Latest News - Page 2985

In a move that few saw coming, Microsoft has released parts of the software used to control its Kinect hardware into the Open Source world. Twenty two code samples have been released into CodePlex for Makers, Hardware Hackers and third party engineers to use to develop their own Kinect based projects.

The code samples are available in C++, Visual Basic and C#. Anyone wanting to use the code will need to download Visual Studio, .NET and the Kinect for Windows SDK. The code allows for face tracking, depth of field, as well as audio capture and voice controls.

In what I consider a very smart move, Microsoft said that it released the code because it wants to get feedback from the developer community as well as rapidly speed up development for the Kinect as well as improve its software. All the code samples are released under the Apache 2.0 license and can be downloaded at Source #2 below.

Chris Hurley, co-founder of YouTube, is looking at getting back into the video website business after selling his video streaming site to Google for a nice $1.65 billion. Hurley has now begun teasing his new venture, where he said during a Q&A session with Digg founder and Google Ventures partner Kevin Rose: "I wish [South by Southwest] was a month later because I could unveil the new product."

He didn't go into much detail, but added that the new product is "primarily video-based...and gives flexibility for people to work together and create content." It looks like we should expect a next-generation YouTube, and that's not a bad thing at all. Digg founder Kevin Rose asked him if that was his intention, where he responded with: "We're not setting up to [kill YouTube]-now. There's always going to be a place for YouTube." His intention, instead, is to create a platform better suited for collaboration."

Facebook is used for a million and one things these days, but child trafficking - you'd think not. Misty VanHorn, a mother of two in Oklahoma has tried to sell her two children on Facebook. She was arrested on the weekend for alleged trafficking of minors on Facebook, trying to sell her 10-month-old and 2-year-old for $4000.

VanHorn reportedly offered the kids up for sale more than once, offering her innocent 10-month-old girl for $1000. Alternatively, you could buy a package deal which included both kids for $4000, where she actually had someone interested. VanHorn was dealing with a woman in Fort Smith, Ark., according to The Oklahoman. Because she was dealing across the state line from her home in Sallisaw, she might be charged with a federal crime.

Her Facebook message to the Fort Smith-based woman said: Just come to Sallisaw, it's only 30 minutes away and I'll give you all of her stuff and let y'all have her forever for $1,000. Why was VanHorn trying to sell her children? She wanted the $1000 to bail her boyfriend out of jail, where ironically she's being held on a $40,000 bail. Her kids are now in the custody of the state's department of human services, who alerted the police in the first place.

Intel has a bit of a problem on its hands. It's probably not as terrible as the Sandy Bridge SATA controller issue, but it could end up being another costly fix for the chip giant. According to Fudzilla, the problem cannot be fixed by a mere software update. Rather, the chipset will require a new revision to take care of the issue.

The bug isn't too major. If a USB 3.0 port is being used when the system is put to sleep (S3 state), the device will need to be reconnected upon waking the machine. It's nothing more than a slight hassle, but this is the second chipset glitch experienced by Intel in less than a year.

Motherboard vendors are saying that June is still the planned introduction for Haswell, so it looks like the first batch of motherboards could possibly be coming with the buggy chipset. We'll know more as the proposed launch period nears.

Rovio has announced that the new Angry Birds Toons show will be available through Rovio games on smartphones and tablets. Not only are they using their wide distribution channel, they will also be making the series available from select video-on-demand channel providers, Smart TVs, and select TV networks around the globe.

The first episode of the series will be launching this upcoming weekend. CEO Mikael Hed said the following:

Steam posted an announcement that Tomb Raider has been updated. While the update should be automatically applied when the game is next started, you may have to restart the Steam client. This update brings with it fixes for some of the problems that were discovered shortly before launch and immediately after.

This means that users with NVIDIA cards should have fewer issues relating to the game. NVIDIA was forced to make a statement last week after many users experienced less-than-optimal gameplay. The update includes the following fixes:

Whether you like Arduino or not, you have to admit that the small Italian company founded my Massimo Banzi has truly revolutionized the way the DIY world does things. Today Arduino released its next official product, the GSM Shield.

Arduino has paved the way for things such as cheap, easy to use development boards, all the way to DIY gaming controllers, and now they are looking to truly connect the internet of things wherever you may be. The GSM Shield partnered up with Telefonica Digital to "design a tool that is greatly simplifying the process of building Internet of Things applications based on the GSM mobile phone network".

The GSM Shield also includes a Telefonica SIM card that includes a worldwide data tariff which can be used anywhere there is a cellular signal. Features include the ability to have the Arduino send an SMS message when a sensor or data set reaches a specific threshold, or even send and receive voice calls directly to your Arduino based project.

Comic books have made a comeback in recent years thanks to blockbuster movie releases such as Iron Man, X-Men and The Avengers. Marvel, looking to capitalize even more on this revolution, has released over 700 first in series issues through its Android / iPhone app ComiXology as well as its online store of the same name.

The free digital editions will cover mainstream favorites such as Spiderman, X-Men, Avengers, Thor, and the Punisher as well as other popular and obscure titles. The freebies are tied in with Marvel's appearance at the South by Southwest festival and are aimed at generating new customers who may not yet be into comic books.

The free comic book deal only last until Tuesday at 11pm ET. As of the time of this writing, the ComiXology site (Source #2) is getting slammed with traffic and I have only been able to connect every three or so tries. I am sure the traffic will taper off as the day progresses. If you are unable to reach the site, keep trying.

Images of what appear to be Samsung's Galaxy S IV have surfaced, and from what we can tell they look authentic. The images first appeared on 52samsung.com, a Chinese message board centered on Samsung products.

The phone in the images has a model number of GT-I9502 and looks similar in design to the Galaxy S III, but is larger and squarer in form. Information from the site confirms that the screen is a 5-inch 1080p display, and the device is running an eight-core 1.8GHz Exynos 5 Octa processor, which has been long rumored to be in the Galaxy S IV.

The phone appears to be similar in thickness to an Galaxy S III and has an aluminum bezel similar to an iPhone 5. It's running Android 4.2.1, which would make it the first handset to launch with the latest version of Android other than Google's own Nexus devices, which recently upgraded to 4.2.2. With the official launch just three days away, we will soon find out if these images are the real deal. Stay tuned to TweakTown for full coverage on the Galaxy S IV launch.

Most digital based currencies come and go, but it seems that Bitcoin may just stick around for a while. As of this morning, a single Bitcoin is worth about $48, which equates to a 250 percent rise in value since January.

250 percent growth in two months in any financial market is unprecedented, and is sure to make some people very wealthy if they can figure out how to convert those digital dollars into physical assets. In just one year the humble Bitcoin has risen 800 percent or a whopping 54,900 percent since its launch back in 2011.

No solid reason for the massive growth has been pinpointed at the moment, with speculators stating that it is due to high profile sites like Reddit who now accept donations in the digital currency. Others say that it is a matter of investors trying to capitalize on the fast paced growth Bitcoin has seen.

Cooler Master is waking up this morning to a fresh lawsuit involving its Seidon closed loop liquid CPU coolers. Asetek, the company who licenses similar coolers to companies like NZXT, Corsair and PNY is claiming that Cooler Master is infringing on two of its patents.

US Patents 8245764 and 8240362 are the two in dispute here, both of which provide a very vague overview of a sealed "cooling system for a computer system". Both reference a maintenance free liquid cooling system that is connected to a pump and radiator and "different embodiments of the heat exchanging system as well as means for establishing and controlling a flow of cooling liquid".

These patents (2010 filing) are updated versions of the ones Asetek used against CoolIT in a similar suit which were filed in 2005 which means that they are valid for any product created since 2005. Neither company has released a statement about the suit and both have refused to comment on the matter.

There's a gap in AMD's GPUs that needs to be filled, which is the very lucrative $110-$170 price point. NVIDIA currently nails this with their GeForce GTX 650 Ti, but AMD are looking to correct their mistake with the HD 7790, or "Bonaire".

The Radeon HD 7790 looks to skip the "Pitcairn" and "Cape Verde" silicons, moving directly to an entirely new ASIC codenamed "Bonaire". The first SKU to be built on this silicon will be the Radeon HD 7790, which should feature 896 stream processors, and will perform at around 10% slowly than the HD 7850. This should definitely take some of the lime light away from the GTX 650 Ti, and if AMD work on the price, they could move a lot of that lime light away.

We should see the HD 7790 launched sometime next month.

EA are in a world of hurt right now, so bad that they're now offering a free game to anyone who has purchased SimCity. They're doing this as an apology, with Maxis' boss, Lucy Bradshaw took to a blog post saying that anyone with a copy of the currently out of action sim game that was activated before March 18, will receive a free game from EA's catalog.

The full blog post is below:

As a huge fan of SimCity, who pumped countless hours into as a kid, I haven't purchased it yet personally and I'm sure you know it's for good reason - the huge amounts of issues. We've posted many times about it, not just once, or twice, but even three, four, and now five times. There is now a petition against DRM, with a strong title of 'Institute an industry-wide return policy for video games that rely on remote servers and DRM to function properly.'

The petition states, in full:

A famous quote in the tech world is "nobody will ever need more than 640kB of RAM." Obviously we've blasted through that amount of RAM with cell phones and even embedded devices having much more than that. Yet, for some reason, the PlayStation 3 came with just 512MB of RAM, forcing level designers to cut corners.

Dishonored's lead level designer Christophe Carrier:

The White House and FCC aren't the only groups that are advocating for the legal unlocking of smartphones. AT&T has authored a post on their blog explaining that they are perfectly happy to unlock your device as long as the customer is paying his or her bills and they have fulfilled their service agreement commitment.

If you're an AT&T customer who meets the requirements above and have tried unlocking your device to no avail, let us know! We'd love to hear your story in the comments. If you'd like to read AT&T's full blog post detailing their unlocking policy, you can head over to AT&T's website.

It looks like Facebook hasn't been able to dominate the destructible communication market. New active usage data suggests that Facebook's Poke app hasn't had much, if any, impact on the usage of Snapchat, the app that came onto the scene around a year ago.

According to active user data from Onavo, Snapchat's market share grew after the launch of Poke. In February, the data shows that roughly 12 percent of iPhone users in the United States opened Snapchat. This is compared to Poke, which the data shows was only opened by about 0.25 percent of users in February.

It just goes to show that Facebook can't be the best at everything. Sometimes it's better for a company to focus on just one or two main products. For Facebook, this is social networking.

The latest news surrounding the numerous problems plaguing the SimCity launch is that EA has changed its mind about refunds. A post authored March 5 by EA Global community manager Marcel Hatam said, "If you regrettably feel that we let you down, you can - of course - request a refund for your order at https://help.origin.com/contact-us."

Numerous Redditors have said that they were receiving refunds as late as yesterday afternoon. Currently users are reporting that Origin CSRs are saying that they cannot provide a refund. The original post, seen above, has been amended to point users to the return policy. Origin's Twitter account also tweeted the following:

CCleaner has been a staple in the PC file clean up game for years. In fact, I have been using the program since it first hit the market. Now the company behind CCleaner is gearing up to release it in Android form.

A post on CCleaner's blog stated:

Ubuntu, the user-friendly Linux distro, has seen a multitude of changes and transformations over the last few months. It has sprouted wings and became a fully functional multi-platform operating system. With these changes Canonical has taken a lot of flak and now founder Mark Shuttleworth is speaking out about how he feels.

Shuttleworth on his personal blog said that he has no interest in keeping Ubuntu "hard" for the "elite" crowd. He said that in the grand scheme of things unity, mobile processing and cloud applications are being focused on because that is where the common PC user wants things to go.