Latest News - Page 3020

Since the dawn of the Internet, many have attempted to save minors from experiencing the beast that is the world wide web. Age-gates are used for a number of video game websites as well as other adult material on the web that vary from asking "Are you over 18?" to something a tad more thought provoking like requesting the user's birthdate. Nintendo's Wii U has introduced its own age-gate of sorts for minors who would like access to the Nintendo Network at the cost of their guardians.

When a user registers their account to be connected to the Nintendo Network, they'll be asked if they're over 18 years old. If they are, the user can just continue on and finish the sign-up process without thinking twice of their honor of being an adult.

If a minor creates their profile and registers for the Nintendo Network, they'll be asked to obtain the approval of their parent or guardian by having the amount of $.50 charged to the adult's credit card.

With the Nintendo Wii U launching yesterday, the eighth generation of video game consoles has officially begun. Rumors over the past year have speculated both Microsoft and Sony will unveil their next-generation consoles at E3 2013. But some new rumors for the next Xbox surfaced over the weekend that offer an interesting look into Microsoft's gaming future if they turn out to be true.

It's been two years since Microsoft introduced the Kinect, which is why the company is planning to introduce a new and improved Kinect 2.0 when the next Xbox is unveiled. Kinect 2.0 will improve on the original Kinect's technology as it'll be more accurate, able to track four players at one time, better voice recognition and stereo imaging.

A Blu-ray drive will also be available in the next Xbox, which is certainly a reason to be excited about seeing as one of the biggest mistakes Microsoft made with the Xbox 360 is sticking to a DVD-format for its discs.

Anand himself has grabbed out his tool belt, and ripped Nintendo's latest, just released, next-gen console, the Wii U, and gave it a teardown treatment. The Wii U isn't too hard to open up and begin looking inside, according to Anand.

The included Wii U optical drive uses a custom format, offering 25GB of storage on-disc. Max sequential read speeds are actually pretty good compared to current-gen consoles, at 22MB/sec. There's two separate 802.11 b/g/n Wi-Fi controllers, one for the usual Internet connectivity, one for the Miracast display streaming between the Wii U and the GamePad display.

There's some Samsung eMMC included, and Toshiba NAND on the back of the board. Four 4Gb (512MB) Hynix DDR3-1600 devices are baked inside, with the memory shared between the CPU and GPU. We should have around 12.8GB/sec of peak memory bandwidth in the Wii U. Comparing this to the 5.6GB/sec available on the Wii, and we're looking at just over double the internal bandwidth - which isn't too bad at all.

With rumors floating around that cloud-managed network infrastructure company, Meraki, were about to announce their IPO, networking giant Cisco has swooped in and acquired the company for $1.2 billion in cash.

Cisco have said that they plan to use the freshly acquired Meraki's technology to "cloudify" its network management products. Cisco will turn the company into a new Cloud Networking Group. Meraki's CEO, Sanjit Biswas released a memo to employees, announcing the acquisition:

Skyrim lovers get ready, as Bethesda have unveiled twelve new images to the upcoming Skyrim DLC, Dragonborn. Dragonborn is considered, by some enthusiasts, as the game's first "real" expansion, going above and beyond previous DLC packs by introducing an entire new, and very large territory to explore.

Gamers will be able to leave Skyrim, to travel over to the island of Solstheim, located northwest of Vvardenfell, and was previously mentioned in Bloodmoon. Bloodmoon being the second expansion to the 2002-released The Elder Scrolls III - Morrowind.

The terrain of Solstheim has been described as "ash wastes and glacial valleys", with Bethesda teasing that when you're on the island, you'll "encounter the Dark Elven Settlers of Raven Rock and the native Skaal as you unravel the mystery of a Dragonborn's return". New towns, dungeons and quests will be available to the player, with it ending in what should be your biggest battle yet - the first Dragonborn.

Grand Theft Auto V is set to pretty much be one of the biggest games of 2013, and one of the biggest games ever released - but with no PC version in sight, it is disappointing.

GTAForums, a community dedicated to everything GTA, has some more details on GTA V thanks to a recent Q&A session with Italian website, Multiplayer.it. GTAForums published the finding in a recent thread, and there are some very big details on the game:

Of course, this is all on an un-refined, unfinished demo of the game, and does not, at all, mean that everything here is correct. The final version will undoubtedly sport some huge improvements in performance, as well as changes in the above information.

I've been using HTTPS to access Facebook ever since the social network offered it, but with over one billion users - having it by default is a much better way of keeping your users' data more secure.

Facebook has used HTTPS (Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure) to protect users when they submit their username and password to login - which prevents someone from diving in and accessing your username or password when typing it. But, in January of 2011, the social network starting offering users to opt in for all of their Facebook browsing to fall under the more secure HTTPS umbrella, at the time warning "Encrypted pages take longer to load, so you may notice that Facebook is slower using HTTPS."

Facebook also said that "We hope to offer HTTPS as a default whenever you are using Facebook sometime in the future." We're finally here, and they're about to press the GO button on this more secure way of browsing. A few days ago, a Facebook Developer Blog post hinted that "this week, we're starting to roll out HTTPS for all North America users and will be soon rolling out to the rest of the world".

Apple and Samsung have been at each others throats for what feels like years now, and if you didn't hear, just recently Apple settled with HTC over patents - and now Samsung want the details of this settlement.

On Friday, the South Korean device maker asked a court to force Apple to provide them with a copy of the HTC deal, where they argued that the deal most likely covers some of the patents covered in their own case against Apple. Samsung wrote in their filing with the court:

Powerbook Medic have down a detailed teardown on the recently launched Nexus 10 from Samsung. After they've pulled that high-res 2560x1600-pixel screen, the insides get peeked at.

They've found that the battery, processor, and flash storage are all genuine Samsung-made parts. Considering that Samsung make components for most of the other big players in the mobile market, it would make sense for them to bake their own goods into their own product.

Powerbook Medic found that there's not much glue used, which is good news, meaning that the Nexus 10 can be pulled apart easily - requiring just a few tools.

LSI AIS 2012 - During the keynote address at the 2012 LSI Accelerating Innovation Summit (AIS) the head of the Windows Server 2012 program stepped on stage to say a few words about the extensive role that LSI played in helping to develop Windows Server 2012, in particular the High Availability segment.

LSI and Microsoft worked very closely during the development of Windows Server 2012. LSI's overwhelming presence in the datacenter helped Microsoft to understand the needs of customers and their most pressing issues, and together they came up with several initiatives to address storage-based challenges.

One of the most sought after attributes by customers are High Availability products. These are in essence 'always on' solutions, which will continue to function regardless of the situation. For instance, if a server were to fail another would have the ability to pick up its workload with absolutely no interruption of service. For these types of challenges to be addressed both servers have to share the same storage pool.

LSI AIS 2012 - LSI has a number Ultrabook design wins and a few of them tipped up at AIS 2012 for their moment under the spot light. Ultrabooks require thin packaging, generally mSATA or 2.5" 7mm form factors. Since the SandForce architecture is void of a DRAM buffer its possible for OEMs to purchase low cost mSATA SSDs for their ultrabook products.

By now everyone reading TweakTown knows SSDs are several times faster than HDDs but that isn't the case with the general public. LSI SandForce likes to show their dominance over spinners every chance they get.

SandForce's design wins are with premium products like the LG XNote Z3300.

LSI AIS 2012 - We all have enough doom and gloom with the whole Twinkie situation but this story has a theoretical happy ending. If you follow the SSD market you already understand that as flash scales to smaller die sizes the number of electrons held decreases. The following slides were taken from two tracks at AIS 2012. We're working on getting the full slide decks or at least getting a link so you can read through both of these well put together presentations.

TLC is already shipping in a number of thumb drives and a couple of SSDs (one consumer, one enterprise that we know of) and increases the number of bits per cell. At the same time die shrinks decease the available space to electrons stored to charge a cell.

As the dies shrink, the access time and program times increase, not the direction we want to go with SSDs.

LSI AIS 2012 - Most of us haven't spent a lot of time with Windows To Go yet but those articles are in the pipeline. W2G is a feature in Windows 8 Enterprise that allows Win 8 Enterprise to boot and run from mass storage devices, like flash drives. The general concept has been around for years with other devices and software tools but Windows To Go puts a big name, Microsoft, at the head of the table.

At AIS 2012 LSI displayed three Windows To Go solutions. Kingston had their solution running on an off-the-shelf notebook. The DataTraveler Workspace is currently shipping in 32GB and 64GB capacity sizes. A 128GB model is available by special order according to Kinston's website. You know what model I want.

SPYRUS offers the Secure Portable Workplace and Super Talent has the USB 3.0 Express RC8, both with LSI SandForce controllers.

LSI AIS 2012 - LSI's acquisition of SandForce is really paying off for enterprise customers. LSI's Nytro product line started off with the original Warp Drive has expanded from there. Last week we told you all about the LSI Nytro WarpDrive 800GB BLP4-800 in our breakout enterprise review but today we peer into the future.

The Nytro WarpDrive we reviewed last week used four SSD cards but the model we see here doubles the card capacity to eight total! If that's a PCIe 3.0 ROC under the black heat sink then the next generation WarpDrive products will not only increase in capacity but also receive a massive performance improvement as well.

LSI integrated Nytro products to their existing MegaRAID line up to offer an additional tier of performance to datacenters. Innovative products like the Nytro WarpDrive XD add advanced software to the solution and increase overall efficiency with minimal investment.

LSI AIS 2012 - The keynote from LSI CEO Abhi Talwalkar today focused on the data deluge that is currently overwhelming system administrators in some of the world's largest datacenters. This onslaught of data is being driven primarily by the explosion of mobile devices and social media. With users increasingly turning to the 'cloud' to store and share their data, the flood of information being stored in the datacenter is becoming overwhelming.

This data deluge is leading to new and exciting technologies on the storage front to handle the load. As noted on the banner behind the CEO, more data equals more opportunity for those in the data storage business.

This chart puts things in perspective. In 3 minutes alone there were over 183,423 (or 18 years) hours of video downloaded, 3.9 million YouTube views and 18 million Facebook views. YouTube views on mobile devices was up a staggering 300% last year alone, and the year over year growth for mobile usage is intended to multiply further this year. The increase in mobile bandwidth, with 4G and faster connections becoming prevalent, is placing the focus increasingly upon service providers to deliver better latency to serve customers faster.

While in San Jose we visited Corsair to see the new lab toy. The Longwin LW-9266 is an advanced fan testing machine but don't let the application fool you. This 45K USD tool is a serious piece of hardware that takes fan testing to levels far beyond the reach of computer component reviewers.

It looks like something from the movies, a cart the bad guys wheel from a truck to blow up a city.

A system of interchangeable plates allow the operator to change fans quickly.

LSI AIS 2012 - We've known about PNY's growing relationship with USA based system builders for some time but the HP connection just became a little more public. Before we dive into the new products though let's have a brief look at PNY's new Made in the USA manufacturing facility located in New Jersey.

Image Courtesy of PNY

PNY has a new manufacturing facility in New Jersey. The new green factory gets up to 40% of its power from solar cells, quite an achievement considering the amount of power needed to run SMT lines. While looking for information about the factory we found several positions available so if you're looking for a job in the high technology manufacturing sector PNY is a good place to send your resume.

LSI AIS 2012 - Avant Technology made a rare public appearance at AIS 2012. Before you ask we'll fill you in. Avant Technology is responsible for the design and manufacture of several SSDs sold around the world. As a private company we don't have access to specific numbers but we know it's a significant market share. CTO Paul Goodwin joined Avant in 2007 and personally designs most, if not all of the innovative Avant SSDs.

The first product is a massive 2TB 2.5" SSD in an enterprise standard 15mm z-height. Combining four SF-2281 controllers, a LSI RAID controller and SAS 6GB/s, this unannounced product surpasses HDD density in the 2.5" form factor. I'm sure the performance is a bit better as well.

Avant's focus isn't just on the enterprise market. Here we have a new mSATA SSD with 480GB capacity. In order to achieve form factor leading density Avant added a daughter board to hold additional flash. At the same time this product increases the performance over standard mSATA SSDs because it utilizes all 8 channels of the SF-2281 controller. Most mSATA SSDs only use 4 channels so the performance of this mSATA product should line up with 2.5" SF-2281 SSDs.

LSI AIS 2012 - LSI beat the rest of the market to release the SAS 6Gb/s controllers that now dominate the datacenter, with over 75% of the channel and 4 out of 5 major OEMs utilizing their current generation products. LSI aims to extend this lead and has shown us some of the initial results for their new 12Gb/s SAS products.

The Invader, referred to as the 9271-8i MegaRAID, sports LSIs latest ROC, the 3108. This chip provides excellent scalability and the potential for speeds that saturate the current PCIe 3.0 bus.

We can also observe the battery backup unit, and also the innovative cache module that provides a fail-safe cache protection for mission critical applications.

According to Reed Hastings, CEO of Netflix, Amazon's streaming service that comes with an Amazon Prime membership isn't anywhere near profitable. In fact, he pegs the yearly loss at an amount somewhere between $500 million and $1 billion. That's an incredible price to pay to try and enter a market, but Amazon has the ability to do so.

The way Hastings has determined this estimate is by using the value of content deals that Amazon picked up when Netflix and Amazon were directly competing for them. Netflix is planning on spending over $2 billion on content over the next year, so the fact that Amazon is only losing $1 billion isn't such a big deal.

Both Amazon and Netflix charge the same amount per month for their services, $8, but Amazon also offers free two-day shipping and other benefits for that $8. Amazon spokesman Andrew Herdener, via email to All Things D: "We don't comment on our individual investments but it's correct that Prime Instant Video is an amazing value for customers. Not only do Prime members get unlimited streaming video, but they also get free 2-day shipping and the Kindle Owners' Lending Library as well."