Latest News - Page 3022

Google Fiber is an idea Google has been kicking around for the past couple of years as it aims to become an Internet Service Provider that will offer customers in the U.S. the speeds they deserve at a reasonable price. Earlier this year, they announced Kansas City would be one of the first to receive Google Fiber promising 1 gigabit download and upload speeds for only $70. Today, Google has announced its Google Fiber installation has officially kicked off in Kansas City.

If you live in Kansas City, specifically in Hanover Heights, and see a new box on the side of your home and a sticky note on your door indicating your home is ready for Google Fiber, Google will be contacting you by phone or email within the next couple of days to schedule an appointment with you.

Google Fiber customers will receive a Network Box, which is a gigabit router with Wi-Fi built into it. If you're a Google TV subscriber, you'll also be given a DVR called the Storage Box as well as a Google Fiber TV box for each TV you want connected. Best of all, the remote control Google will give you isn't one of those "universal remotes" that you'll just throw in a drawer somewhere. Instead, it's a Nexus 7 tablet, which I'm sure will cost a ton in rental fees, especially if you accidentally drop it.

Before Halo 4 and Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 took over my gaming time, I was playing Need for Speed: Most Wanted on a very regular basis. Its driving mechanics felt a tad heavy compared to previous Criterion titles, but after spending several hours with the game, I became used to it and enjoyed my time with it before first-person shooters took dominance over all games.

If you have yet to pick up Need for Speed: Most Wanted and are the type to try a game before you spend your hard-earned cash on it, then you should head over to Xbox Live or PlayStation Network as EA has announced a demo for the game is now available.

The demo gives players access to the Aston Martin V12 Vantage with the ability to stumble upon the Porsche 911 Carrera S, Audi R8 GT Spyder and the Ford Focus RS500, which can be driven as well. Each vehicle will have its own unique races, challenges and mods that can be unlocked through play and players can receive a total of 50,000 Speed Points in the demo, which can then be carried over to the full game if they decide to pick it up.

Yesterday, we reported on PC copies of Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 including a Mass Effect 2 disc instead of the second disc of the game. If you were one of those unlucky few, your luck has instantly changed overnight as BioWare has got a sweet deal for you.

BioWare, who are the developers behind the Mass Effect trilogy, has seen the mixup as an omen which have given these select few a surprise Mass Effect 2 disc. With that said, BioWare is reaching out to those few who were accidentally given Mass Effect 2 discs and giving them the complete Mass Effect Trilogy they never wanted.

This should really come as a surprise to, well, no one. The consumer tech world has changed, and gone are the requirement for desktops for productivity work or surfing the web - you can do all of this on a smartphone, or a notebook. Recent figures have pointed toward a decline for this year in relation to PC sales, a first in 11 years.

More and more consumers are grabbing smart devices, and while some analysts have hopes for Windows 8, Barclays analyst Ben Reitzes, isn't so sure on PC sales. Reitzes says that PC sales could decline "for years to come" and has now reduced his estimates for 2012, all the way up until 2016. Reitzes wrote in a research note that Forbes reported on:

The Android team has just made the Android 4.2 SDK (AP level 17) available for download, including some juicy nuggets of goodness for developers to mess around with. The SDK includes files and tools for application developers to use to create all the apps you see and download from the Google Play store, with some of the highlights being:

Performance

We've worked with our partners to run Renderscript computation directly in the GPU on the Nexus 10, a first for any mobile computation platform.

Everspin Technologies, an Arizona-based company, has become the first in the world to supply MRAM, shipping their own ST-MRAM (Spin-Torque Magnetoresistive Random Access Memory) chips to select customers. This non-volatile storage claims to be up to 500x faster than current SSDs, but comes with a similar price tag - up to 50x more expensive.

Let's talk specs - we're looking at 1.6 billion IOPS, and "up to" 3.2GB/sec of bandwidth with latency measured in mere nanoseconds. To compare, most decent SSDs are the mid 100k IOPS with just under 600MB/sec in throughput, with latency measured in microseconds, rather than nanoseconds.

Although the speed is there, drawbacks are, too. Everspin aren't looking to replace SSDs, but they're aiming to supplement them. This is most likely because of the huge price, with ComputerWorld stating that ST-MRAM is around 50x more expensive than current flash-based offerings. But, all technology starts out like that, just like SSDs. SSDs once cost thousands of dollars, and can now be had for under $100 for an 120GB drive.

PayPal is about to get to know your face a whole lot better, with the company looking to use facial recognition technology in a trial in Australia for in-store payments. All you'll need to do is finish your shopping, "check-in" at a store on your smartphone, place an order, and have the sales assistant check your photo ID when it pops up on their terminal.

The facial recognition-based tech is said to ramp up over the next three years, as Australians become more and more technology dependant. They're becoming much more comfortable using them to shop, and online payment provider PayPal is jumping at the chance.

Nielsen's latest figures have shown that an estimate of annual purchases of goods and services using smartphones was just $155 million two years ago, that figure has now rocketed up to $5.6 billion. To say that this is a large jump would be a severe understatement. At the end of this week, PayPal's new technology will be unveiled at Sydney fashion outlet Glue Store's Pitt St flagship site, after which it will begin its rollout at other locations across Victoria, NSW and Queensland before the end of the year.

In the land of the free, the United States, the department of Homeland Security has just approved a one-year contract which will see them investigate the effectiveness of using social networks to look for instances of bioterrorism, pandemics and other health and security risks.

The department of Homeland Security are paying Accenture Federal Services $3 million the scan the social networks for keywords in real-time, where they'll monitor if growing threats or health trends can be identified. An example would be if an individual talks of their nasty cough or cold on a Facebook status update, the software would be looking to see if key medical terminology is repeated in connected groups, or from other individuals from the same locale.

Managing director for Accenture's public safety department, John Matchette, has said that "this is big data analytics", and has admitted that the technique hasn't been proven yet, adding:

Most of our readers will know about the service Dropbox, which provides 2GB of free cloud storage, with ways to earn more and options to pay for more. The service was started roughly five years ago after the creator forgot his USB stick at home. Since then, Dropbox has grown by leaps and bounds and has had to fight off competition from larger tech companies, such as Microsoft and Google.

Today, the Dropbox blog announced that they have 100 million users, "100 million [different] reasons" for needing cloud storage, but a general place to join together. The blog post goes on to share some stories of people who use the service and how they use it to advance whatever worthy cause they are championing.

For instance, Coach Stringfellow:

Sony announced earlier this year it would be making its widely successful premium membership service, PlayStation Plus, available to PS Vita owners without any additional costs to PS Plus members. Today, the company has finally announced the PS Plus service will be made available on the PS Vita on November 19th.

The PlayStation Plus service for the PS Vita will have its own Instant Game Collection and on November 19th, will give PS Plus members access to the following titles:

As with the PlayStation 3 version of PlayStation Plus, the PS Vita Instant Game Collection will be regularly refreshed, but seeing as the current library of titles for the Vita is lacking, I'm curious to see just how many games Sony can make available without Vita owners opting out of buying games in hopes their game of choice will be free on PS Plus.

One fun activity my brothers and I have when we get together is playing our favorite YouTube videos just to make each other laugh. It usually ends in a lot of laughter and high-fives, that is, unless one of us accidentally decides to play a video of a person cleaning a spider bite in their bathroom. That kind of content will put a damper on any good time.

When my brothers and I are watching YouTube videos, we usually watch them off of the YouTube applications available on our PS3 or Xbox 360, but today's update will certainly make watching videos together easier now that Google has updated its YouTube application for Android to interact with Google TV devices.

The way it works is a person with an Android smartphone or tablet can send YouTube videos that they discover on their devices to their Google TV device simply by pushing a new "TV" button. Google TV devices will automatically pair with any Android device that is found within the same WI-Fi network. The Android device can also be used as a remote as you can perform many of the controls you could within YouTube.

GrubHub has single-handedly saved my wife and I from complete starvation on numerous occasions as we'd always want food, but are either too lazy to call for takeout or actually go outside to obtain nourishment. Any time we use GrubHub, we know it's going to be a good time, but with its latest update, the experience became a lot more interactive.

GrubHub has rolled out a new service called "Track Your Grub" which allows users of the food ordering service to watch the progression of their order from the moment it's submitted up until the delivery person drops off your food.

The way GrubHub is able to do this is by its OrderHub and DeliveryHub app that is used by restaurant owners and drivers to help track a customer's order. Those restaurants who wish to go through all of the trouble to allow their customers' orders to be tracked will receive a "Track Your Grub" badge on their restaurant listing within the app.

Ever since I got myself a smartphone and tablet, the majority of my messaging takes place on those devices than on my computer. I rarely use text seeing as alternatives like Google Talk and iMessage are around, and it now looks like other smartphone users are starting to take notice of alternatives to text messaging as it looks like its use is dropping in the U.S. for the first time.

According to a report by Chetan Sharma, who is a mobile analyst and consultant for wireless carriers, in the third quarter of 2012, cellphone users in the U.S. only sent an average of 678 texts a month. Previously, the average rate of text messages being sent was 696, which isn't necessarily a huge dip in use, but a dip nonetheless.

Sharma credits the drop to Internet-based messaging services becoming more popular as more users are flocking to them in order to save themselves from texting.

Update: BioWare has announced they will be giving PC players affected by this mishap a very special gift.

If you were one of the millions of Call of Duty fans who attended midnight launch events last night to pick up your copy of Black Ops 2 as soon as it was legal to do so, then you're probably sound asleep as you played the game to hell until the sun came up. But a small minority seem to be having issues with their newly acquired game, specifically the PC version.

Reports have been spreading across the Internet of people whose second Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 disc not containing the second part to the game's installation process. Instead, it's a Mass Effect 2 disc. YouTube user zeroiez even took video of his experience when attempting to install Black Ops 2 on his PC, with many an expletive flying in Treyarch's direction.

NASA and the European Space Agency have just gone where no man has ever gone before, by testing out an "interplanetary Internet" connection. It wasn't quite Mars to Earth, but involved an astronaut on the International Space Station controlling a small robot here on Earth.

NASA is trying to respark the imagination of Americans, and with this latest mission showing off a new communications protocol, it is definitely on the right path. A new communications protocol capable of transmitting data between planets and spaceships - just typing this feels odd, but quite exciting at the same time.

The new protocol is known as Disruption Tolerant Networking (DTN), and is capable of allowing for many disconnections and errors that would occur when a signal travels long distances through space. NASA deputy associate administrator for space communications and navigation, Badri Younes, said in a statement:

Based in Australia, at the time of writing this, it is 4:11pm in my state (South Australia). The Nexus 4 was set to go on sale "Tuesday 13th of November", which was 16 hours ago for me.

This morning I woke up, and starting my round of work for TweakTown, keeping the Nexus 4 order page open. Every time I finished a piece of news, I'd check back and refresh the page, after a few times the "notify me" turned into "order now". I clicked it with anticipation and filled out the details for my credit card and scored a Nexus 4.

I sat back thinking, do I really need this - as I get some seriously bad buyers remorse sometimes, but I think this is definitely worthy of replacing my Galaxy S II flashed with a customized ROM (Cynanogen Mod 9). I then had fellow TweakTown-er Matthew Wu tag me on a post on Facebook telling me the Nexus 4 had sold out - oh really!

Any Grand Theft Auto fan knows that with each successive game, the game world itself gets much bigger. Well, it looks like Grand Theft Auto V is set to be the biggest of them all. The digital edition of Game Informer's December Issue is out, and it includes a mammoth amount of information on the game.

There will be not one, but three protagonists in GTA V, which can be switched between at nearly any time during the game. There's no confirmation on whether there'll be cooperative play, but with three players to choose from, I don't see how it can't feature the wicked ability for co-op.

Randomized events make a return, as well as some of the characters from GTA IV. The biggest thing with this feature in Game Informer is that they unleashed the news that the game world is going to be bigger than Red Dead Redemption, San Andreas and GTA IV... combined.

Apple must really be regretting some decisions made in the past, their stock prices are looking like they've been a stock market piñata and now main competitor and the receiving end of their nasty patent lawsuit, Samsung, are increasing the prices on the components that get baked into Apple's bread and butter, the iPad and iPhone.

Chosun Ilbo has said that Samsung have just increased the price of manufacturing Apple's application processors by close to 20%, where they also note that this is the first time that the South Korean Galaxy device maker has increased the pricing on processors to Apple, but with a lack of alternative options, Apple has had to agree.

Apple's A-series of processors are custom-designed by Apple, but they are actually built by Samsung. This relationship, as you can imagine, is beginning to really whither away. Apple have slowly been diversifying away from their reliance on Samsung, but unfortunately no one can match the production volume that Samsung has to offer - leaving Apple stuck for the time being.

It is being reported that anti-virus pioneer and founder of McAfee, John McAfee, is on the run from police on murder charges, according to Beliza police, reports Gizmodo.

The head of the national police force's Gang Suppression Unit, Marco Vidal, has said that McAfee is the prime suspect in the murder of American expatriate Gregory Faull, who was shot and killer on Saturday night in his home in San Pedro Town, on the island of Ambergris Caye.

The police report has stated:

A court in Australia has ruled that Google published defamatory content linking Milorad Trkulja with gangsters in Melbourne. The issue in question is whether or not Google publishing links to other sites constitutes publishing defamatory content, if the links point to sites where possibly defamatory content is posted.

In this case, the top links pointed to sites which linked Trkulja with references to Melbourne's gangs. Google of course denied that they published any material--after all, they didn't write these other websites. Google also argued that the material in question did not convey the defamatory implications that Trkulja said they did.

"What the court's said here is that this isn't just innocent architecture, what this is is human-designed software to showcase information in a certain way," Bond University media law expert Mark Pearson told AFP. "The judge has said that because you (Google) have designed (the search results) to appear in this way, you are the publisher of the material."