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OCAU News |
Tuesday Afternoon
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Tuesday, 1-October-2013 13:47:22 (GMT +10) - by Agg
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Steam recently announced SteamOS, Steam Machines and a new Steam Controller for gaming. As we’ve been working on bringing Steam to the living room, we’ve come to the conclusion that the environment best suited to delivering value to customers is an operating system built around Steam itself. SteamOS combines the rock-solid architecture of Linux with a gaming experience built for the big screen. It will be available soon as a free stand-alone operating system for living room machines. There's a thread discussing SteamOS here and some editorials about it all here on TechCrunch and here on TechReport.
John McAfee has emerged from his secret billionaire hideout with a gadget to shield you from the NSA. The gadget might sound like something straight out of a Bond movie, but McAfee wants to build it and sell it for less than $100. "There will be no way [for the government] to tell who you are or where you are," McAfee says. Effectively, it works by creating small private networks that act as a dark web that's inaccessible to others. More here.
There's another challenge happening in the forums: a Low Clock 3D11 Physics Challenge. The objective is simple- produce the highest 3D11 physics score with a fixed cpu clock. It will have classes as follows: Ivy-E, Sandy-E, Haswell, Ivy Bridge, Sandy Bridge, all AMD hex cores or higher, all other AMD(ambient), all other Intel(ambient), Intel sub-zero and AMD sub zero.
Wired reckon that leaving your laptop plugged in all the time is bad for the battery. In order to squeeze as much life out of your lithium-polymer battery, once your laptop hits 100 percent, unplug it. In fact, you should unplug it before that. Surely the laptop's power management should be dealing with all that?
Venerable science mag PopSci have turned off their comments system online, apparently for the good of science itself. Another, similarly designed study found that just firmly worded (but not uncivil) disagreements between commenters impacted readers' perception of science. If you carry out those results to their logical end--commenters shape public opinion; public opinion shapes public policy; public policy shapes how and whether and what research gets funded--you start to see why we feel compelled to hit the "off" switch.
I didn't even know the ban existed, but China is now allowing game console sales for the first time in 13 years. Gamers in China have won a key victory they've been after for years: the ability to buy consoles. China's State Council, the country's top decision maker, announced on Friday that companies could eventually start selling game consoles across China. In order to get the hardware on store shelves, however, the companies would need to have their devices approved by the Ministry of Culture. It's not clear what might cause a particular console to be banned from sale.
Kotaku have an article on the death of LucasArts. The once-revered studio responsible for the production and distribution of Star Wars video games shut down in April, and although the name lives on for licensing purposes, the developers are gone. Promising games have been canceled, staff have been scattered, and Star Wars is now in the hands of Electronic Arts, where it will be used for a Battlefront reboot and an action-adventure game helmed by the studio Visceral.
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