58262779
submission
jones_supa writes:
Microsoft Visual C++ compiler's static-analysis parallelism caused Bruce Dawson's machine to seriously get on its knees, so he rolled up his sleeves and dug deeper to investigate. It turns out that the MSVC++ compiler (cl.exe) causes the full Internet Explorer engine (mshtml.dll) to be loaded every time the static code analysis feature is used. However the actual slowdown isn't created by the weight of the IE engine but by the communication on the windowing system. In fact, about 65% of the traffic on the windowing system lock was from the VC++ compiler, mostly via mshtml.dll. But why? Well, here's what we know. The compiler loads mspft120.dll – the /analyze DLL. Then mspft120 loads msxml6.dll to load an XML configuration file. Then msxml6 loads urlmon.dll to open the stream, and finally urlmon loads mshtml.dll. Then mshtml.dll creates a window, because that’s what it does. If you run many copies of the compiler then you get many windows being opened, and over-subscribed CPUs, and madness ensues. Maybe nobody at Microsoft ever noticed that mshtml.dll was being loaded, or else they didn’t run enough parallel compiles for it to matter.
58236261
submission
jones_supa writes:
Having a good night's sleep seems to play a big part in people having heart attack risk. Switching over to daylight saving time, and hence losing one hour of sleep, raised the risk of having a heart attack the following Monday by 25 percent, compared to other Mondays during the year, according to a new U.S. study released on Saturday. By contrast, heart attack risk fell 21 percent later in the year, on the Tuesday after the clock was returned to standard time, and people got the extra hour of sleep. The not-so-subtle impact of moving the clock forward and backward was seen in a comparison of hospital admissions from a database of non-federal Michigan hospitals. It examined admissions before the start of daylight saving time and the Monday immediately after, for four consecutive years. Researchers cited limitations to the study, noting it was restricted to one state and heart attacks that required artery-opening procedures, such as stents.
58216611
submission
jones_supa writes:
New Caledonian crows — already known to be smart — may also understand how to displace water to receive a reward, with the causal understanding level of a 5-7 year-old child, according to results published in the open access journal PLOS ONE by Sarah Jelbert from University of Auckland and colleagues. As demonstrated in the included video, Scientists used the Aesop's fable riddle — in which subjects drop stones into water to raise the water level and obtain an out-of reach-reward — to assess New Caledonian crows' causal understanding of water displacement. Crows completed 4 of 6 water displacement tasks, including preferentially dropping stones into a water-filled tube instead of a sand-filled tube, dropping sinking objects rather than floating objects, using solid objects rather than hollow objects, and dropping objects into a tube with a high water level rather than a low one. However, they failed two more challenging tasks, one that required understanding of the width of the tube, and one that required understanding of counterintuitive cues for a U-shaped displacement task. The authors note that these tasks did not test insightful problem solving, but were directed at the birds' understanding of volume displacement.
58042041
submission
jones_supa writes:
Everyone knows video games are big in Japan, but in recent years the question has been whether Japan is still big in video games. 'Japan is over. We're done. Our game industry is finished,' said Mega Man and Dead Rising creator Keiji Inafune at the Tokyo Game Show in 2009, and five years on there's no doubt that the country has continued to lose the grip it once held on the gaming world. Whereas the biggest games in the PlayStation 2 era came from Japanese franchises like Final Fantasy and Resident Evil, the most recent console generation saw blockbuster development dominated by Western games like Call of Duty and Mass Effect. The responsibility of saving the situation could be in the hands of Japanese indie developers.
57943499
submission
jones_supa writes:
The legendary musician Kate Bush will play her first series of shows after a 35-year break, performing August and September in the UK. Bush will play 15 shows at London’s Eventim Apollo starting 26 August as part of her Before the Dawn series of shows. Theories to explain her absence from the tour circuit have included a fear of flying, perfectionism and the death of her lighting director, Bill Duffield, who was killed in an accident during her April 1979 concert at Poole Arts Centre. In an interview with Mojo magazine in 2011, Bush said she’d also endured extreme exhaustion as a result of the tour. 'It was enormously enjoyable. But physically it was absolutely exhausting.' The singer has made isolated and rare appearances in the 80s.
57904369
submission
jones_supa writes:
Researchers at Tampere University of Technology, Finland have been surprised of their finding about engine braking creating significant amounts of toxic nanoparticles (Google translation). 'Traffic exhaust fumes carrying nanoparticles are distributed all around where people go. Whether we are indoors or outdoors, there is an exposure to them. According to current knowledge, nanoparticles are the biggest health concern in our environment', tells associate professor Topi Rönkkö from the aerosol physics laboratory. The metal-based particles are released when gasoline injection is stopped during driving when performing engine braking. When they analyzed a heavy diesel engine vehicle rolling downhill with the foot lifted from the gas pedal, the amount of generated toxic particles shot through the roof, even though previous research claims otherwise. This was a surprise also to car manufacturers and oil companies. After the finding, Rönkkö himself cringes driving especially behind large trucks and recommends keeping a good safe distance.
57874273
submission
jones_supa writes:
Unreal Engine 4 from Epic to game developers is launching now. Supported platforms are Windows, OS X, iOS and Android, with desktop Linux coming later. The monetization scheme is unique: anyone can get access to literally everything for a $19/month fee. Epic is working to build a company that succeeds when UE4 developers succeed. Therefore, part of the deal is that anyone can ship a commercial product with UE4 by paying 5% of gross revenue resulting from sales to users, helping the ecosystem. The tools you get are the Unreal Editor in ready-to-run form, and the engine's complete C++ source code hosted on GitHub for collaborative development. Provided also is the foundation for the community: chat in the forums, add to the wiki, participate in the AnswerHub Q&A, and join collaborative development projects via GitHub. The company is also shipping lots of ready-made content, samples, and game templates. So, will this effort succeed? That's up to you and your judgment of the engine’s value. Unreal Engine 4 has been built by a team of over 100 engineers, artists and designers around the world, and this launch 'represents all of Epic's hopes and dreams of how major software can be developed and distributed in the future'.
57868147
submission
jones_supa writes:
In a Business Insider column, Dan Moskowitz observes McDonald's having to change in future to survive. The restaurants would become more of a coffee shop, or die a slow and painful death. This doesn't mean McDonald's will completely stop serving burgers and fries. That has yet to be established, and even if it did do this, it would likely occur many years down the road. However, one thing is certain: because of the rise of the health-conscious consumer, burgers and fries will not be the company's growth catalyst. Moskowitz talks a lot about healthy breakfast choices in the menu already gaining increasing interest. It's very possible that McDonald's key competitors down the road will be Dunkin' Donuts and Starbucks, not Wendy's and Burger King.
57834749
submission
jones_supa writes:
More great news for Linux gamers: following the footsteps of Steam, GOG.com is preparing delivery of Linux games, with expected showtime being this autumn. The officially supported distributions will be Ubuntu and Mint. Right now they are performing testing on various configurations, training up their teams on Linux-speak, and generally preparing for the rollout of at least 100 titles — DRM-free as usual. This will update some existing games of the catalog with a Linux port and bring new ones to the collection. Further information on specific games is yet not known, but GOG invites fans and customers to their community wishlist to discuss.
57797659
submission
jones_supa writes:
In a new blog post, the Ubuntu main man Mark Shuttleworth calls an end for proprietary firmwares such as ACPI. His reasoning is that running any firmware code on your phone, tablet, PC, TV, wifi router, washing machine, server, or the server running the cloud your SAAS app is running on, is a threat vector against you, and NSA's best friend. 'Arguing for ACPI on your next-generation device is arguing for a trojan horse of monumental proportions to be installed in your living room and in your data centre. I've been to Troy, there is not much left.' As better solutions, Shuttleworth suggests delivering your innovative code directly to the upstream kernel, or using declarative firmware that describes hardware linkages and dependencies but doesn’t include executable code.
57792745
submission
jones_supa writes:
The Khronos Group today announced the immediate release of the OpenGL ES 3.1 specification, bringing significant functionality enhancements to the royalty-free 3D graphics API that is used on nearly all of the world’s mobile devices. Key features of ES 3.1 include: compute shaders, mixing and matching shaders without explicit linking step, indirect memory-fetched draw commands, enhanced texturing functionality, new shader language features and, optional extensions. The API will retain compatibility with previous versions of OpenGL ES. The OpenGL ES working group at Khronos expects also to update the OpenGL ES Adopter’s Program to provide extensive conformance tests for OpenGL ES 3.1 within three months. This ensures that conformant OpenGL ES implementations provide a reliable, cross-platform graphics programming platform.
57774327
submission
jones_supa writes:
Min Liang Tan, the CEO of Razer, tells an interesting story how his company had spent $380,000 redesigning the color of the USB ports on the laptop. Razer is a single-minded operation; it is Min's company. Maybe he wants, to be a gamer version of Steve Jobs, taking attention of the little details. The Razer aesthetic is pure gamery. Everything is black and a particular shade of acid green. For USB female connectors, to request a custom color is certainly possible, but it is very expensive to deviate from the mainline. 'We had to send people to the factory to make sure the color mix is perfect, we had to do quality control to make sure the color wouldn't change over time,' says Min. He actually sent three of his top engineers out to Taiwan, the location of the factory that was producing the Blade. 'They spent Christmas and New Year's at the factory just to get the color just right for us,' he says. Then Min himself flew out to the factory to double-check. It became much more complicated a task than anyone realized, for the simple reason that nobody had bothered to do this before.
57760851
submission
jones_supa writes:
Previous research shows that genres of music can elicit different emotions, and that the enjoyment of some foods can be affected by emotions. New work takes the next step and looks at how music affects the perception of food. In the experiment, 99 taste-testers sampled a comfort food versus a food that is not one, while listening to the same piece of music which had been recomposed as classical, jazz, hip-hop and rock. The emotional food was milk chocolate and the non-emotional food was bell pepper. Afterward the subjects were asked to rate the foods. Among their findings was the discovery that jazz made the chocolate taste measurably better and hip hop did not (the same effect wasn't seen on the bell peppers). They also found that the background music-induced food perception varies by music performer, type of food, consumers' demographics, experience and culture.
57646693
submission
jones_supa writes:
Delays keep piling up for the Mir display server on the Ubuntu desktop. After already being postponed multiple times, Mir might not be enabled by default on the Ubuntu Linux desktop until the 16.04 LTS release — in two years time! This was the estimate by Mark Shuttleworth in a virtual Ubuntu Developer Summit. Using Mir, Mark says, will lead to supporting more hardware, obtaining better performance, and 'do some great things' with the technology. He expects some users will start using Mir on the desktop over the next year. Mir is already packaged as an experimental option, along with an experimental Unity 8 desktop session.
57584149
submission
jones_supa writes:
A bit surprisingly, Valve Software has uploaded their Direct3D to OpenGL translation layer onto GitHub as open source. It is provided as-is and with no support, with an open license that allows you to do pretty much anything with it. Taken directly from the DOTA2 source tree, the translation layer supports limited subset of D3D 9.0c, bytecode-level HLSL to GLSL translator, and some SM3 support. It will require some tinkering to get it to compile, and there is some hardcoded Source-specific stuff included. The project might bring some value to developers who are planning to port their product from Windows to Linux.
