Items tagged with action
In the world of action cameras, GoPro currently rules the roost. But there's always room for competition, and JVC is hoping to steal a bit of the market share with an updated version of its own tough-as-nails, go-anywhere recording machine. The upgraded GC-XA2 ADIXXION was announced today, offering a water-, shock-, dust- and freeze-proof chassis. In terms of specification improvements, they include 1920 x 1080 60p/50p Progressive Full HD recording, and 1280 x 720 high-speed recording at 120fps/100fps for 4x slow-motion playback. Other upgrades include a brighter and wider-angle optical lens, improved image stabilization, a higher-resolution LCD monitor with Auto off and Auto brightness functions,...
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Spore is a critically-acclaimed game, but (at least by users) its DRM has been universally panned. Many of those who know anything about the SecuROM copy protection used in the game don't want it near their computers, unless they absolutely have to. And while Electronic Arts (EA) has "loosened things up" slightly, the DRM has spawned thousands of negative reviews at Amazon.com and protest creatures. And now, it has birthed a class action lawsuit (.PDF). The lawsuit was filed on Sept. 22nd by Melissa Thomas, represented by Alan Himmelfarb and Scott Kamber with KamberEdelson LLC. The lawsuit makes a number of statements, including: What purchasers are not told is that, included in the purchase,...
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Despite our technophile-ness, we haven't seriously considered moving to the i 64-bit version of Windows Vista, mostly because we figure we will have application or device driver woes. However, in a blog post on the Windows Vista blog, Microsoft product manager Chris Flores said that Microsoft has noted a shift in adoption of 64-bit operating systems. Microsoft has been tracking this shift by tracking the number of 64-bit PCs connecting to Windows Update. According to Flores, The installed base of 64-bit Windows Vista PCs, as a percentage of all Windows Vista systems, has more than tripled in the U.S. in the last three months, while worldwide adoption has more than doubled during the same period....
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Intel Statement on Latest European Commission Action SANTA CLARA, Calif. – Intel Corporation today issued the following statement in response to allegations contained in the new Statement of Objections (SO) issued by the European Commission: We're naturally disappointed the Commission has decided to issue a new SO. The issuance of a second SO suggests that the Commission supports AMD's position that Intel should be prevented from competing fairly and offering price discounts which have resulted in lower prices for consumers. We will evaluate this newest SO and respond fully, but it's clear that the allegations stem from the same set of complaints that our competitor, AMD, has been making to regulators...
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Getting that perfect picture has always been a problem. There are books and courses dedicated to the art of taking one, but what if you don't have time for all that? Some cameras detect smiles and wait to take pictures until the time is perfect, other cameras take a few photos then run a quick facial recognition routine on them to determine which one had the most smiles. But compared to those techniques, Sony's Happy Face technology certainly seems the most impressive, at least on paper. The idea behind the Happy Face technology is simple: The camera can take existing photos and retouch them so that the subject(s) appear to be smiling. Think of it as a sort of automated...
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When it comes to solid, reliable networking connections, nothing beats copper at the moment. It's not the most convenient, as most people (particularly wives and girlfriends) don't want cables running across the floor, or even jacks in walls throughout the house. That leaves wireless, and although most people have wireless-G at this time, 54 Mbps (when you consider actual throughput) pales in comparison to standard 100 Mbps wired Ethernet. Even when you consider wireless-N, which still hasn't even been fully ratified, and its up to 300 Mbps speed, throughput isn't that fast by any means. Let's not forget the issues with distance and signal drop that exist in both...
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You've all felt the pain a WiFi network can bring, with fading signal strength through walls or over even moderately long distances inside your home or office. The only other option, short of snaking CAT5 cables inside walls and around your home or office is Powerline Networking. Initially, Powerline Networking technology was spotty at best in terms of its performance and reliability. Though it's not new, only recently have products entered the market which have the potential to meet or even exceed 100 Mbps wired Ethernet. One such product is the Actiontec MegaPlug AV 200 Mbps Ethernet Adapter. Rated for peak throughput of up to 200Mbps, we...
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By now we hope you have all taken some time to check out our evaluation of AMD’s latest ATI Radeons, the HD 3870 and HD 3850. If you haven’t you can find the article right here. In that article we talk a bit about CrossFireX and explain that with a future driver release and the right motherboard, two, three, and four-way CrossFire configurations will be possible. And now, we want to show you what a system with four-way CrossFire will look like... What you see here are four Radeon HD 3870 cards installed in an upcoming MSI motherboard built around the AMD 790FX chipset. We don’t have benchmarks results to share with you just yet, but you can probably...
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20th Century Fox scrapped a plan to make a movie based on Microsoft's smash hit Halo series of video games, but they've inked a deal with Redmond to become the primary licensor for the Halo franchise anyway. They'll sell books, clothes, and various other collectible stuff, and probably cash in big in September when Halo 3 is released. Though the unsuccessful film development helped bring the two companies closer together, Fox's licensing division has a longer relationship with Microsoft. It handled similar duties for "Perfect Dark Zero" and "Kameo: Elements of Power," two Microsoft-published games that came out in late 2005 in conjunction with the launch of the Xbox 360. "Those...
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Microsoft has teams of engineers working on all kinds of interesting projects. Some are never meant see the light of day; others have to be seen to be believed, like Photosynth. Photosynth is a technology that takes multiple pictures and not only stiches them together (with angle correction) but also allows the construction of 3D environments based on the photographs. Photosynth is an amazing new technology from Microsoft Live Labs that will change forever the way you think about digital photos. Our software takes a large collection of photos of a place or an object, analyzes them for similarities, and displays them in a reconstructed three-dimensional space.With Photosynth you can:...
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X-Bit Labs have managed to get their hands on the demo for the add-on for the popular game F.E.A.R and run it using the latest crop of hardware to illustrate what hardware will provide the best possible performance for this title. Using the Jupiter EX graphics engine and Havok physics engine, the title demands some significant resources for those aiming to get the full visual effect of the game. In short, one had best have a strong CPU with 2GB of memory and a dual-GPU solution if they have any intention of seeing this title running at 1280x960 with full FSAA and AF. Obviously, F.E.A.R. Extraction Point is tremendously hungry for graphics card's performance and we the better one...
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Gamers can get their first taste of the upcoming expansion pack for F.E.A.R. with the single player demo that was released today. Head on over to whatisfear.com to get yourself started....
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There is a great article on-line at acmqueue.com detailing the past, present, and potential future methods by which humans interact with computers. They cover advances made at Xerox's PARC and speculate about future technologies like perceptual interfaces. I don't know about all of you, but give me a good wireless laser-mouse and a clicky keyboard and I'm all set. "Personal computing launched with the IBM PC. But popular computing - computing for the masses - launched with the modern WIMP (windows, icons, mouse, pointer) interface, which made computers usable by ordinary people. As popular computing has grown, the role...
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ATI announced today their plans for "boundless gaming" which includes new hardware physics acceleration. To those interested in seeing how the ATI cards perform physics, Tweak Town has coverage of the ATI presentation at Computex, which demonstrated their "True-to-Life Gaming Reality". They also posted a short video of a physics demo. Check out the article here. ...
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