Reaching the end of a world map in a classic JRPG game sends you to the opposite end of the map. This is how most world maps worked back in the 2D days, and this is why these worlds are actually donut-shaped (or more precisely, toroidal), as WolfieMario's GIFs of Chrono Trigger show.
Diablo II. The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past. Secret of Mana. These are just some of the inspirations behind Hyper Light Drifter, a game I'm off to Kickstart right about now.
As the company announced today that it has reached 150 million active users, Instagram told The Wall Street Journal that it's preparing to introduce advertising. Emily White, Instagram's director of business operations, said that the service should be ready to begin selling ads within the next year. While Facebook has already confirmed plans to "monetize" Instagram, White's comments are the first explicit recognition that Instagram will eventually contain ads.
Since being acquired by Facebook last year, Instagram has added more than 100 million users. The company has added 20 million users since June of this year.
While there's no solid date for when Instagram will start displaying ads to its users, the Journal says that White is...
Soon, new iPhone owners will be able to use a fingerprint to access a phone or buy something on iTunes. Apple's introduction of this fingerprint technology adds a nice layer of security and a bit of convenience for those whose fingers are too tired to type in a four-digit password. But soon, we will be interacting with a lot more devices that have no screens, and biometrics will be the logical way to secure our data. Companies have already developed ways to identify you, from your fingerprints to your heartbeat. And while these methods certainly seem more effective than simple (and often easy-to-hack) passwords, it's a little worrisome that we'll essentially be sharing even more personal data, right down to our person. In order to give us the promise of more security, companies will want to know even more about us. It feels like we've passed a point of no return. So much about us is stored in the cloud (our finances, our communication, our social lives) that we can't turn back. The only way to protect what you've shared so far is to share some more. Protect your data with a password. Protect the password with some secret, personal questions. Protect all of that with your fingerprint or your heartbeat. Before long, you'll have to give a DNA swab to access a collection photos you took yourself. It's a trend worth watching. The last decade was about sharing. The next decade will be about protecting.
Tags: iPhone privacy security
    
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In March Canon announced a new high-sensitivity CMOS sensor design, and now the company is showing off its capabilities with some remarkable footage of fireflies shot in almost total darkness. The 35mm full-frame sensor captures video at 1920 x 1080 — or Full HD — resolution, and was designed expressly for low-noise performance in challenging conditions. To test it, a camera was equipped with the sensor and used to capture footage of fireflies on Ishigaki Island in Japan.
The footage captures not just the fireflies themselves, but also the details of the surrounding environment as well. It's particularly impressive as Canon says the light level at the time was measured at just 0.01 lux. To give you a point of reference, a night with...
One of Netflix's goals has always been to combat piracy of TV shows and movies — if you can get all the shows and movies you want for only a few dollars a month, the company hopes you'll stop downloading them illegally. But as the service rolls out in the Netherlands, Reed Hastings' team has gone so far as to actually check piracy statistics in determining what shows to buy. VP of Content Acquisition Kelly Merryman told Tweakers that "with the purchase of series, we look at what does well on piracy sites." That led to Netflix buying Prison Break, for instance, a commonly torrented show in the Netherlands.
Merryman told Tweakers about some of Netflix's other considerations as well, including shows like The Voice that the company...
In The Washington Post, film critic Stephanie Merry takes on her biggest professional problem: she can't stand horror movies. As films like Insidious and The Conjuring win at the box office, Meyer is left to wonder why the films repel her so powerfully and appeal so much to others. “The going theory is that these are fears that we have, and that what horror movies allow us to do is to either come to terms with them or to overcome them,” says one psychologist quoted in the piece. Merry's problems with the genre may be even simpler: like many moviegoers, she describes being turned off by Saw and the genre's subsequent shift to so-called "torture porn."
Mike Johnston:
But camera manufacturers don’t seem constitutionally capable of making a super-simple camera. They must be deeply convinced that the complexity of the feature set (which certainly does appeal to a lot of us) is an indivisible part of how they add value to their product, and the temptation to add more and more is something they can’t forswear even for one product. I mean, with hundreds of cameras on the market, wouldn’t you think they could make one that was super-simple, just for that segment of the population that wants it? And market it that way. You’d think. But no.
I think it’s one of the “stealth reasons” why cellphones are encroaching on the camera market so rapidly. Not the only reason, not the main reason, but a reason. (I also think that as cameraphones gain an ever-enlarging share of the camera market, the cameras in them will inexorably get more complicated.)
Bingo.
Nice scoop by Nick Wingfield:
And now, it is clear that a Nokia Android phone was more than a possibility. It was real.
A team within Nokia had Android up and running on the company’s Lumia handsets well before Microsoft and Nokia began negotiating Microsoft’s $7.2 billion acquisition of Nokia’s mobile phone and services business, according to two people briefed on the effort who declined to be identified because the project was confidential. Microsoft executives were aware of the existence of the project, these people said.
And Tom Warren reports for The Verge:
While Nokia was testing Android in a variety of different ways, Microsoft was busy experimenting with a Surface Phone. Sources familiar with Microsoft’s plans have revealed to The Verge that the company built a number of prototype devices to test the viability of such a phone. We’re told that Terry Myerson, who now heads the Windows, Windows Phone, and Xbox operating systems, was in charge of the secret Surface phone project. We understand the company had originally considered the idea of its own phone devices as a “Plan B” if Nokia wasn’t successful with Windows Phone.
Think of all the wasted and duplicated effort between these two companies; if they were going to get married they should have done it two years ago.
In a swank office building, waiters handed out fried pickles and caviar-covered sushi. Shiny new LCD screens covered several walls. It was opening night for Samsung’s new startup accelerator in midtown Manhattan, and the company had spared no expense. "The future for us is about the thoughtful integration of hardware and software," said David Eun, the head of Samsung’s Open Innovation Center. "And that means startups."
The smartphone market is increasingly made up of vertically integrated companies that create both the hardware and software for their devices. Apple was the pioneer of this model in its modern form. Google got in the game when it purchased Motorola. And Microsoft completed the trifecta when it acquired Nokia. Samsung,...
Biking is one of the most efficient ways to get around town, so long as you know where you're going. For cyclists who don't, Hammerhead Navigation thinks it has one of the simplest ways to get directions without lifting eyes on the road. Its T-shaped device, the Hammerhead, clips onto a bike's handlebars and lights up LEDs along its left or right side when the rider is approaching a turn that they need to take. It receives directions by connecting to a smartphone app and constantly pinging its GPS to detect where the rider is. The hope is that by simply directing cyclists to head either left or right, that the Hammerhead can provide turn-by-turn directions without being a distraction.
Hammerhead Navigation is now running a crowdfunding...
The South Korean government has cleared The Korean Land and Housing Corporation, which it owns, to build the world's first "invisible" skyscraper — near Seoul's Incheon International Airport. Erecting a completely invisible high-rise is obviously not literally possible — if it were, putting it near an airport would be a flatly stupid idea. Fortunately, the planned building won't be truly invisible.
Whether it's set to silent mode or not, the dazzling glare of a smartphone screen is a pretty good way to ruin the cinema experience for movie-goers around you. Disney's solution? Encourage people to use much bigger screens, and integrate them into the film itself.
For this month's upcoming re-release of 1989 classic The Little Mermaid, dubbed "Second Screen Live," viewers will be able to bring along their iPads and play games, "find hidden treasure," and do any number of things apart from paying attention to the actual movie. Watch the trailer below to see Disney's full vision for the face-illuminating future of film; "movie-going," as the narrator puts it, "has never been so much fun."
Rockstar launches GTA 5 social network parody Lifeinvader originally appeared on Joystiq on Thu, 12 Sep 2013 09:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Paul Bogard recently published a book on darkness called The End of Night. Nicola Twilley and Geoff Manaugh interviewed Bogard about the book, the night sky, astronomy, security, cities, and prisons, among other things. The interview is interesting throughout but one of my favorite things is this illustration of the Bortle scale.
Twilley: It's astonishing to read the description of a Bortle Class 1, where the Milky Way is actually capable of casting shadows!
Bogard: It is. There's a statistic that I quote, which is that eight of every ten kids born in the United States today will never experience a sky dark enough to see the Milky Way. The Milky Way becomes visible at 3 or 4 on the Bortle scale. That's not even down to a 1. One is pretty stringent. I've been in some really dark places that might not have qualified as a 1, just because there was a glow of a city way off in the distance, on the horizon. You can't have any signs of artificial light to qualify as a Bortle Class 1.
A Bortle Class 1 is so dark that it's bright. That's the great thing-the darker it gets, if it's clear, the brighter the night is. That's something we never see either, because it's so artificially bright in all the places we live. We never see the natural light of the night sky.
I can also recommend reading David Owen's 2007 NYer piece on light pollution.
Tags: astronomy books Geoff Manaugh interviews Nicola Twilley Paul Bogard space The End of NightBut if New York City is better than ever -- and we think it is -- then why does it suck so bad?
The money, yes. And the cupcakes, and the ATMs, and all these apartments that somehow are in clock towers, which are all also just money. Among the young set, it's newcomers' parents paying up at our phantom tollbooth. There is now a class of New Yorkers with the luxury of not just money but also plenty of time. Once you got a crappy coffee at the deli or you didn't get coffee. Now the city is a wonderland of delicious pour-over. Every day is choose-your-own-adventure when you're not dying over the rent. Now there's a substantial population who thinks New York's a lark, or college 2.0, or an indie-lectual Rumspringa, a lazy not so Grand Tour before packing it in to get married in Dallas. Not to pick on the millennials: The olds aren't suffering either. Now a vast number of them pretend to live in the city while gardening at their second homes, in the sweet spread from Germantown to Ghent to Kinderhook. The result: New York has fewer who'd bleed for her. Once the city was for people who craved it with the stridency of a young Madonna. The result was entertainment, friction, mayhem, disaster, creation, magic.
(via @tcarmody)
Tags: Choire Sicha NYCOld people, like those who live to be older than 30, didn't exist in great numbers until about 30,000 years ago. Why is that? Anthropologist Rachel Caspari speculates that around that time, enough people were living long enough to function as a shared cultural hard drive for humans, a living memory bank for skills, histories, family trees, etc. that helped human groups survive longer.
Tags: anthropology humans Rachel Caspari scienceCaspari says it wasn't a biological change that allowed people to start living reliably to their 30s and beyond. (When she looked at other populations of Neanderthals and Homo sapiens that lived in the same place and time, the two different species had similar proportions of old people, suggesting the change was not genetic.) Instead, it was culture. Something about how people were living made it possible to survive into old age, maybe the way they found or stored food or built shelters, who knows. That's all lost-pretty much all we have of them is teeth-but once humans found a way to keep old people around, everything changed.
Old people are repositories of information, Caspari says. They know about the natural world, how to handle rare disasters, how to perform complicated skills, who is related to whom, where the food and caves and enemies are. They maintain and build intricate social networks. A lot of skills that allowed humans to take over the world take a lot of time and training to master, and they wouldn't have been perfected or passed along without old people. "They can be great teachers," Caspari says, "and they allow for more complex societies." Old people made humans human.
What's so special about age 30? That's when you're old enough to be a grandparent. Studies of modern hunter-gatherers and historical records suggest that when older people help take care of their grandchildren, the grandchildren are more likely to survive. The evolutionary advantages of living long enough to help raise our children's children may be what made it biologically plausible for us to live to once unthinkably old ages today.
We all know that you can drop red food dye in white wine and get a critic to call it plummy and tannic. But the same holds true for classical music and other snob-infested culture zones. Alex Mayyasi at Priceonomics:
Expert judges and amateurs alike claim to judge classical musicians based on sound. But Tsay’s research suggests that the original judges, despite their experience and expertise, judged the competition (which they heard and watched live) based on visual information just as amateurs do. ... The key to understanding the aforementioned wine research - without concluding that the entire wine industry is a massive conspiracy powered by snobbery to sell identical fermented grape juice - is that just like with classical music, we do not appraise wine in the way that we expect.
If it comes in a bottle and you paid more than $30 for it, you're probably a sucker.
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Not too long ago, real-life Tony Stark Elon Musk was talking on Twitter about wanting to design rocket parts using something awfully like the 3D hologram interface we've seen in Iron Man. Well here it is—complete with Leap Motion. It's not quite there, but it's still freakin' awesome.
Solving the traveling salesman problem is difficult enough without having to consider the happiness of the salesman. But Tom Vanderbilt reports that's essentially what UPS, FedEx, and the like have had to do.
Tags: business mathematics Tom VanderbiltPeople are also emotional, and it turns out an unhappy truck driver can be trouble. Modern routing models incorporate whether a truck driver is happy or not -- something he may not know about himself. For example, one major trucking company that declined to be named does "predictive analysis" on when drivers are at greater risk of being involved in a crash. Not only does the company have information on how the truck is being driven -- speeding, hard-braking events, rapid lane changes -- but on the life of the driver. "We actually have built into the model a number of indicators that could be surrogates for dissatisfaction," said one employee familiar with the program.
This could be a change in a driver's take-home pay, a life event like a death in the family or divorce, or something as subtle as a driver whose morning start time has been suddenly changed. The analysis takes into account everything the company's engineers can think of, and then teases out which factors seem correlated to accident risk. Drivers who appear to be at highest risk are flagged. Then there are programs in place to ensure the driver's manager will talk to a flagged driver.
In other words, the traveling salesman problem grows considerably more complex when you actually have to think about the happiness of the salesman. And, not only do you have to know when he's unhappy, you have to know if your model might make him unhappy. Warren Powell, director of the Castle Laboratory at Princeton University's Department of Operations Research and Financial Engineering, has optimized transportation companies from Netjets to Burlington Northern. He recalls how, at Yellow Freight company, "we were doing things with drivers -- they said, you just can't do that." There were union rules, there was industry practice. Tractors can be stored anywhere, humans like to go home at night. "I said we're going to need a file with 2,000 rules. Trucks are simple; drivers are complicated."
I’m reading Amir Efrati and Jessica Lessin’s article about Amazon toying with the idea of giving a free smartphone to people.
Of course there’s a real issue here with the cost of the device: “Offering a phone for free would be a daunting proposition. Amazon would have to find a way to make up for the cost of manufacturing — on average, $200 per smartphone.”
In 2010 I had a good source saying that Amazon was trying to figure out how to give a free Kindle to its Amazon Prime members – the best and most loyal Amazon customers who pay a yearly fee for free shipping and (now) premium digital content.
They had the same problem then – they’d do it, said my source, “Just as soon as they can work out how to do it without losing money.”
I’m not sure they’ll ever figure it out. Hardware costs and software development isn’t cheap. And if the product sucks because the hardware is dated or the software is iffy, then people won’t really want it. The kind of customer who’ll live with a sub par free product probably isn’t who they’re targeting.
Still, it’s a tantalizing idea, and one that clearly keeps coming up at Amazon HQ.
Next month Nintendo will be releasing Pokémon X and Y, the sixth generation of the long-running monster battling series. And for those trainers who have amassed a huge lineup of pokémon over the years, the company just announced a new feature: a cloud storage service called Pokémon Bank. A downloadable app for the 3DS, Bank lets you store up to 3,000 creatures online for safe keeping. A sister app called Poké Transporter was also announced, which lets you transfer pokemon from previous DS games to the cloud as well, so that they can either be stored or transferred into the new game.
Both apps will be free to download, but Nintendo says the Bank service will come with as-yet-unannounced annual fee which "will allow the service to...
Google is stepping up efforts to encrypt information flowing between its own data centers as a response to surveillance programs waged by the NSA and other intelligence agencies around the world. "It's an arms race," Eric Grosse, Google's vice president for security engineering, tells The Washington Post. "We see these government agencies as among the most skilled players in this game." The disclosure of the security effort, which has been going on for about a year, comes amid reports that the NSA can get around most common encryption methods.
Everyone agrees that Rio de Janeiro is a beautiful city with beautiful beaches filled with beautiful people doing beautiful things. Everyone can also agree that the favelas in Rio show another side of the city where people's lives are seemingly next to, on top of and even inside other people's lives. This wonderful time lapse by Joe Capra captures all of Rio de Janeiro—its natural beauty, its crowded slums, its landmarks—and it's just perfect. Few cities can look this good.
Sony's 4K video store has officially gone live today, offering owners of the company's $699 4K media player over 70 movies and TV shows in native Ultra HD resolution. Sony expects its 4K video library will grow to over 100 titles by the end of the year. The company previously outlined some of its launch titles, though it saved one surprise for today: for the first time, Breaking Bad fans can view the AMC hit in 4K resolution. TV episodes run $3.99, with film rentals priced at $7.99 for a 24-hour viewing window. Buying movies is a bit more costly at $29.99, but Sony says "select" content will include UltraViolet digital copies — a nice perk for early adopters.
Sony's 4K player can store up to 50 feature-length films on its 2TB hard...
When the Snowden leaks first revealed the depths of the NSA’s spying capabilities, most eyes were on Gmail and Outlook.com. But for lawyers, there was a bigger worry: Dropbox.
The profession has embraced the tool wholeheartedly as a way to share confidential documents among teams, but when documents showed Dropbox as an upcoming PRISM partner, the privacy reckoning was immediate. As one lawyer wrote, "With an unfettered pipe to all of the major data houses, lawyers have to question how safe their client data is."
Matt Drance:
One thing must be observed: all the major mobile players — Apple, Google, Microsoft, and oh what the hell, BlackBerry — now own a top-to-bottom technology stack. Alan Kay was right as ever when he said “People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware.”
It is further ordered that no person shall disclose to any other person that the FBI or NSA has sought or obtained tangible things under this Order.
There’s an old saying that it’s far better to ask for forgiveness than for permission. I’ve seen the many, many statements by Google, Microsoft and everyone else about how they really want to tell everyone just how bad these government demands for information are, but they can’t because it would be illegal to do so.
Today we saw it again. Microsoft and Google continue their lawsuits and negotiations with the government, and ask for credit for fighting the good fight – for example, “The purpose of our litigation is to uphold this right so that we can disclose additional data.”
But at the same time they argue that they already have the legal right to disclose – “We believe we have a clear right under the U.S. Constitution to share more information with the public.”
Ok. So do it. You believe you have the right. You know it’s the right thing to do. Forget the lawsuit. Just release the damn information.
Do it.
