Latest News - Page 3104

An update to the popular Infinity Blade 2 is coming soon, with lead designer Donald Mustard teasing that the update includes "Clash Mobs" which will let players all over the world play Infinity Blade 2 and fight enemies together in real-time.

Mustard says:

Intel is set to smash into the system-on-a-chip (SoC) market in 2012, where they are going to be "becoming mobile" in quite a serious way. Intel went through an internal reorganization and merged four distinctive business units into one: Mobile Communications, Mobile Wireless, Netbook & Tablet PC and Ultra-Mobility.

The new group is called "Mobile and Communications" and is lead by Mike Bell and Hermann Eul. The first product to come from the fancy new group is the 32nm chip called Medfield. Medfield is Intel's codename for their first SoC and first true highly-integrated-solution. Intel have in the past, talked of "vertically integrated platforms", without talking about how many chips were required in order to have a functional platform. This marks a new direction for Intel.

Intel's Medfield is competition against Apple's A-Series, NVIDIA's Tegra range, Qualcomm's Snapdragon, Samsung's Exynos, Texas Instruments OMAP and others. Out of the ranges just explained, Samsung's Exynos is the only SoC currently built on a 32nm process, just like Medfield.

Intel have reportedly notified their partners that they will "fully release" Thunderbolt technology in April of next year. Intel are said to be preparing to launch Thunderbolt-supported motherboards, notebooks and desktop PCs at that time.

Intel and Apple originally partnered on Thunderbolt which became a standard across Apple's MacBook Pro, MacBook Air, Mac mini and iMac lines. The cost of Thunderbolt technology is said to drop in the second half of 2012, which will allow for much more market penetration.

Apple may offer Thunderbolt-equipped goods, but the first Thunderbolt products have been limited to the relatively high-end market. Widespread adoption of Thunderbolt should help accessory makers for not just the PC, but the Mac market. Intel have always said that they see USB 3.0 and Thunderbolt as complementary technologies and have plans to support both in their motherboards in 2012.

I've covered SOPA-related news for the past few days, as it is getting quite serious with GoDaddy being hit hard. It has just been announced that Jimmy Wales decision to find a new home for Wikipedia, away from the SOPA loving hands of GoDaddy.

Wales is quite unhappy with GoDaddy's position on the Stop Online Privacy Act, by announcing the shift in the following tweet:

Apple's cloud-based iTunes Match launched last month in the U.S. and while it has lagged behind a little, they've finally launched a website that is purely dedicated to iTunes Match. The new iTunes Match website tries to clear up most of the confusion that has risen since it was announced.

Apple thoroughly explain the basics of iTunes Match, quoted below:

We've all seen the reviews on the spectacular AMD Radeon HD 7970, but what about its slightly younger brother? Well, we have some leaked specifications on the Radeon HD 7950 now, so let's see.

While the HD 7970 is based on the "Tahiti XT", the HD 7950 is based on the "Tahiti Pro". According to a slide posted by Donanim Haber, the Radeon HD 7950 sports 4 compute units disabled when compared to the HD 7970, which brings the number of stream processors down from 2048 to 1792.

These will be joined by 112 texture units, but the 384-bit memory interface and 3GB of GDDR5 memory remain unchanged. AMD also retain the same display output configuration with one dual-link DVI, one HDMI 1.4a, and two miniDisplayPort 1.2 outputs.

Bad Robot, the company behind Lost, Alias, Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol, and Super 8, have just released a free iOS app called Action Movie FX. Action Movie FX lets you shoot a small video, and then layer in some special effects such as a Missile Attack or Car Smash.

The app comes with two free effects, the above mentioned Missile Attack and Car Smash, but for $0.99 you can download extra effects such as Chopper Down, Tornado, Air Strike and Fire Fight.

Some of the effects look crappy, but there are a couple there that wouldn't look too bad if you shot the video well. There will be more effects added in the future, and the app works on the following devices: iPhone 3GS, 4, 4S, iPad 2 and fourth-generation iPod Touches.

Andrei Krivorukov, wherever you are, stop what you are doing right now, buy eleventy million lottery tickets and bunker down. Andrei received quite the strange Christmas present yesterday, a Russian communication satellite crashed directly into his house, with Andrei escaping death by mere meters.

The Russian satellite was a Meridian, which is used for both civilian and military communications. It was destroyed when a Soyuz-2 rocket exploded in mid-air, just a few minutes after launch. The Soyuz-2 rocket had an excellent track record until then, with hundreds of launches since the 1960s.

The explosion sent several pieces over Siberia, near the city of Tobolsk, and as far as 100km from the city of Novosibirsk. One of them was the 5kg titanium ball that fell through Andrei's roof, landing where he was just minutes before. Andrei is lucky as he decided to go out into his hard to grab some wood for his fireplace.

Anonymous don't rest during the holidays like most people, they've donned their Santa hats and hacked their way into thousands of credit card numbers and other personal information belonging to clients of a U.S.-based security think tank, Stratfor.

One of the hackers said their goal was to take the funds from individuals' accounts to give away as Christmas donations. Anonymous boasted of stealing Stratfor's confidential client list, which includes entities including Apple, the U.S. Air Force, and even where Dexter Morgan works, the Miami Police Department. They mined it for more than 4,000 credit card numbers, passwords and home addresses.

Stratfor is an Austin, Texas-based company which provides political, economic and military analysis to help clients reduce risk, according to their YouTube page. They charge subscribers for its reports and analysis, which are delivered through the web, e-mail and videos.

Microsoft is preparing a new way to log into tablet PCs with Windows 8, by allowing a user to perform gestures on a screen instead of typing in letters or numbers. For example, you can use a photo with some personal meaning to you, create a sequence of taps, lines, and circles that must be performed in the right order, in order to unlock the computer.

It is a new form of an unlock procedure, and will have three paths chosen for it: people will love it, people will hate it, or Apple will sue Microsoft for some form of patent rip-off. Microsoft does acknowledge that the new gesture unlock puts smudges on the screen, and recording devices could theoretically allow the gesture password to be compromised, but says the risks are very low.

Not everyone agrees with Microsoft, though. Kenneth Weiss, inventor of RSA's SecurID token who now runs a three-factor authentication business called Universal Secure Registry, told Network World that it's not "serious security," that the gestures someone makes upon a screen can easily be recorded from a distance.

2011 was relatively quite for GPU releases, it featured more next-gen CPU and APU launches than anything else. We had a few different cards come out, but nothing revolutionary, until last week with AMD's launch of their Graphics Core Next (GCN) and the launch of the AMD Radeon HD 7970.

The new 28nm-based "Tahiti" chips have taken the world by storm, and have been a very impressive GPU, considering early drivers and whatnot. AMD are planning to launch a dual-GPU card codenamed "New Zealand" and will carry the AMD Radeon HD 7990 moniker, launching in Q1 2012.

This means we'll see AMD's dual-GPU beast before April Fools next year. Since Tahiti/HD 7970 is so energy-efficient, dual-GPU efficiency should be quite the sight to see. We should see two Tahiti GPUs sporting the same power of the single-GPU HD 7970's, with 6GB of total graphics card memory (3GB per GPU system).

In what could look like a pre-alpha video for Battlefield 4 (face it, COD:whatever comes next will feature the same engine as previous games), the U.S. Army has been financing a "game" called Dismounted Soldier Training System, commissioned by the government in May of this year for $57 million.

The contact was awarded to RealTime Immersive Inc. The simulator is said to be cutting edge, with the director of strategic programs at Intelligent Decisions, Floyd West, stating:

Dropbox fans rejoice, Dropbox 2.0 for Android is now here. If you want some cloud storage for your Android-based device, you're in luck. Version 2.0 of the app includes new features and a totally revamped layout. A little arrow can be found to the right of each file in the app, which then leads you to a pop-out menu.

From the pop-up menu, you can share, delete, and favorite, which is a brand new feature to Dropbox. When in the main menu, you'll have three taps up top including Dropbox, Uploads and the new addition, Favorites. From Dropbox, you can put files into your cloud-based storage, which then puts them across all of your devices, and once a file is favorited, you can access it even without an Internet connection because it'll be stored locally on the device itself.

Dropbox also includes the ability to rename files directly from the app, as well as uploading files in bulk. If you like to upload from and export to local storage, you're in luck: you can now do this from the Uploads tab. Ice Cream Sandwich support has been baked in, as well as various bug fixes.

Earlier this week, Mozilla renewed their agreement with Google to be their default search engine in Firefox for another three years. Google Chrome engineer, Peter Kasting, has said: "Google is funding a partner," not a competitor. And its a great way of putting it, more revenue streams and people coming to your search engine, are better than none.

Kasting adds:

Samsung have a duo of products to release before Christmas, in the form of two new dual-SIM Android-powered handsets. The Galaxy Y Duos sports a 3.14-inch QVGA (243x320) touchscreen, 834MHz processor, HSDPA, a 3-megapixel rear-facing camera, and software wise we have Google's Android 2.3 Gingerbread.

The Galaxy Y Duos Pro is the same handset inside, but features a smaller 2.6-inch LQVGA TFT screen so make space for its physical keyboard. The new devices will hit Russia in January 2012, with the Galaxy Y Duos rolling out to Europe, CIS, Latin America, Southeast and Southwest Asia, Middle East, Africa, and finally, China.

Galaxy Y Pro Duos will arrive in Europe, CIS, Latin America, Southwest Asia, Middle East and Africa. Both phones sport the great feature of dual-SIM, which can be handy for those who want to either have one side for business, one for pleasure. Alternatively, if one carrier has better offers at certain times (or more data allowance), and then you could switch to the other SIM for everything else.

Ok. If I were rich enough, I admit it: there would be one of these in each of my rooms. But, Japan gets it first, as they are the country of not only vending machines, but super-new technology and tech items.

Developed by Japan-based tech companies Sanden and Okaya (as well as Intel), this "vending machine 2.0" features a 65-inch see-through display with full HD resolution as its biggest selling point. When there are no potential customers nearby, it turns into a digital clock and also includes various animations to attract people.

Of course, the facial recognition feature is one of the stand out features of the new vending machine 2.0. Once a person is standing in front of the machine, facial recognition picks up the gender and approximate age and serves up personalized ads. The machine is suggested to sell "luxury" items such as cosmetics and wine.

Amazon released version 6.2.1 of its Kindle Software. The aim of this update seems to be improving UI performance, which is something people have wanted since the Kindle Fire went on sale. The update is set to be delivered over-the-air, but for those who haven't received it OTA, you can download it manually, with some instructions below.

Amazon say that the 6.2.1 contains the following:

Enhanced fluidity and performance - The user interface felt choppy, especially with items like the coverflow or "carousel" feature. This update aims to improve that.

It is the season to be jolly... to be jolly, you really need $1 million in your bank account. But what good is $1 million spare when you don't own a Human Slinky costume! Well, you're in luck!

There is one for sale on eBay! The Veniamin Human Slinky costume, which is on sale right now for $1 million. But that's not the surprise. You don't just get the suit, you get the rights to perform the Human Slinky act exclusively worldwide for five years.

After the five years, you'll be allowed to rock the suit to private parties, etc. The suit and act was originally developed by Romanian artist Veniamen. Get that credit card out! Also, invite me to your event when you buy it.

PCI-Express 3.0 has been here for a little while now, but it has only been with the launch of the PCI-Express 3.0-capable AMD Radeon HD 7000-series that there has been some proper testing. The world's first 28nm GPU to support PCI-e 3.0 is here, people!

PCIe 3.0 increases per-land bandwidth from 500MB/sec to 1GB/sec, this means for an x16 slot, double the bandwidth from 8GB/sec to 16GB/sec. Impressive, but will we see anything close to double the performance? Not now, and not in games. GPU compute tasks do see a difference in performance, however.

Improving bandwidth and latency between the CPU and GPU is always a good thing, but for high-performance GPU compute tasks, this is the difference between night and day. AnandTech tested AMD's AES Encrypt/Decrypt sample application. The test bed consisted of an EVGA X79 SLI motherboard, with a BIOS provided by EVGA for the PCIe 3.0 toggle on/off.

Most people I know haven't even heard of 'Prometheus', so if you haven't, then check out the trailer below. The movie works two ways, by itself as a stand-alone Ridley Scott-directed movie, and secondly, a sort-of prequel to Ridley Scott's awesome 'Alien'.

Alien really changed things up in the genre when it came out, and paved the way for James Cameron's awesome Aliens. Prometheus looks much more epic in scale than what I thought it did, so for those of you who have (like me) watched the constant trickle of leaked screenshots, teasers and real lack of info, the trailer will really blow you away.

The atmosphere of Prometheus is thick, Ridley Scott has done an amazing job making it feel like it really is a totally different place to Earth. Something that has impressed me, a lot.