Friday, June 04, 2004
A New Zealand man was angry that his wireless company was putting a cap on the "unlimited" text messaging portion of his service plan. He retaliated by sending over 2,500 text messages per day before the change in protest.
From AZ Central, "Allowing eight hours for sleep every day, Fraser Ray, 24, zapped off 80,012 messages from his phone after Telecom Corp. decided to end a deal giving subscribers unlimited text messaging for $6.29 a month."
Posted by
Al on 06/04 at 10:33 AM
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Thursday, June 03, 2004
Graphics company ATI, long time critic of competitor Nvidia's video card driver optimizations, concedes to using undocumented optimizations of its own.
From Gamespot, "After criticizing rival Nvidia for using optimized trilinear filtering algorithms in its PC graphics card drivers--calling them "unacceptable tricks" in a recent presentation to hardware reviewers last month--ATI Technologies has acknowledged using similar optimizations itself.
The graphics company's admission was a response to allegations raised by German Web site ComputerBase.de. ComputerBase.de staffers voiced concerns that ATI was possibly using application specific cheats or optimized filtering algorithms after observing that the company's drivers rendered colored mipmaps, such as those used in synthetic image quality tests, with full trilinear filtering enabled, but the filtering method seemed to change under real game conditions in Unreal Tournament 2003.
For the layman, mipmaps are a sequence of textures, each of which is a progressively lower resolution representation of the same image. Mimicking real life, where people perceive less detail the farther they are from a subject, games use detailed mipmaps in areas closest to the player's viewpoint while using less detailed mipmaps in more distant areas.
Trilinear filtering is a technique used to blend together two adjacent mipmaps in the game environment to eliminate noticeable areas of "mipmap banding" in the game where high-resolution mipmaps transition to a lower level of detail. Trilinear filtering, however, is notoriously demanding in terms of graphics performance, but optimizations can be made to still create similar image quality with less work.
When asked about trilinear optimizations in light of ATI's recent disclosure, Nvidia's Brian Burke commented, 'In our view, if an optimization produces the correct image while speeding up performance then it is beneficial to the end user and is legitimate. If a change in the driver does not produce the correct image, or functions only in the benchmark, it is either a bug and must be fixed, or a cheat.' "
Posted by
on 06/03 at 04:55 PM
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Sunday, May 23, 2004
Security software maker Zone Labs updated its desktop firewall on Monday, adding new features that aim to put the kibosh on viruses, the company said.
From Cnet-NEWS, "The antivirus features will be offered in a commercial version of its basic free product, Zone Alarm, and as part of a comprehensive security suite, said Fred Felman, vice president of marketing of Zone Labs, an independent division of security technology company Check Point Software Technologies.
'Many consumers and small business users have asked for a more complete security solution, including antivirus, as well as a great firewall,' Felman said. Zone Labs has licensed the antivirus technology from technology service provider Computer Associates International, which typically sells its product, eTrust Antivirus, to small and medium-size businesses."
Posted by
on 05/23 at 11:34 PM
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From Kansas.com, "New software that lets anyone create unique cellular phone rings for free has some record labels worried it will kill the cash cow that is the ringtone.
The software, called Xingtone, evokes the same 'oh wow, oh no' reaction from the labels that greeted the original Napster. The fear is that people will make ringtones out of pirated songs, thus compounding the file-sharing problem while robbing the music industry of a new source of revenue.
The quest for a distinctive cell phone ring has created a $3 billion global market for everything from computer-generated renditions of such classics as The Temptations 'Just My Imagination,' to near-CD-quality snippets of popular songs like OutKast's 'Hey Ya!.'"
Posted by
on 05/23 at 11:14 PM
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From Simmunity, "Simmunity has created the world's first tongue-controlled Nintendo Game Boy AdvanceSP console and Game Cube controller for quadriplegic youth and adults.
The unit is designed for special people in school, residential and hospital settings, who can now play Game Boys with their tongues using the new Abilities Systems Inc. Tongue Touch Keypad.
To make this work, we added a new jack for the TTK receiver input. This receiver processes signals from the tongue-touch keypad and, in this case, relays them to a second micro-controller computer chip inside the Game Boy, added by Simmunity, to decode the TTK signals from the receiver and activate the Game Boy Advance SP buttons."
Posted by
on 05/23 at 06:54 PM
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