JetLib News

Rock Band 3 Officially Announced For Holiday 2010

admin — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 11:25:00 +0000

An anonymous reader writes “Philippe Dauman, Viacom CEO and President, announced today that Harmonix is currently working on the next Rock Band game, Rock Band 3, due for release Holiday 2010. ‘The company is pursuing the game in spite of an industry-weakening decline in the once-booming genre of peripheral-equipped music games. Although the franchise has generated over $1 billion to date, the category in general saw sales contract by as much as half throughout 2009. MTV Games parent Viacom also saw Rock Band declines drag on its balance sheet in its last fiscal quarter, and expressed a need to refocus away from pricey peripherals in favor of software. It also said that due to royalties it would need to be more “selective” about track listings, and that it needs more support from the music industry in that department.’”

Source: Rock Band 3 Officially Announced For Holiday 2010

Linux Takes Over E-Voting In Australian State

admin — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 10:19:00 +0000

daria42 writes “The Electoral Commission in the Australian state of Victoria has made plans to expand its use of electronic voting kiosks based on Linux in the next state election in November of this year. But it appears to be a little confused: the documentation states it will be using the ‘2.6 kernel/Gentoo release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux.’ Huh?”

Source: Linux Takes Over E-Voting In Australian State

Puzzle In xkcd Book Finally Cracked

admin — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 08:49:00 +0000

An anonymous reader writes “After a little over five months of pondering, xkcd fans have cracked a puzzle hidden inside Randall Munroe’s recent book xkcd: volume 0. Here is the start of the thread on the xkcd forums; and here is the post revealing the final message (a latitude and longitude plus a date and time).”

Source: Puzzle In xkcd Book Finally Cracked

The Value of BASIC As a First Programming Language

admin — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 07:21:00 +0000

Mirk writes “Computer-science legend Edsger W. Dijkstra famously wrote: ‘It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration’. The Reinvigorated Programmer argues that the world is full of excellent programmers who cut their teeth on BASIC, and suggests it could even be because they started out with BASIC.”

Source: The Value of BASIC As a First Programming Language

US Considers Some Free Wireless Broadband Service

admin — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 04:29:00 +0000

gollum123 writes “US regulators may dedicate spectrum to free wireless Internet service for some Americans to increase affordable broadband service nationwide, the Federal Communications Commission said on Tuesday. The FCC provided few details about how it would carry out such a plan and who would qualify, but will make a recommendation under the National Broadband Plan set for release next week. The agency will determine details later. One way of making broadband more affordable is to ‘consider use of spectrum for a free or a very low-cost wireless broadband service,’ the FCC said in a statement.” Nobody has more than a couple of paragraphs on this story. None of the press coverage mentions the obvious likelihood that any such free network would be heavily filtered, censored, and monitored.

Source: US Considers Some Free Wireless Broadband Service

US Gamers Spend $3.8 Billion On MMOs Yearly

admin — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 02:30:00 +0000

eldavojohn writes “A new report from Games Industry indicates that MMO gamers in the United States paid $3.8 billion to play last year, with an analysis of five European countries bringing the total close to $4.5 billion USD. In America, the report estimated that payments for boxed content and client downloads amounted to a measly $400 million, while the subscriptions came to $2.38 billion. Hopefully that will fund some developer budgets for bigger and better MMOs yet to come. The study also found that roughly a quarter of the US population plays some form of MMO. Surely MMOs are shaping up to be a juicy industry, and a market that can satisfy people of all walks of life.”

Source: US Gamers Spend $3.8 Billion On MMOs Yearly

The World’s First Commercially Available Jetpack

admin — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 00:33:00 +0000

ElectricSteve writes “It’s been a long time coming. While Arthur C. Clarke’s geosync satellites have taken to space, and James Bond’s futuristic mobile technology has become commonplace, still the dream of sustained personal flight has eluded us — until now. At $86,000, the Martin Aircraft jetpack costs about as much as a high-end car, achieves a 30-minute flight time, and is fueled by regular gasoline. A 10% deposit buys you a production slot for 12 months hence.” Here’s a video of some indoor test flights. This isn’t Buck Rogers’s jetpack — it’s about 5 by 5 feet and weighs more than the average human. You won’t be able to commute with it (the FAA has not certified this class of device) so it’s recreational only for now.

Source: The World’s First Commercially Available Jetpack

Google’s Computing Power Refines Translation

admin — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 23:48:00 +0000

gollum123 sends an excerpt from the NY Times on how Google has taken a lead in language translation, in one of the company’s few unqualified successes as it attempts to broaden is offerings beyond search. “…Google’s quick rise to the top echelons of the translation business is a reminder of what can happen when Google unleashes its brute-force computing power on complex problems. The network of data centers that it built for Web searches may now be, when lashed together, the world’s largest computer. Google is using that machine to push the limits on translation technology. Last month, for example, it said it was working to combine its translation tool with image analysis, allowing a person to, say, take a cellphone photo of a menu in German and get an instant English translation. …in the mid-1990s, researchers began favoring a so-called statistical approach. They found that if they fed the computer thousands or millions of passages and their human-generated translations, it could learn to make accurate guesses about how to translate new texts. It turns out that this technique, which requires huge amounts of data and lots of computing horsepower, is right up Google’s alley. …Google’s service is good enough to convey the essence of a news article, and it has become a quick source for translations for millions of people.”

Source: Google’s Computing Power Refines Translation

Jeff Jaffe Named CEO of W3C

admin — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 22:58:00 +0000

blozza2070 notes the news that Jeff Jaffe has been appointed CEO of the World Wide Web Consortium. Until January Jaffe was CTO at Novell and, while his name hasn’t come up very often in this community, he is one of the architects of the Novell-Microsoft patent deal. A reading of Jaffe’s blog while at Novell tenda to paint him as a software patent supporter, Microsoft apologist, and no fan of the FSF. This strongly worded page at Boycott Novell features copious links to support the above characterization.

Source: Jeff Jaffe Named CEO of W3C

Generosity Is Contagious, Study Shows–But Selfishness Is Too

admin — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 22:36:46 +0000

Contagiousness: It’s contagious! Happiness was contagious in 2008, then loneliness last year, and don’t forget being fat. Now it’s generosity that spreads like the flu across social networks, according to James Fowler and Nicholas Christakis (who were both behind the happiness study). Their new study appears in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

To test out whether generosity spreads, the scientists devised a game. In groups of four, each person had 20 “credits,” some of which they could decide to toss into a common fund for all the players. The scoring was set up so that giving to the fund was costly unless the other players did it too: If everyone kept their money, they’d have the 20 credits, but if everyone put all they could into the fund, each player would end up with 32. However, the players had no way to know how generous the others were being. The best payoff would come if everyone gave all their money — but without knowing what others were doing, it always made sense to keep one’s money and skim from the generosity of others [Wired.com].

The researchers found that if a person was particularly generous, the people he or she played with were more likely to be generous during the next round, when they were shuffled into groups with different people. Ultimately, the initial person’s contribution was multiplied up to three times—a result in keeping with earlier findings on social contagion suggesting that this sort of ripple effect continues for three degrees of separation [TIME]. However, while kindness and generosity spread through the network of players, selfishness did too.

Certainly, these studies have their doubters. Commenters on one of our last “contagious” posts pointed to a 2008 BMJ study noting that if social networking studies weren’t careful in looking at correlations, one could plausibly find that traits like height, acne, and headaches are similarly contagious. Though Fowler and Christakis designed their experiment to try to see cause-and-effect links, not just correlation, they say the study is a general model for group behavior, and how well it fits the more convoluted real world remains to be seen.

But we talking apes are impressionable social creatures, after all, so perhaps we really do spread behaviors—and not just disgusting infectious diseases—amongst ourselves. Says Fowler, “When people benefit from kindness they ‘pay it forward’ by helping others who were not originally involved, and this creates a cascade of co-operation that influences dozens more in a social network” [The Telegraph].

Image: flickr / Woodleywonderworks

Source: Generosity Is Contagious, Study Shows–But Selfishness Is Too