Hugh Pickens writes "JP Mangalindan writes that for years psychologists have studied what makes video games so engrossing — why do players spend hours accruing virtual points working towards intangible rewards and what characteristics make some games more addictive than others? Now, companies are realizing that 'gamification' — using the same mechanics that hook gamers — is an effective way to generate business. For example, when Nike released Nike + in 2008, it 'gamified' exercise. 'Place the pedometer in a pair of (Nike) sneaks and it monitors distance, pace and calories burned, transmitting that data to the user's iPod. The Nike software loaded on the iPod will then "reward" users if they reach a milestone,' writes Mangalindan. 'If a runner beats his 5-mile distance record, an audio clip from Tour de France cycling champ Lance Armstrong congratulates him.' In addition, users can upload their information, discuss achievements online with other users, and challenge them to distance or speed competitions. The result: to date, Nike has moved well over 1.3 million Nike + units."

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ChipMonk writes "Over at hobbyist site OS News, editor-in-chief Thom Holwerda published a highly skeptical opinion of the announcement of Commodore USA's own Amiga line. Within hours, Commodore USA sent a takedown notice to OS News, demanding a retraction of the piece and accusing the site of libel and defamation. What's funny is that the takedown notice was mostly copied, with minor edits, from Chilling Effects, a site dedicated to publicizing attempts at squelching free speech. The formatting, line breaks, obtuse references to 'OCGA,' and even the highlighted search terms were left largely intact."

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YokimaSun writes "Sony may have dealt a major blow to the PSjailbreak sellers, but the release last week of PSGroove, an open source version of the hack, has now opened the floodgates of ports to mobile phones such as the Nokia N900 and Palm Pre. The final kick in the teeth is that a port of the exploit has been released by Waninkoko of Wii custom firmware fame for the Dingoo Handheld, which is a homebrew console that is very popular amongst emulation fans. It makes you smile that you can use one homebrew console to hack another to get homebrew on that console. Awesome." pudge notes that you can apparently do the same with a TI-84 Plus graphing calculator (YouTube video).

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An anonymous reader writes "The Royal Mail on Friday issued what it called the world's first 'intelligent stamps,' designed to interact with smartphones using image-recognition technology. The Royal Mail's latest special-issue stamps, devoted to historic British railways, are designed to launch specially developed online content when a user snaps them using an image-recognition application available on iPhone or Android handsets. 'This is the first time a national postal service has used this kind of technology on their stamps and we're very excited to be bringing intelligent stamps to the nation's post,' a Royal Mail spokesman said in a statement. 'Intelligent stamps mark the next step in the evolution of our stamps, bringing them firmly into the 21st century.'"

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Stoobalou writes "A member of Iceland's parliament and prominent organizer for whistle-blowing website WikiLeaks has turned on the site's spokesman, Julian Assange, urging him to step down over rape allegations made against him in Sweden. Birgitta Jonsdottir told news site The Daily Beast that she did not believe Assange's repeated assertion that the allegations of rape and molestation made against him were part of a US-backed smear campaign to distract attention from documents posted on the site laying bare US involvement in the war in Afghanistan and further promised revelations."

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theodp writes "Raw intellect ain't always all it's cracked up to be, advises Ted Dziuba in his introduction to Programming Things I Wish I Knew Earlier, so don't be too stubborn to learn the things that can save you from the headaches of over-engineering. Here's some sample how-to-avoid-over-complicating-things advice: 'If Linux can do it, you shouldn't. Don't use Hadoop MapReduce until you have a solid reason why xargs won't solve your problem. Don't implement your own lockservice when Linux's advisory file locking works just fine. Don't do image processing work with PIL unless you have proven that command-line ImageMagick won't do the job. Modern Linux distributions are capable of a lot, and most hard problems are already solved for you. You just need to know where to look.' Any cautionary tips you'd like to share from your own experience?"

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postbigbang writes "Ryanair's miser-in-chief Michael O'Leary now suggests eliminating co-pilots as a way to save money. Will airliners be powered by drones, or is it actually viable to have just a single pilot on passenger planes?"

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bossanovalithium writes that an umbrella group including Japanese heavyweights like Panasonic and Toyota is working on bringing the price of self powered parts down to levels where they can be mass produced: "The idea is that the parts will make external power sources redundant — because they can convert energy from body heat, light and vibrations straight into electricity. Self powered electronics have already sporadically been used in technology like wall-mount remote control units for air conditioners, says Nikkei, but existing parts are bulky and cost a couple thousand yen a piece. 3,000 yen is about $35 — which means they're not the best bet, financially, yet."

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mspohr writes with a sad excerpt from Fast Company: "Despite a seemingly stout business plan, and all the financial, social, and educational benefits it would bring, the FCC's just turned down M2Z's application for a coast-to-coast free wireless broadband system. ... The FCC is known to have heard complaints about M2Z's plan from existing wireless carriers. Though M2Z's network would've operated at under 1 Mbps peak speeds — meaning it was very slow by today's standards, and probably snail-like by tomorrow's — its free pricing may well have tempted many folks away from spending cash with an established ISP. Those carriers are now reported to be pleased with the FCC's decision, though they argue it's in line with the greater National Broadband Plan. Whenever that actually gets off the ground."

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An anonymous reader writes "I have kept every email I have ever sent or received since 1990, with the exception of junk mail (though I kept a lot of that as well). I have migrated my emails faithfully from Unix mail, to Eudora, to Outlook, to Thunderbird and Entourage, though I have left much of the older stuff in Outlook PST files. To make my life easier I would now like to merge all the emails back into a single searchable archive — just because I can. But there are a few problems: a) Moving them between email systems is SLOW; while the data is only a few GB, it is hundred of thousands of emails and all of the email systems I have tried take forever to process the data. b) Some email systems (i.e. Outlook) become very sluggish when their database goes over a certain size. c) I don't want to leave them in a proprietary database, as within a few years the format becomes unsupported by the current generation of the software. d) I would like to be able to search the full text, keep the attachments, view HTML emails correctly and follow email chains. e) Because I use multiple operating systems, I would prefer platform independence. f) Since I hope to maintain and add emails for the foreseeable future, I would like to use some form of open standard. So, what would you recommend?"

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MojoKid writes "Remote-controlled helicopters are not new, but Parrot's AR.Drone Quadricopter is set to make a splash when it goes on sale on Sept. 9th. It will use an iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad as a controller, and give a live video feed from two different cameras to the pilot. Each model comes with two hulls, one of them for indoor use, with protective loops around the rotors. The device creates its own Wi-Fi network, which the iOS device connects to in order to control the Quadricopter."

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An anonymous reader writes "One of the big, unsolved problems in explaining how life arose on Earth is a chicken-and-egg paradox: How could the basic biochemicals — such as amino acids and nucleotides — have arisen before the biological catalysts (proteins or ribozymes) existed to carry out their formation? In a paper appearing in the current issue of The Biological Bulletin, scientists propose that a third type of catalyst could have jumpstarted metabolism and life itself, deep in hydrothermal ocean vents."

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eldavojohn writes "MSNBC spoke with the senior producer of a new stereoscopic 3D game called Killzone 3 and highlighted problems they are trying to solve with being one of the first FPS 3D games for the PS3. The team ran into serious design problems, like where to put the crosshairs for the players (do they constantly hover in front of your vision?) and what to do with any of the heads-up display components. Aside from the obvious marketing thrown in at the end of the article (in a very familiar way), there is an interesting point raised concerning normalized conventions in all video games and how one ports that to the new stereoscopic 3D model — the same way directors continue to grapple with getting 3D right. Will 3D games be just as gimmicky as most 3D movies? If they are, at least Guerrilla Games is at least making it possible for the player to easily and quickly switch in and out of stereoscopic 3D while playing."

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An anonymous reader writes "Given the history of ACTA leaks, to no one's surprise, the latest version of the draft agreement (PDF) was leaked last night on KEI's website. The new version — which reflects changes made during an intense week of negotiations last month in Washington — shows a draft agreement that is much closer to becoming reality. Perhaps the most important story of the latest draft is how the countries are close to agreement on the Internet enforcement chapter. In the face of opposition, the US has dropped its demands on secondary liability for ISPs but is still holding out hope of establishing a super-DMCA with digital lock rules that go beyond the WIPO Internet treaties and were even rejected by US courts."

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Are you still using the Winlist (or a reasonable facsimile) in order to switch from one working window to another? How old school! If you are still clicking minimized buttons in a panel to restore your minimized windows it is time you were drawn into the here and now. Thanks to Compiz you have better, slicker, and more efficient ways to switch from one application to another. Take a look at Compiz Switchers, and you'll never want to go back to the boring old panel buttons!

It's terribly difficult to get reliable statistics, as numbers tend to vary drastically depending upon whom you ask, but if you're inclined to believe that Android is mopping up Apple and RIM's declining mobile mindshare in the US, you'll find nothing but corroboration from Quantcast. 

At insideHPC, we’re looking at new ways to bring you the latest on High Performance Computing. This week we’re starting a new feature called Video Sundays. In this video, the University of Louisville uses a Dell HPC cluster and visualization wall to further its research on personalized medicine.  ...

How To Set Up Apache2 With mod_fcgid And PHP5 On Ubuntu 10.04 This tutorial describes how you can install Apache2 with mod_fcgid and PHP5 on Ubuntu 10.04. mod_fcgid is a compatible alternative to the older mod_fastcgi. It lets you execute PHP scripts with the permissions of their owners instead of...

Well, well -- what have we here? Word on the street has it that we're looking at a new, unreleased (officially, anyway) Froyo build for Google's now-tough-to-locate Nexus One. The open source community has yet again uncovered what looks to be a real gem, with this fresh Android 2.2 version...

In the last week, I started working on the last big missing infrastructure piece of the mesh networking peer-to-peer network. A way to send messages between may two nodes in the peer-to-peer network. Each node communicates with at most 20 neighboring nodes, this is useful to form a mesh, but it only gets interesting is you can route messages by hopping from node to node.