You may have already heard: Apple is cleaning out their apps store. They’ve decided “to remove any overtly sexual content from the App Store.” It’s definitely not a first for Apple… banning a particular genre of apps. According to PC World, Apple also banned GPS apps that feed the user location-aware ads and Apple-brand competing apps (such as Google Voice and “Flash of Genius” which mentions the Android).
TechCrunch uncovered this recent no-no after developed Jon Atherton, Wooble iBoobs, received a letter from iPhone App Review. Then there was the letter from Apple, that didn’t explain much. And today, a few guidelines have been uncovered through Atherton’s blog, ChilliFresh, regarding his app.
No images of women in bikinis
No images of men in bikinis
No skin
No silhouettes that indicate that Wobble can be used for wobbling boobs
Lingt, a new startup, just launched in public beta today. And not only is it fun and addictive, but it’s also educational!
Lingt helps people learn the massive number of vocabulary terms required for basic competency in a foreign language. We think the biggest problem with learning a new language is simply giving up, so we’ve built something that we think makes learning more compelling.
It’s sort of like interactive flash cards. Remember studying for tests with home-made flash cards? I think I still have stacks and stacks somewhere in the basement somewhere… Well, my classmates and I would take turns quizzing each other before a test with those cards. Lingt is like that classmate that quizzes you.
In a recently released study from the University of California, San Diego, Americans were found to consume about 1.3 trillion hours of information. in 2008 Eating up 3.6 zettabytes of information and 10,845 trillion words, that equals out to 34 gigabytes and 100,500 words each day, per person!
Uh, Zettabyte?!? A zettabyte = a 1 with 21 zeros. In regards to the 3.6 zettabytes… the study points out “if we printed 3.6 zettabytes of text in books, and stacked them as tightly as possible across the United States including Alaska, the pile would be 7 feet high.”
This isn’t to say that we read 100,500 words a day though… In the paper “How Much Information?,” authors Roger Bohn and James Short define “information” as “flows of data delivered to people.” They measure the data by “the bytes, words and hours of consumer information.” So, rather, it means that we come across 100,500 words a day. The leading source of information is video sources (1.3 zettabytes from television and almost 2 zettabytes from computer games) with radio and Internet rising not too far behind. Reading has even tripled from 1980 to 2008, “because it is the overwhelmingly preferred way to receive words on the Internet.” An even more shocking jump – a previous study estimated only .3 zettabytes consumed worldwide in 2007 (3,300,000,000,000,000,000,000 more than UCSD’s recent findings for 2008).
For over 12 years, fans of the insanely popular PC game Duke Nukem have been waiting for the next installment in the franchise. Yesterday it was confirmed that the software company developing Duke Nukem Forever, 3D Realms, is shutting its doors, effectively ending what may be the longest running software development cycle in gaming history.
Development of Duke Nukem Forever began in mid-1996 as the much anticipated sequel to Duke Nukem 3D, one of the most memorable first-person shooter games of the 90’s. Duke Nukem 3D was very controversial, and popular, in the mid-90’s due to its excessive violence, strong language, and crude content. It was one of the first games that had hilarious, memorable, and quotable audio clips.
I was in middle school when this game was first released, and I clearly remember many late night gaming sessions playing Duke Nukem 3D; a bunch of us huddled around a PC with the one kid in town that convinced his parents to buy the game. You were especially cool if you could quote Duke Nukem lines in context.
Duke Nukem Forever has been turned into a software development legend in the last 12 years. It has won the infamous Wired Vaporware Award quite a few times (including the Lifetime Achievement Award), for the most hyped title that has yet to be released. If you Google “when it’s done”, the Duke Nukem Forever website is the number one result. Many delays were caused by 3D Realms switching physics engines every few years, much to the frustration of the gaming world.
3D Realms has closed up shop due to lack of funding. Take-Two Interactive still holds the rights to Duke Nukem Forever, but currently they have no plans of ever releasing the game. I think the Duke may finally be dead. Well, at least there will always be the Duke Nukem soundboard.
For the complete timeline of Duke Nukem Forever delays, and a few kickass teaser trailers, check out A Decade of Duke on Shack News.
Myst was once the best selling computer game software of all time, and it has found new life on the iPhone. The iTunes store now features a 727MB download of the popular adventure game for a mere $5.99.
The original version of Myst was released in 1993 for the Macintosh. The game turned out to be a surprise hit with gamers and critics alike, and it was soon released for Windows. Myst featured advanced graphics and sound for its time, and it held the title of best selling PC game for almost 10 years, until The Sims surpassed it in 2002.
What made Myst so popular was its unique game-play. From the very beginning of the game you were immersed in a 3D world without any clear objective, enemies or time constraints. Your were simply free to explore a strange island on your own time. Hidden throughout the island are various clues and puzzles that begin to unravel the mystery surrounding your current circumstance. Your only controls in the game were clicks of the mouse to move forward, turn, or interact with simple objects.
The iPhone is the perfect platform for a game like Myst. The controls are simple, and it a great game to pull out of your pocket for a few moments while you have some free time. There are no time constraints or pressing actions, and you can resume exactly where you left off. The iPhone version even has unique features like being able to perform a screen capture (hold the home button and then hit the sleep button), which sends picture of the current screen (or a valuable clue) directly to your photo album for later viewing. For more tips and complete game information, see the Cyan Worlds website.
The arrival of Myst to the iPhone only further solidifies the evolution of mobile or casual gaming. More and more, today’s game software developers are focusing on the huge number of people that are spending more time playing simple games that fit right in their pocket.
IBM has officially unveiled its plans for a new supercomputer codenamed “Watson”. This new artificial intelligence and reasoning computer is set to compete against human contestants on the quiz show Jeopardy!.
For over two years, IBM has been developing the technology behind Watson in a research project called DeepQA. This project is the follow-up to the infamous Deep Blue chess computer that successfully defeated World Chess Champion Garry Kasparov in 1997. This chess match still stands as one of the crowning moments in the battle between man and machines.
In order to compete on a live, real time quiz show like Jeopardy!, Watson must be leaps and bounds ahead of any computer system developed to date. IBM scientists have been developing advanced artificial intelligence, voice recognition, and parallel processing software that will be unlike anything the world has ever seen. Today’s computers are incredibly fast and react well to specified user inputs, but Watson will have to interpret not only the audible questions, but the underlying meaning behind them. Jeopardy! questions often involve subtle riddles and hidden complexities that humans can pick up on in a fraction of a second. In order for Watson to compete, its software will have to think like a human.
If it is successful, IBM will make a leap into the next realm of artificial intelligence technology. Watson has the potential to be the first computer system with software that can seamlessly interact with humans in natural language-related tasks. Its software will analyze enormous volumes of language data extremely quickly to determine the meaning of voice inputs, and then calculate an appropriate response. This is the supercomputer of science fiction movies that can listen in on conversations and then offer its guidance.
A date for Watson’s debut on Jeopardy! has not been set, but plans for the show are already in place. Who will win in this next great clash between humans and computers? If the past is any indication of the future, my money is on Watson.
For more information, check out the video below, and then click over to the official IBM Watson website.
The New York Times recently ran an article outlining the health of the video game software development industry. This article states that despite a 19% growth in sales this year, video game makers are still losing money. Sales increases of this magnitude should be excellent news, but the costs of developing games for today’s systems is so large that game developers are seeing profits on fewer and fewer game titles.
According to the New York Times, the costs for developing new software for the latest video game systems like the PS3 and XBox 360 can easily exceed $25 million. After licensing fees and marketing costs, game companies typically need to sell over 1 million copies to make a profit. The problem is, most game titles sell no more than 150,000 copies.
These increased costs, along with a host of other factors like the slumping economy, free online games, and cheap games on mobile devices like the iPhone, are putting tremendous pressure on console and PC software development companies. Companies like OnLive, which I reported on last week, are trying to change the game industry, but this probably won’t help the game developers. OnLive will try to win over current gamers and could attract some new users, but their software licensing business model won’t do much to boost the bottom lines of the software developers.
I assume, like so many other industries today, the game development industry is about to do some downsizing and re-organization. There are simply too many game titles on the shelves and development companies creating them. I expect sales will slump this year because gamers will be buying less, due to the fact that so many gaming options exist. I have a great time playing simple online games and iPhone apps that are completely free. This definitely takes away from the amount of time I spend playing the newest games “real games” on my PS3 or PC, and in turn causes me to buy fewer software titles. At $60 per game, do these full-featured titles provide me with more entertainment than a simple iPhone game? It’s these questions that will bring down many companies in the game software development industry.
Companies that develop blockbuster titles like the Grand Theft Auto and Guitar Hero franchises won’t be going away any time soon, but the smaller companies producing more obscure games will definitely face some tough choices this year.
Yesterday, a San Francisco start-up called OnLive revealed its new video game streaming service that has been 7 years in the making. According to a CNET article, OnLive is trying to do for video games what iTunes has done for music: remove the content from the restrictions of physical media.
Basically OnLive will be harnessing the power of cloud computing to stream first-run, AAA games from major game companies straight into your home via your PC or or a small device about the size of a wallet that connects to your TV. OnLive is trying to remove the game console and physical media from the gaming experience. It claims that its ultra high-end servers will do all of the computing necessary to run the game, and it will stream the resulting video to your home with only a 1 millisecond delay. All that is needed is a high-speed internet connection and a custom wireless controller that works with your PC, Mac, or the OnLive plug-in box. Pretty cool stuff.
(Credit: OnLive)
OnLive has partnered with major game developers like Electronic Arts, Take-Two, Ubisoft and others, and claims that brand new games will available through its service at the same time they are released to the public on the major consoles and PC’s. Their goal is to offer a reasonably priced subscription service that will be much less expensive than spending hundreds of dollars for the latest console and upwards of $50 for each new game. OnLive will also be able to adapt to new technologies as they become available, thus eliminating the need to buy the latest versions of Playstation or XBox every few years to play the newest games.
This all sounds great, but OnLive has some major challenges to overcome. Gamers will be tough to win over initially, especially those that already own one or more gaming consoles. The technical hurdles of providing this service are even greater. If the video game experience is sub-par in any way due to lag or graphics performance, gamers will not use the service, at any price point. OnLive is currently undergoing closed beta testing, but early reports claim the service may have some issues to work out before its official launch towards the end of 2009.
Other industries like music, film, television, and computer software are also experiencing similar competition from cloud-based services like OnLive. Most have yet to gain any significant market share, but these trends seem to only be gaining strength. Time will tell if OnLive has what it takes to compete with the software based gaming experience found on a console like the PS3, but its presentation later this week at the Game Developers Conference should give us some clues.
Three professors at Georgia Tech have developed a college basketball ranking system called LRMC that is designed to predict the outcome of the NCAA Division I basketball tournament. This software has been in use for a few years now, and it has been surprisingly accurate in predicting the winner of past tournaments. This year, the LRMC predicts the final game to be between North Carolina and Memphis, with North Carolina as the winner. Now that March Madness is upon us and there are only 16 teams left, I thought I’d check in on the LRMC rankings to see how the software’s predictions are holding up.
First, let me explain what the LRMC is and how it works. The software’s only input is basic scoreboard data from every Division I game played in the regular season this year. However, the Pure LRMC method takes into account not only which teams played and the final score, but the margin of victory and home court advantages to further boost its accuracy. The LRMC is particularly good at flushing out the best of the best and picking the true final four teams. It also excels at picking teams on the lower end of the rankings that will be the last (on the bubble) teams to be picked for the tournament. Taking the margin of victory and home court advantages into account helps the LRMC beat out most every other bracket predicting software out there, as shown in this chart.
So how is the LRMC doing this year? Their predicted winner for 2009 is North Carolina, which has been doing well in the tournament so far, and is still on track to win. The rest of its top five are Pittsburgh, Memphis, Connecticut and Duke, which have all made it to the Sweet 16. However, Memphis and Connecticut are both in the West bracket, so only one will make the Final 4; the same goes for Pittsburgh and Duke in the East bracket. Out of the LRMC’s top 16 teams before the tournament started, 10 teams are still remaining. Not too bad considering the LRMC does not take bracket match-ups into account at all; it only relies on data from the regular season.
Some of the missteps from the LRMC include Xavier (ranked 39th) and Arizona (ranked 36th) making it to the Sweet 16. The LRMC also ranked West Virginia as 10th overall, but they lost to 81st ranked Dayton in the first round!
This data shows how truly unpredictable college basketball can be. While the top teams are often identifiable, individual match-ups between middle-ranked teams are often no more than a coin toss. I recently read that the odds of successfully predicting the outcome of every game in the Division I tournament is over 1 in 9 quintillion. That is 9 thousand trillion! Those are way worse odds than winning the Powerball, which boasts an almost likely by comparison 1 in 195 million. So, I guess we can’t be too hard on the LRMC.
Last year the LRMC predicted that Kansas would beat Memphis in the final, which turned out to be true. It also picked out overrated teams that ended up losing in early rounds. Will the LRMC correctly predict the winner again this year with North Carolina? My bracket thinks so, but only time will tell.
Amid Microsoft’s recent round of layoffs, one smaller group of programmers responsible for the Microsoft Flight Simulator series was let go. ACES Studio, which consisted of around 100 people, has been completely eliminated from Microsoft. This ends one of the longest-running (if not the longest) video game franchises in history. Microsoft Flight Simulator was first launched in 1982, and over 25 years later it still has a die-hard following. Fans of Flight Simulator are notoriously dedicated to the game due to its extreme realism and open-world gameplay.
The most recent release of the game is Microsoft Flight Simulator X, the twelfth main version since 1982. Microsoft is reportedly not giving up on the franchise, but many suspect any possible future versions will be created by an outside company. A more detailed account of the end of the ACES Studio can be found on former developer Phil Taylor’s blog.
Many industry insiders blame sluggish sales of Windows Vista for the recent round of 5,000 planned layoffs at Microsoft. Will we see Flight Simulator again? Only time will tell.
You may have already heard: Apple is cleaning out their apps store. They’ve decided “to remove any overtly sexual content from the App Store.” It’s definitely not a first for Apple… banning a particular genre of apps. According to PC World, Apple also banned GPS apps that feed the user location-aware ads and Apple-brand competing apps (such as Google Voice and “Flash of Genius” which mentions the Android).
Lingt
In a recently released study from the University of California, San Diego, Americans were found to consume about 1.3 trillion hours of information. in 2008 Eating up 3.6 zettabytes of information and 10,845 trillion words, that equals out to 34 gigabytes and 100,500 words each day, per person!
Myst was once the best selling computer game software of all time, and it has found new life on the iPhone. The iTunes store now features a 727MB 
IBM has 
The 
Three professors at Georgia Tech have developed a 
