Latest News - Page 2845

Hyundai has been working on a new sort of zero emissions vehicle that doesn't rely on gasoline for power. It also doesn't rely on electricity from an outlet to get around either. The car is a hydrogen fuel cell vehicle and it has landed in California this week. The fuel cell powered Tucson marks commercial availability of mass-produces fuel cell vehicles in the US.

Other automakers have put fuel cell vehicles on the roads in the past, including Honda and others, but in limited numbers. The big challenge is the small number of hydrogen refueling stations that are available. That low number of refueling stations will continue to hamper the growth of the hydrogen fuel cell market for years to come.

The first US customer for the Hyundai hydrogen fuel cell vehicle was Timothy Bush. He leased the car for $499 monthly with a $2999 down payment. The big draw for this vehicle is that the three-year lease includes unlimited hydrogen refueling and free maintenance at any of three participating dealerships in Southern California. The vehicle has a driving range of 265 miles with each fill up. Refueling takes about ten minutes to complete. There are only nine hydrogen-refueling stations in Southern California and to qualify to lease the vehicle, drivers must live within range of the stations.

There are plenty of smartwatches on the market today that will give the wearer alerts for emails, texts, and calls. The problem for some people is that smartwatches are often not that attractive. A new wearable device has turned up that brings some of the notification features of a smartwatch to users who don't like the looks of a smartwatch.

The product is called Ringly and it looks like some sort of fashion ring that people would wear normally. The big difference between Ringly and normal fashion rings is that Ringly has tech inside to sync with your smartphone. Ringly can alert the wearer of smartphone app notifications, texts, phone calls, and emails. It's aimed mostly at women.

Ringly will work with iOS and Android devices and will be offered starting at $145. Eventually the device will sell for $195. Ringly will be offered in four styles that all feature gold plated bands with different square semi-precious stones set inside. Power in the battery for the ring will last up to three days. When the user taps their pointer finger and thumb together, the ring lights up and a combination of lights and vibrations tell the user what notifications are active on the phone. A tiny flashing light is also on the side of the ring.

E3 2014 - Until now you have probably never heard of No Man's Sky, but today, we're going to introduce you. No Man's Sky is a totally different type of things, where the game has virtually no limits, whatsoever. No Man Sky will launch "console-first" on the PS4, without a release date right now. Check out the trailer below:

What you're seeing here is Hello Games' next release, which pits No Man's Sky in an infinite universe that is created by procedural generation. In the trailer that is embedded above, the player is exploring a very alien world that you can see is filled with varying, wonderful creatures. The player then jumps into a spacecraft, takes off from the planet, shoots at and explodes a few space rocks, flies into another planet's atmosphere - seeing the land of this next planet, took my breath away. I haven't had a game do that in quite some time.

Hello Games' founder Sean Murray explains: "One of the things we wanted to put across is that No Man's Sky is a game without limits. That mountain in the distance is a real place you can visit. So is that planet. And that star". Since Murray first showed off No Man's Sky, he has said that his team has added "hundreds of new procedural systems that have made the universe explode with new alien creatures, amazing geological formations and vegetation patterns, pirates and wingmen".

Computex 2014 - QNAP went on a new product spree at Computex 2014 showing the new TS-x51 product series comprised of four new products at launch.

QNAP wanted to the new models in the spotlight and placed a few throughout the booth. Here we see all four lined together.

The new models should ship with QNAP's new QTS 4.1 software. We're currently testing 4.1 on a few QNAP products in the lab to get a feel for both the consumer and enterprise side.

Sometimes new gadgets turn up in the strangest places before they are actually announced. A perfect example is the time when an unreleased iPhone was found in a bar after a drunken Apple employee left it on a bar stool. A report is making the rounds that a gadget writer happened to be in New York City walking around when he ran into a person testing the Microsoft Surface watch.

That is hard to believe, but not much harder than believing an unreleased iPhone could be found in a random bar. The person wearing the watch originally tried to say it was a random wristband from China before spilling the beans according to the report.

First thing to note is that the image here is said to be a parody, but the watch has an elongated form factor along the lines of the Fitbit One or Galaxy Gear Fit. The icons are said to have been in flat Windows 8 style. The watch uses Bluetooth 4.0 Low Energy. The person who saw the watch says that the screen had low resolution. Lots of sensors were inside the watch including a heart rate monitor, accelerometer, gyroscope, GPS, and a galvanic skin response sensor in the watchband. Only time will tell if these leaks are correct.

Skype users that use the iPhone app will soon have a new version that they can download and use. The new version of the app is much faster than the previous version. In fact, Microsoft claims that the app is five times faster than the current iPhone Skype app. The redesigned app is Skype 5.0.

Skype 5.0 has improved group chat, better navigation, and improved notification sync across devices. The updated app has smoother scrolling and simplified navigation to make it easier to swipe between conversations, contact lists, and your favorites.

Group chats are easier to initiate with the updated app. Users can also send messages and photos to offline users and the content will be saved until they come back online. Synchronization between devices is also improved in the updated app with messages read on one platform marked as read on all others where Skype is installed. The app will roll out next week.

E3 2014 - After months of teasing, Sony has made it official: Uncharted 4: A Thief's End will reach the PlayStation 4 next year. Uncharted 4 will see an older Nathan Drake than what we're used to, with "The Thief's End" possibly seeing an end to Drake's adventures.

The video describes: "Several years after his last adventure, retired fortune hunter, Nathan Drake, is forced back into the world of thieves. With the stakes much more personal, Drake embarks on a globe-trotting journey in pursuit of a historical conspiracy behind a fabled pirate treasure. His greatest adventure will test his physical limits, his resolve, and ultimately what he's willing to sacrifice to save the ones he loves".

Naughty Dog says that Uncharted 4 will be running at 1080p with 60FPS, with Drake's character featuring twice the polygons that Joel had in The Last of Us. The video above was footage all from the PS4, captured "completely in engine" according to Naughty Dog.

E3 2014 - Ubisoft is dominating E3 2014 this year, with Far Cry 4, Rainbow Six: Siege and now a truly next-gen title in Assassin's Creed: Unity. The studio showed off quite a few trailers to the game, with a cinematic trailer for your viewing pleasure below.

Below, we have some actual gameplay footage, which is a better indication of how it will look and play to gamers.

It looks quite incredible, a huge jump technologically from the previous Assassin's Creed games. This is thanks to Ubisoft not having to scale the game down to previous generation consoles, better harnessing the extra grunt found in the PS4 and Xbox One. Assassin's Creed: Unity will launch on October 28 for next-gen consoles and PC, which will include four-player cooperative play, which should be a blast!

With the HP Discover event scheduled to kick off tomorrow in Las Vegas, HP is getting an early start by announcing enhancements to its backup, recovery and archive (BURA) product family. The latest additions to the HP StoreOnce Backup solutions reduce the time required by administrators to manage the backup process by up to 75 percent by eliminating physical mapping of backup jobs to individual backup appliances. As an extension to the HP StoreOnce Backup portfolio, HP is calling this new solution the HP StoreOnce Federated Catalyst.

At the heart of this new feature set is the ability to aggregate multiple backup stores to a single pool of total backup capacity that can expand across multiple nodes. Depending on a customer's particular workload, this can scale up to more than 17PB assuming a 10:1 deduplication ratio. Also, via HP unique innovations such as adaptive bidding and adaptive routing, workloads are analyzed so that data is sent to the most optimal physical location. This includes more than just standard appliances, but also the ability to aggregate across hybrid cloud environments.

In addition, further enhancements to the HP StoreOnce Backup family include:

HP has announced a new set of feature enhancements for its all-flash HP 3PAR StoreServ 7450 array along with the claim that this marks the end of spinning disk. The new features include hardware-accelerated, inline primary deduplication, thin cloning software, Express Indexing and support for a new 1.92TB commercial multi-level cell (cMLC) SSD. By coupling these new drives with HP's data compaction technologies, customers can now achieve a $2/GB price for an all-flash array solution.

At this price target, HP believes they are creating a major market shift to allow customers to move from traditional spinning disks to all SSD arrays, no matter what the workload. Up until this point, all-flash arrays have mostly been utilized for niche workloads requiring the highest possible performance. At these prices though, HP believes all-flash arrays can be the only storage tier necessary. In fact, according to Vish Mulchand, senior director, Product Management and Marketing, HP Storage, with this release, "HP is predicting the end of auto-tiered arrays".

Comparing a 7450 configured with 250TB of 1.92TB cMLC drives and the latest OS enhancements to a similar VMAX configuration, Mulchand says the 3PAR solution is three times less expensive, takes up 1/25th the Rackspace, and consumes eight times less power. For current owners of an HP 3PAR 7450 on a support contract hoping to get similar results, they can expect a free upgrade to the new OS in September 2014. The new 1.92TB drives will be available in July 2014 at a price of $14,315.

The hacker collective Anonymous is preparing to attack World Cup 2014 sponsors, in response to the Brazilian government spending outlandish amounts of money to prepare for the soccer tournament. It is unknown which specific companies will be hit, but World Sponsor companies include Adidas, Coca-Cola, Emirates Aireline, and Budweiser.

"We have already conducted late-night tests to see which of the sites are more vulnerable," a hacker known as "Che Commodore" told Reuters. "We have a plan of attack. This time we are targeting the sponsors of the World Cup."

The hacker group has already hit the Brazilian Foreign Ministry, compromising at least three hundred documents before the email system was shut down. A phishing attack was used to compromised the ministry, but cyberattacks on World Cup sponsors will likely rely on distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks.

SteelSeries has been making gaming accessories and peripherals like keyboards and mice for a long time. SteelSeries has announced that it has teamed up with Tobii, the company that makes all sorts of eye tracking gear for gamers on a new product called the Sentry Eye Tracking System.

Sentry is designed to be the world's first training device designed to improve your gaming performance. The eye tracking system promises to improve your gaming performance by tracking, analyzing, and benchmarking eye movement and behaviors during game play. The goal of the tracking and benchmarking is to help the gamers improve and win the game.

The virtual coach device tracks fixations per minute, a value of how often the user moves the eyes around the screen. SteelSeries says that a lower value for fixations per minute is better. SteelSeries is working with pro gamers to set benchmark metrics to help amateur gamers have numbers to strive for. Sentry will be available for gamers to purchase later this year.

Computex 2014 - Lian Li is a company that has always had my attention, but when a company crafts one of the best PC desks I've ever seen, allowing not one, but two PCs to be installed - you have my full and utter attention. I present to you, the Lian LI DK-02K.

As you can see in the shots above, the DK-02K is a true work of art. Two full PCs can be built into the desk, with the ability to install 8 x 3.5-inch HDDs on one side of the chassis, and another 9 x 3.5-inch HDDs on the other side for a total of 17 HDDs! The body is made from aluminum, while the legs are made from iron (and are extendable). It weighs a huge 45kg (or 100lbs), can take 8 x 120mm fans, all sorts of motherboards, and GPUs up to 400mm in length.

Noctua is always looking to push the boundaries of CPU coolers. Some may think this is like reinventing the wheel but luckily the company is talented enough to push the established methods to new heights.

Enter Noctua's latest Skunkworks like project, flat plane heat pipes for vertical integration.

When heat pipes are bent the inner diameter shrinks causing a bit of a bottleneck, although small. By placing the heat pipes vertically Noctua can fit several more, and place in closer to the actual heat source.

Computex 2014 - Each year I make it a point to meet with Noctua at Computex. Since the company doesn't attend many shows each year, it's nce to get to see upcoming hardware coming from the company. We also get to see our old time friend Jakob whom we have a great relationship with. This year the company went all out with several prototype products on display.

One of my favorite products was this small, 2u capable coolers with dual 60mm fans.

Moving down the prototype list, the company designed two offset coolers that leave room for VGA and other large PCI devices in the top slot next to the cooler.

Computex 2014 - USB 3.1 isn't something we've heard a ton about yet but with its eye clearly set on destroying Thunderbolt MSI has jumped to the party early showing off a motherboard utilizing the upcoming technology. While we don't have much in the way of the model or anything like that, putting the pieces together we can see this upcoming Z97 motherboard which will fall under the GD series offers us USB 3.1 technology via the ASMedia ASM1142 controller.

Looking above you can see the next generation USB connectivity will offer up to 10Gbps; twice as much as the current generation USB 3.0 connectivity. Along with the massive boost in performance the technology will continue to support USB 3.0 devices with no issue.

As for the actual board you can see we've got all the standard Z97 features with an M.2 slot sitting in the middle along with SATA Express support towards the bottom right of the board alongside two SATA III connectors. We're not quite sure when we'll see this board as USB 3.1 devices aren't something that are being promoted too heavily at the moment.

Computex 2014 - Noctua's booth was bursting at the seams with new cooler technology, as per usual, at Computex 2014. Noctua is a premium cooler supplier that offers coolers not only for consumer applications but for server cooling as well. They also offer a wide range of industrial application fans and other goodies.

Noctua is working on a new larger fan to be used in case cooling, such as the large side fans we see on a lot of computer cases. The new A-Series fans come in sizes off 80, 90, and 200mm. They feature optimized bearings, optimized acoustic optimization and integrated anti-vibration pads. Thee large 200mm fan is very robust, and its solid construction doesn't bend or flex like other large fans on the market.

It's always nice to see the TweakTown logo out and about at shows, and Noctua even had a dedicated card with the opinion of our resident CPU cooler guru Chad Sebring. To paraphrase Chad on the NH-D15; "...how can you deny an air cooler that tops all the others on the charts, and does it with less noise than all the rest."

Computex 2014 - OCZ Storage Solutions was showing its latest entrant to the SSD market, the Vector 180, at Computex 2014. The Vector 180 straddles the blurry line between client enthusiast-class and the light-enterprise markets. This is a growing segment that has seen a flurry of recent releases from all major SSD manufacturers, including OCZ Storage Solutions parent company Toshiba. The merging of development roadmaps and segmentation between the two product lines offered by Toshiba and OCZ Storage Solutions will become clearer as the merger progresses.

OCZ continues to develop their proprietary Barefoot 3 M00 controller and enhance functionality to bring it to different market segments.

The Barefoot is paired with Toshiba A19nm flash and also has Micron NAND packages for caching purposes.

Computex 2014 - Sandisk released a new flagship consumer / prosumer SSD that fits into what we call the Hyper Class of product at Computex 2014. Hyper Class is a term we coined from the automotive industry, hyper cars, the fastest products on the market that are beyond excessive luxury and performance. The new Extreme Pro SSD carries an industry leading 10-year warranty that shows the companies confidence in the drive, but just as impressive are our early tests here in Taipei on a loaner system from the TweakTown Taipei office.

The Sandisk Extreme PRO is one of the most significant SSD product launches of the year for enthusiasts and demanding users who need high reliability coupled with top tier performance. Sandisk has raised the warranty bar and doubled previous hyper class warranty lengths, showing that the company is very confident in releasing a product of this caliber. At the same time, the Extreme Pro SSD warranty triples the existing standard for mechanical storage warranty length. In our view, this isn't a marketing ploy, Sandisk SSDs are worthy of such a high standard and it the industry should take note.

Offered in three capacity sizes that range from 256GB to a massive 1TB model. Just as impressive as the warranty is the fact that Sandisk was able to achieve high data write transmissions at a constant rate without using additional overprovisioning. On paper and in traditional Sandisk fashion, the Extreme PRO's specification sheet shows conservative performance numbers to account for older and slower computing systems. In our early tests, we confirmed the tested drives deliver higher than advertised speeds in nearly all areas right out of the box without any system tweaking.

Computex 2014 - Error rates are increasing as NAND manufacturers shrink lithography. This requires SSD controller innovation to provide stronger error correction without negative performance ramifications. Even with a standard HDD, data read directly from the media is rarely decipherable without post-processing, such as BCH error correction. As we move towards smaller NAND with much higher bit-error rates, manufacturers are scrambling to develop error-reduction technologies. Some approaches occur prior to, and during, drive operations. However, there are inevitable errors that require correction after command completion.

The method currently favored is BCH ECC. BCH can handle the error rates of current NAND, but all error correction methods add additional processing overhead to command latency. As the error rates have increased, designers have simply implemented more robust BCH ECC. The problem is the diminishing point of returns, and more robust BCH adds too much overhead on thee low-wattage controllers utilized in SSDs. Eventually there is a point where the controller can no longer correct the errors, and the data is corrupted.

Enter LDPC. Enabling a more efficient algorithm, that is also adaptive, provides intelligent error correction with less overhead. This provides more error correction power with less impact on SSD performance. In the video above Marvell is intentionally injecting errors into the path of the controller, thus simulating errors encountered during SSD use. A simple view of the two video streams side-by-side illustrates the vast difference in ECC performance between the two methods. Other manufacturers are also utilizing LDPC technology, such as SandForce and Adaptec. There are varying levels and complexity to LDPC algorithms, and until products reach the market it will be hard to determine which works best. It is clear that Marvell has a great grasp of the technology, and the increased performance will allow the use of smaller NAND lithographies with no impact to data integrity.