Latest News - Page 2882

ROCCAT's Kone series of gaming mice are some of the best on the market today, and its Kone Pure Color line allows for optimum gaming performance while breaking the black gaming mouse mold. This week, ROCCAT announced the release of the new Phantom White Kone Pure Color to the line of colorful peripherals.

Much like the other Kone Pure mice, the Phantom White version of the Kone Pure Color features a high-end 8,200 DPI Pro-Aim R3 laser sensor and high quality Omron switches. The mouse includes exclusive ROCCAT Technology such as Easy-Shift[+], Easy-Aim and ROCCAT Talk that ensures you have an edge over the competition that will land you in the top spot at the end of the match.

In what is certainly one of the last pages in the OCZ saga, the company announced this afternoon that it has signed an asset purchase agreement with Toshiba Corporation to acquire substantially all of OCZ's assets in a chapter 11 bankruptcy proceeding for $35 million.

The acquisition will land Toshiba access to OCZ's proprietary controller, firmware, and softeare and well as the engineering teams responsible for these technologies. OCZ will continue to operate and server existing and future customers during a transition phase, and Toshiba will provide the company with the capital to operate during this period. The sale is expected to finalize within the next 60-days.

SAN JOSE, CA -- (Marketwired) -- 12/02/13 -- OCZ Technology Group, Inc. (NASDAQ: OCZ), a leading provider of high-performance solid state drives (SSDs) for computing devices and systems, today announced that the Company has signed an asset purchase agreement with Toshiba Corporation, a global technology leader and manufacturer of NAND flash memory, to acquire substantially all of OCZ's assets in a chapter 11 bankruptcy proceeding for $35M. Under this agreement Toshiba will acquire OCZ's client and enterprise solid state drive business. OCZ will continue to operate and serve existing and future customers during this process. Toshiba has agreed to provide the Company with DIP (Debtor-in-Possession) financing to ensure that there is adequate capital and flash supply to support the business during the contemplated sale period. The consummation of the asset purchase agreement is subject to an auction and approval by the bankruptcy court in the Company's bankruptcy case.

The so-called "Console Wars" formed earlier this year when Microsoft and Sony began a dance to see who could one up the others new features on its next-gen console, and it appears that Microsoft may have won a major battle. A newly released report from InfoScout is suggesting that Microsoft took home the majority of console sales during Black Friday.

The retail analytic firm gathered data from about 83,000 shopping receipts, and the figures state that the $499 Xbox One topped sales at both Walmart and Target. In fact Microsoft garnered both the top and second spots with the Xbox One capping 31-percent of the Black Friday market share. The Xbox 360 managed to hold onto 30-percent which means Microsoft held 61-percent of console sales on Friday.

The report lost Sony as holding a mere 30-percent of sales with the PS3 and PS4 capping 15-percent each. Nintendo managed to grab a measly 7-percent with the Wii U accounting for 6-percent while the Wii walked away with barely 1-percent. What does this mean for the PS4? Since it has been released for a several weeks now, I think that many of its big sales numbers are over, and Microsoft led sales due to the close proximity of its Xbox One launch, combined with massive discounts on Xbox 360 units.

Up until now, the only way to get your hands on one of Motorola's low-cost Moto G Android-based smartphones was to order it from the official Motorola website, but today the company announced that customers could purchase it through Amazon.com. Pre-orders for the Moto have been available on Amazon since early morning and the company says that orders will begin shipping on December 4th.

The Motorola Moto G features a 4.5-inch 720p screen and a quad-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 400 processor that has been clocked at 1.2GHz. 1GB of RAM is on hand to keep things moving nice and smooth, while a 5-megapixel rear camera handles imaging duties. Unfortunately LTE support is missing, and only 3G radios are installed. The phones pricing points make up for this though, with an 8GB model retailing for $179 off contract, and 16GB for $199 with no contract.

Today BIOSTAR unveiled two new motherboards that it says are the ideal solution for mining Bitcoins. The first board is based on an Intel H81 chipset and supports Intel's socket 1150 CPUs, while the second features an H61B chipset and socket 1155 support. This allows Bitcoin mining using Intel 2nd, 3rd, and 4th generation Core processors.

Both of the boards feature PCI-E 3.0 support and include a single 16x slot and 5 PCI-E 1x slots. The Hi-Fi H81S2 V.6.X supports two DDR3 DIMM modules, and connectivity is handled via 2x SATA 3 connectors and 2x SATA 2 connectors. USB 3.0 is featured on two ports while two other ports as well as the USB headers are version 2.0. Gigabit Ethernet is present as well.

The H61B v 6.1 supports socket LGA 1155, and can house up to two DDR3 DIMMs. Four SATA 2 ports are available while all of the on-board USB is version 2.0. Gigabit Ethernet is present as well as on-board VGA graphics and serial out. Load either of these boards up with several AMD Radeon or NVIDIA GeForce GPUs and enjoy all of the bitcoins you can mine!

Back when I first reported on Comet ISON, the entire astronomical community was convinced that if given the chance, ISON would bloom into the brightest comet in recorded history. ISON was deemed something special because this visit was its first into the inner solar system, and no one knew how it might react to the suns immense heat.

As ISON passed earth and headed towards the sun, it brightened a great bit and it looked as though we might get the spectacular once in a lifetime show that had been promised, but on Thanksgiving day that all changed. As the comet approached perihelion it seemed to take a quite sharp turn into the sun and hours passed without any sign of the ball of ice and rock. Shortly after many had declared ISON dead, a glimmer of hope appeared in the form of a bright v shaped cloud of dust that was heading away from the sun.

Many though that a fraction of ISON may have survived and that just a rocky nucleus was all that was left. If true, ISON could have flared back up to naked eye visibility once it was far enough away from the sun to not be out-shown by the suns glare. Unfortunately what we though was a solid intact nucleus turned out to be fragments of the comet that were rapidly disintegrating, and new images have shown that the bright dust trail left by ISON's remains have began to fade into obscurity. As of today, the official word appears to be that ISON has met its fate and was mostly vaporized upon its entry into the Suns coronasphere.

Some people thrive on the adrenalin rush that comes from fighting the hoards of turkey stuffed shoppers on Black Friday, but there are those of us who play it smart and enjoy the weekend after Thanksgiving and never enter a store. That is because we know that the biggest deals of the year come with the massive online sales that Cyber Monday brings.

I took a few moments this morning to round up what I think may be some of the best deals on the web today. Everything from mobile phones to tablets, and even 3D Printers are listed, but some of the sales have limited stock and are a first come first serve kind of thing.

Tablets:

Here's a scary thought: the combination to start an all-out nuclear war with the world, killing billions, up until 1977 at least, was 00000000. The stupidly simple code was chosen by Strategic Air Command, in an effort to make weapons as quick and easy to launch as possible.

John F Kennedy pushed for PAL (Permissive Action Link) encoding in 1962, which is a security device for nuclear weapons that is meant to prevent unauthorized arming or detonation of the nuclear weapon itself. JFK signed the National Security Agency Memorandum 160 in 1962, which required that all nuclear weapons be fitted with the security system.

Problem was, nuclear experts claim the military was worried that command centers and communication lines would be destroyed in a true nuclear war, which would stop soldiers getting the codes to launch nuclear missiles when they were actually needed. This forced the action of reducing the code to something that is very simple: 00000000.

If a drone is flying high in the sky above you, they can be hard to spot, but when you do see it, it looks like a drone. This might not be the case in another 5-10 years, with the US Army finding a solution to this: making the drones, look like birds.

Enter Maveric, which features a bird-like profile, with flexible wings. The drone is made from composite metal, and can fly at heights of 25,000 feet, scooting along at 20-65 mph. Derek Lyons, Vice President of Sales and Business Development at Prioria Robotics, said: "There was a Special Operations requirement for a plane that had a natural, biological look - it wasn't supposed to look DoD-ish."

Prioria Robotics won a $4.5 million contract from the US Army's Rapid Equipping Force to make 36 of the bird-like drones for an urgent, undisclosed need. Earlier this month, training to use the Maveric began at the Joint Special Operations Task Force, with full-equipped delivery expected this month. One of the major benefits of Maveric is that it weighs just 2.5 pounds, and is capable of being contained in a 6-inch tube.

We know that the NSA's PRISM system scoops up unimaginable amounts of data, so a couple of researchers created an Android app to see just how much metadata is collected from a smartphone, which was compared to basic information on Facebook.

The two Stanford researchers, Jonathan Mayer and Patrick Mutchler, created MetaPhone, using it to see how revealing the metadata was. Mayer told MIT Technology Review: "Some defenders of the NSA's bulk collection programs have taken the position that metadata is not revealing. We want to provide empirical evidence on the issue.... Our hypothesis is that phone metadata is packed with meaning."

You can grab MetaPhone yourself, a free app from the Google Play Store, with the app capable of collecting call and text logs, and asks for basic information from Facebook. Early research points to the fact that the metadata definitely includes some juicy data on you, with early results showing that phone metadata can predict whether someone is in a relationship with around 60% accuracy.

Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo have all been ordered by a French court to remove search results from 16 websites that host pirated materials. The case itself began in December 2011, with a handful of French organizations and groups that protect large companies like Paramount, and Sony.

Local ISPs are being ordered to "implement all appropriate means including blocking" of these pirate websites. Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, and ISPs have two weeks to remote or block the 16 websites in question, which the court found were in violation of copyright laws, as these websites are "dedicated or virtually dedicated to the distribution of audiovisual works without the consent of their creators."

Bogdan Alecu, a system administrator at Dutch IT services company, Levi9, has discovered an issue that leaves Google Nexus devices open to DDoS attacks that would reboot the smartphone, or fail to connect to mobile Internet services.

Alecu discovered the issue in all Android 4.x firmware versions of Google's Nexus, Nexus 4 and Nexus 5 smartphones. If a Nexus smartphone was to receive the message, it would display itself on top of every other active window, and is surrounded by a semi-transparent black overlay that has a dimming effect on the screen. If this message isn't saved, or dismissed, a second message is received, which is placed on top of the first message, and the dimming effect continues.

These messages will hit the Nexus phones without a notification, so if they're being sent when you're asleep, or the phone is in your pocket, you'll be none the wiser. Most of the time, Alecu says the phone will reboot, and if a PIN is required to unlock the SIM card, the phone won't connect back to the network for hours. During this time, the phone is useless, as it is unable to receive messages, phone calls, or any other notifications.

Over the last year, I have been reporting on Comet ISON, and its impending extremely close encounter with the sun. Yesterday, while many of us were sitting down to dinner tables, and enjoying a nice meal with friends and family, ISON skirted through the very upper region of the sun.

ISON reached perihelion, its closest point to the sun, around 1:30pm EDT yesterday afternoon. Initial reports were that the icy traveler had succumbed to the intense heat and gravity that is present just 750,000 miles from the sun. In fact, all of the images coming out of NASA's SOHO observatory indicated that ISON took a sharp turn into the sun just before perihelion and vaporized.

Fortunately this morning new data has been released that shows that ISON's nucleus or partial chunk of its nucleus managed to survive. In the video above, you can see what appears to be a jet of debris getting flung away from the Sun just a few degrees above the comets entry point. It is still unclear whether or not any of this debris will become visible to the naked eye from earths surface in the next few weeks, but all is not lost. The data that ISON has provided the scientific community is simply massive and will allow scientist to study not only comets, but the suns magnetosphere for decades to come.

Nick Starr, a network engineer based in Seattle, was enjoying a nice meal in a 24-hour diner in Seattle's Capital Hill neighborhood, when he was asked to remove his Google Glass headset.

Starr demanded to see a written policy that Glass was banned in the diner, but the server held her ground and demanded he remove it. Starr took to Facebook, saying "I would love an explanation, apology, clarification, and if the staff member was in the wrong and lost the owner money last night and also future income as well, that this income be deducted from her pay or her termination."

Starr had stumbled into Lost Lake Cafe, with the owner of the diner being very anti-Glass. Lost Lake's owner, David Meinert, has been in the news before with his anti-Glass stance, banning the wearable device from another place he owns: Seattle's 5 Point Cafe. Meinert said that he had recently told his staff at Lost Lake to ask anyone wearing Glass to remove it.

It looks like there's problems on the Xbox One version of Battlefield 4, where the Second Assault DLC is not available for Xbox One owners who have coughed up the dough for Battlefield Premium.

Battlefield 4: Second Assault includes four maps from Battlefield 3, and the biggest issue here is that the DLC is an Xbox One exclusive for two weeks to those who have Premium access. But, the problem is, that the pack is listing as "null data" when logging on to the in-game Premium store. An EA spokesperson has said that Microsoft is looking into the matter.

EA_Rick, said: "I know some of you have said already that it is being looked into, I wanted to just confirm that for you so you guys have a blue [staff] post to refer to. Right now all I can say is that we are aware of this issue and are currently investigating this with Microsoft. Once we have some more details I'll be sure to let you know."

You would think that if you walked into the Google HQ, that you'd see Chromebooks sprawled everywhere, but that is not the case. Google's OS of choice, is Apple's Mac OS X platform, with the company imposing Mac use to all its employees.

The company supports most operating systems, including Windows, Linux and its own Chrome OS. Google System Engineer, Clay Caviness, says: "There was a time when Macs were a small part of the Google fleet, but as of now if you start at Google and want to use a platform other than Mac you have to make a business case."

I can see where Google is coming from, Macs are great, and overall, more 'stable' than Windows. I think this is in part to Macs being more secure, and its user base is nowhere near the size of Windows' user base. But, everyone has their preferences. Google's Chairman, Eric Schmidt, had some interesting things to say about the 'superiority' of Macs versus PCs, where he compared Android devices with Macs.

It looks like Netflix is having issues pushing out its content to its massive user base, and because of that, Netflix is not able to push it all out in what it calls "Super HD", or 1080p.

Netflix's stream gets pushed out to you as soon as possible, but not in its full-resolution glory. This is done so that you're not sitting there watching it buffer for minutes on end, but as soon as the stream is capable of delivering 1080p video, it will switch over. If the bandwidth slows down, the resolution will drop and the buffering of Super HD will begin again.

This is all done to keep you, the content consumer, with a full show always - instead of buffering constantly, not being able to enjoy the latest episode of Orange is the New Black, or House of Cards. The bigger question I have, is that Netflix wants to push Ultra HD, or 4K, content to the masses, but if it's tripping over the network cables in its servers trying to deliver Full HD, with issues, what will Ultra HD cause?

Bitcoins are massive business right now, with the value of the digital currency passing $1000 for the first time ever. This is a gigantic milestone for the digital currency, and represents a 4000% year-over-year increase in value.

People who have sold their Bitcoins early would be feeling quite ill right now, with an early Bitcoin owner purchasing 10,000 Bitcoins for just $50. He ended up giving his Bitcoins away, but if he had held onto those 10,000 Bitcoins, it would be worth a very swift $10 million today. The Winklevoss twins purchased $11 million worth if Bitcoins back in April, which cost them $120 a piece - an investment that has turned into $90 million or so right now.

I was so close to getting into Bitcoin when it first launched, but backed off - even a small investment back then would be worth magnitudes more now, which makes me a sad man.

We all know how harsh the US government is on piracy and illegal activities, and while we have Vice President Joe Biden saying things like "piracy is theft, clean and simple", the same government he works for was doing just that: stealing.

The US government has been in a multi-million dispute with Apptricity, a software company that makes enterprise software that manages the US Army's troops and supply movements. The deal struck between Apptricity and the US government was signed in 2004, and allowed the US government to use Apptricity's software on five servers and 150 standalone devices.

The company explains: "The Army has used Apptricity's integrated transportation logistics and asset management software across the Middle East and other theaters of operation. The Army has also used the software to coordinate emergency management initiatives, including efforts following the January 2010 earthquake in Haiti."

Back on October 14th TweakTown first heard a rumor that OCZ was entertaining an offer from Toshiba acquire the company. This was a big deal as OCZ's CEO had recently announced that his company had been having issues acquiring NAND flash modules to build its SSDs. The company had also just posted some very bad losses for Q3 2013, and everything looked ripe for Toshiba to pick up the company for a song.

Soon after, the rumors died down and we mostly thought that they had been just that, Rumors. Fast forward a few weeks and on November 4th, I broke a developing story about Toshiba's stock falling by more than 22-percent in just hours after the market opened. I reached out to OCZ to which a reply never came. By the end of the day, the stock had fallen by more than 30-percent to just $0.65 per share, a 52-week low. Upon opening the next day, OCZ saw its stock fall another 30-percent to $0.44 per share.

By November 9th, OCZ's stock was back up to $0.85 per share which was widely attributed to the release of the new SSD that was seeing great reviews across the web including TweakTown. Ten days later on November 19th, TweakTown received word that OCZ had laid off 15-percent of its workforce in an effort to ease its massive $2 million per month cash burn. It appeared as if the SSD manufacturer was attempting to dig itself out of the deep hole it had fallen into. At this point the company's stock had leveled off at around $0.70 per share.