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'Jurassic World' director won't be back for fifth instalment

Ben Gourlay | Celebrities & Entertainment | Jun 1, 2015 2:24 AM CDT

The eagerly awaited 'Jurassic Park' sequel 'Jurassic World' is still a little over a week away from release, and with expectations for a massive opening week, talk is already turning to fifth entry in the series. But one man that won't be part of it is 'Jurassic World' director Colin Trevorrow.

Speaking to Bad Taste at the French world premiere, Trevorrow likened the film series to 'Star Wars' in that "Different directors can give a different taste to each movie. I would be involved in some way, but not as director."

'Jurassic World' hits hits in 3D, 2D and IMAX screens worldwide on June 12.

Continue reading: 'Jurassic World' director won't be back for fifth instalment (full post)

NVIDIA wants to apply G-Sync to laptops and more

Chris Smith | Laptops | Jun 1, 2015 1:29 AM CDT

Computex 2015 - Looking to improve our portable technology, NVIDIA has mentioned that it is interested in adding G-Sync to laptops.

As G-Sync sets out to increase frame rates and improve an overall gaming experience, laptops designed with gamers in mind are becoming more popular as technology makes advancements. There is no shortage of Intel i7-toting, NVIDIA 980m wielding 17" beasts on the market and it only makes sense that G-Sync should be added to the arsenal.

NVIDIA's director of technical marketing, Tom Peterson, claims that this technology will be flexible - further claiming that we could see it soon added to mobile phones and Virtual Reality applications.

Continue reading: NVIDIA wants to apply G-Sync to laptops and more (full post)

Researchers teaching robots to play a role in even more industries

Michael Hatamoto | Science, Space, & Robotics | May 31, 2015 11:05 PM CDT

Researchers are creating robotic technology that can help faster automate food processing, using technology that could have major long-term ramifications. Working with the FTNON food-processing equipment manufacturer, new technology could be used in chillers to help process lettuce, cabbage, and other vegetables prior to packaging.

"In industry, only humans can do that at the moment," confirmed van der Linde, co-founder and CEO of Lacquey, in a statement published by the MIT Technology Review.

One robot can successfully manipulate a chicken, able to slice shoulder tendons before breasts and wings are cut in a processing plant. The new automated system can match the same speed as humans, and developers want to see the speed increase. Also inside of a food processing facility, the Baxter robot from Rethink Robotics are tasked with putting chicken carcasses onto a holder before they are shipped elsewhere in the plant.

Continue reading: Researchers teaching robots to play a role in even more industries (full post)

Jay-Z still struggling to make Tidal into streaming music giant

Michael Hatamoto | Business, Financial & Legal | May 31, 2015 10:30 PM CDT

Rap industry icon Jay-Z has had many success stories throughout his career, but his multi-million-dollar decision to purchase Tidal still needs a lot of work.

"We're gathered... with one voice, in unity, in the hopes that today will be another one of those moments in time, a moment that will forever change the course of music history," artist Alicia Keys said during the Tidal press conference earlier in the year. While the record industry struggles in trying to generate revenue from streaming services, it looks like Tidal is struggling even more.

In a changing landscape that is dominated by Spotify and Pandora, it looks like music listeners don't have many reasons to bother giving Tidal a shot. Despite Jay-Z previously saying the service is "just fine," it remains to be seen how he will help win over music listeners.

Continue reading: Jay-Z still struggling to make Tidal into streaming music giant (full post)

Patriot includes 64GB, 128GB DD4 RAM to its Viper 4 series

Michael Hatamoto | RAM | May 31, 2015 10:05 PM CDT

RAM manufacturer Patriot has announced it is adding 64GB and 128GB DDR4 memory kits to its Viper 4 series, designed for the Intel X99 DDR4 platform and Haswell-E processor. The kits are expected to launch during Q3 2015.

The 64GB (4 x 16GB) and 128GB (8x16GB) kits are designed for use in gaming and other PCs where RAM will be under heavy load. Both kits start at 2400MHz 1.2V, and higher speeds will be launched in the future, Patriot says. The Patriot Viper 4 has been built to support a custom heat shield to promote cooler and more stable operations.

"The addition of the 64GB and 128GB DRAM to the Viper 4 line will help to propel our already well established catalog of gaming memory," said Les Henry, VP of Engineering at Patriot. "Patriot is committed to further developing its gaming line of memory in order to meet the ever growing demand of today's high-end PCs."

Continue reading: Patriot includes 64GB, 128GB DD4 RAM to its Viper 4 series (full post)

GIGABYTE ramps up the server game with a new board

Chris Smith | Motherboards | May 31, 2015 9:59 PM CDT

Computex 2015 - The MT70-HD0 is certainly a server board to behold - featuring dual socket ARM support and coupled with an associated 2U rack mount, the H270-T70.

This new release is based on the Cavium ThunderX ARMv8 processor and are designed to utilize the full power of Cavium's 48 core ARMv8 2.5GHz ThunderX chip.

The half-width MT70-HD0 motherboard is designed for this 48 core beast, with GIGABYTE's recent press release showing off the sheer amount of processing power on offer by explaining that "each server node combines up to 96 cores with up to 1TB of high speed 2400MHz DDR4 memory, two 40Gb/s LAN ports directly controlled by the SoC processors.

Continue reading: GIGABYTE ramps up the server game with a new board (full post)

Ford wants to support wearables, mobile tech in its vehicles

Michael Hatamoto | Electric Vehicles & Cars | May 31, 2015 9:30 PM CDT

Ford CEO Mark Fields recently spoke regarding his desire to see the automaker support wearables, smartphones, and other connected tech in vehicles. Embracing technology helped the once-struggling automaker turn around a few years ago, and Ford wants to make sure it doesn't shy away from emerging technologies.

During a recent visit to Ford's new Palo Alto research center, Fields mentioned the "intersection between cars and wearables" that only seems to be accelerating:

" Yeah. Absolutely," Fields said during a recent interview with the San Jose Mercury News. "A lot of the research that we're doing down here is working with companies on wearables and sensors and things of that nature and what would that mean for cars. And is there is an experience on that that makes sense to integrate into our cars?"

Continue reading: Ford wants to support wearables, mobile tech in its vehicles (full post)

NVIDIA: Pascal will be our first 16nm GPU, to be revealed in 2016

Anthony Garreffa | Graphics Cards | May 31, 2015 8:50 PM CDT

Computex 2015 - NVIDIA hosted a round table at the Grand Hyatt here in Taipei with a select handful of press from around the world, where company CEO Jen-Hsun Huang was talking about various products from NVIDIA, such as the GeForce GTX 980 Ti that was just launched.

Not only that, but Jen-Hsun talked about the new Shield Android TV which is 4K capable, as well as Drive PX. When the press was asked if they had any questions, we asked if Pascal would be the first GPU architecture to be baked onto the 16nm process, or if we would see Maxwell made on 16nm. Jen-Hsun took a few seconds to answer, but he did say that Pascal will be the first architecture on 16nm.

With the GeForce GTX 980 Ti only just launching, we like to know when the next-gen of everything will be out, so we should see the GeForce GTX 1080, or something completely new in terms of branding, to be unveiled in Q3 2016 (or so).

Continue reading: NVIDIA: Pascal will be our first 16nm GPU, to be revealed in 2016 (full post)

Streaming music is the present and future, not the death of music

Michael Hatamoto | Business, Financial & Legal | May 31, 2015 5:29 PM CDT

The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and musicians don't seem overly enthusiastic that music listeners would rather stream music instead of pay for individual downloads. Taylor Swift's decision to pull her music catalog from Spotify, which hurt her music listeners more than the streaming service, didn't earn much praise.

The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) said its music revenue dropped 0.4 year-over-year, accounting for $14.97 billion in 2014 - while revenues have slid for more than one decade. However, the number of subscribers to a premium streaming service continues to increase, from 28 million in 2013 up to an estimated 41 million people in 2015.

To start the year, a report indicated the streaming music market is absolutely booming, as paid downloads continue to slide - and that has many people in the record business concerned. The transition from physical album sales and paid downloads towards streaming music will continue, and record labels trying to pressure streaming services won't do any good - music listeners want to be able to use services such as Spotify and Pandora, but are willing to pay to do so.

Continue reading: Streaming music is the present and future, not the death of music (full post)

Researchers: Identifying Tor users isn't as hard as many think

Michael Hatamoto | Hacking, Security & Privacy | May 31, 2015 1:44 PM CDT

Independent researcher George Tankersley and CloudFlare security team member Filippo Valsorda again showed how Tor users are not as secure as they wish.

Speaking during the Hack in the Box conference in Amsterdam, the researchers said motivated users can subvert anonymous access to the service. Hackers can identify the original location of users by operating rogue HSDir (hidden service directory) nodes that are required - with two sets of three needed to connect to the hidden service - with four days of operation to be marked as a "trusted" HSDir node.

A malicious HSDir instead of an exit node can be used in the process, making it easy to attack hidden service users.

Continue reading: Researchers: Identifying Tor users isn't as hard as many think (full post)

The Witcher 3 is massive, with over 950 speaking roles

Anthony Garreffa | Gaming | May 31, 2015 8:43 AM CDT

Just how big is The Witcher 3? Huge. The RPG is so large that it has over 450,000 lines which required 950 speaking roles. Side, a voice production company, was hired to handle all of the voice roles in CD Projekt Red's ambitious RPG, where it took over two and a half years to record the dialogue alone.

Senior writer on The Witcher 3, Borys Pugacz-Muraszkiewicz, talked about the game's vocal directors, where he said: "masters of the human psyche and heart, with a keen ear for language in its many regional and social variations". So if you had any doubts in how massive in scale The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt is, with two and a half years behind the game in voice recording alone, it makes it one of the biggest games of all time.

Continue reading: The Witcher 3 is massive, with over 950 speaking roles (full post)

Project Soli: Google's upcoming gesture control for wearables

Anthony Garreffa | Wearable Computing & Fashion | May 31, 2015 7:07 AM CDT

With Google I/O 2015 now over, one of the more interesting things that the Google ATAP team unveiled was Project Soli. Project Soli is a Kinect-like system that is also similar to Leap Motion, where it will eventually see gesture-based controls to Android wearables.

Project Soli uses a "broad beam radar to measure doppler image, IQ and spectrogram" reports Engadget. The chip itself recognizes movement, velocity and distance, which can all be programmed to change the input based on that distance. This will see gesture-based controls on mobile devices in the near future, with hand motions that would be quite natural, something that Technical Program Lead from ATAP, Ivan Poupyrev, explains as: "What we propose is that you use a hand motions vocabulary".

The Project Soli chip itself features a 60Hz radar spectrum, going nuts at 10,000 frames per second. The final chip will feature everything required to be plug and play, including the antennas. ATAP says that the device can be made to scale, and that they are still working on finalizing the board. The team has already gotten the device from the size of a pizza box, to around the size of an SD card in just 10 months time. Project Soli will hopefully be rolled out to developers later this year.

Continue reading: Project Soli: Google's upcoming gesture control for wearables (full post)

ASRock teases two of its upcoming Z170 motherboards

Anthony Garreffa | Motherboards | May 31, 2015 5:38 AM CDT

We're only a couple of days away from Computex 2015 kicking off, with ASRock showing off two of their upcoming Z170-based motherboards in the form of the Z170 Extreme 7 and Z170 FATAL1TY Gaming K6 motherboards.

These two new boards will feature Intel's new Z170 chipset, which will handle the company's upcoming Skylake processors which are launching in Q3 2015. ASRock has spent some time on the design of the new Z170 motherboards, with a slick new look for these Skylake-powered motherboards. The boards use the LGA 1151 socket, with these new Z170-based motherboards supporting DDR4 RAM.

The ASRock Z170 Extreme 7 motherboard will feature four DDR4 DIMMs, SATA 10Gbps support, SATA Express, USB 3.0, Ultra M.2 support, and much more. ASRock has deployed its Purity Sound 3 design on an isolated part of the PCB, so you shouldn't have any interference with your audio on the Z170 Extreme 7.

Continue reading: ASRock teases two of its upcoming Z170 motherboards (full post)

The line up of NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 Ti cards has been revealed

Anthony Garreffa | Graphics Cards | May 31, 2015 2:13 AM CDT

NVIDIA looks to be all set to launch the GeForce GTX 980 Ti tomorrow, so we're getting a very good look at all of the cards from their AIB partners like ASUS, EVGA, ZOTAC, MSI, and everyone else.

It looks like each company will have a few different models, with a reference model as a minimum followed by a few other models with varying overclocks and cooling setups. EVGA will have 10 cards, which is just insanity, but it will provide such a great line up to consumers, all the way up to the EVGA GeForce GTX 980 Ti Classified KingPin Edition.

Some of the Inno3D editions look great, with their iGame line up offering triple-fan models and the use of their HerculeZ and Accellero coolers. We will see ZOTAC make great use of their AMP! Edition card, as well as something new in the Arctic Storm edition.

Continue reading: The line up of NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 Ti cards has been revealed (full post)

'Tron 3' killed off by Disney

Ben Gourlay | Celebrities & Entertainment | May 30, 2015 6:53 PM CDT

In a huge surprise considering that the wheels had recently begun turning on a sequel to 2010's 'Tron Legacy', Disney has apparently decided to shelve production of a third 'Tron' film in part due to the disappointingly soft premiere of this summer's 'Tomorrowland'.

Whilst the studio has yet to make an official announcement, according to The Hollywood Reporter, Disney has decided to shelve the plans for the film which would have begun filming in a few month's time.

This is a decidedly disappointing outcome for a series with a dedicated and growing band of followers since the release of the original 'Tron' in 1982. Now, I guess Disney can give their full attention to crap like another dozen 'Pirates of the Caribbean' films, a sequel to the poor Tim Burton 'Alice in Wonderland' and other remakes no one asked for, such as 'The Jungle Book', 'Beauty and the Beast' and 'Dumbo'. Sigh.

Continue reading: 'Tron 3' killed off by Disney (full post)

Microsoft Xbox boss confirms company isn't purchasing Silent Hill

Michael Hatamoto | Gaming | May 30, 2015 5:30 PM CDT

Sorry gaming fans, Microsoft Xbox chief Phil Spencer says the company isn't trying to purchase the Silent Hill game franchise from Konami.

Konami is focused on making changes internally, and will make mobile game development a priority moving forward - but that doesn't mean Microsoft can purchase Silent Hills.

"Konami will continue to embrace the challenge of creating entertainment content via different platforms," said Hideki Hayakawa, president of Konami, in a statement published by GameSpot. " Not only mobile platforms, but for home consoles, arcade units, and cards, to meet the changing needs of the times."

Continue reading: Microsoft Xbox boss confirms company isn't purchasing Silent Hill (full post)

IRS still using Windows XP, and has more than 300 cybersecurity staff

Michael Hatamoto | Hacking, Security & Privacy | May 30, 2015 3:40 PM CDT

The IRS recently suffered a data breach that left thousands of Americans at risk, and more attention is now focused on government mismanaged. Utilizing a $10.9 billion budget, either the agency is greatly mismanaged and/or the IRS just isn't ready to try to protect taxpayer information.

There seems to be a lot of problems with the IRS, and that has certainly trickled down to its cybersecurity protocols. The agency still uses Microsoft Windows XP - and while the IRS originally paid Microsoft for support - that support has ended. To make matters worse, some fraud identification software is almost 20 years old.

The IRS previously had 410 cybersecurity team personnel, but that has been slashed down to 363 workers. The idea that IRS personnel are unable to keep up with identity theft is a huge problem, especially as cybercriminals get cleverer.

Continue reading: IRS still using Windows XP, and has more than 300 cybersecurity staff (full post)

Carbine Studios switches things up, makes Wildstar MMO free-to-play

Michael Hatamoto | Gaming | May 30, 2015 6:20 AM CDT

Carbine Studios has confirmed it will make its WildStar massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) a free-to-play game title.

When the game launched last June, it required a monthly subscription - Carbine Studios originally facing criticism to charge players - and it looks like things will change this fall. Developers watched how other similar games tried to make a transition from subscription to free-to-play and believe they will have time to work with players during the transition.

"WildStar is now a much better game than it was when it launched nearly a year ago," said Mike Donatelli, product director at Carbine Studios, in a statement to GameSpot. "We're at the point where it's time to really focus on growing the game, and we as a team feel that the best way to do that is to make it so that everyone who wants to play can do so with as few hurdles as possible. This means removing the two biggest barriers of entry to the game - the cost of the box and the required subscription."

Continue reading: Carbine Studios switches things up, makes Wildstar MMO free-to-play (full post)

Apple scrambles to release fix for widespread iMessage glitch

Michael Hatamoto | Hacking, Security & Privacy | May 30, 2015 4:20 AM CDT

It didn't take long for Apple to provide a temporary fix for a bug that allows users to crash an iPhone, iPad or Apple Watch via text message. The company was reportedly working on a fix anyway, but had to speed things up when users started sharing details about the problem on YouTube and social media outlets.

The problem stemmed from the way Arabic text is rendered by an iOS device, and the device's RAM ends up full, forcing a restart.

iOS users can have Siri read unread messages, and have Siri respond to the malicious message. Once that is done, users can open Messages again. Once in messages, users must swipe left to delete the entire conversation thread - or tap, hold, and delete the malicious message.

Continue reading: Apple scrambles to release fix for widespread iMessage glitch (full post)

Migration from PCs towards wearables and IoT expected at Computex 2015

Michael Hatamoto | Wearable Computing & Fashion | May 30, 2015 3:40 AM CDT

Computex 2015: We're just a few days away from Computex 2015, and the tech world will turn its focus towards Taipei. Traditionally used to show off PCs, mobile devices, and other consumer-centric devices, there could be a new focus at this year's show: wearables and products that connect to the Internet of Things (IoT).

As consumers become more comfortable with wearables, Computex could be a major launching pad for announcements - with Acer, ASUS, and other major Asian companies expected to announce new consumer wearable products. In addition, smaller companies could use the major tech trade show to announce and launch devices, especially if they can connect to smartphones and tablets.

Meanwhile, IoT should have a major presence at the show, and with more business partnerships being forged, consumers are looking ahead to the future. An estimated 30 billion to 50 billion Things will likely be on the market by 2020, and the emerging market will only accelerate higher.

Continue reading: Migration from PCs towards wearables and IoT expected at Computex 2015 (full post)

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