Latest News - Page 2891

Volvo is talking about some of what it will be showing off at the Geneva Auto Show next month. Along with concept cars and production vehicles, the automaker will also be showing off its new in-car experience. As you might expect the new in-car experience will be touch focused.

The system will use a large portrait mode touchscreen in the center of the dash. That touchscreen will have sections that display different content like navigation, audio, and others. At the bottom of the screen are the controls for climate.

Using a touch system while driving is often not ideal for the driver, I wonder how Volvo is going to get around that. Just ask anyone that has used the Ford touch system and left unhappy. The touchscreen also interacts with the slick digital instrument cluster in the dash. Each of the tile stacks on the screen has a thin band that tells what it is.

If you are a gamer that likes to play games on your Nintendo Wii or DS portable game console, Nintendo has announced something this week that won't leave a good feeling in your stomach. As of May 20, Nintendo will be ending the online gaming functionality of the Wi-Fi Connection service for legacy devices.

That means that Wii and DS gamers will no longer be able to play games like Mario Kart online against other players. Nintendo says that the games will still work in offline mode. Once you get used to racing against other people online, it's hard to go back to playing offline.

Nintendo is also clear that the online gaming support for the new Wii U and Nintendo 3DS will continue to work. That means if you want to play online with Nintendo games you will need to upgrade hardware.

With a slew of new phones announced at Mobile World Congress 2014 this week, new rumors about the iPhone 6 have surfaced. Apple is rumored to unleash the new, bigger iPhone 6 in July, much earlier than expected.

Mizuho Securities analyst Abhey Lamba delivered some research to clients yesterday, which said that the iPhone 6, as well as a new phablet, will be launched by Apple in July, instead of September or October, like usual. Lamba says that he has checked with Apple's suppliers in Japan and throughout Asia, who suggest things are ramping up much earlier than expected.

Lamba said in his note: "Recently, the company has been introducing new lineup in September time frame whereas the next generation phones could come out in July this year. The earlier launch will be helpful for Apple as it will ensure significant availability and distribution of the new device during the holiday season".

The hybrid memory cube consortium (HMCC) is an organization comprising of memory providers such as Micron Technology, Samsung Electronics, and SK Hynix, is dedicated to developing and establishing an industry-standard interface specification for the hybrid memory cube (HMC) technology.

This week, the consortium unveiled HMC 2.0, which is capable of some truly crazy speeds. HMC 2.0 is capable of supporting bandwidth of 480GB/sec per one memory device. HMC can do this by using advanced through-silicon vias (TSVs) - which are vertical conduits that electrically connect a stack of individual chips - in order to combine high-performance logic with dynamic random access memory (DRAM) die.

HMC 1.0 was capable of 160GB/sec of bandwidth, in 2GB density while running 10Gb/s per late data-rate, using up to 70% less energy per bit than existing technologies. The new HMC 2.0 specification supports increased data rate speeds advancing short-reach (SR) performance from 10Gb/s, 12.5Gb/s, 15Gb/s and up to 30Gb/s, allowing the peak bandwidth of a single memory cube to bounce all the way up to 480GB/sec.

Central America is home to some of the most ferocious tornadoes on the planet, but one scientist wants to see mother nature stopped, through the use of gigantic walls built across Tornado Alley.

Rongjia Tao, a physicist with Temple University, says: "If we build three east-west great walls in the American Midwest .... one in North Dakota, one along the border between Kansas and Oklahoma to the east, and the third one in south Texas and Louisiana, we will diminish the tornado threats in the Tornado Alley forever".

Tao says that the walls would need to be 1,000 feet high, and around 150 feet wide. But at an estimated cost of $60 billion per 100 miles, and the engineering challenges, "it wouldn't work", according to tornado researcher Harold Brooks of the National Severe Storms Laboratory in Norman, Oklahoma. Brooks said that "If his hypothesis was true, we'd already have the thing he wants to build naturally. This is essentially a case of a physicist, who may be very good in his sub-discipline, talking about a subject about which he is abysmally ignorant".

The Game Developer's Conference 2014 is being held next month, where Microsoft will be hosting a session called "DirectX: Evolving Microsoft's Graphics Platform". The session is being hosted by Anuj Gosalia, Developement Manager for Windows Graphics. The session is described as:

"For nearly 20 years, DirectX has been the platform used by game developers to create the fastest, most visually impressive games on the planet.

However, you asked us to do more. You asked us to bring you even closer to the metal and to do so on an unparalleled assortment of hardware. You also asked us for better tools so that you can squeeze every last drop of performance out of your PC, tablet, phone and console.

Back when Google owned Motorola, it talked about a modular smartphone that it was working on, known as Project Ara. Well, the company has just announced it is hosting the first Ara Developers' Conference in April.

It will be the first of three conferences where the Mountain View-based giant will show developers what they'll be able to do with Ara. The first conference will be held over the Internet through a live webstream, with an interactive Q&A session hosted to a select few people able to attend in person at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California.

The conference itself will be focused around an alpha release of the Ara Module Developers' Kit, which will provide developers with all of the information requires to make an "Ara module". The company will also walk through the existing and future features for the Ara platform, with prize challenges for module developers.

A tease of SAPPHIRE's upcoming blue-and-black themed Radeon R9 290X VAPOR-X GPU has me foaming at the mouth... why? Well, it will ship with 8GB of GDDR5 RAM, that's why.

We've seen the SAPPHIRE Radeon R9 290X Tri-X, which is a great GPU, but 4GB of RAM really holds it back for monster resolutions like 4K and triple-monitor setups. One of the other changes to the VAPOR-X GPU is the beautiful backplate. This won't do much for most people, but with all of that memory (and dual-sided memory modules) it'll do wonders for temperatures.

There's not many more details on this new GPU, but you can bet your bottom dollar we'll get some of these in for some 4K and triple 2560x1440 monitor testing.

Roberts Space Industries has just pushed out Star Citizen Patch 11.1, which has enabled support for Oculus Rift within the Hangar Module. This is quite the surprise, but something that was promised when the game hit its $12 million stretch goal.

All you'll need to do is make sure your game is up-to-date with the latest patch, and then create a file named 'user.cfg' in your Star Citizen/CitizenClient folder, and add the lines 'sys_currentHMDtype=1' and 'r_stereostrength=-8' and voila, you have virtual reality support thanks to the Oculus Rift, in Star Citizen.

There are various issues of course, as this is just early days yet:

Apricorn, one of the industry's leading designers of secure mobile storage solutions has just unveiled its latest rigged mobile storage solution. The Aegis padlock SSD has been designed to specifically meet the stringent and rigorous need of government, military and law enforcement needs when it comes to strong and secure mobile storage.

The Aegis Padlock SSD features a crush-resistant aluminum enclosure that is able to withstand more than 6500-pounds of force and is water-resist, dust proof, and shock proof. With no moving parts, the device is able to withstand the extremely harsh environment of everything from a combat zone, to day-to-day law enforcement use. The device is invincible to key logging attacks, and with all data on the drive being protected with real-time AES-XTS 256-bit hardware encryption, access to the drive is permitted only by the user's unique PIN via an on-board keypad.

"For those deployed in harsh environments, computing solutions must be built to the highest level of durability and reliability. Sensitive data may be used for mission-critical applications, and failure in the field is just not an option," said Mike McCandless, VP of Sales and Marketing at Apricorn. "With this in mind, we tasked our engineers to come up with super rugged drive that could really take a beating; one that not only protects data against a myriad of security threats, but physical threats as well."

Today the US House of Representatives passed a bill that makes it legal for consumers to unlock their cell phones if they wish to take it to another carrier. The bill passed with a vote of 295 to 114, and is now headed to the Senate where it is also expected to pass. If the bill does make it through congress, then it will let consumers unlock their phones without fear of legal ramifications, something that has been illegal since a supreme court ruling in 2012.

The practice was deemed illegal based on wording in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act that prevents circumventing of content protection systems, something that was intended to protect DRM on music, video games, and other digital media. Unfortunately the supreme court and lawmakers twisted these words around to include cellular phones under the DMCA's "protection." If passed, this bill could set precedence on who legally owns the cellphone, and if subsidization of devices can legally ban the use of that phone on a network it was not subsidized for.

Unfortunately this bill, even if passed and signed into law, will have to be reexamined in just two years, and it also includes an add-on bill that would limit the bulk reselling of any smartphones that have been unlocked. This makes it hard for aging smartphones to be recycled back into the market as cheaper alternatives to those who want a phone but not necessarily an expensive flagship.

Voting for American Idol (that show is still on the air?) has never been easier thanks to a new feature from Fox and Google. Fans of the show can now vote on their favorite contestants up to 50 times per day straight from Google's search results. This new voting method virtually eliminates the need to ever vote via text messaging again, and has to open up the door even wider than before for vote scamming.

Fans can vote by simply heading over to Google.com on their desktop or mobile device and searching the keywords "American Idol, or "Idol" during the show's voting window. The sponsored ad will be a voting block which will allow each fan to vote for each contestant up to 50 times before clicking submit. Voting is done by taping or clicking on the contestants photo they wish to vote for. A pop-over will appear with a slider that can be adjusted with the mouse or finger to indicate how many votes that contestant gets. This will definitely make voting for the show easier, but I am left wondering why the show lets each contestant get up to 50 votes each per voter. It would make much more sense if voters were given just 50 votes total to distribute among contestants.

MWC 2104 - SoC's centered around smartphones were a big topic at this years Mobile World Congress with big hitters like Qualcomm and Broadcom announcing several new chips designed to carry mobile communications into the next-generation. Samsung was not to be left out of the party either and has announced two new additions to its Exynos line of mobile SoCs.

The Samsung Exynos 5 Octa 5422 is an updated version of the Exynos 5 Octa 5420. The SoC features four ARM Cortex-A15 cores and four ARM Cortex-A7 cores in what is known as a big.LITTLE configurations. Clock speeds are set to 2.1GHz and 1.5GHz respectively, and the SoC supports heterogeneous multi-processing just like its predecessor. This means that the computationally intensive task are handled by the ARM Cortex A-15 cores while the low-level duties are passed off to the lighter Cortex A-7 cores. Additionally a dual-channel 32-bit LPDDR3-1866 memory controller is featured as well as a Mali-T628 MP6 GPU. An integrated modem is not present in the SoC though, which means manufacturers will have to look to solutions such as Intel's recently-announced XMM 7160 chip for LTE connectivity.

Samsung also unveiled the new Exynos 5 Hexa 5260, a six-core SoC which also utilizes a big.LITTLE configuration. Two ARM Cortex-A15 cores are paired up with four ARM Cortex-A7 cores with clock speeds at 1.7GHz and 1.3GHz respectively. The 5260 also features a 32-bit LPDDR3-1600 memory controller and HMP support, making it a very tempting processor for applications where low-power draw is ideal. Word on the street is that the Exynos 5 Hexa 5260 will make its way into the Galaxy Note 3 Neo which is slated for a spring launch.

Have you ever dreamed of stumbling across a pile of buried treasure and striking it rich? I know I have had that exact dream many times before in my 30 years on planet earth. For one California couple, that dream became a reality recently when hiking with their dog on the couples property in Sierra Nevada. While walking their dog, the couple basically tripped over several tin cans filled with more than 1,400 rare, mint condition gold coins dating between 1847 to 1894.

The coins are all in super-rare uncirculated, mint condition, with some of them being worth up to $1 million each. Their total weight in gold only equates to about $3k on the current market, but the fact that these coins are rare and as perfect as perfect can get makes them highly valuable to collectors world wide. The coins themselves are some of the first to be struck in California and are in $5, $10, and $20 denominations, The couple says that they will put the coins up for sale on Amazon while keeping a few of them as keepsakes, and will use the money to pay off their debts and donate to charity.

"I don't like to say once-in-a-lifetime for anything, but you don't get an opportunity to handle this kind of material, a treasure like this, ever," said veteran numismatist Don Kagin, who is representing the finders. "It's like they found the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow." Before listing the coins for sale on Amazon, the couple will lend several of them to the Numismatic Association for its National Money Show, which opens tomorrow in Atlanta.

It's only been two days since Samsung's Galaxy S5 was unveiled at the 2014 Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain, but that has not stopped the phone from being ripped off by the infamous copycat smartphone manufacturer, Goophone. The device appeared on the company's website this morning bearing the overly obvious name Goophone S5.

The Goophone S5 copies the Galaxy S5 ascetically down to the last dimple on the rear and even appears to include a similar heart rate monitor to the one featured on the new Samsung flagship except this one is just a LED flash for the camera with no heart rate monitoring functionality. Hardware wise, the two phones are world's apart with the Goophone featuring a 5-inch 1080p display, 13MP rear camera, and Android 4.2 Jelly Bean on-board. A 2GHz MTK MT6592 octa-core processor, and 2GB of RAM are featured as is 32GB of on-board storage. No fingerprint scanner is present either, making this purely a look-alike copy and not a full on duplication.

This is not the first smartphone that Goophone has copied either, the company has knocked off everything from the iPhone 5S and 5C all the way down to the Galaxy S4, and the Galaxy Note 3. Tablets are not immune either with Goophone making a iPad mini knock off, as well as the Galaxy Gear and another smartwatch / fitness band. The Goophone S5 is out of stock at the moment, but will retail for $299.99.

Last year we heard lots of rumors and saw several leaks surrounding a Google Nexus-branded smartwatch, but nothing ever came to fruition and the Nexus smartwatch never appeared. Today website, Android Police, has posted leaked photos which are said to be of the ill-fated Nexus wearable, but I remain skeptical. If true this had to have been a very early prototype or proof-of-concept type thing and nothing near a finished Nexus product.

The images depict a smartwatch that appears to be very bulky in design with a band that better fits a $10 Timex watch from the 90's rather than a ultra-modern intelligent wearable that one would expect from Google's Nexus division. The band does have one cool feature though in the form of a built-in USB data and charging port. Little clues are available to say for certain that these leaked images are the Nexus GEM though, and even the single image of the device powered on shows little useful information. Even the menu item "3 Bit Mode Apps" is useless as a deep Google search turns up nothing.

We do know that Google and LG are working together to bring a Nexus smartwatch to the market, but this device is most certainly not it. It does somewhat resemble Motorola's ACTV sports watch though, and could be an early prototype of that device, or even a fresh prototype of the smartwatch it has confirmed its working on right now. Whatever the case, lets hope that the end result of both Google and Motorola's upcoming wearables are more refined this this as they have some stiff competition from LG and Samsung to contend with.

I'm sure a bunch of people out there are wondering if they need glasses right about now. The problem for many people is that going to the eye doctor is expensive and takes a lot of time. A new service has turned up online called Opternative that will give you an online eye test and a legit prescription for glasses or contacts.

Once you get that prescription, you can take it wherever you want to have the glasses or contacts made. The test takes about ten minutes and costs about $35. The only potential drawback is that you need to pay for the test whether or not you end up needing glasses.

This is a real test according to the co-founder of the company, Dr. Steven Lee. Lee is an optometrist and he says that the Opternative test given uses a series of images that is able to tell what sort of eye problems you might have.

If you work in an office often the only time you can get out before closing time is when you head out for lunch. The problem is that much of the time lunch break isn't long enough to go to a restaurant, order, eat, and get back. That means you need a quick and easy way to order your food and get it back to the office on time.

If you are familiar with Square, the company that makes the mobile credit card readers and operates a mobile payment system, you might be interested in Squares latest offering. The new offering is an app called Square Pickup and it lets you order food from any eatery that takes Square payments.

The app lets you view the full menu offered for all participating restaurants, choose what you want, order, and pay in one place. That means all you need to do is drive over, get your food, and get back before the boss misses you at your desk.

If you are a fan of the Plants vs. Zombies franchise, you might recall the console game that we talked about at E3 last year. That game was called Plants vs. Zombies Garden Warfare and it was promised to land for console gamers this spring. This spring is here, even if it's cold in your neck of the woods.

PvZ Garden Warfare is now available for gamers on the Xbox 360 or Xbox One to purchase as a download. PopCap says that the PC version of the game will come later. Exactly how much later PC gamers have to wait is unknown.

The game has several multiplayer modes including two different 12 v 12 modes. Those modes are Garden & Graveyards and Team Vanquish. One of the coolest parts about Garden Warfare is that the player can choose to be a zombie or a plant. The mobile games always put you in the plants camp.

Team Group, Inc. collaborated with HKEPC Laboratory for the 23rd time to make a Super Pi 1M record using TeamGroup ProjectX memory kits.

The team was able to set a new world record of 5.078 seconds for Super PI 1M scores, therefore beating the previous record of 5.094 seconds by Russia's Smoke Core. What made this very impressive is that the previous record was held for 7 months, therefore one can imagine the time, effort, co-ordination and patience it would require to get everything right to break an already impressive world record.

The overclockers used Xtreem Series' DDR3-2000 2x 2GB CL8 memory kits that used Elpida ICs. It was paired with an i7- 3770K clocked at 7.13 GHz and ASROCK Z77 OC Formula motherboard. The ProjectX memory kit was clocked with 11-7-14 timings 1T at 1,359 MHz. Both components were cooled down by LN2.