Latest News - Page 2864

We've only just seen the announcement of the NVIDIA GeForce GTX Titan Z, and the proper release of the AMD Radeon R9 295X2 dual-GPU card, but now we're hearing about AMD's next-generation single GPU, the Radeon R9 390X.

If the rumors are true, the Radeon R9 390X has a codename of Bermuda, with a family name of Pirate Islands. The Pirate Islands-based GPUs will be baked onto AMD's 20nm process, succeeding the Volcanic Island GPUs we all know and love today. The Radeon R9 390X would be quite the beast, featuring 4224 Stream Processors, 264 Texture Units (TUs), 96 ROPS, a Core Clock of around 1GHz, Memory Clocks hitting 7GHz or so, and a super-wide 512-bit memory bus.

Comparing this against the Radeon R9 290X which is already powerful, the R9 390X will trump it, easily. The R9 290X for comparison sake had 2816 SPs, 176 TUs, 64 ROPS, and similar core and memory clocks depending on the card (third-party cards can overclock very high).

In something that feels like it's right out of HBO's 'True Blood,' we're looking at a future of artificial blood, mass manufactured on an industrial scale - in the near future.

Wellcome Trust is behind the research, with scientists working on getting to the point of reaching a trial stage of using artificial blood made from human stem cells. Principal researcher, Marc Turner, has said that his team has made red blood cells that are capable of being used in a clinical transfusion. Professor Turner has talked of a technique to culture red blood cells from induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells - cells that have been taken from humans, and 'rewound' into stem cells.

From there, biochemical conditions that are similar to what happens inside of the human body are recreated to induce the iPS cells to mature into red blood cells - best of all, in the universal blood type O. Prof Turner explains: "Although similar research has been conducted elsewhere, this is the first time anybody has manufactured blood to the appropriate quality and safety standards for transfusion into a human being".

Google is pushing out an update to Glass, which will see some improvements, and the removal of the function to video call people. Google removed the video call function from Glass as the feature didn't meet Google's "high standards".

The search giant says that around 10% of Glass users were using the video call function, so in light of this, the Glass team made "the hard decision to remove video calls from Glass until the experience is better". Onto the updates, where Glass will not bundle photos together - this is really important, as your timeline can be completely cluttered with photos.

The latest update to Glass will bundle all of your photos, videos and vignettes into a single bundle for each day. For someone like me who takes lots of photos and videos per day, my timeline is constantly cluttered - news to my wearable ears!

During the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) Show in Las Vegas just recently, Japan's public broadcasting organization, NHK, showed off an 8K test. This test, according to Mashable, was "so dense with detail that the human eye will not detect additional resolution".

NHK was showing off some footage that included a Japanese fireworks display, a short film by a performing arts troupe, a fashion show, and footage from a soccer game between Brazil and Spain. Mashable editor Josh Dickey said that this footage looked "real" and that it was "spectacular". Dickey talked more about the 8K footage: "The clarity and depth of field truly is uncanny, yet the picture had none of the harsh edges, strange light and "video" vibe of other super-HD displays and high frame-rate demos I've seen. It's somehow cinematic; yet you can focus in on any face in a large crowd and make out every feature at varying distances. It really is like being there".

He continued: "3D is already wobbling off to international markets, and if something like 8K ever catches on here, it won't help it. During the fireworks display footage, birds that fly into the shot had me thinking some sparrows had gotten into the place. Stereovision would be overkill". When will 8K penetrate more into the market? Well, the displays and TVs have no current ETA as we need broadcasts and movies to catch up.

For weeks now it has appeared that Facebook would be swooping in and buying up drone manufacturer, Titan Aerospace, but today Google has apparently beaten Facebook to the punch and picked up the company itself. While no price has been mentioned on how much the deal cost Google, it does mark the third company of this type that the Mountain View-based company has added to its stables.

"Titan Aerospace and Google share a profound optimism about the potential for technology to improve the world. It's still early days, but atmospheric satellites could help bring internet access to millions of people, and help solve other problems, including disaster relief and environmental damage like deforestation," said a Google spokesperson.

Google says that it will utilize technology from Titan Aerospace, its Project Loon, and Makani Airborne, a wind turbine company it acquired last year, to work on a solution that will bring unbiased, and unfiltered internet to developing and war-torn countries around the world. "Titan Aerospace and Google share a profound optimism about the potential for technology to improve the world," Google said. "It's still early days, but atmospheric satellites could help bring internet access to millions of people, and help solve other problems, including disaster relief and environmental damage like deforestation."

Some new stats have been publishes by a third party company called Twopcharts looking at Twitter. At last count, Twitter has about 974 million users, but it's less clear how many of those accounts are still in use. Twopcharts has offered up some numbers that claim twitter is much less active than the 974 million user number might suggest.

The stats that Twopcharts had gathered claim that 44% of those Twitter accounts have never made a single tweet. That means that 44% of Twitter's accounts have never been used. The company goes on to claim that only 126 million of Twitter accounts have sent a tweet in the past 30 days.

Twitter is tight lipped about its stats for the most part and doesn't like to talk about user retention. What Twitter has said in the past is that it has 241 million average monthly users as of December 31 2013. Twopcharts also claims that 391 million Twitter accounts have 0 followers and about 232 million haven't followed a single Twitter user themselves.

The HTC One M8 has been around for a while now and has proven to be one of the more popular smartphones HTC has launched in recent memory. The device launched late last month and prices have started to come down a bit on the smartphone. Amazon started offering a special with a new contract last week that allowed buyers to get the M8 for $150.

For those who don't want a contract, buying a phone outright and unlocked is the way to go. The M8 is quite expensive if you go that route costing around $680 unlocked. That is a lot of money for a smartphone no matter how you cut it.

A new rumor making the rounds suggests that next month a new version of the One M8 will hit the market with a key change to significantly reduce the cost. The change is said to be eliminating the aluminum case of the current version in favor of a plastic case.

Part of having kids is letting them become independent enough to go palces on their own. That is tough for a parent because they need to know where kids are at all times for safety reasons. Sprint has announced a new device that is specifically made to let parents keep up with kids and help kids feel safe.

The device is called the Sprint WeGo and it is a small handheld mobile phone that supports texting and talk. WeGo offers kids limited SMS texting options to keep them from talking to people the parent doesn't know without permission. The device will alert parents via text or email if the phone exceeds a pre-set speed, if the panic alarm is pulled, or when SMS messages are received.

WeGo also has on demand GPS functions that let the parent track their child on a map at anytime from a PC, Android device, or iOS device. Scheduled find services keep an eye on the kids to make sure they are where they are supposed to be at a specific time. The mobile device is shatterproof and can survive drops up to 12-feet high and is water and dust resistant too. WeGo can be purchases for 24 monthly payments of $9.99 and has 1000 talk minutes and 1000 text messages.

The Netherlands is testing out a new technology on a 500m, or 0.3 miles, stretch of highway - using light-absorbing glow-in-the-dark road markings. These markings have replaced streetlights on the stretch of highway.

Rewinding back to 2012, Studio Roosegaarde proposed the design, and after much jumping through the usual government hoops, the finished product is shaping up incredibly well. The studios founder and lead designer, Daan Roosegaarde, said: "One day I was sitting in my car in the Netherlands, and I was amazed by these roads we spend millions on but no one seems to care what they look like and how they behave. I started imagining this Route 66 of the future where technology jumps out of the computer screen and becomes part of us".

The future of this new roll out will include weather markings, where snowdrops would appear when the temperature would hit a certain level. The glow-in-the-dark stretch of highway at the moment uses a photo-luminescent powder that is integrated into the road paint, something that was developed in conjunction with Heijmans, a road construction company.

We've heard so many rumors that Apple would release a new iPhone this year, while other rumors point to two new iPhones to be released from the company. Well, now we have KGI Securities analyst Ming Chi Kuo predicting that the company will release two 'all-new design' iPhones, coming in 4.7- and 5.5-inch variants.

The 4.7-inch iPhone would be released sometime in Q3, where we should see it unveiled toward the end of September - but then there's the case of the second iPhone. This iPhone would be much bigger, sitting at 5.5 inches, and would be released toward the end of this year. There's not much known about this 'all-new design', but I'm expecting a big departure from what we're used to from the iPhone - and it's about damn time.

Considering we already had a "newly designed" from the ground up with the iPhone 5, what was all of that about when Apple did that? After five years of no changes to the iPhone, we had a big change. But now that Samsung has become an almost unstoppable threat for the company, Apple has been forced to go back to the drawing board it seems. Gone are the days of marketing videos pushing that you can use the iPhone with just one hand, and that any other phone that makes you do this is inferior.

Google isn't seeing massive adoption rates no Android 4.4 KitKat, even though the updated mobile OS is capable of working on more devices than the OS it succeeded on. KitKat's adoption rate is sitting at a lower point than Jelly Bean was when it first launched.

Chitika's number crunching abilities see that Android 4.4 KitKat is on around 10% of devices, six months after it was launched. After six months of Jelly Bean being available, it was on 14% of devices. Chitika explains: "[L]ooking beyond the device type breakdown, on a wider scale, KitKat has not progressed quite as quickly as Jelly Bean in North America from an adoption perspective. We previously observed Jelly Bean users generating 13.6% of North American Android Web traffic approximately 24 weeks following its debut on the Nexus 7. This overall number is 10.1% for KitKat as of this study, close to 22 weeks following its release on the Nexus 5".

Chitika has analyzed just North American numbers here, with its ad impressions blasting onto tens of millions of US and Canadian Android-based devices between March 31, and April 6, 2014. When it comes to the US, around 61.8% of devices are running a version of Jelly Bean. 20.3% of traffic is coming from Gingerbread-based devices, while Ice Cream Sandwich sits on 21.3% devices.

Samsung may have just launched its new Galaxy S5 in over 125 countries around the world, but if you want to use a Galaxy S5 from one country in another - region locking has been stamped into the new flagship smartphone.

Samsung now requires a user to make a five-minute phone call on the Galaxy S5 with a local SIM card before the device can be used with SIM cards from other regions. A warning message on the European version of the Galaxy S5 reads: "This product should be activated with a SIM card issued from a mobile operator within Europe. (as defined EU/EEA, Switzerland and the following Non-EEA countries Albania, Andorra, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (F.Y.R.O.M), Monaco, Montenegro, San Marino, Serbia and Vatican City.)"

The South Korean electronics giant adds: "To use SIM cards from other regions, a cumulative call over five minutes must first be made with the SIM card from European operators". This isn't something that Samsung is doing to hurt its consumers, but it is trying to stop "grey" imports of its products, which will stop it from bleeding unnecessary lost profits around the world.

James Cameron is pretty much a household name thanks to directing movies like The Terminator and Terminator 2: Judgement Day, oh and Avatar. Cameron was asked some interesting questions during his Reddit AMA session.

Cameron was asked on whether he would be making any movies using VR devices, such as the Oculus Rift, where he said: "I personally would be very interested to find a way to incorporate VR and a narrative-filmmaking experience. So a narrative directed experience that has individuated pathways where you have choices that you make in real-time, I think that would be a lot of fun. I think it would be very technically daunting and expensive, to do it as the same quality level as a typical feature, but it would be fun to experiment with".

He continued, saying: "It sounds like a lot of fun. I don't think it would take over the feature film market though. I'm very familiar with VR, but I haven't seen the specific Oculus Rift device". Cameron will be getting his hands-on Oculus VR's headset soon enough, where the director of Avatar said: "I'm interested in it. I'm meant to see it some time in the next month or so, but I've been familiar with VR since its inception. In fact, virtual reality is a way of describing the way we work on Avatar, we work in a virtual workspace all day long. We use a 'virtual camera' which is how I create all the shots that are CG in the film, a window into a virtual reality that completely surrounds me".

The US Internal Revenue Service (IRS) didn't migrate from Microsoft Windows XP before the April 8 end of support deadline, and will pay millions to Microsoft for extended support.

Microsoft pulled the plug on its popular 13-year-old operating system, urging users to migrate to Windows 7 or 8/8.1. However, millions of PCs are still running XP and haven't been migrated, including many business PCs.

"Now we find out that you've been struggling to come up with $30 million to finish migrating to Windows 7, even though Microsoft announced in 2008 that it would stop supporting Windows XP past 2014," said Rep. Ander Crenshaw (R-Fla), chairman of the House Financial Services and General Government subcommittee, in a statement. "I know you probably wish you'd already done that."

Today Miron Technology announced that it has secured a licensing deal with Avago Technologies to utilize its 28nm Low Power 30Gbps Serializer/Deserializer (SerDes) IP for use in Micron's next generation Hybrid Memory Cube (HMC) devices. Micron's Hybrid Memory Cube technology is recognized throughout the industry as a breakthrough technology that had changed the landscape for future memory solutions.

"Avago is an established leader in the development and delivery of high-speed SerDes cores with an offering that is very well suited for integration into our HMC product line," said Tom Eby, vice president of Micron's Compute and Networking Business Unit. "Based on its advanced performance and low power, we are confident that our customers will benefit from the presence of the Avago SerDes on both sides of the memory channel."

"Micron HMC devices use advanced through-silicon vias (TSVs)-vertical conduits that electrically connect a stack of individual chips-to combine high-performance logic with Micron's state-of-the-art DRAM," Micron said in a release. "HMC has been recognized by industry leaders and influencers as the long-awaited answer to the growing gap between the performance improvement rate of DRAM and processor data consumption rates. In 2013, Micron's HMC device was named Memory Product of the Year by EE Times, EDN and other leading electronics publications."

If your boss walked up to you today and offered you $5000 to quit your job and never look back, would you take the offer, or would you realize that $5000 is just a drop in the bucket over the long-term? Many Amazon employees are experiencing that exact scenario right now. Amazon says that it is offering its warehouse workers $2000 to quit their jobs, and increases the price by $1000 every year to those who refuse until the amount reaches $5000.

Amazon says that it makes this offer to employees as an effort to see who really wants to work for Amazon, and to weed out those who are just there for the job. The idea is not new though, and was pioneered by Zappos who made similar offers to its employees. In his earnings call to investors Amazon's CEO, Jeff Bezos, elaborated on the idea behind offering employees rewards for quitting their jobs.

"The second program is called Pay to Quit. It was invented by the clever people at Zappos, and the Amazon fulfillment centers have been iterating on it. Pay to Quit is pretty simple. Once a year, we offer to pay our associates to quit. The first year the offer is made, it's for $2,000. Then it goes up one thousand dollars a year until it reaches $5,000. The headline on the offer is "Please Don't Take This Offer," Bezos said "We hope they don't take the offer; we want them to stay. Why do we make this offer? The goal is to encourage folks to take a moment and think about what they really want. In the long-run, an employee staying somewhere they don't want to be isn't healthy for the employee or the company."

Amazon is looking to expand its digital reading material offerings very soon by announcing its acquisition of the popular digital comic book distribution service known as ComiXology. The service offers up most of Marvel's best-selling series and boast more than 100,000 issues and more than 200 million downloads since launch.

No word was given on how much Amazon paid for ComiXology, but we would assume that it is in the hundreds of millions if not more. ComiXology is the largest digital comic book distribution services on the internet, and has been dubbed "The iTunes of comic book sales" in the past by the New York Times. Amazon says that ComiXology will continue to operate as a separate company and will be able to continue down its path, but will be able to do so faster, better, and stronger.

Scamming the system via "like baiting" on Facebook post has been a problem for a long time and today Facebook has announced plans to put an end to these confusing and annoying post once and for all. For those who do not know what "like baiting" is, let me explain. Like baiting is when a person or page or group post an image or post and ask you to "like" the post if you agree, or "share" the post if you disagree, and to "comment" if you agree and disagree. This format changes from post to post, but the basic concept is the same.

Additionally, these post often contain links to nefarious websites, or websites that are aimed at causing the user to accidentally click on advertisements. Facebook is using algorithms to measure how many times people who visit links, like the original post, and is using this data to determine whether or not a post is a "like baiting" spam post. Facebook says that it is punishing posters who frequently publish these type of post by decreasing their reach over a period of a few months. This will result in Facebookers seeing less of these post on their news feed and that is something I think we can all appreciate.

If you are a big fan of the X-Men franchise, you will certainly remember Mystique. She was first played on the big screen by Rebecca Romijn. Jennifer Lawrence has played Mystique in the more recent films. I always found that character interesting since she can look like whomever she wants and she appears to fight well.

One of the things that always made me curious about the character is that while she is aligned with the "bad guys" in the films, she seems to be rather reluctant to be bad. Rumors have surfaced that the producer behind the X-Men flicks is in talks to make the next movie on the X-Men franchise a standalone film based on Mystique.

Lawrence is a busy girl and talks of the standalone film are surfacing now that she is done with the Hunger Games franchise. Lawrence will be playing Mystique in the coming film Days of Future Past this May. The film is set for a May 23 release.

BMW has announced a major recall for certain vehicles from the 2010-2012 model years that have a defect that could cause damage to the engine. BMW is recalling 156,000 cars that include models in its popular 3 Series range.

Other models covered in the recall include certain 5 Series and Z4 sports cars. All of these recalled vehicles have 6-cylinder engines. The German automaker says that the problem is that bolts holding certain components of the engine are prone to breaking or loosening. If the bolts break or loosen, damage to the engine could occur.

BMW says that drivers can still drive their cars, but need to contact the closest service center if they see any warning lights. Service Engine Soon or check Engine lights are a bad sign. BMW has notified the NHTSA of the recall and is doing the recall voluntarily.