Nvidia completes $367 million acquisition of Icera

Nvidia has made an important move to strengthen its position in the mobile processor space with the acquisition of Icera, which makes baseband processors for 3G and 4G smartphones and tablets. The $367 million deal was announced back in May, and now that it has cleared all regulatory approvals Nvidia can offer the two main processors used in smartphones -- the applications processor, in the form of its Tegra SoC, and the baseband processor, based on Icera technology.

This will make it easier for OEMs to satisfy their requirements for next-generation mobile products by having to work with one less company, while almost doubling Nvidia's revenue opportunity within each device. The market for baseband processors is one of the fastest growing in the industry, worth an estimated $15 billion in 2010.

Nvidia says no layoffs will result from the acquisition and Icera will continue operating in its U.S. and Europe offices.

The move also opens the door for Nvidia to combine both processors onto a single integrated chip, though there are no immediate plans for that according to the company's CEO Jen-Hsun Huang.

Nvidia's competitors have been busy snatching up complementary businesses to offer comprehensive communications technologies as well. In August 2010, for example, Intel acquired Infineon AG's Wireless Solutions Business group for $1.4 billion -- the company provides chips for Apple's iPad and iPhone 4, along with several other high-profile handsets. Meanwhile, Qualcomm purchased Wi-Fi chipmaker Atheros Communications for $3.1 billion earlier this year, and Broadcom moved to gain a stronger foothold in 4G by acquiring Beceem Communications.

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Source: http://www.techspot.com/news/44237-nvidia-completes-367-million-acquisition-of-icera.html

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Nvidia completes $367 million acquisition of Icera

Nvidia has made an important move to strengthen its position in the mobile processor space with the acquisition of Icera, which makes baseband processors for 3G and 4G smartphones and tablets. The $367 million deal was announced back in May, and now that it has cleared all regulatory approvals Nvidia can offer the two main processors used in smartphones -- the applications processor, in the form of its Tegra SoC, and the baseband processor, based on Icera technology.

This will make it easier for OEMs to satisfy their requirements for next-generation mobile products by having to work with one less company, while almost doubling Nvidia's revenue opportunity within each device. The market for baseband processors is one of the fastest growing in the industry, worth an estimated $15 billion in 2010.

Nvidia says no layoffs will result from the acquisition and Icera will continue operating in its U.S. and Europe offices.

The move also opens the door for Nvidia to combine both processors onto a single integrated chip, though there are no immediate plans for that according to the company's CEO Jen-Hsun Huang.

Nvidia's competitors have been busy snatching up complementary businesses to offer comprehensive communications technologies as well. In August 2010, for example, Intel acquired Infineon AG's Wireless Solutions Business group for $1.4 billion -- the company provides chips for Apple's iPad and iPhone 4, along with several other high-profile handsets. Meanwhile, Qualcomm purchased Wi-Fi chipmaker Atheros Communications for $3.1 billion earlier this year, and Broadcom moved to gain a stronger foothold in 4G by acquiring Beceem Communications.

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Source: http://www.techspot.com/news/44237-nvidia-completes-367-million-acquisition-of-icera.html

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Blog - Measuring The Quality Of Abstract Art

Here's a bit of mischief from Mikhail Simkin at the the University of California, Los Angeles.

Simkin has a made a name for himself evaluating the relative performance of various groups and individuals. On this blog, we've looked at his work on the performance of congress, physicists and even World War I flying aces.

Today, he turns his attention to abstract artists. For some time now, Simkin has a run an online quiz in which he asks people to label abstract pictures either real art or fake. It's fun--give it a go.

One average, people answer correctly about 66 per cent of the time, which is significantly better than chance.

Various people have interpreted this result (and others like it) as a challenge to the common claim that abstract art by well-know artists is indistinguishable from art created by children or animals.

Today, Simkin uses this 66 per cent figure as a way of evaluating the work of well known artists. In particular, he asks how much better these professional artists are than children.

First, he points out the results of another well known experiment in which people are asked to evaluate weights by picking them up. As the weights become more similar, it is harder to tell which is heavier. In fact, people will say that a 100g weight is heavier than a 96g weight only 72 per cent of the time.

"This means that there is less perceptible difference between an abstractionist and child/animal than between 100 and 96g," says Simkin.

So on this basis, if you were to allocate artistic 'weight' to artists and gave an abstract artist 100g, you would have to give a child or animal 96g. In other words, there is only a 4 per cent difference between them.

That's not much!

Simkin goes on to say this is equivalent in chess to the difference between a novice and the next ranking up, a D-class amateur.

If ever a paper was designed to trigger controversy, this is it. If it catches the public imagination, just sit back and watch the fists fly.

That'll be fun. But let's hope he never gets round to applying the same logic to physicists' ability to evaluate dodgy papers on the arxiv.

Ref: arxiv.org/abs/1106.1915: Abstract Art Grandmasters Score Like Class D Amateurs

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Blog - Measuring The Quality Of Abstract Art

Here's a bit of mischief from Mikhail Simkin at the the University of California, Los Angeles.

Simkin has a made a name for himself evaluating the relative performance of various groups and individuals. On this blog, we've looked at his work on the performance of congress, physicists and even World War I flying aces.

Today, he turns his attention to abstract artists. For some time now, Simkin has a run an online quiz in which he asks people to label abstract pictures either real art or fake. It's fun--give it a go.

One average, people answer correctly about 66 per cent of the time, which is significantly better than chance.

Various people have interpreted this result (and others like it) as a challenge to the common claim that abstract art by well-know artists is indistinguishable from art created by children or animals.

Today, Simkin uses this 66 per cent figure as a way of evaluating the work of well known artists. In particular, he asks how much better these professional artists are than children.

First, he points out the results of another well known experiment in which people are asked to evaluate weights by picking them up. As the weights become more similar, it is harder to tell which is heavier. In fact, people will say that a 100g weight is heavier than a 96g weight only 72 per cent of the time.

"This means that there is less perceptible difference between an abstractionist and child/animal than between 100 and 96g," says Simkin.

So on this basis, if you were to allocate artistic 'weight' to artists and gave an abstract artist 100g, you would have to give a child or animal 96g. In other words, there is only a 4 per cent difference between them.

That's not much!

Simkin goes on to say this is equivalent in chess to the difference between a novice and the next ranking up, a D-class amateur.

If ever a paper was designed to trigger controversy, this is it. If it catches the public imagination, just sit back and watch the fists fly.

That'll be fun. But let's hope he never gets round to applying the same logic to physicists' ability to evaluate dodgy papers on the arxiv.

Ref: arxiv.org/abs/1106.1915: Abstract Art Grandmasters Score Like Class D Amateurs

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Video - Data Transfer at Light Speed

Data Transfer at Light Speed

At Intel Research Day, the company demonstrated some of its silicon photonics technology for the first time. The goal of this work is to speed data transfer by replacing today?s electrical wiring with faster, more efficient fiber-optic connections.

06.14.2011 Video by Katherine Bourzac, edited by Brittany Sauser Read the Article

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Apple, Nokia settle patent disputes with licensing agreement

Nokia has announced in a press release that the Finnish phone manufacturer and Apple have finally settled all of their patent disputes that resulted in an agreement that withdraws all complaints filed by Nokia and Apple to the US International Trade Commission.

The agreement entails a one-time payment, as well as the continued payment of royalties, payable by Apple to Nokia for the term of the agreement. The specific terms of the contract are confidential.

Nokia CEO Stephen Elop says:

We are very pleased to have Apple join the growing number of Nokia licensees, said Stephen Elop, president and chief executive officer of Nokia. This settlement demonstrates Nokia?s industry leading patent portfolio and enables us to focus on further licensing opportunities in the mobile communications market.

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Source: http://thenextweb.com/apple/2011/06/14/apple-nokia-settle-payment-disputes-with-licensing-agreement/

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Adventures and Adventuring

Three of my five weapons were offline and leaving small ion trails in space, my cargo hold was full of rare and expensive artefacts and a band of pirates was chasing me down a frantically plotted and improvised course. With a route that picked its way in and out of asteroid fields through systems that were well and truly off the charts, it is fair to say I was panicking. I was also pretty sure that my eyes had stopped blinking.

I loved Freelancer; Microsoft's space trading open world game. It resembled an extremely stripped down Eve Online, but with gameplay replacing the spreadsheets. I'm aware that it was a
condensed version of games that did the same thing better and with more depth many years before, but I found it to be a deep and beautifully realised sandbox. In fact, I'm convinced that most players only ever scratched its surface.

I wouldn't be able to tell you the plot of the game, or name any of the systems, although I could tell you that they had flavours of America, England, Germany and Japan. I couldn't name any of the characters without a short trip to Google either. The game didn't leave that sort of impression on me. What I do very strongly remember, though, was having an adventure.


I've played a lot of games that bill themselves as adventure games. Some of them are point and click adventure games, some of them are 3D action adventure games and almost every triple A release involves an adventure of some description. However, I can only think of one time where I have actually had an adventure for myself.

An adventure is only ever an adventure in retrospect. At the time, it's just an ordeal that the adventurers would rather not be tolerating. It was an adventure climbing Mount Snowdon in the cold and the rain in my jeans, but at the time I just couldn't believe I was so stupid to think it was just a hill. It was an adventure getting a chest of drawers home sticking out of the back of my Ford Ka last week, but at the time it was a living nightmare going up hills, as I was worried that it would slide into the car behind that I couldn't see.

An adventure game is a comfortable experience, no matter how well it immerses you in its world. You're still playing an interactive story, and it's only once you start getting towards the open world games that the capacity to have an adventure starts to kick in. However, even then there's a danger that it will just feel like a great big toy box, rather than sparking any significant connection with the player.

For example, for all the sandbox fun to be had in GTA, I couldn't care less when one of the thugs got shot, arrested or squashed by his own stolen ambulance. In those cases, what I was doing felt like an exercise in karma, as opposed to anything that could provide sufficient tension to facilitate adventure.

With Freelancer, I had become invested in the game, and my main memory of it is a single encounter of being chased. Most of my ship had been destroyed, and I was limping from wormhole to wormhole, desperately trying to get back to civilisation so that I could hide and repair my craft after my ill- advised drift from the beaten track.

There probably wasn't even that much of a consequence if I failed, got killed or ditched my cargo, but still I felt as if failure would result in me being hunted down in the future by bounty hunters, and that I would maybe end up frozen in Carbonite and propped up in Jabba's palace.

I've never seen or experienced this sort of gameplay before or since. I've felt engaged by games, and I've even been threatened with high-stakes failure, but never has it felt quite the same as this single encounter in which I was trying to get away from space pirates.

That said, I nearly felt something similar quite recently while I was playing Mount and Blade: Warband. My medium sized army was chasing down a small band of looters while being chased by a much larger army from an enemy faction. I was the latter that provided the fear of failure. There was a feeling that this was of my own doing, and I felt outside of my comfort zone.


However, this thrill subsided shortly after the second day of chasing, when it became clear that all three armies were running at exactly the same speed and not gaining or pulling away from each other. After that, the only excitement was the realisation that sooner or later my army was going to run out of food and become highly irritable.

There was also a brief foray into genuine adventure during my time with Morrowind, as you can easily get lost in the game's huge world. After missing a crucial direction, I once ended up on the other side of the game world several hours later, being chased by a crocodile-like demon walking on two legs. Again, however, this was less of an adventure and more of an exercise in making me feel like an idiot.

I'm fed up with pre-baked sequences and scripted events in my first person shooters. I get tired of plodding through what amounts to an overly long film with hand-eye-co-ordination exercises to progress the plot. Although I love playing through some of these titles, and it would be difficult to argue that Half-Life 2, the absolute king of disguised linear gameplay, was anything other than a masterpiece, but I want to have adventures as opposed to sitting through those of someone else.

I can't help feeling that the medium would be greatly helped if more games were just a little bit more of an ordeal to play. That's not to say that they need to be frustrating, overly difficult or painful to
play, just that they should provide a bit more than 'press X not to die' and raise the stakes for failure a little higher.

Basically, I want to play more games that facilitate the experience of an adventure, as opposed to adventure games. If you know of any games ripe for adventure-mining, let us know in the forums.

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Duke Nukem Forever reviews are in: the game sucks

The first Duke Nukem Forever reviews are in, and the overall consensus is quite negative. Does the game really suck, or does it simply mean that because of all the delays, the expectations have been set so high that the developers just can't match them?

ComputerandVideoGames has done a quick roundup of five major reviews: IGN (5.5 out of 10), Joystiq (2 out of 5), The Guardian (2 out of 5), Eurogamer (3 out of 10), and PC Gamer (80 out of 100). In short, four out of five publications didn't like it. On Metacritic, the Xbox 360 average is 50, the PS3 version sits at 62, while the PC version has a score of 76. This is likely because of how many PC gamers are appreciating the game for nostalgic reasons.

Gamers have waited over a decade to play the official sequel to Duke Nukem. The title was originally announced by 3D Realms in 1997. The project experienced all types of problems, however, and it was passed over to Triptych Games and Gearbox Software in 2009, with multiplayer components provided by Piranha Games.

Half a year ago, Gearbox confirmed that development on the title was being completed. Given how long the game had been in such a state (some 14 years), there were still many skeptics. Then the game was demoed live, but many would still not believe.

Five months ago, the game was given a set of release dates: May 3, 2011 in North America and May 6, 2011 in the rest of the world. Two months ago, this was pushed back to June 14 in North America, and on June 10 in the rest of the world.

Last month, the official PC requirements were released. This was followed by an announcement that the game is coming to OnLive, meaning you can skip the requirements if you want. Finally, the companies announced that the game has gone gold. A demo was released for some earlier this month.

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Source: http://www.techspot.com/news/44228-duke-nukem-forever-reviews-are-in-the-game-sucks.html

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Sina Weibo testing enterprise accounts that look like Facebook pages

Chinese technology news site Techweb has revealed images and details of Sina Weibo?s new enterprise accounts, which are currently in private beta testing phase.

The enterprise edition of China?s hottest microblogging service allows brands, companies, celebrities and causes to modify their profile page with videos, polls, and other advertising functions.

Companies will be able to combine related Weibo accounts, such as the company executives and customer service representatives, and put them into one single platform. It also comes with an analytics tool that tracks user interactions.

It closely resembles a Facebook page, but is seamlessly integrated with the functions of Weibo. It seems like the copy first, innovate later strategy of Chinese Internet companies is at play here and it looks impressive so far.

The first enterprise account made available for public viewing is the Kuai Shu Bao online bookstore, which according to iChinaStock, earns 40% of its revenues from its Weibo page.

Interestingly, the beta launch can also be regarded as a trial for e-commence on the Weibo platform, seeing as The Kuai Shu Bao profile page also features an external link to a Weibo application that allows users to order food and other products via Weibo.

To know more about Sina Weibo?s Enterprise offering, you can visit the introductory page explaining the new services (in Chinese).

Dubbed initially as China?s Twitter clone, Sina Weibo has far surpassed the U.S. microblogging service in terms of features. Furthermore, the Chinese company is already preparing an English version of their site to go directly head on against Twitter itself, a first for Chinese social networking sites.

The enterprise edition of Weibo is free for now, but Sina plans to charge for various value-added services in the future.

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Source: http://thenextweb.com/asia/2011/06/14/sina-weibo-testing-enterprise-accounts-that-look-like-facebook-pages/

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Video - Data Transfer at Light Speed

Data Transfer at Light Speed

At Intel Research Day, the company demonstrated some of its silicon photonics technology for the first time. The goal of this work is to speed data transfer by replacing today?s electrical wiring with faster, more efficient fiber-optic connections.

06.14.2011 Video by Katherine Bourzac, edited by Brittany Sauser Read the Article

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