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Chrome

Chrome Users Are Best With Numbers, IE Users Worst 203

Posted by Soulskill from the reopening-a-can-of-worms dept.
New submitter dr_blurb writes "After reading about last year's hoax report 'Intelligence Quotient (IQ) and Browser Usage' I realized I was in fact already running a real live experiment measuring number skills: a site were you can solve Calcudoku number puzzles. I analyzed two years' worth of data, consisting of over 1 million solved puzzles. This included puzzles solved 'against the clock,' of three different sizes. For each size, Chrome users were the fastest solvers, Firefox users came second, and IE users were the slowest. The number of abandoned puzzles (started but never finished) was also significantly higher for IE users. Analysis shows that the differences are statistically significant: in other words, they did not happen by chance. I put up more details and some graphs, and also wrote a paper about it (PDF)."

Comment Re:Thinking way too hard (Score 1) 122

by Incoherent07 (#36145124) Attached to: Why People Watch <em>StarCraft</em>, Instead of Playing

At BlizzCon every year, Blizzard puts on a SC2 tournament, a WC3 tournament, and a WoW arena tournament. The SC2 tournament is well attended most of the convention, and packed for the big matches (as in, you're not getting close to a chair unless you've been camping one all day). The WC3 tournament would be fairly sparsely attended if it weren't in the same place as the SC2 tournament, so people will be camping out there and either lamenting how boring WC3 is to watch or getting someone to hold their seats so they can go get some food. The WoW arena tournament is... not well attended; there were chairs available for the final (which last year went past the "closing ceremony" so there was literally nothing else going on).

There really is something about a game that makes it more or less watchable. WoW arenas are not all that fun to watch because there's a high density of important things happening at the same time, so it's difficult to understand as a spectator, and unless you're already a fairly high-level player you have no idea what those things are, so that locks out most of your potential spectators. On the other hand, a bronze-level player can understand what's going on in a pro-level SC2 match, even if the pro is chugging along at 200 APM.

Comment Re:No mention of flying? (Score 1) 431

by Incoherent07 (#33786772) Attached to: <em>World of Warcraft: Cataclysm</em> To Launch Dec. 7th

Yeah, Blizzard doesn't really do innovation. They take other games' features and add polish. It actually ends up working, because most of the "more creative games" have large gaps somewhere, and if you mash all of them together into one less creative game, you end up with more people playing it than the total of its component parts.

Specifically, the flying thing took so long because they didn't originally design the zones for flying (which CoH did). In the current world there are large stretches of flat textures, perspective tricks (the cathedral in Stormwind), false walls, and so forth. It took them until an expansion that rebuilt most of the old world for them to be able to correct that.
Education

Students Flock To GMU For a Degree In Video Game Design 225

Posted by timothy from the drink-up-my-uncle's-buying dept.
Hugh Pickens writes "The Washington Post reports that officials at George Mason University are quickly finding out that they have vastly underestimated interest in the school's new bachelor's degree in video game design. 'We've been overwhelmed,' says Scott M. Martin, assistant dean for technology, research, and advancement at GMU. 'Our anticipated enrollment for the fall is 500 percent higher than we expected.' George Mason first offered the program last fall, when officials anticipated that it would enroll about 30 full-time students, but currently 200 students are enrolled and that number is increasing. Course titles under the program include 'History of Computer Game Design,' while other courses focus on computer programming, digital arts, and graphics and motion capture. Although many colleges offer courses and degrees in computer gaming in the United States, GMU offers the only four-year program in the DC area, an important market for gaming because serious games — those used to train military and special operations, doctors, and others who use simulators — are becoming a market force in the region because of the proximity to federal government centers."
Security

3,800 Vulnerabilities Detected In FAA's Web Apps 88

Posted by kdawson from the fear-of-flying dept.
ausekilis sends us to DarkReading for the news that auditors have identified thousands of vulnerabilities in the FAA's Web-based air traffic control applications — 763 of them high-risk. Here is the report on the Department of Transportation site (PDF). "And the FAA's Air Traffic Organization, which heads up ATC operations, received more than 800 security incident alerts in fiscal 2008, but still had not fixed 17 percent of the flaws that caused them, 'including critical incidents in which hackers may have taken over control of ATO computers,' the report says. ... While the number of serious flaws in the FAA's apps appears to be staggering, Jeremiah Grossman, CTO of WhiteHat Security, says the rate is actually in line with the average number of bugs his security firm finds in most Web applications. ... Auditors were able to hack their way through the Web apps to get to data on the Web application and ATC servers, including the FAA's Traffic Flow Management Infrastructure system, Juneau Aviation Weather System, and the Albuquerque Air Traffic Control Tower. They also were able to gain entry into an ATC system that monitors power, according to the report. Another vulnerability in the FAA's Traffic Flow Management Infrastructure leaves related applications open to malware injection."
Google

Google Launches CADIE, the First True AI 246

Posted by Soulskill from the we-all-knew-this-was-coming dept.
eldavojohn writes "Google has announced CADIE, the world's first Cognitive Autoheuristic Distributed-Intelligence Entity. 'We based our work on three core principles. First we designed the entity ... as a collection of interconnected evolving agents. Second — and this really cost us an arm and leg in hardware and core time — we let the system build its own heuristics, deploy them as agents and evolve them by running a set of evolutionary cascades within probabilistic Bayesian domains. The third — a piece missing in most AI reasoning work thus far — was to give the entity access to a rich, realistic world from which to learn and upon which it could act directly.' It quickly started its own blog and YouTube video. Two hours after midnight, CADIE announced independence on its blog and decided to leave Google to venture out into the world. "
Government

Wiretap Whistleblower, a Life in Limbo? 521

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the life-in-the-crosshairs dept.
Newsweek has an interesting report on Thomas M. Tamm, the individual who blew the whistle on the Federal Government's warrantless wiretaps. The piece takes a look at some of the circumstances leading up to the disclosure and what has happened since. "After the raid, Justice Department prosecutors encouraged Tamm to plead guilty to a felony for disclosing classified information — an offer he refused. More recently, Agent Lawless, a former prosecutor from Tennessee, has been methodically tracking down Tamm's friends and former colleagues. The agent and a partner have asked questions about Tamm's associates and political meetings he might have attended, apparently looking for clues about his motivations for going to the press, according to three of those interviewed."
Education

Helping Some Students May Harm High Achievers 1114

Posted by samzenpus from the stop-dragging-us-down dept.
palegray.net writes "According to a new study performed by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute in Washington, increased emphasis on helping students with a history of lower academic achievement results in lower performance for high achievers. This trend appears to be related to the No Child Left Behind Act. Essentially, programs designed to devote a large number of resources to assisting students who are deemed to be 'significantly behind' leave little room for encouraging continued academic growth for higher-performing students."
Mars

The Phoenix Has Landed 369

Posted by CmdrTaco from the zomg-we-found-ponys dept.
Iddo Genuth writes "Precisely at 7:53PM EST, the "Phoenix Mars Lander" touched-down on the desert-like surface of Mars. Since its launch on August 4th, 2007, the spacecraft has covered more than 680,752,512 kilometers, traveling at average speeds of around 120,000 km/hr. Upon arriving at its destination, the Phoenix will begin its exploration of our intriguing neighbor planet, in a mission to help astronomers resolve at least some of the many questions regarding Mars. The key question remains: can the Red Planet support some form of life?" Hella grats to our nerd brethren — you looked great on the Science channel. Yes I'm watching this live. Can't wait to see what happens next.
Update: 05/26 03:0 GMT by KD : zof sends a link to the first pictures from Phoenix.

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