Veeam believes that modern data centers should be fully virtualized, but we also recognize that unlike servers, endpoints will always remain physical, and they need to be backed up as well.  Plus, if the IT organization still has a few physical servers left in their data center, Veeam Endpoint Backup FREE can help fill that gap.” Free products usually attract users to...