Latest News - Page 2880

The future of memory storage took a big step recently with the announcement from Everspin Technologies and Buffalo Memory that an ST-MRAM cache layer has been incorporated into Buffalo's SS6 industrial SSD. This is the first commercially available SSD to utilize persistent MRAM as a cache layer.

MRAM (magenetoresistive random access memory) is a disruptive technology that looks to change the landscape of memory technology, with many predicting that MRAM will supplant other forms of memory in the near future. In fact, over 20 companies are currently working to develop MRAM products, and mass production from these companies is slated for the 2018 timeframe.

While the industry 'heavies' are 4 years from production, a frontrunner has emerged in Everspin Technologies. They actually have working MRAM in production already, products in the field, and a whopping 600 active patents in their portfolio.

Oculus VR has just secured itself $75 million in Series B funding, with a new lead investor: Andreessen Horowitz. Marc Andreessen is now stepping up to the Oculus board, as well as his partner, Chris Dixon.

What coerced them into investing into virtual reality? Well, Oculus has shown off a new Rift headset, which is said to have solved a lot of the problems that the original Rift headset included. What Andreeseen and Dixon saw, is what the world will see at CES 2014 in just a few weeks time: a brand-new Rift headset, which has a higher resolution, lower latency, and takes away the motion blue of the original Developer Kit.

Over the past year, Oculus has seen John Carmack of id Software, Doom and Quake fame join the team as its Chief Technology Officer, and now this additional funding, virtual reality is ready to be propelled into the hands of consumers across the world in 2014.

Some of you may recall a lawsuit that Nintendo filed and won against an Australian citizen named James Burt. Burt was successfully sued by Nintendo back in 2010 for pirating games for the Nintendo Wii. Nintendo won $1.5 million AUD in the suit, and today it appears that the company has decided to put that in their past.

Burt has just received a statue of Ganon, the evil villain from The Legend of Zelda series. The Statue was given to Burt for being a "Good Customer of Nintendo," something they obviously did not think three years ago. Burt took to Reddit to thank Nintendo, and tell the world that despite the lawsuit, he still loves Nintendo.

It was just a few days ago that a UK court banned the sale of HTC One Mini smartphones after the court ruled that HTC was infringing on patents held by Nokia. Today a UK Court of Appeals has ruled to suspend the injunction banning the sales of the device.

HTC says that it plans to "aggressively appeal the [patent] validity decision," and that it will be be "engaging with chip suppliers on alternative solutions." While the future is not clear on UK imports of the HTC One Mini, it is clear that HTC will fight the previous ruling until the bitter end.

Today OCZ announced the launch of its next-generation Intrepid 3000 Series Enterprise Class Solid State Drives. OCZ says that the new line of SSD's provide the industry's best sustained performance and consistent I/O responses available. Supporting storage capacities up to 800GB, Intrepid 3 represents OCZ's highest performing and largest capacity enterprise SATA SSDs to date.

The new line of SSD's feature the Everest 2 Platform, a mash-up of Marvell's 88SS9187 controller, and OCZ's proprietary firmware, the Intrepid 3000 series is capable of sequential read speeds of 520MB/s and sequential write speeds of 470MB/s. Input/Output operations per second equate to 91,000 for random reads of 4K blocks, and 40,000 IOPS for random writes of 4K blocks.

"Our new Intrepid 3000 Series leverages in-house firmware with an impressive enterprise feature-set to enable customers with unprecedented performance, data management, endurance and reliability, and cost flexibility resulting in an optimal storage environment," said Daryl Lang, SVP of Product Management for OCZ Technology. "Delivering exceptional SSD responsiveness in even the most demanding and compute-intensive applications, the Intrepid 3000 Series achieves unsurpassed performance under any workload, regardless of data type and I/O pattern for the complete spectrum of applications including online archiving, media streaming and web browsing OLTP, VDI, email and analytics."

This morning, Instagram unveiled a newly added feature to its service that will allow users to directly share images and videos with specific friends via Facebook messaging and text messaging. Dubbed Instagram Direct, the new feature allows users to share images with friends directly in real-time and see likes, and comments instantly.

Instagram Direct has a few safety measures in place as well, with the most prevalent being a notification when someone you are not following sends you an image or video. The app will let you chose if you want to see this image or video, and if you decide not to, then you simply decline and the invitation goes away.

"As we've grown, Instagram has evolved not only into a community of photographers, but also into a means of visual communication. From a photo of your daily coffee to a sunrise shared from the top of a mountain hike, every Instagram moment contains something you find special-something you broadcast to your followers when you tap share," Instagram said in its official release. "There are, however, moments in our lives that we want to share, but that will be the most relevant only to a smaller group of people-an inside joke between friends captured on the go, a special family moment or even just one more photo of your new puppy. Instagram Direct helps you share these moments."

Fresh from his position at Epic Games, Cliff "CliffyB" Bleszinski, is wanting to make a new game: a first-person arena shooter for the PC. He told the world the news through a podcast known as Pointless, the podcast from former Attack of the Show host, Kevin Pereira.

CliffyB told Pereira: "I have a slide deck, I have a pitch, I have concept art, I know pretty much what I want to do. It will be a PC experience that will hearken back to a certain type of game that we cut our teeth on, if you know what I'm saying." CliffyB explained the game as something that isn't like the first-person shooters we see today, adding: "a lot of these kids playing Call of Duty, I don't think they know what a proper arena shooter is."

What does the ex-Epic Games boss need to make it happen? He explains: "It would require a studio. But as much as I'm impressed with No Man's Sky, you know, that's four people. I don't want to work with the old guard, per se. I'll talk to them, have meetings. But the last thing I need is some mid-level marketing guy telling me that 'well, traditionally, this doesn't sell well, so we're concerned,' and all that. Because they're all rearward-looking, and it just drives me fucking batshit."

It's no secret that EA pushed out Battlefield 4 early so that it could beat Call of Duty: Ghosts to the punch, and the result was an amazing next-gen shooter that is still quite fun despite its flaws. Unfortunately for some, the game has been a little more less than fun and more of a pain in the neck as crashing, lagging, and player syncing on servers have plagued the game.

Today DICE announced that it has released a new patch for the game that fixes some of these issues, as well as a wealth of others. One of the biggest issues that this patch is said to fix is the ability to shoot a player while he is standing behind cover if that player changes his stance. Other issues fixed in this patch are listed below.

Today Promise Technology began shipping its Pegasus 2 Thunderbolt 2 Storage Solutions to the US market. Promise says that the Pegasus 2 is not only the first, but the only data storage system to utilize Intel's Thunderbolt 2 technology for systems such as the all new Mac Pro.

"Pegasus2 is truly one-of-a-kind, as there has never before been a storage solution that offered such an incredible combination of performance, mobility, and simplicity," said James Lee, CEO, PROMISE Technology. "We are thrilled that Pegasus2 is the first storage solution available with Thunderbolt 2 -- this further illustrates PROMISE's position as a leader in Thunderbolt technology."

The Pegasus2 Series is now available as a 4-bay, 6-bay or 8-bay RAID enclosure through the PROMISE network of distributors. At the time of this writing, no pricing information was given.

This coming Friday is going to be a big day for 300 lucky Steam users as Valve is set to ship its first Steam Machine prototypes to those who qualified. The combo package will include a Steam Machine prototype chassis that is fully upgrade-able, a Steam Controller, and SteamOS.

While only 300 Steam users qualified for this awesome beta program, the rest of us get something out of the deal as well. Valve announced today that alongside the Steam Machine prototype launch, it will be releasing SteamOS to the public. SteamOS is a Linux-based operating system designed to bring Steam gaming into the living room.

Unfortunately, Valve says that unless you are a seasoned Linux veteran, the new OS will not be easy to install off the bat, and that most users should wait until the official launch in 2014 before attempting to install. Valve says that it will fully unveil SteamOS and Steam Machines at CES, and TweakTown will be there for full coverage of the event.

This morning, Elder Scrolls Online game director, Matt Firor, released an official announcement detailing when we can expect to see ESO launch to the public. Firor said that we Elder Scrolls Online will launch on PC and Mac on April 4th, 2014 with a version for Xbox One and the PlayStation 4 arriving in June of 2014.

"We long ago promised that as soon as a version of the game is ready, we will launch it," Said Firor. "So we're happy to announce that the game will launch worldwide for PC and Mac players on Friday, April 4, 2014, while PlayStation 4 and Xbox One fans will see the game arriving on consoles in June 2014." Firor's full statement can be found at the link below.

As a long time Elder Scrolls fan, and a participant in every beta event held for Elder Scrolls Online, I am quite excited to see the game launch. Bethesda has done a fantastic job with ESO and it really does take the series to the next level! As a part of the official launch date celebration the company released a new trailer for the game titled War in Cyrodiil, and I can attest to the game looking as good as the trailer depicts.

It wasn't long ago that a Galaxy S4 smartphone owner had his smartphone catch fire, where he took a video of it for proof, which you can watch below. Well, he contacted Samsung, who offered to swap the phone, but Samsung wanted him to remove the video, and agree to its terms, first.

Richard, the owner of the Galaxy S4, declined, where he put the terms and conditions Samsung sent him, on video, which is below.

Well, the story gets better, as Nokia came to the rescue, offering Richard a free Lumia smartphone, saying: "Let me send you a Nokia Lumia so you can experience how customer service should *really* work". Pow, right in the kisser, Samsung.

Our friends at Mobile Geeks were at a special event in Taiwan hosted by ASUS, where the Taiwanese giant showed off its PadFone Mini smartphone, which is a smaller version of its 10-inch PadFone Infinity.

The ASUS PadFone Mini has a 4.3-inch Super IPS display with a 960x540 resolution, the 1.4GHz dual-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 400 SoC, 1GB of RAM, 16GB of internal flash storage which is expandable to 64GB through microSD, a 1500mAh battery, and weighs just 105g. Of course, there's a dock it can slide into, which sports a 7-inch 1280x800 display, adds another 2200mAh battery, and itself weighs 310g.

ASUS will be pricing the PadFone Mini at around $400, which is Nexus 5 territory. But, this price is for the smartphone, and the dock - which is a surprisingly good price from ASUS.

During an interview with Wired, John Carmack talked with the struggles of requiring hardware upgrades to continue gaming. Carmack looked back on the days of making Doom a 386-only game, something that paid off, as he said the experience with a 286-based machine at the time would've been sub par.

Carmack also talked about the last generation of consoles, the Xbox 360 and PS3, with their hardware not yet fully utilized. But now, programmers and developers are having to move onto next-gen hardware. Carmack said: "Even to this day, I struggle a little bit with that; there's so much you can still do on the previous console generation."

He continued: "The 360 and PS3 are far from tapped out in terms of what a developer could do with them, but the whole world's gonna move over towards next-gen and high-end PCs and all these other things. Part of me still frets a little bit about that, where just as you fully understand a previous generation, you have to put it away to kind of surf forward on the tidal wave of technology that's always moving. That's something that we've struggled with in every generation. And now I at least know enough to recognize that some of my internal feelings or fondness for technology that I understand or have done various things with usually has to be put aside. Because data has shown over the decades that that's usually not as important as you think it is."

One of the more interesting companies working with Oculus VR's Rift headset, is Autodesk. The developer has held its Autodesk University in Vegas, where it showed off some impressive Rift projects to the crowd.

Autodesk noticed one thing about Rift: it "generates buzz, draws crowds around your booth, with people waiting in line just for the chance to look at your product or service. If your business does trade shows, Arch Virtual can definitely help build a Rift app for your next show." Better yet, when you actually want to show someone your product within Rift, it gets even better.

Autodesk teases: "We could even place the viewer on an animated path that shrinks them down to travel directly inside a massive version of your product. The opportunity to tell a story and show off the best features your product or service has to offer is a tremendous, unprecedented opportunity." This is a big selling point of the Rift, is that it creates the world for you - something you simply cannot do on a computer screen, or a TV.

If you have ever ready any of my articles here at TweakTown that involve multimedia streaming, you know that I regard Plex as the best media streaming server and app combo out on the market today. You can imagine my excitement when Google announced this morning that Plex has finally made its way onto the Chromecast along with ten other third-party apps.

"I'm happy to tell you that over the last few months, we've been working closely with Google to bring Plex to the Chromecast," said founder Elan Feingold. "It's an honor for us to be among the first handful of apps on the device, and it's been great working with Google - we've never met a smarter or more energetic group of people to work with."

For those of us with substantial libraries being served up by Plex, this news is great, and the the addition of other apps such as Songza, Red Bull.TV, Revision 3, and Avia make Chromecast an even more affordable streaming device for anyone. With today's additions, Google has shown that it fully intends to support Chromecast well into the future, and now lets hope to see a Spotify, Vimeo, Amazon Instant, and Redbox Instant join the party soon. Read my full review of Google's Chrome cast here, and check out the full list of apps that were added today below.

When it comes to online entities, there are few who change domain names as often as ThePirateBay, and this morning we are learning that the infamous BitTorrent tracking site has moved yet again. After Caribbean authorities were bullied into to seizing the .sx domain name TPB had used over the last six months, the pirates have moved to Ascension Island and now lay claim to thepiratebay.ac.

Unfortunately the website will not have much time to rest in its stay on Ascension, as the pirates are planning a more permanent stay in Peru and its .pe top level domain. If Peruvian authorities choose to let the RIAA and MPAA bully them into seizure as well, then TPB officials say that they have dozens of TLD's that they can move to at any time.

During this mornings 840 EVO mSATA announcement the company also mentioned that owners of existing 840 Pro SSD's are getting an exciting new feature that was previously only available on the 840 EVO line of SSDs. Samsung says that it has applied the Samsung Magician 4.3 and the RAPID mode on its previous 840 PRO SSD line-up.

"RAPID (Real-time Accelerated Processing of I/O Data) mode is a performance level of approximately twice that of a typical SATA SSD and ten times of an average HDD. Samsung also applied Samsung Magician 4.3 and the RAPID mode on its previous 840 PRO SSD line-up," Samsung said in its official blog post about the new 840 EVO mSATA SSDs.

With RAPID technology now enabled on the Samsung 840 Pro SSD's customers can expect to see a significant performance boost, of close to twice that of a similar SSD with only standard SATA transfer protocols. I asked TweakTown's own Jon Coulter for a comment on this and he had the following to say. "After much anticipation Samsung has made owners of their top of the line SSD, the 840 Pro very happy today. With the Release of the newest Magician 4.3 software Samsung has enabled RAPID Mode for the 840 Pro which caches hot data and enables performance like shown in the image above from a single SSD. RAPID was previously only available with the EVO."

Today Samsung announced the launch of the worlds first mSATA SSD featuring a capacity of 1TB. The all new 840 EVO mSATA 1TB SSD boast a performance of 98,000 random reads and 90,000 random write IOPS with a sequential read speed of 540MB/S and write speeds of 520MB/s.

"With the new mSATA SSD line-up offering up to 1TB of memory and an optimized software tool, we expect that consumers can enjoy high storage volume and performance on ultra-slim notebooks besides desktop PCs," said Unsoo Kim, senior vice president, memory brand product marketing, Samsung Electronics. "We will continue to bring leading-edge SSD products and software solutions with improved quality and reliability, while working on offering higher consumer satisfaction and strengthening competitiveness of our branded memory business."

Samsung's new 840 EVO mSATA SSD line features the company's advanced 128Gb NAND flash memory that is based on 10nm fabrication processes. This extreme density allows Samsung to pack in 16 layers of 128Gb chips for a total capacity of 1TB. Samsung says that the new 1TB mSATA SSD is just 3.85mm thick and weighs only 8.5 grams.

Just 10 days ago we reported that Bitcoins reached over $1000 in value each, which at the time was a meteoroic 4000% increase, year-over-year. Now? The digital currency has dropped to around $800 each, from their peak at $1200 just days ago.

Few thought that Bitcoins would reach parity with gold, some thought there was no end in sight, but you can't dispute the fact that the digital currency has stumbled, with no exact science or past on how it will react. Will it go down to $100 each? Will we see another country completely embrace it and see it skyrocket past $2000?

With China's central bank refusing to consider Bitcoins as legal tender, the drop in price quickly happened. But, the Chinese government didn't put an all-out ban on the digital currency, with all citizens still able to use Bitcoins legally. The central bank's refusal to use them is what hurts the most, as it could spread quickly throughout the world.