Using a ripped game ROM from a 2010 release of Donkey Kong, Mike started doing a midnight hackathon to complete this gift of fatherly love for his daughter. Mike took the pains taking time of redrawing the 8-bit Mario sprite frames and swapped the palettes in the ROM. And with in less time than it takes to get an Amazon Prime package ordered on a monday Mike had his “Girls Can Save The Day Too!” edition of Donkey Kong.
Really cool. Here’s the YouTube video Mika made showing off his efforts.
[Editor’s note: This article originally identified the princess in Donkey Kong as Peach – the princess in later Mario adventures, instead of Pauline.]
Google’s high-tech augmented reality “Project Glass” spectacles are still in development, and not available for purchase. But Seattle’s 5 Point Cafe is getting ahead of the game — and fueling a debate over privacy — by banning the devices from the bar in advance.
Maybe it says something about the wretched hives of scum and villany where I like to drink, but I’m no stranger to bars that have “no camera” policies, so this doesn’t surprise me in the least.
Musk, co-founder of Tesla and PayPal, recently said that Broder’s review cost Tesla $100 million.
During his SXSW talk, Musk called Broder’s review a “low-grade ethics violation” that “was not in good faith.” He added, “I don’t have a problem with critical reviews. I have a problem with false reviews.”
A new patent application published by the US Patent Office this week shows that Microsoft’s delusional engineers think that they’ve actually invented Pinch and Zoom as if Apple’s technology never existed.
Apple also accused Samsung in a second lawsuit of violating a separate batch of patents, including the rights to search technology that is part of the iPhone Siri voice feature. That case is scheduled for trial in March 2014.
EA’s Maxis general manager Lucy Bradshaw has offered an apology and an olive branch to Windows gamers affected by the poor launch of the new SimCity game for Windows. (A Mac version is in development and is expected to be released in Spring.)
EA launched the new SimCity this past week, and the launch has been an utter debacle. EA’s Origin game delivery service – its own answer to Valve’s Steam service – was crushed by the number of customers attempting to download the game. SimCity is very dependent on server connectivity: it features multiplayer support, uses cloud save and relies on server-based copy protection management, requiring a persistent online connection. Frequent server outages, disconnections, crashing and loss of saved game data are all problems reported by players.
Bradshaw says that EA continues to add server capacity, but admits that EA got caught with its pants down.
So what went wrong? The short answer is: a lot more people logged on than we expected. More people played and played in ways we never saw in the beta.
OK, we agree, that was dumb, but we are committed to fixing it. In the last 48 hours we increased server capacity by 120 percent. It’s working – the number of people who have gotten in and built cities has improved dramatically. The number of disrupted experiences has dropped by roughly 80 percent.
EA is giving anyone who purchases the game until March 18, 2013 a free PC game download to apologize for the mess. Said Bradshaw:
I know that’s a little contrived – kind of like buying a present for a friend after you did something crummy. But we feel bad about what happened. We’re hoping you won’t stay mad and that we’ll be friends again when SimCity is running at 100 percent.
It’s times like this when it playing second fiddle to Windows may work out in Mac users’ favor. By the time the Mac version arrives, these server problems should be a distant memory. What’s more, according to a FAQ posted on the SimCity Web site, the Mac version will be a fully native game. That’s a departure for EA, which has been dependent on TransGaming’s Cider translation technology for many Mac offerings in recent years.
Netflix just used the quiet Friday afternoon to announce that it is effectively ending its public developer program. Netflix will stop issuing API keys immediately and will not accept new API affiliates.
Until now third-party developers have been able to integrate data from Netflix into their own apps. But Netflix is closing that door. The good news is that API keys that have already been issued and used will still work, so if you’re using an app that’s dependent on Netflix connectivity, it should still work.
Jun Dong-soo, president of Samsung’s memory chip division:
“The global PC industry is steadily shrinking despite the launch of Windows 8,” Jun said. “I think the Windows 8 system is no better than the previous Windows Vista platform.”
And, as if that wasn’t enough:
“[Microsoft’s] rollout of its Windows Surface tablet is seeing lackluster demand,” he said. “Meanwhile, previous vigorous pitches by Intel and MS for thinner ultra-books simply failed and I believe that’s mostly because of the less-competitive Windows platform.”
I, personally, wouldn’t buy anything refurbished from Apple or from their Ebay store. I’ve seen refurbished stuff. So called “blemishes” and “normal wear” can mean scarred screens and body cracks. No thanks.
Not on refurbed gear sold by Apple. I’ve worked very happily for the last two years on a refurbed MacBook Air I bought from Apple and I’ve been delighted with it. It was as good as new when it arrived, has worked flawlessly, and eligible for AppleCare (and covered by Apple’s standard factory warranty). Only difference is that I didn’t pay even close to the regular retail price.
I’ve gone with the refurb section on the Apple Store, but if Apple’s moved to eBay too, I say go for it.
Unless you need to configure a machine to order and have very specific requirements or need to buy a machine when it first comes out, buying new is for suckers.
Here is a brilliant piece written by Daniel Eran Dilger in February 2013 that shows how pathetic the mainstream media is when reporting on Apple. Bloomberg even goes so far as to contradict its own reporting.
That revelation appears in an article entitled “Toilet Hygiene in the Classical Era,” by French anthropologist and forensic medicine researcher Philippe Charlier and his colleagues. Their report examines tidying techniques used way back—and the resultant medical issues.
Almost three years after Google released its WebM video encoding technology as a “free” and open alternative to the existing H.264 backed by Apple and others, it has admitted its position was wrong and that it would pay to license the patents WebM infringes.
Google got away with stealing Java code, so I guess it thought why not steal some video codecs too.
Motorola staffers were informed by the company via email this week that “while we’re very optimistic about the new products in our pipeline, we still face challenges.” The company email added that “our costs are too high, we’re operating in markets where we’re not competitive and we’re losing money.” The layoffs will affect workers in the U.S., China and India.
Ouch. That means about 1,200 employees are getting laid off.
Producer and engineer Bobby Owsinski gives his list of the 10 most significant amps. Like he said, we all have our favorites that might not be on the list.
The freemium or free to play (F2P) business model is still new and in an immature state. There are some early adopters that have used exploits or tricks to squeeze money from their players, while others created what we call a “pay-to-win” experience where you’re almost guaranteed to win if you pay money. While these tactics may have generated a lot of revenue for these developers, as the market, business model and player expectations mature, these tactics will become less and less accepted by players. They probably won’t go away all together, but it’s better to get ahead of the curve and start designing and executing smarter games today. Here are examples of 5 of these tactics:
There are a lot more than five ways to screw up the free to play model, but these are five big ones. The one that particularly galls me is “Design a free to play Player vs Player (PvP) game to be pay-to-win.” That drives me absolutely bonkers.
Apple devices are still reigning above the clouds, following the tablet trend with the iPad being the device of choice. Among all mobile devices being used to connect through Gogo, 84 percent carry Apple’s iOS operating system while 16 percent carry the Android operating system. If you look only at the smartphones our customers are using, the iPhone makes up 73 percent and all Android devices make up 26 percent, with Blackberry and Windows based devices each making up less than 1 percent of devices being used in air.
“We said, ‘oh the OEMs, that’s their design, they deal with it.’ We got huge diversity out of that at all possible price points, but it became hard to guarantee a uniform quality of experience that the end user had,” he explained. Pointing to the initial touchscreens in Microsoft’s first-generation phones, there were clearly devices with better hardware than others. “If you were in front of a bad one then people said that was a piece of crap; it didn’t work a damn.”
So let me get this straight. The way Apple does it, controlling hardware and software is the best way to do things. Got it.
And OEMs are to blame for everything that went wrong at Microsoft.
Perfect. Carry on Microsoft, you’re doing just fine.
Elop, hired in 2010 from Microsoft Corp to turn around the Finnish mobile phone maker, earned 4.33 million euros ($5.63 million) in 2012, down from 7.94 million euros in 2011.
While his base salary rose by 59,500 euros to 1.08 million euros, his stock and option awards fell slightly and he earned no bonus, according to the Thursday filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
I felt bad for him until I saw the numbers. How much money do you deserve for running a company into the ground?
To get around this, researchers Tilo Muller, Michael Spreitzenbarth and Felix Freiling from FAU put Android phones in a freezer for an hour until the device had cooled to below -10C.
The trio discovered that quickly connecting and disconnecting the battery of a frozen phone forced the handset into a vulnerable mode. This loophole let them start it up with some custom-built software rather than its onboard Android operating system. The researchers dubbed their custom code Frost – Forensic Recovery of Scrambled Telephones.
Every once in a while we hear statistics about how technology like the iPad is helping kids learn and how the device is moving education forward, but those are just numbers. It’s not until you see and hear students and teachers talking about using the iPad do you get an understanding of how much it’s really doing.
Apple has a profile on its education page that offers an article and a video talking the faculty and students of Burlington High School, just outside Boston, Mass. The article is great, but the video is amazing. The teachers want the best tools they can get and they recognize that text books are not the best way to go.
They even recognize that computer labs aren’t the best way to go anymore. This is a forward thinking group of teachers. The principal believes in access of all kinds, including giving the kids access to technology and even to him — he moved his desk into the lobby so he could always be available.
“Rather than simply parrot back the same things, students can engage in a discussion about why sites present information differently, and come to their own understanding,” said Todd Whitten, history teacher, Burlington High School. “In my view, that’s actual learning, and iPad makes that more possible.”
Technology can help our kids expand their thinking. Educators, like the group at Burlington High School, are going to be a big help moving that forward.
Android malware has been strengthening its position in the mobile threat scene. Every quarter, malware authors bring forth new threat families and variants to lure more victims and to update on the existing ones. In the fourth quarter alone, 96 new families and variants of Android threats were discovered, which almost doubles the number recorded in the previous quarter.
Android accounts for 79 percent of the security threats for mobile platforms. iOS barely registers in the results, despite the fact there are hundreds of millions of users. F-Secure published a PDF with all of the results.
Do consumers even want an iWatch? We don’t know what we want yet; Apple hasn’t told us.
What an utterly crap article, from the headline straight through to the last sentence. Don’t click on the link. Just know it’s there, and that a Web site called “Android Authority” and a writer named Nate Swanner are responsible for the stupidest thing on the Internet right now.
