Elder Scrolls O. Exclusive Images!

Elder Scrolls Online – exclusive concept art gallery – in pictures

Bethesda is set to take its critically acclaimed Elder Scrolls series into the massively-multiplayer realm later this month. Here, the concept and lore design team introduce us to a selection of concept artworks produced for the forthcoming PC, PS4 and Xbox One title

"This is a biome piece for Stormhold, an ancient city founded by the Barsaebic Ayleids. You can see what remains of their architecture in the background. Later it was taken over by Argonians who built their modern mud homes among the crumbled arches."

"These are designs for the Robes of the Worm Cult. The Cult of the Black Worm is a society of necromancers, worshipers of Molag Bal, and evil fiends devoted to the hastening of the Planemeld. They sow dissent wherever they operate, performing foul rituals, hoarding powerful relics, and raising undead minions to cause chaos."

"This is a biome design for Auridon in the Aldmeri Dominion. It’s a region of tall, broken cliffs, colorful forests, and pale sands. While the High Elves cultivate their surroundings, wild regions of deep forest and forgotten ruins still remain. This is a very ancient and traditional region."

"Medium, heavy, and light armors in the Breton style are shown here. There were several iterations of these throughout development. Breton designs are the most 'traditional' medieval fantasy designs in ESO. Centuries of warfare in High Rock have led the Bretons to value functionality over beauty; their architecture and attire alike share an earthy, hand-crafted quality."

"This piece depicts southern Bangkorai, a landscape of shifting desert sands with small outcroppings of hard, flat stone. A few shallow oases dot the desert, almost all fortified by Redguard nomads who have made this treacherous land their home for centuries."

"An array of props designed for the Oblivion realm of Coldharbour, the setting for much of ESO’s main storyline. Molag Bal holds dominion over this wretched plane."

"The battle-scarred Breton city of Camlorn, which you can help liberate from its bestial conquerors."

"These Colovian rugs can also be hung as tapestries. The Colovians of western Cyrodiil have Nord ancestors, and their influences are apparent in Colovian culture and attitudes. They’re a stern, religious people. You can see the symbols of Akatosh, Kyne, and Stendarr woven into these decorations."

"The entrance to the Crypt of Hearts lies on the southeastern border of Rivenspire at the foot of the Wrothgar Mountains. Once an idyllic farming enclave, something evil has taken root here and destroyed the peaceful city of Heartland."

"Here, you can see some of the modular system designed for the Dwarven ruin set, which is the setting for many dungeons in ESO. Dwarven architecture is primarily subterranean; the few surface features are generally entryways."

"This shows a glimpse of Eyevea, a sanctuary for members of the Mages Guild. But now the entire idyllic island has been magically spirited away by a mysterious force. Can you help the Mages Guild regain it?"

"These are some tree and rock guides designed for Eastmarch, which is mostly icy volcanic tundra. It has a few scattered lakes bordered by snow-covered mountains to the east and west. Pine forests grow in the fertile lands at the base of the mountains, thinning at altitude to form a vast, frozen wasteland."

"This is a banekin, a weak servitor Daedra that is only clever in its cruelty. They are not masters of their own powers and are known to be more destructive than helpful. A summoner might find some use in letting them wreak the wanton havoc they so love. Beyond that, their uses are few—they’re quick to forget commands."

"These Daedra, the harvesters, are often used by Molag Bal as overseers of cult activities. They’re frequent participants in rituals involving sacrifices or soul-stealing. Though they do have some measure of intelligence, their lack of culture or language places them below the Dremora in Daedric hierarchy."

"The titan is a giant, armored behemoth used by Molag Bal as a guardian of souls and other critical strategic resources. Part undead, part Daedra, this horrific monstrosity is intelligent and powerful, making it a formidable foe for even the most skilled adventurers."

"This shows a battle with a daedroth, a crocodile-headed humanoid Daedra. Reptilian and massive, simple and brutish, daedroth are savage, ravenous beasts. Their thick hides are resistant to magical attacks, and they’re known to belch forth fire—a devastating addition to their powerful attacks."

Canines and Techs!

A new canine masterclass promises to teach dogs how to paint and read commands on a touchscreen

Shiona Tregaskis teaches her dog, Olive, to recognise the word 'sit'. Photograph: Ross McElwain/The Guardian

It was inevitable, really, given the irrepressible rise of the selfie: the day has finally come when we can attempt to teach our canine friends to capture images of themselves.

All the same, I am a little taken aback to find myself smearing my iPad screen with peanut butter and waving it under my pup’s nose.

I am at an iPad class billed as “higher education for your dog”, run by the pioneer of dog-selfie training, New Yorker Anna Jane Grossman. She has teamed up with her childhood friend Nicole Scott, founder of City Dog, and Londoners now have the opportunity to attend one of their iDog clinics.

“These courses are about having fun together, developing the bond between you and your dog, and refining your training skills. Plus you will walk away with a cool party trick,” promises Scott, while Grossman is quick to point out that we are not here to teach our dogs to do useful things, such as online banking.

Refine your training skills

City Dog has its own bespoke app in development, which will launch in early May, but in the meantime, Grossman and Scott use a variety of apps, including Big Camera Button, which turns the entire screen of a tablet or smartphone into a shutter button. The camera is constrained to close-focus and is able to take pictures in quick succession, increasing the dog’s chances of capturing itself at a flattering angle.

My dog and I don’t get off to a brilliant start. Olive is a sensitive Chinese crested-mix who can’t cope with the sound of the clicker - the training device used to pinpoint and reward the exact moment the dog does something that the trainer wants to encourage. She modestly turns her face away from the iPad, desperate for a place to hide.

When I clock the carefree shiba inu next to us, who has already progressed to creating her own artworks on a specially designed painting app, I begin to question whether my dog is quite as bright as I have always liked to believe.

‘A dog is like a little robot’

But under Scott’s gentle guidance, we build Olive’s confidence, teaching her first to touch my hand with her nose, moving to a wooden dummy iPhone, and finally, the iPad screen. Before long, she has captured dozens of selfies. Most of them are fairly abstract, but I’m delighted.

Olive takes a selfie. Photograph: Olive Tregaskis/The Guardian

At one point she gets her tricks mixed up and does a high-five on the screen. The result is a nice shot, but maverick acts of spontaneity such as these are not to be encouraged. “We want our dogs to nose the iPad on cue,” explains Grossman firmly, “because if you can master that, the better she’ll be at understanding you when you need to teach important stuff.”

Social engagement aside, what lies at the heart of the iPad training is motor development. Scott points out that Olive is aiming for exactly the same spot on the screen every time, and what may appear to be random nose swipes are in fact fairly precise. “It’s conditioning,” she says. “Dogs learn in pictures. Inside your dog’s brain is a very simple algorithm – pleasant images in one place and unpleasant images in another. A dog is like a little robot, and every time we say ‘yes!’ she takes a picture of whatever is visually in front of her and files it in her ‘pleasant’ queue.

“Later, we can train her to differentiate between images, such as words on a screen, for example. We can even get her to answer a question by training her to tap a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ button.”

It all sounds a little too sophisticated for poor Olive, but my reservations are swept aside when Grossman, in a matter of mere minutes, teaches her to recognise – and respond correctly to – written commands, using the app Big Words.

Trying it for myself, I hold up the iPad with the word “sit” in large white letters against a black screen. Olive immediately sits. Next I show her “whirly” and she twirls around, enthusiastically rewarding me with what is, helpfully, her favourite trick. I return the word “sit” to the screen, and she obliges. I am amazed. We agree she’s clearly more of an intellectual than an artist. “You’ll have her reading Dostoevsky soon,” says Grossman.

What dogs really want

Cats have long dominated the pet app market. Game for Cats, for example, which encourages them to chase after laser dots, has been downloaded more than 1m times. But never mind the popularity of cat apps – you’d never get a cat to recognise a word and respond to it.

Olive's artwork created on App for Dog. Dogs are, of course, operating-system agnostic.

At first glance, it all seems like a bit of silly fun, but key to City Dog’s methods is something genuinely essential to dog ownership: nurturing through play the deep two-way bond between animal and human. 

“So many of our clients love to spoil their dogs with material stuff, but their dogs don’t care about all that. What they really want is mental stimulation. They want to play,” Grossman says. “We’re teaching owners how to get engagement from their dogs, which is the foundation for all dog training.

“I think people are starting to see dog selfies less as a novelty and more as something that actually can be a step toward developing other kinds of training skills.” 

As the lesson draws to a close, Olive has taken 146 selfies. I think I may have created a monster. 

Hard Drive Reliability

A few months ago we asked and answered one of computing’s oldest questions: How long do hard drives actually last? That story missed one vital piece of information, though —who makes the most reliable hard drives? Well, we can now answer that question too.

Just like last time, this information comes from Backblaze, an all-you-can-eat online backup company. Backblaze currently has around 28,000 hard drives powered up and constantly spinning, storing a total of around 80,000 terabytes (80 petabytes) of user data. As you can imagine, it is very much in Backblaze’s interests to ensure that it buys reliable hard drives. Every time a drive fails, it takes considerable time and effort to pull the drive, slot in a new one, and rebuild the RAID array.

Which hard drive manufacturer is the most reliable?

Backblaze breaks down its data in two ways — by manufacturer, and by specific drive. The data is fairly complex, but we’ll try to break it down into morsels of easy-to-digest, actionable information. (Read: How a hard drive works.)

As of the end of December 2013, Backblaze had 12,765  Seagate drives, 12,956 Hitachi drives, and 2,838 Western Digital drives. These drives are not all the same age — some are almost four years old, while many were installed in the past year. The odd numbers are because Backblaze basically buys whatever drive offers the most competitive dollar-per-gigabyte ratio, with reliability being a secondary factor. For most of the last four years, Seagate and Hitachi have offered the best price-per-gig, with Western Digital Red drives only now becoming a viable option for Backblaze.

Hard drive annual failure rate, broken down by maker (Hitachi, Seagate, Western Digital) and size

As you can see from the graph above, Hitachi drives are by far the most reliable. Even though most of Backblaze’s Hitachi drives are now older than two years, they only have an annual failure rate of around 1%. The “annual failure rate” is the chance of a drive dying within a 12-month period. After three years of being powered up 24/7, 96.9% of Hitachi drives are still running.

Western Digital is slightly worse, but still impressive: After three years of operation, 94.8% of Western Digital drives are still running. Backblaze lists the annual failure rate of the WD drives at around 3% (I don’t think the numbers quite add up, but I could be wrong).

Seagate drives are not very reliable at all. As you can see in the second graph below, Seagate drives are fine for the first year, but failures quickly start building up after 18 months. By the end of the third year, just 73.5% of Backblaze’s Seagate drives are still running. This equates to an annual failure rate of 8-9%.

Hard drive failure rate, plotted by month

In Backblaze’s words: “If the price were right, we would be buying nothing but Hitachi drives. They have been rock solid, and have had a remarkably low failure rate.”

Which single hard drive is the most reliable? (And which is the least?)

In general, then, if you want a reliable hard drive you should go for a Hitachi or Western Digital. If you’re looking for a specific drive model that has good longevity, the numbers break down interestingly.

The two best drives, with 0.9% annual failure rate over more than two years, are the Hitachi GST Deskstar 5K3000, and Hitachi Deskstar 7K3000. Get one of these drives and you’re almost guaranteed (97-98%) to make it through three years without a dead drive. If you want a 4TB drive, the Hitachi Deskstar 5K4000 is your best bet — it has a slightly higher failure rate, but still below WD and Seagate’s offerings.

As far as poor reliability goes, Seagate has some nasty offenders. The 1.5TB Seagate Barracuda 7200 (an old drive now) has a very high chance of failing after three or four years. Even the newer 3TB Seagate Barracuda has a pretty high failure rate, at 9.8% per year.

Backblaze also notes that some drives (the Western Digital Green 3TB and Seagate Barracuda LP 2TB) start producing errors as soon as they’re slotted into a storage pod. They think this is due to the large amounts of vibration caused by thousands of other hard drives. (They also think that their aggressive spin-down setting, which is ostensibly to save power, causes a lot of wear to the drive.)

Samsung and Toshiba

Unfortunately, Backblaze doesn’t have a statistically significant number of Samsung or Toshiba drives installed. Even so, because Samsung’s hard drive division was acquired by Seagate in 2011, it’s hard to say if an older, pre-acquisition Samsung drive would be more or less reliable than a post-acquisition drive. Toshiba/Fujitsu still have a reasonable wedge (~10%) of the market share pie, but unfortunately we’ll have to wait for another study to see how they compare to Seagate, Western Digital, and Hitachi.

On the topic of acquisitions, you may also remember that Western Digital acquired Hitachi GST almost two years ago. If we compare Hitachi drives from before and after the acquisition, the annual failure rate seems to stay the same (around 1%). It would seem that Western Digital and Hitachi have the reliable hard drive business sewn up — and this is before we’ve had a chance to see what WD/HGST’s helium-filled hard drive can do!

Security at Risk

A U.S. cybersecurity firm says it has gathered evidence that the Russian government spied on hundreds of American, European and Asian companies, the first time Moscow has been linked to cyber attacks for alleged economic – rather than political – gains.

According to the firm, CrowdStrike, the victims of the previously unreported cyber espionage campaign include energy and technology firms, some of which have lost valuable intellectual property.

CrowdStrike declined to go into detail about those losses or to name any victims, citing confidentiality agreements related to its investigation.

Officials with the Russian Interior Ministry could not be reached for comment early on Wednesday in Moscow.

“These attacks appear to have been motivated by the Russian government’s interest in helping its industry maintain competitiveness in key areas of national importance,” Dmitri Alperovitch, chief technology officer of CrowdStrike, told Reuters on Tuesday evening.

Cybersecurity researchers have in the past said that China’s government was behind cyber espionage campaigns against various corporations dating back as far as 2005, but China has vehemently denied those allegations. Alperovitch said this is the first time the Russian government has been linked to cyber intrusions on companies.

Governments have been using computer networks to spy on each other for more than 30 years in the type of surveillance programs conducted by virtually every nation, according to CrowdStrike. It is only in the past decade that some nations have started using cyber espionage as a platform for gaining data to help promote their national economic interests, according to Alperovitch.

CrowdStrike has been following the activities of the Russian group of hackers, which it dubbed “Energetic Bear,” for two years. The firm believes the Russian government is behind the campaign because of technical indicators, as well as analysis of the targets chosen and the data stolen, according to Alperovitch.

“We are very confident about this,” he said. Victims include European energy companies, defence contractors, technology companies and government agencies, according to the CrowdStrike report.

Manufacturing and construction firms in the United States, Europe and Middle East as well as U.S. healthcare providers were also cited as targets in the report that was posted on the web early on Wednesday morning.

CrowdStrike described the activities of the Energetic Bear hackers in its annual cyber threat report, released on Wednesday. It also documented attacks by hacking groups in China and Iran and described the activities of the activist Syrian Electronic Army.

Alperovitch, who is of Russian ethnic origin and now lives in the Washington, D.C., area, is an expert on cyber espionage who rose to prominence while working for McAfee Inc. While there he managed a team of researchers who produced a landmark January 2010 report that described how Chinese hackers had launched an unprecedented series of attacks known as “Operation Aurora” on Google Inc and dozens of other companies.

In 2012, he co-founded CrowdStrike, which collects intelligence about the activities of hacking groups around the world and sells software to thwart such attacks.

He told Reuters that the data his firm has obtained about Energetic Bear suggests that authorities in Moscow have decided to start using cyber espionage to promote Russia’s national economic interests.

“They are copying the Chinese play book,” he said. “Cyber espionage is very lucrative for economic benefit to a nation.”