Latest News - Page 2918

If you didn't already know, you should expect a new Terminator trilogy, as the franchise is being completely rebooted. Now there's news popping up that Skydance Productions and Annapurna Pictures are developing a new TV series that will compliment the reboot.

The new Terminator TV series is being written in conjunction with the first film in the new trilogy, which should hit screens in June 2015. The new series will reportedly follow a critical moment from the original Terminator, but it will be pushed down a completely different narrative path. I don't know whether to be excited or not, but I did like Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles.

Sure, it was slow at times, and had its problems, but that last episode was absolutely awesome. I'm looking forward to the new movie, especially with Arnold Schwarzenegger signed on.

This is quite the rumor, but according to Wedbush Morgan analyst, Michael Pachter, DICE won't be developing the next Battlefield title. This is interesting, especially because it's EA.

Pachter said in a note to the press: "We spoke with management on Thursday afternoon, and although they have not yet announced a version of Battlefield for FY15, they confirmed that our understanding is spot on and that if a version of Battlefield were to be released in FY15, it would be developed by a studio other than DICE."

This would make sense, if EA wanted to pump out annual Battlefield games, like Activision does with Call of Duty. It would make more sense, because EA has killed off the Medal of Honor franchise, and doesn't have two military shooters to go back-to-back every alternate year. But, would it water down the Battlefield franchise, or would it help it flourish?

Google spent around $500 million marketing its Moto X smartphone, but it looks like this hasn't done much to help the Moto X penetrate into the US smartphone market, according to comScore's new numbers.

comScore's numbers show that Motorola's US smartphone market jumped ever so slightly between July and October, from 6.9% to 7%. In that time, Motorola launched multiple devices, but didn't gain any much market share at all in the US. Motorola is battling all sides of the Android war right now, and with Google behind it using LG and ASUS to build its Nexus devices, it's really just shooting itself in the foot with its multi-billion-dollar acquisition, and now $500 million marketing bill for the Moto X.

You probably thought I was smoking something exotic when I wrote that title, but no - this isn't bait - Samsung has just launched the Prelude, the world's largest floating vessel. Samsung, a company known for its Galaxy devices and various electronic devices, will use its Prelude for offshore gas extraction.

The Prelude is truly massive in scale, where it is 12x the size of the already-gigantic Titanic, nearly as big as the Taipei 101 - which is a massive building in its own right. The Prelude is 488m long, and is the first platform on Earth that can liquefy natural gas on-board, and then pipe it directly into liquefied natural gas (LNG) ships for delivery into neighboring countries. It will be stationed just north of Australia, where it will be parked for 25 years.

Liquefying natural gas isn't easy, but the Prelude can do this - and shrinks it up 600x, which requires an incredible amount of energy to get the gas to -260F, which makes it nice and compact for easy transportation. Samsung has reportedly spend $12 billion to create the Prelude, and was built for Shell, by Samsung Heavy Industries, a Samsung affiliate. Samsung Heavy Industries has an annual revenue of around $13 billion, so this is quite the investment.

No mobile platform or software package is without its bugs, and Apple's devices are no exception. Recently reports have began to come in that show that some Apple users can not access iTunes or the App Store on the iPhones, iPods or iPads. When attempting to log-in the users are met with an error that reads: "FATAL::Unable to process your request. Please try again."

Additionally, Apple users trying to access the services from their Mac devices have been met with the same error, and it appears that the issue reaches to the iBookstore as well. Apple has not acknowledged the error on any of its Status pages, and no official statement has been made. The issue does appear to be fairly widespread, and I am guessing that an authentication server somewhere may be broken.

If there is one thing that bothers me with almost every amateur photo taken of a landscape, product, or person, its the lack of a level horizon in the background. It is not that hard to level a shot when shooting off a tripod, but when you attached the camera to the three legged device, a lot of adjustments must be made to ensure a perfectly level photograph.

While it is quite easy to fix these crooked images in image editing programs, you lose some of the image due to cropping. Additionally, when shooting large panoramic sets, having a level imaging plane makes a lot of difference in the end result. A new Kickstarter campaign is looking to change the way we level our cameras for imaging everything. Called the OhSoh ELi -Electronic Leveling Intelligence Camera Support, this new device attaches to your camera and tripod and automatically levels every shot.

The OhSoh ELi uses sensors to automatically level your camera on both the X and Y axis and ensures that the horizon is always straight, even if your tripod is perched on an extreme angle. "ELi was designed to speed up workflow allowing you to concentrate on your photography. When you set your tripod down you only need to roughly place it and let ELi take over - with the press of a button you will be setup," reads the Kickstarter page.

As I first reported yesterday, the US House of Representatives has been hearing arguments on a new bill that could put an end to many of the frivolous patent lawsuits filled each year by so-called patent trolls. As expected, the bill has passed in the House with support from both sides of the isle.

Known as the Innovation Act 325-91, the bill will now make its way to the senate where it is expected to pass with a bipartisan majority as well. Once it is finished in congress, the bill will make its way to President Obama's desk and he also is expected to sign it into law. If this does happen, we could see an end to the era of east Texas shell corporations that exist only to file and buy low-quality, low-detail patents that are so vague that they can be claimed as part of many technologies.

This is the first step into patent reform, and hopefully the next step will be a complete overhaul of the United States Patent and Trade office. With companies now patenting seeds, human, animal and plant genes, and even specific code, we need to work hard to prevent these sort of things from happening. If not, then I am afraid that we may see an immense slowdown in technological and scientific innovation and breakthroughs for decades to come.

The saga over who will become Microsoft's next CEO has taken yet another step forward today after a board member at Ford told press that Alan Mulally will not be leaving the car maker for Redmond, Washington. Since this news began to spread earlier this week, Microsoft's stock has fallen about 3.5-percent, equating in a $12 billion fall in market cap for the company.

The news came from Ford board member, Edsel Ford II who stated that "Alan is staying through the end of 2014," a time frame far past Steve Ballmer's departing date. This is good news for Nokia's Stephen Elop, who is also in the running to take the CEO seat. Today's news does not surprise me at all though, as I have expected Elop to be the "Chosen One" since Microsoft announced its acquisition plans for Nokia. Other reports suggest that Microsoft's head of Cloud Services Satya Nadella could head up the company, but I see that as a far stretch at this point.

This morning MSI announced the launch of a new mobile lineup that includes the industry's first 3K gaming notebook and an Adobe certified 3K workstation. Just in time for Christmas, the all new GT60 20D-261US features a ultra-HD display resolution of 2880x1620 which provides bright, sharp and crisp graphics for an unmatched experience.

The GT60 gaming notebook features an Intel Core i7-4700MQ processor, 16GB of DDR3L RAM, an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780M GPU, and a Killer NIC. A 720p webcam is on hand while Dynaudio speakers and a subwoofer handle the audio. The 2880x1620 3K display is of the 15.6-inch class, but does not feature touch sensitivity. Three USB 3.0 ports and two USB 2.0 ports, and a 128GB SSD / 1TB HHD combo rounds things out.

The GT60 Workstation has been optimized to run Adobe Creative Suite 6, Autodesk software, and Solidworks, and the 3K display allows professionals to work in stunning ultra high-resolution for the highest quality work possible from a mobile workstation. The GT60 2OKWS-278US features the same CPU, RAM, and storage. The difference in the powerful NVIDIA Quado K3100M workstation GPU that MSI has fit inside.

I've had issues with Battlefield 4, don't get me wrong, but when it works, it's an amazing game. Well, there are issues plaguing most platforms - next-gen consoles included - and EA wants to get it all fixed before it continues working on its DLC for BF4.

EA has put its foot down, with future expansions not being worked on until the problems with Battlefield 4 are a thing of the past. It's good to see EA kicking ass this early into the game, but these problems wouldn't be here if they didn't rush the game to release. EA said in its statement:

EA's new boss, Andrew Wilson, has come out and publicly apologized for the issues in BF4, where he said: "We have had our challenges with stability issues on Battlefield 4, and the DICE team is 100 per cent focused on understanding and resolving the problems that some players have been having."

It's no secret that Valve has been very Linux friendly as of late, and today the company publicly declared its commitment to the open source operating system by officially joining the Linux Foundation. This adds Valve to a prestigious list of heavy hitters such as HP, Intel, IBM, Oracle, and Samsung who are also part of the foundation.

"Joining the Linux Foundation is one of many ways Valve is investing in the advancement of Linux gaming," Mike Sartain, a key member of the Linux team at Valve said. "Through these efforts we hope to contribute tools for developers building new experiences on Linux, compel hardware manufacturers to prioritize support for Linux, and ultimately deliver an elegant and open platform for Linux users."

With SteamOS just around the corner, and more game developers supporting Linux and Steam every day, 2014 is going to be a big year for Linux gaming. I have a friend who has been predicting this for several years now, and today I had to concede all of my arguments to him on why this would never happen. At the rate things are progressing, I am willing to bet that in 5 years Linux and SteamOS will be as big of, if not a larger gaming platform than Windows is now.

2014 is going to be a big year for SSD technology in general, and the second quarter is going to be no exception for Intel's SSD business. Today new official slides have leaked that detail a massive portion on Intel's 2014 SSD offerings, and include new devices in the Temple Star, Pleasantdale, and Fultondale lines.

All three of the SSD families will utilize 20nm MLC NAND Flash memory and will arrive in three form factors. The SSD Pro 2500 Series (Temple Star) will be featured in traditional 2.5-inch and M.2 sizing with performance falling in the 540MB/s read and 490MB/s write speed range. The slide shows capacities from 80GB up to 480GB.

The SSD DC P3500 series (Pleasantdale) will arrive in both PCIe and 2.5-inch form factors, and will be available in 250GB, 500GB, 1TB and 2TB capacities. Read performance is around the 2800MB/s range while writes are a little slower at 1700MB/s.

Alan Rusbridger, editor of The Guardian, is being threatened by British police over "potential" terrorism charges for publishing the incriminating NSA and GCHQ documents that NSA whistleblower, Edward Snowden, leaked.

Rusbridger testified in front of a British parliamentary committee on Tuesday, where lawmakers pushed the suggestion that the Guardian helped terrorists, just because the British paper revealed UK and US spy agency 'secrets'. Rusbridger stood his ground, stating that the government spying going on all around the world should be of public knowledge.

The Guardian editor said: "We have published I think 26 documents out of the 58,000 we've seen, or 58,000 plus. So we have made very selective judgments about what to print. We have published no names and we have lost control of no names."

Something interesting just popped up onto my radar, and that's the news that ASUS is working on a new dual OS tablet. The new tablet is capable of running Android and Windows, something of which ASUS is no newbie at.

But, with Android 4.4 KitKat now out, and Windows 8.1, could we see a mashup of operating systems under a new ASUS-built device? Well, it looks liker we can expect three models: M82T, L82T, and the R82T - with no information on what makes them all different. We do know that on the tablet that slid through the FCC was powered by the Intel Atom "Bay Trail" chip.

Other than that, we know it has a 3910mAh battery, and either 32GB or 64GB of storage. We don't know about the screen size, but we could expect something in the 7-inch range or so - which would work, considering ASUS builds the Android 4.4-powered Nexus 7 slate. If we do see this thing released, we should expect it to be shown off at CES 2014 in Las Vegas, in January.

DisplayPort technology is continuously improving, with DisplayPort 1.3 now being teased with some huge improvements. DP 1.3 will feature a bitrate of 8.1 Gbps per channel, up from 5.4 Gbps found in DP 1.2.

We should see a wonderful world where multiple 4K displays are supported from a single cable - something I'm longing for as I type this on a 4K display - and DP 1.3 will allow this. DP 1.3 will see support for 8K thanks to its insane bandwidth of a theoretical 32.4 Gbps. We should also see 4K 3D support ushered in with DisplayPort 1.3, which will be another awesome addition going into 2014.

What I would like to see, is some confirmation that we will indeed be seeing 4K in 3D, and whether this means I'll get what I've been waiting for, for quite sometime now: 4K at 120Hz. Unfortunately, we won't see the fruits of high-resolution labor until sometime in 2014 - where we'll see it announced, but it won't be pushed into devices until 2015.

Today Thecus announced the launch of its latest entry-level home and small office NAS. The all new N2310 is a 2-bay Network Attached Storage device that is packed with features you would expect from Thecus. The new N3210 features support for RAID 0, 1, and JBOD and packs in hardware that will ensure speed and reliability.

"Not only does the N2310 pack in a lot of the capabilities of larger and more expensive units, but it does so with style," said Florence Shih, General Manager at Thecus. "This dashing little black box can store up to 8TB of data with an unprecedented level of energy efficiency. In fact, powering the N2310 for an entire year would only cost you $5.03 in the US."

The N2310 also features a built-in FTP server, BitTorrent Client, and even Plex Media Server support that allows users to stream content to TVs, Xbox 360, and any other device running Plex's streaming client. The device also features two USB ports that enable users to easily copy over photos and files from external drives, as well as a printer, turning the NAS into a central print server. The Thecus N2310 is available now and retails at an MSRP of $169.99.

Nokia has just won a major battle in the so-called "Patent War", with a UK judge ruling that the HTC One Mini infringes on some of Nokia's patents. As a result of the ruling, the HTC One Mini has been banned from sale in the UK, and all sales must halt by December 6th, or HTC will face major fines.

Additionally, the company could see its flagship, the HTC One, banned from sale in the UK as well, which could cripple the already troubled manufacturer. The judge presiding over the matter did acknowledge that this would cause considerable damage to HTC and has postponed ruling on the one until HTC has had time to appeal. HTC says that it has agreed to cease all imports of its devices, until the appeal hearing has concluded.

The patent violations are based on certain chip sets used in the HTC One and One mini, and HTC says that it is working with chip suppliers to look into alternative chip solutions that could allow the devices back on the market. "HTC is pleased by the decision of the High Court of England and Wales to stay an injunction against certain chip sets, including those in our flagship HTC One, pending the outcome of our appeal against the validity and infringement of Nokia's EP 0 998 024 patent." the company said in a statement.

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.