In 2014, the gaming industry presents
a new landscape once again . All three of Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo have new consoles (
XBox One ,
Playstation 4 , and
Wii U ), PC Gaming is back in a big way, and Valve is on the horizon with their new
Steam Box platform . This says nothing about the emergence of mobile, casual, and free-to-play gaming paradigms as well.
With all the changes, ArsTechnica has suggested that the present business case(s) for Nintendo, in particular, are under severe threat and have offered up
their suggestions for bringing Nintendo back to the fore . Ars' suggestions include: (1) target quantity over quality for their main franchises (a la Activision), (2) find the next game design visionary, and (3) go mobile and to the internet.
Typically, the install process doesn't stop with the installation of the base OS. You've still got to install and configure a lot of programs and drivers, for example: VirtualBox, Flash, LibreOffice, Java, and NVIDIA drivers, to name but a few. That takes time and energy.
Recently I needed a hard drive upgrade, and after trying out Xubuntu 14.04, I decided to stick with
Crunchbang 11 . With a fresh installation, I needed to quickly get the applications that weren't an apt-get away. Enter
smxi , a handy collection of scripts
created to solve the frequent, repetitive support questions that often appear on IRC channels. Here's a
guide showing how to set up smxi in Crunchbang.
How do you complete your config and install? What other tools and scripts are out there to ease the pain, particularly for multiple machines?
Forbes has an interesting article today reminding us about
Michael Sam and his prospects for being drafted to the NFL .
Michael Sam achieved considerable notoriety several months ago when he came out as a
gay football player who happened to be the SEC defensive player of the year and who would become the first openly gay man to star in the NFL if drafted by a team this weekend.
My question for Pipedot: regardless of teams' decisions to draft Sam or not, will the decisions be accepted as based on his skills or football ability alone or will they be judged in terms of their support for or avoidance of support for homosexuality in American football? And, what are the central obstacles to people being judged on skills alone when competing for opportunities (I'm thinking about ageing programmers and so on as similar-type challenges)?
This just in from the Register: If you're watching a "smart television" containing internet capability and camera/microphone,
your television is also watching you and can be coopted via malware to do all sorts of terrible things. Manufacturers seem to be blind to this, turning out lots of new models of internet-aware devices that risk being "smart" in all the wrong ways.
[Security experts] demonstrated exactly [the vulnerability] just down the road from the Infosec Europe conference, held in London. "Installing the bugging software requires physical access to the device, which is how we did it, or by installing a malicious app," said Felix Ingram, principal consultant at NCC Group. "Malicious apps could be downloaded from the manufacturer's app store. The TV does have the option for auto-updating, so releasing a legitimate app, then releasing a malicious update, is another attack vector."
Why bother buying a Smart TV though, when you can
much more simply make your own using a Raspberry Pi [video]? You control the hardware, you control the software, and for bonus points you don't have to rely on the manufacturer to provide you the occasional firmware update out of the goodness of their hearts.
On May 13 and May 20, 2014, PBS FRONTLINE will air a two-part series entitled
United States of Secrets , detailing the
"inside story of the U.S. government's massive and controversial secret surveillance program." "Through in-depth interviews with more than 60 whistleblowers, elected officials, journalists, intelligence insiders and cabinet officials, we have woven together the secret narrative that reveals the scale and scope of the government's spying program," says Kirk. "We've gone deep inside the story, from what really happened at the NSA and the White House in the days after 9/11, through the Bush and Obama administrations, directly into the stunning revelations from Edward Snowden."
Part one, which will broadcast as a two-hour episode May 13 at 9pm on PBS, will cover the history of the NSA surveillance program from its beginnings following the events of September 11 to the present day. Part two will explore the secret relationship between Silicon Valley and the NSA, and will be shown May 20 at 10pm on PBS. Check your
local listings .
oSC 14 , held April 24-28 in the lovely Mediterranean port town of
Dubrovnik, Croatia , has
come and gone . If you like
openSUSE , expect more of the same. Don't expect any radical changes upcoming for this steady-and-predictable distro!
The conference
focused on high level questions of packaging, approach, distro lifecycle management, and marketing. There were some interesting presentations on specific topics of interest as well, including [the following are all video links]:
The rest of the presentations are available
here [youtube], and conference photos are
here .
SUSE has been my go-to distro since 2001. I'm raising a glass to the openSUSE team and hoping for more green!
Like the Internet? Get ready to start talking about the way it was in the "Good old days." If the new proposed changes to the principle of network neutrality take hold, the future Internet of classified traffic and preferential speeds threatens to do irreparable damage to the Internet we know and love.
Mozilla has proposed some solutions that are under consideration (or are they?). The Atlantic proposes
we step back and reboot the debate with a fresh look at what's important. And it's gotten more political than ever now, as
Democrats and Republicans have taken sides over the FCC's proposal .
Time for the big companies to say their piece then, too, and they have:
they hate Wheeler's proposal .
Do you care about net neutrality? Do you know the facts? Now is a good time to
make this the next SOPA with the equivalent of a blackout. Look to Brad Feld for a good idea: he proposes we
demo the slowlane , and show Americans exactly what the end of network neutrality means for the average punter's online experience. I think it's an awesome idea.
ArsTechnica has an interesting article featured today about scientific computing and the
enduring role played by the Fortran programming language . The article explores three potential challengers to the dominance of
Fortran in scientific computing including
Haskell ,
Clojure , and
Julia . One of the main points made by the article is that support for existing Fortran and C libraries is essential as is support for concurrent (parallel) algorithms. Will Fortran rule scientific computing forever or will a challenger usurp the throne?
[edited 2014-05-09 13:32 for spelling]
Is wearable tech the next big thing, or has it already come and gone? Either way, it's the hot topic of 2014.
Blame Google, whose
Google Glass eyewear got everyone excited about something newer and trendier than an expensive smart phone (and made at least some people into instant
glassholes ), or blame Samsung's
Galaxy Gear watch, the
Pebble , and the
Nike Fuelband . It's easy to believe wearable computing is the
next wave of tech innovation. If so, we're not quite there yet, judging by reviews of current products. In fact, some pundits believe innovation is already beginning to
run out of steam .
Wearable tech is being attacked from all angles. While the techies wonder if Google Glass can
pass the ACID test , everyone else is just having enormous amounts of fun
parodying what a family full of wearable computer users might actually look like.
The
Guardian has an interesting review about
materialism and happiness in relation to the book by Graham Music entitled:
The Good Life: Wellbeing and the New Science of Altruism, Selfishness and Immorality . The thesis of the book appears to be that materialism and consumerism create unhappiness that can be exploited to perpetuate the cycle of getting ever more things. And, that this relationship may explain why inequalities get exacerbated by the wealthy with power.
Two quotes of note from the article and its sources:
- A study at Berkeley University, quoted by Music ... "The higher up the social-class ranking people are, the less pro-social, charitable and empathetically they behaved " consistently those who were less rich showed more empathy and more of a wish to help others.", and
- "Those with more materialistic values consistently have worse relationships, with more conflict," Music writes. "This is significant if the perceived shift towards more materialistic values in the west is accurate."