Electronic games now earn more money than recorded music or Hollywood films, about $21 Billion in 2013.
The Strong Museum collects and preserves video games and artifacts through its International Center for the History of Electronic Games. The collection includes more than 55,000 video games and artifacts, personal papers and corporate records that document the history of video games.
70 American Airlines flights were delayed last week when an app on the pilots’ iPads crashed. The problem wasn’t with the planes or the iPads but with the software, made by a division of Boeing. According to Re/Code a conflict between two versions of the Washington National Airport map jammed up the software, and the glitch was finally solved by deleting and re-installing the app.
American Airlines has been using Apple tablets in all its planes since 2013, replacing the 35 pounds of reference papers and manuals each pilot used to haul on board for each flight. The airline says going paperless and replacing 24 million pages of documents with 8,000 iPads saves the company 400,000 gallons of fuel each year.
The Strong Museum in Rochester, home of the National Toy Hall of Fame, has announced the creation of the World Video Game Hall of Fame. “Electronic games have changed how people play, learn and connect with each other, including across boundaries of culture and geography,” said museum President G. Rollie Adams. Unsaid: Games now earn more money than recorded music or Hollywood films, about $21 Billion in 2013.
You can nominate significant arcade, console, computer, hand-held and mobile games here until March 31, 2015. An international panel will choose the annual inductees.
Japan’s virtual singing sensation Hatsune Miku (初音ミク), performing “The World Is Mine” for 3,000 fans at at Zepp Tokyo concert hall in Odaiba. Often called a “hologram,” Hatsune Miku is more properly a 2-D back-projected animation whose synthesized voice was sampled from voice actress Saki Fujita (藤田咲). Hatsune Miku means “First Sound from the Future.”
“It is no overstatement to say that Santa knows when children have been bad or good. He knows much else besides. The information stems from a personal pipeline Santa has to children’s thoughts via a listening antenna that combines technologies currently used in cell phones and EKGs. A sophisticated signal processing system filters the data, giving Santa clues on who wants what, where children live, and even who has been bad or good. Effectively, it gives him advanced neuroimaging capabilities that tell him that Mary in Miami hopes for a surfboard, Michael from Minneapolis wants a snowboard, etc. Later, all this information is processed in an onboard sleigh guidance system, which provides Santa with the most efficient delivery route.
The system serves as a fail-safe backstop to the letters Santa receives via snail mail from around the globe.”
– Dr. Larry Silverberg, NC State University scientist and 2010 Visiting Scholar at Santa’s Workshop-North Pole Labs (NPL).
More:
“Dispatches From The North Pole: The Science of Santa’s List,” Matt Shipman, The Abstract
“In January, New Jersey launched new face-recognition software that forbids license applicants from smiling widely or making other exaggerated facial expressions that might confuse the computer.”
“Pennsylvania and Delaware use the software, too. But ‘smile/no-smile is not a problem,’ said Jan McKnight, a Pennsylvania Department of Transportation spokeswoman. ‘You can smile in Pennsylvania.'”
— “Why you can’t smile for your N.J. driver’s license,” Dana DiFillippo, Philadelphia Daily News
Tom Scocca, managing editor of Deadspin, feels dread when he gets an email with a Microsoft Word document attached:
“Time and effort are about to be wasted cleaning up someone’s archaic habits. A Word file is … cumbersome, inefficient, and a relic of obsolete assumptions about technology. It’s time to give up on Word.”
“Death to Word: It’s time to give up on Microsoft’s word processor,” Tom Scocca, Slate.
It’s a long article, 1405 words with 7596 characters. How do we know? We pasted it into memory-hogging, metadata-infested, editorially intrusive Word and used the word count feature. That’s really the only thing the program’s good for.
Millions of people use their smartphones to access information, and software developers have been optimizing websites for mobile devices. Google has a new initiative to reach those neglected by these efforts, rotary phone users. Google is asking developers: “Ready to Go Ro?” The new rotarization tool set was introduced today, April 1st.
“It is no overstatement to say that Santa knows when children have been bad or good. He knows much else besides. The information stems from a personal pipeline Santa has to children’s thoughts via a listening antenna that combines technologies currently used in cell phones and EKGs. A sophisticated signal processing system filters the data, giving Santa clues on who wants what, where children live, and even who has been bad or good. Effectively, it gives him advanced neuroimaging capabilities that tell him that Mary in Miami hopes for a surfboard, Michael from Minneapolis wants a snowboard, etc. Later, all this information is processed in an onboard sleigh guidance system, which provides Santa with the most efficient delivery route.
The system serves as a fail-safe backstop to the letters Santa receives via snail mail from around the globe.”
— Dr. Larry Silverberg, NC State University scientist and 2010 Visiting Scholar at Santa’s Workshop-North Pole Labs (NPL).
More: “Dispatches From The North Pole: The Science of Santa’s List,” Matt Shipman, The Abstract
The Google search engine has been available in China since 2006, but the firm complied with government censorship restrictions (‘The Great Firewall of China“) until 2010. Disclosure of this fact resulted in Congressional hearings and a Google redirect from China to its Hong Kong site. The conflict was uneasily resolved later after the government realized that 70% of the country’s Web surfers use China’s homegrown search engine, Baidu.
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