Latest News - Page 3048

One of the neatest aspects of attending industry shows like the Flash Memory Summit is that you never know just what the guy sitting next to you has in his pocket. While attending the seminar on NVMe (an emerging specification and subject of another article soon), we managed to strike up a conversation with a fellow attendee. After mentioning that we had previously done a write up of the Intel 910, which he had also happened to have read, he produced something that he claims to be much more interesting.

Considering that this device is unreleased and holds 2.2 TB of raw NAND flash, he most certainly did open our eyes. This is the Virident FlashMAX II, which is a PCIe SSD aimed for the datacenter. With read speeds of up to 2.7 GB/s and write speeds up to 1.6GB/s, these cards deliver monstrous performance. 1.5 Million IOPS of random read is simply astounding, especially considering the attention given to solid, sustainable performance over a long period of time. With MLC NAND, and a hefty bit of overprovisioning, Virident is looking to bring sustainable performance to their customers.

Unfortunately their primary competitors can suffer high levels of performance degradation after extended use. The Virident FlashMAX II is designed specifically to avoid these pitfalls, operating at full speed even after years of continuous load.

We know HTC are struggling, as the competition from Samsung and Apple not slowing down, it seems that HTC can't release a product that really sticks with consumers. My first Android-based product was a HTC Desire, so I'm fond of the company.

But, we've seen the phone maker go from one bad report to another, with recent financial reports showing extremely low profit margins across more than one sector, where they were forced to sell off 50% of their share in Beats Audio just so they could meet some financial obligations. The company also took a $40 million arrow to the knee from the OnLive restructuring, where they invested the money in February of last year.

The big news here is that Taiwan Central Bank have proposed a bailout in an effort to save the struggling company, and we know that when the word "bank" and "bailout" are used, there's trouble brewing. HTC is still profitable, but we're not seeing anywhere near the numbers that rival Samsung are making, and I think right now HTC could all but dream of the numbers Apple are pulling off. What do you think? Are we looking at the beginning of the end of HTC?

CPU World is reporting the different configurations that Intel's upcoming Haswell processors will come in, with respect to graphics core, memory channels, and processing cores. Some of the configurations break from the current Ivy Bridge in that the highest performance CPUs don't have the highest performing GPUs.

This actually makes sense in that a user who buys a top CPU will likely be running a discrete GPU. Intel is offering at least two different graphics configurations which will be joined to dual- and quad-core parts. The dual-core parts will also have a variation in that they may only come with one memory channel.

The graphic above summarizes the different configurations we are reportedly going to see with Haswell. Each memory channel will support either one or two DIMMs, with the ULT (low power) chips seeing the one DIMM per channel memory controller. Each DIMM will have a maximum capacity of 8GB, so the lowest amount of memory (or highest, depending on point of view) will be 8GB on the ULTs.

Those digital picture frames were all the rage a few years ago. Instead of having just one picture displayed 24 hours a day, you could insert a memory card and it would automatically cycle through the pictures. D2M has taken that idea just a bit further with a new product they are pitching on Kickstarter called Instacube.

It's an Android-powered picture frame that shows Instagram pictures at their full 600x600 native resolution. It's operated by a touchscreen and three buttons along the top. Measuring in at 7.5-inches, with a 6.5-inch screen, it will fit most places. Better yet, the cube is themed as the Instagram app icon.

While you will usually have it hooked up to an A/C adapter and located on a shelf, the company is packing in a battery so that it can be taken on the move with you. Only problem is that it needs your help to get into production. As it sits, we only have a proposed spec list and some renders of what it would look like.

In an emergency, everyone seems to pull out a cellphone to try and contact both emergency personnel and family members. This causes problems for emergency crews who are trying to communicate. This is why researchers in Germany have suggested using personal wireless routers as a backup network.

The idea is that emergency crews could flip a switch that would open up a network, similar to guest networks present on some routers, that could be used for voice and data services. The whole premise of this idea hinges on having near 100 percent coverage, which wouldn't be a problem in most medium-to-large cities.

"With a communication range of 30 meters, a mesh network could be easily constructed in urban areas like our hometown," said the research team. An "emergency switch would enable an open guest mode that on the one hand protects people's privacy, and on the other hand makes the existing communications resources available to first responders," says the paper.

CyberpowerPC has announced a new desktop PC called the Pro Gamer FTW. This new line of systems is "tailored for the seamless integration of gaming and live HD broadcasting." The new line features six different base models, the cheapest of which starts at a mere $1085. The systems also feature the option of NVIDIA or AMD graphics.

"They are powered by a choice of Intel's X79 Sandy Bridge-E platform, Z77 Ivy Bridge or AMD's FX Bulldozer processors; equipped with NVIDIA's overwhelming Kepler-powered GTX or AMD's astounding Tahiti series, and feature AVerMedia's innovative Live Gamer HD." This way, if you're in the Red, Green, or Blue camp, Cyberpower has you covered.

Cyberpower brags that "every system is meticulously built with precise cable routing to ensure optimal airflow and a clean aesthetic appearance" and this one should be no different. Housed in the massive Azza Genesis 9000, there's plenty of rooming for cooling and high-end components. The machines are also highly configurable:

Nokia is doing its best to hang in the smartphone market and has placed a large bet on Windows Phone. Instead of investing in Android like many of Nokia's competitor's did, they opted to stick with Microsoft's Windows Phone. And while they have the largest market share of Windows Phone phones, their overall market share is still really low.

As you can see in the graph above, total Windows Phone sales increased for nearly every manufacturer as the market grew, but Nokia managed to pull way away from the competition with their Nokia Lumia line of Windows Phone. This resulted in lower market shares for the other companies, such as Samsung dropping from 23 to 13 percent or HTC dropping from 44 to 21 percent.

However, in the US market, HTC is still the leader with 36 percent of the market. Nokia holds a close second at 32 percent and Samsung is in third with 26 percent. Nokia didn't launch a phone in the United States until January and you can see how much their sales took off between then and July. Localytics explains how Microsoft has a partner in Nokia:

Skype is a popular platform for communication among all walks of life. According to the post, "millions of people use Skype for iPhone or Skype for iPad each month." These users have requested features, and Microsoft has obliged with one of the most requested feature: Photo Sharing. They've also updated the apps for speed.

"In addition, we've made some improvements to the performance of the app, as we know many of you want to keep Skype running on your mobile devices all the time." The new feature allows users to send photos that were taken with a user's iPad or iPhone directly to friends and family via Skype. There is no file-size limit.

This means the feature can be used to avoid MMS fees or e-mail attachment size limits. Regarding the performance tweaks:

Yesterday we spoke with Toshiba on several topics but for consumers looking to buy a new high performance, premium solid-state drive this nugget of information made it to the top of our list.

According to Jason Baker, Director of Marketing, Storage Product Business Unit, "The 30% reduction in Toshiba flash output will have little effect on the consumer SSD Market." Jason went on to say, "The only market we should see affected is the low cost personal carry products like USB thumb drives and other extremely low cost, commodity items."

This is important news for enthusiasts, power users and for that matter anyone looking to purchase some of the highest performing and lowest power consuming SSDs on the market today like the Plextor M5 Pro that uses Toshiba 19nm Toggle Mode flash, Corsair Neutron GTX and Corsair Force GS, both of which use Toshiba 24nm Toggle Mode flash.

"The web is evolving and so should the JavaScript benchmarks that measure its performance," says the Google blog announcing Octane, a new JavaScript benchmark. Due to this, Google has ditched the traditional method of making a benchmark--artificial tests designed to test one feature at a time--and opted to use common web apps and JavaScript libraries.

Since they are based on web apps that are used everyday, this real world scenario allows the benchmark's numbers to be better. Google claims that "a high score in the new benchmarks directly translates to better and smoother performance in similar web applications" since it is based off of real applications.

Google has provided us with an overview of the tests:

Here's a mouthful for a business name: The Storage Products Business Unit of Toshiba America Electronic Components, Inc. Anyway, these folks have announced an expansion to their enterprise SSD offerings in the form of three new lines of varying capacity and specifications. They bill the three lines as "High Performance," "Value," and "Read-Intensive/Boot Server."

"As SSDs continue to broaden their reach into enterprise applications, from web servers to data centers, our customers are looking for a broad set of SSD solutions," said Joel Hagberg, vice president of marketing at Toshiba's Storage Products Business Unit. "Today's announcement further demonstrates how Toshiba is providing our partners with the ability to deliver the best storage solutions for every enterprise need."

All of the drives announced today will begin shipping in the fourth quarter of 2012. If you're a business looking to upgrade your servers with SSDs, these new drives by Toshiba may be just the thing.

GIGABYTE are known for their motherboards and video cards here at TweakTown, receiving generally good reviews and awards for their range of products. It may come to you as a surprise that they have also been producing notebooks for the past five years. Today, GIGABYTE Australia announced their latest models in the Ultrabook and high performance gaming market space and I was there to cover it.

The P2542G 15.6" gaming laptop promises to 'unleash fury' on the latest PC games such as Battlefield 3 which was showcased at the media event. With a NVIDIA GeForce GTX 660M powering the punch, we saw the notebook running BF3 at an average of 38fps on the highest settings (Ultra settings/4xAA/1920x1080) and mirrored onto the 52" Sony TV at the same FHD resolution. "The notebook is only 2.6KG, so it's good for LAN parties." said Hanif Wong, Marketing Specialist for GIGABYTE Taiwan, "but it's not just a notebook for gaming, it's also a notebook for multimedia with its amazing audio."

GIGABYTE will only release the P2542G in a yellow colour only because they are targeting users who wants to stand out from the sea of black and beige notebooks, but a black colour is a possibility and will be considered if the demand is high explained Wong. The battery life of this machine is estimated to be about 3-5 hours depending on the workload. Unfortunately no gaming accessories will be bundled with the notebook when purchased.

Peter Thiel is a lot of things, a billionaire, an early Facebook investor, and board member of the social network, and to add to that, he's a little richer thanks to dumping a tonne of his shares in Facebook. Forbes is reporting that Thiel sold the majority of the shares in Facebook under his name last week, citing a financial document filed on Monday with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Thiel, with his venture capital firm, Founders Fund, sold close to 20.1 million shares late last week, which represent 72% of the shares voted by Thiel. Thiel is the first investor in Facebook who has dumped this amount of shares, and it should put shivers down the spines of any investors in the social network. Facebook shares have absolutely tanked since they first went public, dipping below $19, or under half their initial opening price of $38 per share.

It was rumored that Thiel would dump his shares after the expiration of a lock-up agreement ended, covering around 271 million shares that were held by early investors and employees of Facebook. Thiel still has a personal stake in Facebook, as well as maintaining voting control over the shares that are held by Founders Fund. After dumping his shares in the social network, Thiel netted around $285 million after taxes. Obviously much less than what he would've made had he gotten rid of them at the launch of the IPO, but that's what the lock-up agreement stopped.

PayPal has enjoyed its side of the mobile payments deal lately, but landing a client like McDonald's would definitely be a great move. Reuters is reporting that PayPal are in the early stages of a mobile payments deal with McDonald's Corp, the world's biggest hamburger chain.

McDonald's have been testing out PayPal at 30 of their restaurants in France, and also used the service earlier this year at their franchisee conference in Orlando, Florida. A McDonalds spokeswoman has confirmed the France tests, and said that the PayPal-based demonstration at their conference was part of a booth that features "technology coming within the next 24 months or so".

McDonald's France test included being able to order food on smart devices through a McDonald's mobile application, or online, where you'd pay with PayPal. PayPal with McDonald's would make it even easier to place your order, and pick it up, as you'd be able to cut lines in the restaurant itself. Gil Luria, an analyst at Wedbush Securities has said that "if they can shave 10 seconds off wait times, same-store sales could go up a lot".

I hope you enjoyed the pun in the title, but seriously, I want a DNAS as soon as possible. Grab your lab coat, because we're about to do a quick science post. Harvard geneticist and bioengineers George Church and Sriram Kosuri with the help of John Hopkins Yuan Gao have stored 5.5 petabits (700TB) of data into one gram of DNA.

The accomplishment of these scientists, is grand, as it beats the previous DNA data storage record by more than 1000 times. DNA-based storage is attractive to scientists, as DNA itself is quite dense, requires absolutely no moving parts when stored, and is durable. Usually data is stored on magnetic media, versus DNA strands storing 96 bits, with each of the base pairs representing a binary number.

In this case, Adenosine and Thymine represent zero, and the Guanine and Cytosine represent one. Each strand of DNA is encoded with a 19-bit address block allowing vast quantities of DNA to be stored volumetrically to be decoded and sorted so that usable data can be extracted, 96 bits at a time. In comparison, the original human genome project, with 3 billion base pairs, took 13 years to complete (from 1990 to 2003).

If you've only recently bought a Windows 7-based PC, and would like to upgrade to the upcoming Start menu-less Windows 8, Microsoft have opened up the registration page in order to do so. The Windows Upgrade Offer will upgrade you to Windows 8 Pro for just $14.99.

It's available to anyone who purchased, or will purchase a Windows 7 PC between June 2, 2012 and January 31, 2013. If you'd like to take part in the upgrade to Windows 8, you'll need to provide your 25-digit Windows 7 key as part of the online registration process.

Starting October 26, Microsoft will then send out promotion codes via e-mail, which can be used in the checkout within the Windows 8 Upgrade Assistant.

If you thought you'd thrashed Diablo III enough, Blizzard have some great news for you. They've just announced a new Paragon system that is set to unleash another 100 levels of potential character advancement on top of the currently 60 level max.

Blizzard's upcoming 1.0.4 patch for Diablo will see level 60 characters in the game begin earning experience toward a new set of "Paragon levels" with each monster they slay. There'll still be the usual character stat upgrades like standard levels, but each Paragon level will see your characters ability to find gold and magical items increase by 3%. Paragon levelers will also receive "a distinctive increasingly impressive border" around their character portrait for every ten levels they earn.

Blizzard's new Paragon level system should definitely create some smiles on Diablo III players, with the developer saying that reaching the top levels "approximates the long-term time investment required to get a level 99 character in Diablo II." Blizzard's upcoming 1.0.4 patch for Diablo III will also include some general balancing and class-based changes, which is set to include new legendary items that are much more unique.

Samsung's pen-toting, Galaxy Note 10.1 only saw the light of day last Friday, but iFixit's engineers have already had their hands in its internals. What did they find? Well, along with high-res photos and a bunch of detailed notes, they found that it is an impressively thin slate, and have said that its repairability is excellent.

The Galaxy Note 10.1 is thinner than Apple's third-generation 'new iPad', but iFixit found it surprisingly serviceable. iFixit found that Samsung used only a tiny amount of glue, only five different sized screws and the South Korean-based company didn't fuse the inexpensive digitizer to the expensive display panel. Inside the Galaxy Note 10.1, iFixit found some detailed specs on some of its innards.

iFixit found a 1.4GHz quad-core Samsung Exynos CPU + GPU chip, Wolfson WM12811AE audio chip and 2GB of Samsung-branded memory. iFixit have also noted that the Note 10.1 is the first tablet they've taken apart the sports EMI shields held down with screws, versus being anchored by more permanent methods such as soldering. The teardown also revealed Samsung have opted to use a 25.9 watt-hour battery, which is expected to give the 10.1-inch slate around 8 hours of battery life. Compare this to the third-gen iPad's 42.5 watt-hour battery which promises 10 hours of life, it's quite the thickness Samsung have saved, and they haven't lost too much hours out of the life of the slate, either.

If you thought your home networking setup rocking Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) was fast, then you would think that 10 GbE is even faster. 10 GbE networking can handle around 1GB/sec transfer speeds, but you'd need some serious slick hardware to achieve this speed. Well, IEEE is not happy with the current Ethernet standard, and is pushing for much higher speeds.

Internet providers and many more who depend on high-speed computing networks for a living, are on the rise. Users are streaming more video, and doing more things at once, and the quality of streaming and data is only going to get better, and bigger, respectively. IEEE is worried that large-scale networks will require an insane 10Tbps of total bandwidth to not hit a brick wall by 2020. IEEE have now formed a Higher-Speed Ethernet Consensus group that is looking at creating a new format that would see speeds reach 400Gbps or 1Tbit, depending on which approach is better.

There's a meeting set for late-September in Geneva to start talking about the details. But, you won't be seeing this type of insane connectivity in your house anytime soon. The first to get this type of tech would most likely be the big players such as Google, and co. Hopefully YouTube are on the first adopters list, and we don't get that nasty buffering crap when watching a video from a high-speed connection.

Apple continues to show that it's not the most security-focused company with its response to a security vulnerability found in all iOS versions, including iOS6 beta 4. The vulnerability is that a text can be sent with a "Reply-to" number which is different from the actual sender number. This results in messages in which the sender can be spoofed.

As you can see, there is no mention or commitment to fix the vulnerability. Instead, they take the chance to promote their iMessage service. Unfortunately, everyone in the world would need to be using iMessage (a dream for Apple) for this to effectively take care of the vulnerability present.