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Submission + - When Performance Meets Profit: BitTorrent Bundles (bittorrent.com)

Daniel Sadoc Menasche writes: Today BitTorrent has announced that artists are allowed to offer paid music and video bundles (http://gizmodo.com/bittorrent-now-lets-anyone-release-an-album-as-a-paid-f-1660014496). Bundles are content collections, such as albums of songs. After signing up for a “BitTorrent bundle”, a user can download any of the files in the bundle, learning about new content that he was unaware before (http://www.engadget.com/2014/07/14/bittorrent-paywall-science-fiction-series/). This not only boosts the popularity of the artists, but also improves the performance of the system and availability of content, as described in this scientific paper titled "Content availability and bundling in swarming systems” that appeared last year in IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking (http://www.dcc.ufrj.br/~sadoc/bundling.pdf). According to the researchers, the mean content download time comprises idle waiting for content to become available and active download time while content is available. If the increased availability due to bundling and the corresponding decrease in idle waiting are significant, bundling can allow users to download more content in less time, now with royalties flowing to the artists.

Submission + - Player-Run MMORPG by Former Ultima Online Devs Finding Kickstarter Success 3

An anonymous reader writes: Shards Online has returned to Kickstarter with a refocused plan and a promise to match pledges dollar for dollar up to their goal. With just a week gone by they have already reached 75% of their goal. Project Lead Derek Brinkmann says "If Ultima Online and Neverwinter Nights had a love child, Shards Online would be the result. By combining the persistent virtual world of Ultima Online with the freedom of community run servers and the ability to act as a dungeonmaster in Neverwinter Nights, we are creating a paradise for roleplayers where you are no longer constrained by the rules handed to you by the development team." The team now has their sights set on their stretch goals like more animations for roleplayers and an extra game world to be released at Alpha.

Submission + - DARPA-funded research creates self-repairing virtual machines (thestack.com)

An anonymous reader writes: Four years of DARPA-funded research at the University of Utah by the Flux Research Group has led to the development of the Advanced Adaptive Applications system (AAA), which uses a three-point approach to helping attacked or compromised VMs to not only heal themselves but inoculate against similar attacks by automatically restoring attacked code at the kernel level. AAA sits outside the running VM, constantly scanning the running system using Virtual-Machine Introspection (VMI) and a new scripting language called Weir to understand when alterations in low-level code may be suspicious, rather than any natural change created by high-privileged applications. The system has been developed with military security in mind, but is thought by its creators to have potential in the private sector.

Submission + - Elusive dark matter may be detected with GPS satellites (scienceblog.com)

An anonymous reader writes: Two researchers say time disparities identified through the network of satellites that make up our modern GPS infrastructure can help detect dark matter. In a paper in the online version of the scientific journal Nature Physics, they write that dark matter may be organized as a large gas-like collection of topological defects, or energy cracks. “We propose to detect the defects, the dark matter, as they sweep through us with a network of sensitive atomic clocks. The idea is, where the clocks go out of synchronization, we would know that dark matter, the topological defect, has passed by."

Comment English isn't well suited for speed reading (Score 2) 92

I am German, so please excuse me, if my English isn't that good. There once was a study in Germany, what effect almost exclusively lower case in german texts would have. The result was, that texts are better understandable with nouns written with an upper case first letter. They serve as anchors, especially, when reading fast. Furthermore, in English it is common, that the same word is used as a verb and a noun. This actually would be a damn good reason to write nouns with an upper case first letter. When you skim through an English text, and notice, for example, the word "jump", you don't even know, if it is the verb or the noun. This can also be a source of ambiguity. Another big source of ambiguity is the usage of "it" to refer to almost everything, because most words don't have a grammatical gender. You have to be aware of that, when you are creating relative sentences in English. Even people are not always gendered in English. Is the tennis player female or male? You often have to read a fair bit into a text, until he/she (see?) is referenced as "her" or "him". I have seen some discussions between native English speakers on the internet, were someone wrote sth. like "Ah, so the teacher was your mother!" or "I thought, the cat was chasing the car, not the dog." Oh, this last example has another ambiguity. I should write "I thought, the cat, not the dog, was chasing the car". This ambiguity does not occur in German because articles are declined dependent on the gender and relation. http://de.wiktionary.org/wiki/... To put it in a nutshell, it seems logical, that speed reading is especially hard in English. The more possible ambiguities you have, the more likely you will have to stop and think about, what is really meant.

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