Latest News - Page 2978

I've got a spot of bad news for Nokia Lumia 810 users on T-Mobile. Even though the Lumia 810 hardware has support for LTE, it looks like users won't be getting access to T-Mobile's LTE network, despite earlier remarks that the device would be upgraded to LTE in the future through a software update.

T-Mobile said in a statement:

Mozilla has updated its Firefox web browser with per-window private browsing that functions much the same as Chrome's private browsing feature. In addition to per-window private browsing, Firefox 20 comes with stability improvements, bug fixes, HTML5 additions, and a new download experience.

As part of the stability improvements, users can now close a frozen plugin without the entire browser crashing. This is also similar to how Chrome handles plugins. The improved download experience features a new interface and a button that makes opening the downloads list much easier. When downloads are active, the button shows an estimated time to completion.

Probably the largest change with Firefox 20 is the ability to have both normal Firefox windows and private browsing Firefox windows open simultaneously. As previously stated, this new method is how Chrome has handled private browsing from the get-go. Firefox used to require the entire session to either be a normal session or a private browsing session.

When Finding Dory arrives in 2015, it will have taken Disney just 13 years to make the sequel to the widely popular Finding Nemo movie. Ellen DeGeneres confirmed that Finding Dory would be arriving at a theater near you on November 25, 2015 with DeGeneres remaining the voice of Dory.

"I have waited for this day for a long, long, long, long, long, long time," DeGeneres said in a statement Tuesday. Some might say that she just kept swimming for this day. References aside, she says that she isn't "mad it took this long." With her usual humor, she added, "I know the people at Pixar were busy creating Toy Story 16."

Dan Porter, the former CEO of OMGPOP before it was bought out by Zynga for a rumored $210 million, is leaving Zynga, the company has announced today. Zynga is currently in the process of building Draw Something 2 and Zynga's COO David Ko has acknowledged Porter worked on the sequel.

Porter is just the latest in what seems to be a never ending stream of employees leaving Zynga after it went public in 2011. Zynga has appointed VP Sean Kelly to take over as head of the New York office. Kelly has been with the company since 2009.

Yahoo has teamed up with cloud storage provider Dropbox to do away with the current 25MB e-mail attachment file-size limit. It's much the same technology as Gmail uses with Google Drive integration. Attachments are loaded into a user's Dropbox and can be easily stored, updated, and forwarded.

Some user e-mail accounts restrict file size or inbox size even further causing e-mails with large attachments to bounce. Dropbox says that this new integration will allow users to quickly save attachments directly to Dropbox where it will automatically sync to all of your devices:

This morning ADATA announced its first offering to the enterprise market. The two new solid state drives are part of the SX1000L SSD line and are being offered in 100GB and 200GB capacities.

The SX1000L line takes advantage of ADATA's expertise in NAND flash memory technology which lends an unprecedented level of performance and reliability to thew new modules. The line employs static wear-leveling technology that raises the mean time between failures to 1,500,000 hours.

The SX1000L utilizes advanced controller technology to enhance read/write performance with sequential read speeds reaching 560MB/s and sequential write speeds approaching 340MB/s, with IOPS of 73,000 and 45,000 (maximum 4K random read and write, respectively). The use of multi-level cell NAND flash memory combined with advanced chip sorting lends to outstanding sustained performance lower latency and superior endurance.

We've already heard the rumors that South Korean electronics giant Samsung would release their Galaxy S4 mini shortly after its bigger brother, the Galaxy S4. Now there's fresh rumors that Samsung will announce this smaller smartphone, as soon as this week.

The Galaxy S4 mini would be made available in black and white, as well as a dual-SIM model being put up on the table. The dual-SIM Galaxy S4 mini would sport a 4.3-inch qHD display, a 1.6GHz dual-core Exynos 5210 processor, an 8-megapixel rear-facing camera and come to the party dressed in Android 4.2.2 Jelly Bean.

The single-SIM variant would bump the processor up to a quad-core variant, giving users with the single SIM card some boosted CPU performance.

Google's privacy director has announced internally that she is stepping down from her post with intentions to retire. Alma Whitten became Google's first director of privacy in 2010 after being an engineer with the company. Her job was to oversee future products and prevent the release of products that invaded privacy too much.

Whitten will remain with the privacy team for a few more months as Lawrence You transitions to her position. You is based in Mountain View, California and has been a Google engineer for eight years.

Google said in a statement:

Users on the Intel HD4000 GPU boat are about to get more performance. While at GDC, Intel announced a new version of their driver that will bring with it an up to 10 percent improvement in graphics performance. Also included in the new driver is support for OpenCL 1.2.

The new driver is said to have been built for Haswell processors, though the driver will also be compatible with Ivy Bridge. Different sources are reporting that it will be compatible with HD2500, though others are reporting that it won't be. The new driver will be released as early as this week.

Users can download the latest drivers from Intel's website.

Microsoft's Windows 8 operating system continues to be somewhat of a flop. Usage data from Net Applications show Windows 8 usage is still behind that of Microsoft's last flop, Windows Vista. Windows XP and Windows 7 continue to be top contenders, even though XP was initially released over 11 years ago.

Windows 8 is used on 3.17 percent of computers, up from 2.67 percent in February. Vista, on the other hand, is found on 4.99 percent of systems. Windows XP is still found on 38.73 percent of systems and Windows 7 is the largest used operating system, found on 44.73 percent of systems.

Mac OS X 10.6-10.8 combined is found on below 7 percent of systems. Windows 8 uptake is likely to increase and is predicted to eclipse that of Vista within the year.

It's been a long and drawn out wait for the Raspberry Pi Model A to be released, but it is finally here and on sale in the US for a mere $25. Surprisingly the Model A is not being launched at Element14 as everyone might think.

Allied Electronics, a Texas based component supplier appears to be the first to market with the new $25 credit card sized Linux computer. The Model A is a dumbed down version of the vastly popular Raspberry Pi model B and differs in just a few missing components such as the LAN interface.

Unfortunately it appears that Allied has already sold out of the Model A's which leads us to wonder, why do these component houses not order several tens of thousands of units. They always blame supply, but Arduino was able to overcome supply shortages faster than Raspberry Pi has seemed to. If you know your product is going to sell in the hundreds of thousands almost overnight, why not scale up production to meet that demand?

In a recently released presentation, AMD has hinted that its new Steamroller micro-architecture is on track to be released this year. This comes at a surprise as most industry insiders thought that the new architecture would not arrive until mid to late next year.

In a presentation slide titled "AMD Opteron Technology: Delivering multiple generations of greater functionality and improved performance," it was hinted that AMD will be releasing server-class Opteron chips based on the new technology later this year.

X-Bit Labs is reporting that AMD has pushed forward its plans for Steamroller and the new chips will be compatible with current sockets and that the new server microprocessors will support PCI-E 3.0. Desktop chip's featuring Steamroller technology will most likely not be seen until next year though.

Ah April first, the day that the entire country tries to prank each other in real life as well as on the internet. The biggest names in tech have decided to join in on the fun as well. Microsoft, Google, Bing, and The Pirate Bay have all released "stories" this morning that no one could possibly take serious.

First up, Google tells us that Youtube will be shutting down and that the entire site has been a "contest" to see who could upload the best video on the internet. Google has also revamped Gmail to better align itself with Windows Blue. Called Gmail Blue, the new user interface is... well... very blue...

Not to be out done, Microsoft has released word that it feels that Bing should be more Google like and has switched its main page to reflect those feelings. In addition to all of these shocking breaking news stories, The Pirate Bay has just announced that it has aligned itself with the US Government and has agreed to take down all of its torrents. This announcement is the direct result of a server move from North Korea to a "Nuclear Proof" data center in the US.

This is probably going to be one of the more 'out there' rumors of the year, but Apple have apparently been playing around with a striking new design for the iPhone.

The Telegraph noticed a recently published patent that Apple have been playing around with an iPhone that features a curved display, with no size bezels or physical buttons to be seen. Apple sees the curved display made with a flexible material that can present "an illusion of depth perception" capable of "mimicking a 3D experience."

Apple explains that users could control the volume on the phone "by holding a finger over the volume indicator" and "expanding the volume control over the entire left side of the device," which takes away any reasoning for a physical volume button.

Update: April Fools from Lian Li!

Lian Li are asking all LAN gamers the biggest question of all: "Do you even lift, bro?" with their latest PC-D8000-LAN chassis - which features some back pack straps, perfect for LAN gamers across the world. Lian Li unleashed the news through their Facebook page, where they've tagged it as the 'No Compromises: The Ultimate LAN Case'.

It looks like it's pretty much their kick-ass PC-D8000 case, with some handy back pack straps. What do you think of the case? Adding back pack straps to an already huge case might be a bit hard to lift, but I really think they should use the marketing piece "Do you even lift, bro" or "Do you even LAN, bro?"

eBay started off as something small, but has grown into something incredibly powerful and profitable. So much so that the Internet auction site is estimated that their total volume of merchandise sold will reach $110 billion by 2015.

The Internet auction site also sees a very large portion of their growth from developing markets, which will see a nice injection of both consumers and profits in the coming years. Bloomberg have noted that they estimate eBay to pull in between $21.5 billion and $23.5 billion in the year 2015 with their current business model.

eBay's continued success is thanks to current CEO John Donahue, who pushed for new features like mobile applications and local shopping tools. These goals have seen eBay's shares surge 75% since he took over from Meg Whitman in 2008. Just last year, eBay's sales grew 21%.

Update:

Mark Rein has talked with Engadget, shedding some light on his comments that Unreal Engine 4 wouldn't be heading to the Nintendo Wii U, where he said:

It looks like the Facebook rumors won't die, and are stronger than ever with the social network inviting the press to an event at the Facebook HQ on April 4th, to "Come See Our New Home On Android."

It looks like the Facebook phone would run a modified version of Android, and may be built by HTC. If the April 4 event does see a Facebook phone unveiled, it'll be an interesting future for Google. Google allow manufacturers to modify the stock look and feel of Android, but the rumors with the Facebook phone are looking to have the Facebook phone see a huge change in the look and feel of Android - which we should expect.

Facebook have a slew of features and apps that they could bake directly into their phone, which would essentially just be a basic Android handset, powered by Facebook. Then we have to wonder about Facebook's App Center, which links to both the Google Play Store and Apple App Store. Then we have to think deeper again, with carriers' opinions on a Facebook phone. I'm guessing we'd see Facebook heavily, heavily subsidize this bad boy, and sell it online and unlocked, ala Google's Nexus 4.

Bitcoins have slowly but surely been plowing their way into the market, where they represent a billion dollar market. Bitcoins are an open source, unregulated peer-to-peer currency, with around 10.9 million bitcoins in circulation on a single marketplace.

Bitcoins, at the moment, have a value of around $90, with the 10.9 million of them creating the billion dollar market. Bitcoins have stayed mostly away from the media's attention, but with the digital currency continuing to grow at breakneck speeds, I'm sure we're going to see some intervention soon enough. This rings especially true as bitcoins are used regularly as the currency of choice for the black market, assassins and drug dealers.

The digital currency does have a big upside, in the way that governments in economic troubles freeze citizens' bank accounts - bitcoins are safe from that. They're also easy to transfer between people without requiring citizens' personal information. There are of course downsides, with the growth of the digital currency possibly creating a bubble which will eventually pop, with people losing hundreds or thousands of dollars.

NASA has an interesting plan that would see them find an asteroid in space, drag it toward the Moon and send astronauts to study it. NASA are requesting $100 million for the mission, which is coming in the middle of their fight over the 2014 budget continues in Washington.

The idea comes from the Keck Institute for Space Studies at the California Institute of Technology back in 2011. Scientists have said that the plan is capable of being played out within the next decade, and would be a very good move for future endeavours by US engineers to plunder asteroids with robotic mining for water and metals. NASA has requested $100 million, with Keck researchers admitting that the actual operation would cost as much as $2.6 billion and it would take at least six years to grab an asteroid close to Earth.

The researchers have said that there could be as many as 20,000 pieces of space debris within a decent distance from the Earth, but it could take astronauts up to six months to travel to the asteroid in order to pull it back toward the Moon.