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Google

New Google Tool To Find Trend Correlations 76

Posted by samzenpus from the not-causation-tag-in-3-2-1 dept.
Kilrah_il writes "In 2008 Google found correlation between seasonal flu activity and certain search term, a finding that allowed it to track flu activity better and more rapidly than previous methods. Now, Google is offering a new tool, Google Correlate, that allows researched to do the same for other trends. 'Using Correlate, you can upload your own data series and see a list of search terms whose popularity best corresponds with that real world trend.' Of course, Google reminds us that correlation does not imply causation."
Science

Lasers Approach Their Ultimate Intensity Limit 384

Posted by samzenpus from the biggest-pointer dept.
Flash Modin writes "Death Star style superlasers? Don't bet on it. High-power lasers currently in development appear to be nearing the theoretical laser intensity limit, according to new research set to be published in the journal Physical Review Letters. Ultra-high-energy laser fields can actually convert their light into matter as shown in the late '90s at the Stanford Linear Accelerator (SLAC). This process creates an 'avalanche-like electromagnetic cascade' (also known as sparking the vacuum) capable of destroying a laser field. Physicists thought it might be a problem for lasers eventually, but this work indicates the technology is much closer to its limit than researchers believed. A preprint is available here."
Image

Open Sarcasm Fighting Copyrighted Punctuation 155

Posted by samzenpus from the free-language dept.
pinkushun writes "SarcMark is a copyrighted punctuation mark, that claims 'It's time that sarcasm is treated equally!' Pretty damn cheeky while they're charging for their software, which only inserts their punctuation through a hotkey. Open Sarcasm is destroying SarcMark by advocating a new punctuation mark (not displaying here properly — alt+U0161) as the new open and free sarcasm symbol. Either way, this will be one interesting turnout. With bad unicode support across the web, displaying the characters properly might be an issue. PS Left out sarcastic end sentence as Slashdot doesn't display the U0161 character."
Piracy

Estimating Game Piracy More Accurately 459

Posted by Soulskill from the arrrrbitrary-numbers dept.
An anonymous reader tips a post up at the Wolfire blog that attempts to pin down a reasonable figure for the amount of sales a game company loses due to piracy. We've commonly heard claims of piracy rates as high as 80-90%, but that clearly doesn't translate directly into lost sales. The article explains a better metric: going on a per-pirate basis rather than a per-download basis. Quoting: "iPhone game developers have also found that around 80% of their users are running pirated copies of their game (using jailbroken phones). This immediately struck me as odd — I suspected that most iPhone users had never even heard of 'jailbreaking.' I did a bit more research and found that my intuition was correct — only 5% of iPhones in the US are jailbroken. World-wide, the jailbreak statistics are highest in poor countries — but, unsurprisingly, iPhones are also much less common there. The highest estimate I've seen is that 10% of worldwide iPhones are jailbroken. Given that there are so few jailbroken phones, how can we explain that 80% of game copies are pirated? The answer is simple — the average pirate downloads a lot more games than the average customer buys. This means that even though games see that 80% of their copies are pirated, only 10% of their potential customers are pirates, which means they are losing at most 10% of their sales."

Comment Re:Potential abuse of research? (Score 0) 586

by Odeen (#31677166) Attached to: Magnetism Can Sway Man's Moral Compass
Driving without a seatbelt is not morally wrong if you're doing it on your own private island. Causing other people to take time out of their lives to scrape you off the asphalt and sew you back together, all while having my taxes and/or health insurance premiums pay for it _is_ morally wrong. Stopping traffic for hours while you're being scraped off the asphalt is morally wrong. Seatbelts, as much as they are for your benefit, are also for the benefit of everyone else.
AMD

AMD's 12-Core Chip Cuts Software Licensing Costs 217

Posted by Soulskill from the fewer-boxes-fewer-problems dept.
CWmike writes "AMD released on Monday its 12-core chip code-named Magny-Cours, doubling the number of cores over the previous-generation Opteron chip. While a doubling of performance is nice, another key benefit delivered by a chip with a dozen cores may be in reducing software costs. For Matt Lavallee, director of technology at MLS Property Information Network, a company that supplies real estate data, upgrading to the 12-core Opteron chip from his current quad-core chips will allow him to cut the number of servers — and his software licensing fees. While the 12-core chip costs a little more than an eight-core chip, it's 'nowhere near as much as a SQL server costs,' said Lavallee, who has been beta-testing the new chips. MLS operates 60 servers, and Lavallee said he could theoretically cut the number of servers by half but will likely reduce his server count by a third with the chip upgrade." Reader adeelershad82 adds that AMD is hoping the new Opterons will compete with Intel in the high-volume server market.
Microsoft

Microsoft Sends Flowers To Internet Explorer 6 Funeral 151

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the sorry-about-your-loss dept.
Several readers have written with a fun followup to yesterday's IE6 funeral. Apparently Microsoft, in a rare moment of self-jest, took the time to send flowers, condolences, and a promise to meet at MIX. The card reads: "Thanks for the good times IE6, see you all @ MIX when we show a little piece of IE Heaven. The Internet Explorer Team @ Microsoft."
Image

Man Sues Neighbor For Not Turning Off His Wi-Fi 428

Posted by samzenpus from the have-you-never-wondered-why-I-drink-only-distilled-water-or-rain-water-and-only-pure-grain-alcohol dept.
Scyth3 writes "A man is suing his neighbor for not turning off his cell phone or wireless router. He claims it affects his 'electromagnetic allergies,' and has resorted to being homeless. So, why doesn't he check into a hotel? Because hotels typically have wireless internet for free. I wonder if a tinfoil hat would help his cause?"
Medicine

H1N1 Appears To Be Transmittable From Human To Pig 132

Posted by timothy from the reciprocity-is-just-good-manners dept.
mpetch writes "In an interesting twist, it appears that H1N1 influenza can be transmitted from humans to swine. Apparently a Canadian pig farmer vacationed in Mexico, returned to Canada and infected about 10% of the swine on an Alberta farm. The swine subsequently developed flu symptoms."
Businesses

Stardock Declares Victory Over Demigod Piracy 403

Posted by Soulskill from the power-of-optimism dept.
We recently got a look at some hard numbers related to the piracy of Demigod , a new game from Stardock and Gas Powered Games. Now, two weeks later, Stardock CEO Brad Wardell has essentially declared the game a success in spite of the piracy, and reaffirmed the company's stance that intrusive DRM is a bad thing. The game's sales figures seem to bear him out. Quoting: "Yep. Demigod is heavily pirated. And make no mistake, piracy pisses me off. If you're playing a pirated copy right now, if you're one of those people on Hamachi or GameRanger playing a pirated copy and have been for more than a few days, then you should either buy it or accept that you're a thief and quit rationalizing it any other way. The reality that most PC game publishers ignore is that there are people who buy games and people who don't buy games. The focus of a business is to increase its sales. My job, as CEO of Stardock, is not to fight worldwide piracy no matter how much it aggravates me personally. My job is to maximize the sales of my product and service and I do that by focusing on the people who pay my salary — our customers."
Books

Fraud Threat Halts Knuth's Hexadecimal-Dollar Checks 323

Posted by timothy from the sobering-thought-about-checks-in-general dept.
Barence writes "You may be aware of Donald Knuth, the creator of TeX and author of The Art of Computer Programming, who used to post checks to anyone who spotted an error in one of his books — one hexadecimal dollar, or $2.56. No one cashed them though. This blogger has two of them proudly on his wall, but the sad news is that modern day bank fraud has put a stop to Knuth's much-loved way of keeping his books free of errors." (Here's Knuth's own post about the sad change.)

Comment Re:Government should not be involved at all (Score 0) 727

by Odeen (#23978909) Attached to: Where To Draw the Line With Embryo Selection?
We have to understand the fact that the choices we make as individuals affect our society as a whole. That means that society bears the partial burden of caring for embryos with genetic defects. It is in society's (and, therefore, in all our our) best interests that an embryo eventually contributes to society rather than use its resources and, therefore, it has to be as free of genetic abnormalities as possible. Thus, whenever possible, an embryo should be subject to the most complete battery of genetic disease tests possible.

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