HyperX Savage 128GB Flash Drive Review
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Microsoft Zune is No More
Microsoft stopped production of the Zune music player in 2011 but continued offering its Zune online services. That was until yesterday when the company finally closed the door on its music experiment. The move wasn't a surprise as Microsoft announced that November 15 would be the end of Zune back in September. Microsoft is continuing to offer a monthly music pass through the Groove Music Pass, offering the same features as the Zune Music Pass with the exception of 10 free monthly downloads.
Source: Mashable
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AMD Gains Some Ground on NVIDIA
NVIDIA has been dominating the GPU market at the expense of rival AMD for some time now, with NVIDIA holding an 81.9% market share last quarter and AMD at 18%. In the most recent quarter AMD was able to take back a small piece of the pie, increasing its share to 18.8%. That number is down nearly 10% from the same quarter last year where AMD had a 28.4% share. Add in Board partners have indicated that the number of units being shipped is down from the same time last year but noted that the "average selling prices of GPUs in 2015 have been the highest ever."
Source: Fudzilla
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Experiment Proves Einstein's 'Spooky Actions' Happen
When quantum mechanics was still in its infancy, many scientists took up positions for and against it, with Albert Einstein initially against it. The reason he was against it is because he and another scientist worked out a scenario that would require "spooky action at a distance" to be possible under the new rules. Today we know that phenomenon to be quantum entanglement, but we have still been checking that there are no non-quantum answers, and researchers at NIST have settled the question.
The scenario Einstein helped develop was that two quanta could be made to share a state, such that revealing the state of one would instantly affect the other. That problem is that instant effect because according to Relativity, information cannot travel faster than the speed of light, so some 'spooky action' must be involved. While on paper entanglement is the answer, in reality there are other ways to replicate the phenomenon without invoking quantum mechanics, such as by having sampling biases, not having detection separated enough. The NIST experiment was able to rule out these loopholes though, thanks to new technologies that can efficiently detect photons faster than light-speed communication could reach from one detector to another, and with settings picked by random number generators.
The results technically do not prove quantum mechanics is the answer, but leave only a one in 170 million chance that some local hidden action is the solution. This exceeds the five sigma confidence level needed to declare a discovery to the particle physics community.
Source: NIST
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Hardware Roundup: Monday, November 16, 2015, Edition
A new week is upon us, with several items to help you start it off right. There is a review of the DEEPCOOL Gamer Storm Gabriel low-profile CPU cooler, which is a mere 60mm tall with the fan installed, so it should fit in pretty much every low-profile case around. We have a look at the Cooler Master NovaTouch TKL, but the special Barebones edition that comes without keycaps for those already planning to use their own. For some audio needs, the Corsair VOID Stereo Gaming Headset gets put to the test to hear what it has to offer. If you're currently roaming the wasteland of The Commonwealth and need a little help, we have a handy walkthrough of Fallout 4. Last for the day is a water cooling guide covering the gear and what you need to get started down that path.
CPU Cooling
DEEPCOOL Gamer Storm Gabriel Low-Profile CPU Cooler @ PC Perspective
Water Cooling 101: Why Water Cooling and The Gear Used @ ThinkComputers
Keyboards/Mice
Cooler Master Barebones NovaTouch @ LanOC Reviews
Speakers/Headphones
Corsair VOID Stereo Gaming Headset @ Madshrimps
Gaming
New Fallout 4 Walkthrough @ Neoseeker
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Image Processing In the Cloud Improved for Mobile Devices
Among the promises of Cloud Computing is that an underpowered thin client, like a smartphone, can use the power of remote servers to perform processes that would take too long to do locally. To manipulate images taken by a phone, this requires uploading the original image, the instructions for the manipulation, and then downloading the image again. MIT researchers, however, have devised a new method that dramatically cuts the down on the data transmitted, the power consumed, and the time needed.
Instead of sending the original image to the servers, this new method has the phone send a low resolution JPEG version. As one pixel in this image represents an average of pixels in the original, high-frequency noise is added to the image. This effectively increases the resolution of the image by adding random data, which is there to prevent the image manipulation algorithms from using color consistency too heavily. Now the server applies the manipulation to the noisy image and breaks it into pieces. These pieces are then analyzed by a machine-learning algorithm to characterize the manipulation in just 25 parameters. Now instead of transmitting multiple pieces, say 64x64 (4096 pixels) in size, just 25 numbers are sent for each piece, cutting bandwidth consumption by 98% to 99%. Using those parameters, the phone can apply the manipulation itself far more easily than if it tried to do it all on its own. In fact, the power it consumes performing these manipulations is less than the power it would take to upload and download the original and manipulated images.
This method is only applicable in some situations, such as applying filters to an entire image and not removing and replacing parts of it, but when you consider the savings it brings with it, that is hardly a concern. Also the resulting image is technically not quite what applying the manipulation directly to the original image would get you, but it is close enough to be acceptable.
Source: MIT
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Treyarch Releases Performance Patch for Call of Duty: Black Ops 3
Treyarch has officially released a performance patch for its Call of Duty: Black Ops 3 video game over the weekend. The patch, which comes in at 520MB and is automatically downloaded for those utilizing Steam, is supposed to bring "bug fixes and performance improvements" to the game. Unfortunately, a change log has not been provided for the patch, and a wealth of gamers over on the Group Announcements page of the Steam Community and the official Black Ops 3 PC forums are still having problems properly running the Treyarch video game. The patch is exclusive to the PC version of Call of Duty: Black Ops 3 at this point in time, so it will be interesting to see exactly what changes the update actually contains.
Source: VG247
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