​The ten commandments of PC gaming PC gaming is pretty much the best. You get the prettiest, cheapest, most flexible versions of almost every game, along with hundreds of games that aren't available anywhere else. But despite all that, some of the people who make video games don't treat PC gamers all that well. We've returned to the top of Video Game Mountain in search of answers, and have come down with ten rules that all PC game developers should obey. You could even call them... commandments. Kotaku

Samsung and Apple team up on 14nm FinFET, chips expected in 2015 The will-they-won't-they dance between Apple and TSMC was a long-running tech story years before it became shipping reality. After reported test runs on 28nm and a long negotiation process, TSMC finally won Apple's business for its brand-new 20nm node. This lock, however, appears to be short-lived -- Apple and Samsung are reportedly planning a launch on Samsung's 14nm technology later this year. ExtremeTech (also, Apple's sprawling, back-loaded 2014, and what to expect in 2015)

Linux Mint 17.1 review -- less change is good change The Linux Mint team recently released Linux Mint 17.1 -- a somewhat minor but still welcome upgrade to the Ubuntu-based ecosystem. And while Linux Mint 17.1 arrives as it usually does (a few weeks after the release of a new version of Ubuntu), version 17.1 is not based on Ubuntu's latest effort, 14.10. Instead, this edition of Mint remains tied to the last Long Term Support (LTS) release, Ubuntu 14.04. Ars Technica (also, Ubuntu Core announced

Mysterious '08 Turkey pipeline blast opened new cyberwar era The pipeline was outfitted with sensors and cameras to monitor every step of its 1,099 miles from the Caspian Sea to the Mediterranean. The blast that blew it out of commission didn't trigger a single distress signal. That was bewildering, as was the cameras' failure to capture the combustion in eastern Turkey. But investigators shared their findings within a tight circle. The Turkish government publicly blamed a malfunction... Bloomberg

Understanding hard drive SMART stats I've shared a lot of Backblaze data about hard drive failure statistics While our system handles a drive failing, we prefer to predict drive failures, and use the hard drives' built-in SMART metrics to help. The dirty industry secret? SMART stats are inconsistent from hard drive to hard drive. With nearly 40,000 hard drives and over 100,000,000 GB of data stored for customers, we have a lot of hard-won experience. BackBlaze

Tracking Cirrus: Is this the Silk Road 2.0 mole? The second iteration of Silk Road came crashing down just as dramatically as the first. Blake Benthall, who admitted to mo​onlighting as the site's administrator, known as Defcon, made a similar mistake to Ross Ulbricht, the alleged owner of the original Silk Road. According to the FBI complaint against Benthall, he registered the black market bazaar's servers with the email address blake@benthall.net. Vice

Was isolated from 1999 to 2006 with a 486. Built my own late 80s operating system The OS is called OSCI ("Aussie") or "Operating System Command Interface". It's a parser-based OS that I built in 3 months as I had only a 486 with a copy of DOS, and QBASIC. I was moved out to an extremely remote country area in the middle of NSW Australia to live with people I didn't want to live with and isolated with no internet for 7 years during my childhood/teenhood. Imgur

Logitech 2014 Switzerland Tech Day: The hills are alive with the sound of Romer G For most users who have discussed the multitude of peripherals on offer for PC users, Logitech is a name that features almost every time. I remember my G7 wireless mouse and G15 keyboard combination back in 2005-2006 when I was clan gaming, but Logitech's history goes back way beyond this to some of the first early iterations of mouse design. AnandTech

Better Than a Quad-Head Display: My Adventures with "4K" 2160p and Linux While searching for an upgrade for my aging 1080i television, I became entranced with the progress of 4K "ultra-hd" monitors with resolutions of 3840x2160 pixels. It occurred to me that with all this industry focus on consumer televisions with high resolutions, certainly the next generation of computer monitors would also follow this format. LXer

The story behind AOL's iconic yellow running man It was spring of 1997. "Mmmbop" was the pop song of the moment and unlimited access to AOL cost $19.95 a month. Dial-up Internet had finally tipped mainstream. People were talking about Buddy Lists and instant messaging the way Twitter followers and instagramming come up today. This was, AOL declared, a turning point in communications history. The Atlantic

Is C still relevant in the 21st century? Many programming languages have come and gone since Dennis Ritchie devised C in 1972, and yet C has not only survived three major revisions, but continues to thrive. Large chunks of Windowswere written in C, along with most of Linux. But aside from this incredible legacy, what keeps C atop the Tiobe Index? Dice