Latest News - Page 2854

Yesterday, Arduino announced the launch of its latest edition to its user-friendly development boards. The new Arduino Zero is a powerful 32-bit version of the Arduino Uno, and is designed to empower creative individuals with the power to create something truly amazing. The board features an Atmel SAMD21 MCU which is comprised of a 32-bit ARM Cortex M0+ Core.

The new Arduino Zero is based on a 3.3v standards, has 14 digital I/O pins of which 12 are PWM and 2 are reserved for UART. Analog I/O is handled by 5 pins featuring 12bits ADC and 1 pin with 10bits DAC. Flash memory is set at 256KB, SRAM at 32KB, and up to 16KB of EEPROM is available via emulation. Unlike its AVR siblings, the Arduino Zero is clocked at 48MHz.

"The Zero board expands the Arduino family by providing increased performance to fuel the creativity of the maker community," said Massimo Banzi, Arduino co-founder and CEO. "The flexible feature set enables endless project opportunities for devices and acts as a great educational tool for learning about 32-bit application development."

For more than 100 years now, astronomers have gazed into space and attempted to figure out what fuels the massive hurricane-like storm that orbits just below Jupiter's equator. During the 1800's the storm was estimated to measure more than 25,000 miles across, and recent images from the Hubble Space Telescope show that it is just a mere 10,250 miles across today. To put that into perspective, back in 1890, three Earth's could fit inside the storm, and today only one would could squeeze in.

At the moment, scientist have no conclusive theory on why the storm is shrinking, it has been able to figure out that the storm is shrinking faster as they years go by, and that it is currently losing about 580 miles in diameter per year. One early theory suggest that Jupiter's atmosphere is losing some of its volatility and bleeding off energy, which in turn is causing the storm to slowly die down. The video below from Videos From Space shows just how fast this shrinkage is taking place.

"In our new observations, it is apparent that very small eddies are feeding into the storm," Amy Simon, associate director for strategic science at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, said in a statement. "We hypothesized that these may be responsible for the accelerated change, by altering the internal dynamics and energy of the Great Red Spot."

In some areas if you don't lock your bike up, it will be gone before you come back out to get it. In those areas, a bike lock is a requirement. However, if you want to share your bike with a friend, you have to tell them your combination or give them a key and that can be a problem if you aren't nearby. A new high-tech bike lock called the Skylock is looking to help solve that problem.

Skylock is a U-lock that has a solar powered rechargeable battery inside. The lock is able to send the owner theft and crash alerts. It also has keyless entry and opens the ability to share your bike without having to be there.

It works with a smartphone app that runs on Android or iOS. Bike owners unlock the bike using that app. The app will also warn the user if the bike is jostled while they aren't around. The lock can also call 911 if it senses a severe impact while someone is riding the bike. One hour of sunlight on the solar panels promises a week of power for the lock. Skylock costs $249 and the company behind the product hopes to ship it by the end of the year.

Pure Storage, an all-flash enterprise storage company based in Mountain View, Ca, introduced both a new entry-level and high-capacity array to its portfolio, in addition to announcing June availability for its next generation software, Purity 4.0. The new software features FlashRecover - a set of fully integrated replication, snapshot and policy management services.

The new FA-405 and FA-450 arrays bookend the existing offering - the FA-420 - adding an entry-level price point as well as a higher capacity. The FA-405, dubbed "Small and Mighty", has two high availability controllers and supports up to 40TB of capacity. The new FA-450, playfully named "Consolidation King", raises the maximum capacity up to 250TB. Both of the new products are generally available now through channel partners.

Purity 4.0, available in June 2014, expands on disaster recovery and data protection by providing native and fully integrated replication, snapshot and a policy management service. These new features are aimed at data center customers looking to get the best possible capacity/performance to cost ratios. Key new features of Purity 4.0 include:

When we found out that Watch Dogs would only be running at 792p on the Xbox One and 900p on the PlayStation 4, we weren't surprised - but these "next-gen consoles" are running the latest games that have had tens of millions of dollars pumped into them, at resolutions us PC gamers have been using for years.

Well, Alienware stepped up to the plate to smack talk the 'next-gen' consoles as it puts it, where it said on its Facebook page regarding the low resolution of Watch Dogs on the PS4 and Xbox One: "if these 'next-gen' consoles can't even get to 1080P from 3+ years ago... how do they expect to hold up for another seven years?". Alienware is right, something I've been saying for a number of years now. What do you think about this?

We started hearing the rumors of Far Cry 4 late last year, and then again earlier in the year, but now it is official: Far Cry 4 is coming, on November 18 in the US for the PS3, PS4, Xbox One, Xbox 360 and PC.

Ubisoft has said that we'll continue to see the open-world first-person shooter setting, but it will be based in Kyrat, a fictional region of the Himalayas. This region is controlled by an appointed king, who is the blond-haired person you see in the image above. We should see the usual beautiful graphics and wildlife throughout the game, with five Ubisoft studios working on the game with Ubisoft's Montreal studio being the lead.

Far Cry 4's Executive Producer, Dan Hay, explains: "Following the success of Far Cry 3, we wanted to take the franchise to the next level and create a game that will surprise players and exceed fans' expectations. Given the unique setting, we feel Far Cry 4 will stand out as a top first-person shooter and we're eager to reveal more about the game in the coming months".

According to reports, the CEO of Tesla Motors and SpaceX Elon Musk agreed to help fund the Nikola Tesla Museum, thanks to Matthew Inman's illustration in The Oatmeal.

Inman led the fundraising via Indiegogo to bring up a museum based on Nikola Tesla's invention by using one of his facilities which was going to be torn down. Inman was able to successfully raise $1.5 million to buy the property in time. He needed to raise $8 million more so that the facility can be converted into a museum.

Recently he posted a two-part comic about owning a Tesla Model S. In part One he called it as a 'magical space car' and in Part 2, it was about asking Tesla Motor's Elon Musk to help him fund for the museum via twitter. Inman explained why it would be a good gesture for the electric car company to help fund this project.

As previously reported, NVIDIA was supposed to release its GeForce Titan Z flagship video card on April 29th, but the company delayed its plans, moving it to May 8th.

However since NVIDIA didn't launch that card on May 8th, speculations were on a rise about why it wasn't launched until a leaked benchmarks from a review site indicated that the video card with dual GK110 GPU is slower than AMD Radeon R9 295X2. It was also assumed that NVIDIA was bumping the card's clock speed to boost its performance.

George R.R. Martin's books from the Song of Ice and Fire series are all over 1000 pages long, and require considerable time to write even if he were to use modern speech to text technology. Modern technology does not seem to be the case with Martin though, and no one would have guessed that Game of Thrones and the subsequent titles were written on 30-year old technology.

During a recent interview with Conan O'brian, Martin said that he actually uses a 30-year old MS DOS machine that runs the long-obsolete WordStar 4.0 word processor. Martin says that he likes this old school combo because it gives him everything he needs to write without all of the bells and whistles like auto-correct, and other newage features. An added benefit is that the machine has no ability to connect to the internet, and thus can not be infected by a virus, or hacked by fans and spies looking to steal the latest updates to the next book in the series.

Google account owners are being targeted by a new round of phishing attack, with cybercriminals targeting uniform resource identifiers (URIs) that helps display data in Google Chrome. The attack is mainly targeted at Chrome users, but has also reportedly succeeded against Mozilla Firefox users as well, according to security researchers.

The initial introduction email mimics something sent from Google, with email subjects of "New Lockout Notice" or "Mail Notice" in the subject line. The email itself is written poorly, with bad grammar and odd capitalizations, though that hasn't stopped users from being tricked due to the email.

"With access to users' Google accounts, hackers can buy apps on Google Play, hijack Google+ accounts and access confidential Google Drive documents," said Catalin Cosoi, Bitdefender chief security strategist, in a statement to Infosecurity. "The scam starts with an email allegedly sent by Google, with 'Mail Notice' or 'New Lockout Notice' as a subject."

We've heard rumors that Nintendo would unveil its next-gen console at E3 next month, and while this might not happen, the company is already talking about its next-gen console. Nintendo President, Satoru Iwata, teased that the company is "always developing new hardware" during a recent Q&A.

During the company's recent financial briefing, Iwata said that once Nintendo has launched a platform, it begins preparations for the next one. Iwata explained: "The most difficult question for us to answer in public in concrete terms is when we are going to launch our new hardware and what kind of hardware we are going to launch, and I am afraid that I cannot talk about this in more detail. However, I can certainly assure you that we are not at a dead end of any kind in which we are out of ideas for developing new hardware".

Nintendo aren't just a hardware company, but mainly a software company - it plans to stay that way, and keep consumers happy with their current devices, such as the Wii U. Iwata continued: "We will continue to work hard to ensure that consumers who already own our platforms are satisfied, and make sure that people will continue to see great value in our software. But I would like to say that we are preparing for our next hardware system, and in fact, we already have a clear idea to some extent about the direction our next hardware is going to take".

For countless decades, scientists have been gagged and bought when it comes to "global warming" or "climate change". You might not want to hear it, but if you dig deep enough, the rabbit hole begins to make sense. For those who have never heard of "Suspicious0bservers" on YouTube, you might want to check out his videos - he's quite the expert and spokesperson to the masses.

Suspicious0bservers, or Ben Davidson, has over 180,000 subscribers on YouTube, but his latest video "Why Global Warming Failed" should be an eye-opener for you. The video above has plenty of data and links to papers he cites from, with some very large points to be made. It's not just the Earth that is experiencing changes, but virtually every single planet in our solar system is going through some form of change. Those planets aren't having changes due to man now, are they?

We, mankind, are causing some form of pollution and "climate change" but it is in no way near the numbers scientists, governments and corporations are reporting. During the video (at around the 8:30 mark), you can see the CO2 levels on Earth are skyrocketing - something that man is surely doing. But, the temperature - "global warming" - is right on the models that have been tracked over the last 300,000 years. We're actually seeing the temperature in Antarctica dropping a few degrees in the last 300,000 years - where every 100,000 years we're seeing a drop of a couple of degrees.

NVIDIA was all set to unleash its GeForce GTX Titan Z on April 29, but missed the launch. It was then meant to launch on May 8, but missed that launch date, too. Now we're seeing a leaked review of the dual GK110 beast, which seems to be slower than the much cheaper Radeon R9 295X2 from AMD.

The leaked goodness comes from Videocardz, which reports that the Titan Z is a triple-slot card - but air-cooled. This is compared to the liquid cooler on the Radeon R9 295X2, which requires mounting in your case. There's dual 8-pin PCIe power, so we're looking at a total TDP of 375W on NVIDIA's dual GK110 product. But what about performance? The Titan Z doesn't beat the R9 295X2 in everything, but it comes close. When compared to GTX 780s in SLI, the Titan Z loses, with a much bigger gap.

The problem here is, even if it comes close to the R9 295X2, but doesn't beat it - the Titan Z is at least $3000 (without taxes). You can go and buy a SAPPHIRE R9 295X2 on Amazon for $1536 - half the cost of the Titan Z.

Microsoft is set to release the Xbox One without the Kindle bundled in, available on June 9 with a $399 price tag. The company also is shaking things up so Live Gold subscription will no longer be necessary for access to Netflix, YouTube, HBO Go, Hulu Plus - and also won't be necessary for OneGuide, Internet Explorer, or other premium services.

Microsoft still believes the Xbox One game console bundled with Kinect offers gamers "the best experience," though understands that a cheaper solution must be made available to customers. However, the $399 price point puts it on the same level of the Sony PlayStation 4 game console, which continues to outsell the Xbox One worldwide.

Just a few days ago, research group IDC predicted Microsoft would unbundle the Xbox One and Kinect by 2015, as Microsoft continues to try and compete with Sony.

Today Sandisk unveiled the all new X300s, its first self-encrypting solid state drive. The X300s utilizes CG Opal 2.0 and Microsoft Encrypted Hard Drive hardware-based encryption, as well as a new SSD administration dashboard that allows for easier audit and compliance management. These new features allow the X300s to deliver maximum data protection performance that in-turn gives IT managers peace of mind.

"Businesses of all sizes want computers that are reliable, secure, built to last and are easy to support remotely," said Kevin Conley, senior vice president and general manager, client storage solutions at Sandisk. "For the enterprises that deploy hundreds or even thousands of laptops, it's essential that their IT departments be able to centrally and securely manage these devices. The X300s, designed with Sandisk's world-class flash, helps corporate IT leaders not only deliver the heightened performance and lower TCO that flash is known for, but also addresses data protection and security needs, without business disruption."

According to an Intel PDF that Chinese tech site EXP Review got its hands-on, Intel's upcoming "Devil's Canyon" CPUs could easily do 5GHz on air-cooling. The new Core i7-4790K and Core i5-4690K CPUs will be more than just a clock speed increase when compared to the upcoming Haswell refresh chips.

The new Core i7-4790K CPU will have a Base clock of 4GHz, boosting up to 4.4GHz - this chip will have 8 threads (4 physical cores, 4 x Hyper-Threaded cores), 8MB of cache and a TDP of 88W. Its little brother, the Core i5-4690K will have a Base clock of 3.5GHz, with Turbo Boost up to 3.9GHz. It will not feature Hyper-Threading, so we're stuck with four cores. It will chip the cache down to 6MB, but contain the same 88W TDP.

Both of the new Devil's Canyon-based chips will support 1600MHz DDR3 RAM, too. The biggest thing to take away here is that the new Devil's Canyon CPUs will be the first CPUs from Intel that will have a huge off-the-shelf clock speed - 4GHz. With a Turbo Boost of 4.4GHz, EXP Review and now myself, will bring the "air-cooled 5GHz era back". 5GHz shouldn't be a problem on air-cooling, but if you were to use an aftermarket cooler - such as a Corsair H110i for example, 5GHz and beyond shouldn't be a problem. We should expect Intel to better unveil its Devil's Canyon chips at Computex, which kicks off in just a couple of weeks time.

Most gamers don't even have 4K yet, but we know how the industry works - give them one set of technology, while pushing another, but work on an even better technology behind closed doors.

Well, 8K is beginning to show up, with a new Crysis 3 hack that allows the first-person shooter to be run at 8000x3333 pixels, or 8K. The screenshots don't really do it justice, while they do look pretty, I think the effect of 8K would be better seen in person, on the display itself. Even if you ran 8K, you would need some serious, serious GPU horsepower to get there. You can see more of the screenshots of Crysis 3 running at 8K right here.

But, 8K? Is that all you've got? Keep an eye here at TweakTown for even higher resolutions in the coming months.

Netflix is really owning TV right now, with smash hits like House of Cards and Orange is the New Black, but today the streaming content provider announced it is bringing a 13-episode run of Daredevil to consumers.

The first series of Daredevil will reportedly lead up to The Defenders, which should air sometime next year. Drew Goddard is on-board to write and direct, with Marvel's Chief Creative Officer, Joe Quesada teasing that the show will be basically one huge movie, split into 13 one-hour episodes. When he sat down with CBR, Quesada said: "One of the advantages is really from the planning stage - obviously it's much easier to work with a smaller number of episodes than it is with a larger number of episodes. We can sit there and look at 13 episodes and plan it out as a very large movie". He continued:

New DDR4 memory might not be available for a while yet, but the first samples of DDR4 memory have made it to the TweakTown Enterprise test lab today, fresh from the fabrication labs.

In addition to server's, new DDR4 memory will make its way into gaming systems, ultra books, laptops, desktops and workstations.

The sticks we received are 16GB, 288-pin RDIMM's with a speed of 2133MT/s and run at 1.2V with a CAS Latency rated at CL15.

Every DIYer in the world has at one point or another owned a cordless drill. Since their inception, cordless drills have made life much easier, but they have also resulted in many more stripped screw heads and "oversunken" screws. Black+Decker has just released a new cordless drill / driver with some innovative technology designed to prevent both of these forever.

The new Autosense Drill has been designed to automatically stop when a screw has become flush with the working surface. In the past, the utilization of a clutch system also prevented this, but it relied heavily on the operator knowing the perfect clutch setting for the type of screw and wood that was being used. The new Autosense drill is intuitive and all the user needs to do is select drive mode. This will tell the drill to begin sensing the required torque levels needed and when a rise in torque is sensed, the drill slows down and stops just as the head of the screw reaches the surface of the wood.

In the event that the screw needs to be sunken a little below the surface, the operator can simply pull the trigger again, and the Autosense Drill / Driver will sink the screw further into the wood 1/4 turn at a time. The new Black+Decker Autosense Drill / Driver is set to retail at $80 and will release to the public in Early June. I hope to get my hands-on one before then and will post a full review if I do.