Tag: consumer

Intel’s “Compute Stick” is a full Windows or Linux PC in an HDMI dongle

Andrew Cunningham The Intel Compute Stick is a full PC in an HDMI dongle. 3 more images in gallery LAS VEGAS, NEVADA—Set-top boxes and streaming sticks are decent, cost-effective ways to turn the TV you already have into a “smart TV,” but Intel has an intriguing new option for those of you who want something a little more versatile. The Intel Compute Stick is a full Bay Trail PC complete with a USB port, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, and a micro SD expansion slot, and you’ll be able to get them with both Windows 8.1 and Linux. We got a chance to see and hold the stick at CES this week. It’s just a bit bigger and bulkier than simple sticks like the Chromecast or the Fire TV stick, but they’re all basically comparable in size. The stick is big enough to block one or more neighboring HDMI ports depending on how your TV or monitor is laid out, but Intel says it will bundle a short extension cable you can use to keep this from happening. The stick has a number of potential applications—in a business, you could hook it up to any HDMI monitor and create a makeshift all-in-one PC, or hook it up to a TV for use as a digital signage kiosk. At home, plugging it into your TV would give you something less than a full HTPC, but something much more capable than a basic streaming stick or even most streaming set-top boxes. The biggest problem for now is that the stick cannot be powered over HDMI—you’ll need a powered USB port or a USB power adapter if you want to be able to turn the thing on. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Intel’s “Compute Stick” is a full Windows or Linux PC in an HDMI dongle

Apple Faces Class Action Lawsuit For Shrinking Storage Space In iOS 8

An anonymous reader notes that Apple is being sued over claims that iOS 8 uses too much storage space on the company’s devices. “Ever wonder why there never is enough space on your iPhone or iPad? A lawsuit filed this week against Apple Inc. alleges that upgrades to the iOS 8 operating system are to blame, and that the company has misled customers about it. In the legal complaint filed in California, Miami residents Paul Orshan and Christopher Endara accuse Apple of “storage capacity misrepresentations and omissions” relating to Apple’s 8 GB and 16GB iPhones, iPads and iPods. Orshan has two iPhone 5 and two iPads while Endara had purchased an iPhone 6. They contend the upgrades to the operating system end up taking up as much as 23 percent of the storage space on their devices.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Apple Faces Class Action Lawsuit For Shrinking Storage Space In iOS 8

Proscutors Raid LG Offices Over Alleged Vandalism of Samsung Dishwashers

As reported by Reuters, Korean manufacturing giant LG’s Seoul headquarters have been raided over allegations that LG employees sabotaged dishwashers made by rival Samsung. The Samsung machines were “on display at two stores in September ahead of the IFA electronics show in Berlin.” From the article: On Friday, investigators searched the Seoul offices of LG Elec’s home appliance head, Jo Seong-jin, and others and secured documents and computer hard disks related to the IFA fair, Yonhap News Agency said. They also combed through LG Electronics’ home appliance factory in the southeastern city of Changwon, the report said. … Samsung sued LG Electronics employees after the incident in Germany, and LG said the company has counter-sued Samsung employees on Dec. 12. Media reports have earlier said prosecutors banned LG’s Seong-jin from leaving the country ahead of the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) to be held January 6-9. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Proscutors Raid LG Offices Over Alleged Vandalism of Samsung Dishwashers

Seagate Bulks Up With New 8 Terabyte ‘Archive’ Hard Drive

MojoKid writes Seagate’s just-announced a new ‘Archive’ HDD series, one that offers densities of 5TB, 6TB, and 8TB. That’s right, 8 Terabytes of storage on a single drive and for only $260 at that. Back in 2007, Seagate was one of the first to release a hard drive based on perpendicular magnetic recording, a technology that was required to help us break past the roadblock of achieving more than 250GB per platter. Since then, PMR has evolved to allow the release of drives as large as 10TB, but to go beyond that, something new was needed. That “something new” is shingled magnetic recording. As its name suggests, SMR aligns drive tracks in a singled pattern, much like shingles on a roof. With this design, Seagate is able to cram much more storage into the same physical area. It should be noted that Seagate isn’t the first out the door with an 8TB model, however, as HGST released one earlier this year. In lieu of a design like SMR, HGST decided to go the helium route, allowing it to pack more platters into a drive. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Seagate Bulks Up With New 8 Terabyte ‘Archive’ Hard Drive

Comcast Sued For Turning Home Wi-Fi Routers Into Public Hotspots

HughPickens.com writes: Benny Evangelista reports at the San Francisco Chronicle that a class-action suit has been filed in District Court in San Francisco on behalf of Toyer Grear and daughter Joycelyn Harris, claiming that Comcast is “exploiting them for profit” by using their home router as part of a nationwide network of public hotspots. Comcast is trying to compete with major cell phone carriers by creating a public Xfinity WiFi Hotspot network in 19 of the country’s largest cities by activating a second high-speed Internet channel broadcast from newer-model wireless gateway modems that residential customers lease from the company. Although Comcast has said its subscribers have the right to disable the secondary signal, the suit claims the company turns the service on without permission. It also places “the costs of its national Wi-Fi network onto its customers” and quotes a test conducted by Philadelphia networking technology company Speedify that concluded the secondary Internet channel will eventually push “tens of millions of dollars per month of the electricity bills needed to run their nationwide public Wi-Fi network onto consumers.” The suit also says “the data and information on a Comcast customer’s network is at greater risk” because the hotspot network “allows strangers to connect to the Internet through the same wireless router used by Comcast customers.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Comcast Sued For Turning Home Wi-Fi Routers Into Public Hotspots

Consumer-Grade SSDs Survive Two Petabytes of Writes

crookedvulture writes The SSD Endurance Experiment previously covered on Slashdot has reached another big milestone: two freaking petabytes of writes. That’s an astounding total for consumer-grade drives rated to survive no more than a few hundred terabytes. Only two of the initial six subjects made it to 2PB. The Kingston HyperX 3K, Intel 335 Series, and Samsung 840 Series expired on the road to 1PB, while the Corsair Neutron GTX faltered at 1.2PB. The Samsung 840 Pro continues despite logging thousands of reallocated sectors. It has remained completely error-free throughout the experiment, unlike a second HyperX, which has suffered a couple of uncorrectable errors. The second HyperX is mostly intact otherwise, though its built-in compression tech has reduced the 2PB of host writes to just 1.4PB of flash writes. Even accounting for compression, the flash in the second HyperX has proven to be far more robust than in the first. That difference highlights the impact normal manufacturing variances can have on flash wear. It also illustrates why the experiment’s sample size is too small to draw definitive conclusions about the durability of specific models. However, the fact that all the drives far exceeded their endurance specifications bodes well for the endurance of consumer-grade SSDs in general. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Consumer-Grade SSDs Survive Two Petabytes of Writes

According to The Verge, Microsoft is planning to unveil the consumer preview of Windows 10 at an eve

According to The Verge , Microsoft is planning to unveil the consumer preview of Windows 10 at an event in late January. We’ll apparently see new consumer features, including a touch interface, and get more news on Microsoft’s phone and tablet lines. [ The Verge ] Read more…

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According to The Verge, Microsoft is planning to unveil the consumer preview of Windows 10 at an eve

Getting ‘Showdown’ To 90 FPS In UE4 On Oculus Rift

An anonymous reader writes Oculus has repeatedly tapped Epic Games to whip up demos to show off new iterations of Oculus Rift VR headset hardware. The latest demo, built in UE4, is ‘Showdown’, an action-packed scene of slow motion explosions, bullets, and debris. The challenge? Oculus asked Epic to make it run at 90 FPS to match the 90 Hz refresh rate of the latest Oculus Rift ‘Crescent Bay’ prototype. At the Oculus Connect conference, two of the developers from the team that created the demo share the tricks and tools they used to hit that target on a single GPU. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Getting ‘Showdown’ To 90 FPS In UE4 On Oculus Rift

Alienware’s Triangular Area-51 Re-Design With Tri-SLI GeForce GTX 980, Tested

MojoKid writes Dell’s Alienware division recently released a radical redesign of their Area-51 gaming desktop. With 45-degree angled front and rear face plates that are designed to direct control and IO up toward the user, in addition to better directing cool airflow in, while warm airflow is directed up and away from the rear of the chassis, this triangular-shaped machine grabs your attention right away. In testing and benchmarks, the Area-51’s new design enables top-end performance with thermal and acoustic profiles that are fairly impressive versus most high-end gaming PC systems. The chassis design is also pretty clean, modular and easily servicable. Base system pricing isn’t too bad, starting at $1699 with the ability to dial things way up to an 8-core Haswell-E chip and triple GPU graphics from NVIDIA and AMD. The test system reviewed at HotHardware was powered by a six-core Core i7-5930K chip and three GeForce GTX 980 cards in SLI. As expected, it ripped through the benchmarks, though the price as configured and tested is significantly higher. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Alienware’s Triangular Area-51 Re-Design With Tri-SLI GeForce GTX 980, Tested