Gaming 27 - The PlayStation Ryvita
Posted on 15th Jun 2011 at 07:41 by Podcast with 8 comments
Two gadgets that began shipping last week represent assaults from Google on the dominant model of computing, in which we use a cursor and a keyboard to manipulate boxes and windows on a virtual desktop. Samsung makes the hardware for both: the Series 5 Chromebook notebook, the first computer with the browser-only ChromeOS, and the Galaxy Tab 10.1 tablet, whose operating system is the latest version of Honeycomb, the tablet edition of Google's Android mobile operating system.
These products have arrived at a pivotal moment for computing. Steve Jobs popularized the phrase "post-PC era" to describe what's supposed to come next, with the iPad displacing the window-driven, desktop-focused experience that the word "computer" conjures up. Now Google too is offering alternatives to that experience, taking on traditional computing with a pincer movement of tablets and Chromebooks. That the two are advancing together may be either an accident or a deliberate attempt to establish distinct post-PC categories?all we know for sure that Google likes to experiment publicly.
The Galaxy Tab
The Galaxy Tab 10.1 is a close match for?some might say it mimics?that proven PC-skewering weapon the iPad 2. The tablet that I reviewed is a special edition, with Android logos on the back, that was handed out to developers and lent to journalists at the Google I/O conference last month. You can buy it without the decoration for $500 with 16 gigabytes of storage or $600 with 32 GB. It's WiFi-only for now, but a version with a cellular data plan is due out soon.
The Galaxy Tab's similarity to the iPad 2 highlights the fact that in the tablet world, hardware is scarcely relevant. A responsive, glossy, color-rich touch screen, eight-hour-plus battery life, and front and rear cameras are all table stakes by now. The Galaxy Tab 10.1 is actually slightly slimmer than the iPad 2 (by 0.2 millimeters) and lighter (by 35 grams), thanks to the plastic back it has, instead of an aluminum one. It's also more widescreen, with a 16:10 aspect ratio.
Google's post-PC vision?like Apple's?is all in the software, but this is where the similarity ends. Jobs's claims about the first iPad's "magic" were dismissed by those who saw the device as nothing more than a "giant iPhone," and the iPad 2 can still be accurately described that way. When you turn it on, you are greeted with a grid of every app you ever installed. Customization doesn't go beyond the ability to group the icons into folders and move six to privileged spots on a dock at the base of the screen.
The Galaxy Tab's Honeycomb 3.1, however, seems to be gunning to replace the desktop experience with something that looks to be suspiciously like another one, albeit without a mouse. You can clutter your five desktops with app shortcuts to your heart's content. You can add "widgets" (cut-down, interactive versions of regular apps) to that clutter to do things like provide a permanent view of your e-mail inbox or music player. This latest release of Honeycomb allows you to resize your widgets, an option that makes it possible to create a desktop-PC feel by putting, for example, a calendar and an e-mail inbox side by side.
Honeycomb even comes with a very Windows-like system tray?a place where running apps can be seen and notifications pop up?in the bottom right corner. But it all adds up to a less slick experience than an iPad?there's much more to tinker with, and you invariably leave things untidy. The Galaxy Tab 10.1 requires a steeper learning curve than the iPad 2.
The Chromebook
The second part of Google's post-PC vision requires is even trickier to master.
I used the "stable" version of Chrome OS that comes with Samsung's Series 5 Chromebook on Google's prototype the Cr-48 notebook, released last year, which has much the same hardware. The Samsung Series 5 will set you back $430 with 16 GB of storage and Wi-Fi only, or $500 for the same with 3G added (yes, it has less storage than you can get with the Galaxy Tab).
Learning how a Chromebook works is pleasant enough at first, as you adjust to a computer that takes just eight seconds to switch on from cold, and one second to wake from sleep (a state it can maintain for over a weekwhen starting with a full charge). The machine may be physically lightweight and have stripped-down functionality, but unlike some netbooks, it provides snappy access to even complex Web pages and handles full-screen Flash video just fine. Its settings menu is delightfully spare and really highlights the fun of junking a lot of stuff you always assumed had to be there in an OS.
But you soon hit the post-PC limitation of this vision: not being able to store files on your computer or do anything while offline. Users are encouraged to "install" Web apps from the Chrome Web store, but that essentially means adding a bookmark. File storage is intended to be via online services like Google Docs or Google's beta cloud Music locker. (Google has said some of its services will work offline by later this year.)
Two recent additions to Chrome OS help, enabling you to view files that are on a USB drive and play music or video from a connected device, but both feel very primitive. When you can't get Wi-Fi, or use 3G if your Chromebook has it, this vision of post-PC computing feels post-apocalyptic: everything digital you (digitally) own is gone, and your only chance of getting it back is to reinvent the Internet from scratch.
When you look at them together, it's clear that each of Google's two takes on a world beyond the PC demands considerably more of users than the simple, singular vision promoted by Apple. You're expected to take a more active role in managing the complexity (Honeycomb) or the limitations (Chrome OS) of your device.
A deficiency the pair have in common is a lack of decent apps: the Chrome OS and Android tablet app stores are pitifully bare. Google claims that both are about to be saved by waves of innovative apps from third-party developers, but it's an argument that feels persuasive only for tablets. Android phones had a few delinquent early years while their app ecosystem got started. But the Galaxy Tab's groundwork of a richly featured if somewhat complex OS has been laid, and it just needs more app developers to come and build. The foundations of Chrome OS, however, are not so complete. Here Google is relying on developers to create powerful Web apps that work offline even before its own apps do so, or the OS feels like a finished product.
The two claws of Google's pincer movement against traditional PCs may each offer more features - and complexity - than the iPad, but only one, Android Honeycomb, feels capable of doing as much damage as Jobs' magical giant iPhone.
Source: http://feeds.technologyreview.com/click.phdo?i=f546574ff92f11cd3f09c07dc10ddb91
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Posted on 15th Jun 2011 at 07:41 by Podcast with 8 comments
Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/bit-tech/blog/~3/twVcw9pIGrE/
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The popular collaborative revision control app GitHub is now available for the Mac. Largely regarded as one of the best ways for developers working on a project to keep track of changes to a repository. The web based version of Git now hosts over 2.3 million repositories, so the addition of a native Mac app is welcome.
GitHub?s Mac version looks very slick and uses a largely custom UI without many ?traditional? OS X elements. The native application will help you set up and find repos already on your machine when you first launch it.
The app also allows you to view commit history, see the changes and perform some basic operations. You can also create commits from the app once you?ve made alterations. The Mac app also allows for switching, merging, creating and deleting branches.
There are other visual Git clients for Mac like Gitti, GitX and SmartGit but GitHub for Mac definitely looks the most polished. It will be interesting to see if it is widely adopted enough to affect the use of those other clients, some of which are ?for pay? options. If you?ve tried out the other clients, how do you think that it compares?
GitHub for Mac 1.0 is free and available for download here.
Source: http://thenextweb.com/dd/2011/06/22/github-for-mac-is-now-available/
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The birth of stars is one of wonders of the cosmos but it is also a puzzle.
Astronomers have a rough idea of how it happens. Stars clearly form inside huge clouds of gas and dust. The thinking is that ordinary turbulence causes some parts of the cloud to become more dense than others.
When this happens, gravity takes over, drawing in more mass and creating a dense knot of gas and dust. This begins to heat up until the pressures and temperatures at the centre are so great that atoms begin to fuse. At this point, a new star switches on.
But this model raises a number of questions, in particular, why stars of a certain type tend to form in clusters within a cloud rather then evenly throughout it.
Clearly the process is more complicated and astronomers think they know why. The best theories assume that these clouds, driven by supernovas or other processes, often smash into each other as they expand.
At the interface where this collision takes place, there is a sudden rapid heating of gas which triggers star formation here. Again that seems perfectly sensible but the experimental evidence to back up this idea is sparse--it's just very hard to tease apart the motions of gas clouds after they've collided.
Today. Kazufumi Torii at Nagoya University and a few pals say they've found two clouds that appear to be colliding in the Trifid nebula, M20. What's more, they say that young stars appear to be forming at the interface. "We argue that the formation of the ?rst generation stars...was triggered by the collision between the two clouds," they say.
These guys used the NANTEN2 4-metre telescope in Chile to measure how the light emitted by carbon monoxide in these clouds is redshifted. That showed a number of different clouds in the Trifid Nebula, but two of them with different velocities seem to be superimposed.
The observations also show that the temperature of other clouds in the region is about 10K. But the two clouds of interest are much warmer at about 50K. Clearly these clouds must have collided, heating each other up in the process.
Crucially, the mass of each cloud is about 1000 solar masses but this is spread over a vast region of space some 2 parsecs across. "The total stellar and molecular mass is too small by an order of magnitude to gravitationally bind the system," say Torri and buddies.
And yet, stars are forming in this region. This star formation must have been triggered by the collision, which took place about a million years ago (not long by astrophysical standards).
That's quite a coup. Identifying clouds that have collided is obviously tricky. Back in 2009, astronomers (including some of these guys) spotted a similar cloud collision that also seems to be triggering cloud formation in a star cluster called Westerlund 2.
So this is just the second time anybody has seen this kind of starbirth, which must otherwise be common throughout the Universe.
Expect to see more examples from now on. Astronomers suspect that the chemical and physical characteristics of these clouds are an important factor in determining the size and type of stars that form.
Clearly, cloud collisions change the chemistry and physics of this process. The big question now is how.
Ref: arxiv.org/abs/1106.3603: Molecular Clouds in The Tri?d Nebula M20; Possible Evidence For A Cloud-Cloud Collision In Triggering The Formation Of The First Generation Stars
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Source: http://feeds.technologyreview.com/click.phdo?i=7c57d283c4ae939ba7a03e4cee84bdfc
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Pogoplug is known as a company which produces devices you connect to your computer, making all your files available wherever you are. Now it?s launching a hardware-free solution.
The service supports Windows and OS X and allows users to stream any photos, music or video from their home computer to wherever they are in the world. You can also stream your files to iOS devices via an updated version of Pogoplug?s OneView app.
While Pogoplug?s press release uses the description ?Personal cloud?, suggesting that it is positioned against Apple?s iCloud, in actual fact this is a traditional streaming product as your media stays on your home computer. Hence it can boast ?No storage limits? because Pogoplug isn?t doing any storage at all ? it?s all down to you. It truly is a personal cloud in the most literal sense, in that it?s entirely operated by you
That said, as a personal streaming service, Pogoplug?s solution has a well-rounded set of features. It offers a Jukebox that lets you listen to all of your music aggregated from all of your Pogoplug-enabled devices into a single, duplicate-free library, a Cinema section for easy streaming of video, and a Gallery that displays all your pictures from multiple devices in a unified timeline. Individual files can be shared between computers using a device browser.
So, a true ?cloud? product it isn?t really, but if you?re the kind of person who just doesn?t trust your data to be stored in some far-away server farm, this is probably a better solution. The only downside is that you?ll have to leave whichever computers you want to access switched on.
The software-only Pogoplug is free to install and use, with a one-off payment of $29 to stream music outside the home or to stream movies anywhere. However, Pogoplug has given The Next Web 100 free premium accounts to give away to our readers. To claim a free account, follow this link and sign up as fast as you can before they all run out.
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Gamers waited over a decade to play the official sequel to Duke Nukem. The title was originally announced by 3D Realms in 1997. It was finally released on June 14, 2011 in North America, and on June 10, 2011 in the rest of the world. The reviews that followed were poor ? they basically concluded the game sucks.
Duke Nukem Forever will not, however, be the game that killed the franchise. In a recent interview with Forbes, Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick hinted that we would be seeing more of Duke. Making another game anytime soon would not be a good idea. Then again, I really can't see Duke on TV, or even in a movie. Okay, I can see him in a movie, but I'm scared it will be abysmal (think Doom).
Does Take-Two own the intellectual property surrounding Duke? Could you spin that out into not just new games, but movies and TV?
We don't really talk about it in detail but you will see future Duke IP coming from this company.

One other aspect came up in the interview: the raunchiness of the game. While many die-hard fans of Duke Nukem insist this is just how the game is meant to be, some believe the fact that it wasn't tasteful only further hurt it. Although Zelnick understands the need to properly label a game as inappropriate for certain audiences, he believes that once you get over that hurdle, you can do whatever the hell you want:
David Ewalt: Are you concerned about criticism over the adult content and humor in your new game Duke Nukem Forever?
Strauss Zelnick: We take ratings guidelines and marketing guidelines as seriously as a heart attack around here. We do not market mature products to children. When friends of mine say, "Oh, I plan to get Red Dead Redemption for my fifteen year old," I say, "You know this product is intended for adults?" We are incredibly serious about it.
That said, when we put something out I stand behind it, and will not compromise. When you put all those things all together it's difficult to be critical of the company. Because here in America, thank God, we have the ability to do what we want.
What is there left to be said? I'm sorry if you don't like it. Don't consume it.
While I can't comment on whether the game was a good mature title (because I have yet to play it), I have to say that its launch trailer (the NSFW one) was very well done. I have never seen a trailer that was so entertaining.
Source: http://www.techspot.com/news/44360-take-two-planning-more-duke-nukem.html
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Apple could soon get a little more active in cracking down on its smartphone rivals after the Cupertino-based company was able to finally secure the patent rights to how capacitive touch-screens are used in smartphones.
PCMag reports that on Tuesday, Apple?s 40 months of waiting came to an end when it was awarded U.S. patent number 7,966,578 for ?[a] computer-implemented method, for use in conjunction with a portable multifunction device with a touch screen display, [that] comprises displaying a portion of page content, including a frame displaying a portion of frame content and also including other content of the page, on the touch screen display.?
The patent is likely to give Apple power to issue legal complaints against its smartphone rivals, including HTC, Samsung, Motorola et al, over how they employ their user interfaces to interact with a touchscreen. PCMag suggests that the patent could be broad enough that it could cover any device that utilises a swipe on a device?s screen.
Florian Mueller, expert and follower of other Apple patents believes Apple could stifle innovation of its rivals:
?This patent covers a kind of functionality without which it will be hard to build a competitive smartphone. Unless this patent becomes invalidated, it would allow Apple to stifle innovation and bully competitors.?
However, vendors may be able to argue their way out of lawsuits by suggesting that Apple?s patent can only be infringed if it has been copied completely, but at this time it is not known what the patent will be used to cover.
If Apple does decide to enforce its patent rights, it could see the company move to stop competing manufacturers from selling products that infringe its rights in the U.S, possibly reaching settlements so that competitors can license its technology.
The decision to enforce its patents aggressively could backfire on Apple though; a source close to the matter said that if the company doesn?t seek to license its patent and chooses only to fight its rivals in the courts, it is possible that the courts could scrap the patent so that Apple does not have a monopoly on the smartphone market.
Its a big win for Apple, one that could see it accrue millions in licensing rights it if it plays it right. It is not known whether it will seek to claim damages in the courts, but as it is currently engaged in a number of other lawsuits, it could take a road familiar to it.
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Last week, we reported on the most popular ?connected? apps in the UK, noting that Google Maps was number one, followed by Yahoo in second place.
The data was the result of a collaboration between The GSMA, comScore and UK mobile operators, and some more interesting stats have been released relating to the platforms UK app users are connecting with.
The data, garnered from the GSMA Mobile Media Metrics (MMM) application key measurements report, revealed that almost 9 million UK mobile owners used an app that connected to the Internet throughout April. iOS users comprised over two-thirds (66%) of the connections, whilst Google?s Android OS had the second highest share among operating systems for application usage at 31%. Symbian ranked third overall, accounting for a mere 1% of connected app users.
As The Guardian reports, these figures aren?t really representative of smartphone usage overall, with 27.6% usings iPhones, 24.7% on Android, 23.6% on Symbian, 18.1% on BlackBerry and 3.8% on Windows devices.
This is very interesting data, as it shows that iOS users are far more switched on to the app revolution than its market share would suggest. But it also indicates that the quality and quantity of apps available for iOS outweighs other platforms.
Of course, these figures may not be entirely representative across the board. They don?t include gaming apps and they don?t include apps that are connected via a WiFi connection, something that could skew the figures significantly. And it could be that iOS users are more likely to be on unlimited data plans than, say, Symbian or Android users.
So these figures are certainly indicative, but they probably don?t tell the whole story.
Source: http://thenextweb.com/uk/2011/06/22/ios-accounts-for-66-of-connected-app-use-in-the-uk/
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As Mr. Obama begins trying to untangle the country from its military and civilian promises in Afghanistan, his critics and allies alike are drawing a direct line between what is not being spent to bolster the sagging economy in America to what is being spent in Afghanistan ? $120 billion this year alone.
On Monday, the United States Conference of Mayors made that connection explicitly, saying that American taxes should be paying for bridges in Baltimore and Kansas City, not in Baghdad and Kandahar.
The mayors? group approved a resolution calling for an early end to the American military role in Afghanistan and Iraq, asking Congress to redirect the billions now being spent on war and reconstruction costs toward urgent domestic needs. The resolution, which noted that local governments cut 28,000 jobs in May alone, was the group?s first venture into foreign policy since it passed a resolution four decades ago calling for an end to the Vietnam War.
And in a speech on the Senate floor on Tuesday, Senator Joe Manchin III, Democrat of West Virginia, said: ?We can no longer, in good conscience, cut services and programs at home, raise taxes or ? and this is very important ? lift the debt ceiling in order to fund nation-building in Afghanistan. The question the president faces ? we all face ? is quite simple: Will we choose to rebuild America or Afghanistan? In light of our nation?s fiscal peril, we cannot do both.?
Demonstrators describing themselves as ?angry jobless citizens? said they would picket the Capitol on Wednesday to urge members of Congress to use any savings from Mr. Obama?s troop reductions to create more jobs. The group sponsoring the demonstration, the Prayer Without Ceasing Party, said in a statement on Tuesday that it was ?urging the masses to call their congressmen and the president to ensure that jobs receive a top priority when the troops start returning to America.?
Spending on the war in Afghanistan has skyrocketed since Mr. Obama took office, to $118.6 billion in 2011. It was $14.7 billion in 2003, when President George W. Bush turned his attention and American resources to the war in Iraq.
The increase is easy to explain. When Mr. Obama took office, he vowed to aggressively pursue what he termed America?s ?war of necessity? (Afghanistan) and to withdraw from America?s ?war of choice? (Iraq). He has done so; the lines on Iraq and Afghanistan war spending crossed in 2010, when the United States spent $93.8 billion in Afghanistan versus $71.3 billion in Iraq, according to the Congressional Research Service.
But the White House is keenly aware that the president is heading into a re-election campaign; with the country?s jobless rate remaining high, topping 9 percent, his poll numbers on his handling of the domestic economy have plummeted.
?Do we really need to be spending $120 billion in a country with a G.D.P. that?s one-sixth that size?? asked Brian Katulis, a national security expert at the Center for American Progress, a policy group with close ties to the Obama administration. ?Most Americans would be shocked to know that we?re spending that kind of money for jobs programs for former Taliban, and would wonder where are our jobs programs for Detroit and Cleveland??
In 2010, Congress ? at the Obama administration?s request ? set aside $100 million to support programs in Afghanistan aimed at moving former insurgents off the battlefields and into the country?s mainstream economy. Those efforts ? similar to what the Bush administration did in Iraq ? have yet to bear much fruit; the 1,700 fighters who have enrolled in the reintegration program represent only a fraction of the estimated 20,000 to 40,000 Taliban insurgents, The New York Times reported Monday.
Source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=9d9832fe40e7a3be5588f4efb9ea336e
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Calorie Tracking
The Fitbit dashboard has a calorie-tracking function, similar to DailyBurn and other apps, that allows you to track food intake and search for the caloric content of popular foods.
These tools have become easier to use, thanks to extensive databases listing the nutritional content of food, as well as smart-phone apps that can scan a product's bar code to automatically get that information. But I used this for about three days before giving up; manually calculating the caloric content of everything I ate and then entering it into the site was just too time-consuming. For someone like me, who makes most of what I eat from scratch, bar codes and databases don't make calorie tracking much easier.
Apps like Mealsnap purport to give a rough estimate of calorie content from a picture of what you're going to eat, but I highly doubt their accuracy. But I might try taking pictures of what I eat. According to research discussed at the Quantified Self conference in May, this can help you eat less, even if you don't calculate how much you ate. A biotech incubator in San Diego has promised the holy grail of calorie counting?a device that would automatically track calorie intake, as the Fitbit does for activity?but has yet to explain how it works or how accurate it is.
Mood
In addition to new wireless devices for self-tracking, a growing number of smart-phone apps are available to monitor more subjective states, such as mood, migraines, and pain. I tried a popular mood-tracking site called Moodscope, which administers a daily questionnaire to assess your mood. But, just as with calorie counting, I only stuck with it for a few days.
I found that I have a hard time assessing subjective states. (Perhaps I need some mindfulness training, which I could remedy with Equanimity, a meditation tracking app.) But others have found programs like Moodscope very helpful. Alexandra Carmichael , founder of a patient networking site called CureTogether, describes her experience here.
Data Analysis
Perhaps the biggest limitation I found for many self-tracking devices is the lack of tools to help make sense of all the new information at my fingertips. While the individual devices incorporate software to analyze the data they collect, it's difficult to analyze all the data en en masse. For example, does the number of steps or level of activity during the day influence stress level in the evening or sleep quality at night? Do the active periods of sleep recorded by the Fitbit coincide with awakenings or transitions between sleep states recorded by the Zeo? (I would also like to attach an accelerometer to my cat and correlate her data with my sleep patterns.)
There are no existing apps for a non-programmer like me to do that kind of analysis, and I'm unlikely to try to do it by hand. And while the Zeo provides an easy way to export your raw data, the Fitbit does not. That looks like it's beginning to change, however. A number of devices have released APIs so that software developers can create new apps to manage your data. And Runkeeper, a smart-phone app initially developed to track runs via the phone's GPS, is creating a "powerful correlation engine" called Health Graph that should enable this kind of analysis. (Stay tuned for a guest blog from Jason Jacobs, Runkeeper's founder.)
For the most part, individual self-tracking is limited to simple experiments that examine the effect of one variable on a single output. But if self-tracking tools are supposed to be able to help us understand and change our behavior in the real world, they need to be more sophisticated.
Yesterday: Under Pressure
Tomorrow: Gaming Your Health
Source: http://feeds.technologyreview.com/click.phdo?i=b279641b1cf5e6da5c847efb1f68bc49
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