79053899
submission
Deathspawner writes:
WD today announced a new helium filled enterprise drive that allows for 10TB densities without using the SMR method, sticking to industry standard PMR. SMR, or Shingled Magnetic Recording drives can not typically be used natively by the OS or disk controllers, and instead often require extra software and/or firmware updates. This makes their broad adoption limited, since the drives are not drop-in replacements for the far more ubiquitous Perpendicular Magnetic Recording (PMR). WD’s latest enterprise drive, sold as the HGST Ultrastar He10, uses the PMR storage method, and as such is a full drop-in replacement for any standard hard drive..
78867033
submission
Deathspawner writes:
The ubiquitous WiFi wireless networking standard is commonplace in just about all of our gadgets. With technologies like 802.11ac, we're transferring data over the air at fantastic speeds. However, Professor Harald Haas, hailing from the University of Edinburgh, has invented Li-Fi, which uses VLC or visible light communication to transmit data wirelessly at even higher speeds. In its current iteration, Li-Fi uses LED lights which flicker at a rate that is imperceptible to the human eye to transmit data. Researchers from the University of Oxford were recently able to hit bi-directional Li-Fi speeds of 224 Gbps in a lab setting. To put that in perspective, those speeds would allow 18 high definition movies to be download in a just one second. In addition, researchers at Velmenni based in Estonia have moved past lab trials into a pilot program which uses an even faster version of Li-Fi in a commercial setting. Instead of mere 224Gbps speeds, Velmenni was able to top 1 GBps, roughly 100 times faster than current Wi-Fi technology.
77754851
submission
Deathspawner writes:
The Apple iPhone 6s and 6s Plus have been available for a few weeks now. Many of the new features, like the improved iSight and Facetime cameras, new 3D Touch capabilities, fast storage, and iOS 9 have been discussed quite a bit already, but the A9 SoC (system on a chip) inside the devices deserves some additional attention. Although the A9 packs only dual processor cores, it is able to compete very favorably against even the 8-core SoCs used in devices like Samsung’s Galaxy Note 5 or S6 Edge+ in multi-threaded workloads. And with single-threaded workloads, Apple’s A9 simply dominated. The graphics core in the A9 is similarly powerful, and clearly outpaced the best Samsung and Qualcomm currently have to offer in most benchmarks.
77375439
submission
Deathspawner writes:
The Internet and Web browsers are an ever-changing congruous mass of standards and design. It's a delicate balance between features, security, and performance. Through extensive browser performance testing, some similarities do crop up in the results. If you are in a business environment that's rolling out Windows 10, and the only browsers you have access to are Edge and IE, there's an easy answer: go with Edge. If you do have a choice, then there are perhaps better options to consider, depending on your use case. The performance differences between browsers currently are admittedly quite small, and there is no dominant browser generally speaking, but for Web standards like HTML5, Blink browsers (Chrome, Opera and Vivaldi) still have the upper-hand, even beating the rather vocal and former Web-standards champion, Mozilla.
76635715
submission
Deathspawner writes:
It wasn't that long ago that Samsung unveiled its super-fast SM951 M.2-based SSD, capable of delivering read speeds of 2GB/s. Today, the company one-upped itself with its 950 Pro. Taking advantage of an x4 PCIe 3.0 lane and brand-new V-NAND MLC chips, this drive is able to deliver read performance of 2.5GB/s, and a staggering IOPS performance of 270,000.
75637361
submission
Deathspawner writes:
At its IDF event in San Francisco last week, Intel talked a lot about the super-fast Thunderbolt 3.0 protocol and what it is capable of. Surprisingly, one such use shown off is a GPU dock, one that would allow mobile warriors the ability to play high-end games on their modest notebook, either on the device itself, or an external monitor. We've been hearing about such docks for many years, but we're being promised that this one is going to take hold within the next six months.
74346215
submission
Deathspawner writes:
To say that it’s been a tumultuous month for reddit is an understatement. While multiple events have occurred in recent months that have caused an uproar, such as the banning of popular “hate” subreddits, nothing impacted the site quite like the out-of-nowhere firing of “Ask Me Anything” admin Victoria Taylor last week. Following that, other minor revelations surfaced, and finally, this past Monday, reddit CEO Ellen Pao came out from hiding to issue an apology. While her message instilled a bit more confidence in the future of the site, it wasn't enough. Today, it's been announced that Ellen Pao has left the company she joined last fall, and will be superseded by someone who knows what he's getting into: founder Steve Huffman.
74286995
submission
Deathspawner writes:
Following-up on the release of 12GB and 16GB FirePro compute cards last fall, AMD has just announced a brand-new top-end: the 32GB FirePro S9170. Targeted at DGEMM computation, the S9170 sets a new record for GPU memory on a single card, and does so without a dual-GPU design. Architecturally, the S9170 is similar to the S9150, but is clocked a bit faster, and is set to cost about the same as well, at between $3,000~$4,000. While AMD's recent desktop Radeon launch might have left a bit to be desired, the company has proven with its S9170 that it's still able to push boundaries.
73371089
submission
Deathspawner writes:
Despite all of its competition, Valve's Steam service remains the most popular digital PC game store around. While Steam does do a lot of things right, it can sometimes stumble in the worst of ways. Look no further than April's Skyrim mod debacle as a good example. Well, just as Valve fixed up that issue, it's gone ahead and fixed another: it's making refunds dead simple. While refunds have been possible in the past, it's required gamers to jump through hoops to get them. Now, Valve has set certain criteria, and if it's met, a refund will be granted, no questions asked — a definite step in the right direction.
73352417
submission
Deathspawner writes:
Despite all of its competition, Valve's Steam service remains the most popular digital PC game store around. While Steam does do a lot of things right, it can sometimes stumble in the worst of ways. Look no further than April's Skyrim mod debacle as a good example. Well, just as Valve fixed up that issue, it's gone ahead and fixed another: it's making refunds dead simple. While refunds have been possible in the past, it's required gamers to jump through hoops to get them. Now, Valve has set certain criteria, and if it's met, a refund will be granted, no questions asked — a definite step in the right direction.
73304161
submission
Deathspawner writes:
In advance of the rumored pending launch of AMD's next-generation Radeon graphics cards, NVIDIA has decided to pull no punches and release a seriously tempting GTX 980 Ti at $649. It's tempting both because the extra $150 it costs over the GTX 980 more than makes up for it in performance gained, and despite it coming really close to the performance of TITAN X, it costs $350 less. AMD's job might just have become a bit harder.
71052479
submission
Deathspawner writes:
When NVIDIA announced its GeForce GTX TITAN X at GTC, no one was surprised that it'd be faster than the company's previous top-end card, the GTX 980. But what did impress many is that the company said the card would sport a staggering 12GB of VRAM. As Techgage found, pushing that 12GB is an exercise in patience, with you really having to go out of your way to come even close. This is future-proofing at its best.
70700489
submission
Deathspawner writes:
After a month of anticipation, NVIDIA announced its SHIELD at GDC. Yes – “SHIELD”. Unlike the portable and tablet to come before it, the latest SHIELD is a dedicated set-top box that acts as a media player and game console. It’s an inch thick, five inches high, features Tegra X1 under-the-hood, includes a controller, and costs $199. This is the most intriguing SHIELD yet.
70562117
submission
Deathspawner writes:
It should come as a surprise to no one that the amount of data scraped from our digital lives each and every day is immense. But could there still be room to be wowed — or even a little concerned? At reddit, user FallenMyst claimed that everything we've ever spoken to our phones, either via Siri, Cortana, or what-have-you, has been recorded — and in some cases, we can go back and listen to it. Techgage went on to investigate, and found proof of that claim. Further, it was also discovered that Google could be tracking a lot more data than you were even aware of, such as where you were a couple of years ago. Fortunately, this tracking can be turned off, but there's something to be said about the fact that it's on by default, and is so incredibly subtle.
70532971
submission
Deathspawner writes:
It should come as a surprise to no one that the amount of data scraped from our digital lives each and every day is immense. But could there still be room to be wowed — or even a little concerned? At reddit, user FallenMyst claimed that everything we've ever spoken to our phones, either via Siri, Cortana, or what-have-you, has been recorded — and in some cases, we can go back and listen to it. Techgage went on to investigate, and found proof of that claim. Further, it was also discovered that Google could be tracking a lot more data than you were even aware of, such as where you were a couple of years ago. Fortunately, this tracking can be turned off, but there's something to be said about the fact that it's on by default, and is so incredibly subtle.
