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UK Drone Registration

The UK Government has announced plans to introduce the requirement for UAV drone registration for owners of aircraft weighing > 250g. There have been an increasing number of problems with drone owners operating aircraft unsafely, such as very close to airport runways or flying them at high speed in public places.

There is no time frame or firm plans as to how the new rules will be enforced and the Department of Transport admitted that "the nuts and bolts still have to be ironed out".

The drone safety awareness test will involve potential flyers having to "prove that they understand UK safety, security and privacy regulations", it said.

The plans also include the extension of geo-fencing, in which no-fly zones are programmed into drones using GPS co-ordinates, around areas such as prisons and airports.
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The BBC have more details here:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-40684581
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by Ian, Jul 24, 2017 at 11:50 AM

AMD Ryzen 5 1600 vs Intel Core i7-7800X: 30 Game Battle!

TechSpot have a very detailed comparison of the Ryzen 5 1600 vs the Intel i7-7800x. 30 games are tested and benchmarked, and there is a reasonably wide range of results:

If you care at all about value, the Ryzen 5 1600 is clearly the way to go. This is why we recently named it the best value performance desktop CPU. It was unlikely that the Core i7-7800X was going to change that, but we hoped the performance would at least be a compelling reason to buy Intel's new six-core processor.

Ryzen will hit 4GHz with the box cooler but it will be a more mild experience with a $20 aftermarket cooler like the Cooler Master 212, so keep that in mind. The 7800X on the other hand cannot be overclocked to 4.7GHz using a 240mm AIO closed loop solution. Instead, it required a $380 custom loop setup to achieve that result.
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Read the review here:
https://www.techspot.com/review/1450-core-i7-vs-ryzen-5-hexa-core/

If you were building a budget gaming PC, which CPU would you choose?
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by Ian, Jul 21, 2017 at 4:18 PM

Logitech G Pro Gaming Mouse and Keyboard

Legit Reviews check out the Logitech P Pro keyboard and mouse, designed for gamers. It comes with RBG backlighting and mechanical keys:

The folks over at Logitech have been in the mouse and keyboard business for a long time and have essentially dominated the marketplace when it comes to those aforementioned peripherals for business and general computing use. If you’ve used computers for any length of time at all, odds are good you’ve used at least one of their products. However, on the gaming side of things they aren’t typically the first brand that comes to mind even though they’ve been doing gaming hardware since the 90’s. In recent years, Logitech has made a concerted effort to better delineate their gaming hardware by aligning them under their G brand name which covers entry to professional level products. In fact, I’ll be honest – I’ve used a lot of Logitech products over the years for both gaming and business applications and I never really thought of them as a gaming powerhouse even though upon reflection, they’ve been there every step of the way in terms of gaming peripherals for both PC and console gaming. I think it’s a smart move to continue to nurture their G gaming brand to ensure they stay in the forefront of customers’ minds in this respect.
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Read more at: http://www.legitreviews.com/logitech-g-pro-gaming-mouse-keyboard-review_196014
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by Ian, Jul 18, 2017

Google Deepmind AI learns how to walk

Google have released a very interesting (and amusing) video of the Deepmind AI learning how to walk in a virtual environment:

As impressive as this is, it's worth watching for a laugh, as some of the "walks" are quite unique!
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Views: 242 / Likes: 2 / Replies: 2

by Ian, Jul 14, 2017

Net Neutrality Protest

You may have noticed websites displaying protests against the rolling back of "net neutrality" rules within the United States. These rules mean that all web traffic must be treated equally - i.e. an ISP can't charge more to allow priority access to streaming services, etc... Although these rules don't cover the UK/EU, it could set a precedent.

The sites will display a variety of messages, or simulate the potential effects of losing the basic principle of all internet traffic being treated equally.

The US communications regulator earlier this year voted to remove an Obama-era rule that would prevent the prioritisation - or "throttling" - of data, as well as other measures campaigners consider to be detrimental to the internet.

Opponents to net neutrality say it stifles innovation and discourages investment in telecoms infrastructure.
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Read the rest on the BBC:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-40575882
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by Ian, Jul 13, 2017

Final "bug bash" before Windows 10 Autumn Creators Update

Microsoft are getting closer to releasing a large Windows 10 update (sometime in Autumn), as a "bug bash" has been announced to try and reduce the number of problems in the latest Windows Insider build. Windows Central have a sneak peak at new features we can expect to see:

While Microsoft were unable to commit to a release timeframe for the Fall Creators Update, Microsoft recently announced that Windows 10 was moving to a two-per-year upgrade schedule, where Windows 10 updates are scheduled to launch in March/April and September/October every year. Considering we already had our March/April release for 2017 with the Creators Update, it makes sense to assume the Fall Creators Update will be launching in September/October.

If we had to put money on it, we'd say October is when the Fall Creators Update will be released. We suspect Microsoft will sign off on the Fall Creators Update sometime in September allowing Insiders to test the final bits for a couple of weeks before beginning a public rollout in October.
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Read the rest here: https://www.windowscentral.com/fall-creators-update
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by Ian, Jul 10, 2017

AMD Radeon Vega Frontier Edition CrossFire Testing

PCPerspective take a look at the new Vega Frontier Edition in CrossFire mode - if you're considering buying this new card, it's worth a read to find out the current performance (this will likely improve with some tweaking of drivers):

The current state of CrossFire for Vega isn’t amazing me. Scaling at 2560x1440 is abysmal with only The Witcher 3 going above 20% improvement by adding the second card. At 4K we do see a better result, ranging from 54% to 84% depending on the game. Hitman in DX12 was the outlier though, with zero scaling, indicative of the continued concerns over the new API and the pressure it puts on developers going forward.

Even if scaling works when looking at average frame rates, the frame time variance of many of our results are higher than we want to see. Take Witcher 3 as the perfect example – we see great scaling from the single Radeon Vega Frontier Edition to two in CrossFire but at the same time we have frame to frame variance going well above 10ms at the 95th percentile. That is a straight up bad experience, and though its front weighted in our testing scenario in Witcher 3, it was continuous in Dirt Rally and GTA V. As we stated at the outset, getting multi-GPU scaling correct is extremely difficult.
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Read the review here:
https://www.pcper.com/reviews/Graphics-Cards/AMD-Radeon-Vega-Frontier-Edition-CrossFire-Testing
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by Ian, Jul 6, 2017

QNAP TS-653B

MadShrimps review the QNAP TS-653B, a 6-bay quad-core NAS that includes a PCIe slot and plenty of connectivity options:

TS-653B is picking the “goodies” from the previous model NASes such as the USB QuickAccess (now with USB-C bus) or the frontal display, which does feature an easy to read OLED panel. The display does feature additional information such as system fan speed, temperatures, HDD capacity, volumes or LUN; the capacitive buttons are easy accessible and can perform different commands, including system restart of shutdown. For doing easy backups of different media, we do have a SD card reader right in front of the unit, along with a separate USB 3.0 port. For connecting extra storage, printers or a Wi-Fi dongle, we can always make use of the four USB 3.0 ports in the back. The unit does also support USB RAID expansion enclosures for five or eight drives, we can use M.2 SSD/10GbE PCIe combo expansion cards, while the dual microphone input jacks can be used for Karaoke.
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Read the review here:
http://www.madshrimps.be/articles/article/1001011/
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Views: 381 / Likes: 0 / Replies: 2

by Ian, Jul 4, 2017

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