Dune HD Pro : A Premium Entertainment System using the Sigma Designs SMP8910

Dune HD  is one of the most respected middleware developers in the media player scene. By exclusively restricting themselves to Sigma Designs, they have managed to produce an enviable lineup of media players coveted by many people. It was not much of a surprise, then, that their latest offering, the Dune HD Pro received a CES innovation award.

When it was announced in late fall last year, the unit was a silver colored monolithic design. In the space of a few months, it has undergone revisions to become more of a modular design.

The unit in the middle is the player housing the main SoC, the SMP8910. It also has all the DACs for full multichannel analog audio output. The module on top is the Blu-ray / HDD add-on, while the third module
is a NAS system with 4 bays and a touchscreen based control unit. Unfortunately, I couldn't play around with the system because the display was running a canned video, and the unit was just showcased without being powered on (at least in the time that I was at the booth).

The main unit comes in at $1900, and I was told by the Dune rep that the rest of the pricing wasn't fully decided yet. At around $2000, it is difficult to justify the purchase of a media player for a majority of the consumers out there. Hopefully, a lower cost version (with just the SoC, couple of USB ports, wired Ethernet, SPDIF optical out and HDMI 1.4a output) will come out soon.

Much has been said about the SMP8910 and its VXP video post processing. I won't go into the details in this piece, but suffice to say that a large number of users are waiting for the SoC to make an appearance in shipping products and believe that only the premium features offered by the SoC can save the local media streamer market from its current rut.

One of the biggest challenges to be faced by the Dune HD Pro (other than consumers accepting their pricing strategy), is the Cinavia DRM system. While I couldn't elicit any official response from the Dune
representatives, I understood that

Cinavia DRM was included in the latest SDK supplied by SigmaThe Cinavia behavior with that SDK wasn't the same as that of the PS3.

Since the SDK is quite immature, not much can be inferred from the current state. However, Cinavia is a threat that Dune is perfectly aware of. It will be quite interesting to see how it is handled.

At CES, Dune also showcased their IPTV platform (Dune HD TV-101/301) which looks very similar in form factor to the WDTV Live SMP and is targeted towards the same market. In the US, the WDTV Live SMP is well placed, and I believe the Dune HD TV series will find its feet in other markets.

Partnerships with THX and Vudu have also been made public. You can read all about that in the official press releases [1 ] and [2]. It is highly possible that one may be able to watch Vudu in HD on the  various Dune units (based on the SMP8642) already in the market.

Dune also confirmed that the current lineup (Smart series, HD Duo and HD Max) would remain in production and continue to use the SMP8642. There are no plans to shift to a SMP8646 model unless Sigma Designs decides to completely stop shipping the SMP8642 before the SMP8910 lineup takes off.

There is no firm shipping date set for the HDI Dune Pro, but a large number of media streaming enthusiasts (including me) are waiting in anticipation just to see how good the SMP8910 is!

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Make Free Video Calls on Samsung Galaxy S and S2 using Skype

In this post, we will show you simple way to make free video calls on your Samsung Galaxy S and S2 Android Devices using Skype video calling feature which was recently added to some limited android phones only and we hope that they will enable this feature for all android compatible smartphones for next update of this application.

Skype is one the best chat client which support many features such as video calling, text messaging, making group calls, group chat for affordable prices. Skype releases its official app to all the Android users in which you can make video calling from your android device. In the previous update of android there are only few phones supports this video calling feature but in this new update it supports almost all the android devices.

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This story was originally published at TechDragInfo

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How to Scan Wireless Networks on Mac using AirRadar

In this post, we are going to show you tutorial on How to Scan Wireless Networks on Mac OS Using AirRadar Software. Before going to see this procedure, you need to know current available internet options. In this Cyber world everyone wants to surf on the web without any interruptions and disturbances, every individuals are now interested in surfing at their favorite place. This used to be dream a couple of years back now you can access internet through wireless services. Using internet wireless has increased virally from past few years. The main advantages of using this wireless is you can access the internet anywhere in a certain location there is no need to use any wired socket to your device. 

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This story was originally published at TechDragInfo

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Kit Guru take Bulldozer to 4.8GHz on air using GIGABYTE 990FXA-UD7

Earlier today, or perhaps late yesterday if like us you live in Taiwan, AMD launched their latest and highly anticipated FX series series processors. Codenamed ‘Bulldozer’ these new 6 and 8-core CPUs have dominated the PC hardware news and review sites over the last 24 hours, with absolutely tons of benchmark and overclock stats appearing online for us to examine and pour over.

One of the more detailed and eye-catching reviews to surface is by Zardon at KitGuru.net in the UK. Zardon used our high-end 990FXA-UD7 motherboard as the platform from which to examine his AMD FX 8150 Black Edition processor. As well as benchmarking the FX 8150 at stock settings, Zardon also wanted to overcock the CPU to see what hidden performance lay within. By all accounts, he found the UD7 a pleasure to work with;

“We have a lot of experience with the Gigabyte 990FXA-UD7 motherboard and have always achieved great overclocked results with it. For this section of the review, we wanted to get the system stable to 4.6ghz so we could compare clock for clock against the Core i5 2500k and Core i7 2600k, on the next page.

The bios is really straightforward to use and due to the ‘no compromises’ design has fantastic power regulation and stability in an overclocked state.We changed the hardware thermal control to disabled. By adding another 0.100V we managed to get the system stable at 4.6ghz. As simple as that. It really is a testament to the quality of the Gigabyte 990FXA-UD7 that a 1 GHZ overclock is such a painfree process.”

What is also very encouraging is that having devised a healthy overclock of 1GHz, he opted to go back into BIOS and try and crank that clock speed just a little further:

“As we noted earlier in the review, hitting a clock speed of 4.6ghz only required a 0.100 voltage increase and a simple change of the multiplier. Achieving 4.8ghz required a little extra voltage – +0.125 according to the Gigabyte 990FXA-UD7 bios as shown above. We also changed the Load Line Control to the ‘extreme’ setting for complete stability. Until now we didn’t need to use this setting.

We think this is very impressive for air cooling and is around 400mhz better than we achieved with the last generation X6 1100T.”

Here’s the CPUz validation screen.

An overclock of 4.82GHz is pretty much the highest we’ve spotted on the web for the FX 8130 on air. Most other reviewers seemed to have faced stability issues crossing the 4.6GHz line, so of course we’re very proud to see our UD7 leading the pack in terms of overclocking performance. Off course, we also have to say hats off to Zardon for his efforts. For those of you wanting to try and replicate these results, our latest F6E version BIOS was used in the review, which you can download here.

Be sure to read the full review here.

Catch the 990FXA-UD7 board on our site here.

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Building Traffic to your Website Using Forums

In this post, we are going to show you simple way to building traffic to your website or blog using forums. Forums are discussion boards that have some members who ask things to each other. As a blogger you should understand the necessity of using forums to make your site boosted with traffic. Almost, one-third of my site traffic comes from forums. The Good thing about forums is that people are of your site's interest. The Traffic is of high quality and helps you in increasing readership of your blog.

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This story was originally published at TechDragInfo

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Rendering and HPC Benchmark Session Using Our Best Servers

Each time we publish a new server platform review, several of our readers inquire about HPC and rendering benchmarks. We're always willing to accommodate reasonable requests, so we're going to start expanding beyond our usual labor intensive virtualization benchmarks. This article is our first attempt. It was a bumpy ride, but this first attempt produced some very interesting insights.

The increasing core counts on modern servers makes finding useful benchmarks difficult, and given how many businesses have chosen to use virtualization that has been our major focus. For this article, we decided to run the latest version of Cinebench and Stars Euler 3D CFD, as both seemed like they would be fairly easy to work with. That didn't end up being the case, but at least our testing results are a lot more interesting than we imagined they would be.

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Windows 8 Syncs Settings Between Systems Using Windows Live ID

Today on the Building Windows 8 blog, Katie Frigon explains how user settings, Metro apps purchased through the Windows app store, and other data can be synced across Windows 8 devices using a Windows Live ID. 

When setting up a new or reloaded Windows 8 device, you're given an opportunity to sign in with a (or create a new) Windows Live ID. Windows will then create a user profile with that username, and can sync various settings including your lock screen picture, desktop background bookmarks and browser history, and various other settings to the cloud and between devices.

A new Control Panel gives users control over exactly what is synced, and IT administrators will also be able to determine whether users can link their domain accounts with Windows Live IDs (and the kinds of data the users can sync). Data synced to Microsoft's servers is encrypted using SSL/TLS, and that new devices associated with your Windows Live ID must be confirmed before they can access your sync data. The post also notes that local accounts and domain accounts can continue to function just as they always have, if desired. 

These changes are mostly consumer-oriented, and mirror moves by Apple and Google (among others) to sync data between different devices using a central account. For more information (and, as always, there's plenty more), check out the post on the Building Windows 8 blog.

Source: Building Windows 8 Blog

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Using High Performance RAM with AMD A-Series APUs in DX11 Gaming

The Lynx GPU

In recent weeks we’ve been really excited to see the discrete-class performance of AMD’s new A-Series APUs, where a multi-core CPU and a full DirectX11 GPU basically sit side by side on one piece of silicon. This means that users can get fairly solid 3D gaming performance out of their rig using the onboard graphics alone.

Like all of today’s graphics processors, the Lynx GPUs that reside on these Llano APUs are also reliant on the memory sub-system to reach decent performance levels in today’s 3D games. This is because modern GPUs use parallel processing to churn through large data sets on-the-fly, using accelerated pixel and vertex shaders to make these realistic 3D environments come to life. Memory bandwidth, or basically the speed of your RAM, is therefore a crucial factor in getting this data to and from the GPU.

The upshot of all this is that if you use high-performance memory with your A-Series APU, the onboard Lynx GPU will have more bandwidth to play with, resulting in faster frame rates and smoother game-play in modern 3D games.

To give you a clearer idea about just how much extra performance you can expect see by using high-performance RAM, we’ve done some benchmarking and testing which we will share with you here.

Raising the Memory Clock

We took AMD’s A8350 APU, our GIGABYTE A75-UD4H board and tried a variety of differently clocked memory modules. We wanted to see exactly what effect raising the memory clock had on DX11 3D gaming performance. For this we used a variety of Corsair RAM modules; DDR3 1333, 1600, 1866, 2000 and 2400.

And just to make interesting, we also benchmarked the DDR 2400 rig with HiCookie’s overclocked GPU settings – to take a glimpse of the outer limit of A-Series APU performance.

Here are the test configurations we used.

Here are the benchmarks of four DirectX 11 titles that we enjoy playing; Dirt 3, Dragon Age II, Metro 2033 and Civilization V.

As you can see, you can expect to enjoy a decent performance boost with each successive memory clock increase. Civilization V stands out an example of how even relatively affordable DDR 1600 RAM can be used to effect a FPS change of huge significance – moving from 28 FPS to a much smoother 47 FPS. In short, APU users who invest in high-performance memory will be getting more performance out of their AMD APU – in 3 out of 4 cases we explored, that performance boost was pretty much incremental.

Overclocking Does Make a Difference

A few reviewers in the last week or so have concluded that AMD’s Llano APUs are entirely bandwidth constrained, and that overclocking the APU is more or less a waste of time. We attempted to explore that idea by getting our resident overclocker HiCookie to try and push the Lynx GPU on a higher RAM clock. The results here speak for themselves. Using our A75-UD3H board with HiCookie’s overclocked GPU settings, you’re entering another performance bracket entirely, with often double the frame rates of stock settings. If you’re going to use DDR 2400 RAM, there‘s clearly GPU headroom worth exploiting.

A Word to the Wise

So if you’re thinking of building a AMD A-Series rig anytime soon, bear in mind that the RAM you choose will have an effect on gaming performance. High performance RAM will allow you to get more out of the onboard Lynx GPU. But hey, don’t forget that you’ll probably have to configure the memory timings in BIOS according to the manufacturers recommendations (usually printed on the DIMM itself). SPD alone won’t get you there!

Good luck, and good gaming…

You can read this blog in Chinese (中文版) here.

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Qualcomm Demos Remote Handwriting Recognition Using an Ultrasonic Pen

 The technology is pretty cool and I can see a number of real world applications for it. If you wanted a pen-and-paper feel but want your notes to be stored digitally, this is one option. Qualcomm mentioned that we could see smartphones or tablets featuring this technology starting next year. ]]>

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Download Files Using Torrents

What is a Torrent?

Downloading music, video, data and software has never been easy using torrents. Torrent has been in awhile and is a popular choice of downloading files than direct download. In direct download, a file is retrieved or downloaded continuously. It should be the perfect choice for download but what makes some turn down from it is because if there is an internet connection interruption or connection problem, you have to repeat the process of downloading. It wastes time through repeating unsuccessful downloads.

However in using t0rrents, downloading can be stopped or paused then resumed. This solves the problem with interrupted connection to the server with direct download. T0rrent downloads packet after packet and later assemble the broken files into its usable form. The availability of the torrent files greatly relies on the number of leechers and seeders. Leechers are computers that are part of the torrent network that retrieves the files packet after packet. The seeders however are the computers that has the full or had amassed a larger packet and shares the collected packets to the computer of the torrent network called leechers. That means if the leechers outnumber the seeders, the downloading of the packets will become terribly slow. It is best to download a file with a large number of seeders than leechers. One thing to note, t0rrent users are encouraged to seed any file available in their computers.


Do You Have a T0rrent Client?

A torrent client is a program you install on your computer to let you download your t0rrent file. There are a lot of torrent clients out there but I prefer to use utorrent because it is light and also has the portable version. Here I will be giving you a small list of some of the t0rrent clients in popularity order.

Utorrent
BitTornado
BitComet
BitTorrent
Shareaza
Frostwire

Best Torrent Search Engines?

T0rrent search engines are websites that has a pool of t0rrent files readily available from the local servers and from the computers included in the torrent network. Torrent search engines are not the same. Some share files privately and you need to have an invitation in order to be part of their community, this reduces the risk of having broken, virus infected and useless torrent sites. Also, torrent community members of that private torrent search engine are encouraged to seed.

Some torrent search engines doesn't require membership to be able to have access to their torrent database. So here is the small list of my favorite torrent search engines.

ThePirateBay
TorrentFunk
IsoHunt
Demonoid
Torrents.to
FlixFlux
KickAssTorrents
ShareReactor
BTJunkie
MiniNova
Fenopy


How to Download from a Torrent Search Engines

1. Get a t0rrent client. A list was given above and just choose any of those. Once you have downloaded a torrent client, install it and follow the instructions given.

2. Having your t0rrent client already installed, go to your favorite t0rrent search engine and find the file you want.

3. Download the torrent file (it has a .t0rrent file extension)and open it. The torrent client should automatically open and download your file.

4. Wait until the download completes. Completion depends on the number of seeds and leechers. Be sure to choose the torrent files with more seeders than leechers.

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