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OCAU News |
Thursday Midday
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Thursday, 3-April-2014 12:49:14 (GMT +10) - by Agg
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Windows XP will no longer be supported by Microsoft in a few days, but it's still going strong. March was the fifth full month of availability for Microsoft’s latest operating system version: Windows 8.1 continues to steadily grow while Windows 8 managed to stay flat, allowing the duo together to finally crack 11 percent market share. Meanwhile, with only a week left of support, Windows XP still has more than 27 percent of the pie.
The new NBN boss arrived this week. To say he faces a tough challenge is an understatement of international proportions. Never before in his life has the executive faced the level of scrutiny, animosity and politicking that the $41 billion national broadband network’s construction will throw at him.
The UK Government are updating their copyright laws for the digital age. The changes make small but important reforms to UK copyright law and aim to end the current situation where minor and reasonable acts of copying which benefit consumers, society and the economy are unlawful. They also remove a range of unnecessary rules and regulations from the statute book in line with the government’s aim to reduce regulation.
Closer to home, a couple of weeks ago the Minister for Justice released legislation to streamline the classification system in Australia. The reforms remove the need for reclassification when minor changes are made to computer games, such as software updates, bug fixes, or even when a new song is added to a karaoke game. Films that were modified to play on the small screen of an aeroplane in-flight service, or movies changing from 2D to 3D, will no longer require reclassification.
An autocorrect SNAFU apparently led to lots of people donating to the wrong charity. In order to donate to Cancer Research UK, you had to text the word “BEAT”, to a generic donations number but instead some charitable folks’ generous donations were auto-corrected to “BEARS”, resulting in them adopting a polar bear, rather than donating to Cancer Research.
You probably want to skip this story if you're squeamish, but neurosurgeons have successfully implanted a 3D-printed section of skull. The operation was performed by a team of neurosurgeons at the University Medical Centre Utrecht and the university claims this is this first instance of a successful 3D printed cranium that has not been rejected by the patient.
Tech Report look at DirectX 12 in more detail. We already covered the basics of DirectX 12 amid the GDC frenzy. Now that we've had time to study our notes from the show, we can delve into a little more detail about the new API's inception, the key ways in which it differs from DirectX 11, and what AMD and Nvidia think about it.
This video is from October but I don't recall seeing it before - 3M demonstrating an immersion bath cooler. This is a demonstration rig that shows off submersion cooling with one of the Novec products from 3M. A normal commercial motherboard is partially submerged (the CPU is fully submerged) in the liquid and cools the components without any issues like thermal buildup or short circuiting.
TechSpot explore how much effect video formats and players can affect battery life. Over the course of the last two weeks, I’ve been digging deep into what the optimal playback setup is for lengthening battery life. Throughout more than 145 hours of testing, I’ve looked at a range of Windows video players, including the stock Windows 8 app, Windows Media Player, VLC and MPC-HC, plus many encoding formats such as H.264, Xvid, and the all-new HEVC format.
If you've been hooked on one of the various versions of 2048, you might be interested in this article, thanks Matt. Because the story is basically wrong: 2048 is summarily a free public mod of 1024, which is a rip-off of Threes. Threes, by Asher Vollmer and Greg Wohlwend, is a game made by people the game development community know and like. It addresses the Flappy Bird phenomenon also.
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