Latest News - Page 2778

I'm a massive fan of Orange is the New Black and House of Cards, but Netflix is ready to start ramping up the number of original series that it produces and airs on its service.

Vulture spoke with Netflix's Chief Content Officer, Ted Sarandos, who said that users can expect many more Netflix shows going into the future. He added that the company could even release a new show every two and a half weeks or so. He said: "I think that we can expand on our original programming ... from where we are today to probably as many as 20 original series. So the idea of launching original series or [an] original season of content every two [and a] half weeks".

Not all of the shows will be of interest to such broad ranges of viewers, with Sarandos explaining: "Not a show or not a new show for everybody, every two and a half weeks, but a new show that for segments of the viewership every couple of weeks".

Remember how we told you to hang onto your iPod classic for a little longer as they're discontinued and selling for a mint? Well, if you're looking for a house deposit or a fancy new imported car - now might be the time to auction off your limited edition iPod classic.

Spotted recently on eBay thanks to Mashable, this special edition U2 iPod was auctioned off for a cool $90,000. Factory sealed and engraved with the autographs of U2's band members, this UK edition has surely helped boost some lucky fans bank accounts - and drained another.

There's also been a $180,000 iPod classic offering pop up on the popular auction and trade website, seeing investors jump at the chance to bolster their income for the year. We've also seen reports that sealed first-generation iPods are now going for a cool $20,000.

If you're looking for something a little more stylish for the office, Rapoo have set out to provide you with a solution. Their new 8000 mouse and keyboard set are designed as a minimalist peripheral solution, seeing simple and effective styling all wrapped up in their low $19.99 retail price.

Coffee drinkers rejoice - the keyboard on offer is spill-resistant alongside running on a 2.4 GHz wireless connection, this board can be used up to a length of 10 meters away from the source device. Also providing 360 degree coverage, the keyboard offers customizable media keys, making it a possibility for your home entertainment system also.

The mouse gives you a handy 1000 DPI and is available in this set across different color options, including black/blue, black/green, black/gray and white/pink. This kit is available now from Walmart for the previously-quoted cheap retail price of $19.99 and sets out to offer you a home or office solution that's a little more stylish than the rest.

With space for up to eight internal hard drives, any full size video card and incorporated dense sound-absorbing material all wrapped up in Fractal's signature clean overall design, the Fractal R5 case has arrived.

Self-quoted in their press release as "the definition of silence", Fractal sets out yet again to build on their simple, elegant and high-quality Scandinavian design concepts as seen throughout their other cases in the Define series. Although somewhat lacking in different types of models on offer, Fractal has decided to steer away from 'giving it all' and focusing on a few simple case design concepts - working harder on singular projects to make them right.

Fractal make sure to mention that water cooling is a viable option in this case, allowing the user to install radiators up to 420mm in the top and 360mm in the front of the chassis. However if air cooling is more your thing, they're providing two GP14 140mm low noise fans as standard.

The rights to Marvel's stable of comic book heroes are splintered between studios, with the majority including 'Avengers', being held by Disney, but others, such as 'X-Men' are owned by Twentieth Century Fox and 'Spider-Man' by Sony Pictures. With Disney carving out a fan-pleasing cohesive cinematic universe with their properties, it's put more pressure on the studios to unify the Marvel characters.

Courtesy of the leaked emails from the recent Sony Pictures hack, it seems that Marvel extended an olive branch to Sony for future co-operation on the character, which would have seen Spider-Man appear in 2016's 'Captain America: Civil War'.

Discussions went to the highest levels of Disney and Sony, with emails exchanged between Sony Pictures CEO Amy Pascal, Sony CEO Kaz Hirai and Disney CEO Bob Iger. Unfortunately for fans, discussions broke down last month - although there is a glimmer of hope that following this leak, fans will lobby for plans to be reinstated.

Microsoft today released Minecraft Pocket Edition for the Windows Phone, available for $6.99. The Windows Phone version also includes Creative mode, Survival mode, and Wi-Fi-based multiplayer mode. Interested gamers must be running Windows Phone 8.1 on their smartphones.

The price tag is the same for Windows Phone, Google Android, and Apple iOS. The extremely popular game is available on a large variety of different platforms: Microsoft Windows, Mac, Linux, Microsoft Xbox 360 and Xbox One, Sony PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, PlayStation Vita, iOS, Android, Windows Phone, and Raspberry Pi.

Microsoft bought Mojang and Minecraft earlier this year for $2.5 billion, and has promised to continue its development in a manner that won't alienate avid Minecraft gamers.

Not one to be left out of the promotional rounds in the wake of high profile trailers for 'Star Wars', 'Jurassic World', 'Terminator: Genisys' and 'Avengers: Age of Ultron', Warner Bros has dropped a new trailer for next year's 'Mad Max: Fury Road' - the fourth movie in the 35 year old franchise.

The long gestating project, which wrapped principal photography back in December 2012 serves as both a sequel and a reboot to the original 'Mad Max' series, which launched the career of star Mel Gibson back in 1979. 'Fury Road' sees Tom Hardy take up the role of Max Rockatansky along with Charlize Theron, Nicholas Hoult and Rosie Huntington-Whiteley and is scheduled for release in the United States on May 15 2015.

Social networking site Instagram has reached an impressive milestone, surpassing 300 million monthly active users. Those users post 70 million photos per day and help share 2.5 billion daily "likes" while interacting with the website. Facebook purchased Instagram in 2012 for $1 billion, and has been able to help the site grow even further - especially helping the service steadily grow outside the United States.

"We're seeing a lot of people coming in the fashion world, a lot of people coming in, in the youthful teens world, and a lot of people internationally as well," said Kevin Systrom, Instagram CEO, in a statement to CNBC.

Facebook has done a good job of bringing advertisers onboard, and Instagram should be able to utilize the experience to further monetize. Instagram first rolled out advertising about six months ago, and while Facebook keeps Instagram's revenue figures private, it would appear the sky is the limit.

Peter Sunde was one of the original The Pirate Bay founders, and his stint as the official spokesman for the popular torrent site earned him prison time. In comments on his blog Peter outlined his disdain with the current state of The Pirate Bay and expressed his feelings on the matter. "The Pirate Bay has been raided, again. That happened over 8 years ago last time. That time, a lot of people went out to protest and rally in the streets. Today few seem to care. And I'm one of them."

Much of Peter's angst stems from the fact that The Pirate Bay has devolved into a soulless entity hell-bent on running garish ads to receive as much money as possible, at least in his eyes. "The site was ugly, full of bugs, old code and old designs. It never changed except for one thing - the ads. More and more ads were filling the site, and somehow when it felt unimaginable to make these ads more distasteful, they somehow ended up even worse," Peter writes. The suggestive ads began when The Pirate Bay was sold to Reservella, a shadowy company based out of Seychelles. Reservella made several moves to monetize the site, but made very few improvements in actual function and design.

The Pirate Bay owns several other domains that can be used to bring the site back online, but so far there hasn't been a trace of the trusty old pirate ship. There are several scam sites popping up that are attempting to charge subscription fees, so readers are warned to steer clear of those particular bands of pirates. The Pirate Bay pioneered torrenting, and its widespread use has led to an entire constellation of other trackers on the web. This proliferation of alternatives may blunt the blow of The Pirate Bays untimely demise, but many expect the ship to pull back into port soon.

Qualcomm is releasing new chipsets for access points that leverage MU-MIMO technology. Current-gen Wi-Fi systems can become easily overwhelmed when multiple users access the system simultaneously. The core reason is because Wi-Fi wasn't designed to serve multiple users at the same time. Wi-Fi sends a single stream of data to a user, then that transmission is terminated and another stream initiates for another user, but there is never more than one active data stream. These snippets in time become increasingly smaller and more frequent as more users log in, effectively throttling the network bandwidth and speed for all users.

MU-MIMO (Multi-User Multiple-Input-Multiple-Output) is a revolutionary new antenna technology that enables communication with multiple devices simultaneously over multiple streams of data. This enables the host router to act more as a switched ethernet fabric and will exponentially increase the ability for wireless routers to handle groups of users. Qualcomm's new chipsets will enable this capability with 802.11ac networks. Qualcomms offerings are going out to the enterprise first, and several vendors will begin offering products supporting MU-MIMO in the middle of 2015.

The only drawback is that most current receivers do not support the technology. Qualcomm's existing Snapdragon 801 and 805 processors support the technology, but will need a software update to operate correctly. MU-MIMO will enter the consumer space as well in 2015, and will allow users to experience much smoother performance on large-scale networks.

Avago has announced the expansion of their successful 9300 HBA series to include two new 12Gb/s SAS 16-port models. The ever-changing datacenter has necessitated high port-count solutions to address DAS and external configurations. The 9300-16i and 9300-16e address these requirements with 16 native ports in internal and external flavors. Avago has accomplished this feat by merging two SAS 3008 controllers onto the same device. Each of these controllers, in tandem with the Fusion MPT 2.5 architecture, deliver plenty of grunt power to handle challenging workloads.

In aggregate both controllers deliver nearly 2 million IOPS for the HBA. The HBA's connect to the host via an x8 PCIe 3.0 connection and are backwards compatible with previous SAS and SATA revisions. The Fusion MPT (Message-Passing Technology) architecture leverages in-box drivers for ease of deployment and wide compatibility while delivering maximum host CPU offload capability.

Both adaptors are full-height and feature mini-SAS HD ports that can control up to 1024 non-RAID devices. Power draw weighs in at 27W for the internal and 28.6W for the external versions. There is an auxiliary power connector for power-constrained PCIe ports. For a look at the latest competitive performance analysis of Avago (previously LSI) components head over to our RAID/HBA category in the IT/Datacenter section.

We've seen a trend of global technology companies come and go with their local branch Facebook pages, often opening them up in each region and then shutting them down later when they realize how much work and money is required to keep them properly functional.

We've just received information that Corsair are the latest company to do this, shutting down their Australia and New Zealand Facebook page - moving everything to the global page and all under one banner.

There are obviously a few positives to keeping it all under one roof, these being things such as: streamline of content delivery, much less work for staff, only one page to distribute advertisements through and the feeling of a larger community (as they're all-in-one place). But, if you've got the local staff there on the ground, I feel that the benefits quite outweigh this.

The FBI has tried to crack down on the Anonymous hacker collective, including turning a former high-ranking member into an informant - but the group is still alive and well. Hector Monsegur, operating under the hacker name of "Sabu," admits to a large number of attacks against select targets.

Since being flipped by the FBI, Sabu spent three years communicating with Anonymous and LulzSec members, with the government listening in. His actions reportedly helped prevent more than 300 major cyberattacks against government and NASA PCs and networks.

Sabu says he didn't identify Anonymous members and turn them over to the FBI - and cooperated to help identify attacks, and work to prevent them in the future. "It wasn't a situation where I identified anybody. I didn't point my fingers at nobody. My cooperation entailed logging and providing intelligence. It didn't mean, 'Can you please tell me the identity of one of your mates?'"

MKV files are finally receiving some desktop support from Microsoft, where Matroska Multimedia Container (MKV) file support is now native under Windows 8.1, meaning you won't need to find a third-party piece of software to play them.

Even though MKV files are mostly associated with high-end pirated copies of TV shows and movies, Microsoft baking native support for the container could see this change. Windows 10 will also have native support for MKV files, as well as FLAC files. The company recently rolled out an update for the Xbox One that provided support for MKV, too. Microsoft is really changing lately, especially with this type of news happening, and it's a good thing.

Evolution Studios has been working around the clock to make it right with its PlayStation 4 exclusive Drive Club, with the latest patch for the game not only fixing up some of the issues with the game, but it is offering up some damn impressive dynamic weather effects.

Driveclub is now sitting at version 1.08, with the latest update coming in at 1.4GB, adding rain and snow to both the offline and online modes for the game. There are also two new tracks: Norway's Atlanterhavsvegen and Canada's Sinclair Pass as well as the improvements that the developer promised not too long ago. The patch provides:

But don't worry, Evolution Studios is promising another patch before the end of the year, something that will add:

iHeart is a new tool tailored towards health conscious consumers. Coming out of Vancouver, BC - this product and app claims to measure your aortic stiffness, said to be able to give you a readout of your physiological age among other things.

'Vitalsines' is the Bio-Tech start-up company behind this venture. Their president Dr. Jess Goodman explained their goals in a recent press release as "[wanting] to provide people with a system that objectively shows how positive lifestyle choices extend lifespan". She goes on to explain their new development as "a product that is complimentary to other fitness tools on the market. iHeart is a window to the life sustaining world within. It gives people the positive reinforcement to continue with their positive lifestyle changes".

This product comes in two parts - a Bluetooth fingertip 'oximeter' and a paired iOS application. Explained as a 'non-invasive' technology, this device will conduce a 30 second scan on your arterial pulse signal, sending the information directly to your iOS device with the free application installed. You'll then be able to see the readout of your Aortic stiffness and physiological age immediately with this information being stored locally on your device and the www.iHeartalive.com webpage - allowing you to track progress.

We know that both Target and Kmart Australia have banned Grand Theft Auto V from their shelves, with a petition that has been fired back by peeved gamers that want to see the Bible banned from sale, too. Well, now Take-Two Interactive's Chairman and CEO, Karl Slatoff has stepped up to talk about it all.

Slatoff talked at the BMO Capital Markets 2014 Technology & Digital Media Conference, where he said that people who find individual pieces of content offensive should simply not purchase that product. He said: "It's one thing for someone to not want to buy a piece of content, which is completely understandable. And that's really the solution. If you don't like it and it's offensive to you, then you don't buy it".

He also talked about the petition, and that the results were an infringement on free speech, where he added: "For a person or a group of people to try to make that decision for millions of people... We have 34 million people who bought Grand Theft Auto, and if these folks had their way, none of those people would be able to buy Grand Theft Auto. And that really just flies in the face of everything that free society is based on. It's the freedom of expression, and to try to squelch that is a dangerous and slippery slope to go down".

Microsoft has a nice exclusive for the Xbox One next year, with Rise of the Tomb Raider hitting its console sometime in 2015. The company's Head of Global Product Marketing, Aaron Greenberg, announced the news on Twitter. Greenberg said: "Yes we are publishing Rise of the Tomb Raider".

The company announced its exclusivity of the sequel to Crystal Dynamics' Tomb Raider at E3 2014 earlier this year, and then at Gamescom 2014, Microsoft's Corporate Vice President Phil Harrison announced that Rise of the Tomb Raider would be a timed exclusive for the Xbox One. This means the PlayStation 4 and PC could see Rise of the Tomb Raider sometime after it hits the Xbox One, but that timed exclusive for Microsoft could be months.

The reboot of Tomb Raider from Crystal Dynamics has been a big hit for the company, with Tomb Raider selling millions upon millions of copies across the Xbox 360, PS3 and PC. It was then released for the PS4 and Xbox One as Tomb Raider: Definitive Edition, and then we've just had the launch of Lara Croft and the Temple of Osiris, too.

Coming out of San Jose, CA - Addonics Technologies has recently announced their UDD25, a pocket-sized device family that can read multiple data storage devices ranging from 2.5-inch HDD's to CF Cards.

Said to provide the user with up to 6Gbps in both internal and portable versions, Addonics also claims support for write-protected devices that support read only. Their external Pocket UDD25 model can read/write to 2.5" SATA drives at the same speeds that any normal internal drive could, the same being said for their internally mounted option - which can be sat in your case in any 3.5-inch drive bay. Both of these models connect through a USB 2.0 or 3.0 port.

When connected to an eSATA 3.0 port, these devices claim a peak transfer speed of 6 Gbps, lowered slightly to 5 Gbps if you're utilizing a USB 3.0 connection. With new products like this on the market listed for a low $45, alongside SSD's reaching an ultra-low pricing structure, don't be surprised to see some people using this kind of technology to start transferring data compared to your standard 500 GB+ pre-built HDD enclosure. Not only is this smaller and lighter, it's going to be a lot faster too.

Alien: Isolation is one of the scariest, most atmospheric games ever made... so why not make it even harder? That must be the exact train of thought that Creative Assembly, the developer of the game, is on, as they've just announced two new difficulty modes for the game. Novice, and Nightmare.

Novice will slide in before Easy, Normal and Hard modes, but it's the Nightmare mode that has people excited. Creative Assembly promises that the new Nightmare mode provides the "ultimate alien". Nightmare cranks up the scares by making your motion tracker not-so-perfect, as its signal can be kinda on the fritz half the time. Other tweaks inside of the Nightmare mode for Alien: Isolation include faster-burning fuel for your flamethrower that is also harder to find.

The Novice mode for the game provides a slower, less adaptive and not-so-clicked-on Xenomorph, which can be good for gamers who don't want to be replacing their pants every 15 minutes. The combat in Alien: Isolation is also dialled down a notch on Novice, making it easier to play through the game in general.