Tech News
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Micron to Acquire Elpida Memory in $2.5 Billion Deal
Published: Monday, July 2, 2012 | By: DennisHere is some hometown news.
Hometown being "my" home town considering that the Micron HQ is located about 10 miles from my present location. Crucial, a division of Micron, is also close but not mentioned in the news story.
Micron, based in Boise, Idaho, also announced on Monday that it was buying a 24 percent stake in the Rexchip Electronics Corporation from the Powerchip Technology Corporation for about $334 million. Since Elpida owns a 65 percent stake in Rexchip, Micron will own 89 percent of that company once both deals close.
Elpida, which makes dynamic random-access memory chips used in personal computers and other products, filed for bankruptcy earlier this year amid mounting debt and falling chip prices. Although some analysts questioned Micron’s appetite for all of Elpida, the deal would allow Micron to expand its manufacturing capacity at a relatively low price.Good news for Micron, makes you wonder how that will change the enthusiast memory market considering that Elpida made some of the better chips out there.
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Battlefield 3 Premium Subscriptions Top 800,000 in First Weeks
Published: Friday, June 29, 2012 | By: DennisDLC and micro transactions are the methods that most game developers have adopted to keep their games in the news and fresh with gamers, and why not, its almost free to the players and costs the game developers very little to market.
Within the first two weeks of availability, more than 800,000 players signed up for the Battlefield 3 Premium service, says EA Games chief Patrick Soderlund in an interview with Game Hunters.
The service tied to EA's popular first-person shooter gives players early access to the game's downloads, including the recently released Close Quarters.
Soderlund says the initial response has topped EA's expectations. "We are very pleased with the performance so far," he says.They are offering the DLC on PS3 first (likely because of some grease from Sony) and then open it up for the other consoles and PCs a week later. It would seem that buying a mission pack disk is no longer a viable option.
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HP to hold off on ARM-based Windows tablet
Published: Friday, June 29, 2012 | By: DennisI think this is a good move for them, but I really (and I mean REALLY) hope they decide against using Atom in their designs.
HP has confirmed that it is canceling plans to launch an ARM-based Windows RT tablet and will instead focus solely on Intel-based Windows 8 tablets for debut this fall. The company explains that the decision was influenced by customer feedback, which indicated that the ecosystem of x86 applications would offer the best customer experience.
It would seem that HotHardware was the first to break this story. I guess it pays to farm out your content digestion.
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Hacker uses malware built-in chat to toy with researchers
Published: Friday, June 29, 2012 | By: DennisFun story! (kinda old, sorry about that)
Malware researchers investigating a Trojan linked in a gaming forum as a how-to video for Diablo III got a surprise when the hacker started chatting with them—through a feature in the malware. Franklin Zhao & Jason Zhou of antivirus company AVG were looking for keylogging code in the malware with a debugger after downloading it to a virtual machine when a chat box popped up. The hacker asked, in Chinese, “What are you doing? Why are you researching my Trojan?”
Gotta love when a hacker has a sense of humor, (so to speak) I think in this case the hacker was just looking to be an elitist.
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NL: Review Block - Coolers and Keyboards, Keyboards?
Published: Friday, June 29, 2012 | By: DennisYep thought it might be fun to include some keyboard reviews in this review block. Gaming keyboards and mice are not part of the core focus "here at Ninjalane" (omg I hate having to write that) so I rarely post the reviews that get sent in.
One of these days I may find another super awesome hardware enthusiast that enjoys writing and is willing to post news on a daily basis. Maybe when that happens more of the un-core stuff will get some lime light.
Until then this is what you get
(as always comments are accepted, please email or post in the forum)Cooler Reviews
- Thermaltake Frio Extreme CPU Cooler Review @ Hardware Secrets
- Noctua NH-L12 Review at Overclockers Online
- Be Quiet! Dark Rock 2 CPU Cooler Review
- Arctic Freezer i30 CPU Cooler Review on Technic3D
- Lepa Vortex PWM Fan @ TechwareLabs
- Antec KUHLER H2O 920 Liquid CPU Cooler Review @ NikKTech
- Top 5 Heatsink Charts on Frostytech - June Update @ Frostytech
- BeQuiet Dark Rock Pro 2 CPU Cooler @ Pro-Clockers
- Funky Kit Review: Thermaltake Water 2.0 Pro - CPU Liquid Cooler
Input Devices - Keyboards and stuff
- Cooler Master Storm Trigger Gaming Keyboard Review @ Hardware Canucks
- CM Storm Spawn Gaming Mouse @ Planet Overclock
- Roccat Savu Gaming Mouse Review @ XSReviews.co.ukMore to come.
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Top 100 Websites PCSTATS Posts News For... @ PCSTATS
Published: Friday, June 29, 2012 | By: DennisNow this is a great list. Shows what sites are popular based on who sends them news. Ninjalane is on the list but its way down there. This is mostly because I don't post that many reviews when compared to other sites.
If you've ever wondered "does PCSTATS post my news?" this story is for you! As with any industry, some publications send out many news emails a week, others just a few a month. Some publications work really really hard to post nearly EVERY news email they receive in their inbox from fellow websites, while other websites do next to nothing in return. The Top 100 websites PCSTATS has posted news stories for are: TweakTown.com, Digitimes.com, HardwareZone.com, HardwareSecrets.com, LegitReviews.com, Bjorn3d.com, Xbitlabs.com, OverclockersClub.com, HotHardware.com, Hexus.net..... (continued below).
Of course this is only a small look into the metrics of cross-site affiliate hardware site news posting stuff. For instance there are some sites that go to great lengths to post news, so much in fact that they plagiarize the article for keywords making a full page post on their site. These work great for SEO (the main reason for doing it) but translates into 0 (yes that is ZERO) click-thrus to the source. Not only is plagiarism illegal but when it steals traffic that just compounds the problem.
There are other sites that do the news postings right and either make large link lists or individual posts with comments about the reviews. The latter of these two generates the most clicks while the link list is rarely even indexed in google. I track these things and can usually tell what sites post my news based on the traffic they send me.
If there is no or little traffic then I can assume one or more of the following:
1) the site is dead
2) their community just reads the news
3) the site is a content farm
4) the site didn't post the articleI could go on about the politics of the whole thing but that might be best left for an indepth blog post and I hesitate to do that since rocking the boat tends to get me ousted by the community.
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'Breastaurants' Experiencing A Mini-Boom
Published: Wednesday, June 27, 2012 | By: DennisI used to manage the kitchen at a local Breastaurant called "Busters". Their gimmick was black miniskirts and all female waitstaff. The money was good and I got to meet some pretty hot chix would have otherwise ignored my very existence. For a college kid that is sometimes more important than making sure you had a regular meal.
Twin Peaks owner Randy DeWitt downplays all of that and insists that the appeal of the restaurant goes beyond the obvious. Hearty meals and a focus on making customers feel special, he says, are what really keeps them coming back.
"We believe in feeding the ego before feeding the stomach," he says. Or as the website of the mountain lodge-themed restaurant states, "Twin Peaks is about you, `cause you're the man!"
Twin Peaks is part of a booming niche in the beleaguered restaurant industry known as "breastaurants," or sports bars that feature scantily clad waitresses. These small chains operate in the tradition of Hooters, which pioneered the concept in the 1980s but has struggled in recent years to stay fresh.Staying fresh is the hardest part of running a Breastaurant and the challenges often start with the staff based on an implied perception from the customers. (read: unwelcome touchy feely) Despite this the experience can be good when good etiquette is enforced so I hope the trend can stay alive.
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Google Brain-Mapping Project Learns to Find Cats Online
Published: Tuesday, June 26, 2012 | By: DennisLooks like I might have to change the captcha I have implemented to protect the Ninjalane Message Forum from spammers.
As detailed by the New York Times, researchers at Google have been working on a way to map the human brain. Using 10 million images pulled from YouTube videos and a connection of 16,000 processors, the team was able to teach the machines to recognize cats.
While that might seem silly, the project is noteworthy because researchers never prompted the computers to be on the lookout for cat faces. Over time, the machines just recognized the animals.
"It performed far better than any previous effort by roughly doubling its accuracy in recognizing objects in a challenging list of 20,000 distinct items," the Times said.
The large amount of data and computing power also make the project unique.The Captcha I use is based on a project called KittenAuth which takes pictures of cats and cars and requires the user to select all of the cats before submitting the form. Based on what I have seen this works great to stop automated bots from registering but does very little to stop human spammers paid to post.
It also doesn't stop human spammers from creating an account and saving the login details to a robot database. Lucky for me both are easy to spot and with the aid of "The Ban Hammer" I can clean up the system rather quickly.
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Microsoft Surface blurs boundary between tablet and ultrabook
Published: Tuesday, June 26, 2012 | By: DennisI was hoping that someone would mention Asus when it comes to ultratabs.
With Microsoft and Asustek both having come out with tablet-like ultrabook designs that choose to adopt the new Ivy Bridge-based Core i7 processors, instead of processors from Clover Trail platform, Intel is unlikely to be able to demand its downstream partners follow its rules for separating the two product lines, the sources noted.
One thing is certain I will likely be getting an Ivy Bridge based ultratab when they come available and by any means necessary. (beg, borrow steal) This of course is assuming the mfg can:
a) provide good screen resolution
b) keep battery life in check
c) make it affordableSadly we are almost guaranteed that both a and b will not be met while c is left in the questionable category.
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ASUS Xonar Phoebus 7.1 Gaming Soundcard Review @ HardwareHeaven
Published: Monday, June 25, 2012 | By: DennisDiscrete sound cards have fallen out of popularity lately, so much in fact that it is next to impossable to find one to replace the onboard crap most motherboard vendors give us. That's not to say "all" boards come with a crap sound processor, I can name a few, but rather the boards the majority of you buy who opt against affording something good.
Lucky for us Asus still makes a good sound board complete with 7.1 channel audio.
Aimed very much at providing a fantastic gaming experience whether it be 2.0 via the headphone amp or 7.1 through the multi-channel outputs the Xonar Phoebus is, at least on paper, the latest in a line of impressive audio products from ASUS. Today we will be taking a look at the card in detail to find out if it can live up to some very high expectations.
I did get a chance to listen to one of these at Computex and the overall quality is amazing. They also come with a pretty good amplifier which is important when you want to hear bass while running Corsair headsets.
