Matthew Handrahan for GamesIndustry International:
According to a report in the Providence Journal, Lincoln Chaffee, Governor of Rhode Island, has been meeting with representatives from the 38 Studios over the last few days in an effort to “protect” the $75 million incentive the state offered to lure the company away from its Massachusetts headquarters.Precise details of the meetings are still secret, though Chaffee has admitted that he is working under a “tight time-frame” to “keep 38 Studios solvent.”
38 Studios was created by former Red Sox pitcher Curt Schilling, and had been headquartered in Massachusetts until it was lured away by incentives offered by neighboring Rhode Island. It’s been in business for six years, but the company’s first game was only released earlier this year: “Kingdoms of Amalur” is an action RPG for Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360.
If you’re still poking along with Mac OS X 10.5 “Leopard,” Apple has finally gotten around to offering a Flashback Removal Security Update you might want to download.
Flashback is OS X malware which was first discovered late in 2011. It made headlines again in April when a Russian antivirus software developer discovered a new variant of it that exploited an unpatched vulnerability in Java. Apple has since closed the hole and provided a Flashback removal tool for newer versions of Mac OS X, but this will help the few remaining users still working with 10.5 to make themselves more secure.
New York, the District of Columbia and fifteen other states have joined the e-book pricing class action suit against Apple, Macmillan and Penguin, bringing the total number of states involved so far to 31 (if you include DC and Puerto Rico). The amended complaint, released Friday, reveals details that were previously redacted, including an e-mail from Steve Jobs.
Your CallingVault number is a real phone number capable of receiving SMS/MMS messages and calls from any phone. The people you give your number to do not have to be CallingVault members to reach you.We believe that software should be fun and easy to use, and that we should strive to empower users through intuitive design. We believe that privacy is a right and that we should do everything we can to protect it. And we believe that you – not advertisers – should be in control of your data.
During the Games an aircraft carrier will dock on the Thames. Surface-to-air missile systems will scan the skies. Unmanned drones, thankfully without lethal missiles, will loiter above the gleaming stadiums and opening and closing ceremonies. RAF Typhoon Eurofighters will fly from RAF Northolt. A thousand armed US diplomatic and FBI agents and 55 dog teams will patrol an Olympic zone partitioned off from the wider city by an 11-mile, £80m, 5,000-volt electric fence.
We began the Perian project over 6 years ago. We wanted to simplify viewing your content. Our team has attained that goal and with that in mind, Perian will be retired soon. Our stewardship has been a blast but it’s time for all of us to move on.
Perian allows you to play a variety of audio and video formats on your Mac. I’ve been using it for years and it’s still on every Mac I own. Thanks to the Perian team for your years of hard work.
Today, TheNextWeb took a little bit of that away from me by basically plagiarizing my post (pic), being sneaky about it, and defending it.
The response by The Next Web is terrible.
What bothers me about this situation is that it’s not an isolated incident — it’s the norm. Writers take the majority of another person’s story, put a link to the original story somewhere at the bottom and call it their own. Worse yet, some sites don’t even link to the original story in the text, they list it after the story as a “Source Link.”
These types of things are only meant to do one thing — keep pageviews for yourself. If the original story is so good you want to use it as the basis for your story, then you need to do two things: 1. Name the publication and link prominently 2. Add something to the story.
Update: TNW’s CEO posted his thoughts on the situation. It’s in a Google Doc and not posted to the Web site, which seems odd to me. I also added some more of my thoughts.
Elektronista.dk last month about a Dell Computer event in Europe that featured misogynistic media personality Mads Christensen:
After the break Mads Christensen shares with us his whole “show” about the bitchy women who want to steal the power in politics, boards and the home. “Science” he calls it and mentions that all the great inventions come from men. “We can thank women for the rolling pin,” he adds. And then the moderator of the day finishes of by asking all (men) in the room to promise him that they will go home and say, “shut up bitch!”.
Molly Wood at CNet weighs in with her own thoughts about the underrespresentation of women in tech, and how incidents like this don’t help:
There’s not only a persistent absence of women in the fastest-growing economic sector in the world, there are toxic and dangerous attitudes that make that sector persistently unwelcome for women.
Wood managed to get an official statement out of Dell disavowing the incident and attempting to distance itself, which read in part, “We can tell you that the moderator’s attempted humor does not reflect Dell’s values, or its strong record on and commitment to diversity and equal opportunity.” Click the link for details.
So the reason Apple TV doesn’t show up in Freewheel’s data is because it doesn’t show any ad-backed video. Freewheel’s data isn’t about online video watching — it’s specifically about ad-backed online video watching.
I don’t understand how people can draw conclusions from data like this. Gruber gets it right.
The new features, expected to be announced at Apple’s world-wide developer conference beginning June 11, will allow iCloud users to share sets of photos with other iCloud users and to comment on them, these people said. Currently, users can only store one set of photos in iCloud through a feature called Photo Stream, which is designed to sync those photos to other Apple devices, not share them.
The original story is at WSJ, but that story is for subscribers only, so enjoy it at Mac Rumors.
This statement was taken out of context by the magazine – Apple did not invite or solicit Kaspersky Lab’s assistance in analyzing the Mac OS X platform.
You gotta hand it to the folks at G-Form – they’re always looking for an interesting and unique way to test the durability of their cases. Now they’ve enlisted the help of Boston Bruins goalie Tim Thomas to test the toughness of their iPhone cases.
Thomas gamely steps into the net as G-Form’s own Dave slapshots several iPhones in G-Form cases at him. Thomas gloves the final shot and answers the call on the intact iPhone. (G-Form is based in Providence, RI, which may explain their choice of Thomas.)
G-Form’s previous publicity stunts include dropping its iPad case (with an iPad inside) from an airplane – it came out unscathed. They’ve even dropped an iPad from the edge of space before (a 100,000 foot drop) – don’t argue about terminal velocity, it was still a neat gimmick.
G-Form makes a line of protective cases for iOS devices and other electronics; they also manufacture sports padding out of the same “RPT” material.
But the thing is, Digitimes isn’t just wrong some of the time. When it comes to the big Apple stories, it’s wrong most of the time. Sometimes wildly so. It’s reported that its sources had said that Apple was going to release MacBooks with AMD processors, iMacs with touch screens, iPhones with built-in projectors and iPads with OLED displays. Those products, and others mentioned in Digitimes articles, never showed up.
McCracken looked at 25 Digitimes predictions about Apple. Sixteen of them turned out to be wildly off base.
I completely agree with Harry’s assessment: journalists writing about Apple need to take a much more critical view of what Digitimes says until it’s independently verified.
Blizzard Entertainment will release Diablo III at midnight on May 15, 2012. Some retailers are offering special store hours for people who don’t want to wait until the sun rises before getting their hands on the game.
Diablo III is the long-awaited sequel to the hit dungeon crawler action RPG game series. It’s available for both OS X and Windows.
“Twenty years have passed since the Prime Evils were defeated and banished from the world of Sanctuary. Now, you must return to where it all began – the town of Tristram – and investigate rumors of a fallen star, for this is the first sign of evil’s rebirth, and an omen that the End Times have begun,” explains Blizzard.
Five hero classes are included with the game, which sports randomized 3D environments, guaranteeing you’ll have a different experience each time you play. A “real money auction house” has been set up to let you buy and sell rare items for real world currency.
The game is already available for digital pre-sale: customers can download the game and activate it at midnight. But if you’d like to mill about with other Blizzard fans, the company has coordinated launch events at retailers throughout the world. A special launch event site has been set up with details.
System requirements call for Mac OS X 10.6.8 or later, Intel Core 2 Duo-equipped Mac with Nvidia GeForce 8600 GT or ATI Radeon HD 2600 or better, 2GB RAM, 12GB hard disk space, DVD-ROM, broadband Internet connection and 1024 x 768 resolution. The game is rated M for Mature by the ESRB.
Glenn A. Britt, the company’s chief executive, said in a group interview on Friday that the challenge for digital video was that there was no simple way to get Internet-based video onto the television screen. He wasn’t familiar with AirPlay.
Says a lot about the cable industry when the CEO of one of the most important players in the business has no idea how Apple’s technology is disruptive to his own.
Apple has invited security company Kaspersky Lab to advise it on the security of its Mac OS – according to the security provider’s chief technology officer. Speaking exclusively to Computing, Kaspersky CTO Nikolai Grebennikov said his firm had recently begun the process of analysing the Mac OS platform at Apple’s request.
Kapersky made headlines recently for claiming that one in five Macs was hit with malware – stretching the truth, perhaps, since that number included Macs that have received malware spam, which doesn’t direct affect the Mac operating system.
UPDATE: Turns out that like the previous story, Kaspersky was full of shit when it said that Apple requested its help.
Reverse Engineering Rock and Roll: Capo is a revolutionary tool that helps you learn the music in your iTunes library. Available for your Mac, iPhone, iPod, and iPad.
Download the free trial for the Mac, and check out the new mastering-quality slowing engine that retains the detail in your music all the way down to quarter-speed!
Yahoo’s embattled CEO Scott Thompson (pictured here) is set to step down from his job at the Silicon Valley Internet giant, in what will be dramatic end to a controversy over a fake computer science degree that he had on his bio, according to multiple sources close to the situation.
The stink over Thompson’s falsified credentials has been led by Yahoo shareholder and hedge fund investor Daniel Loeb, who’s fighting for control over Yahoo’s board of directors.
AllThingsD reports that Thompson’s successor is probably going to be Ross Levinsohn, Yahoo’s EVP of “Americas.” Levinsohn formerly was president of Fox Interactive and managing director at Fuse Capital.
Betteridge’s Law of Headlines states the following:Any headline which ends in a question mark can be answered by the word ‘no’.Ian Betteridge explains his theory as follows:The reason why journalists use that style of headline is that they know the story is probably bollocks, and don’t actually have the sources and facts to back it up, but still want to run it.
If you post crap, but post it first, it’s still crap.
“The team decided to make available patches for Photoshop CS5.x, Illustrator CS5.x, and Flash Professional CS5.x.” The time frame for availability of those fixes is unclear. “We are still in the process of finalizing the timeline for the patches,” the spokesperson said. “We will update the respective security bulletins once the patches are available.”
It’s good that they did this, but the original decision to not issue updates and force people to upgrade to CS6 left a bad taste for many users.
Animoca, a Hong Kong mobile app developer that has seen more than 70 million downloads, says it does quality assurance testing with about 400 Android devices. Again, that’s testing with four hundred different phones and tablets for every app they ship!
What a bunch of shit to make your developers go through.
Carroll Hall Shelby, the Texan who created the famous Shelby Cobra and uncounted other high-performance machines that turned the auto world on its ear, and made it a whole lot more fun for 50 years, died in Dallas Thursday night at age 89. He had been hospitalized for pneumonia.
Jim and Dan talk about the latest 7-inch iPad rumors, justification for Mark Zuckerberg’s hoodie, iOS 6’s new Maps app, Lightroom 4, The Beard’s WWDC party, the MacMan, and more.Sponsored by Igloo Software and Hover.
Facebook co-founder, Eduardo Saverin, has renounced his U.S. citizenship, according to an Internal Revenue Service report, just days before the company’s record initial public offering.The offering could leave Saverin – who once owned 5 percent of the company – with a hefty capital-gains tax bill.
The Iconfactory has announced the release of their hit game Astronut on the iPad. It costs $1.99.
The planet-hopping game has you using gravity to get where you need to go, avoiding space invaders and gathering star shards.
The iPad version is fully optimized for new iPads’ high-res “retina” display. The iPhone version is available for free. In a novel twist, Astronut lets you remote control that version.
You know it’s a slow day when the media is picking up on the fact that Siri is using WolframAlpha’s search to return a query for the “best smartphone ever” as the Nokia Lumia 900 4G. Here are a couple of points that only a few have picked up on so far.
The Nokia Lumia 900 4G from AT&T, with a cyan exterior, is recommended by WolframAlpha based on a total of just four user reviews, with an average score of 5 out of 5. The site offers an extensive list of details on the Windows Phone-based device, including its price, dimensions, features, and comparisons to other smartphones.
Four user reviews. Let’s not forget that the iPhone isn’t even listed as a choice by WolframAlpha.
