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30 Minutes Inside Valve's Prototype Virtual Reality Headset 59

Posted by timothy from the inside-your-head dept.
muterobert writes "Owlchemy Labs, the developers behind the excellent Oculus Rift ready game, Aaaaaaaculus!, share their impressions of their time at Steam Dev Days and detail their experiences using Valve's secretive virtual reality HMD prototype. An excerpt: 'I was told to walk off of the cube and it was physically difficult to step forward into the space where there was no solid footing, even though I knew that there would be a solid floor with a rug right there for me. It's amazing how the mind can trick you.'"

Submission + - LibreOffice 4.2 with GPU mantle support is out (libreoffice.org) 4

Submitted by Billly Gates
Billly Gates writes: A basic summary of the new features are listed here. In catching up with MS Office the new LibreOffice 4.2 now has full Windows 7/8 integration including aero peak, thumbnails, jumplists, and recent documents all from the taskbar. In addition one weak area for LibreOffice has been enterprise network support and the lack of active directory tools. LibreOffice now has GPO and active directory support for system administrators to deploy and manage Libreoffice over corporate networks. Libreoffice also includes an expert configuration Window to assist power users and system administrators when deploying to hundreds of workstation at a time as well.

Also of particular interest is AMD/ATI is expecting to finally release Mantle in the next coming hours for games like Battlefield 4. Surprisingly LibreOffice also supports mantle as well according to the release notes. However you will need the 14.1 driver which is being compiled and uploaded at the time of this writing to utilize this feature. Mantle will accelerate lower end cpus by up to 300% in some tasks while having modest improvements for those with more recent powerful CPUs. A real niceties for those like myself on AMD phenom II's with the later 7000 series cards.

The only issue (some on slashdot may say benefit ) is the lack of a ribbon UI. However, for recent articles about governments considering openoffice this release addresses shortcomings with the new active directory and GPO support.

Submission + - First Global Map Outside the Solar System

Submitted by Kreuzfeld
Kreuzfeld writes: For many years, astronomers have suspected that brown dwarfs — 'failed stars' with masses between those of planets and stars — have cloudy atmospheres. Our recent paper in Nature presents the first global, 2D map of the patchy clouds in the atmosphere of a brown dwarf: our neighbor, the 6.5 light-years-distant Luhman 16B. Eventually, astronomers will use this technique to make weather movies of global cloud patterns on brown dwarfs and extrasolar planets.

Submission + - 30 Minutes Inside Valve's Prototype Virtual Reality Headset (roadtovr.com)

Submitted by muterobert
muterobert writes: Owlchemy Labs, the developers behind the excellent Oculus Rift ready game, ‘Aaaaaaaculus!’, share their impressions of their time at Steam Dev Days and detail their experiences using Valve’s secretive virtual reality HMD prototype.

An Excerpt:

I was told to walk off of the cube and it was physically difficult to step forward into the space where there was no solid footing, even though I knew that there would be a solid floor with a rug right there for me. It’s amazing how the mind can trick you.
Google

Google's Motorola Adventure: Stinging Defeat, Or Semi-Victory? 139

Posted by timothy from the all-the-way-to-the-bank dept.
Nerval's Lobster writes "Google had previously sold Motorola's Home division for $2.4 billion. Combine that with yesterday's $2.91 billion sale of Motorola's remaining assets, subtract the $12.5 billion acquisition price for the company back in 2011, and Google's little smartphone adventure cost it roughly $7.1 billion even before you start throwing in expenses related to actual production, marketing, and personnel. That's a hefty chunk of change, but some analysts think the deal was ultimately a good one because it allowed Google to pick up patents, engineering talent, and insight into the mobile-device marketplace. It's debatable, however, whether those patents ultimately helped Android in the still-raging smartphone wars, and Google was slow to promote Motorola smartphones out of fear of irritating other Android manufacturers. At least Google can console itself with the thought that so many of its other acquisitions—including YouTube and DoubleClick—resulted in massive profits; but you can't hit a home run every time you step up to bat."

Submission + - The Scent Rhythm Watch Tells Time By Releasing Fragrances (gizmag.com)

Submitted by Zothecula
Zothecula writes: Glancing at a clock face in one form or another has been the de facto way to measure the passage of time. Aisen Caro Chacin though, is exploring a different perspective. She wants to give everyone the ability to tell time using their noses. Her chemical-based watch called the Scent Rhythm emits specially-designed fragrances in minute doses, in tune with circadian cycle of the human body. You get a fragrance of coffee in the morning, the smell of money in the afternoon, a relaxing whiskey scent in the evening, and a soothing chamomile fragrance at night. More than being merely pleasant, each chemically-supplemented scent aims to induce action appropriate to the time of day; the caffeine in the coffee scent for example, aims to trigger the person into being more active.
Science

Amherst Researchers Create Magnetic Monopoles 156

Posted by timothy from the can-we-call-them-dirac's-revenge? dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Nearly 85 years after pioneering theoretical physicist Paul Dirac predicted the possibility of their existence, an international collaboration led by Amherst College Physics Professor David S. Hall '91 and Aalto University (Finland) Academy Research Fellow Mikko Möttönen has created, identified and photographed synthetic magnetic monopoles in Hall's laboratory on the Amherst campus. The groundbreaking accomplishment paves the way for the detection of the particles in nature, which would be a revolutionary development comparable to the discovery of the electron." That's quite a step beyond detecting monopoles; the Nature abstract is online, but the full paper is paywalled.

Submission + - Red Team, Blue Team: The Only Woman On The Team (darkreading.com)

Submitted by ancientribe
ancientribe writes: Cyber security pro Kerstyn Clover in this Dark Reading post shares some rare insight into what it's like to be a woman in the field. She ultimately found her way to her current post as a member of the incident response and forensics team at SecureState, despite the common societal hurdles women face today in the STEM field: "I taught myself some coding and computer repair in probably the most painstaking ways possible, but my experiences growing up put me at a disadvantage that I am still working to overcome," she writes.

Submission + - Google's Motorola Adventure: Stinging Defeat, or Semi-Victory? (slashdot.org)

Submitted by Nerval's Lobster
Nerval's Lobster writes: Google had previously sold Motorola’s Home division for $2.4 billion. Combine that with yesterday’s $2.91 billion sale of Motorola’s remaining assets, subtract the $12.5 billion acquisition price for the company back in 2011, and Google’s little smartphone adventure cost it roughly $7.1 billion even before you start throwing in expenses related to actual production, marketing, and personnel. That’s a hefty chunk of change, but some analysts think the deal was ultimately a good one because it allowed Google to pick up patents, engineering talent, and insight into the mobile-device marketplace. It's debatable, however, whether those patents ultimately helped Android in the still-raging smartphone wars, and Google was slow to promote Motorola smartphones out of fear of irritating other Android manufacturers. At least Google can console itself with the thought that so many of its other acquisitions—including YouTube and DoubleClick—resulted in massive profits; but you can’t hit a home run every time you step up to bat.

Submission + - AMD Catalyst Driver To Enable Mantle, Fix Frame Pacing, Support HSA For Kaveri (hothardware.com)

Submitted by MojoKid
MojoKid writes: AMD has a new set of drivers coming in a couple of days that are poised to resolve a number of longstanding issues and enable a handful of new features as well, most notably support for Mantle. AMD's new Catalyst 14.1 beta driver is going to be the first publicly available driver from AMD that will support Mantle, AMD’s “close to the metal” API that will let developers wring additional performance from GCN-based GPUs. However, the new drivers will also add support for the HSA-related features introduced with the recently released Kaveri APU, and will reportedly fix the frame pacing issues associated with Radeon HD 7000 series CrossFire configurations. A patch for Battlefield 4 is due to arrive soon as well and AMD is claiming performance gains in excess of 40 percent in CPU limited scenarios but smaller gains in GPU-limited conditions, with average gains of 11 — 13 percent over all.

Submission + - It's Not Memory Loss - Older Minds May Just Be Fuller of Information

Submitted by Hugh Pickens DOT Com
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes: Benedict Carey writes in the NYT that the idea that the brain slows with age is one of the strongest in all of psychology but a new paper suggests that older adults'; performance on cognitive tests reflects the predictable consequences of learning on information-processing, and not cognitive decline. A team of linguistic researchers from the University of Tübingen in Germany used advanced learning models to search enormous databases of words and phrases. Since educated older people generally know more words than younger people, simply by virtue of having been around longer, the experiment simulates what an older brain has to do to retrieve a word. When the researchers incorporated that difference into the models, the aging “deficits” largely disappeared. That is to say, the larger the library you have in your head, the longer it usually takes to find a particular word (or pair). “What shocked me, to be honest, is that for the first half of the time we were doing this project, I totally bought into the idea of age-related cognitive decline in healthy adults,” says lead author Michael Ramscar but the simulations “fit so well to human data that it slowly forced me to entertain this idea that I didn’t need to invoke decline at all.” The new report will very likely add to a growing skepticism about how steep age-related decline really is. Scientists who study thinking and memory often make a broad distinction between “fluid” and “crystallized” intelligence. The former includes short-term memory, like holding a phone number in mind, analytical reasoning, and the ability to tune out distractions, like ambient conversation. The latter is accumulated knowledge, vocabulary and expertise. “In essence, what Ramscar’s group is arguing is that an increase in crystallized intelligence can account for a decrease in fluid intelligence,” says Zach Hambrick, In the meantime the new digital-era challenge to “cognitive decline” can serve as a ready-made explanation for blank moments, whether senior or otherwise (PDF). "It’s not that you’re slow.," says Carey. "It’s that you know so much."
Bitcoin

Would Linus Torvalds Please Collect His Bitcoin Tips? 231

Posted by timothy from the just-keeping-them-backed-up-on-the-internet dept.
jfruh writes "Tip4Commit is a new service that allows anyone to link a tip for a developer to GitHub commits for open source projects. The tips are denominated in Bitcoin — and it appears that some developers aren't interested, with almost 40% of the total value tipped going uncollected. One dev who hasn't collected his $136 in tips is Linux inventor Linus Torvalds. It's not clear if the devs who aren't collecting their tips are opposed to the concept of tipping on open source projects or just don't want to deal with Bitcoin."

Submission + - John Woo Has Released a Bloody Game

Submitted by SlappingOysters
SlappingOysters writes: That's right, the director of such action classics as Hard Boiled, Face/Off and Mission Impossible II has put down the camera and taken a second dip at the development scene following his so-so 2007 title Stranglehold. As you'd expect, the game — called Bloodstroke — is action focused and piles on the blood. In fact, it's all black and white save the red spilt all over the snow by the game's protagonist as she rips enemies apart. Grab It Magazine has the story and trailer.
Government

Atlanta Gambled With Winter Storm and Lost 723

Posted by timothy from the snowball's-chance dept.
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "Kim Severson reports at the NYT that by keeping schools and government offices open, and by not requiring tractor-trailers to use chains or stay out of the city's core, metropolitan Atlanta gambled and lost. "We don't want to be accused of crying wolf," said Gov. Nathan Deal, who pointed out that the storm had been forecast to just brush the south side of the city. If the city had been closed and the storm had been as light as some forecasters had told him it was going to be, he said, money would have been lost, and people would have complained. Tuesday's snowfall, that brought only 2-3 inches of snow to most of the Atlanta metro area, and the hundreds of thousands of motorists who flooded the metropolitan area's roadways as the storm moved in — created travel nightmares for commuters, truckers, students and their families. Some commuters were stuck in their vehicles up to 18 hours after they first hit the roads. Others abandoned their cars in or beside the road. Hundreds of students spent the night at school. Some surrounding cities, including Hiram, Woodstock, Sandy Springs and Acworth, opened emergency shelters for stranded motorists. "It's an easy joke made by Northerners," wrote Joe Sterling and Sarah Aarthun. "A dusting of snow shuts down an entire city and hapless drivers white-knuckle their way through a handful of flurries." Further North streets are salted well in advance of a coming storm but Atlanta doesn't have the capacity for that kind of treatment. "We simply have never purchased the amount of equipment necessary," said meteorologist Chad Myers adding Atlanta had plenty of warning. "Why would you in a city that gets one snow event every three years? Why would you buy 500 snowplows and salt trucks and have them sit around for 1,000 days, waiting for the next event?""

Submission + - Will Linus Torvalds Please Collect His Bitcoin Tips? (itworld.com)

Submitted by jfruh
jfruh writes: Tip4Commit is a new service that allows anyone to link a tip for a developer to GitHub commits for open source projects. The tips are denominated in Bitcoin — and it appears that some developers aren't interested, with almost 40% of the total value tipped going uncollected. One dev who hasn't collected his $136 in tips is Linux inventor Linus Torvalds. It's not clear if the devs who aren't collecting their tips are opposed to the concept of tipping on open source projects or just don't want to deal with Bitcoin.

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