Slashdot Mirror

Deathspawner writes: Intel's Basis has just sent an email to customers who own a Basis Peak smartwatch with some bad news: it's being recalled. In mid-June, Basis admitted that its flagship (and only) smartwatch had the chance to overheat, and then asked them to wait for a firmware update. Ultimately, a firmware update couldn't have been issued that wouldn't have compromised the user experience, and as such, the company is asking for every single Basis Peak to be returned for a full refund -- it will even handle the shipping. Users can still access Basic Peak services until December 31, 2016, after which they will be turned off and the watch will be rendered useless. If you own a Basic Peak, you can visit the support site and follow the instructions to return your unit and claim your refund.

Deathspawner writes: Intel's Basis has just sent an email to customers who own a Basis Peak smartwatch with some bad news: it's being recalled. In mid-June, Basis admitted that its flagship (and only) smartwatch had the chance to overheat, and then asked them to wait for a firmware update. Ultimately, a firmware update couldn't have been issued that wouldn't have compromised the user experience, and as such, the company is asking for every single Basis Peak to be returned for a full refund -- it will even handle the shipping. Users can still access Basic Peak services until December 31, 2016, after which they will be turned off and the watch will be rendered useless. If you own a Basic Peak, you can visit the support site and follow the instructions to return your unit and claim your refund.

Deathspawner writes: NVIDIA has today released a Game Ready GeForce driver that introduces its interactive screenshot tool 'Ansel.' Named after famed photographer Ansel Adams, this new tool requires a developer to integrate up to a couple hundred lines of code to give players the ability to pause their game, move around the environment, and then capture a more "artistic" image. To further that artistic value, users will have the ability to apply filters as well as capture an image in high-res 360 mode so that they can be viewed properly with a virtual-reality (VR) headset. Currently, Ansel supports only a single game -- Mirror's Edge Catalyst -- but NVIDIA promises that many more supported titles are on the way. In addition, NVIDIA has released its first ever video game via Steam that just so happens to be a VR game. The game is called VR Funhouse and is available for free via Steam but is only playable on the HTC Vive. The game consists of a virtual-reality carnival and employs many NVIDIA graphics technologies, like collision-based haptic feedback and advanced physics simulation.

Deathspawner writes: Last March, Canada's regulatory agency for all things broadcasting, CRTC, ruled that cable TV providers would soon be forced to offer $25/mo packages. With enforcement having kicked-off on March 1, these inexpensive packages have now been made available. As Techgage has discovered, though, the first packages out-of-the-gate pack a number of caveats, and in some cases, are outright misleading. And, despite a simple framework to worth with, the two largest providers in the country, Rogers and Bell, offer vastly different packages, and ultimately vastly different values to the consumer.

Deathspawner writes: There's never a lack of stuff to be impressed by in Minecraft, but rarely does that impressive stuff involve a corporation. Recently, Verizon teamed up with some prolific Minecraft streamers to design a mod that takes interactivity to a new level. After building an in-game smartphone and cellular tower, the gamer is not only able to browse the Web on the device, but also video call, all in a humorously low resolution. Verizon has created a GitHub page to explain how the magic is done.

Deathspawner writes: Western Digital today announced a new, helium-filled enterprise HDD that allows for 10TB capacities 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.

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.

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.

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 for granting a refund, no questions asked: if you've bought the game within the past two weeks and played it for two hours or less, your refund is guaranteed. The changes are being welcomed by most, but not all: some developers of smaller games that take less time to play through are worried that this will lead to abuse, and the system may enable more risk-free review-bombing as well.

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. Vigile adds The GTX 980 Ti has 6GB of memory (versus 12GB for the GTX Titan X) but PC Perspective's review shows no negative side effects of the drop. This implementation of the GM200 GPU uses 2,816 CUDA cores rather than the 3,072 cores of the Titan X, but thanks to higher average Boost clocks, performance between the two cards is identical. And at Hot Hardware, another equally positive, benchmark-laden review.

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 — you really have to go out of your way to come even close. Additional reviews available at PC Perspective and AnandTech. The latter notes, "...from a technical perspective, the GTX Titan X and GM200 GPU represent an interesting shift in high-end GPU design goals for NVIDIA, one whose ramifications I’m not sure we fully understand yet. By building what’s essentially a bigger version of GM204, heavy on graphics and light on FP64 compute, NVIDIA has been able to drive up performance without a GM204-like increase in die size. At 601mm2 GM200 is still NVIDIA’s largest GPU to date, but by producing their purist graphics GPU in quite some time, it has allowed NVIDIA to pack more graphics horsepower than ever before into a 28nm GPU. What remains to be seen then is whether this graphics/FP32-centric design is a one-off occurrence for 28nm, or if this is the start of a permanent shift in NVIDIA GPU design."

Deathspawner writes: Following its huge Windows 10 event last Wednesday, Microsoft released a brand-new preview build to the public, versioned 9926. We were told that it'd give us Cortana, Microsoft's AI assistant, as well as a revamped Start menu and updated notifications pane. But as it turns out, that's not even close to summing up all that's new with this build. In fact, 9926 is easily the most substantial update rolled out so far in the beta program, with some UI elements and integral Windows features seeing their first overhaul in multiple generations.

Deathspawner writes: Samsung's SM951 is an unassuming gumstick SSD — it has no skulls or other bling — but it's what's underneath that counts: PCIe 3.0 x4 support. With that support, Samsung is able to boast speeds of 2,150MB/s read and 1,550MB/s write. But with such speeds comes an all-too-common caveat: you'll probably have to upgrade your computer to take true advantage of it. For comparison, Samsung says a Gen 2 PCIe x4 slot will limit the SM951 to just 1,600MB/s and 1,350MB/s (or 130K/100K IOPS), respectively. Perhaps now is a bad time to point out a typical Z97 motherboard only has a PCIe 2nd Gen x2 (yes, x2) connection to its M.2 slot, meaning one would need to halve those figures again.

Phopojijo writes "A monitor redraws itself top to bottom because of how the electron guns in CRT monitors used to operate. VSync was created to align the completed frames, computed by a videocard, to the start of each monitor draw; without it, midway through a monitor's draw process, a break (horizontal tear) would be visible on screen between the two time-slices of animation. Pixels on LCD monitors do not need to wait for above lines of pixels to be drawn, but they do. G-Sync is a technology from NVIDIA to make monitor refresh rates variable. The monitor will time its draws to whenever the GPU is finished rendering. A scene which requires 40ms to draw will have a smooth 'framerate' of 25FPS instead of trying to fit in some fraction of 60 FPS." NVIDIA also announced support for three 4k displays at the same time. That resolution would be 11520×2160.

Deathspawner writes "Grand Theft Auto V has shown itself to be potential GOTY material, and has even managed to break a sales record already. But aside from that, the game has also become one of the most adult-oriented games ever released, with torture, drug use and sex prevalent not long after beginning the game. You'd expect this gameplay to deter most parents from picking the game up for their young children — but not so. An anonymous editorial at Kotaku written by a video game store employee says that out of the ~1,000 copies sold in the first week, at least 10% of them went to parents accompanied by a child. Clearly, this could be interpreted as a problem. Techgage adds that this is one of the biggest problems facing gaming today. With one breath, many parents criticize video games for being so violent, and with the next, they're saying 'thanks' at the counter after picking up these very games for their kids. While ESRB ratings and other warnings about violent games for kids have good reason to exist, many parents still ignore them, aren't aware to them, or simply don't care about their warnings."

Deathspawner writes "Valve has today announced its next attempt at a console-killer: 'Family Sharing' is a feature that will allow you to share your Steam library with family and close friends. This almost seems too good to be true, and while there are caveats, this is going to be huge, and Valve knows it. As Techgage notes, with it you can share nearly your entire Steam library with family or friends, allowing them to earn their own achievements, and have their own saved games. 'Once a device is authorized, the lender's library of Steam games becomes available for others on the machine to access, download, and play. Though simultaneous usage of an account’s library is not allowed, the lender may always access and play his games at any time. If he decides to start playing when a friend is borrowing one of his games, the friend will be given a few minutes to either purchase the game or quit playing.'"

Deathspawner writes "There's little that's more frustrating than being a legal customer and getting screwed over by the company you're supporting. If there's a perfect example of this, it's with Microsoft's OS and its millions of customers that have had to ring its tech support lines for activation help. Recently, a Techgage writer got bit by an issue with Windows 8 — caused by Microsoft itself — and wasn't even able to call to fix it. Microsoft has two problems to solve here: it needs online chat support (like most large companies in 2013) and it definitely needs an activation system that doesn't make things difficult for its legal customers on a too-regular basis."

Deathspawner writes with a view on Six Strikes we don't normally see around here: "It's been well-established all over the Web that the just-implemented 'Six Strikes' system is bad... horrible, worthy of death to those who created it. But let's take a deep breath for a moment. Can Six Strikes actually be a good thing for consumers? While the scheme isn't perfect (far from it), one of the biggest benefits from this system is that it introduces a proxy, and any persecution you might have easily faced prior to Six Strikes is delayed under the new program. Wouldn't you rather receive a warning from your ISP than be sent a bill or legal threat by the RIAA/MPAA?" A couple of days ago, someone sent Torrentfreak an actual alert they received from Comcast (the alert itself is a few screens down). Noteworthy is that there is zero mention of the appeals process.

Deathspawner writes "Using a mobile device to control an application on a PC, media player or video game console, isn't too uncommon, but it is when the content being controlled is a game. Just how possible would it be to play a fairly fast-paced game on your PC via your mobile device? Google wanted to find out, so it crafted a game called Super Sync Sports, where you control an athlete on your desktop or notebook via controls on your phone or tablet. To make a game like this possible, Google turned to WebSockets for real-time collaboration between two devices, HTML5 for the audio, Canvas for the graphics, and CSS3 for the styling and transitions." It appears that it routes your controls through the Internet rather than locally. Something like this over bluetooth or wifi with a shared touch screen might be cool for electronic board games.

Deathspawner writes "If there's one thing that each CES can bring, it's a handful or products that manage to drop jaws everywhere. Kingston's latest flash drive series, DataTraveler HyperX Predator 3.0, manages to be one of those. It's aimed at folks who actually need mass storage on the go at speeds that mechanical hard drives cannot offer. Available soon will be a 512GB model, followed by the 1TB later this quarter. The drive features read speeds of 240MB/s and write speeds of 160MB/s — not quite desktop SSD speeds, but much faster than a mechanical hard drive, and with vastly reduced latencies due to it being flash storage. Not surprisingly, pricing has not yet been discussed."

Deathspawner writes "Perhaps hinting at the fact that the official Steam for Linux launch isn't too far off, Valve has begun updating some game pages to include Linux system requirements. Some games don't list only Ubuntu as the main supported distro, with some listing Linux Mint and Fedora as well. A common theme is that Valve recommends you always use a 'fully updated' OS, regardless of which distro you use. And based on the system requirements laid out so far, it's safe to say that Serious Sam 3: BFE will undoubtedly be the most system-intensive game released at launch."

Deathspawner writes "The future of PC gaming is oft-debated, but one thing's for certain: modding has always made it better. With that, wouldn't it make sense for developers to focus more on giving the community the modding tools it needs? Further, couldn't publishers look to modding as a way to increase revenue, by allowing modders to sell their sanctioned creations? Valve already offers robust community options in its Steam platform — and already has payment processing in place. Is this the natural next step for PC gaming?"

Deathspawner writes "Think that all SATA 3.0 (6Gb/s) controllers are alike? As Techgage explores, that's not the case. While most SATA 3.0 controllers do deliver the performance promised, the most popular offering on the market does not — at least where bandwidth-busting SSDs are concerned. The controller comes from Marvell, and was bundled on all motherboards prior to AMD and Intel launching their own SATA 3.0 solutions. In some cases, Marvell's controller is half as fast as the others, making it no better than a SATA 2.0 controller. For those with motherboards using a Marvell controller, the solutions are few; build a new PC, or invest in a super-expensive add-in card."

Deathspawner writes "In an unusual move, Advanced Micro Devices has issued a press release rejecting its endorsement for the industry recognized benchmark SYSmark 2012. Developed by BAPCo and backed by industry heavyweights such as Dell, Intel and Hewlett-Packard, AMD has stated that BAPCo both has tuned SYSmark to create bias in favor of its competitor, and that its benchmarks are not relevant for the audience it targets. Also noted is a complete lack of heterogeneous CPU+GPU testing. Techgage tears apart AMD's claims to see if they are valid, while also evaluating the overall usefulness of SYSmark and the impact it can have on consumers."

chix4mat writes "Techgage takes a first look at the upcoming Gentoo-based distro 'Sabayon.' It's a feature-filled Live DVD that allows you to install within minutes. Users are treated to a Vista-esque KDE theme, with transparent windows The greatest feature of the distro is the hardware and software support. DVD movies work from the start in addition to audio, bluetooth, WiFi and even XGL."