Latest News - Page 2982

Fresh from the conversion of Director Alex Proyas' i, Robot, Twentieth Century Fox will next set their sights on converting the 1987 Arnold Schwarzenegger sci-fi hit Predator to the third dimension later this year, according to Schwarzenegger fansite TheArnoldguys.

Any 3D Blu-ray release will likely employ the same 3D conversion as afforded to i, Robot; a new algorithm created by JVC which significantly reduces the amount of manual roto-scoping utilised in top-of-the-line 3D conversions such as Top Gun, Jurassic Park and Titanic. Subsequently, this method is substantially cheaper to perform but leads to less impressive results, as my review of i, Robot shows.

Twentieth Century Fox has had differing results with 3D conversions thus far; last year's theatrical release of Titanic grossed some $58 million in the United States, and huge business worldwide, whilst The Phantom Menace 3D grossed only $43 million and tanked worldwide. A planned theatrical 3D conversion of Independence Day was junked not too long after that.

NVIDIA have been doing quite well in the System-on-a-Chip (SoC) department lately, with Tegra 2 and 3 making big splashes in mobile devices across the world. Tegra 4i is nearly here, but what is coming next? Well, NVIDIA have updated their mobile roadmap at NVIDIA's GPU Technology Conference.

The next SoC we should expect from NVIDIA is codenamed "Logan", and the one after that was previously said to be "Stark", but is now "Parker". Both will use NVIDIA's CUDA technology, with Logan featuring a Kepler GPU and Parker running a Project Denver 64-bit ARM-based CPU as well as packing a next-generation Maxwell GPU. Logan should reach us early 2014, with Parker not being baked into devices until sometime in 2015.

NVIDIA's GPU Technology Conference in San Jose earlier today unveiled some interesting developments with the company, with NVIDIA CEO Jen Hsun-Huang revealing the next step in their GPU roadmap - Volta.

Volta will arrive after Maxwell, and will provide GPUs with an insane amount of memory bandwidth. Volta-based GPUs will provide up to 1TB per second of bandwidth, made capable by stacking the DRAM on top of the GPU itself, with a silica substrate between them. Then, cutting a hole through the silicon and connecting each layer provides the ability for this insane level of bandwidth. Something Huang has said has the ability to shift "all of the data from a full Blu-Ray disc through the chip in 1/50th of a second."

I don't know what this will do in the consumer space, as even the unreleased next-gen consoles will be holding back a beast like Volta. The future is looking great for NVIDIA, and I'm excited to see what we'll see from these next-gen GPUs.

It truly has been the year for shuffles at the top of big companies, with today bringing news that Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch is stepping down. Lynch is taking a job over at Apple, where he'll be titled as the VP of Technology.

Lynch will step down on March 22, with his CTO position not being filled by a successor. Adobe's official statement, below:

Since its release, the Raspberry Pi has been changing the DIY landscape much like the Arduino did in 2009-2011. The Raspberry Pi Foundation has been hard at work developing the most anticipated add-on module it has developed to date, the camera module.

Today Raspberry Pi released a blog post detailing how the upcoming $25 camera module was created, and in that document we learn some interesting information about the camera. A fixed focus 5MP sensor capable of 2592x1944 stills, but also 1080p30, 720p60 and 640x480p60/90 video is featured. The lens is fixes so that means no auto focus will be present.

The camera will connect to the Raspberry Pi via two connections. I2C will handle the basic functions like start, stop, change resolution, and adjust exposure time. The much higher bandwidth CSI bus will handle the pixel data from the sensor back to the processor.

You might want to be good this year, or else Santa won't know to add this to your Christmas list - Digital Storm have just announced their brilliantly specced Hailstorm II. Digital Storm's latest creation crams some seriously high-end components into Corsair's Obsidian Series 900D case.

Hailstorm II features an advanced liquid cooling system with the current of cold air driven by three front intake fans, backed up by a large exhaust fan. The Hailstorm II is capable of having a total of 15 fans installed, which should give even the most airflow crazy gamer out there plenty of room to move. There's ten expansion slots at play, up to nine HDDs or SSDs with three hot-swap mounts, four 5.25-inch optical drive bays, two USB 3.0 ports and four USB 2.0 ports on the front of the Hailstorm II give you plenty of storage and connectivity options.

Each Digital Storm PC goes through a rigorous 72-hour stress-test, ensuring that when you receive your Hailstorm II (or any other Digital Storm PC) it is ready for some serious gaming. There are four tiers of Hailstorm II PCs available, Level 1 through 4. Level 1 starts at $2762 and comes with an Intel Core i7 3770K overclocked to up to 4.8GHz, 16GB of DDR3 1600MHz, NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 680 GPU, a 120GB SSD and 1TB HDD for storage.

Samsung has made it no secret that it intends to go head to head with Apple in everything it does. This time we are getting reports that the Korean make-everything giant is planning on entering the Smart Watch game... again.

Samsung's executive VP said in an interview with Bloomberg today that "We are preparing products for the future, and the watch is definitely one of them." He went on to say that between Apple and Samsung the "issue here is who will first commercialize it so consumers can use it meaningfully."

This is not the first time Samsung has taken on the role of Smart Watch builder, just back then we did not call them smart watches. The S9110 "Watchphone" debuted in 2009 and a decade earlier, it released the SPH-WP10 "Watch Phone". Who do you think will win the Smart Watch war? My bet is on Samsung, but in reality all we can do is sit back and watch.

There have been rumblings about this for a few weeks now, but Sapphire have just announced the release of their new HD 7950 Mac Edition graphics card. From the model alone, you can tell this is destined for an Apple machine, more specifically, their Mac Pro series of desktop PCs.

Sapphire's HD 7950 Mac Edition comes with 3GB of GDDR5 memory, and works on the PC too thanks to its dual firmware support through a simple dual BIOS switch. The HD 7950 Mac Edition GPU is compatible with Apple Mac Pro late-2010 and up models, as long as there is an available PCI-Express x16 slot. Two six-pin PCIe power connections are required, which come in the box.

AMD brings along their powerful Graphics Core Next (GCN) architecture, which gives the Mac a number of technologies to play with. These include de-blocking, de-noising, automatic de-interlacing, Mosquito noise reduction and edge enhancement as well as advanced image quality enhancement technology, such as adaptive anti-aliasing and 16x angle independent anisotropic texture filtering.

Kogan Mobile is in the headlines again, this time for booting a customer off their network for abusing their mobile phone plan. The telco offers an unlimited calls and text pre-paid plan that includes 6GB of data for $29, something they launched in December last year.

Brisbane customer, retail store manager Joel Campbell, was kicked off of the network, with Kogan claiming he was not using his service for "personal use", giving him 90 days to find a new provider. Within section 1.1 of Kogan Mobile's terms of service, they state that their network must be used for "personal use only" - the big problem is that in this seven-page ToS document, it does not state that heavy users would be kicked off of their service.

Campbell said "I have no reason to need a business phone," admitting he was a heavy user, saying that he accessed the Internet on his phone a lot during the day, but didn't think the cancellation of his service to Kogan was "warranted." He adds: "I'm paying for it. At the end of the day if I want more, I'll pay for more. It's not a loss to them."

DICE have confirmed that the debut trailer for their upcoming Frostbite 2-powered Battlefield 4 will arrive on March 27, taking it a step further by unveiling a very short teaser clip to get those gaming juices flowing.

The announcement came from the official Battlefield Twitter account, which included a sneak peak at the trailer. It looks as though we should 'Prepare 4 Battle' and that we should expect some naval gameplay, too. Once the trailer breaks, we should hopefully hear more on the game in the coming months, which platforms it'll be released on - and when - and which platform was the development platform.

Remember last time, we were told it was the PC, but then switched to the consoles to get it out on time. Hopefully this time, DICE aren't messing around and have developed on the PC first and foremost, especially considering that next-gen consoles are powered by x86-based, PC architecture - like the PlayStation 4 from Sony.

Valve have quite the announcement today, telling the world that Team Fortress 2 will get a new mode this week - "VR Mode" for Oculus Rift, the superstar VR headset. This means that people who own the development kit of Oculus' VR headset can play Team Fortress in virtual reality.

Engadget have an interview with Joe Ludwig, one of the engineers in Valve working with Team Fortress 2's VR Mode. The interview can be seen here. The good news doesn't stop there! What good is a new mode if we don't have a new exclusive had in the game? The Oculus Rift development kit is now a wearable item within the game! Valve has been even more generous, donating Rift hats to the Oculus developer community - so if you backed the Kickstarter campaign at any level at all, or pre-ordered one of the Rift developer kits from Oculus' website before April 1, 2013, you'll receive a code to redeem your own TF2 Oculus dev kit hat.

Now the big question - how long until we see Rift support added to other games? In Engadget's interview with Joe Ludwig, he says that TF2's VR Mode is a big test, to see how the community accepts it. Obviously Oculus' Rift headset won't be available to the consumer market until later in the year, so hopefully we see some Steam Box support, and maybe some Half-Life 3 launch at E3 with Rift support? Or am I asking too much there?

RapidShare will likely upset some of its customers with its latest move. As of March 20, the unlimited storage option will disappear, even for those who have pre-paid for unlimited storage for longer periods. In exchange, RapidShare is expanding its options provided to free users.

Current customers will now be able to pick from a 250GB plan for 10 euros per month and a 500GB plan for 20 euros per month. Unfortunately for some, RapidShare's Terms of Service allow them to change the contents of RapidPro services at anytime. RapidShare had the following to say:

It looks like NVIDIA may be working on a second GK110-based consumer GPU to fill the gap between the marginally expensive GTX 680 and the ridiculously expensive GTX Titan released last month. With a $500 gap between the GTX 680 and GTX Titan, NVIDIA has a lot of wiggle room to squeeze another GPU in the lineup.

The video card is said to feature 13 of the 15 streaming multiprocessors that are built into the GK110 silicon. This means we would have 2,496 CUDA cores to do our gaming bidding. Combine that with 208 texture memory units, 40ROPs, a 320-bit memory interface, and 5GB of GDDR5 RAM and you end up with a fairly powerful card.

The rumored release date is somewhere between July and August of this year.

Google has climbed some of the highest peaks in the world to bring Street View images so that you don't even have to get out of your seat. While this won't satisfy some of the most adventurous Google Maps users, it will satisfy those of us who may not be physically capable of climbing these mountins.

You might be interested in checking out Mount Everest, Kilimanjaro, Aconcagua, and Mount Elbrus. You might also be interested in checking out the blog post drafted by one of the people who went on the adventure.

The Australian Financial Review released a report this morning in which BlackBerry CEO Thorsten Heins slams Apple over "lack of innovation." With a market cap that is less than Apple's quarterly profits, Heins claims are making some industry insiders laugh.

Heins went on to say that BlackBerry has surpassed Apple in innovation with the new BlackBerry 10 and that Apple has stood virtually still and has just rehashed the same old technology it released in 2007 with the first iPhone.

Last week we learned that Google Reader would be put out to pasture this coming July, and while Google continues to sever the heads of some of its apps, it seems to be planting seeds for new services to grow.

Earlier today website Android Police spotted some source code that alluded to a new service from Google called "Keep" that would let users easily take, store, and sync notes using one's Google Drive storage space. After some more digging, the sleuths discovered that the desktop version had already gone live at drive.google.com/keep.

The site has since been taken down, suggesting that Google had not meant for the public to see the new service yet. TheNextWeb was able to demo Keep for a few minutes before it was pulled offline and they described the interface as being "basic" and "made for mobile". They said that it did include a search feature, but integration with the rest of Google Drive was nonexistent.

Last week's launch stole the smartphone news show, but this week, everything is about Sony's next offerings. The company has announced two new Android based smartphones today in its Xperia line. In a series of videos, Sony shows off the best features of each phone.

The Xperia L is a lower end smartphone that is aimed at improving photo quality. Sony is touting the L as "the beat of Sony Camera Experience in a smartphone." It features a 1GHz dual-core Qualcomm MSM8230 processor, 1750mAh battery, an 8MP camera and 8GB of internal storage. The Xperia L will come in three colors - white, black and red.

The Xperia SP looks to be the new flagship phone from the company. Sony states that the XP was "precision crafted in every detail." and "the Xperia SP brings Sony brilliance to life, inside and out." The Xperia SP features a 4.6-inch 1280x720 "reality display" and is powered by the Mobile Bravia Engine which can sense the type of content on the screen, and adjust settings for the best image possible.

March has been a roller coaster ride for gaming companies, with major games like Sim City and Tomb Raider experiencing major issues on launch. Tomb Raider was all but playable on NVIDIA GPUs up until now. The GPU architecture giant has finally been able to release an official driver update that fixes most issues with the latest installment from Crystal Dynamics.

On the company's official blog, they stated:

Lenovo have just unveiled their latest ThinkPad, the T431s. Lenovo's ThinkPad T431s is a 14-inch Ultrabook, sporting a 1600x900 matte display backed up by 250 nits of brightness. Inside, we have Intel HD graphics, a 720p front-facing camera, 4GB of RAM (upgradeable to 12GB), a 47WHr sealed battery, an optional backlit keyboard, Bluetooth 4.0 and support for both Wi-Fi and WWAN connections.

Diving in deeper, we find Intel's Core i5-3337U processor clocked at 2.7GHz, with an upgrade to a Core i7 available. A full-sized Ethernet port is available, while VGA makes a weird appearance, too. A 3.5mm headphone/microphone combo jack is here, two USB 3.0 ports, a 4-in-1 SD card reader and a 320GB 5400RPM mechanical HDD resides inside for storage - with the option to upgrade to a super-fast SSD. It'll ship with your choice of Windows 7 or Windows 8.

No touchscreen is here yet, but Lenovo have said that future T431s models might feature touch panels. The trackpad has lose its physical buttons, with a custom-built alternative at play from Lenovo and Synaptics that reportedly took two years to work on. The T431s' trackpad supports some 20 different gestures. Lenovo's latest Ultrabook will start at $949 and will be in stores next month.

Defense Distributed has received a federal firearms license, with company head Cody Wilson announcing this would allow his company to manufacture and sell the group's guns. The news comes from Defense Distributed's Facebook page, where they uploaded a photo of the license with a note saying "The work begins!"

Wilson has said that the Type 7 license he received will allow him the same rights as other manufacturers, where he adds: "I can sell some of the pieces that we've been making. I can do firearms transactions and transport." Wilson will be required to, of course, keep records on what his company makes and sells, but he doesn't have plans to sell anything until he receives a supplemental license to make a broader range of firearms.

Defense Distributed seem to be the sharpest tool in the shed when it comes to 3D-printed gun companies, successfully testing 3D-printed rifle lowers and high-capacity magazines.