Latest News - Page 3016

The Grand Theft Auto series is one of the best selling series of all time, with numbers passing 125 million units life-to-date according to Take-Two Interactive's CEO, Strauss Zelnick. Zelnick revealed the amazing milestone during his presentation at the Credit Suisse 2012 Technology Conference.

In September 2011, GTA series units were sitting at 114 million - so we're looking at 11 million units selling in the last twelve months alone. Zelnick didn't break the figures down, but a Take-Two Interactive rep confirmed that the 2008 released GTA IV shipped 25 million units. Zelnick attributes the success of the Grand Theft Auto series to the James Bond film franchise, which doesn't get a release every two years. The release schedule keeps the series "special", says Zelnick.

Zelnick doesn't like the risks associated with a yearly release like Activision's Call of Duty series, with Zelnick stating that this business model has risks that his company doesn't want to take. He adds:

We all knew this was coming, but it looks like there's now more movement in the news department from DigiTimes' latest report. Industry sources are now claiming that Apple could move from Samsung to TSMC for their A-series production.

At first, you would think this only effects Samsung - as they'd lose Apple's huge business, but TSMC would also benefit, greatly. But remember, TSMC have some gigantic clients in NVIDIA, Qualcomm, Broadcom and more, and this move would effect every single one of them, considerably. At the moment, Samsung is the only source of production for Apple's A-series of processors, which include the A5, A6 and A6X processors.

These chips are baked into the latest and greatest iDevices, such as the iPhone 5 and iPad (new, new one - the fourth-gen, yes it's confusing). Rewinding back to the A4 and A5 processors, which were designed by Intrinsity, but had input from Samsung in terms of their design. Apple acquired Intrinsity in 2010 - but they may have had some interesting intellectual property that Apple couldn't take over to share with TSMC, forcing them to make a custom-designed processor which materialized into the A6.

Toshiba have just announced new models in their MG series of HDDs, which includes both SATA and SAS drives. The SATA models arrive in the form of the MG03ACA400 and the MG03ACA400Y, with the SAS drives following with the MG03ACA400 and the MG03ACA400Y models. All four models come in 4TB, which is the company's largest capacity drives to date.

Toshiba are pushing the MG series as the perfect partner for "RAID storage and arrays, tiered virtual infrastructures for public and private cloud deployments, archives, and disk-based backup and data protection solutions." The drives feature Toshiba's latest five-platter mechanical design, with the new 4TB offerings providing a 100% increase in capacity of Toshiba's previous models, which were only 2TB in size.

Not only do the new SATA and SAS models offer double the capacity, but they also offer performance improvements, as well as sporting better power efficiency.The new drives come in the usual 3.5-inch form factor, and offer up to an 18% increase in sustained transfer rates for both the SATA and SAS models, as well as featuring power management features that are designed to lower power consumption during off-peak activity periods.

It's about time we got some competition out of China, where they're close to unveiling details on a new 8-core processor designed and developed entirely within the country of China. The new CPU is a custom design and ready to take on competitors Intel, AMD and ARM in the PC, server and supercomputer categories.

Development on the chip began over a decade ago in 2001, by Loongson Technology, a group that receives funding from the Chinese Academy of Science. The first processor they developed was the 32-bit Godson-1, which was followed by the 64-bit Godson a few years later and since then, the chips have been used in low-power notebooks since 2008. Late last year, the Shenwei supercomputer was turned on, and powered by the same design.

The latest chip out of the company is the Godson-3B1500, which sports a 1.35GHz clock speed, and is capable of performing 172.8 gigaflops of performance while chewing just 40W of power. The chip is manufactured under a 32nm process, sporting 1.14 billion transistors. Loongson CPUs aren't compatible with Microsoft's WIndows OS, which will hinder its adoption - big time. There are still plenty of places this chip is destined to reach - mobile devices being an absolutely huge market, for example.

SemiAccurate is reporting that AMD is planning on launching Radeon-branded solid state drives fairly soon. It was just last year that AMD decided to launch their own Radeon-branded RAM to market and they clearly want to continue expanding the Radeon brand beyond just video cards.

Of course, the solid state drive wouldn't be produced by AMD. Instead, they will likely take a solid state drive produced by an ODM and label it with Radeon stickers and market it as their own. This is the method that they employed for bringing their RAM to market, and more recently, their RAMDisk software.

AMD is likely trying to build a platform similar to Apple, where every component in the system can be AMD. This way they can market the stability of the system as all of the components are AMD and should work together well. Similar to Intel's "Better Together" marketing campaign, AMD could market the platform and its performance as a whole.

Ever since Transformers debuted back in the 1980s, toy creators have been trying their best to create their own real Transformer that would be able to change between a robot to a vehicle of some sort with the simple push of a button. It looks like one group has finally been able to produce a fully-functioning Transformer that not only is able to function as a robot and vehicle separately, but it also has a few awesome surprises as well.

Brave Robotics spent months building its Transformer-style toy that can switch between a luxury vehicle to a standing robot complete with projectiles that can be shot out of each arm. The mechanics of the robot changing from a vehicle to a robot and vice versa seems a little sloppy as in the video below, you can see the robot wobbling all over the place.

Not only can the toy be used as either a vehicle or robot, but it also has a Wi-Fi camera that faces the correct way regardless if the toy is in its vehicle or robot form.

The holiday shopping season is in full swing and what would the season be like without major video game console manufacturers bundling their previously released systems with an extremely popular game? It wouldn't be a holiday season without it as many parents will be enticed at the prospect of getting a hot game console with a great game for a great price.

Nintendo is the king of bundling their hardware with software and this year is no different as they announced a new 3DS XL bundle will be made available at major retailers starting on Dec. 2nd. The 3DS XL bundle will come with a Blue/Black Nintendo 3DS XL and comes pre-loaded copy of Mario Kart 7 for $199.99. Without this special bundle, the 3DS XL system and Mario Kart 7 would retail for a total of $239.98, which makes this one sweet deal if you were already planning on picking up both the 3DS XL and Mario Kart 7.

When you think about what we do with our smartphones on a daily basis, it should be no surprise one of the activities American adults use their devices for has nothing to do with actually talking on their phone. Instead, Americans have been found to use their smartphones as a camera the most, according to a survey conducted by Pew Research.

The results of Pew Research's study were released this past Sunday and found 82% of Americans use their mobile devices to take pictures with 80% of users sending and receiving text messages.

The study was conducted by taking two surveys in the spring of 2012 and another during the summer. Aside from users using their mobile devices as a camera and to text other cell phone users, only around 56% of users accessed the Internet, 50% used their devices to send or receive emails and only 43% downloaded apps onto their phones.

As the Android and iOS flame wars continue on an hourly basis, there's one thing we could all agree with: our fingers are freezing when using our phones in the winter. Temperatures below zero and using touchscreen phones don't mix as having your delicate fingers out for too long can result in some seriously cold digits.

Touchscreen-compatible gloves have been available for for years now, but what if you want to use your phone while outside of the classiest of classy parties and cotton gloves would look silly? Then you may be interested in Mujjo's Leather Touchscreen Gloves.

Yes - these are leather gloves that are compatible with touchscreen devices. Mujjo has infused its nanotechnology into their leather gloves while still keeping the integrity of the gloves in tact. Unlike other gloves that give users the ability to use their smartphone with just their first and middle fingertips, Mujjo gives its glove uses the ability to use all of their fingertips and even the palms of their hands.

Sharp have just announced a beautiful new screen, dubbed the PN-K321. The PN-K321 is built for professionals in mind, sporting a 4K resolution (3840x2160) as well as HDMI and DisplayPort connectivity.

Sharp has some bragging rights with the PN-K321 in the way that they claim it is the industry's thinnest frame, measuring in at just 35mm thick. We should expect a price of around 450,000 yen, or around $5500. The 4K-capable 32-inch monitor is to debut in February 2013, so it should be flashing itself around at CES in Las Vegas in January next year.

It's great that we're finally see desktop-bound 4K-capable screens in a decent size, just 32-inch, and not 85-inch like the huge HDTVs lately. At $5500 - it's also priced decently. 30-inch monitors were around $3000-$3500 when they debuted, so this is not that far out from those prices, for a much higher-res screen. I want one, no, three of them.

Apple aren't the only ones that get mixed up in the news over work practices, as Samsung have come under fire from a rights group on Tuesday over illegal work practices at its Chinese suppliers. The company admitted just 24 hours previous, that excessive overtime and fines for employees in China.

The New York-based China Labor Watch have said that employees working at Samsung's suppliers sometime work a crazy 16 hours per day, with just a single day off per month. Samsung said on Monday, after a review of 105 of its Chinese suppliers, which involved more than 65,000 employees, that illegal work practices were found. But the South Korean company said that the companies involved would be given two more years to change their ways. Two more years! Samsung said in a statement:

If you ever thought that Google just waved their fingers and had magical algorithms working their search results, you'd be flat out wrong. The Register has opened up the Google 160-page guidebook, which is a reference manual for human "raters".

This has revealed that there's a big human involvement in the results provided by Google when a user runs a search. Google actually outsource to a few different crowdsourcing agencies - Lionbridge and Leapforce, where they use real people and their real-life opinions on search results. The Register refers to one Leapforce job ad, where they employ around 1500 search assessors which is a great work-from-home job.

Before landing this glorious work-from-home job, a potential employee must first pass an initial examination. After this, search assessors will receive periodic Google evaluations to ensure they're doing a standup job on grading search results. The 160-page manual also informs raters about how to rank search results basic on multiple metrics, such as quality, relevance and spamminess. Google's search assessors will judge the results for various queries and choose from different tiered grades, including "Not Spam", "Maybe Spam", "Porn", "Off-Topic", "Unratable", "Vital" and more.

I still remember the feeling of booting up my fresh Xbox console with Halo - it was the same feeling that Half-Life on the PC gave me, and it looks like Bungie, now separate from Microsoft, could have lightning strike twice with 'Destiny'.

Details on the new game from Bungie have been leaked out and provided to IGN by a reader, including story details and concept art. According to the document:

ASRock and GIGABYTE both fight on the podium of motherboard makers - but it looks like ASRock has taken the fight to a different level on its Facebook page. The motherboard maker has posted a troll meme, poking fun at a BSOD on a GIGABYTE motherboard.

As you can see above, they've cleverly censored out the GIGABYTE motherboard - but you can still tell what brand board it is. So, what I would take away from this is, if you buy an ASRock-branded motherboard, you would never get a BSOD? Or is it in just the first 30 minutes?

I run combinations of all brands of boards at home, my main system with ASRock, my second system with ASUS and my third system with GIGABYTE - I love them all. I do think this was a low blow, and I'm sure GIGABYTE will refrain from retaliating - hopefully they just continue to work on great motherboards and ASRock learn from this.

Samsung just can't seem to escape being sued lately. After losing to Apple to the tune of $1 billion, Ericsson has now filed a lawsuit against the South Korean electronics giant claiming that they have refused to sign licensing agreements for some of Ericsson's patents, even after two years of negotiations.

Ericsson issued the following statement on their website:

Google has settled with Immersion just nine months after it was sued by Immersion, a company that develops touch feedback systems. The deal sees Google licensing the patents for use in future Motorola devices, along with compensating the company for using the technology in prior Motorola devices.

The lawsuit was filed against Motorola before Google officially acquired them in May 2012. The original lawsuit alleged that Motorola infringed upon six of Immersions patents and was filed with the US ITC, which has the power to block imports should a device be found to be infringing. CEO Victor Viegas:

Amazon is touting that Black Friday and Cyber Monday were the best days for the Kindle family in terms of sales. They say that Cyber Monday more than doubled last year's numbers for the Kindle family, which puts this at the single best day. These sales were certainly helped by the fact Amazon put the Kindle Fire on sale.

Amazon provided the following as the milestones for the holiday shopping weekend:

"Kindle e-readers and Kindle Fires have held the top 4 spots on the Amazon worldwide best sellers list since launch, and that was before the busiest shopping weekend of the year," said Dave Limp, Vice President, Amazon Kindle. "We're excited that customers made this Black Friday and Cyber Monday the best ever for Kindle worldwide-Cyber Monday was the biggest day ever for Kindle sales, and we're looking forward to millions of customers opening a new Kindle this holiday season."

New Super Mario Bros. 2 was released this past August and Nintendo has announced fans of the game have collected a total of 300 billion gold coins in a little over 3 months. To celebrate the milestone, Nintendo is offering a new piece of DLC called the Gold Classics Pack for free for a limited time.

The Gold Classics Pack includes three new courses inspired by older Mario titles like Super Mario Bros. and Super Mario Bros. 3. Each course can be played through the game's Coin Rush mode and will allow players to share their records with other player's through the game's StreetPass feature.

As of now, the Gold Classics Pack is completely free to download until Feb. 1, 2013 where the Gold Classics Pack will be available to purchase for $2.50.

Nintendo has come out and confirmed the Wii Mini after a few leaks had made the device's launch not-so-secret anymore. The new Wii Mini will only play Wii games and will lack support for the older GameCube games and lack the ability to connect to the internet. This means no eShop or online features in games.

Sadly, the Wii Mini is currently only slated to show up in Canada and Nintendo has said they don't currently have any plans to bring it to other markets. "The system launches in Canada on December 7th with a suggested retail price of $99.99. No announcements have been made regarding other regions."

"There are games in the Wii library for every type of player," said Ron Bertram, Nintendo of Canada's vice president and general manager. "Wii Mini is a great gift for the holidays that brings everyone in the family together to play. Wii Mini has a mini price, but it's all about big fun."

As of now, Grand Theft Auto 5 has only been announced to be releasing on the Xbox 360 and PS3 in Spring 2013. If you're a PC gamer, you may have noticed Rockstar Games has left your gaming platform of choice without GTA V which is why fans are petitioning in favor of a PC version of the game be made available.

The petition, which has over 50,000 signatures as of this posting, hopes to receive 100,000 signatures in hopes their voices are heard by Rockstar to release a PC version of GTA V.

A portion of the petition reads: