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Australia

Australian Malls To Track Shoppers By Their Phones 236

Posted by samzenpus from the dial-S-for-shopping dept.
Fluffeh writes "Australian shopping centers will monitor customers' mobile phones to track how often they visit, which stores they like and how long they stay. One unnamed Queensland shopping center is next month due to become the first in the nation to install receivers that detect unique mobile phone radio frequency codes to pinpoint location within two meters."
Graphics

Wolfenstein Ray Traced and Anti-Aliased, At 1080p 158

Posted by timothy from the sounds-like-an-in-n'-out-burger-order dept.
An anonymous reader writes "After Intel displayed their research demo Wolfenstein: Ray Traced on Tablets, the latest progress at IDF focuses on high(est)-end gaming now running at 1080p. Besides image-based post-processing (HDR, Depth of Field) there is now also an implementation of a smart way of calculating anti-aliasing through using mesh IDs and normals and applying adaptive 16x supersampling. All that is powered by the 'cloud,' consisting of a server that holds eight Knights Ferry cards (total of 256 cores / 1024 threads). A lot of hardware, but the next iteration of the 'Many Integrated Core' (MIC) architecture, named Knights Corner (and featuring 50+ cores), might be just around the corner."

Comment Re:Good. (Score 1) 483

by ardyng (#32698658) Attached to: ASCAP Declares War On Free Culture, EFF
No, people DO care when the movie that they've legally bought doesn't play, or when the game that they just legally purchased doesn't work.

Perhaps they don't care about DRM as an acronym, but they care when stuff doesn't work after they've shelled out money.
Crime

The South Carolina Primary and Voting Machine Fraud 467

Posted by kdawson from the good-ol'-politics dept.
cSeattleGameboy writes "South Carolina sure knows how to pick 'em. Alvin Greene is a broke, unemployed guy who is facing a felony obscenity charge. He made no campaign appearances and raised no money, but he is the brand new Democratic Senate nominee from South Carolina. Tom Schaller at FiveThirtyEight.com does a detailed analysis of how a guy like this wins a primary race, and many of the signs point to voting machine fraud. There seem to have been irregularities on all sides. 'Dr. Mebane performed second-digit Benford's law tests on the precinct returns from the Senate race. ... If votes are added or subtracted from a candidate's total, possibly due to error or fraud, Mebane's test will detect a deviation from this distribution. Results... showed that Rawl's Election Day vote totals depart from the expected distribution at 90% confidence. In other words, the observed vote pattern for Rawl could be expected to occur only about 10% of the time by chance. ... An unusual, non-random pattern in the precinct-level results suggests tampering, or at least machine malfunction, perhaps at the highest level. And Mebane is perhaps the leading expert on this very subject. Along with the anomalies between absentee ballot v. election day ballots..., something smells here.' Techdirt.com points out that South Carolina uses ES&S voting machines, which have had strings of problems before; and they have no audit trail."
Patents

Amazon Seeks 1-Nod Ordering Patent 194

Posted by timothy from the sold-to-the-gentleman-with-the-slight-facial-tic dept.
theodp writes "Amazon.com is famous for its patented 1-Click ordering system. But what about 1-Nod ordering? Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos is seeking a patent on a system that would let people make purchases with a nod, a smile, or even a raise of the eyebrow. Bezos' invention — 'Movement Recognition as Input Mechanism' — envisions a computing device that could interpret certain facial expressions and enhance or potentially replace conventional input devices such as keypads and touch screens."
Cellphones

Tetris Clones Pulled From Android Market 396

Posted by Soulskill from the bad-news-bears dept.
sbrubblesman writes "The Tetris Company, LLC has notified Google to remove all Tetris clones from Android Market. I am one of the developers of FallingBlocks, a game with the same gameplay concepts as Tetris. I have received an email warning that my game was suspended from Android Market due to a violation of the Developer Content Policy. When I received the email, I already imagined that it had something to do with it being a Tetris clone, but besides having the same gameplay as Tetris, which I believe cannot be copyrighted, the game uses its own name, graphics and sounds. There's no reference to 'Tetris' in our game. I have emailed Google asking what is the reason for the application removal. Google promptly answered that The Tetris Company, LLC notified them under the DMCA (PDF) to remove various Tetris clones from Android Market. My app was removed together with 35 other Tetris clones. I checked online at various sources, and all of them say that there's no copyright on gameplay. There could be some sort of patent. But even if they had one, it would last 20 years, so it would have been over in 2005. It's a shame that The Tetris Company, LLC uses its power to stop developers from creating good and free games for Android users. Without resources for a legal fight, our application and many others will cease to exist, even knowing that they are legit. Users will be forced to buy the paid, official version, which is worse than many of the ones available for free on the market. Users from other countries, such as Brazil in my case, won't even be able to play the official Tetris, since Google Checkout doesn't exist in Brazil; you can't buy paid applications from Android Market in these countries."
Apple

Steve Jobs Says PC Folks' World Is Slipping Away 1067

Posted by kdawson from the freedom-from-porn dept.
theodp writes "Provoked by an iPad ad promising a 'revolution,' Valleywag's Ryan Tate fired off a late-night missive to Steve Jobs. Jobs responded, and the two engaged in an after-midnight e-mail debate over lockdown, Cocoa vs. Flash, battery life, and whether 'freedom from porn' is a bug or a feature. 'The times they are a changin',' quipped Jobs, 'and some traditional PC folks feel like their world is slipping away. It is.' Tate was unswayed by the Apple CEO's reality distortion field, but did come away impressed by Jobs' willingness to spar one-on-one over his beliefs — at two in the morning on a weekend."
GUI

Game CEO Sees "Gamification" of Work and Military 115

Posted by Soulskill from the browsing-slashdot-gives-you-rested-xp dept.
An anonymous reader writes "The CEO of Unity discusses 'gamification' — applying game design and technology to real-world applications beyond 'gamespace.' The military is using game design theory for some training programs — not just 'the 3-D, realistic, virtual world experiences, but also the built-in use of frustration and reward.' (And similar training packages were adopted by Unilever, the giant corporation which owns Ben & Jerry's ice cream.) Medical professionals have licensed a 'Google Earth for the human body,' and game design is also being used to build tax software. ('It has to be the most boring field, but I mean that's the point. You can make it slightly challenging and give people little reasons to play these tax tools — beyond, you know, not going to prison!') While some companies conduct team-building exercises using Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter, others use game technology to standardize their in-house employee training programs. The interviewer adds, 'I know I'd feel better about job training if it felt more like killing zombies.'"

Comment Things that make you go, hmmm. (Score 1) 264

by ardyng (#30174722) Attached to: Netbooks Have Higher Failure Rate Than Laptops
The data are fishy. Do they fail because people buy a netbook because they can take them more places, and thus have a higher incidence of failure because they're being carried and used in more places? My own experience with a netbook vs laptop is that the Asus EEE PC I purchased nearly two years ago is still going strong without a single hardware issue, vs the cheap Dell that lasted a year before developing critical power issues (right after my warranty expired, of course) and the Fujitsu Lifebook likewise failing with hinge death at about a year and a half, after a long run of problems. My Asus netbook seems to just be more rugged than your average PC. Also, I take the thing everywhere, where my last laptops were left home a lot more because they weighed so much more.

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