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Submission + - $10K Ethernet Cable Claims Audio Fidelity, If You're Stupid Enough To Buy It (hothardware.com)

Submitted by MojoKid
MojoKid writes: There are few markets that are quite as loaded-up with "snake oil" products as the audio/video arena. You may have immediately thought of "Monster" cables as one of the most infamous offenders. But believe it or not, there are some vendors that push the envelope so far that Monster's $100 HDMI cables sound like a bargain by comparison. Take AudioQuest's high-end Ethernet cable, for example. Called "Diamond," AudioQuest is promising the world with this $10,500 Ethernet cable. If you, for some reason, believe that an Ethernet cable is completely irrelevant for audio, guess again. According to their claim: "AudioQuest's Diamond RJ/E is a directional Ethernet cable made with the same hallmark materials, philosophy, care and attention that is applied to all their interconnects, whether it's an entry level introduction to Hi-Fi or a died-in-the-wool music connoisseur. Another upgrade with Diamond is a complete plug redesign, opting for an ultra-performance RJ45 connector made from silver with tabs that are virtually unbreakable. The plug comes with added strain relief and firmly lock into place ensuring no critical data is lost." It's too bad AudioQuest limits itself to just audio, because descriptions like that would prove a welcome sight in other markets. Just imagine how tempting it would be to own 100% solid paper clips made with uncompromising materials that take a no-nonsense approach to holding paper together. Unfortunately, in this case, there's the issue of digital data being, well, digital. But hey, a 1 or a 0 could arrive at its destination so much cleaner, right?

Submission + - Dell Venue 8 7000, "Word's Thinnest Tablet" With Intel Moorefield Atom, Reviewed (hothardware.com)

Submitted by MojoKid
MojoKid writes: Dell recently launched their Android-based Venue 8 7000 slate, claiming it's the "world's thinnest" tablet. It measures a mere 6 millimeters thick, or 0.24 inches and change. That's 0.1mm slimmer than Apple's iPad Air 2 and 1.5mm flatter than the iPad mini 3, giving Dell full bragging rights, even if by a hair. Dell also opted for an Intel Atom Z3580 processor under the hood, clocked at up to 2.3GHz. This quad-core part is built on Intel's 22nm Moorefield microarchitecture. Compared to its Bay Trail predecessor, Moorefield comes in a smaller package with superior thermal attributes, as well as better graphics performance, courtesy of its PowerVR G6430 graphics core. The Venue 8 7000 also features one of the best 8-inch OLED displays on the market, with edge-to-edge glass and a 2560x1600 resolution. Finally, the Venue 8 7000 is also the first to integrate Intel's RealSense Snapshot Depth Camera, which offers interesting re-focusing and stereoscopic effects, with potentially other, more interesting use cases down the road. Performance-wise, the Venue 8 7000 is solid enough though not a speedster, putting out metrics in the benchmarks that place it in the middle of the pack of premium tablets on the market currently.

Submission + - Homemade RC Millennium Falcon Is The Drone You've Always Dreamed Of Flying (hothardware.com)

Submitted by MojoKid
MojoKid writes: Here's a dose of Rebel goodness to tide you over while you wait for the next Star Wars trailer. A drone enthusiast in France recently graced the web with a few videos of a self-built quadcopter with a shell designed to look like the Millennium Falcon. It's enough to make a Star Wars fan tear up. The drone features a blue thruster light, just like the real Millennium Falcon, and has bright front lights as well. Its creator, who goes by "Oliver C", has some serious modding skills. The shape of the Millennium Falcon presented Oliver with some challenges, but he has the balance more or less handled by the time the spaceship (or quadcopter) takes its first flight outside.

Submission + - ARM's Cortex-A72 And Mali-T880 GPU Announced For 2016 Flagship Smartphones (hothardware.com)

Submitted by MojoKid
MojoKid writes: ARM's Cortex-A57 is just now starting to break stride with design wins and full-ramp production in new mobile products. However, today ARM is releasing a wealth of information on its successor: the Cortex-A72. ARM is targeting a core clock of 2.5GHz for the Cortex-A72 and it will be built using a 14nm/16nm FinFET+ process. Using the Cortex-A15 (NVIDIA Tegra 4, Tegra K1) as a baseline, ARM says that the Cortex-A57 (Qualcomm Snapdragon 810, Samsung Exynos 5433) offers 1.9x the performance. Stepping up to the Cortex-A72, which will begin shipping in next year's flagship smartphones, offers 3.5x the baseline performance of the Cortex-A15. These performance increases are being made within the same power envelope across all three architectures. So in turn, the Cortex-A72 can perform the same workload as the Cortex-A15 while consuming 75 percent less power. Much like the Snapdragon 810, which uses a big.LITTLE configuration (four low-power Cortex-A53 cores paired with four high performance Cortex-A57 cores), future SoCs using the Cortex-A72 will also be capable of big.LITTLE pairings with the Cortex-A53. ARM has also announced its new Mali-T880 GPU, which offers 1.8x the performance of the current generation Mali-T760. Under identical workloads, the Mali-T880 offers a 40 percent reduction in power consumption compared to its predecessor. ARM again also points to optimizations in the Mali-T880 to efficiently support 4K video playback.

Submission + - Americans Watched A Lot Of Pr0n After The Super Bowl 1

Submitted by Freshly Exhumed
Freshly Exhumed writes: Perhaps this is one for sociologists to explain, but as Pornhub Insights has previously tracked during other major sporting events, Internet traffic changes on both Pornhub and YouPorn surrounding major sporting events tend to be in a pattern resembling an upside down parabola. This year’s post-Super Bowl pr0n-centric activity occurred in much the same pattern.

Submission + - Big Telecoms Strangling Municipal Broadband, FCC Intervention May Provide Relief (hothardware.com)

Submitted by MojoKid
MojoKid writes: With limited choice and often dismal upstream speeds, it's no wonder many people are excited to hear that newcomers like Google Fiber are expanding super-fast gigabit internet across the country. But some Americans also have access to other high-speed fiber internet options that compete with the big guys like Comcast and Time Warner Cable: municipal internet. In the case of the small town of Wilson, NC, town officials first approached Time Warner Cable and Embarq, requesting faster Internet access for their residents and businesses. Both companies, likely not seeing a need to "waste" resources on a town of just 47,000 residents, rebuffed their demands. So what did Wilson do? It spent $28 million dollars to build its own high-speed Internet network, Greenlight, for its residents, offering faster speeds and lower prices than what the big guys could offer. And wouldn't you know it; that finally got the big telecoms to respond. However, the response wasn't to build-out infrastructure in Wilson or compete on price; it was to try and kill municipal broadband efforts altogether in NC, citing unfair competition. NC's governor at the time, Bev Perdue, had the opportunity to veto the House bill that was introduced, but instead allowed it to become law. However, a new report from indicates that the FCC is prepared to side with these smaller towns that ran into roadblocks deploying and maintaining their own high-speed Internet networks. The two towns in question include aforementioned Wilson, and Chattanooga, TN. Action by the FCC would effectively strike down the laws — like those that strangle Greenlight in Wilson — which prevent cities from undercutting established players on price.

Submission + - Round-Up: GeForce GTX 980 and 970 Cards From MSI, EVGA, and Zotac Reviewed (hothardware.com)

Submitted by MojoKid
MojoKid writes: In all of its iterations, NVIDIA's Maxwell architecture has proven to be a good performing, power-efficient GPU thus far. At the high-end of the product stack is where some of the most interesting products reside, however. When NVIDIA launches a new high-end GPU, cards based on the company's reference design trickle out first, and then board partners follow up with custom solutions packing unique cooling hardware, higher clocks, and sometimes additional features. With the GeForce GTX 970 and GTX 980, NVIDIA's board partners were ready with custom solutions very quickly. These three custom GeForce cards, from enthusiast favorites EVGA, MSI, and Zotac represent optimization at the high-end of Maxwell. Two of the cards are GTX 980s: the MSI GTX 980 Gaming 4G and the Zotac GeForce GTX 980 AMP! Omgea, the third is a GTX 970 from EVGA, their GeForce GTX 970 FTW with ACX 2.0. Besides their crazy long names, all of these cards are custom solutions, that ship overclocked from the manufacturer. In testing, NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 980 was the fastest, single-GPU available. The custom, factory overclocked MSI and Zotac cards cemented that fact. Overall, thanks to a higher default GPU-clock, the MSI GTX 980 Gaming 4G was the best performing card. EVGA's GeForce GTX 970 FTW was also relatively strong, despite its alleged memory bug. Although, as expected, it couldn't quite catch the higher-end GeForce GTX 980s, but occasionally outpaced the AMD's top-end Radeon R9 290X.

Submission + - The Pirate Bay is back online, properly

Submitted by cbiltcliffe
cbiltcliffe writes: About a month ago, a story was submitted that the Pirate Bay domain name was back online. This story mentioned a timer, which supposedly showed the time since the police raid. I didn't notice at the time, but a more recent check showed this counter was counting down, not up, with a time to reach zero at the end of January. Sometime around a week ago, the waving pirate flag video changed to a graphic of an orange phoenix, and a disabled search box showed up. I've been watching the site since, and now, about 12 hours before the timer was to reach zero, the site is back up, complete with searches.

Submission + - Dell 2015 XPS 13: Smallest 13" Notebook With Broadwell-U, QHD+ Display Reviewed (hothardware.com)

Submitted by MojoKid
MojoKid writes: Dell's 2015 XPS 13 notebook made a splash out at CES this year with its near bezel-less 13-inch QHD+ (3200X1800) display and Intel's new 5th Gen Core series Broadwell-U processor. At 2.8 pounds, the 2015 XPS 13 isn't the absolute lightest 13-inch ultrabook book out there but it's lighter than a 13-inch MacBook Air and only a few ounces heavier than Lenovo's Core M-powered Yoga 3 Pro. The machine's Z dimensions are thin, at .33" up front to .6" at its back edge. However, its 11.98" width almost defies the laws of physics, squeezing a 13.3" (diagonal) display into an 11.98-inch frame making it what is essentially the smallest 13-inch ultrabook to hit the market yet. Performance-wise, this review shows its benchmarks numbers are strong and Intel's Broadwell-U seems to be an appreciable upgrade versus the previous generation architecture, along with lower power consumption

Submission + - Passengers React To Tesla 'Insane Mode' Button That Delivers 0-60 In 3 Seconds (hothardware.com)

Submitted by MojoKid
MojoKid writes: Tesla's Model S P85D is a beast; there is no question about it. The all-wheel-drive electric sedan generates 691hp and 687 ft-lbs of peak torque. That's enough to hurtle the 4,900-pound vehicle to 60 mph in roughly three seconds. The vehicle actually lays down a mind-blowing 864 ft-lbs of torque at the wheels. So, what happens when you toss an unsuspecting person into the passenger seat of the vehicle for some wickedly fast takeoffs? The passengers are subjected to "silent fury" courtesy of the car's "Insane Mode" setting which unleashes all of the P85D's power at once and minimizes wheel spin at launch. The reactions are priceless. With the Model S P85D now out in the wild, the next big release from Tesla will come in the form of the Model X crossover that will use a similar AWD setup.

Submission + - Adobe's Latest Zero-Day Exploit Repurposed, Going Viral Via Adult Websites (hothardware.com)

Submitted by MojoKid
MojoKid writes: Yesterday, Adobe issued a patch for bug CVE-2015-0311, one that exposes a user's browser to become vulnerable to code injection, and the now infamous Angler EK (Exploit Kit). To fall victim to this kind of attack, all someone needs to do is visit a website with compromised Flash files, at which point the attacker can inject code and utilize Angler EK, which has proven to be an extremely popular tool over the past year. This particular version of Angler EK is different, however. For starters, it makes use of obfuscated JavaScript and attempts to detect virtual machines and anti-virus products. Its target audience is also rather specific: porn hounds. According to FireEye, which has researched the CVE-2015-0311 vulnerability extensively, this exploit has reached people via banner ads on popular adult websites. It was also noted that even a top 1000 website was affected, so it's not as though victims are surfing to the murkiest depths of the web to come in contact with it.

Submission + - Alienware Alpha Windows-Based Steam Machine Alternative PC Console Tested (hothardware.com)

Submitted by MojoKid
MojoKid writes: Valve's Steam Machine was all the rage at CES 2014 but as we enter 2015, the SteamOS gaming platform (and Valve's Steam Controller) are still works in progress. SteamOS hasn't been written off, but Dell, which was one of the first PC makers to build a custom console-sized system for SteamOS, made it clear they weren't waiting around. Dell's Alienware gaming brand launched the Alienware Alpha, which is targeted as a living room gaming PC. The Alienware Alpha plugs the holes left by Valve with standard PC and Microsoft hardware, Microsoft-powered software and a simple 10-ft UI developed in house. Instead of shipping with a Steam Controller, for example, the Alpha features an Xbox 360 wireless controller. The 10-foot user interface, which would have been handled by SteamOS, comes courtesy of Dell's custom Alpha UI. And that software, in turn, runs on Windows 8.1, though you can choose to boot directly to Windows if you wish. You can also boot to Steam Big Picture mode. Prices on the various Alpha models currently available range from $499 to $899. The processor selection includes Intel Core i3, Core i5, and Core i7 CPUs and 8GB of memory. For graphics, Alpha relies on an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 860M GPU with 2GB of GDDR5 memory. The system can handle most modern game titles at 1080p resolution with medium to high image quality. It's a decent little gaming rig that looks good and blends in well with a home theater setup.

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