Hauppauge Digital TV Tuner for Xbox One Officially Released
While Microsoft has provided a wealth of support for cable, satellite, live TV applications, and on demand applications through the Xbox One, the company has not provided a solution for users of antennas, until now that is. The company has officially revealed the launch of the Hauppauge Digital TV Tuner for Xbox One, which allows owners of an HDTV antenna to access broadcast networks available in their region. The Hauppauge Digital TV Tuner for Xbox One features support for streaming over-the-air TV to other devices within the home using the Xbox application or the Xbox One SmartGlass application, and offers the ability to pause up to 30 minutes of live television. Over-the-air content is even integrated into OneGuide, providing Xbox One owners with all of their favorite content in one easy to access place.
The Hauppauge Digital TV Tuner for Xbox One is available for immediate purchase at Microsoft Stores and Amazon for $59.99.
Source: Xbox Wire
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CareFirst Suffers Security Breach of Single Database
CareFirst BlueCross BlueShield has officially announced that roughly 1.1 million current and former CareFirst members and individuals who do business with the health insurer online are affected by a recently found security breach. The cyberattack on CareFirst that affects the 1.1 million individuals occurred in June 2014, in which attackers successfully gained limited access to a single database that contained usernames, names, birth dates, email addresses, and subscriber identification numbers. Fortunately, no account passwords were compromised as a result of the security breach, and the database that was accessed contained no Social Security numbers, medical claims, employment, credit card, or financial information. Chet Burrell, the CareFirst President and CEO, publically stated that the company regrets any concern that customers now face due to the attack, and that all affected customers will be provided with two years of free credit monitoring and identity theft protection.
Source: CareFirst
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Oculus VR Hosting an Event on June 11
Oculus VR sent out invitations to an event that will be held in San Francisco on June 11 with the tagline "Step into the Rift." It is speculated that the company will reveal the consumer version of the Oculus Rift VR headset, which currently has an early 2016 release date. The company is also planning to show it off at E3 which starts on June 16, and unveiling it prior to the event would make sense. Oculus recently revealed the minimum system specs for using the Rift, requiring an Intel i5-4590, 8GB of RAM, and an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970 or AMD R9 290.
Source: PC Mag
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Adblock Plus Launches Web Browser for Android
The developer behind the popular Adblock Plus browser extension has released a standalone browser for Android devices known as Adblock Browser. The browser is currently in beta and simply packages Firefox for Android with Adblock Plus. For users that want to test it out, the APK can be downloaded from the Adblock Plus website. Adblock Plus has been available on Android for a while, both as a standalone app and as an add-on for Firefox for Android, but both of those required some finagling to get working properly. Adblock Plus cofounder Till Faida described the move stating, "Adblock Browser for Android puts the control back into users’ hands."
Source: Venture Beat
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Tunable Liquid Antenna Created
Many of the devices we use every day rely on antennas, even though manufacturers have gotten quite good at hiding them. This achievement is actually not a little one as longer antennas can have desirable properties. As reported in the American Institute of Physics' Journal of Applied Physics, researchers at North Carolina State University have developed a tunable liquid antenna that may give us the best of both worlds.
The antenna in question is made of a liquid metal, which normally would require a pump to manipulate. Pumps are not exactly easy to integrate into devices like phones though, but the researchers have found an electrochemical solution that does the trick. When a voltage is applied to the liquid metal, the oxide layer on its surface is affected, which in turn impacts its surface tension. When a positive voltage is applied, the surface tensions weakens, allowing the liquid metal to flow into a capillary, lengthening the antenna, while a negative voltage does just the opposite. This allows the antenna's properties to be altered on the fly, such as increasing the range of frequencies it can operate over.
The next step for the researchers is to see what else they can do with this discovery. Potentially other tunable, liquid components could be made, such as filters, but they also want to see if more complicated shapes can be made, than one dimensional antennas.
Source: EurekAlert!
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Hardware Roundup: Wednesday, May 20, 2015, Edition
The middle of the week is here, with a few items along the way to help get you through the day. We have a review of the OCZ ARC 100 240GB SSD, which uses the Barefoot 3 M10 controller and Toshiba's 19nm MLC NAND flash to offer a fast and affordable storage solution. The Buffalo MiniStation Extreme NFC Portable Hard Drive is another storage solution, but one that offers military-grade dust, water, and shock protection, as well as an NFC chip for easy unlocking. Wrapping things up is a look at the Microsoft Lumia 640 smartphone, a budget Windows 8.1 phone that can upgrade to Windows 10 for free later on.
Storage/Hard Drives
OCZ ARC 100 240GB SSD @ Madshrimps
Buffalo MiniStation Extreme NFC Portable Hard Drive @ ThinkComputers
Mobile
Microsoft Lumia 640 @ TechSpot
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ARCTIC Begins Selling Thermal Pads
ARCTIC, which provides advanced cooling solutions for PCs, including CPU coolers, VGA coolers, and case fans, has revealed that it is now selling thermal pads after the company successfully received multiple awards with its thermal pastes. The latest product from ARCTIC offers optimal heat transfer in situations where gaps are present due to height differences and uneven surfaces. The silicon thermal pads by ARCTIC feature a special filler and low hardness, and do not contain any metallic particles, making them electrically non-conductive.
The thermal pads by ARCTIC are immediately available for purchase, and feature an MSRP of $4.99, though retailers such as Amazon.com currently have the product listed for $7.99.
Source: techPowerUp
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The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt Now Available to GTX TITAN X Owners for Free
For some time, NVIDIA has been giving away The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt to consumers who purchased select GeForce GTX 980, 970, and 960 graphics cards. In an effort to provide consumers of its monster GTX TITAN X graphics card with the same level of value, NVIDIA has revealed that current and new GTX TITAN X owners are now eligible to receive The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt for free. In order to receive a Steam key for the CD Projekt RED game, GTX TITAN X owners simply need to download the latest GeForce drivers along with the latest version of GeForce Experience and click on the "redeem rewards" button within the application.
The offer to receive The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt for free is only available for a limited time, and detailed instructions on receiving and redeeming the code can be found on the official GeForce website.
Source: techPowerUp
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Real-Time, Screen-Camera Communication You Cannot See
Some believe that the future for some technologies will involve more directly linking them, and we already see something like this with television content that our phones can listen and react to. The trick for such a future is keeping this communication hidden from the viewer, or at least unobtrusive. Researchers at Dartmouth College have achieved just that, while still encoding information directly into the video displayed on screen.
Some attempts to encode data into video have been made before, but one does not necessarily want a QR code to appear on top of whatever they are watching. The Darthmouth researchers' solution, called HiLight, is to use the alpha channel of the image, so the information can be found in pixel translucency changes. This way the communication and screen content is separated, hiding it from the users, yet still allowing for real-time communication. Also, because it uses the visible part of the spectrum, there is not electromagnetic interference.
Source: Dartmouth College
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AMD Fiji GPUs Aimed at NVIDIA's TITAN; Fiji XT and VR Details and Price Emerge
We have some new rumors concerning AMD's upcoming Fiji XT GPU, and boy, are they a doozy. The first rumor deals with the fact that Fiji XT will not be the R9 390X, but rather a separate product similar to NVIDIA's TITAN line. The R9 300 series will be composed of Hawaii GPUs rebranded and heavily tweaked to offer better performance, which is an interesting take on a new series. When viewed like that, it didn't seem like there was any room for the all-new Fiji GPUs, but now it appears to be slated for the ultra high-end market. It would also mean a vastly highly price tag, which is where the second rumor comes in.
This rumor deals with the fact there will be two Fiji products: the Fiji XT and the Fiji VR. The Fiji XT will be a single GPU model with 4GB of HBM, which AMD says won't be an issue. The Fiji VR is the dual-GPU card with 8GB of HBM, so 4GB per GPU. Whether or not it will be watercooled, like early rumors suggested, remains to be seen. The single GPU Fiji XT card is expected to be priced at $849, with the Fiji VR's price currently unknown. It will most likely be above $1,000, maybe even around $1,200, so it definitely won't be for everyone. The single GPU card will also launch earlier, think mid to late June, with the dual GPU one later on, which also lines up with past rumors.
Now, remember, all of this is strictly based on rumors, so do take it with a grain of salt. Computex is around the corner, so you can definitely be sure to find the exact details on the Fiji GPUs right here.
Source: WCCFtech and Fudzilla
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AMD Explains Why 4GB of HBM Is Not an Issue for Fiji GPUs
There have been some concerns lately about AMD's upcoming Fiji GPU and its use of HBM memory. Namely the amount of it, as the card could use 4GB of HBM, which is the same amount the current high end cards from both AMD and NVIDIA have. If Fiji is as powerful as the rumors suggest, wouldn't that 4GB HBM be a limitation and a possible hindrance to pushing the card as far as possible for graphical fidelity? Well, AMD CTO Joe Macri recently explained why that is nothing to worry about, as according to Macri:
You're not limited in this world to any number of stacks, but from a capacity point of view, this generation-one HBM, each DRAM is a two-gigabit DRAM, so yeah, if you have four stacks you're limited to four gigabytes. You could build things with more stacks, you could build things with less stacks. Capacity of the frame buffer is just one of our concerns. There are many things you can do to utilise that capacity better. So if you have four stacks you're limited to four [gigabytes], but we don't really view that as a performance limitation from an AMD perspective.Macri did not say exactly how much HBM would be on the Fiji GPU, especially since HBM supports a 1024-bit bus and over 100GB/s of bandwidth per stack. That is an insanely huge number on both accounts, because four stacks would mean a 512GB/s bandwidth. HBM is also much smaller than GDDR5, so where a1GB of GDDR5 takes up 672mm2, a 1GB stack of HBM occupies only 35mm2. According to AMD, it allows for a PCB 50% smaller than the one with the R9 290X, which bodes exceptionally well for a dual-GPU card or small form factor cards.
If you actually look at frame buffers and how efficient they are and how efficient the drivers are at managing capacities across the resolutions, you'll find that there's a lot that can be done. We do not see 4GB as a limitation that would cause performance bottlenecks. We just need to do a better job managing the capacities. We were getting free capacity, because with [GDDR5] in order to get more bandwidth we needed to make the memory system wider, so the capacities were increasing. As engineers, we always focus on where the bottleneck is. If you're getting capacity, you don't put as much effort into better utilising that capacity. 4GB is more than sufficient. We've had to go do a little bit of investment in order to better utilise the frame buffer, but we're not really seeing a frame buffer capacity [problem]. You'll be blown away by how much [capacity] is wasted.
So, a Fiji GPU equipped with 4GB of HBM1 potentially sounds like it will be extremely competitive with what NVIDIA has to offer. Of course, first we actually need that Fiji GPU to see for sure, which Macri says should arrive sometime in the next two months. Maybe we'll see it during Computex and then get our hands on it near the end of June. But we'll just have to wait and see.
Source: Ars Technica via WCCFtech
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