Software/Hardware news

[zme-ul]

Warning about large hard discs, GPT, and Gigabyte Motherboards such as GA-P35-DS4

[zme-ul]

UL, a global safety science leader, today announced the acquisition of Futuremark, the market leading provider of performance benchmarking software.

[zme-ul]

ZALMAN Files for Bankruptcy

The company filed for bankruptcy on the 3rd of November in Seoul. This is suspected to be due to a scam by its owner Moneual.

---

Moneual, a maker of home appliances such as home theater PCs and robot vacuum cleaners, was once lauded as an adorable up-and-coming small enterprise. Investors, government officials and even Bill Gates hailed the company as a champion of innovation.

On paper, the company’s performance was more than impressive. Moneual, founded in 2004, joined the club of firms whose sales exceeded 1 trillion won last year, boasting 1.27 trillion won in sales and 110 billion won in operating profit.

No wonder it was inducted into the ranks of the “Hidden Champions,” a group of promising small- and medium-sized enterprises named by the Export-Import Bank of Korea. No one questioned the value and potential of this marvelous tech firm which grew by an average of 50 percent each year.

As it turned out, this success story was nothing but a fraud. The company went bankrupt last month, and its founder and two other executives were put behind bars on charges of tax evasion, fraud and operating slush funds.

What happened was that the founding CEO, Park Hong-seok, fabricated documents to overstate the value of home theater PCs shipped overseas. He used them to receive export financing amounting to 3.2 trillion won over a six-year period, starting in 2009.

The company even operated a bogus plant and storage facility in Hong Kong, which were staffed by temporary workers only when bankers or trade officials visited. It sounds like a perfect racket.

Using the ill-gotten money, Park operated slush funds worth 44.6 billion won, and he brought 12 billion won of this into Korea to use personally, for gambling, buying a private mansion and paying credit card bills. Creditor banks have yet to recover 674.5 billion won.

[DANiel]

Dar sunt fanboy Zalman...

[zme-ul]

baga imprumut la banca si cumpara-o

[zme-ul]

update:

Zalman tells Maximum PC that the bankruptcy rumors are "completely false," and while there are some "financial difficulties due to the recent troubles experienced by Moneual, Zalman is not going bankrupt," plain and simple. Furthermore, if you currently own a Zalman product that's under warranty, nothing is changing -- existing products will continue to be covered as usual.

We're also told that Zalman will release a more in-depth statement later this month to explain "the recent scandals in Korea" by Moneual, but in the meantime, the company will continue to operate as normal

http://www.maximumpc.com/zalman_claims_ ... false_2014

[zme-ul]

direct din gura AMD: DX12 nu vine pe W7
daca mai aveati sperante, la gunoi cu ele

phpBB [video]

[zme-ul]

overclock3d.net - Gigabyte, When is a revision not a revision?

[joonior_bmf]

phpBB [video]

Display: 5,5-inches, 1920×1080.
RAM: 2 GB.
Internal storage: 16 GB.
Processor: MediaTek MTK6596, octa-core, 2,2 GHz.
Battery: 4000 mAh.
OS: Android 4.4.4 KitKat.
Price: 250 $ (?)

[Jaunty]

The Pirate Bay down, forever? (Peter Sunde blog post)
The Open Bay: Now Anyone Can Run A Pirate Bay ‘Copy’
https://oldpiratebay.org/
https://rarbg.com/
...
http://thepiratebay.cr/

[zme-ul]

GTX 960 Specifications leaked

[zme-ul]

AMD plugs firmware holes that allowed command injection

phpBB [video]

[zme-ul]

NVIDIA Publishes Statement on GeForce GTX 970 Memory Allocation

NVIDIA’s statement affirms that the GTX 970 does materially differ from the GTX 980. Despite the outward appearance of identical memory subsystems, there is an important difference here that makes a 512MB partition of VRAM less performant or otherwise decoupled from the other 3.5GB.

Being a high level statement, NVIDIA’s focus is on the performance ramifications – mainly, that there generally aren’t any – and while we’re not prepared to affirm or deny NVIDIA’s claims, it’s clear that this only scratches the surface. VRAM allocation is a multi-variable process; drivers, applications, APIs, and OSes all play a part here, and just because VRAM is allocated doesn’t necessarily mean it’s in use, or that it’s being used in a performance-critical situation. Using VRAM for an application-level resource cache and actively loading 4GB of resources per frame are two very different scenarios, for example, and would certainly be impacted differently by NVIDIA’s split memory partitions.

For the moment with so few answers in hand we’re not going to spend too much time trying to guess what it is NVIDIA has done, but from NVIDIA’s statement it’s clear that there’s some additional investigating left to do. If nothing else, what we’ve learned today is that we know less than we thought we did, and that’s never a satisfying answer. To that end we’ll keep digging, and once we have the answers we need we’ll be back with a deeper answer on how the GTX 970’s memory subsystem works and how it influences the performance of the card.

[zme-ul]

GeForce GTX 970: Correcting The Specs & Exploring Memory Allocation

[brutalistu]

phpBB [video]

[zme-ul]

GLNext, OpenGLs susccesor, to be presented @GDC March 5 by Valve, Epic, Unity, Oxide and Frostbite Engineers

Join us for the unveiling of Khronos' glNext initiative, the upcoming cross-platform graphics API designed for modern programming techniques and processors. glNext will be the singular choice for developers who demand peak performance in their applications. We will present a technical breakdown of the API, advanced techniques and live demos of real-world applications running on glNext drivers and hardware.

[zme-ul]

phpBB [video]

[zme-ul]

Why is the Raspberry PI2 camera-shy ?

Peter’s bug report came via our forums. He’d been proudly photographing his new Raspberry Pi 2, and had discovered something peculiar: every time the flash on his camera went off, his Pi powered down.

[kensky]

HUGE SPY PROGRAM EXPOSED: NSA has hidden software in hard drives around the world

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/r-russia ... z3S6WtblGf

[Jaunty]

^ Recomand articolul din Ars Tehnica.