Thanks to research currently being conducted at the 5G Innovation Centre at the UK's University of Surrey we could all be enjoying some incredibly fast mobile data connections, when 5G networks are rolled out. They have recently tested equipment that exceeds 1Tbps wirelessly with extremely low latency. This lab test handily beats any …
Read More »Solar eclipses could soon become dangerous
Solar eclipses are probably not something that most of us humans have been scared of in a very long time, thanks to science and reasoning, but soon there may actually be a reason to be at least a little nervous. With our increasing dependence on energy drawn from the Sun …
Read More »Start10 the Windows 10 Start menu replacement from Stardock
While some of us have no problem navigating and customizing the Windows Start menu in Windows 8, there are a few who just cannot get to grips with it, or hate the changes that it brought. Seeing as things are not going to change all that much with Windows 10, …
Read More »DirectX12 could bring AMD and NVIDIA together
In a pretty exciting rumor today there have been claims that the new DirectX standard coming with Windows 10, could allow you to use graphics card from both AMD and NVIDIA. The so called, Explicit Asynchronous Multi-GPU capabilities could bring all of the GPU power in a system into a pool …
Read More »SteamVR hardware could finally soon be upon us
It's been a while since we have heard anything about Valve efforts to dip its toes into the virtual reality hardware market, but it seems that the wait may very soon be over. At GDC 2015 between March fourth and sixth they have officially announced that they will be showing off a, …
Read More »CITIZENFOUR wins an Oscar and Snowden does an AMA
CITIZENFOUR, the recently premiered documentary by Laura Poitras about the beginning of the Edward Snowden NSA revelations, has won an Oscar for “Best Documentary” at this year's Academy Awards ceremony. The film shows Snowden's efforts to expose the gross abuses of the US government's National Security Agency, along with the help of Laura Poitras …
Read More »Bing predicts 84% of this year’s Oscar winners correctly
The Bing prediction engine has been busy this last week getting to grips with the Oscars and trying to predict the winners for each category. While it didn't get all 24 predictions correct, it did manage to get 20 correct giving it an 84% success rate. At last year's Oscars …
Read More »Y2k for the Linux world is the year 2038
All computer systems rely heavily on clocks to perform almost any function and this is a problem when your computer OS, does not know how to count past a certain number. The year 2038 will be for Linux, much like the old Y2k “Millennium Bug” back in 2000, where-by computers …
Read More »A functional Halo helmet for bikers is here
If you are a Halo fan, the iconic helmet of Master Chief is forever etched into your brain, even if you are not a Halo fan you have most likely seen the helmet clad super warrior somewhere. You may see him soon (or his helmet at least) cruising down the road …
Read More »Lenovo “messed up” with Superfish bloatware
Lenovo has recently been in hot water due to its use of Superfish, or what it calls “shopping aid” software, that it pre-installed on some of its laptops between September and January. It had originally said that the software was only being pulled temporally, while it waited for a new version …
Read More »Apple will continue to repair MacBooks with GPU fault
It seems that some MacBooks that were sold between February of 2011, until December of 2013 started to develop some pretty severe graphical issues when they were used. Back in 2014 a class action lawsuit was even brought against Apple, as it knew that the laptops were defective and failed to properly compensate customers. …
Read More »Would you pay for YouTube? Google think so
It's no secret that YouTube is the go to source for instantly watching online videos these days, with YouTube access being a consideration when people are buying anything from tablets and phones, to consoles and TVs, let alone PCs. But now that YouTube is in such a dominant position, as …
Read More »Spies probably have the keys to your phone
Everything your phone transmits to and receives from your network providers phone tower is encrypted, so that only the network operator can receive your calls and data and route them as you request. This is all encrypted with a set of keys on the sim card inside your phone and another set …
Read More »Want to buy 50,000 Bitcoins?
In a rare opportunity, thanks to the United States Marshals Service and Ross Ulbricht of Silk Road fame, you are now able to bid on 50,000 seized Bitcoins. These Bitcoins are currently worth around £7.7 million (or $11.9 million USD) and were seized from Ulbricht when the feds snatched his laptop away from him in a San …
Read More »HTTP/2 is finished and will be coming to your browser soon
The Internet Engineering Task Force has just reached a consensus and finished finalising the next major update, to the HTTP standard that we all use every day. The specification builds upon and is an alternative to, but does not obsolete, the HTTP/1.1 standard that was first introduced in 1999, that we currently use whenever …
Read More »The best selling British computer is the Raspberry Pi
The low-cost and low power Raspberry Pi micro-computer has just crossed the five million sales marker, making its creators, the Raspberry Pi foundation, the biggest selling UK-based computer manufacturer ever. The Pi computer was originally intended to be used in classrooms to help kids learn to code, but it has found a lot …
Read More »The Halo Needler is now a real dart gun
There are many iconic guns in the Halo series, but perhaps one of the strangest was the Covenants Needler (or Type-33 Guided Munitions Launcher as you may know it). It fired piercing needles that embedded into a target and then after a second or so each dart exploded with predictably bad …
Read More »Computers are now better than you at recognising stuff
On average, us flesh sacks can recognise stuff in pictures pretty well, with an error rate of around 5.1% according to a recent study. Previously computers could come pretty close to that, getting around 6.66% of objects wrong. Now however, a new computer vision system from Microsoft Research is actually managing to …
Read More »Dota 2 reaches over 1,000,000 simultaneous online players
One of the wonderful things about the Steam platform is that it is incredibly open with its statistics, showing how many people are playing different games and how many users are online at all times. This is something that is pretty unique amount digital distribution platforms and it allows us to …
Read More »Water cooling in a super computer called Trinity
I'm sure your gaming PC is astonishingly powerful and some of you probably have some pretty incredible custom built water cooling solutions, but they don't stand a chance next to the water cooling system currently being installed at the Los Alamos' Strategic Computing Center for the new Trinity supercomputer. Previous supercomputers at the …
Read More »Obama signs order to protect America’s computer networks
In a move to help protect American online businesses and help them coordinate with US authorities, Obama has signed an executive order that will make federal agencies set up a way of sharing data between technicians in these businesses and federal agents. This information sharing will go both ways, with companies tipping …
Read More »The .blog gTLD is now owned by some guy from Panama
The number of Generic Top Level Domains (or gTLDs) has expanded rapidly since ICANN got around to opening up the bidding process, to allow people and corporations to apply for any gTLDs in 2012. After the application process had finished there were applications for 1,409 new TLDs. Some of these domains were …
Read More »Peter Molyneux’s Curiosity indirectly makes a God
Peter Molyneux's Curiosity game that had thousands tapping away at big cube for months during 2013 trying desperately to reach the center and the final tap. In the end a young chap from Edinburgh called Bryan Henderson tapped the final block out of existence and was destined to receive the …
Read More »China loves censoring the internet so much it wrote a song about it
In a very strange video that has leaked out, despite Chinese efforts to keep it off the internet (we all know that never works), officials from the Cyberspace Administration of China perform a song about how amazing internet censorship is. This seems a bit odd when it is coming from the very …
Read More »Windows 10 Technical Preview arrives on phones
A few hours ago Microsoft opened up the Windows 10 Technical Preview, to a few models of Lumia phones that are currently running Windows Phone 8.1. While on the surface this upgrade isn't a massive change for Windows phone 8.1 users, underneath the covers big changes have been made, to allow …
Read More »NVIDIA posts record revenues for fiscal 2015
NVIDIA has had a very good financial year over the last 12 months, finishing off with a record-breaking 4th quarter with revenue in Q4 of $1.25 billion, up 9 percent from the previous years quarter. GPU revenues for the quarter were 85.8 per cent of the total and climbed 13 percent to bring in …
Read More »Apple bans “bonded servitude” of factory workers
When a new Apple product is being made, production ramps up massively in factories that supply components and products to it, this obviously necessitates a large hiring spree by these factories. Until recently these workers could be charged more than a month's salary in recruitment fees by the agency that hired them, rather than …
Read More »Facebook unveils its data centre scale open-source switch
Facebook might not be the first company that you think of when it comes to data centre hardware, but over the last few years hardware engineering is something that the social network has started to take very seriously, something that happens naturally when your company deals with 890 million daily active users. Today …
Read More »Atari announce Asteroids: Outpost an open-world survival MMO
When you think of the classic Atari game Asteroids, you might imagine that is about as far from any current MMO as one can go in a spectrum of PC games, but that's not what Atari think. Enter a new title bearing the original games name, Asteroids: Outpost, a PC …
Read More »Apple acquires $848m stake in Solar power plant
As part of his keynote address to the Goldman Sachs conference, Tim Cook has announced that Apple has purchased an $848m stake in a new solar plant, to be built in Monterey County, California by First Solar. For its stake in the new plant it will get 130 of the total 230 …
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