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PlayStation (Games)

Split Screen Co-op Is Dying 362

Posted by Soulskill from the just-like-lan-parties dept.
kube00 writes "Split-screen co-op and local multiplayer are becoming things of the past. What happened to cramming a bunch of gamers into a room with two TVs and doing a system link match in Halo? Where have the all-night GoldenEye matches gone? Like the arcades of gamers' youth, the local multiplayer and co-op bonding experience has been replaced with individual gamers and a network."
First Person Shooters (Games)

Video Games Found To Enhance Visual Attention 79

Posted by Soulskill from the told-you-mom dept.
donniebaseball23 writes "Reporting on new research from WIREs Cognitive Science, IndustryGamers writes: 'Action games like Call of Duty and Halo can enhance visual attention, the ability that helps us focus on relevant visual information. The mental mechanism allows people to select pertinent visual information and ignore irrelevant information. It suggests that action titles can be used to augment military training, educational tools, and correct visual deficits.' Shawn Green, co-author of the study, commented, 'At the core of these action video game-induced improvements appears to be a remarkable enhancement in the ability to flexibly and precisely control attention, a finding that could have a variety of real-world applications. For example, those in professions that demand "super-normal" visual attention, such as fighter pilots, would benefit enormously from enhanced visual attention, as their performance and lives depend on their ability to react quickly and accurately to primarily visual information."
Portables (Games)

Epic Games Predicts Console, Mobile Convergence 104

Posted by Soulskill from the sounds-like-a-job-for-ben-heck dept.
An anonymous reader writes "After taking the stage at the Apple iPhone event in September, game developer Epic Games has finally revealed more about its plan to release Unreal Engine for the iOS devices. UE3 is incredibly popular on consoles, and its free UDK has been really great for us modders. In this new interview, engine boss Mark Rein says the developer envisions a future where all game devices are handhelds, with high-end processors inside: 'It feels like there's a great opportunity for game consoles to cease to be something you plug into the wall and rather become something you take with you. Of course it will be more than just your game console; you can have your productivity apps, your documents, and your media collections on it as well.'"

Comment HTML5 is not a standard yet - it is in dev (Score 1) 108

by Rovastar (#32510688) Attached to: Google Updates Chrome Frame, Makes IE Better

"let them access sites and Web applications that rely on standards that IE doesn't support, primarily HTML5."

What does this mean? HTML5 is still in dev. Are there really sites or app that *rely* on it?

The only things that browsers can support is the latest betas of this of HTML5.

MS basing is one thing about standards but is it is another to quote standards that do not exist yet.........
Earth

Submission + - MIT Trash Track: Like Google Latitude for Garbage

Submitted by
GeekyKhan
GeekyKhan writes: "Researchers at MIT have developed an innovative system called Trash Track, which uses electronic tags to follow pieces of garbage through their journey to the dump. Although the team invested time and effort into the technological side of the project, they are most interested in quantifying how the knowledge that trash is being tracked could modify people's behavior. If a correlation is found, this could be a phenomenal breakthrough in recycling and waste reduction systems."
Software

Submission + - 50 sites in 10 months with one WordPress-based CMS (automattic.com)

Submitted by TechnoLute
TechnoLute writes: Need more evidence that WordPress can be used as a "serious" publishing platform? The folks at Tierra Innovation and WNET.ORG (Channel Thirteen in New York) have put together a white-paper detailing how they now roll out 5-10 high-traffic, high-quality Web sites each month — at a fraction of the cost once spent creating 1-2 sites in the same time. The secret sauce? The same open-source WordPress software many of us use for our seldom-updated blogs.

The white paper describes how this project came about and how they ultimately decided on WordPress as the platform of choice. Using WordPress MU's built-in features along with custom themes and plugins (such as WPDB Profiling), WNET.ORG can now roll out multiple sites that provide a great user experience as well as editorial and creative flexibility.

Comment Not really increasing compared to domain names (Score 4, Informative) 183

by Rovastar (#28488423) Attached to: Domain-Name Wars, Rise of the Cybersquatters

According to netcraft in the last year there has been about 40% increase in fully qualified domain names out there (includes subdomains not just top level so not a perfect stat but a good indication)

June 2008 172,338,726 FQDNs (http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2008/06/index.html)
June 2009 238,027,855 FQDNs (http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2009/06/17/june_2009_web_server_survey.html)

So really you could say that cyber squatting is decreasing relative to the increase in domain names........

Not really increasing compared to domain names
Power

Panasonic Begins To Lock Out 3d-Party Camera Batteries 450

Posted by timothy from the humbly-meeting-customer-demands dept.
OhMyBattery writes "The latest firmware updated for Panasonic digital cameras contains one single improvement: it locks out the ability to use 'non-genuine Panasonic' batteries. It does so for safety reasons, it says. It seems to indicate that this is going to be the norm for all new Panasonic digital cameras. From the release: 'Panasonic Digital Still Cameras now include a technology that can identify a genuine Panasonic battery. For the protection of our customers Panasonic developed this technology after it was discovered that some aftermarket 3rd party batteries do not meet the rigid safety standards Panasonic uses.' The firmware warning is quite clear as to what it does: 'After this firmware update your Panasonic Digital Camera cannot be operated by 3rd party batteries (non genuine Panasonic batteries).'"
Games

On the Feasibility of Single-Server MMOs 316

Posted by Soulskill from the where-are-my-ten-thousand-player-battles dept.
GameSetWatch takes a look at the issues involved in creating an MMO that does not split its users among many different servers. They suggest that running a single "shard" is the next step in the evolution of MMOs, since it better allows player choices to have a meaningful impact on the game world; supporting different outcomes across multiple shards is a technical nightmare. They estimate, from the hip, that the cost to develop the technology required to support a massive amount of players (i.e. far more than EVE Online) on a single server to be roughly $100 million. Another recommendation is the strong reliance on procedural and user-generated content creation to fill a necessarily enormous game world.

Comment Re:Corporate users (Score 1) 409

by Rovastar (#24277237) Attached to: Internet Users Not Updating Browser

I agree, many corps have a similar attitude and therefore the stats are become more meaningless. There area a lot of corp workers that use older browsers and cannot/will not upgrade. What use is a message on Google for those people.

I atm work for Vodafone running their intranet. The browser policy is IE6.

Also how are they a browser can be out of date and unpatched and there is no way for the website to know this. They can only look at the user agent string to find this out and that will only tell you what browser version they are using not the patch level of it in say IE. It will just say 5.5, 6 or 7 or 8, etc.

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