When it comes to free public Wi-Fi, your best bet is to head to a local Starbucks coffee shop or McDonald's fast food restaurant, according to a study from wireless specialist OpenSignal.

Starbucks decided to drop AT&T in favor of Google, and that has meant 80 percent faster Wi-Fi for store visitors, according to the study. The coffee shop has speeds reaching 9.01 Mbps, with McDonald's in the No. 2 position with slightly more than 4 Mbps, while Best Buy and Lowe's trail behind.

For hotel visitors, nightly reservation costs tend to increase as Wi-Fi speed and connectivity also increase. It makes sense for companies to roll out Wi-Fi to visitors, which helps keep them engaged and provides a unique sales and marketing opportunity by providing in-store digital coupons to guests - and establishments such as Starbucks, McDonald's, and other similar businesses can get patrons in the door.

If you have been holding gout on buying a new Xbox One game console, you might want to consider getting one of these new bundles that Microsoft has unveiled. A white version of the Xbox One will available for the average consumer to buy. That white version was previously only for Microsoft employees.

The white console is available today with the Kinect and on October 28, you can buy it with no Kinect for $399. The second bundle is the more interesting one and it is a Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare edition of the console.

It has a specially designed console with black, gray, and yellow graphics. It will also be the first Xbox One to feature 1 TB of storage, which is twice the storage currently available. The game console will land on November 3 without Kinect with a copy of the game for $499.

Flash Memory Summit 2014 - The list of software caching solutions is expanding rapidly as manufacturers, and software vendors, try to make their way into this expansive market. Deploying flash is great, but deploying it in a manner that accelerates existing infrastructure is even better. Very few will totally replace spinning disk in their datacenter deployments, so marrying the capacity of HDD with the performance of SSDs is the current go-to solution.

Cachebox wades into this large market with a new method of caching. The CacheAdvance software uses an ASM (Application Specific Module) that analyzes what is important to the application and provides seamless acceleration based upon application-centric performance profiles. The system has predefined knowledge of existing popular programs, but also adjusts to the specific environment.

One of the advantages of application-centric caching is that it doesn't accelerate any unwanted processes or applications, such as backup operations. This maximizes the capacity of the underlying flash solution. Users can use any block-level device for caching, so there is hardware independence from specific vendors and the system is also interface agnostic. PCIe, SAS, SATA, NVDIMMS, and UltraDIMMS can all play equally. Any block-level device is fair game. One particularly exciting aspect of the flexible design is that it will also allow for future storage technologies as well.

Lenovo has just taken the wraps off of its new ThinkStation P Series, P500, P700 and P900 workstations at SIGGRAPH 2014. Completely redesigned and rebuilt from the ground up to offer more flexibility and ease of use with a new look. Features include enhanced thermal management, tool-less upgrades and Lenovo's new FLEX module technology.

"After a period of intensive research, development and testing, we're excited to introduce our next generation workstations to the market, as we truly believe this is the best designed workstation ever," said Victor Rios, Vice President and General Manager, Workstation, Lenovo. "We built on the advancements delivered in our 30 Series workstations and engineered the P Series with new levels of innovation based on extensive customer feedback. The result for users is optimum performance, outstanding reliability and unparalleled usability that is unlike anything they have experienced."

Rios continued: "Performance Boosting productivity starts with incomparable computing and graphics performance. With the Lenovo ThinkStation P Series, users can run their mission-critical applications to their limits - from advanced rendering and simulation to analysis of vast data sets." The following can be found in the new ThinkStation P Series of workstations:

There's not much reason to be excited over DirectX 12 just yet, but Intel was showing off the performance and power benefits of DirectX 12 at SIGGRAPH 2014. Microsoft used its Surface Pro 2 with Intel HD4400 graphics, showing off some impressive performance improvements, with heavily refuced CPU power consumption.

Intel had a demo that was rendering an asteroid field with 50,000 unique asteroids, each equating to 50,000 draws per frame. Each asteroid then had a unique combination of vertices, textures, and constants. Intel's demo was able to switch between DirectX 11 and DirectX 12 with a single key press, but it could also lock the frame rate in order to keep the workload on the GPU at a constant level.

The company was showing people the benefits of DX12, with massive power gains being unlocked from Microsoft's new API. Intel locked the frame rate of the demo, rendering it for a period of time on DirectX 11, and then switching over to DirectX 12. As you see in the graph above, the CPU power consumption was reduced by over 50% when DX12 was enabled, highlighting the fact that DX12-enabled games could offer some serious reductions in power consumption on our devices.

The National Park Service banned drones from flying over national markets because of safety issues and noise problems, and it seems a banned drone was crashed into Yellowstone National Park's Grand Prismatic Spring on August 2.

The drone hasn't been recovered and specific damage to the natural spring remains unknown, but will try to determine where the drone crashed. The spring is 300 feet across and up to 160-feet deep, making it the largest in the United States.

"We don't know what damage may have been caused when it entered the hot spring, but we also don't know what kind of damage could be caused by leaving it there or by taking it out," said Amy Bartlett, a U.S. National Park Service official, in a statement to LiveScience.

Launched by NASA in 2006 and tasked to study Pluto, the New Horizons spacecraft captured unique footage of Charon revolving around Pluto, filmed from 265 million miles. Pluto has five moons, but Charon, at 750-miles across and is just 11,200 miles from Pluto.

A total of 12 photos were captured and researchers are using images to help accurately identify where Pluto is and the path it takes around the sun. Only one-third of the dwarf planet's orbit around the sun has been accurately recorded, space researchers have noted.

The New Horizons is expected to arrive at Pluto around 2015, and is finalizing its pre-Pluto annual systems instrument calibration before arriving. The spacecraft will be placed into "hibernation" mode from late August until early December, which is when it will be used for two years to conduct flyby missions while relaying information back to researchers.

Microsoft seems to be having a big time at Gamescom, with some big titles being talked about for the Xbox One, including Quantum Break from Remedy Entertainment, the studio which made Alan Wake and Max Payne, and Rise of the Tomb Raider, which is an Xbox One exclusive.

The company has announced that they are adding many more options to the Xbox One in a future update, which will turn the Xbox One into a much more feature laden media player. Microsoft will be adding the ability to play media files from a USB drive from the Xbox One, as well as teasing that it will be providing support for the very popular MKV format, as well as DLNA network support. Major Nelson has promised that the Xbox One will receive support for new file types, including MPEG2 TS, animated GIF and of course, MKV. There should be a preview version of the app that will include USB support, but DLNA and MKV abilities will be baked into a later update.

Microsoft will also be making the Xbox One a better device for controlling your TV, with a new update to soon let you boot directly to your TV from standby mode, something that will make things easier for non-gamers who want to watch TV and not play games at that particular time. SmartGlass TV streaming is also coming, something that will allow you to be in another room and watch your shows over your home network with your SmartGlass-powered tablet or smartphone, on either Windows Phone, iOS or Android.

When the first rumbles started about the next Tomb Raider game, we heard it would reach both the previous generation and current generation consoles, as well as the PC. Well, at Gamescom which is cranking along in Cologne, Germany, Microsoft has announced that Rise of the Tomb Raider will be an exclusive to the Xbox One.

Rise of the Tomb Raider will reach the Xbox One in Holiday 2015 to Microsoft's console, but that exclusivity might not last too long - hopefully. Crystal Dynamic, the studio behind the game, has come out explaining why the game is an exclusive to the Xbox One:

Dear Tomb Raider Community,

For the first time since E3 2013, Remedy Entertainment has shown off gameplay footage of its upcoming Xbox One exclusive, Quantum Break. If you haven't heard about Quantum Break, it's Remedy's time manipulation game, a game that comes off of its success with Alan Wake.

Sam Lake, Remedy Entertaiment's Creative Director, and the constipated face of Max Payne, walked up on the stage of Microsoft's Gamescom press conference to show off Quantum Break. Quantum Break sees Jack Joyce as the main character, who has some unique abilities. Joyce can control time for a limited period, where he can freeze enemies in ice-like time crystals, and then dive from cover to cover.

Quantum Break's world is in peril, as the end of time is happening, with the stutters in the game representing the world itself. These stutters are the outcome of time itself breaking, with bodies, debris, and fire frozen in its tracks. One of these stutters sees Joyce climbing onto a highway, where he sees a frozen semi truck, with its front hanging off of the egde of the highway. Joyce can walk through these stutters, as if they are Matrix-like museums, with people, objects and everything in between frozen in time.