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Comment Before someone says it's a "youtuber" (Score 5, Insightful) 156

Just a reminder: Machinima is not a "youtuber". It's a professional gaming publication with accreditations to major industry events (like E3) and 15 years of experience, and that's merely using youtube to deliver their own content, including reviews, previews and yes, "native ads". So before any professional publication takes the distance from Machinima just remember that most of any other major gaming site or gaming journalist is or has been in the past guilty of doing the same things.

Comment Easy Access or Money? (Score 1) 92

For "Easy access to the market" I'd say it was the 8-bit era, since all you had to have was an 8-bit computer, record your software on a tape and go to any tape printing facility with your "master".

For money I'd say it was the early iOS era, since Apple made nearly as easy and open as the 8-bit era to access iOS, and the market was not as fully crammed of competition as it has become later.

The 90's were already too difficult, hardware was a rapidly moving target (if you came from Amiga or the Atari ST in the 90's you had to start writing to DOS since both 68k machines never had a sequel with the right success, and then you would have ended up to reshape your abilities to write first for Windows and some weird graphical API, then ending up to write for Windows with either Direct X or OpenGL).

Crowdfunding is letting small creators getting easier access to better artists, musicians, but the market is still the same, and creating assets hasn't became easier than with the mobile resolution.

Comment Adding up braking power. (Score 1) 800

Physics lovers and automotive geeks answer me: if the car cpu thinks to be in presence of an unavoidable and possibly lethal crash to engage can't it just engage an additional system that adds braking power?

Like an emergency system of additional feets, something like a jet landing gear, ending not in a pair of tires but in a brake. I don't know if that could have side effects requiring the parts to be substituted or putting some odd straining to engine or transmission, but that's still better than swerving into another car.

Submission + - First new top-level domains added to the root zone (computerworld.com.au)

angry tapir writes: The Internet – or at least its namespace – just got bigger. Four new top-level domains have been added to the Internet's root zone. The four new gTLDs all use non-Latin scripts: "web " in Arabic, "online" in Cyrillic, "sale" in Cyrillic, and "game" in Chinese. In total, the generic top-level domain process run by ICANN will result in expansion of top-level domains from 22 to up to 1400.

Submission + - Dolphins' Hunting Technique Inspires New Radar Device (ibtimes.com)

minty3 writes: The twin inverted pulse radar (TWIPR) made by a team from the University of Southampton in England uses the same technique dolphins do to capture prey. Like dolphins, the device sends out two pulses in quick succession to cancel out background noise.

Submission + - Black Death Predated "Small World" Effect, Say Network Theorists (medium.com) 1

KentuckyFC writes: Epidemiologists know that modern diseases can spread almost simultaneously in different parts of the planet because an individual who becomes infected in Hong Kong, for example, can infect friends in New York the following day. This is known as the small world effect. It is the same property that allows any individual to link to another individual anywhere in the world in just a few steps. But in the 14th century, the Black Death spread in a very different way, moving slowly across Europe at a rate of about 2 kilometres a day. Now network theorists have simulated this spread and say it is only possible if the number of long distances travellers in those days was vanishingly small. In other words, people in medieval society were linked almost exclusively to others nearby and so did not form a small world network. That raises an interesting question. If society in 14th century Europe was not a small world but today's society is, when did the change occur? The researchers say the finger of blame points to the invention of railways and steamships which allowed large numbers of people, and the diseases they carried, to travel long distances for the first time.

Submission + - Scientology's fraud conviction upheld in France (telegraph.co.uk)

schwit1 writes: France's top appeals court has upheld a fraud conviction and fines totaling hundreds of thousands of euros against the Church of Scientology, for taking advantage of vulnerable followers.

France regards Scientology as a cult, not a religion, and had prosecuted individual Scientologists before, but the 2009 trial marked the first time the organisation as a whole had been convicted.

Submission + - IBM devises software for its experimental brain-like chips (networkworld.com)

alphadogg writes: Following up on work commissioned by the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), IBM has developed a programming paradigm, and associated simulator and basic software library, for its experimental SyNAPSE processor. The work suggests the processors could be used for extremely low-power yet computationally powerful sensor systems. "Our end goal is to create a brain in a box," said Dharmendra Modha, and IBM Research senior manager who is the principal investigator for the project. The work is a continuation of a DARPA project to design a system that replicates the way a human processes information.

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