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Comments: 27 + -   US Gamers Spend $3.8 Billion On MMOs Yearly on Tuesday March 09, @09:30PM

Posted by Soulskill on Tuesday March 09, @09:30PM
from the tell-us-about-your-paladin dept.
business
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."
Read More... 27 comments story

Comments: 120 + -   The World's First Commercially Available Jetpack on Tuesday March 09, @07:33PM

Posted by kdawson on Tuesday March 09, @07:33PM
from the quieter-in-version-2 dept.
transportation
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.
Read More... 120 comments story

Comments: 60 + -   Google's Computing Power Refines Translation on Tuesday March 09, @06:48PM

Posted by kdawson on Tuesday March 09, @06:48PM
from the throwing-silicon-at-it dept.
supercomputing
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."
Read More... 60 comments story

Comments: 82 + -   Jeff Jaffe Named CEO of W3C on Tuesday March 09, @05:58PM

Posted by kdawson on Tuesday March 09, @05:58PM
from the what-price-standards dept.
gnu
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 tends 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.
Read More... 82 comments story

Comments: 193 + -   NewEgg Confirms Shipping Fake Core i7s on Tuesday March 09, @05:12PM

Posted by kdawson on Tuesday March 09, @05:12PM
from the making-good dept.
crime
adeelarshad82 writes "After originally rejecting the story, online retailer NewEgg confirmed that a shipment of Core i7s were indeed fake, and apologized for the affair. NewEgg has also broken off its relationship with IPEX, the supplier of the phony lot. The retailer said that it has already contacted affected customers and would continue to reach out and replace the counterfeit parts. We discussed the fake Core i7s over the weekend."
Read More... 193 comments story

Comments: 157 + -   Dot-Com Craze Peaked 10 Years Ago This Week on Tuesday March 09, @04:22PM

Posted by kdawson on Tuesday March 09, @04:22PM
from the irrational-exuberance dept.
business
netbuzz writes "When the NASDAQ stock index hit its all-time high of 5,133 on March 10, 2000, it had more than doubled in a year and the dot-com bubble was already leaking in a big way. A week later the NASDAQ had fallen 9 percent. A year later it was below 2000. Gone were such poster children of the era as Pets.com, Kozmo, and — who could forget? — Whoopi Goldberg's Flooz. Here's a look back."
Read More... 157 comments story

Comments: 216 + -   Best Resource For Identifying Legit Applications? on Tuesday March 09, @03:30PM

Posted by kdawson on Tuesday March 09, @03:30PM
from the x-ray-goggles dept.
it
bjb writes "While helping a somewhat computer illiterate person figure out a problem recently, they mentioned that PDF files had recently stopped working. Upon investigation I found something installed called 'PDF Suite.' Never having heard of it, I Googled it with 'malware' and other key words, but nothing turned up, though my suspicion remained (and was somewhat confirmed by WOT.) So my question is, where can you go to find out if something is legitimate? Because the person I'm helping is on a dial-up connection, downloading malware detection applications (and updates) is too heavy consider. And I don't maintain a USB stick with such apps, since I don't do this kind of thing very often. Where can you quickly find information?"
Read More... 216 comments story

Comments: 230 + -   Cisco Introduces a 322 Tbit/sec. Router on Tuesday March 09, @02:45PM

Posted by kdawson on Tuesday March 09, @02:45PM
from the one-loc-per-second dept.
internet
CWmike writes "Today Cisco Systems introduced its next-generation Internet core router, the CRS-3, with about three times the capacity of its current platform. 'The Internet will scale faster than any of us anticipate,' Cisco's John Chambers said while announcing the product. At full scale, the CRS-3 has a capacity of 322Tbit/sec., roughly three times that of the CRS-1, introduced in 2004. It also has more than 12 times the capacity of its nearest competitor, Chambers said. The CRS-3 will help the Internet evolve from a messaging to an entertainment and media platform, with video emerging as the 'killer app,' Chambers said. Using a CRS-3, every person in China, which has a population just over 1.3 billion, could participate in a video phone call at the same time. (Or you could pump nearly one Library of Congress per second through the device, or give everyone in San Fransisco a 1Gbps internet connection.) AT&T said it has been using the CRS-3 to test 100Gbit/sec. data links in tests on a commercial fiber route in Florida and Louisiana."
Read More... 230 comments story

Comments: 322 + -   Doctors Skirt FDA To Heal Patients With Stem Cells on Tuesday March 09, @01:57PM

Posted by kdawson on Tuesday March 09, @01:57PM
from the self-supplied dept.
biotech
kkleiner writes "For many years countless individuals in the US have had to watch with envy as dogs and horses with joint and bone injuries have been cured with stem cell procedures that the FDA has refused to approve for humans. Now, in an exciting development, Regenerative Sciences Inc. in Colorado has found a way to skirt the FDA and provide these same stem cell treatments to humans. The results have been stunning, allowing many patients to walk or run who have not been able to do so for years. There's no surgery required, just a needle to extract and then re-inject the cells where they are needed. There has always been a lot of hype around stem cells, but this is the real deal. Real humans are getting real treatment that works, and we should all hope that more companies will begin offering this procedure in other states soon."
Read More... 322 comments story

Comments: 319 + -   The Secret Origin of Windows on Tuesday March 09, @01:12PM

Posted by Soulskill on Tuesday March 09, @01:12PM
from the sounds-like-a-comic-book-character dept.
windows
harrymcc writes "Windows has been so dominant for so long that it's easy to forget Windows 1.0 was vaporware, mocked both outside and inside of Microsoft — and that its immediate successors were considered stopgaps until OS/2 was everywhere. Tandy Trower, the product manager who finally got Windows 1.0 out the door a quarter century ago, has written a memoir of the experience. (He thought being assigned the much-maligned project was Microsoft's fiendish way of trying to get rid of him.) The story involves such still-significant figures as Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer, Ray Ozzie, and Nathan Myhrvold; Trower left Microsoft only in November of 2009 after 28 years with the company."
Read More... 319 comments story
 
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Cablevision Reprograms Boxes To Include Anti-ABC Channel
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