SIMS 4 has been out long enough for reviewers and gamers to provide feedback on the latest chapter in the mighty SIMS franchise. So far the reviews have not been highly positive.

The game has a number of issues with the most disturbing being deformed babies leading to galleries of deformed SIMS 4 babies. The consensus at this stage is that the game is ok, lacks game mechanics users expect in a SIMS game, has some new quirks, and generally could be a lot better.

EA has apparently not learnt from the last SIMCity debacle with SIMS 4 requiring an Origin account and internet connectivity to register. Players are disappointed. Too bad! Given the resources EA commands and that 5 years have passed since the last SIMS this game could have been awesome.

IBM, 1950s inventor of modern hard drives, is said to be working on a new technology to replace their creation.

Saving files to memory is something that's supposed to be mostly invisible for the end user. We don't need to think about it; it just has to work. But whether it's a solid-state or hard disk drive, conventional storage solutions have their limitations -- namely, speed, rewritability and durability. A team at IBM Research's Almaden facility in California has a cure for all of that and it's called "racetrack memory."

The new technology is said to be far faster than solid state, and far more durable.

In the Hindu pantheon, Kali represents death and change, the dispelling of evil and the devouring of the unwanted. She is forbidden, and even death itself, but therefore also an element of salvation. In the Linux world, she is like opening a can of whoop-ass on your server.

Kali Linux (appropriately named, if I may say so) is a Linux distro focused on penetration and exploit testing, and therefore the element of change that will get you to shore up all those gaping configuration gaps in your systems: it's perhaps your salvation! But enough metaphors. Practically, Kali Linux installs on a DVD or pendrive, and contains dozens and dozens of specialized penetration testing tools to test your system. It's developed by the folks at Offensive Security, and grew out of the well-acclaimed Backtrack Linux, which had the same focus.

It's based on Debian rather than Ubuntu so you get a dated version of the Gnome 2 desktop, but who cares? It's not really a desktop, just a platform for launching tools. Over three hundred of them, from information gathering to vulnerability analysis, password attacks, wireless attacks, spoofing, stress testing, reverse engineering, hardware hacking, forensics, and more. As mentioned, you can run it from a DVD, pendrive, or even remote-boot from PXE or install to Amazon cloud. To make it as useful as possible they support ARM aggressively including ARMEL and ARMHF (and of course Raspberry Pi and cousins), plus as many different wifi devices as humanly possible.

They're innovating, too, producing opensource products like the ISO of Doom (hardware backdoor), custom images, the Evil Wireless Access Point, and more.

Fun stuff if you want to ensure your system is as safe as possible; scary stuff if you don't want to bother. Kali's Distrowatch page has more information including a link to their excellent documentation (the best place to start if you want to know what else Kali does), but ZDNet has a good review and LinuxBSDOS has another cursory review with some decent screenshots.

Scientists have discovered the fossilized remains of a new long-necked, long-tailed dinosaur that has taken the crown for largest terrestrial animal with a body mass that can be accurately determined.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2014/09/04/this-is-the-kind-of-dinosaur-you-find-in-hollywood/

A new generation of routers have emerged that promise unparalleled gigabit wireless speeds using new 802.11ac Wi-Fi technology. The problem is that our mobile devices - even the ones that boast 802.11ac radios - often can't take full advantage of them. Broadcom aims to change that with a new wireless chipset that will boost theoretical connection speeds from a smartphone or tablet to the Wi-Fi router to 650 Mbps. That may not be gigabit speed, but gigabit speed was always a bit of misnomer anyway - it's more an indication of overall network capacity rather than how quickly any given device could connect to the network.