Many years ago, back in the first days of digital photography, torture testing JPEG images to determine how much quality has been lost by making multiple edits was quite a big thing. JPEG’s use a technique called lossy compression that drops information to keep file sizes at a manageable level.
A YouTuber and a keen studier of generation loss, Jon Sneyers resurrects this with a very quick video demonstrating the effect of opening and resaving the same JPEG 500 times. He does so using several different compression methods too, such as JPEG, WebP and BPG. The video demonstrates some of the formats maintain quality much better than the others. In fact, some of them change and give a very interesting metamorphosis.
From the video, it’s quite easy to see that the JPEG format is the best of them all when it comes to retaining its original form after hundreds of saves. When working with photos and having seen the video above, it certainly makes sense to use the RAW format when working with constant edits to images. However, JPEG is still a very good format for images, it keeps the file sizes fairly regular and makes it a lot easier for taking a quick photo without having to go through the hassle of post-image processing in Photoshop.
A new campaign has appeared online and caught our attention, to bring back Spyro the dragon. The campaign has been ongoing for a few months now on the popular petition website, change.org and is hoping to get enough supporters to make Sony acknowledge the fans and bring back the adorable little purple dragon to our consoles.
The petition was made by a fan page available on Facebook called Spyro HD Collection who have been trying to raise awareness about the iconic dragon for the past few years. So far the petition has 374 supporters out of their 1000 goal.
Spyro was born in late 1998 (I was one year old then!) and has since appeared on 4 generations of console, with his most recent appearance in the Skylanders series from Activision. This appearance, however, has caused big controversy amongst Spyro fans. Although the character is rumored to be moving back to Sony alongside his rival, Crash Bandicoot. In a set of interviews in 2014, the CEO of Sony stated that they were considering attempting to bring back both Spyro and Crash Bandicoot. He said that the iconic characters are “never off the table” and “we shouldn’t close the door on that one yet.”
If you fancy bringing back the iconic purple dragon to our consoles, sign the petition here.
Ahead of Intel’s much awaited Broadwell-E processor launch, ASRock announced the release of a new BIOS with support for X99 CPUs that are available on today’s market. The update applies to all of the motherboard manufacturers’ X99 product lines.
The new Broadwell-E processors will fit in the same LGA2011-V3 sockets as their Haswell predecessors and introduce a 14nm manufacturing process. The new BIOS will support the new ten core Core i7-6950X, the Core i7-6900K, i7-6850K and i7-6800K processors. So far there has been little in the way of information on the new processors available from reliable sources. ASRock is the first reputable place to confirm Intel’s offerings (well, the names at least) ahead of the Intel announcement due at Computex 2016. Although, MSI was the first motherboard manufacturer to release widespread BIOS updates for their X99 range.
There were rumors at one point of Intel cancelling the Broadwell-E range in favour of some Skylake chips. However, the release from Asrock certainly thwarts this. The ten core beast, the 6950X will run at a base clock of 3GHz and have a 3.5GHz boost clock, boasting 10 cores and 20 threads. From the release, it will be unlocked to allow enthusiasts and professional overclockers to tinker and overclock the processors to the absolute maximum they can get. It’ll come with a whopping 25MB of layer three cache and will work in most X99 motherboards, providing the manufacturer releases a new bios that can support them.
Will you be upgrading to the latest from Intel as soon as it hits the market? Let us know in the comments below.
Most of us know of the breathalyzer, the device that all police officers carry in their cars to check if you’re over the alcoholic tolerance levels whilst driving. The simple device has been in use for decades and helped police officers across the globe arrest drivers that are breaking the law by drinking. Now there seems to be a so-called “textalyzer” device appearing.
The new device will help authorities determine whether someone involved in a road traffic accident was using a mobile device unlawfully, causing them to be distracted whilst driving. The technology is made by a company called Cellbrite, the Israeli firm that was rumored to have assisted the FBI with cracking the iPhone.
Drivers involved in accidents would have to submit their phone to roadside testing from a textalyzer device. The device would then determine if the driver was using a mobile device ahead of a crash. In a bid to get around the Fourth Amendment right to privacy, the textalyzer would not conversations, contacts, numbers, photos, and application data private. It will solely say whether the phone was in use prior to a motor vehicle mishap. Further analysis, which might require a warrant, could be necessary to determine whether such usage was via hands-free dashboard technology and to confirm the original finding.
Some of the first cards to run utilizing the all new “Pascal” architecture made by Nvidia, may debut at Computex 2016. The show is going to be in Late may / Early June in Taipei and is one of the biggest ICT shows in the world and you can be sure the eTeknix team will be there to catch the latest news from the event!
Mass shipments should start sometime in July according to Digitimes, the Taiwan based industry observer. With Nvidia unveiling the new cards via its add-in card (AIC) partners, with large manufacturers such as ASUS, MSI, and GIGABYTE being at the event.
The new GPU will be based on the GP104 chip and utilize GDDR5X VRAM; a whopping 8GB is rumored to be the amount. The leaked specs show it having a single eight-pin power connector, meaning that (due to electrical capacity) the max power usage would be 225W, though it could use a lot less power. The 980 is only 165W so this card can’t be a huge amount more. The leaked specs also tell us that it could feature up to 6144 CUDA cores and a whopping 12.6 Teraflops. We’re not sure how accurate these specs are as they have been sourced from various places, only time will tell. Either way, Computex 2016 is going to be huge this year.
So far, we can accurately say:
2x performance per watt estimated improvement over Maxwell
DirectX 12_1 or higher
Successor to the GM200 GPU in the 980TI
Built on 16nm manufacturing process
It will be interesting to see the Polaris release too, as there is going to be some very tough competition on the GPU market shortly and that’s obviously great news for consumers.
Which cards are you most excited about this year, AMD’s or Nvidia’s latest? Let us know in the comments section below.
Amazon wants to push its Alexa voice assistant as far and wide as possible, so much so that one of the company’s employees has released a step-by-step guide to building an Alexa-powered speaker yourself with a Raspberry Pi.
The DIY echo can be made using a cheap USB microphone, speaker and several other easy to obtain parts. The code is shared on the Github platform and was posted by Amit Jotwani, Amazon’s senior evangelist for Alexa. It’s his job to help developers and tinkerers. This in turn generates interest from a technical perspective and all of a sudden – millions of people are tweaking code, modding parts and making some really nice inventions with the Pi and Amazon’s software.
It would take some basic technical knowledge to assemble and make the echo work via the Raspberry Pi. However the guides are very good and it should be fairly easy for the average joe to make. The Echo is now on sale for $180 – it hasn’t been released in the UK as of yet. There is one downside to running it off the Rasberry Pi, though, you can’t wake it up by saying “Alexa” and to run a voice command you have to press a button.
Microsoft is announcing a massive new feature for all Xbox owners today, Cross-platform gaming! The giant tech corporation has been hinting at the addition of this for the past few years and today it seems to have become reality. PS4, Xbox One and Windows 10 will be able to support the new feature, providing Sony and others partake. The feature will be dependent on game developers incorporating it into their game releases, chances are this will become a very large part of the releases we have ahead of us for the rest of this year.
Microsoft has confirmed that Rocket League will be one of the first games to take advantage of the new feature between Xbox One and PC players, with an open invitation to other networks such as Nintendo’s own platform, utilised on their Wii and DS products.
This change could reshape gaming’s future for the better, people who don’t have gaming rigs but own consoles can play games with others on PC’s. I think that’s awesome! Currently, you are restricted to playing games released for your platform. Opening up cross-platform networking capabilities will remove a big restriction in console gaming. Although it may open up a conversation around which titles should allow PC gamers to play against console gamers, a mouse and keyboard still have some huge advantages on most fps games so could cause for some interesting challenges for the game developers.
Imagine if a McDonald’s advertisement looked as captivating as one produced by Apple. Picture a Big Mac and fries marketed with minimalist type, a white background, and CEO rattling off terms like “refined,” “complexity,” and “extraordinary.”
Well, Buzzfeed have done it. Their team has made and released a Mcdonalds advert in the style of an Apple advert. The advert features several standard features of an Apple advert. White backgrounds, a high-level member describing the new product whilst using lots of buzz words.
“what happens when machinery meats meat”.
Chicken is never mentioned as an ingredient in the ad, however, it explains:
“To change the way we experience chicken is to change chicken itself.”
In the video, the fake advert tells us about three new products. Fri, Nugget and Mac. All of which are being described as now “refined” and much better than the last version. The advert is very clever and well made by the team at BuzzFeed. It’s very impressive how by using a white background and some clever words, they make me crave a McDonalds now. Maybe I’ll be able to utilise their “Smart Grease” to help me find that chip from the other night, it’s here somewhere…
Speaking at a hearing today, Microsoft president and chief legal officer, Brad Smith announced that the company ‘wholeheartedly’ support one of their competitors, Apple in the long-running case between Apple and the FBI.
In case you’ve not heard about the ongoing battle, the FBI have ordered Apple to remove the security blocks that the tech giant has put into place on their devices in order for the FBI to be able to access it.
This has all been sparked by the incident where Farook Malik and his wife, Tashfeen killed 14 people in an attack last year. The FBI want access to the encrypted iPhone as it may have evidence to support the investigation.
Apple spoke at today’s hearing The Verge told us, Smith used an adding machine made in 1912 when the law was passed.
“We do not believe that courts should seek to resolve issues of 21st century technology with a law that was written in the era of the adding machine,”
Apple’s CEO, Tim Cook spoke out too, he said that the decision to refuse the FBI was hard, but he feels that it was the correct thing to do.
The FBI has argued that Apple is overstating the security risk to its devices. FBI Director James Comey said Apple had the technical know-how to break into Farook’s device only in a way that did not create a so-called “backdoor” into every Apple device.
The law that has been used in this case is the All Writs act of 1789, of which the Department of Justice has used twice against Apple to open a smartphone. Both cases are still open. The law itself is very brief and broad.
“The Supreme Court and all courts established by Act of Congress may issue all writs necessary or appropriate in aid of their respective jurisdictions and agreeable to the usages and principles of law.”
The act is one of last resort. All other avenues have to be exhausted before the All Writs Act can be invoked.
The cast is getting back together on their old TV network, NBC, to pay tribute to the veteran sitcom director James Burrows. Burrows has recently held his 1000th TV episode, he has helmed series such as Taxi and the Bob Newhart Show. He has directed 15 episodes of friends, one of which was the pilot episode.
While the special is about Burrows, the reunion of the cast of Friends — which launched in 1994 and ran for 10 seasons — is obviously the highlight. All six original cast members (Jennifer Aniston, Courteney Cox, Lisa Kudrow, Matt LeBlanc, Matthew Perry, David Schwimmer) are on board.
https://youtu.be/sLisEEwYZvw
The average friends episode took 5 hours to film, meaning that in total around 1180 hours were spent making the entire 10 seasons. That is a fair old time for a TV series! Hopefully, the two hour’s air time will be enough to please the immense amount of fans that loved the show. The news comes as a surprise, especially over the news on the 1st of may last year, which came from the shows co-creator Marta Kaufman telling us that there would be no chance of a reunion.
“There will never ever – it’s not to going to happen. They have to let it go,” she told E!’s Marc Malkin on the red carpet for the premiere of her new Netflix show, Grace and Frankie.
Well, that clearly has changed – for this short little get together anyway! The episode will be aired on the 21st of Feb.
The Pinnacle of V creator Josh Romito has been under a lot of heat recently. So much that he has now shut down the project due to claims that he has stolen assets from other Grand Theft Auto mods that are available online.
Josh claimed that some people have contributed graphical assets for him to use in the Pinnacle of V mod. However, he was unaware that they had been extracted from other mods.
“Over the past week or so, I have been informed that parts of this project have been directly stolen from other developers, and handed to me as additions to my work. I have been made a fool of due to the motions of my peers, and I am taking action to try to preserve any honesty and integrity with the community I can. I apologize to everyone who was stolen from, and I wish there was a way this could be reversed.” Josh told DSOGaming.
He then explained to them the reason he has decided to shut the project down:
“I have personally put hundreds of hours of my own time and hard, legitimate work into this project. I am truly hurt and disgusted to see the fraud that has come from others. I hope the community can see this situation for what it is, that I have been honest from the beginning, and am doing what I can to make amends of this wrong doing. I started this project as a learning experience, and it turned into fraud when others became involved. The internet is full of scammers and people who serve no purpose but to cause havoc. This was my first time getting involved in a “community” type project, and I was shocked to see some of the support I was receiving, and how generous people were. It turns out it was all lies and stolen content. I’m not sure how else to handle a situation like this, so I am simply shutting it down and releasing the honest truth.”
I think it’s a real shame that such a fantastic mod with a great creator has been forced to shut down the project due to people submitting illegitimate content. However, Josh has now said that he will be releasing a new version of the mod under a new title in the next few months.
This battlefield 4 player has clearly gotten to know the game inside and out. A video was posted on YouTube a short while ago showing how this player gets a phenomenal kill streak.
He picks up an SV-98 sniper rifle equipped something rather strange, not a typical sniper telescopic sight but instead, an iron sight. When I saw him do it I thought he was crazy. However, he manages to get a whopping kill streak. A regular scope is rather hard to use in close quarters so the best thing to do is to go with a small scope or just plain iron sights. But it’s really hard to be successful rocking a single-shot bolt-action rifle and iron sights at close range.
You can see Julle993’s awesome kill streak in the video below:
As you can see on his stats on the bf4stats website, he is a seasoned player. Clocking up over 73 days of play time (1768 hours!).
He has played 8000 rounds and is ranked in the top 1% in the rankings. With 171,594 kills, 24,006 pf those being headshots. His favourite gun is an AEK-971 with the m16A4 being julle669’s second favourite weapon. He also seems to like his aircraft, having spent 117 hours in an AH-6J and gaining 19,908 kills with it. Julle993 doesn’t seem to hold back on the battlefield.
What are your stats? let us know in the comments below
Thank you to ibitimes for providing us with this image.
The BBC is currently suffering from intermittent internet service outages this morning. All BBC web-based services have been affected including iPlayer and the main news website.
DownDetector has shown a dramatic rise in reports of the websites being unavailable from around 7am too, the website is showing 500 error pages, with some parts of the website not loading at all, and others partially loading. It seems that radio and television broadcasting services are not affected but many of the services remain offline.
BBC have tweeted an apology via their Twitter account.
We're aware of a technical issue affecting the BBC website and are working to fix this now. We'll update you as soon as we can.
The last outage that the BBC encountered was back in 2011 due to technical issues and later in 2o12 the BBC revealed that it had been under cyber attack which took its telephone and e-mail services offline. However, the cause of this outage has not currently been confirmed, but we will post more information as we find it.
Poor old @BBC seen to be having troubles with their entire online presence. Or is it just me?
When such a big website goes down, it can be a major inconvenience for quite a lot of people. Especially for a site like BBC, which is a hub for many around the world for breaking news, weather, and so much more.
We all know Bill Gates has a whopping amount of money. He’s the owner of Microsoft, several hotel chains, and Corbis. Well, he also has several stunning properties. His home in Washington is worth a phenomenal $154 million. That’s approximately 1000 average British houses. However, he only paid $2 million back in the golden days of 1988. It is also said that he pays approximately $1 million in property tax per yer. Not a lot for Mr Gates though is it?
Sensors, sensors everywhere!
On arrival at the Gates household, you’ll be handed a little pin. This pin interacts with sensors built into the house, in turn, it then tracks your movement throughout the entire complex. As a result of the pin and sensors, the house then automatically adjusts temperature and lighting to ensure comfort throughout. He also has hidden speakers in all the rooms so music can follow you wherever you go.
Oooh, nice pictures Bill
Many of the paintings in the house are digital, he has roughly $80,000 dollars of displays that then connect back to a $150,000 server farm. The server farm then has a nearly unlimited supply of artwork for you to switch to.
Bounce Bill bounce, the trampoline room
The house has its own exercise facilities. The main room has a trampoline in and a 20ft high roof space for you to bounce around in. The facilities are 2500 square feet and contain a sauna, steam room, and separate men/women’s locker rooms.
Hosting a party? The reception hall
If the family wants to hold a party, Bill has a 2300 feet square reception hall. It can seat 150 people at a dinner party or 200 at a cocktail party. One wall has a 6 feet wide fireplace whilst the other is home to a whopping 22 feet wide video screen. Perfect for chilling and looking at cat pictures!
Fancy a read? The library is massive
Bill Gates paid $30.8-million for the 16th Century Codex Leicester manuscript, so it does not come as a surprise that he also has a 2,100-square-foot library, complete with a dome roof and two secret bookcases. On the ceiling, he has a quote from “The Great Gatsby”. “He had come a long way to this blue lawn, and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it.” I wonder if the blue reminds him of the windows XP taskbar, we will never know.
More of a film fan? Bill has it covered
In his 20 person movie theater. It has an Art-Deco theme, humongous chairs and much more. The screen itself is huge, however, we’re not allowed to know the true size. There is even a snack bar just for the theater.
The Car garage
Across the residence, there are several garages that amount to having room for 23 vehicles. One of which is designed to look like the Batcave. Rather cool I say – not bad for a 60-year-old!
Earlier this week the Rpi foundation were approached by a lady called Linda. Linda asked the team if they would ever so kindly distribute an exe file alongside their Linux operating system, Raspian. The e-mail they were sent asks if the foundation would perform the miracle of running an exe on a Linux operating system in return for a sum of money based on a Price Per Installation scheme (PPI).
Amazing. This person seems to be very sincerely offering us money to install malware on your machines. pic.twitter.com/1soL0MIc5Z
It’s amazingly surprising the sheer cheek that this company has, as they’re asking one of the world’s most know organizations to cheat its customers. Why on earth would this company think they would go along with it? I don’t know. However, I can safely say that the foundation has not accepted this fantastic offer. The Raspberry Pi foundation is now a huge corporation with over 5 million Pi boards having been sold since the release of the original Pi. The use of an open source operating system has also done them wonders. There are thousands upon thousands of scripts and programs for the Pi available to the public.
Pi Facts: The name “Raspberry” originates from the fruit-based naming tradition for microcomputers in old days. “Pi” refers to “Python” because Python was one of the first programs ported to run on Raspberry Pi. Hence the rather unusual name.
If you’ve been Star Wars: Battlefront, one of the most eagerly awaited games released this year, you may have noticed a slight glitch in the system.
Recently there have been a lot of players crashing their X-wings and tie fighters at full pace into the ground, daft as it sounds, doing so triggers a glitch in the game that gives you infinite health. Kotaku said that “It’s the kind os s*** that you would tell a new player in the chat so you can laugh as they fly their craft straight into the ground”
Above you can see the video by Flynn Moloney demonstrating the new-found glitch. Since the surfacing of the bug, there has been lots of threads and videos popping up on various forums. Reddit users have posted their thoughts on the matter, you can see them here. alongside over videos of people finding the glitch.
The confusing (and a little amusing) thing is, not every nose dive into the map activates the glitch and sometimes the glitch happens without a crash occurring. Hopefully, Dice will manage to correct the glitch before too many people discover it and ruin the game.
The problem seems limited to Xbox One and PS4 only though, but please let us know if you find any bugs on the PC version.
I will say though, this game is stunning, they really have done a fantastic job (other than the glitches) and it certainly fails to disappoint me. What do you think of the game so far? let us know in the comments below
Nvidia has been fairly quiet on the VR front, allowing the Oculus Rift to take most of the limelight. However, they haven’t been doing nothing, Nvidia’s boffins have been working away with Stanford University to develop a new technology. The new tech has a catchy name of NE-LF. This stands for Near Eye Light Field. The system proposes to eliminate all forms of motion sickness caused by traditional virtual reality headsets. The system works by utilising 4D (2d+2d) images. These are displayed to both eyes that then combine to form a single 3D image; Fudzilla believes that the new tech will be available by 2018.
The problem with current VR systems is that when viewing objects close to the virtual camera, some people experience motion sickness. This in turn limits the amount of time you spend using the device as you may find that you feel rather ill, rather quickly. The last thing you want to do is vomit on your nice, shiny VR headset! The system uses two layers of display, with about 5mm of distance between the two panels. This then sends the eye an entire “4d” field of images so the eye can naturally focus between two objects. The only downside is that because of the early adoption, the resolution works out at 640 X 800 per eye, not a useable resolution for gaming or any modern application.
I do find the VR headsets rather cool, and love the Oculus Rift ( I’ve even had a go with one!). However other VR vendors may solve the motion sickness problem by the time NE-LF hits the market, I guess we will see.
Xenia is an Xbox 360 device emulator. It has been in development since January 10th 2013 with 2956 commits of code to the popular open source code sharing website – Github. The developers have been very busy for the past two years creating this beast of an emulator, however, it is still in early days of development.
Recently they have been able to get Halo Reach to start on the emulator and managed to load into the game menu, but the game runs into an error when trying to select a game mode, which you can see the video below.
Things look promising for the project, they are trying to make a start on multi-platform, but won’t be able to run on Mac until Apple starts to support Vulkan. For now, you need to have Windows 8.1 with python 2.7 and Visual Studio 2015 installed to run it.
They have also been able to get Frogger 2 to run in the emulator:
The project is created by Ben Vanik, a developer from Seattle who works as an engineer for google, also he has worked for Microsoft in the past. He states on his blog how the emulator works.
“At the highest level the emulator needs to be able to take the original PowerPC instructions and run them on the host processor. These instructions come in the form of a giant assembled binary instruction stream loaded into memory – there is no concept of ‘functions’ or ‘types’ and no flow control information. Somehow, they must be quickly translated into a form the host processor can understand, either one at a time or in batches”
Pretty complex stuff, he also has to extract the XEX file from games and then reverse engineer the code to try to make it work on the Xenia emulator.
George Orwell, a great writer of the classic book Nineteen Eighty Four. A book that describes the future with surveillance and control as themes.
George himself sadly passed away in 1950, currently all his rights are controlled and protected by the Orwell estate. Recently, the estate itself has started to gain a reputation for exerting tight control of copyrights and trademarks. TorrentFreak discovered that Josh Hadley, an Internet Radio host on 1201 Beyond had experienced this first hand. Hadley used the show to gather and distribute his shows and writings.
Before he set up a fully fledged website and store he used Cafepress to sell T-Shirts. Although he never actually sold any shirts in the time that it was running it was noticed by the estate. Last week he received an e-mail from Cafepress informing him that one of his designs has been taken offline due to copyright infringement. The design that breached the law contained the string “1984”:
According to the complaint, the design that he used contains George Orwell quotes. However, the only reference was the four numbers that made up the book title, 1984. Hadley has stated that he is offended by what he believes to be an illegitimate request and something that George Oswell would be against. He told TorrentFreak“First off is the irony of the estate of George Orwell being all Orwellian but second is that you can’t copyright a number,”
Cafepress has kept the designs offline and now listed as pending in his dashboard. He could appeal if he wishes, yet has no plans to do so.
Tensions are rising between device makers such as Apple and Google against law enforcement. It’s showing no signs whatsoever of slowing down either, you may remember that the US government have their force on Apple to unlock encrypted iPhones used in criminal cases.
Apple, however, is now contending that the encryption it provides on the iPhone is meant to safeguard user data first and foremost and that giving law enforcement access to see private data is a dangerous precedent. Earlier this week, comments made by U.S Magistrate James Orenstein this week has bolstered Apple’s position and also dampened the U.S government’s wishes to steamroll technology companies. He took the tactic of comparing forcing apple to unlock an iPhone with forced lethal injection.
HotHardware released that Orenstein said it was similar to a hypothetical situation of a drug company being forced to provide lethal injection drugs for use in an execution, even if had objections to its products being used for such a purpose.
The lawyer for the Department of Justice Saritha Komatireddy didn’t take too well to Orenstein’s comparison, calling it “somewhat inflammatory.” Komatireddy also countered the comment, rightfully pointing out that Apple has been complicit in the past in granting law enforcement the ability to unlock iPhones. It makes me wonder why they’re fighting back now?
BlackBerry have started taking preorders for the all new BlackBerry Priv, the company’s first phone that runs the popular Android OS.
The device is being sold in the US, UK, and Canada, with pricing at £559.lackberry say that in the US and Canada, the device will start shipping November 6th, and in the UK the Priv will ship “starting the week of November 9.”
Blackberry, according to Ars Technica, have included some of the much loved android functions that are not used on many devices these days. There is a hardware keyboard that slides out from the bottom, a physical camera shutter button on the side. It also has a Micro SD card slot and a hardware convenience key.
The CEO of blackberry stated that he was willing to leave the hardware market if he feels that the profits are non-existent. The Priv will probably become the make or break device for Blackberry. However, the approach that blackberry has taken is slightly different to other manufacturers. The price may make it harder to sell, especially when other flagship devices are selling for £200 less than the Priv. However, the unique features may draw some users in.
I can see a lot of businesses adopting the Priv, if Blackberry makes it work with their mobile device management solution (BES12) as well as their Blackberry OS devices do, then a lot of corporate environments will probably use the device. They will, however, have to catch up on the software front as the Priv ships with 5.1 instead of the newer 6.0 (Marshmallow).
If you want to be one of the first to see the new star wars trailer, be sat at your computer on Monday night around 8PM EST. Theatres around the country have been contacted by Disney to prepare for self-advanced tickets for the eagerly awaited new film. Tickets are expected to be on sale for 8:30PM EST.
When tickets do go on sale they’ll be for the screening of the film that starts at 7pm on December the 17th through to Jan the 3rd. In addition to this you’ll be able to get tickets for a movie marathon, where you can watch all seven Star Wars movies from The Phantom Menace through to The Force awakens. The marathon will start at 4am and continue to a 7pm screening of the new film.
Tickets should be on sale at most major ticket stores once released, so be quick to snap your tickets!
For those who haven’t seen it, here are the first two teasers of the new film.
Both trailers look pretty damn awesome in my opinion. I am really looking forward to seeing the new film. It’s been eagerly awaited by a lot of fans across the globe. Hopefully, it’ll be as good as the hype suggests.
AMD have just announced that they are now on a joint venture with electronics giant, Fujitsu. The two companies will be pairing together to provide factories in Penang (Malaysia) and Suzhou (China). Fujitsu will be getting a whopping 85 percent of the joint venture, which is suspected to heavily reduce AMD’s capital expenditure. Approximately 1700 workers at the two factories will become employees of the new venture the companies stated. For AMD, this is all for $371 Million in cash and retain a 15% stake in the new entity.
AMD announced on their investor relations page:
AMD (NASDAQ: AMD) and Nantong Fujitsu Microelectronics Co., Ltd (NFME) (SZSE: TFWD) today announced the signing of a definitive agreement to create a joint venture combining AMD’s high-volume assembly, test, mark, and pack (ATMP) facilities and experienced workforce in Penang, Malaysia and Suzhou, China with NFME’s established outsourced semiconductor assembly and test (OSAT) expertise. Upon close, the new business will leverage the capabilities of 5 facilities and approximately 5,800 employees to offer differentiated ATMP capabilities and scale to service a broad range of customers. The transaction is expected to close in the first half of 2016, pending successful completion of regulatory approvals.
The transaction is expected to be closed in the first half of 2016, pending completion of regulatory approvals. The joint venture positioned to take advantage of the increasing demand for semiconductor assembly and test services (SATS).
AMD also state:
According to Gartner Research, the SATS market revenue is expected to be $27.4 billion for 2015, with growth of 1.1 percent. The 2014 through 2019 CAGR for the market is forecast to be 4.6 percent, leading to approximately $34 billion in total estimated market revenue by 2019
AMD will contribute to the joint venture:
ATMP facilities in Penang, Malaysia and Suzhou, China
Approximately 1,700 employees — including the site leadership teams which will continue to provide management and oversight
NFME will purchase an 85 percent share of AMD’s Penang and Suzhou operations, and serve as controlling partner for the new combined business.
As consideration for the transaction, at close AMD expects to receive approximately $371 million from NFME, record cash of $320 million, net of expenses, and retain 15 percent ownership of its Penang and Suzhou operations.
Post close, AMD expects the transaction to be cost neutral with significantly reduced AMD capital expenditures.
There are no planned workforce reductions at AMD’s Penang or Suzhou facilities in conjunction with the creation of the joint venture.
I think AMD are back on the radar now, they seemed to be struggling in the market recently and share value was dropping rapidly. This move by Fujitsu has helped AMD get back into the market and will hopefully providing us with some awesome new chips and tech. The company reported that they were down 5% on their gross margin this year, due to an inventory write down of $65 million. Their woes were concentrated on its PC business, with suffered a $181 million loss on $424 million revenue.
AMD have been serving us for 45 years now, they’ve driven some serious innovation in their processors, graphics and visualization technologies, big building blocks for gaming, immersive platforms and data centers.
Amazon surprised developers today with the launch of a device dubbed as Snowball. Snowball is a new physical appliance that will allow Amazon Web Service users to ship huge amounts of data for import by shipping the device back and forth between their offices and the AWS data centers.
The appliance is a bit larger than an old-school desktop case and it can hold up to 50 terabytes of data. It has a Kindle on the side, which functions as an automatic shipping label. Amazon says the case can withstand a 6 G jolt and is entirely self-contained, with a 110-volt power supply and 10 GB network connection built-in.
Amazon have a set price for using this service. It will cost you $200 for 10 days of usage, each extra date on site will cost you an additional $15 per day. Amazon are not going to charge for importing the data from snowball back into your S3 appliance on their servers.
After you set up a “snowball” on their website, Amazon will ship the storage appliance. You then import your data and ship it back to amazon, using the embedded kindle as a shipping label. At the moment, all of the data will be imported into the companies Oregon data center; they say additional data centers are coming soon.
Have you ever suffered the pain of trying to cancel your internet service? The endless mashing of buttons and following horrible instructions via the IVR to get to an operator, since there is no easy option for “cancel your service.” Sure, you can change your service or upgrade it — but cancel it? It becomes a long ordeal in which you are tricked and sometimes berated into keeping your service, or else. Comcast is particularly bad about this process, meaning customers just get more and more frustrated.
A new service has launched, called AirPaper. For a measly $5 you can pay them to automatically cancel your Comcast contract in a speedy 5 mins. You provide them with your phone, address etc and they cancel your service.
It seems like a fantastic bargain and it is definitely worth the 5 dollars so you don’t have to deal with the dreaded customer support yourself. The company also hopes to expand into other services. They say they want to be able to help provide services for getting parking permits or renewing your visa to china etc.
I think it sounds epic, I can see people having issues with sharing their info with 3rd parties, but they state in their FAQ that they won’t share the information
Thank you to Geek.com for providing us with this information
The location of major cables has always been a secret, but now researchers hope that the knowledge of it will spark thoughts on how to keep it safe.
The Internet is a major part of people’s lives, in a forever changing world. It’s hard to think of as a whole entity yet it is possible to map the entire thing. Computer scientists at the University of Wisconsin have proved so by releasing the first map of the infrastructure that supports the heart of the US internet. It took Paul Barford and his colleagues four years to produce the map.
Barford told Smithsonianmag:
“The map shows the paths taken by the long-distance fiber-optic cables that carry Internet data across the continental U.S. The exact routes of those cables, which belong to major telecommunications companies such as AT&T and Level 3, have not been previously publicly viewable, despite the fact that they are effectively critical public infrastructure”
There may well be other maps in existence, yet none are in the public domain. Many attempts in the past have been deemed as illegal and a security risk. However, the map has been allowed because homeland security has made the map, the data being available to the public via a project dubbed as “Predict”
This is the map, the black lines are the cables. Red boxes represent where they connect to each other.
Thank you to smithsonianmag for providing us with this information.
The influential and controversial message board 4chan has been sold to Japanese web entrepreneur-turned-magazine editor Hiroyuko Nishimura for an undisclosed sum, it was announced yesterday.
Revelling in its reputation as the filthy, sweaty engine-room of the internet, 4chan was the originator and hub of a crazy amount of internet subculture including “LOLcats” and the practice of “Rickrolling”, in which an unsuspecting user is tricked into clicking on a link which takes them to the YouTube video of Rick Astley’s Never Gonna Give You Up – a practice which re-booted Astley’s career.
It was also the place where Anonymous, the online hackers collective began and was also at the center of the nude celebrity leak, dubbed as “The fappening” last year. The website currently gets 22 million new visits every month and a million posts per day.
In January 4chan’s founder, Chris Poole – who goes by the username Moot –announced he was stepping down as administrator of the site, and in a news post on Monday he announced the sale of the site to Nishimura. He said that he and Nishimura were “fast friends” who had bonded “over our shared passion for creating and managing online communities”.
It will be interesting to see what happens to the site, I guess we’ll find out!
Thanks to Forbes for providing us with this information.
