Latest News - Page 3105

Well, if the iiNet acquiring Internode wasn't big enough news for Australia this afternoon, this will be enough to have a celebratory drink tonight. Gerry Harvey has just announced Harvey Norman Direct Import, which will sell import European copies of video games at 'vastly reduced prices'. The site goes live at 6pm this evening, and continue from now. Gerry Harvey has been quoted "if you can't beat them, join them."

Harvey Norman spokesperson Ben Mackintosh has been quoted:

Two favourite ISPs, Internode and iiNet are merging into one. iiNet are buying Internode for a cool $105 million. The deal is said to be completed by the end of February. This isn't the first ISP that iiNet have scooped up, they purchased Westnet and Netspace previously.

Internode will continue to as a separate business unit, with business as usual. "Off-net" customers, those who are using services wholesaled from Telstra, will be merged onto the iiNet network. This is said to be 15,000 of Internode's total 190,000 customers. Right now, there's no short-term plans to change any of Internode's existing plans, with iiNet CEO Michael Malone saying:

Fast Five was a fairly big hit for Universal, considering it was the fifth movie in the Fast and the Furious franchise. It pushed the franchise beyond just car racing and car-based set pieces, to action-adventure crime films. The fifth movie also sported a decently large cast consisting of series regulars Paul Walker, Vin Diesel, as well as bringing back favorites such as Michelle Rodriguez, Dwayne 'The Rock' Johnson, and Eva Mendes.

There's now rumors floating around that there's a sixth movie in the works, and it could even be shot back-to-back with a seventh. They might even be one big interconnected story. Vin Diesel has gone as far as talking of the sixth movie, where he's been quoted:

AMD have today updated their A-Series line-up of desktop and notebook APUs (Accelerated Processing Units), which include not only speed and performance improvements, but AMD Steady Video update makes this unique feature more compelling than ever. AMD have also included the ability to overclock the APU, so for the first time users can now tune both x86 and graphics settings within the single processor for boosted performance.

The new updated AMD A-Series APUs combine up to four x86 CPU cores with up to 400 Radeon cores, where it delivers DirectX 11-capable, discrete-level graphics and dedicated HD video processing, all on a single chip. The new A-Series APUs deliver a bigger performance punch when compared to the existing A-Series APUs.

AMD Steady Video, now featured in the AMD A-Series APU family, is designed to stabilize videos during playback. Any videos you have that are unsteady, or jumpy, look steady and smooth as you watch it.

Apple have just completed a deal to purchase Israeli flash memory firm, Anobit. The deal is reportedly worth between $400-$500 million, which makes it Apple's largest acquisition since NeXT which cost $404 million. A tweet from the Twitter account of Israel's Prime Minster has said:

It is not just exciting for Apple, but for consumers, too. Apple's new investment in Anobit shows their commitment to requiring fast flash memory, as Israel is a country known for technological breakthroughs, such as its early work in mobile phones and instant messaging.

If you haven't heard of SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act), then I suggest you do some serious reading, because last week the House Judiciary Committee discussed it, and the results of SOPA would not be good, at all.

There was an abrupt end to the markup session on Friday, with a new hearing date set for this week. Opposition to SOPA is growing, with the General Manger of Reddit stepping in and saying that the bill would "almost certainly mean the end" of Reddit.

On Wednesday, the House Judiciary Committee will continue discussing SOPA to decide whether the bill should move to the full House. Until then, lobbying groups for and against the bill continue with their efforts to influence the votes of committee members.

There was a patch that was released by Microsoft last week (KB2592546) for Windows, where it was claimed it would improve performance of systems powered by AMD's latest processor architecture, Bulldozer.

What the patch did, was make the OS aware of the way AMD's Bulldozer cores are structured, so it could effectively make use of the parallelism at its disposal. Microsoft a few days later, pulled the patch. But, this is the Internet.

SweOverclockers' had enough time to do a "before and after" performance test of the new AMD FX-8150 processor, with the now pulled patch. The results of SweOverclockers' tests are in the picture above. "tidigare" is before, "nytt" is after, and "skillnad" is change. The chip has been put through a fair amount of tests, some synthetic CPU-intensive tasks, and real-world gaming performance tests.

We've had a fair amount of news on AMD's next-generation GPUs over the past six weeks, with the first news that the cards would be launching in January, then we had some rumored pricing, and then a few days ago we posted some leaked info on the AMD Radeon HD 7970 specs. Today, we have news of the feature-set that will be included on the GPU when it launches.

There are three main categories of feature updates: Graphics CoreNext, AMD Eyefinity 2.0 and AMD APP Acceleration. AMD have claimed that CoreNext will be a "revolutionary" new architecture that changes the way the GPU crunches numbers. Also keep in mind that GCN is the first new architecture since the HD 2000-series launches all those years ago.

The first five generations since the HD 2000-series launched all included VLIW (very-long instruction word) core arrangement. CoreNext replaces the now ageing VLIW4 that was introduced by the Radeon HD 6900-series cards, which was an evolution, not a revolution of the VLIW set. CoreNext replaces VLIW stream processors with super-scalar Graphics Compute cores.

CD Projekt, developers behind the successful currently PC-only game The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings is going after pirates. The game has sold over one million copies so far, and while they are confident behind these sales numbers, they are also confident in going after pirates of their hard work.

CD Projekt are going after pirates, claiming that only people who they are sure downloaded a copy of the game illegally are receiving a threat of legal action. Michal Nowakowski, CD Projekt's VP of Business Development says:

WD have just cut their warranty on Blue and Green drives, and Seagate didn't want to be left behind so they've followed suite. Segate had just sent a letter to authorized distributors where they've said:

The details on the new warranty periods are as follows:

Intel, in it's plot to take over the CPU world, is set to release another unlocked Core i5 processor. It will arrive in the form of the Core i5-2550K and has a retail channel part number of BX80623I52550K and OEM part number CM806230121300, the Core i5-2550K was added to the MDDS database.

The Core i5-2550K will carry the S-spec code SR0QH. Clock speeds are unknown at this time, but CPU World expect it to be 3.40GHz. The chip will be on the LGA1155 package, feature four cores, 256KB L2 cache per core, 6MB shared L3 cache, integrated dual-channel DDR3 IMC, integrated PCI-Express 2.0 root complex and a TDP of 95W.

We all know Skyrim has enjoyed a very successful career in just six weeks, but just how successful? Well, firstly, it has shipped over 10 million copies since it's 11/11/11 launch, with "Large retail reorders across all platforms and record-breaking digital sales reflect the ongoing global demand by consumers excited to explore this extraordinary fantasy epic," the company said in a statement.

Robert Altman, Chairman and CEO of ZeniMax Media has said:

Juniper is out, Cape Verde is in. The Radeon HD 5770, after two years on the force, is retiring. In it's place is the rookie AMD Radeon HD 7770. If you remember, AMD rebranded the HD 5770 as the HD 6770, so we saw nothing new. This is the first time in two years that AMD are giving its mainstream performance class products a performance upgrade.

As you can see from the above shot, the HD 7770 definitely looks like it's older, and much stronger brother, the Radeon HD 7970. It includes a large diameter fan pushing air down vertically and is a similar design introduced by the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 460. The length is also nearly the same, measuring in at 8.25-inches.

The HD 7770 includes the usual 3 display outputs - DVI, HDMI and miniDisplayPort. The card only requires a single 6-pin PCI-e power connector, and power consumption is said to be in the early-100W range. It can only be CrossFired with another card, so a maximum of 2 GPUs is limited here.

Password management and security is something that confuses a lot of people, and Microsoft are hoping to change that. A new feature that will be included in their next OS will allow users to put an unlimited number of individual passwords behind one master password, and then sync them across all other Windows 8-based machines they use.

The Live ID password is all you'll need, so for the multiple websites you use, you can set very complicated passwords for them, in the case you get hacked and your credentials are stolen, your entire digital life isn't ripped away from you. Windows 8 will automatically enter your login information when visiting a saved website.

There are similar services and apps available that do this, examples are 1Password and LastPass, but being built into the OS is a much better option. What if your Windows Live ID is stolen or lost somehow? That's fine. Microsoft are including a bunch of safety features into Windows 8 that are designed to detect compromise and limit account usage until you can recover it.

Western Digital in a strange move, has cut the warranty of Caviar Blue, Caviar Green and Scorpio Blue drives from three to two years. Channel partners received a letter from SelectWD explaining the news, where it is said that Caviar Black and Scorpio Black drives will still receive five-year warranties.

The SelectWD letter says:

Sony have released their next-generation portable, PlayStation Vita, in Japan over the weekend. This is something Sony are really hoping scrapes back some of their lost market share, not to just Nintendo, but mainly to Apple and Google with their smartphones and tablets getting into the mobile gaming market.

PlayStation Vita will launch in the U.S. and Europe next February, but over the weekend saw thousands of PS Vita future-owners lining up to grab one at launch on Saturday. Sony Computer Entertainment CEO Andrew House said that pre-orders of Vita in Japan had sold out as customers lined up at retailers to make reservations.

PS Vita sports a 5-inch OLED touchscreen with a resolution of 960x544, dual analog sticks, front and rear touchpads, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, GPS and optional 3G. Horsepower-wise, the Vita includes a quad-core version of the same SGX543 graphics processor that is found in Apple's A5 chip.

This was mostly unexpected, but then again, AMD have been waving their big red flag all over the Internet in the last few days due to the leaked AMD Radeon HD 7970 performance and specs. Today, we have PCINLIFE leaking an NVIDIA slide, that shows the difference in performance between their current single-GPU hero, the GeForce GTX 580 versus the GeForce GTX 780.

Say what? GeForce GTX 780?? Not GTX 680? Yes!

The above slide shows the performance between the current GTX 580 and the next-gen Kepler-based GTX 780. The test bed is a Core i7-3960X, Windows 7 64-bit, 297-Series driver, 2560x1600 resolution with both AA and AF enabled. The GTX 780 is virtually twice as fast as the GTX 580 if the chart is correct.

A little while ago we visited the Antec Taipei office here in Taiwan and got an early and exclusive look at its range of upcoming EarthWatts Platinum power supplies which are set to hit the market next month and really shake things up as far as pricing goes. Antec reckon their competitors are nervous.

Antec will soon launch the EA-650 watt Platinum, EA-550 watt Platinum and EA-450 watt Platinum. Each is certified with an 80 Plus Platinum rating which means they achieve up to 93% power efficiency, which is the best rating that can be given to a PSU. Antec claims that the EA-650 model can save up to 25% on your electricity bill - we aren't quite sure how they worked that out, but we'll have to take their word for it until we test their claims.

Each comes with a three year warranty and includes a "whisper quiet" 120mm double ball bearing fan with what Antec call long lifetime expectancy. There are little fancy features with these PSU such as an LED on the fan or modular cable management, but they still include key quality components such as Japanese heavy-duty capacitors and Antec CircuitShield which includes over current protection, over voltage protection, under voltage protection, short circuit protections and so on.

The USB Implementers Forum announced this week that Intel's upcoming "Ivy Bridge" 7-Series Chipset, and other Intel chipsets, have achieved, finally, USB 3.0 certification. Intel's Ivy Bridge silicon, which is due to ship in Q2 2012, will have USB 3.0 as a standard feature, for the first time ever. At the moment, it has only been made available on select notebooks and desktops, and requires chips from AMD, or additional chips from NEC, and others.

General Manager of Intel's Chipset and SoC IP Group, Ahmad Zaidi, said in a statement:

Facebook have now unveiled Timeline to the world, and its now available anywhere in the world. Once you've noticed it, you'll have a 7-day review period, where you'll be able to flick over everything on your Timeline to make sure its all good, before anyone can see it.

If you approve the Timeline, you can make it 'live' to the world before the 7-day review period. If you decide to wait, it will automatically go live after the 7 days. If you want to view your Timeline as another person to see what it will look like, click the little gear menu at the top of your timeline, and click "View As." You can choose to see how your timeline looks to a specific friend, or the public.

As you start strolling through your timeline, you may or may not want certain things shared. These things can be removed by rolling over the timeline, clicking the star expand it to two columns and then clicking 'Hide from Timeline." The privacy dropdown can also do something similar, where you could just allow "friends" or "family" to view the posts you choose.