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Patents

Apple Wants Patent On Video Game-Based iBooks 104

Posted by Soulskill from the making-your-own-stories dept.
theodp writes "Patently Apple reports that a new Apple patent application has surfaced describing an application that would record your personal journey through a video game and turn it into a custom comic or iBook when you're done playing. Imagine how thrilled little Billy's Mommy would have been if she only had the chance to read the story of her son's foray into Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas or see how he dealt with BioShock's Little Sisters."
Cellphones

Why Overheard Cell Phone Chats Are Annoying 344

Posted by timothy from the they-drown-out-the-bark-of-my-gun dept.
__roo writes "American researchers think they have found the answer to the question of why overhearing cell phone chats are annoying. According to scientists at Cornell University, when only half of the conversation is overheard, it drains more attention and concentration than when overhearing two people talking. According to one researcher, 'We have less control to move away our attention from half a conversation (or halfalogue) than when listening to a dialogue. Since halfalogues really are more distracting and you can't tune them out, this could explain why people are irritated.' Their study will be published in the journal Psychological Science."
Image

Websites That Don't Need to Be Made Anymore 161

Posted by samzenpus from the do-not-want dept.
They say that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, but there is a finite number of social networking or selling websites that the world needs. Here is a collection of the eight kinds of websites that absolutely don't need to be made anymore. I'd add dating sites and anybody who uses pop-up ads myself, but I think that would eliminate half the Web.
Games

Game Endings Going Out of Style? 190

Posted by Soulskill from the to-be-continued dept.
An article in the Guardian asks whether the focus of modern games has shifted away from having a clear-cut ending and toward indefinite entertainment instead. With the rise of achievements, frequent content updates and open-ended worlds, it seems like publishers and developers are doing everything they can to help this trend. Quoting: "Particularly before the advent of 'saving,' the completion of even a simple game could take huge amounts of patience, effort and time. The ending, like those last pages of a book, was a key reason why we started playing in the first place. Sure, multiplayer and arcade style games still had their place, but fond 8, 16 and 32-bit memories consist more of completion and satisfaction than particular levels or tricky moments. Over the past few years, however, the idea of a game as simply something to 'finish' has shifted somewhat. For starters, the availability of downloadable content means no story need ever end, as long as the makers think there's a paying audience. Also, the ubiquity of broadband means multiplayer gaming is now the standard, not the exception it once was. There is no real 'finish' to most MMORPGs."
Biotech

Fear Detector To Sniff Out Terrorists 342

Posted by timothy from the interesting-assumptions dept.
Hugh Pickens writes "Evidence that the smell of fear is real was uncovered by US scientists last year who studied the underarm secretions of 20 terrified novice skydivers and found that people appear to respond unconsciously to the sweat smell of a frightened person. Now the Telegraph reports that researchers hope a 'fear detector' will make it possible to identify individuals at check points who are up to no good. 'The challenge lies in the characterization and identification of the specific chemical that gives away the signature of human fear, especially the fear in relation to criminal acts,' says Professor Tong Tun at City University London, who leads the team developing security sensor systems that can detect the human fear pheromone. The project will look at potential obstacles to the device, such as the effects of perfume and the variances in pheromone production and if the initial 18-month feasibility study is successful, the first detectors could be developed in the next two to three years. 'I do not see any particular reason why similar sensor techniques cannot be expanded to identify human smells by race, age or gender to build a profile of a criminal during or after an incident,' Tong added."

Comment Re:Shape My Traffic (Score 1) 291

by qor (#28716459) Attached to: Canadians Find Traffic Shaping "Reasonable"

I am sick and tired of Canadian ISP's providing crap for bandwidth - overcharging for this bandwidth - then complaining when I use it.

I used to be with Cogeco Cable... 45 $ a month of a shared, shaped and throttled 6 mbit connection. 2 computers on the same network, at the same time, brought everything to a screeching halt (ie, WoW at 7pm on a weekday).

We got so tired and overall frustrated, we changed to Telus. I pay about the same price for a dedicated 5 mbit line. My traffic is not shaped or throttled... and if a torrent download is slow, I know it's not because of my provider.

The question now is, what makes Telus so different from Bell, Cogeco or other cable providers? Why can't Rogers upgrade their infrastructure? Telus sure did... I know have the phone, internet & TelusTV from the same line... and I sure ain't the only one.

** I do not work for Telus, nor do I know anyone who does, nor am I trying to spin for them. This is based from purely personal experience, after dealing with a few cable companies both here in QC and in the States. Now get off my lawn.

Comment Re:Most of these rules are. (Score 1) 554

by qor (#27462273) Attached to: Quebec Says 'Non' To English-Only Video Games
Aww, screw my mod points.

I live in Quebec, and my American wife is actually paid by Emploi Quebec to take French classes, which is great. The area where we live is very much french (20 or so anglophones in a 32,000 people city), and it'll allow her to not only get on the job market faster, but to socialize with other people (friends, family, strangers) without my need to be there to translate. (That's a bad problem in some parts of the province, as a lot of ignorant people just say "We're in Quebec, speak French" and don't even bother trying -- probably one of the main reasons most anglophones have issues here)

That said, I can't stand translations. Most movies and games either sound extremely cheesy, the quebecois accent is way over the top, or it's too much "France" French; same can be said with french productions translated in english.

What I find sad is that they want to force that bad dubbing down our throats for the sake of the langue de Molière, whether we want it or not -- Never mind the fact that a lot of the words used here are borrowed or adapted from English anyways.

Thank you, Gouvernement du Québec, for passing such laws that keep us, the lowly people, isolated from the rest of the world.
The Almighty Buck

Sony Bringing RMT To Vanguard 39

Posted by Soulskill from the saga-of-ka-ching dept.
Eurogamer reports that Sony Online Entertainment will be adding the ability to do real money trading to at least some of their Vanguard: Saga of Heroes servers. It's the same service they opened for a pair of Everquest II servers a while back. Quoting: "The service, offered by Live Gamer, allows players to sell items, currency and characters for real cash through a secure channel, authorised by the game operator. Most real-money trading in MMOs is a 'grey' market that doesn't have the operator's consent. ... Sony Online Entertainment recently said that it had no intention to bring its other real-money trading initiative — the Station Cash item shop — to Vanguard."
United States

Barack Obama Is One Step Closer To Being President 601

Posted by kdawson from the donkey-faithful-one-hundred-percent dept.
At 3:00 Eastern time on Monday Dec. 15, 538 electors in state capitols across the US cast the votes that actually elected Barack Obama the 44th President. Obama received, unofficially, 365 electoral votes (with 270 needed to win). The exact total will not be official — or Obama officially elected — until Congress certifies the count of electoral votes in a joint session on Jan. 6, 2009. The Electoral College was established in its present form in 1804 by the Twelfth Amendment to the US Constitution. Electors are not required to vote for the candidate who won their state — in fact, 24 states make it a criminal offense to vote otherwise, but no "faithless elector" has ever been charged with a crime. "On 158 occasions, electors have cast their votes for President or Vice President in a manner different from that prescribed by the legislature of the state they represented. Of those, 71 votes were changed because the original candidate died before the elector was able to cast a vote. Two votes were not cast at all when electors chose to abstain from casting their electoral vote for any candidate. The remaining 85 were changed by the elector's personal interest, or perhaps by accident. Usually, the faithless electors act alone. An exception was in 1836 when 23 Virginia electors changed their vote together. ... To date, faithless electors have never changed the otherwise expected outcome of the election."
Editorial

The Player Is and Is Not the Character 152

Posted by Soulskill from the i-agree-and-disagree dept.
Jill Duffy writes "GameCareerGuide has posted an intellectual article about video games which argues there is no such thing as 'breaking the fourth wall' in games. Written by Matthew Weise, a lead game designer for the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab, the article considers the complex relationship between video game players and characters. Weise says that, unlike in theater and film, video games don't ever really break the fourth wall, as it were, because in games, there is no wall. Players are always tethered to the technology, and the player is always just as much the main character as not the main character. Weise looks at both modern experimental games, like Mirror's Edge, as well as old classics, like Sonic the Hedgehog, to defend his point. He writes, 'Both avatars and the technological devices we use to control them are never simply in one reality. They are inherently liminal entities, contributing to a mindset that we, as players, exist in two realities at once. It's just as natural for a player to say, "I defeated that boss," as it is to say, "Snake defeated that boss," since Snake is and is not the player at the same time. It is likewise natural for a player to say, "I punched an enemy soldier," when in reality, she punched no one. All she did was press a button.'"
Real Time Strategy (Games)

Fable II DLC Coming In December 25

Posted by Soulskill from the almost-like-they-planned-it dept.
Microsoft has announced that the first pack of downloadable content for Fable II will be available on December 12th. It introduces a new island called "Knothole," which contains new quests and dungeons, as well was various items and character customization effects. An interesting article about Fable II's morality system is up at Valuable Games. The author says, "In many ways the game's moral dimension feels more like a feature, similar to the implementation of new shaders or an upgraded AI system. It is not that the morality system is tacked on; it is a central part of the gameplay. But, compared to the enormous amount of work that must have gone into designing the world (i.e. creating artwork, a coherent narrative and the world itself), there seems to be far less time spent on developing (minor) emergent moral choices and major moral dilemmas in the game's overall narrative." GameSetWatch has a related story about how the game approached storytelling.

Comment Re:Yes. (Score 1) 794

by qor (#25819505) Attached to: Should You Get Paid While Your Computer Boots?
There goes my careful mod work.

I am *the* assistant for a 17-or-so-people engineering consulting firm. I can tell you that my PC is an Athlon 700mhz with 768mb of ram, running Windows 2000.

It can easily take 10 to 12 minutes before I'm actually able to sit down and start up shit without having the freshly-booted box slow to a crawl of death on me.

Lucky for me, we have no such "energy conservation" policies (or not yet, at least), and I can't be bothered with booting every morning (but then again, I get paid for it... fill-it-up-yourself time sheet rather than a clock-in system). Even if and when we do have such a policy, I can tell you without a doubt that I'll get paid for my "booting time"... especially since the bosses can't be bothered to check the time sheets every week, heh (our own version of UAC! Click accept and be done with it)
Image

Colossus of Rhodes To Be Rebuilt As Giant Light Sculpture 39

Posted by samzenpus from the seven-great-projects-of-the-world dept.
The people of Rhodes will once again be able to gaze upon one of the world's seven ancient wonders with the help of East German artist Gert Hof, and international funding. Like the original, the new Colossus will adorn an outer pier in the harbor area of Rhodes, and be visible to passing ships. Unlike the original Colossus, this one will be made of light. "We are talking about a highly, highly innovative light sculpture, one that will stand between 60 and 100 meters tall so that people can physically enter it," said Dr Dimitris Koutoulas, who is heading the project in Greece. "Although we are still at the drawing board stage, Gert Hof's plan is to make it the world's largest light installation, a structure that has never before been seen in any place of the world."
Image

The Science of the Lightsaber 197

Posted by samzenpus from the the-force dept.
Smartcowboy writes "Chances are that you have seen a lightsaber at one time or another, whether on the evening news or down at the local cantina. Therefore you know that a lightsaber is an amazing and versatile device that is able to cut through nearly anything in a matter of milliseconds. Have you ever wondered how these remarkable weapons work? Where does the energy come from, and how are they able to contain that energy in a rod-like column of glowing power? In this article, you will have a chance to look inside a lightsaber and discover the source of its incredible characteristics." I was sure the blade was made from the focused hate and disappointment of the last three movies.

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