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Facebook IPO now the subject of a Securities Fraud Lawsuit

Anthony Garreffa | Business, Financial & Legal | May 23, 2012 9:32 PM CDT

It seems that the ongoing tanking of the Facebook shares is now getting worse, with the Facebook IPO now the subject of a Securities Fraud Lawsuit filed in the United States District Court in New York. The lawsuit is built upon certain Facebook IPO documents containing untrue statements of material facts and omitted other facts necessary to make such statements not misleading.

But, it gets worse, the fraud lawsuit goes on to say that the Facebook IPO documents weren't prepared in accordance with Federal rules and regulations governing their preparation, thus, violating Federal Securities Laws. But, you might be safe, if you purchased, or acquired shares in Facebook common stock (FB), traceable to the Facebook IPO, on or around May 18, 2012, you can contact the Securities Fraud Attorneys to discuss your rights to recovery.

If you have purchased or acquired shares in Facebook, and want to go through with this, here are some contact details:

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Continue reading: Facebook IPO now the subject of a Securities Fraud Lawsuit (full post)

AMD continue to fib on their transistor count, this time with the Llano Fusion APU

Anthony Garreffa | Processors | May 23, 2012 9:23 PM CDT

If we remember late last year, AMD had talked about the transistor count in their then-released Bulldozer chip, which was meant to house 2 billion transistors, but actually only had 1.2 billion. How a mistake like that can happen is anyone's guess, but it looks like Team Red are up to their old tricks again, it seems.

Bright Side of News has an interesting piece, where they've noticed that AMD have again given the public an erroneous transistor count. AMD's Llano was meant to have 1.45billion transistors, as the company explained at the Hot Chips 2011 conference, as well as most reviews citing that it sported 1.45 billion transistors.

But, if we look at some of the Trinity reviews, such as AnandTech's, where they state it has 1.178 billion transistors, Tom's Hardware and Tech Report state it has 1.45 billion, but Trinity actually sports 1.30 billion transistors. The die size hasn't changed, and measures in at the same 228mm² since Llano emerged in 2011. Most sites can't really be faulted here, as they've just copy/pasted the specs directly from... AMD.

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Continue reading: AMD continue to fib on their transistor count, this time with the Llano Fusion APU (full post)

Windows 8 boots too quickly, how is that a problem? Well...

Anthony Garreffa | Software & Apps | May 23, 2012 8:31 PM CDT

Windows 8 is nearing release, and with it, we're prompted with more and more news about it, but that's good, right? The latest out of the gate is that the upcoming OS from Redmond is booting... too fast? Yes, too fast. Everyone wants quicker boot times, and Windows 8 definitely delivers in that way.

But, there are problems with an OS that boots too quickly, that if you need to enter the setup menu by pressing F2/F8 during the boot, there's next to no time to tap those keys. What did Microsoft do? Well, they can't just hold the OS boot time back, that would be crazy, so they've had to add some new features to the OS to make it easier to get to these menus.

If you have a machine with a solid-state drive installed, you can boot into a machine in around 7 seconds, and this will only decrease as hardware gets faster over time. In a test machine at Microsoft sporting an SSD and UEFI system, the time window to tap F8 is 200 milliseconds, yes, 200 milliseconds. In the case where you can't boot into Windows, Windows 8 will automatically enter automatic failover behavior which is determined by an algorithm that establishes a baseline over several boots.

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Continue reading: Windows 8 boots too quickly, how is that a problem? Well... (full post)

RumorTT: Nintendo Wii U supports DirectX 11, runs Unreal Engine 4, and runs Assassin's Creed at 1080p at 60fps

Anthony Garreffa | Gaming | May 23, 2012 7:59 PM CDT

If a post on an Italian message board is to be believed, a developer from Ubisoft Milan has posted a bunch of Wii U-related information that almost sounds too good to be true. The poster says that the price will be between $350-$450, and that it will launch on November 23. But that's not even the best bit.

The Wii U, according to the post, supports DirectX 11, and is already running Unreal Engine 4, sports 2GB of RAM, and has an AMD Radeon HD 6770 GPU. It can run Assassin's Creed at 1080p at 60fps, compared to just 720p on the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360.

The report also states that Crytek, EA, and Valve are all working on the Wii U, and that Valve are working on a digital distribution platform and Portal ports for the Wii U. The full list of details:

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Continue reading: RumorTT: Nintendo Wii U supports DirectX 11, runs Unreal Engine 4, and runs Assassin's Creed at 1080p at 60fps (full post)

HP to lay off 27,000 employees in multi year restructuring

Trace Hagan | Business, Financial & Legal | May 23, 2012 5:36 PM CDT

We previously reported that anonymous sources were saying HP was going to lay off 25,000-30,000 people. We now know that those numbers were correct as Meg Whitman has announced a restructuring plan which will result in 27,000 workers being let go. To put that number in perspective, it is about 8% of HP's 325,000-person workforce.

People won't be losing their jobs immediately as these layoffs are part of a multi-year restructuring plan. As such, the cuts will only be fully implemented by October 2014 which gives employees plenty of time to find new jobs. The move is aimed at making HP more innovative and cost efficient and will include an early retirement program and a one-time charge of $1.8 billion.

"We are making progress in our multi-year effort to make HP simpler, more efficient and better for customers, employees, and shareholders," said Meg Whitman, HP chief executive. "This quarter we exceeded our previously provided outlook and are executing against our strategy, but we still have a lot of work to do."

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Continue reading: HP to lay off 27,000 employees in multi year restructuring (full post)

Diablo III breaks several sales records, explains connection issues

Trace Hagan | Gaming | May 23, 2012 4:32 PM CDT

Diablo III has been selling incredibly well. Sales numbers for the first week, let alone the first day, have been absolutely unbelievable. I'm sure part of that is due to the fact it has taken Blizzard so long to release this sequel. The other contributing factor would be the absolute quality of the game as seen in the demo.

Sales on the first day totaled 3.5 million copies. That yields about $210 million in revenue. That number doesn't include the 1.2 million players who received Diablo III as part of signing up for World of Warcraft for a year. In total, an incredible 4.7 million users purchased the game within the first 24 hours it was available.

By the end of the first week, Diablo III had sold 6.3 million copies yielding a rough revenue of $378 million. Wow. With incredible uptake numbers such as those, its clear why Blizzard's servers have been getting hammered and giving players trouble logging in. Mike Morhaime, CEO and cofounder of Blizzard Entertainment:

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Continue reading: Diablo III breaks several sales records, explains connection issues (full post)

NVIDIA looks to bring $199 quad-core Android tablets into reality

Trace Hagan | Mobile Devices | May 23, 2012 3:31 PM CDT

The Kindle Fire may currently be rocking the low-price Android tablet market, but it could soon have quite a bit of competition thanks to NVIDIA. NVIDIA has been working on a new platform called "Kai" which aims to bring quad-core Android tablets down to the $199 price range by this summer. At that price point, the Kindle is going to have some serious competition.

NVIDIA hasn't played any games with their intentions to make lower cost Android tablets a possibility. These intentions aren't just a dream either as NVIDIA has a plan to help quad-core Android tablets reach the $199 price point by this summer. During the investor meeting last week, Vice President Rob Csonger provided some details on Kai.

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Continue reading: NVIDIA looks to bring $199 quad-core Android tablets into reality (full post)

Seagate announces agreement with LaCie to acquire controlling interest

Trace Hagan | Business, Financial & Legal | May 23, 2012 2:32 PM CDT

Seagate is looking to expand their grasp in the consumer market and what better way than acquiring a company that already produces consumer storage devices? Seagate has extended an offer to LaCie's CEO to purchase the CEO's and his affiliate's stock in LaCie which would give Seagate 64.5% of the outstanding shares, which is enough to have majority control.

Of course, this offer is pending approval by governmental regulatory agencies. Once Seagate gets these approvals, "Seagate would commence an all-cash simplified tender offer (followed as the case may be by a squeeze-out procedure) to acquire the remaining outstanding shares in accordance with the General Regulation of the French Autorite des Marches Financiers (AMF)."

The offer to the LaCie CEO by Seagate is pretty good. The offer is at €4.05 with a potential adjustment depending on LaCie's cash and debt position of LaCie at closing. The price could also possibly increase by up to 3% "in the event that the threshold of 95% of the shares and voting rights of LaCie would be reached by Seagate within 6 months following closing."

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Continue reading: Seagate announces agreement with LaCie to acquire controlling interest (full post)

Jury finds Google did not infringe on Oracle patents with Android

Trace Hagan | Business, Financial & Legal | May 23, 2012 1:27 PM CDT

It what can only be considered a win for programmers around the country, Google has been found not guilty of infringing on Oracle's patents. It took the jury an entire week of deliberations to come to this conclusion. Of the eight claims across two patents, RE38,104 and 6,061,520, Google was acquitted of every single one.

Now that we have this decision, there is no need for the trial to move onto the damages phase as there are no damages to be awarded. The jury is no longer needed in the trial as the final decision as to Fair Use has been left to Judge Alsup to decide. The judge thanked the jurors and dismissed them adding that "this is the longest trial, civil trial, I've ever been in."

Google had been found to be infringing on Oracle's copyrights on a couple of counts, but it is unclear whether or not this was fair use. The jury was unable to decide unanimously if it was. The jury found Google guilty of just one count of infringement, but Judge Alsup later ruled they infringed on 8 other minor counts.

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Continue reading: Jury finds Google did not infringe on Oracle patents with Android (full post)

RunCore launches Xapear SSD with Remote Data Deletion and RFID Protection

Trace Hagan | Storage | May 23, 2012 12:32 PM CDT

Apparently a self-destructing SSD wasn't enough protection for RunCore as they have just announced the global availability of their new Xapear solid state drive. The new Xapear features some even more innovative features to protect a user's data than just self-destructing. It provides both remote data deletion and RFID protection.

The SSD uses a USB 2.0 interface for data transfer. The drive features two partitions: one freely accessible and one that is only accessible after applying a special RFID key. Xapear comes with two RFID keys that are initialized by the user. After initialization, users have two partitions which can be resized to user preference. One swipe of the RFID key and the hidden partition becomes visible and usable. Another swipe and it is gone.

The drive also features a GSM connection:

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Continue reading: RunCore launches Xapear SSD with Remote Data Deletion and RFID Protection (full post)

Win a trip to Computex Taipei 2012 winner announcement!

Cameron Wilmot | Contests & Giveaways | May 23, 2012 12:19 PM CDT

Firstly of all I would like to thank all of you for entering our Win a trip to Computex Taipei 2012 contest on behalf of the whole TweakTown team. Again we need to thank Corsair, LSI and Sapphire for helping to make this possible!

We had a rather good response and will consider running the contest again next year. However, enough of the dribble... you are here to see if you are the winner of our contest.

Drum roll please! The lucky winner of our Computex trip is Roshan from India. We have already been planning the trip with Roshan and things are proceeding well. He is very excited about the opportunity we have given him to come to Computex and Taiwan for his first time. You can look forward to some guest blogger coverage from Roshan during Computex.

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Continue reading: Win a trip to Computex Taipei 2012 winner announcement! (full post)

Dear Facebook, you're a public company now - fix your site already!

Cameron Wilmot | Internet & Websites | May 23, 2012 11:58 AM CDT

Dear Facebook and Mr. Mark Zuckerberg, you're a publicly listed company now. Don't you think it's high time you fixed these things? I'm pretty positive your near enough to 1,000,000,000 users are sick and tired of the issues.

Invest your cash injection in more staff, perhaps? Your users aren't going to stick around with poor quality aspects to some areas of your site and apps.

These are just some of the issues that have been bothering me deeply with Facebook.

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Continue reading: Dear Facebook, you're a public company now - fix your site already! (full post)

ITC judge recommends banning Xbox 360 imports due to patent infringement

Trace Hagan | Business, Financial & Legal | May 23, 2012 11:17 AM CDT

If you want a new Xbox, you better get one now. The judge in the Motorola versus Microsoft patent infringement case has recommended to the six-person review commission that they ban imports of the Xbox 360 due to it infringing upon 4 of Motorola's patents. I can see where this could put a massive kink in Microsoft's current "buy a computer, get an Xbox" promotion.

In court documents that were released Monday, Judge Shaw recommended that the Xbox 360 4GB and 250GB be blocked and that Microsoft should have to post a bond worth 7% of the wholesale value of unsold Xbox's currently in the country. This ruling follows Shaw's previous ruling last month that Microsoft was in fact infringing on some of Motorola's patents.

"It is recommended that the Commission enter a limited exclusion order against infringing Microsoft products," Shaw wrote in his finding. "It is further recommended that the Commission issue a cease and desist order. Additionally, it is recommended that Microsoft be required to post a bond for importation of accused products during the Presidential review period."

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Continue reading: ITC judge recommends banning Xbox 360 imports due to patent infringement (full post)

Google to warn the 500,000+ users infected with DNS Changer malware

Trace Hagan | Internet & Websites | May 23, 2012 9:02 AM CDT

A while back we brought you the story about users being infected with the DNS Changer malware and how, come July, they were going to lose their ability to connect to the internet. We also told you about how a collection of websites were running a piece of code to alert users to the fact their computers may be compromised.

Now Google has joined the group of websites offering up the warning to users. They are expecting to alert around half a million users in the first week alone. Without Google, it was going to take the other sites quite a bit of time to reach everyone. Who doesn't use Google? It's important that these messages reach users as the system will be shutdown July 9, 2012.

"In general we want to notify users [of malware infections] anytime we are capable of doing so, but the fact that we don't do this more often is really just because it's hard to come across cases where we can do it this accurately," Google security engineer Damian Menscher said. "In many cases we only have maybe a 90 percent confidence that someone is infected, and the false positive rate of 10 percent is simply too high to be feasible. But in this case we can be essentially certain that someone is infected."

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Continue reading: Google to warn the 500,000+ users infected with DNS Changer malware (full post)

New Call of Duty: Black Ops II screenshots

Anthony Garreffa | Gaming | May 23, 2012 5:19 AM CDT

There are some screenshots of the upcoming Call of Duty: Black Ops II that have just hit the Internet, where they show off some crazy Los Angeles destruction. In the screenshot below, you can see two drones going nuts and firing all sorts of missiles down onto L.A.

The second screenshot, below, shows off a soldier and his gun, as well as some drones in the background. The first screenshot actually doesn't look too bad, but it looks like it's running a very, very high-res, with some crazy amounts of anti-aliasing applied.

The second screenshot shows off the detail of the human characters, which doesn't look too bad. If this has filled in your COD: Black Ops II fix, then I've done my job. Are you looking forward to this? Or do you feel it's 'yet another COD title'?

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Continue reading: New Call of Duty: Black Ops II screenshots (full post)

WinX Blu-ray Decrypter is available right now, for free!

Anthony Garreffa | Contests & Giveaways | May 23, 2012 2:20 AM CDT

An e-mail made its way to my inbox just a few moments ago, with a pretty amazing giveaway. Digiarty Software, from their voting result giveaway gift of its "Hello Summer!" special offer, are giving away WinX Blu-ray Decrypter, for free! The software had a majority of popular votes, and is now being given away until May 25.

Here are the main functions of WinX Blu-ray Decrypter:

You can grab WinX Blu-ray Decrypter here.

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Continue reading: WinX Blu-ray Decrypter is available right now, for free! (full post)

AMD CEO says that every laptop on earth has enough processing power

Anthony Garreffa | Laptops | May 23, 2012 12:26 AM CDT

AMD CEO, Rory Read, has been quoted with quite a powerful quote: that there's enough processing power on every laptop on the planet today. He's specifically referring to what he calls the conclusion of the era between AMD and Intel to develop increasingly faster processors.

AMD spokesperson, Mike Silverman told the San Jose Mercury News that AMD needed to let go of the old AMD versus Intel mindset, as technology moves forward this strategy will no longer be the key focus. AMD CEO Rory Read also talked to Bloomberg Businessweek, where he said that computing is increasingly moving into the cloud where data centers are able to process computations much faster than a single computer, tablet or smartphone can.

Personally, I thought we were over this? I think the whole AMD versus Intel thing ended when we moved into multiple cores? Intel, in my opinion, is so far out in front right now, that CPU power just doesn't have the same effect it did years ago. You can upgrade from a Core i3, to a Core i5 and if you're not utilizing all of that power - is there a difference? If you're using your PC for Facebook and e-mail and move from a dual-core AMD to a quad-core AMD, do you notice the difference?

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Continue reading: AMD CEO says that every laptop on earth has enough processing power (full post)

GeForce 301.42 WHQL drivers are here, provides 4-way SLI support to the GTX 670, and lots, lots more

Anthony Garreffa | Software & Apps | May 23, 2012 12:00 AM CDT

NVIDIA have just released some new drivers to the public, and what makes these stand out from the other R300 series of drivers is that these are the first WHQL-certified drivers from the R300 family of drivers. NVIDIA have baked plenty of improvements, and features into the R300 series of drivers.

The GeForce 301.42 WHQL does contain some nuggets of gold, such as improving support for the GTX 600 Series of cards. We're looking at the inclusion of GEFORCE GTX 670 4-way SLI support, and a bunch of HDTV displays getting a dded support, as well as the usual single- and multi-GPU bugs being squished. New and/or improved SLI and 3D Vision profiles have arrived, for new games such as Max Payne 3, Dirt: Showdown, Sniper Elite V2, and Street Fighter X Tekken.

For more information on the GeForce 301.42 WHQL drivers, check out NVIDIA's page.

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Continue reading: GeForce 301.42 WHQL drivers are here, provides 4-way SLI support to the GTX 670, and lots, lots more (full post)

Japan, Russia looking to set up bases on the Moon

Anthony Garreffa | Science, Space, & Robotics | May 22, 2012 10:39 PM CDT

If you've ever imagined being a fly on the wall in an important meeting between companies, or corporations, this might be it. The heads of the space agencies for Europe, Canada, and Russia as well as senior representatives from the space agencies of India and Japan, were all together in a hotel in Washington, DC, where they were talking about the benefits of international collaboration at the Global Space Exploration Conference.

The leader of the space agency who's HQ is just a few blocks away, was not on the stage. NASA administrator, Charles Bolden, was in Florida where he was watching the attempt by SpaceX to launch a capsule to the International Space Station. But, it's not strange for NASA to not be involved with these talks, as the agency has had a hard time working with others in joint ventures, and Europe in particular has had to turn elsewhere for partners.

NASA is still interested in space, but are looking to head into manned missions to asteroids, but several space agencies representatives reiterated that the Moon was still a very big deal to them. The head of Roscosmos, the Russian space agency, Vladimir Popovkin, said that Russia intends to pursue extensive, long-lived operations on the Moon's surface. Popovkin has said:

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Continue reading: Japan, Russia looking to set up bases on the Moon (full post)

Facebook shares continue to tank, now down 18.1% below the IPO launch price

Anthony Garreffa | Business, Financial & Legal | May 22, 2012 8:45 PM CDT

Yesterday I reported that Facebook shares were down 11-percent from the IPO launch price of $38 per share, to a shave over $34 per share. Today, they've dropped even more, down a total of 18.1-percent from $38 per share to $31.12 per share.

An 11-percent drop, is significant in itself, but an 18.1-percent drop is even more significant as it's barely days from its IPO launch. Business Insider has a great piece on it, where they've explained that once again, Wall Street insiders had some great information, where small investors an individuals were left out in the cold.

It seems that Facebook was not as powerful on the stock market, and that this information was shared among the elite before the IPO itself. If we take note that Mark Zuckerberg himself sold 30.2 million Facebook shares, netting him (before tax) a very tidy $1.1 billion. Various people along the line who have the means and power to have much more knowledge than you or I, or the normal investor, were told to cut estimates.

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Continue reading: Facebook shares continue to tank, now down 18.1% below the IPO launch price (full post)

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