1point618 writes "According to an article at the BBC, scientist have found a new way to correct amblyopia, or lazy eye, using a virtual reality system. The system works by giving some stimuli to the good eye, but more important stimuli to the bad eye, making it work harder to get stronger while keeping both eyes in use so as not to produce double vision. Supposedly, the system will do in 1 hour what used to take 400 hours, but I'd stay skeptical of such a claim until there is a peer-reviewed paper out."

CNN's Game On column has a look at Gears of War developer Epic Games. The piece goes into the company's success as a tools merchant as well as a game developer. They discuss the excitement that Unreal Engine 3 has generated, both for AAA and less ambitious titles. From the article: "Several titles, including the forthcoming 'HoopWorld' and 'RoboHordes,' will use the engine for less than AAA games. And don't be surprised if educational titles or children's games use the engine as the Xbox 360 reaches the end of its life cycle. While Epic will continue enhancing and improving Unreal Engine 3 for the next four or five years, work has already begun on Unreal Engine 4, which the company sees as a powering force for the fourth PlayStation and third Xbox machines."

MrByte420 writes "The Ruby On Rails team today released version 1.1 of the web framework. From the announcement: 'Rails 1.1 boasts more than 500 fixes, tweaks, and features from more than 100 contributors. Most of the updates just make everyday life a little smoother, a little rounder, and a little more joyful.' New features were examined back in February at Scottraymond.net and include Javascript/AJAX integration, enhancements to active record, and enhanced testing suites. Not to mention upgrading this time promises to be a piece of cake."

News.com reports that Second Life, the virtual world run by Linden Labs, has netted $11 Million in venture capital funding from the Globespan Capital Partners group. From the article: "The company makes its money by charging players use fees for land they buy and build on. For now, the company isn't profitable, and it's not clear when it will be, said Catherine Smith, Linden Lab's director of marketing. However, she told CNET News.com that Linden Lab plans to use its new funding for aggressive international expansion, as well as for hiring intended to boost its infrastructure. "

The Register is reporting that Australia has implemented a new industry code for the regulation of email with respect to spam. From the article: "Under the new code, internet service providers (ISPs) will bear some of the responsibility for helping fight spam. Service providers must offer spam-filtering options to their subscribers and advise them on how to best deal with and report the nuisance mail. ISPs will also be compelled to impose 'reasonable' limits on subscribers' sending email."

Gamespot reports on a suit brought by a game guide creator against Warcraft-maker Blizzard Entertainment. The two parties will be going to court because of an attempt by Blizzard to quash a guide the plaintiff created for the World of Warcraft MMORPG. Offered electronically through eBay, the company claims that the guide creator is infringing on their IP. From the article: "Kopp's complaint argues that his book does not infringe on any of the companies' copyrights for several reasons: The book presents a disclaimer on its first page about its 'unauthorized' nature, contains no copyrighted text or storylines from the game, and makes "fair use" of selected screenshots under copyright law, the complaint said."

Jim writes "Microsoft has joined a committee that has a key role in the ratification of OpenDocument as an international standard, leading to accusations that it intends to sabotage the process. Microsoft has denied this accusation, claiming that the only reason why Microsoft employee Jim Thatcher has joined the group was to get involved in the ISO standardisation of its own file format." From the article: "'There sits Microsoft, waiting, like a spider,' wrote Jones, in a posting on her site. 'I am imagining ODF plodding along, with Microsoft asking questions, fine-combing through the comments, did you mean this or that?, getting bogged down in minutia until, lo and behold, either Microsoft's XML makes it as an ISO standard first, or they arrive neck and neck.'" More information here on a subject we touched on in a recent Slashback. update a few readers have asked for the clarification that MSFT has not joined ODF, but rather the "INCITS/V1 Technical Committee"

Some more great writeups of GDC events are now available. Gamasutra's coverage continues to be comprehensive, with articles on the localization of Counter-Strike, the development of God of War, and the a design postmortem on the Xbox 360. God of War: How the Left and Right Brain Learned to Love One Another discusses the ways the dev team balanced the needs of the artists, designers, and programmers to create a cohesive title. The Localization of Counter-Strike in Japan gives the reader some object lessons in what it's like to take western ideas and translate them to an eastern culture. Finally, Ophelea wrote to mention a GamersInfo.net story on the design of the Xbox 360. From this last article: "The user interface was one of the more difficult designs to accomplish. While the original Xbox had 250MB of space to utilize, the Xbox360 had only 4.5MB uncompressed or 1.5MB in total! Not only this, they expanded on the original Xbox's 45 screens and grew it ten fold to 450 screens! Several iterations were gone through with the end result being a combination of several of these schemes."

conq writes "BusinessWeek reports that Facebook has turned down an offer for $750 million and is looking for 2 billion dollars. The article speculates that one possible suitor would be Viacom. From the article: 'A Facebook deal would help Viacom founder and Executive Chairman Sumner Redstone fend off a growing challenge from News Corp. The media conglomerate run by Rupert Murdoch has poured enormous resources into the Internet during the last year. It acquired social-networking pioneer MySpace.com last year for $580 million.'"

Here's a man who obviously has his finger on the pulse of open source software development. I mean, who hasn't heard of Apache? His work history is interesting, too: He's moved from Microsoft to CollabNet to Google. And he's not shy about speaking his mind about open source, as shown in this ZDNet blog entry. Please try to confine yourself to one question per post. (If you have more than one question, post more than once.) We'll send 10 of the highest-moderated questions to Greg tomorrow and run his answers when we get them back.

Ian wrote to mention a ZDNet article about several patents on wireless technology held by Google employees. From the article: "The patent applications, filed by Google employees Wesley Chan, Shioupyn Shen and former Google product management director Georges Harik, propose lowering the cost of wireless access by offsetting the costs via advertisements on the service. Google, which receives the bulk of its revenue from advertisers, is seeking to expand its potential advertising base by moving further into the wireless market."

daria42 writes "It's been a hectic six months for the Joomla open-source CMS since its split from the Mambo project, but according to this interview with project director Andrew Eddie there are even faster times ahead. Next week Joomla will make its formal debut at LinuxWorld Expo in Boston, with the milestone Joomla 1.1 release due towards the end of April. As Mambo and Joomla continue to diverge, Eddie says, users and developers will be forced to declare their colours and pick one or the other for production sites."

siddesu wrote to mention an article on CNN Money about the upcoming U.S. Supreme Court patent suit involving eBay. We've previously mentioned the case. The SCOTUS will hear opening arguments on Wednesday, March 29th. From the article: "Lawyers for eBay and small e-commerce company MercExchange will square off over whether eBay should be barred from using its popular 'Buy it Now' feature, which infringes on two MercExchange patents. The case is being closely watched to see if the high court will scale back the right of patent holders to get an injunction barring infringers from using their technologies. Software companies complain they can be held for ransom by owners of questionable patents while drugmakers oppose any weakening of patent rights, which they say would chill their investment in new medicines."

An anonymous reader writes "CNET.com.au makes an interesting case for why the next revision of Viiv will kill off living room PCs as we know them. Instead, we'll be streaming content to digital media adapters from a PC in our home office. From the article: 'The existence of digital media adapters will totally remove the need to have a media centre PC taking up space in your living room, unless you're one of the few users that finds it practical to do anything other than passively soak up multimedia content whilst relaxing on the couch.'"

hype7 writes "The New York Times is running an article on why they think Windows is so slow. They boil it down to one key factor - legacy support - and they hold up Apple as an example of a company willing to make hard decisions around legacy support in order to provide a better product. From the article: 'Windows is now so big and onerous because of the size of its code base, the size of its ecosystem and its insistence on compatibility with the legacy hardware and software, that it just slows everything down ... That's why a company like Apple has such an easier time of innovation.'"