Month: August 2012

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From Engadget: Amazon launches its own game studio, goes social with Living Classics on Facebook

Amazon launches its own game studio, goes social with Living Classics on Facebook

Amazon is committing itself to gaming much more seriously than providing a storefront: it just launched its own game development house. The simply titled Amazon Game Studios is starting out gently by producing a Facebook hidden object game, Living Classics, that lets the socially inclined dig around through scenes from well-known literature — what else would you expect from the Kindle’s creator? While the free, me-too game isn’t going to give Microsoft or Sony any frights just yet, the company has the ambition of making “innovative, fun and well-crafted” titles. Amazon is actively recruiting more help for the studio as we write, so we’d expect more grandiose work before too long.

 

from Engadget

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From Ars Technica: Report says 15 percent of Mitt Romney Twitter followers are paid fakes

More than 15 percent of Mitt Romney’s Twitter followers may be generated by paid services that use fake accounts to artificially inflate the number of people subscribed to the presumptive Republican nominee for US president, according to a new report.

The report comes from researchers at security firm Barracuda Labs, and it cites the addition last month of 116,922 followers to @MittRomney in a span of just 24 hours. The infusion on July 21 represented a 17-percent spike in accounts following Romney. A quarter of those new accounts were less than four days old, and 23 percent of them had never issued a single tweet. Ten percent have since been suspended by Twitter for unspecified reasons.

“Based on the above distinguishable features, we believe most of these recent followers of Romney are not from a general Twitter population but most likely from a paid Twitter follower service,” Barracuda Labs Research Scientist Jason Ding wrote in the report. Such services allow customers to buy followers for any Twitter account, he stressed, so it’s not clear if the fakes were purchased by Romney, his supporters, or his political foes.

 

from Ars Technica

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From AnandTech: ARM Announces 8-core 2nd Gen Mali-T600 GPUs

In our discrete GPU reviews for the desktop we’ve often noticed the tradeoff between graphics and compute performance in GPU architectures. Generally speaking, when a GPU is designed for compute it tends to sacrifice graphics performance or vice versa. You can pursue both at the same time, but within a given die size the goals of good graphics and compute performance are usually at odds with one another.

Mobile GPUs aren’t immune to making this tradeoff. As mobile devices become the computing platform of choice for many, the same difficult decisions about balancing GPU compute and graphics performance must be made.

ARM announced its strategy to dealing with the graphics/compute split earlier this year. In short, create two separate GPU lines: one in pursuit of great graphics performance, and one optimized for graphics and compute.

Today all of ARM’s shipping GPUs fall on the blue, graphics trend line in the image above. The Mali-400 is the well known example, but the forthcoming Mali-450 (8-core Mali-400 with slight improvements to IPC) is also a graphics focused part.

The next-generation ARM GPU architecture, codenamed Midgard but productized as the Mali-T600 series will have members optimized for graphics performance as well as high-end graphics/GPU compute performance.

The split looks like this:

The Mali-T600 series is ARM’s first unified shader architecture. The parts on the left fall under the graphics roadmap, while the parts on the right are optimized for graphics and GPU compute. To make things even more confusing, the top part in each is actually a second generation T600 GPU, announced today.

What does the second generation of T600 give you? Higher IPC and higher clock speeds in the same die area thanks to some reworking of the architecture and support for ASTC (an optional OpenGL ES texture compression spec we talked about earlier today).

Both the T628 and T678 are eight-core parts, the primary difference between the two (and between graphics/GPU compute optimized ARM GPUs in general) is the composition of each shader core. The T628 features two ALUs, a LSU and texture unit per shader, while the T658 doubles up the ALUs per core.

Long term you can expect high end smartphones to integrate cores from the graphics & compute optimized roadmap, while the mainstream and lower end smartphones wll pick from the graphics-only roadmap. All of this sounds good on paper, however there’s still the fact that we’re talking about the second generation of Mali-T600 GPUs before the first generation has even shipped. We will see the first gen Mali-T600 parts before the end of the year, but there’s still a lot of room for improvement in the way mobile GPUs and SoCs are launched…

from AnandTech

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From Technology Review RSS Feeds: Epic Games Finds New Customers

The graphics software used to create 3-D game environments is being adapted to create better, cheaper training tools and simulations.

Software frameworks known as game engines are opening up new markets for game designers and making high-quality simulations available to companies that otherwise couldn’t afford them. With help from software based on the technology used to create the immersive virtual worlds of video games, paramedics and firefighters are finding ways to train more effectively and inexpensively, and architectural firms are showing designs to clients at an unprecedented level of detail.




from Technology Review RSS Feeds

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From Popular Science – New Technology, Science News, The Future Now: Physicists Demonstrate Working Quantum Router, a Step Toward a Quantum Internet

Quantum Computer Chip Wikimedia Commons

As much as we love our silicon semiconductors, quantum computers are very much a technology of the future. Instead of the usual string of 1s and 0s, they’ll be able to send both types of information at the same time, dwarfing their traditional counterparts. But one major problem is that they can only move through one optical fibre. To push more information through, they need a router, and Chinese physicists have unveiled the first one.

In a quantum computer, photons ferry information to other sources. It’s possible to send the photons directly through one fibre, but routing comes in when another fibre is needed. Like the router you probably own, a control signal reads the data then sends it to its destination. But dealing with unruly quantum particles is a little more complicated; when a signal is read it’s also destroyed. So even though the data can be transferred with traditional methods, that doesn’t offer the kind of data-transferring power quantum computing offers.

This new quantum router proves it’s possible to truly guide a quantum signal. The information used is encoded in two different types of polarized photons (like 1s and 0s). Scientists then create a single photon that acts as both (the combined 1s and 0s). That photon is then broken down into two photons that share the combined state. The router picks up one to determine the route, then the other photon is used to transfer the information. A simple series of half mirrors guides the photons along the correct route.

Does this mean we’re now well on our way to a globally connected, super-fast stream of information? No. The scientists say it’s just a proof of concept–we know it’s at least theoretically possible to send quantum information through a router, but it’s still a limited way of doing it. In other words, when this sort of technology is usable (and it will be), it won’t look like this.

[Technology Review via Gizmodo]

 

from Popular Science – New Technology, Science News, The Future Now

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From Popular Science – New Technology, Science News, The Future Now: Russian Robotic Spacecraft Completes First Same-Day Docking at ISS, Just Six Hours After Launch

Progress 48 on Approach to the ISS Just Hours After Launching NASA TV

Russia just set a speed record for a sprint that took place a long way from London. An unmanned Russian Progress cargo ship launched from Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan yesterday and docked with the International Space Station just six hours later, marking the first same-day docking ever performed at the ISS.

Launched aboard a Russian Soyuz rocket, the robotic Progress 48 performed additional firings of its own onboard engines early in the mission to boost it toward the ISS in a shorter period of time. This isn’t a completely novel maneuver–back in the Gemini days NASA docked spacecraft together on obit on the same day they were launched, and Russia has done the same. But it does require more precise calculations and a tighter margin of error.

Spacecraft usually spend two days catching up to the ISS in orbit, making the approach much slower (and safer). For same-day docking, spaceflight engineers have to execute that famous “striking a speeding bullet with a speeding bullet” math and physics. But it does come with unique benefits, especially if the maneuver is extended to manned Soyuz capsule missions as it is expected to be.

With manned missions, docking at the station within hours reduces the amount of food and water that must be packed aboard a spacecraft and provides for far greater crew comfort (spacious the Soyuz capsule is not). And of course, while no one is saying it out loud, it also could prove an important capability if something should go wrong aboard the station. Though there’s really no such thing as an emergency space launch–it takes time to fuel up a rocket and place a mission on a launchpad–the ability to shave two days off the arrival time of people or supplies at the ISS could make a difference should things ever get hairy up there.

[SPACE]

 

from Popular Science – New Technology, Science News, The Future Now