When I first saw this image I thought that some industrious Photoshop user had put together an oil tanker and a power station for the fun of it. Then I discovered she is a real thing: A full thermal power plant on top of a hull. One of these ships is now on its way to the Gaza strip. Read more…
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I thought this was a photoshop but it’s the weirdest ship I’ve ever seen
It’s not a new image, but I just saw it popping again on my feed and I had the irresistible urge to get in there, to enjoy this bath during that sunset until I look like a California prune. Read more…
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Is this the most amazing bathtub in the world? (Spoiler: Yes, yes it is)
An anonymous reader writes: John Romero helped bring us Doom, Quake, and Wolfenstein, but he’s also known for Daikatana — an immensely-hyped followup that flopped hard. After remaining on the periphery of game development since then, Romero announced last month that he’s coming back to the FPS genre with a new game in development. Today, he spoke with Develop Magazine about his thoughts on the future of shooters. Many players worry that the genre is stagnant, but Romero disagrees that this has to be the case. “Shooters have so many places to go, but people just copy the same thing over and over because they’re afraid to try something new. We’ve barely scratched the surface.” He also thinks the technology underpinning games matters less than ever. Romero says high poly counts and new shaders are a distraction from what’s important: good game design. “Look at Minecraft – it’s unbelievable that it was made by one person, right? And it shows there’s plenty of room for something that will innovate and change the whole industry. If some brilliant designers take the lessons of Minecraft, take the idea of creation and playing with an environment, and try to work out what the next version of that is, and then if other people start refining that, it’ll take Minecraft to an area where it will become a real genre, the creation game genre.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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John Romero On Reinventing the Shooter
Front Porch ad. A Northern California company that bills itself as the “worldwide leader in Wi-Fi monetization” is the vendor behind Comcast’s and other US cable companies’ promotional advertising campaign performed through JavaScript injection, Comcast said Monday. Comcast spokesman Charlie Douglas confirmed the vendor’s name, Front Porch of Sonora, hours after Ars reported that Comcast recently started serving Comcast ads to devices connected to one of its 3.5 million publicly accessible Wi-Fi hotspots across the US. We wrote that Comcast’s decision to inject data into the net raises security concerns and cuts to the heart of the ongoing net neutrality debate . As it turns out, Front Porch also does business with Cox, Time Warner, Bright House, and Cablevision in the US, Front Porch CTO Carlos Vazquez said in a telephone interview. Read 8 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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Meet the tech company performing ad injections for Big Cable
Home Depot confirmed today that the company was, indeed, the victim of a large credit card breach reported by many customers last week. An estimated 60 million card numbers were stolen, which would make it the biggest such hack in retail history. Read more…
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Home Depot Confirms Hack: As Many As 60 Million Cards Stolen
MojoKid writes Intel took the wraps off its Xeon E5 v3 server line-up today and the chip, based on Intel’s Haswell-EP architecture, is looking impressive. Intel’s previous generation Xeon E5 V2 chips, which were based on Ivy Bridge, topped out at 12 cores per socket. The new Xeon E5 v3 processors, in contrast, are going to push as high as 18 cores per socket — a 50% improvement. The TDP range is pushing slightly outwards in both directions; the E5 V2 family ranged from 50W to 150W, whereas the E5 V3 family will span 55W — 160W in a single workstation configuration. The core technologies Intel is introducing to the E5 V3 family pull from the Haswell architecture, including increased cache bandwidth, improved overall IPC, and new features like AVX2, which offers a theoretical near-doubling of floating point performance over the original AVX instructions. Full support for DDR4 DRAM memory is now included as well. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Intel Launches Xeon E5 V3 Series Server CPUs With Up To 18 Cores
It’s been 60 years since a viking settlement was discovered, leading historians to assume that we’d uncovered everything there is to uncover. But this weekend, Danish and English archaeologists announced they’ve unearthed evidence of a new fortress that’s been sought after for years. Read more…
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Archaeologists Just Discovered a 1,000-Year-Old Viking Fortress
There’s a different kind of two-seater roaming the sidewalks of the University of New South Wales (UNSW) in Australia: a motorized couch. Thanks to the efforts of a few engineering students, what started as a joke amongst friends is now a Xbox gamepad-controlled robotic sofa. Under the cushions, there’s an electric scooter motor and an armrest-mounted Raspberry Pi to wrangle the vehicle’s four independent wheels. All told, it took a group of nine students a year to get the kinks worked out of the mechanical, software and assembly systems. “We were thinking about making a fridge robotic, too, so you could call it over, ” said co-creator Will Andrew. One thing’s for sure: they’d certainly improve gameday lounging . Filed under: Misc , Transportation Comments Source: UNSW Australia
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Robocouch takes students to class without all of that exercise nonsense
Automatic object recognition in images is currently tricky. Even if a computer has the help of smart algorithms and human assistants , it may not catch everything in a given scene. Google might change that soon, though; it just detailed a new detection system that can easily spot lots of objects in a scene, even if they’re partly obscured. The key is a neural network that can rapidly refine the criteria it’s looking for without requiring a lot of extra computing power. The result is a far deeper scanning system that can both identify more objects and make better guesses — it can spot tons of items in a living room, including (according to Google’s odd example) a flying cat. The technology is still young, but the internet giant sees its recognition breakthrough helping everything from image searches through to self-driving cars . Don’t be surprised if it gets much easier to look for things online using only vaguest of terms. Filed under: Internet , Google Comments Via: GigaOM Source: Google Research Blog
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Google’s latest object recognition tech can spot everything in your living room
A respiratory illness that almost exclusively infects children and for which there is no vaccine has struck Denver, Colorado, the latest in a series of infection clusters in the Midwest; one Denver hospital alone has treated more than 900 children for the illness since August 18, though no deaths have been reported. Health officials believe that the sickness is related to a rare virus called human enterovirus 68 (HEV68), the [Denver] Post says. HEV68, first seen in California in 1962, and an unwelcome but highly infrequent visitor to communities worldwide since then, is a relative of the virus linked to the common cold (human rhinoviruses, or HRV), according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. … HEV68, which almost uniquely affects children, tends to first cause cold-like symptoms, including body aches, sneezing and coughing. These mild complaints then worsen into life-threatening breathing problems that are all the more dangerous to children with asthma. Since viruses do not respond to antibiotics, hospitals have treated the illness with asthma therapies. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Denver Latest City Hit By Viral Respiratory Infection That Targets Kids