Monthly Archives: July 2014

Coffee and Dessert Makes It’s Way to the ISS on ESA Resupply Ship

Posted on by Kyle Williams
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Now being aboard the ISS (International Space Station) must be an amazing privilege indeed, living way about the earth seeing everything that’s happening below. For the lucky few that get to live/work up there for a living they need to be able to function like the rest of us here on the gloomy earth. Eating, breathing, sleeping, you know, normal stuff that we do becomes incredibly difficult up in space because there is no gravity, which as awesome as that is, can be annoying.

Now astronauts deserve a treat now and again, they are away from their families most of the time, so in this next refueling mission the astronauts are being sent Cappuccino and Tiramisu, as well as Oxygen, fuel and other essentials. The resupply ship is set to dock with the ISS on August 12 at about 9:30 am. This is the last resupply mission that the ESA will perform.

Seeing as this is the last resupply mission ESA will ever perform, someone needs to take over. Russian Progress spacecraft and the Japanese HTC cargo ships will be taking over from ESA. When the resupply is launching from the USA, missions will be handled by SpaceX and Orbital Sciences. So there are plenty of people to keep the astronauts topped up with air, fuel, spare parts and much more for the foreseeable future.

Thanks to Tweaktown for supplying us with this information.

Image courtesy of Tweaktown.

GBA4iOS Deemed As The Best Game Boy Advanced Emulator for Apple’s Smartphones

Posted on by Gabriel Roşu
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It’s hard to find an original Game Boy nowadays or even buy games for it from a handful of 3DS eShops that still survived up until today. Game Boy fans have to resort to emulators in order to play their favourite old titles.

Smartphones appear to have become the best emulation alternatives in order to get that Super Mario Land game loaded and play it on-the-go due to the low hardware requirements needed to actually simulate the Game Boy and the game itself.

Up until now, Android users were able to emulate these games on their mobile devices. The Play Store has a variety of emulators, granting its customers a large list of applications to choose from. However, Apple has not been too kind when it comes to emulators, having them restricted from its AppStore.

Up until now, two Game Boy iOS emulators by the name of gpSPhone and GBA.emu were available and limited only to jailbroken devices, having them as the only options available for the platform at hand. GBA4iOS, developer Riley Testut’s creation, however aims to be a more simple and easy solution to iOS emulators. It is said to use a loophole in Apple’s app installation system, having the user set the smartphone’s date back one day. The app can be directly downloaded via the GBA4iOS website and the best part is that the app is free!

Besides the above mentioned, the app is said to be the best GBA emulator on any platform, having full support for Game Boy Advance, Game Boy Color, and Game Boy support, accelerated speed, multiple and locked save states, as well as customizable skins and Dropbox syncing for saves between multiple devices. It is said to even use some iOS features as well, such as AirDrop and the MFI Bluetooth controllers.

The app does however have some flaws. For example, it does not have any advanced emulation features such as video and sound filters. There is also word of a 2.1 update scheduled to be released at the end of the summer, which promises multiplayer support via Bluetooth and Wi-Fi Direct.

THank you The Verge for providing us with this information

Apple to Lay off Beats Employees after Recent Acquisition

Posted on by Kyle Williams
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Well it looks like Apple are going to be laying off staff at Beats as soon as the deal goes through. Apple recently purchased Beats for $3 billion, which is Apples biggest ever purchase. The company is looking to lay off 200 staff from areas that overlap both Apple and Beats technology, A person familiar with the restructuring plans says that Beats workers in human resources, finance, and other roles will be let go. The source claiming to know Apple’s plans didn’t want to be identified since the plans aren’t public at this time.
So if you work for Beats and work in one of those departments, i’d get job hunting!

I’m sure one will be released soon.  Apples purchase of Beats does make a lot of sense as Beats are high quality products, so are Apples so the pair are perfect for the market, maybe they’ll ship some new in-ear headphones by Beats with the iPhone 6 now that it’s owned by Apple, who knows! I personally hate both Apple and Beats because I hate their corporate strategies, I’ll be sticking with my HTC One M8 and Sennheiser HD598s thank you very much.

No official comment has been made by Beats nor Apple regarding the layoffs.

Thanks to Tweaktown for supplying us with this information.

Image courtesy of Tweaktown.

Windows Phone Store Gets BBM Beta After Reaching 10,000 User Sign-Ups in 24 Hours

Posted on by Gabriel Roşu
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BlackBerry’s popular messaging app, BBM, is stated to have reached the 10,000 sign-up number for Microsoft’s Windows Phone Beta in about 24 hours. This means that Windows Phone users running on Windows Phone 8 or above operating systems are now able to download the app from the Windows Phone Store.

The company has stated that it will release the app in beta form at first, but this does not mean it will lack features present on other platforms, such as the iOS or Android. It is said that BBM Chat, BBM Groups, Find Friends, BBM Feeds and even Pin to Start are available in the Windows Phone app.

Due to its lack of funds, BlackBerry has extended its service to other platform in order to monetize its products. We have previously seen Microsoft do the same with its mobile version of Microsoft Office, having it released for both iOS and Android ahead of its own Windows Phone operating system.

Also, BlackBerry has stated that BBM users decide on which platform they would like to see the service. Since most demand was previously for iOS and Android, Windows Phone fell short and did not receive the app. However, its addition to the Windows Phone Store will also benefit both users and the company, having users talk on their preferred messaging app and BlackBerry making a lot of money out of it.

Thank you Ubergizmo for providing us with this information
Image courtesy of Ubergizmo

Microsoft Ordered by Judge to Submit Customers Emails from Abroad

Posted on by Bohs Hansen
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Microsoft Corp was ordered on Thursday by a U.S. government judge to turn over a customer’s email that is stored in a data center in Dublin, Ireland. The case has already drawn concern from privacy groups and major technology companies around the world.

Microsoft and other U.S. companies had challenged the original warrant, arguing it improperly extended the authority of federal prosecutors to seize customer information held in foreign countries.

District Judge Loretta Preska said after the 2 hour hearing in New York, that a search warrant approved by a federal magistrate judge required the company to hand over any data it controlled, regardless of where it was stored. “It is a question of control, not a question of the location of that information,”

The case seem to be the first in which a corporation has challenged a U.S. search warrant seeking data held abroad and the judge said she would temporarily suspend her order from taking effect to allow Microsoft to appeal her decision to the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

A number of technology companies came to Microsoft’s assistance and filed court briefs in support, including AT&T Inc, Apple Inc, Cisco Systems Inc and Verizon Communications Inc.

The companies are worried that they could lose billions of dollars in revenue to foreign competitors if customers fear their data is subject to seizure by U.S. investigators anywhere in the world. It is unclear which agency issued the warrant because the warrant and all related documents are sealed.

Thank you Reuters for providing us with this information

Image courtesy of Microsoft

Yo Lineup Service Lets Doctors’ Offices and Restaurants Handle Queues

Posted on by Gabriel Roşu
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The one-word messaging app by the name of Yo appears to constantly add new services. A while back, the Yo app launched a service that lets you know about missile strikes in Israel. Now, the app has launched another service which lets doctors’ offices and restaurants handle queues.

“We got an inquiry from a doctors’ office in Miami that read about our restaurant solution and wanted the same,” Or Arbel, founder of Yo, has stated in an email.

They released the Yo Lineup service shortly after, granting people in waiting rooms and restaurant lobbies a way to get Yo’d when they are next in line.

Users who want to try this should know that both the client and the restaurant and/or doctor’s office need to have the Yo app and an account on the Yo Lineup service for it to work. However, the sign-up and download is fairly simple, easy and quick. Yo claims that the service as even been tried 2 million times already.

Yo has also confirmed a figure of $1.5 million in funding this month, but is constantly battling Yo wanna-be apps that keep popping up on the AppStore. Yolo is one of them, having Arbel asking Apple to take it down.

“Yo spawned many clones; though most of the clones offer something slightly different, some of them are a complete replication of the Yo app,” Arbel said. “Even the App Store description was copied word by word. We value creativity and we are in a free market; improving upon our concept is welcomed, copying us bit-by-bit isn’t.”

Thank you Mashable for providing us with this information
Image courtesy of Mashable

SilentPower PC Comes With New Cooling Solution, a Copper Foam Layer

Posted on by Gabriel Roşu
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The new Silent Power PC seems to be coming with a revolutionary cooling solution, distancing itself from the traditional heatpipe and heatsink coolers. The PC is said to come with a copper foam, which helps cool the system, making it one of the best silent cooling solutions available in a rig.

The foam is said to be placed on top of the chassis and transfers heat from internal components with the help of its “micro-circulation” feature. The cooling solution works by having the air present inside it heat up to extreme temperatures, which in turn makes the foam expand and move to the extremities. This is said to create an effective air circulation inside the case, without having any fans present in it.

There are three system variations currently available as a crowdfunding pre-order option, having the target funding for the project set at €45,000. Once the targeted fund has been raised, the systems are said to enter in the production phase.

The systems differ in RAM and hard drive capacity, having them with either 8 or 16 GB of ram or with a 500/1000 GB solid state drive. Other than the latter variations, all systems are said to boast an Intel Quad-Core i7-4785T clocked at 2.2 GHz and a NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780 graphics card.

An interesting feature present in the system’s configuration is a movement sensor that can power it automatically when you sit at your desk. Other than that, the base model is said to be priced at €699 / $930 coming with 8GB RAM and 500GB SSD. Other higher-end versions are said to be priced at €769 / $1,030 and €1,159 / $1,550, coming with more RAM and/or disk space.

Thank you TechSpot for providing us with this information
Image courtesy of TechSpot

King of the 3D-Castle

Posted on by Bohs Hansen
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We’ve seen many things 3D printed before, but this one is my favourites by far. The Minnesota based Andrey Rudenko has amazed us before with his goal of a 3D printed house and his concrete 3D printer is already a reality. He has shown us some smaller projects in the past and is now stepping up the size.

A couple of months ago he announced that he was going to print a 3D castle as a large scale test before printing his house. Not only has he begun this process, he is almost done with it. The ability to print smaller buildings would give him the confidence to advance on to the full scale, he told.

The castle is big enough for people to both stand and walk inside and he is currently printing 50 cm of height every 8 hours. Test have shown that he could go as high as 75-100 cm during warm temperatures. The dark-grey area on the images show one such printing period.

“I still have some imperfections, mostly when I stop the printer,” Rudenko wrote. “But if I print nonstop, the layers look great.Though I’m not completely finished with this structure yet, from the current progress, I can already see that I am ready for the next step, which is printing a house with this technology.”

Rudenko is still a little behind his original schedule, wanting to start the print of his house this summer. While the summer isn’t over yet, it seems unlikely that he’ll manage to stick to that timeline. The small delay doesn’t diminish the awesomeness of his projects and I for one can’t wait to see this one finished.

Rudenko also told that he still plans to make a few improvements to the printer and redesign a few parts of the house before the actual print. It should be clear by now that his dream of a fully printed house isn’t just a dream any more.

Thank you 3Dprint.com for providing us with this information

Image courtesy of 3Dprint.com

WarThunder Caught the Summertime Madness

Posted on by Bohs Hansen
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The highly popular free-to-play flying and tank game WarThunder, created by the Russian based game-studio Gaijin Entertainment, is launching their Summertime Madness event as warm up for Gamescon.

Enjoy numerous events, discounts and special missions in the first weeks of August. Gain more RP and Silver Lions, earn the best premium vehicles! And while the main game show of the year – Gamescom – is on, Golden Battles await you!

Gaijin always throws some amazing events and isn’t shy of giving away premium items or currency. This time is no different and participants can win premium rank 2 and 3 Tanks for the recently released Ground Forces as well as German, American and Japan premium air planes. Some Golden Eagles will be given away too, and not few.

During special times of the day, you’ll earn up to 4x more silver lions and research points then usual, making each battle-reward a little sweeter.

Special sales for premium-items will also be held during the event time. There should be something for all their players. Free items for those who don’t want to pay and discounted items for those who wish to spend a little.

Not all details have been released for all the events, but more news should follow very shortly.

Thank you WarThunder for providing us with this information

Image courtesy of WarThunder

AMD A10-7800 “Kaveri” APU Review

Posted on by Ryan Martin
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Introduction & What’s New?

In January 2014 AMD unveiled its latest generation of accelerated processing units dubbed “Kaveri”. The range was formed of the A10-7850K flagship, the A10-7700K mid-range part and the entry level & low power A8-7600. Back in February I conducted a comprehensive performance analysis of all the released Kaveri APUs. In short, I found them all to be very interesting but I was most impressed by the A8-7600. The reason for this is that it offered a solid amount of performance for its thermal envelope and price, overall the A8-7600 seems ideal for anyone building a multi-use entry level system. The configurable TDP option, of between 45 to 65W, also makes the A8-7600 a great choice for a wide variety of form factors: such as HTPCs, fanless systems and so on. AMD’s A8-7600 is only getting launched now, despite being paper-launched back in January. Alongside the launch of the A8-7600 AMD is also releasing a new APU, the A10-7800 – which is what we are testing in this review. The A10-7800 will be physically identical to the A10-7850K except it does not come with an unlocked option. The main reason for that is that the A10-7800 is optimised for low power and has the configurable TDP of 45-65W like the A8-7600 does.

The pricing for the A10-7800 will be $155, on par with the A10-7700K. The main advantage of the A10-7800 over the A8-7600 is that it features higher clock speeds and two more GPU compute units. This gives it more power on the CPU and GPU side making it more capable of gaming and productivity.

Why not just buy an A10-7850K and set its TDP to 65W? You can do that but AMD claims that you’ll get more performance out of the A10-7800 at 65W than the A10-7850K at 65W. Not to mention that the A10-7850K is a more expensive option, especially if you have no desire to overclock. That’s why the A10-7800 SKU was created, to offer more performance than the A8-7600 but still in a small thermal envelope.

To entice consumers into buying its Kaveri APUs AMD will be offering a choice of a free game, consumers can choose one of three big titles. All three games are part of AMD’s Gaming Evolved program.

Is there anything new that the A10-7800 brings to the table? No not really. It is just a new SKU of the Kaveri APU architecture: a power optimised version of the A10-7850K. As a result of that we can expect its performance to be broadly similar to the A10-7850K, although a little slower and with a little less power draw.

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Samsung Released 78 Inch 4K TV That Can Swap Between Curved and Straight Modes

Posted on by Ryan Martin
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We’ve seen a few display manufacturers come out with curved displays, LG and Samsung are the two obvious ones that spring to mind. However, we’ve yet to see a display manufacturer offer a display that is cable of curved and flat operation, with an option to switch between those two modes at the press of a button. That’s something Samsung is now offering with its latest 78 inch 4K TV. The display features built-in motors which push the display between two sets of bezels to change it between curved and flat modes. Samsung are yet to announce pricing or availability of their latest gadget, but you can be assured that it will ridiculously expensive because of how new the technology is. As far as we can see LG doesn’t have a similar product with a transorming display lined up, which is strange as LG and Samsung nearly always release similar products in a similar time frame. Let’s see if LG can pull something out of the bag before Samsung’s newest TV hits the market in the near future.

Source: Samsung, Via: Softpedia

Image courtesy of Samsung

AMD Reveals Its Opteron A1100 ARM Server Processors, Codename “Seattle”

Posted on by Ryan Martin
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Today AMD unveiled its Opteron A Series development kit which sports the new Opteron A1100 processor. Unlike every recent AMD processor ever made the Opteron A1100 is unique for one specific reason: it isn’t x86, it is ARM. To date ARM has failed to gain traction in the server market, but AMD hopes to change that by being the first major company to try and push ARM in the server market. AMD’s first development platform is based on a 4 to 8 core Cortex A57 CPUs – these CPUs offer full ARMv8 instruction set support and are 64 bit. The specifications of AMD’s “Seattle” platform are as follows:

  • Micro-ATX motheboard
  • Up to 16GB of DDR3 memory with conventional DDR3 DIMMs, or up to 4 SODIMM, UDIMM or RDIMM modules (DDR3 and DDR4 support up to 1866MT/s)
  • 8 SATA III 6Gbps ports
  • Dual Gigabit Ethernet ports
  • UEFI BIOS
  • PCIe 3.0 x8 or dual x4
  • Standard ATX PSU support
  • Crypto and data compression co-processors

The price of AMD’s Opteron A Series kit is a hefty $3000, but this is new technology so the cost will likely come down more in the future. For now this is purely an experimental move by AMD as the precursor to something more complete in the future.

End users can apply for early access to AMD’s new dev-kit here.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CC1o0VWRVXA[/youtube]

Source: AMD (YouTube)

Image courtesy of AMD

BitTorrent Unveils Serverless Encrypted Chat App “Bleep”

Posted on by Ryan Martin
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The market is already flooded with instant messaging and chat applications: WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Kik, Skype, Google Hangouts….the list goes on. However, what do all those chat applications share? A centralised server system. That is something BitTorrent’s Bleep does not have. Their new alpha messaging service relies on fully encrypted and decentralised messaging, based on peer-to-peer connections. What are the advantages of this? Well there is no risk of the centralised server being hacked, exposing your private details, there’s also no risk of snooping governments being able to read through your messages and spy on you.

Bleep is BitTorrent’s more polished version of BitTorrent chat which they announced almost a year ago. BitTorrent offers significant advantages over other messaging apps which claim to be secure, as BitTorrent note:

“Many messaging apps advertising privacy and security by offering end-to-end encryption for messages. But when it comes to handling metadata, they are still leaving their users exposed.”

Not to mention that even secure messaging services have to store some data, even if it is encrypted, and at legal request they can be forced to disclose this information along with the encryption keys required to access them. A P2P service does not suffer from this problem since the information is spread over a massive network, therefore legal notices served to BitTorrent would result in law enforcement agencies acquiring absolutely no information.

Check out more details of the new BitTorrent Bleep software at the source link.

Source: BitTorrent

Image courtesy of BitTorrent

Nvidia GTX 980M Maxwell GPU Arriving In October

Posted on by Ryan Martin
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New rumours suggest that we could be seeing Nvidia’s newest flagship mobile GPU as soon as October. The flagship part, expected to be the GTX 980M, will be based on the Maxwell architecture design although the lithography is unknown – it could theoretically be 28nm or 20nm but 28nm seems most likely given TSMC’s 20nm roadmap. The die design that will be used will be the GM204 and the Maxwell GeForce Mobility line should spawn several GPUs, a speculated list is as follows:

  • Geforce GT 940M
  • Geforce GTX 950M
  • Geforce GTX 960M
  • Geforce GTX 970M
  • Geforce GTX 975M
  • Geforce GTX 980M

The Maxwell-based GTX 980M will offer a significant step up from the current Kepler GK104 based GTX 880M. If the GTX 980M does ship in October we could see it arrive in gaming notebooks such as those made by Aorus, ASUS Republic of Gamers and MSI.

Source: Notebook Review Forums, Via: WCCFTech

Image courtesy of Nvidia

ADATA Ready DDR4 2133MHz Premier Series Memory For X99

Posted on by Ryan Martin
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The first major consumer platform to support DDR4 memory will be Intel’s Haswell-E with the X99 chipset and LGA2011-3 socket. According to the most recent rumours Intel’s X99 is expected as soon as September 14th, but possibly earlier. In response to that ADATA have released a series of Premier memory designed for use with Intel’s X99 platform. The new modules come with speeds of 2133MHz in an unbuffered DIMM format, according to the specifications these are 4GB modules offered in kits of up to 8 modules. These DDR4 kits should operate with 1.2 volts and should have a fair amount of overclocking headroom. Pricing for ADATA’s kit wasn’t announced, but recently we have seen 16GB DDR4 kits selling for around $350, so don’t expect these to be cheap!

Source: ADATA PR

Image courtesy of ADATA

Crytek Sell off Their Last Hope Asset as Financial Woes Continue

Posted on by Peter Donnell
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Koch Media and their publishing division have grabbed Crytek by the throat this week, snapping up the Homefront franchise, as well as rights to their in-development title Homefront: The Revolution and all of its related assets.

This is both good and terrible news for Crytek, the company has been hit with financial troubles and a mass exodus of its main staff in recent months as the company failed to pay staff wages and sales targets were not met. Their last hope was Homefront, their next AAA title and now they no longer even own it, leaving Crytek with a pile of money from the sale, but nothing new to market short of their current back catalogue and game engine CryEngine 3.

We are thrilled to see another great IP joining the Deep Silver universe,” Dr. Klemens Kundratitz, CEO of Koch Media Group, said in a statement. “We strongly believe in the potential of Homefront: The Revolution and trust in the new team to continue the path they have been walking in the last years.”

Crytek may now be completely out of the game just yet, but if this recent sale is anything to go by, we could be about to see another THQ style clear out.

Thank you Forbes for providing us with this information.

Image courtesy of Forbes.

First Trailer For Christopher Nolan’s ‘Interstellar’ Revealed

Posted on by Peter Donnell
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Now that he is done exiting cinema fans with the now iconic Batman movies, Christopher Nolan is back once again with his latest blockbuster Interstellar, an ambitious sci-fi epic that looks set to win yet more awards for the legendary director.

Joining the growing list of surprises that were shown at this years Comic Con in San Diego, the new trailer was shown to attendees of the event, gaining much praise in the process. The trailer features a chilling plot line of human survival and how our days on Earth may be numbered, pushing us to seek no refuge amongst the stars.

There is no point in spoiling the whole thing, you may as well dim the lights, turn it up and enjoy the trailer for yourself!

[youtube width=”800″ height=”450″]http://youtu.be/X2RLzvgJJ2c[/youtube]

The movie is still pegged to hit cinemas on November 7th and I for one will be there for the day one launch. Anyone else looking forward to this movie? Let us know in the comments section below.

Sony Turn Down EA Subscription Plan

Posted on by Peter Donnell
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Xbox One games look set to have the option of a Netflix style subscription from EA, paying $5 per month to gain access to a small set of EA titles such as Battlefield and Fifa. However, while Microsoft welcomed the idea, Sony have turfed EA out on their butts, saying that they don’t think it represents good value for their customers, burn!

“Asking our fans to pay an additional $5 a month for this EA-specific program represents good value to the PlayStation gamer.”

It is strange that Sony would take this stance, especially given that the subscription is completely option, although it is likely that there was an underlying business deal that involved either Sony or EA giving on or the other cash and assets to secure a deal and that terms could not be met by either party.

Personally I don’t like EA’s idea, it’s too limited in choice to be anything like a Netflix for games, much like the way Origin is too restricted to even compete with services like Steam.

This could be a worrying trend for publishers, but for now it looks like Sony are trying to put and end to it before it gets out of hand. Although come to think of it, Sony aren’t exactly winning praise for their game streaming prices.

Thank you Forbes for providing us with this information.

Samsung Profits down by 20%

Posted on by Dave Alcock
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Samsung have seen a 20% drop in profits for their second quarter of the year,  mainly due to a decrease in smartphone sales and an increase in the power of Korean currency. In monetary terms Samsung have made a net profit of 6.25 trillion Won (£3.6bn) down from the 7.7 trillion won from last year. Samsung are the largest manufacturer of mobile phones, with their handset division earning the bulk of the profits. Sales of smartphones have started to down for Samsung and along with other manufacturers they have had to start pricing more competitively which hurts the profit margin on each phone.

In a statement Samsung said “”The second quarter was affected by several factors including the slow global sales of smartphones and tablets and escalating marketing expenditure to reduce inventory”

An increase in the power of the Korean currency, the won, has also hurt Samsung. The won has had an increase of 11% against the US dollar and nearly 7% against the euro in the last year. This hurts companies such as Samsung who rely heavily on exports when they recieve their profits from the foreign countries. Samsung have said they have lost “about 500bn won” in missed revenues.

Samsung are remaining hopeful but are being realistic. New flagship products should ensure that they keep their top spot as the leading phone manufacturer, with a rollout of new models expected soon but they realise that it’s going to be a hard battle.

Thank you BBC News for providing us with this information

Image courtesy of Samsung

DeepSilver Stream An Hour of Risen 3: Titan Lords

Posted on by Peter Donnell
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Risen 3: Titan Lords is currently being prepared for release on PC in mid-August, and as Deep Silver work to build some hype for the title they’ve taken to Twitch to stream an hour of gameplay.

They used a relatively early build of the game, so there is still a good bit of stutter and other issues, but it’s likely this was the most stable build of the game at their disposal. They also suffered some issues with the stream that left the first few uneventful minutes a bit wasted, so skip through to about 12 minutes in to see where things get going and the hissing noise on the stream has stopped.

The game does appear to be shaping up nicely, good graphics, a good size gaming world and more that should keep fans and new comers of the series happy. Either way, we’ve not got long to wait until we can get our hands on it, lets just hope these stutter issues are resolved before release.


Watch live video from DeepSilver on Twitch

If the live stream doesn’t work, you can check out the video on Twitch here.

Right to Be Forgotten Is a Waste of Time

Posted on by Peter Donnell
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The legal ruling in Europe that allows everyone to wipe their digital slate clean is a complete and utter waste of time. Simply removing your articles from Google is hardly going to cover your ass when you’ve done some thing wrong. In fact some members of the public have taken it upon themselves to expose those who are trying to hide, adding further levels of futility to those who are trying to remove content about themselves from search engines.

A recent House of Lord report declared the idea “wrong”, adding that it’s clear that “neither the 1995 Directive, nor the Court of Justice of the European Unions’s (CJEU) interpretation of it, reflects the incredible advancement in technology that we see today, over 20 years since the Directive was drafted”.

The right to be forgotten is an interpretation of Article 12 of the Data Protection Directive, laid down by European Parliament in 1995 and relating to the protection and processing of personal data. The right to be forgotten rule is a new interpretation of this directive.

“We do not believe that individuals should have a right to have links to accurate and lawfully available information about them removed, simply because they do not like what is said,” Baroness Prashar said.

I couldn’t agree more, if people are so ignorant that they feel they can remove data like this from the internet then fool on them, even worse is when convicted criminals, failed businessmen and more are using this ruling to have articles they don’t like removed from Google, if an article is based around the truth, why should we have to hide it? That’s like burning news papers and books from libraries because they contain stories that someone doesn’t want you to know and it looks like time for this law is about to pass.

Thank you Wired for providing us with this information.

Image courtesy of Wired.

Tor Attack May Have Unmasked Dark Net Users

Posted on by Dave Alcock
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Users who have been browsing Tor using The Tor Project might not be as hidden as they thought after developers of the software believe they have been attacked for the past 5 months.

The project have said that they believe the attack was designed to de-anonymise users however are currently unsure how users have been affected.

As Tor is used as an anonymous way to publish websites, keeping websites from search engines and also keeping users identities quiet, this could effectively make using Tor worthless.

The project halted the attacks on the 4th of July and think they might know are behind them.

Two security experts from Carnegie Mellon university have told the project that they had previously found flaws in the software and that these flaws had allowed them to unmask users. The Tor Project have been trying to contact the two experts in hope that the breach is coming from them as if not they do not know where the attacks have originated. The experts are currently keeping quite, not responding to emails.

This comes soon after Russia’s interior ministry had announced a £65,000 prize to anyone who was able to crack users identities saying they want to use the information for their countries ‘defence and protection’

Thank you BBC News for providing us with this information

Image courtesy of wikipedia

Ex-F1 Head taking Google to the High Court over Sex Photos

Posted on by Chris Smith
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Max Mosley, the son of the ex-British Union of Fascists,  has issued High Court proceedings against Google recently – claiming that they are in breach of UK’s data protection act.

Unfortunately for Mosely, this is not the first time these damaging news have reached the public eye. Back in 2008, Britain’s News of the World tabloid published unsavoury images and accused Mosely of organizing a sex party with a Nazi theme. Mosely successfully sued the paper with the High Court ruling that the story was not in the public interest.

Google has stated they are working with Mosely on the issue at hand, which involves images of the ex-FIA boss with prostitutes

There have been no other public statements.

Image courtesy of the FIA

Skywalker Middle Name sees British Womans Passport Declined

Posted on by Chris Smith
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Laura Elizabeth Skywalker Matthews, from Southend, decided to honor her favorite series of movies in a somewhat-permanent way – legally adding Skywalker as a middle name. Although no issues have been seen from this previously, she’s recently found out the hard way that it may not be for the best.

At 29 years old, Matthews has this name added to her bank accounts and drivers license, but hit a brick wall when applying for an official British passport – an outright rejection.

Matthews claims that this name change was brought around several years as a joke, but now she’s seeing some unfortunate consequences.

A representative of Britain’s Home Office confirmed the issue to the BBC, stating that name-changes are not accepted on passports if they are subject to copyright of trademarks:

“We have a duty to ensure the reputation of the UK passport is not called into question or disrepute”

Maybe we all should think twice before changing our middle name or Voldemort or Princess Peach. What do you think? Is this law unrealistic, or is the government protecting themselves from a real threat?

Cover image courtesy of The Gnomon Workshop

Article image courtesy of Board Game Geek

 

Less Buffering on Netflix for Customers on AT&T

Posted on by Kyle Williams
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Do you use Netfilx? Are you with AT&T? If you said yes to both of them then your Netflix experience should get better. Netflix and AT&T have signed a peering deal designed to reduced video buffering on the media streaming service.

There is no news as of yet regarding the financial information in the deal but we do have this statement from AT&T.

“We reached an interconnect agreement with Netflix in May and since then have been working together to provision additional interconnect capacity to improve the viewing experience for our mutual subscribers,” an AT&T spokeswoman said in the statement.”We’re now beginning to turn up the connections, a process that should be complete in the coming days.“

The deal started yesterday (29/07/14 for people reading in the future) and, like the statement said, it should be “complete in the coming days”. Now i’m not sure how long that means but I can imagine it will be complete in about a week or so, maybe less, who knows. If you’re with AT&T and you do use Netflix and you notice a improvement in your streaming performance then you can probably say that you’ve been boosted thanks to this new deal.

Thanks to Tweaktown for supplying us with this information.

Image courtesy of eTeknix.

 

Get Ready for Next-Gen Water Balloon Fights!

Posted on by Kyle Williams
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Firstly, this isn’t a video game I’m talking about, it’s real life. When was the last time you had a water balloon fight? For me personally it was years and years ago but I still remember the fun times I had soaking other people in a fury of different coloured water bombs *sigh*, good times indeed. Anyway if you have children or just behave like a big kid then this is the product you need!

This is Tinnuss Enterprises’ Bunch O Balloons and it looks to revolutionize water balloon fights, revolutionize you say!? Yes, this beast can fill up to 100 balloons a minute and even fill 37 balloon simultaneously. The real time waster in any water balloon fight, as we all know, is having to tie each balloon up which can take forever, not with Bunch O Ballons, it even ties all 37 balloons at the same time with just a shake of your hand! . Bunch O Balloons has been a Kickstarter project with an initial goal of just $10,000 but after the internet caught a glimpse of the future of balloon warfare their target was smashed completely and the project has now raised over $690,000. Just incredible, it may be one of the most successful Kickstarter projects ever.

Bunch O Balloons is set to launch September 2015, if you want to get your hands on some, you need to back the project.

Thanks to Tweaktown for supplying us with this information.

Images courtesy of Tweaktown.

Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare Atlas Pro Edition Will Set You Back $120

Posted on by Kyle Williams
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Brace yourself, $120 for 1 game, never in a million years, this is when publishers like to take the p*ss in my opinion, what you get is a load of digital content and 2 things that are actually physical.

Here is the full list of content you’ll receive if you buy this hideously overpriced package:

Season Pass
Atlas Gorge Bonus Multiplayer Map: A re-imagined Pipeline map from Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare.
Atlas Digital Content Pack: Customized gear inspired by the Atlas Corporation:*Bal-27 AE Assault Rifle – A custom Atlas designed rifle
Atlas 45 AE Pistol – A custom Atlas designed pistol
Atlas Exoskeleton – A white, red and black Atlas exoskeleton
Atlas Helmet – A custom Atlas helmet
Atlas Player Card: A custom Atlas calling card and emblem
5 Bonus Supply Drops: Customized gear and weapons.
Single Player Exoskeleton Upgrade Token: A token for an extra upgrade/perk for your exoskeleton in the campaign
Official Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare Soundtrack: A digital copy of the game score by Harry Gregson-Williams and music by Audiomachine.

Now some of you may be thinking, wow I get the season pass too which is usually $60 so that means I’m saving money, you’re right but I always wait until I see at least 1 trailer for a DLC pack before I even consider buying the Season Pass, you never know, it might be awful.

All in all I think this package is a little ridiculous, tons of digital content, next to no physical content. If this edition came with a little model or something like that then it would be worth $120 but all digital content that hardly alters the way the game plays is not worth it.

Will you be picking this edition up or are you looking for a cheaper way to play the latest titles?

Thanks to Tweaktown for supplying us with this information.

Image courtesy of Tweaktown.