Hasta La Gadget!

One of the biggest talking points about the original Black Ops was Zombies mode. When Activision and Treyarch announced Call of Duty: Black Ops II, footage from the game’s Zombies mode was surprisingly absent, but that all changed today. After teasing the mode last week, Activision has released a new trailer for Zombies, and a new write-up from Polygon gives us an idea of what we can expect to find when we delve into Zombies mode once more.

As it turns out, Zombies mode will be a little deeper than just “shoot all the zombies” this time around. The traditional game mode where players team up to take on wave after wave of zombies is still there, rest assured, but Zombies in Black Ops II will feature two additional modes: Tranzit and Grief. If you’re a Zombies fan, you might want to brace yourself before reading on, because both modes sound excellent.

In Tranzit, players will work cooperatively to make it through a zombie-based story mode. Treyarch studio head Mark Lamia says players will have a “massive world” to explore, and there will be items to collect and defenses to build as well. Did we mention that there’s a bus to use for transportation? There is, and though it provides some degree of shelter, it like like zombies can also board the bus, leading to a potentially sticky situation. Tranzit mode will apparently have ties to the story behind the Moon map that released for the original Black Ops, though Lamia didn’t get into specifics when talking about how the two are related.

Changing gears completely, we come to Grief mode. This is a competitive survival mode that pits two teams of varying sizes against groups of zombies. The teams will compete to be the last team standing, though here’s the twist: you can’t shoot players on the other team. You’ll have plenty of ways to screw them over though, hence the name. It should give us an interesting spin on the played out team deathmatch mode, and that is definitely something to look forward to.

All in all, these new modes sound great, especially Tranzit mode, which immediately reminds us of the Arma II mod DayZ. We’re told to expect more information on Black Ops II‘s multiplayer modes later on this week, so you can bet we’ll be keeping an eye out for those. In the meantime, let us know what you think of Tranzit and Grief modes – have they managed to pique your interest?

Black Ops II Zombies mode debuts in new video is written by Eric Abent & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

The iPhone 5’s processor might be faster than we thought. According to TLDToday, the A6 is clocking in at 1.3GHz after an update to the Geekbench benchmarking app, which is supposed to do a better job of detecting what’s actually going on with the A6. More »

A $2,300 3D printer isn’t really anything special anymore. We’ve seen them as cheap as $350 in fact. But all those affordable units are of the extrusion variety — meaning they lay out molten plastic in layers. The FORM 1 opts for a method called stereolithography that blasts liquid plastic with a laser, causing the resin to cure. This is one of the most accurate methods of additive manufacturing, but also one of the most expensive thanks to the need for high-end optics, with units typically costing tens-of-thousands of dollars. A group of recent grads from the MIT Media Lab have managed to replicate the process for a fraction of the cost and founded a company called Formlabs to deliver their innovations to the public. Like many other startups, the group turned to Kickstarter to get off the ground and easily passed its $100,000 within its first day. As of this writing over $250,000 had been pledged and the first 25 printers have already been claimed.

The FORM 1 is capable of creating objects with layers as thin as 25 microns — that’s 75 percent thinner than even the new Replicator 2. The company didn’t scrimp on design and polish to meet its affordability goals either. The base is a stylish brushed metal with the small build platform protected by an orange plastic shell. There’s even a companion software tool for simple model creation. You can still get one, though the price of entry is now $2,500, at the Kickstarter page. Or you can simply get a sneak peek in the gallery and video below.

Continue reading FORM 1 delivers high-end 3D printing for an affordable price, meets Kickstarter goal in 1 day

Filed under: Misc

FORM 1 delivers high-end 3D printing for an affordable price, meets Kickstarter goal in 1 day originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 26 Sep 2012 18:46:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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If you’ve got a business that has an extraordinary amount of likes on Facebook and have suddenly felt a bit lighter today, you’re not alone: the social network has brought out the axe. This week Facebook has begun implementing many of the changes and rules they outlined in a very basic way several weeks ago regarding fake accounts and likes. If you’ve payed for likes from odd sources or are the sort of person who makes large amounts of fake accounts just to like your own products, you might be in for a wakeup call.

This situation is being reported by multiple sources who speak on the fan count of large pages like Zynga’s Texas HoldEm Poker which TechCrunch says lost 96,000 fans in less than 24 hours. Facebook has noted that most pages will not experience any gigantic changes in their amounts of likes and “real” Facebook fans, but they should expect some manner of change or another in numbers. Do not be afraid though, these changes are not in the number of actual users, but robots and accounts created just for likes instead.

In other words, if you’ve got a page that’s liked by nothing but accounts with single photos of a strangely promiscuous lady who has little to no information up about herself, only a note about how she’s “new to this Facebook thing”, you’ll be seeing some drops. This is part of Facebook’s big plan to give another new wave of legitimacy to the social network universe – with the cuts of the unreal masses, investors will be able to have a much more accurate view of how Facebook is doing (with real humans.)

Have a peek at a few more recent Facebook bits and pieces in the timeline below to see how the company has been changing since they went IPO earlier this year. As a public company, their initial offering did not do so fantastically well. Now that they’re a few months down the road, they’re staying tough about everything, even the knocking off of their own huddled robots.

Facebook terminates fake accounts with extreme prejudice is written by Chris Burns & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

If you have bought an AT&T iPhone 5 without a contract over the past few days, chances are that you want to unlock it to use it on another carrier. The traditional process involves filling out an online form on AT&T’s website, sending a fax (yes, a fax) to AT&T, waiting 5 to 7 days and restoring your phone. It turns out that it is much easier than that: just restore the phone in iTunes and it will be unlocked.

We have confirmed the process with AT&T’s technical support and successfully tried it with a T-Mobile SIM card. After restoring the device in iTunes, the user is prompted with the usual unlocking message: “Congratulations, your iPhone has been unlocked.”

This message wasn’t enough for me though. I need more proof that I could use the iPhone on every carrier and abroad.

After receiving the notification my new iPhone was unlocked, I cut a micro-SIM card into the shape of a nano-SIM by using the AT&T SIM card that was already in the iPhone 5 as a guide. The most difficult part was to make it narrower so that you can close the tiny nano-SIM tray, though some have reported that this step may be optional.

In a couple of seconds, the iPhone was able to pick up the T-Mobile network, and calls and EDGE data connectvity worked as expected. Some reports, including on AT&T forum, confirm this.

When you buy an iPhone, the device is added to Apple’s big iPhone database thanks to the IMEI, which is used as a unique identifier. Full price and subsidized iPhone 5 models apparently don’t have the same status in the database as it is flagged as “ready to be unlocked” when purchased without a contract.

The iPhone 5 we tested was bought in an Apple retail store, but we couldn’t confirm this with another, pre-ordered iPhone 5 — even though the device was purchased at full price, it was tied to an existing AT&T account during the pre-order process. The carrier clearly states on its website that you have to be either a former customer or a customer without contract obligations to be eligible to go through the entire process, fax included. It could be problematic as well if you bought your iPhone 5 directly from AT&T.

Chris Velazco contributed reporting.