Latest News - Page 3091

A picture truly is worth a thousand words, and that picture is Apple being patent trolls. Not only have the Cupertino-based company gone after Samsung multiple times, and even recently against their Galaxy Nexus, but they've gone after several other companies and now the bankrupt company Kodak.

Kodak only filed for Chapter 11 Bankruptcy a few weeks ago now, but now Apple are seeking approval to sue Kodak in a New York court based on an alleged patent infringement. Kodak are now awaiting a decision from a bankruptcy judge who might give Apple permission to file a patent complain over technologies used in printers, digital cameras and digital picture frames.

Kodak just last week announced they would kill off their camera business to concentrate more on its core products, such as printer and picture frames. Isn't it such a kick in the guts that Apple are going after their now bread-and-butter money-makers? Really, Apple? Really?

In a surprising turn of events, CBS may end up producing shows for Netflix. Right now, CBS make 20 or so of their shows at their own production facilities, mainly for themselves. But in the company's earnings call today, CEO Les Moonves said they might end up producing something for Netflix.

They are the only words used to describe the news, with nothing else to dab on as flavor. Moonves did not offer any other details, and won't do until they've signed a deal. Netflix offer even less, by saying "Anyone and everyone who produces content is looking to do deals with Netflix", said Netflix spokesman Steve Swasey.

Considering that Netflix launched a show called "Lillyhammer" last week, which is their first original series, and later this year will debut a show from mastermind director David Fincher, and the incredibly talented Kevin Spacey called "House of Cards", we could be in for a change in TV as we know it. 20th Century Fox is also developing a new run of the hilariously-awesome "Arrested Development" for Netflix.

Leaked images have floated onto the surface of the waves of the Internet in the past 24 or so hours of Research in Motion's next-generation BlackBerry 10 Operating System, and boy do they look nice. BlackBerry 10 OS will sport home screen "widgets" which will allow you to call up apps and mini-apps, video chat capability, improvements to the e-mail clients design, just to name a few.

CrackBerry.com are behind the images, where they've reported they received a 14-page presentation featuring BlackBerry 10-powered BlackBerry's from "a tipster". Of course, we have to question whether these images are indeed legit, but they do seem to be. BB 10 OS is shaping up to look quite swish, and it seems RIM have worked hard at this latest OS.

RIM aren't just dressing to impress, either, it seems they are baking in some useful features such as a clock icon that continues to show the time of the day, but also what time the alarm will go off. It is the detail in the little things that make it stand out. Another feature showed off in a screenshot is RIM's Universal Inbox, which is thanks to The Astonishing Tribe (TAT) which RIM acquired back in 2010.

When Razer first unveiled the "world's first true gaming laptop", they had people in a flurry of excitement. It then arrived, and promptly sold out of its first wave of stock, and only just a few days ago got their second wave of stock, which they again, promptly sold out of.

Razer are telling people through their Facebook page that they expect more stock to arrive on February 29th, and those who are signed up for the notification e-mail, will receive one as soon as stock is back at the Razer HQ. Razer are still one-upping the competition by continuing to offer the Razer Orochi Blade Edition to those who purchase the Blade gaming laptop.

If you want to check out some initial impressions of the Razer Blade by our own amazing Cameron Wilmot, check that out here. Whilst it doesn't do much for me, the laptop is popular on its own merit, in the form of selling out, twice. Both times very quickly, too, I might add.

Mass Effect 3 is set to be one of this years biggest titles, and with EA's new Origin digital distribution service to kick-start it, it should be a big change for the game itself. Little did I know, that a PC demo had arrived for Mass Effect 3.

So now that the excitement is building for the demo you've just found out about, how about I throw you another surprise? On the 17th of this month, the multi-player gets unlocked and lets you try it out however you want. Wait, there's more! If you have a Battlefield 3 online pass activated you can play it, well, right now!

I'm not able to test it right now, but if you're keen to try it out, comment below and let us know your thoughts on the game! Graphics! Sound! Acting, gameplay, mechanics, all of it. Remember that Mass Effect 3 launches with four-player co-operative play. Something that old-school PC gamers will enjoy.

'Oh snapz!' is something our VGA editor, Shane Baxtor likes to say when something like this happens - so, it felt oh so appropriate to use it in this news. The Pirate Bay have just posted on their blog informing their loyal users that Magnet links are now default when wanting to download something, here's the quote:

Do you know what this means? The current court proceedings against The Pirate Bay just got that much harder. This means that the 'illegal' files that are downloaded, are distributed amongst the downloaders. This makes the target turn away from The Pirate Bay and onto tens of millions of downloaders around the world.

Mainstream media doesn't seem to be covering this as much as I thought, as it goes against their Global Warming agenda. But, how about we mix up our tech-related news, with some real-world news, shall we?

For the past fortnight or so, Europe has been stopped in its tracks. A cold snap is responsible for this, stranding people at home, in their cars, resulting in hundreds of deaths, and thousands upon thousands affected. Venice's canals have frozen over, Amsterdam's canals have people ice skating on them, people sledding in Slovenia, and cross-country skiing in Pamplona.

The sad results of this is that the Ukraine has been hit quite hard, resulting in more than 135 deaths, many more have been sent to hospital with hypothermia, massive traffic havoc and have left several Bosnia-based villages completely cut off from the outside world. These things are not reported on your TV as much as they should be.

Team Red have just lost another player, after a few resignations and changes within the company throughout 2011 and even this year, news has hit the Internet that AMD's Corporate Vice President & CTO, Graphics Division, Eric Demers, is leaving the company. He has hung up his Team Red shirt for good.

AnandTech have reported that he isn't leaving for Intel, or Team Green (NVIDIA), but suspect that Eric's talents will continue to be seen within the industry. Considering AMD's current success within the GPU industry, it's hard to see Eric out of work for a long period of time. An official statement has arrived from AMD, too:

[UPDATE] And we're good! We're good people! Amendments will be made to the Classification Act 1995 and Broadcasting Services Act 1992 and will roll through in January 2013. I cannot believe this actually happened, and this shows the power of the people, and the Internet. When they work together, they can really push through new things!

News from last month told us that the new Federal Minister for Home Affairs, Jason Clare, had announced his intentions to stick to former Federal Minster for Home Affairs, Brendan O'Connor's previous plans in regards to the introduction of an R18+ adult classification for video games in Australia.

Clare stated that he would follow O'Connor's decision to introduce the R18+ bill in the February 2012 session of parliament. Well, it's February 2012, and here we are. Clare has stayed true to his word, with news arriving today that the R18+ legislation has been cleared by the Federal Parliamentary Caucus of the Australian Labor Party in its meeting in Canberra, and is now ready to be introduced in parliament.

Next-gen consoles and next-gen graphics engines are something that I have quite close to my heart. It's something I think needs to really evolve. I see the AAA gaming market as something that is stuck inside of a bubble.

The cause of that bubble? Consoles. I've covered this a fair bit in a few of my editorials, where I've talked about smartphones and tablets getting close to, and will eventually pass the power in current-gen consoles. Once this happens, consoles will have a hard time selling, unless we see next-gen consoles.

The previous generation of consoles teased "Full HD gaming", but delivered sub-HD gaming. Most AAA titles run at a resolution lower than 1280x720 and at frame rates less than 30fps. Of course, there are some games that run at either slightly higher resolutions, or slightly higher frame rates, but never both. We don't see games like Halo, Gears of War, Uncharted or Metal Gear Solid running at 1080p with 30fps.

We've reported a few times now that the upcoming next-generation Apple iPad 3 would launch in "Q1 2012", or "early-March" or "the first week of March". It now seems that we could expect an announcement of the iPad 3 on March 7th, 2012, to be specific. It was also reported that it would sport a quad-core chip, and LTE support.

This new information comes from iMore, where they've reported that Apple will hold their iPad 3 announcement on March 7th. iMore also reports that the iPad 3 will feature the 2048x1536 Retina Display, as well as the quad-core A6 processor and possibly, 4G LTE support. They cite sources "who have been reliable in the past".

iMore seems certain of LTE support in the iPad 3:

Intel's new processor architecture codenamed "Haswell" won't see the light of day until 2013, but that doesn't stop information from leaking out onto the Internet about it. The successor to Ivy Bridge now has some more details on its embedded graphics processor, with DonanimHaber detailing the integrated GPU (iGPU) plans.

Haswell's iGPU will be DirectX 11.1 compliant, which means it will take advantage of API optimizations that improve performance, for "typical desktop usage scenarios". It also supports OpenCL 1.2, which will help in GPGPU-optimized applications, and is designed around a new stereoscopic 3D standard called Auto-Stereoscopic 3D (AS3D), which will benefit Blu-ray 3D acceleration, stereo 3D photos, and more.

It would be compared to entry-level GeForce or Radeon GPUs for acceptable performance with stereo 3D.

It was only a few weeks ago that a 'hack' was made available for VLC that allowed the program to have Blu-ray compatibility, where it could playback encrypted Blu-ray images. Now we have the first release candidate (RC) of VLC 2.0.

VLC 2.0 has some big changes, the biggest of which is the OS X version that sports a new user interface that does look quite swish indeed, as well as Blu-ray playback support. Windows doesn't get missed out, which now features a 64-bit version, as well as support for multiple video files found inside RAR archives.

Apple doesn't officially support Blu-ray, as they have no Blu-ray hardware in any form, and the software support is not that great, if applicable at all. Blu-ray discs are encrypted, so you can't just download a program and away you go. Because Apple don't support Blu-ray, Blu-ray on OS X has been barely existant, but there have still been work arounds. MKV files, as well as the ability to rip and encode video with the OS X version of MakeMKV.

Get ready for more Special FX pr0n, as Michael Bay is now confirmed to direct yet another sequel to the phenomenally successful Transformers series. The movie doesn't have an official name outside "Transformers 4" at the moment, and it doesn't even have a cast, or story yet.

The news was rumored last year, but confirmation has now come from producer Lorenzo DiBonaventura, where he says that a fourth Transformers is planned and should hit in 2014, with veteran Transformers director Michael Bay to direct. MTV spoke to the producer, who said:

This years Grammy Awards enjoyed a very tidy 40 million viewers, making it the second-largest audience that the Grammy's have ever enjoyed, a number that is up 50-percent versus the 2011 Grammy's. Why the huge 50-percent jump in viewers? Well, most would presume it has to do with Whitney Houston's untimely death the day before, but we also have the digital side of things pumping along.

Big, live TV events are huge on social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook, where online chatter expands like nothing else, and this draws more viewers to TV, where they expand with even more chatter of said event. 2012's Grammy Awards saw 13 million "social media comments", says "social TV" tracker Bluefin Labs. That's more than even the successful Super Bowl, which had more viewers than the Grammy's.

CBS say they worked hard to generate online interest for the show, where they point to a fact that they attracted a million visitors to the various sites and iPad/iPhone apps it operated over the three days leading up to the show. CBS say they attracted a peak of 165,000 concurrent viewers to the livestream of pre-Grammy's red carpet coverage on Sunday afternoon.

Valve's Steam has had quite the press lately, last year they announced Steam Guard, which featured increased security for gamers, but in November of last year, we reported that Steam confirmed they had been hacked. This was after the Steam Forums went down for "maintenance".

This year, Valve released Steam for Mobile, which was a step in a different direction, and then just a few days ago confirmed that last year's hack was actually worse than previously thought. So as you can see, they're having a hard time. Those hard times got worse over the weekend when Steam suffered a worldwide failure, leaving users unable to play games, as well as taking down the Steam user forum and various associated websites.

There were, of course, claims that Steam was under attack once again from hackers, but it turned out that it was actually a failure of their central datacenters uninterruptible power supply (UPS) system. An engineer posted on Steam's forums yesterday saying:

Google have whipped out their [Google] wallet and are paying more than $120 million for construction projects at their Mountain View HQ, including work on a series of new or previously secret hardware testing labs, that are hinting at Google expanding interest in making consumer objects to combat rivals Apple, Microsoft, and more.

Included in these new secret labs, is a reported new secret consumer product under the brand name "@home", that is said to wireless stream music or data to other household devices. Google are also said to be modifying a lab for their "Project X", which seems to involve precision optical technology and be part of the secret technology projects that Google co-founder, Sergey Brin is heading.

The biggest project in this expansion is said to be a "Google Experience Center", which is at the core of the Googleplex. The 120,000-square-foot center is said to be a kind of private museum for Google's most importan clients and partners, where they plan to "to share visionary ideas, and explore new ways of working" with up to 900 VIPs and other important guests.

It seems as though Samsung have just announced their first line-up of tablets for 2012, by announcing the Galaxy Tab 2 (7.0). Samsung have said that this is the perfect "personal on-the-go device" and will be made in both 3G and Wi-Fi variants. The Galaxy Tab 2 will launch in the U.K. and then globally in March.

JK Shin, President of IT & Mobile Communications Division at Samsung Electronics has said:

Dem be fightin' words from Samsung... Samsung's AV Product Manager said in an interview today, that "TVs are ultimately about picture quality. Ultimately. How smart they are...great, but let's face it that's a secondary consideration".

We all know that picture quality is important, but what if Apple can come along and truly redefine what we think about TVs? Gesture control, voice-controlled, iTunes-powered, and more? Apple could truly come in and change everything we think we know about TVs, just like they did with the iPhone.

Let's also think that most people don't even know the difference, or can't see the difference, between 480p, 720p and 1080p. I personally have many friends, who could not tell the difference between an XviD clip, and a 1080p clip. To me, the difference is day and night. To people who buy a $600 1080p screen, versus a $4000 1080p screen, they can't see a difference. All Apple needs to do is use a good quality panel, and make it, different.

I'm a sucker for GPU-related anything, really. I've reported a few times on rumors or news of NVIDIA's upcoming 28nm spin dubbed "Kepler", with the GK104 part being the mid-range power-house that should have the socks of most people being knocked off, if they can get it right. NVIDIA have been rumored to launch some cards in the March/April time frame and it seems this could be correct.

First off, as always, here's some salt. Let's get into it: SemiAccurate are reporting that GK104 Kepler GPUs are in the wild, and are being testing by AIB's (add-in board partners). Reports have come in to SA, where they're hearing that people 'high up in the priority list' are receiving Kepler cards in disguise last week.

No numbers. No details. Nothing. But, this news is simple, it means that if AIB's are receiving actual hardware, it means NVIDIA are close to release. Usually, it's a 4-6 week window from AIB sampling cards to them hitting shelves. This should mean we'll see GK104 Kepler GPUs on the shelves in late-March, or April.