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07 April, 2014
The PS4′s undeniable hardware advantage Everything we know about the Xbox One-PS4 matchup suggests that the PS4 is winning the hardware battle thanks to a straightforward memory arrangement (no need to muck with the 32MB of SRAM) and a stronger GPU.
Labels:
Critical + Creative Thinking,
Game,
Graphic Design
05 April, 2014
04 April, 2014
03 April, 2014
02 April, 2014
JavaScript has exploded in popularity over the past few years. It’s now the number one language on Github, and getting more popular every day. This popularity plus the recent advances in HTML5 has meant an explosion in the number of JavaScript game engines out there. The JavaScript wiki lists over 80 game engines, where to even begin in choosing one?!
31 March, 2014
You’re able to send and receive messages even when you don’t have a data connection. FireChat accomplishes this magic by allowing each device to connect directly to others nearby using Bluetooth, peer-to-peer Wi-Fi, or traditional Wi-Fi networks. Because you’re connecting directly with other users, you don’t actually need to be connected over Wi-Fi or a cellular network.
The UK Government has published a guide informing consumers about an upcoming revision of copyright law which will legalize CD and DVD copying for personal use. The changes go into effect in June, and will also broaden other forms of fair use, including parody and quotation rights. To most consumers it is common sense that they can make a backup copy of media they own, but in the UK this is currently illegal.
30 March, 2014
28 March, 2014
27 March, 2014
Melbourne's Shrine of Remembrance has been scanned in 3D for the first time, producing images of the St Kilda Road landmark as it has never been seen before. Invented by CSIRO scientists after six years in development, the hand-held scanning device known as Zebedee is so sensitive it records the ripples on a corrugated iron roof after a single walk-by.
Labels:
3D,
ICT Capability,
research
26 March, 2014
25 March, 2014
An important ruling in Florida has made it more difficult for copyright holders to extract cash settlements from alleged BitTorrent pirates. District Court Judge Ursula Ungaro dismissed a lawsuit filed by Malibu Media, arguing that the IP-address evidence can't identify the person who actually downloaded the pirated file.
24 March, 2014
Australian citizens now have the right to remain anonymous or use a pseudonym when interacting with government agencies, private health service providers, and large organisations under new privacy laws. The Australian Privacy Foundation says the laws, which came into effect on March 12, are a huge win for those who don't wish to use their real identity when interacting with organisations and companies
Labels:
Ethical,
Personal / Social Capability,
Privacy
23 March, 2014
Big businesses are turning to criminology methods to work out how to sell you more stuff. How? Because of the mass amounts of data businesses have on you, which can include your purchasing behaviour, demographic information, internet history, media consumption, financial history and more. But the challenge facing many corporations is how to make sense of all the information.
Labels:
Critical + Creative Thinking,
Ethical,
Privacy
22 March, 2014
20 March, 2014
14 March, 2014
13 March, 2014
Green America and China Labor Watch have launched their campaign to protect the health of factory workers assembling the devices in China. The groups unveiled an online petition protesting the use of benzene and n-hexane in the production of iPhones. Benzene is a carcinogen that can cause leukaemia if not handled properly and n-hexane has been linked to nerve damage. Apple says it has already removed a long list of toxic chemicals and ensures all remaining toxic substances comply with U.S. safety standards.
Sitting at the heart of these developments is the expansion and power of digital sports data and the rise of so-called datatainment. As the current infatuation indicates, data comes in many forms. In sport, much of it is directed towards making money in a multi-screen media environment where internet-connected devices sit alongside television in the engagement of fans and the harvesting of user data
Labels:
Critical + Creative Thinking,
Game,
Numeracy,
Social
12 March, 2014
07 March, 2014
28 February, 2014
Google is aiming to sell $50 customisable modular phones by early next year. The company told Time magazine it is continuing to work on Project Ara, an effort to create phones that users can easily modify by switching their parts as though they are Lego blocks.
Labels:
Ethical,
research,
Sustainability
25 February, 2014
Last June, in an interview with Adam Bryant of The New York Times, Laszlo Bock, the senior vice president of people operations for Google - ie, the guy in charge of hiring for one of the world’s most successful companies - noted that Google had determined that academic results weren’t very important. ‘‘[Grade point averages] are worthless as a criteria for hiring, and test scores are worthless ...We found that they don’t predict anything.’’ He also noted that the ‘‘proportion of people without any college education at Google has increased over time’’ - now as high as 14 per cent on some teams.
24 February, 2014
FACEBOOK’S $21bn deal for WhatsApp in part is a move to bolster the US company’s position abroad. But in Asia, Facebook still has its work cut out for it. That is because in Asia, even more so than on Facebook’s home turf, the growing social media market is on mobile phones. And if Facebook wants to be as dominant on smartphones in Asia as it has been on personal computers, WhatsApp will need to lure users away from three popular apps in the region: Naver’s Line, Tencent Holdings’ WeChat, and Kakao’s Kakao Talk.
Labels:
Asia Connection,
Social
A major flaw in Apple devices could allow hackers to intercept email and other communications that are meant to be encrypted, the company says. Apple released a fix on Friday for mobile devices running iOS, such as iPhones, iPads and iPods. The company said it will issue a software update "very soon" to cut off the ability of spies and hackers to grab email, financial information and other sensitive data from Mac computers.
Labels:
Critical + Creative Thinking,
Cybersafety
Facebook has made its boldest business move ever, buying the mobile-messaging service WhatsApp in a deal worth about $US19 billion ($21 billion) in cash and stock. That is six times what Google paid for Nest in January, and 19 times what Facebook paid for Instagram two years ago. It is so much money that people found themselves reaching beyond the business realm for context. Development expert Charles Kenny compared the purchase price to the total annual lending of the World Bank.
Labels:
History,
ICT Career,
Intellectual Property,
Social
19 February, 2014
After an 18-month review, the Australian Law Reform Commission (ALRC) has backed calls to bring Australia's copyright laws into the modern age with "Fair Use" exemptions. The change would streamline our current hotch-potch copyright laws, which aren't designed to cope with the rapid pace of technological change.
Now, all the big music publishing companies around the world, led by the Universal Music conglomerate, have launched a format that will revolutionise the world of high-quality audio. Universal calls it Pure Audio, and it will succeed because it piggybacks on Blu-ray, a format that already has a viable and growing presence.
17 February, 2014
14 February, 2014
13 February, 2014
10 February, 2014
why would Nguyen remove a popular game that stands to make him millions? The Los Angeles Times speculate that “Nguyen may have boosted the game’s popularity using fake accounts to help Flappy Bird’s rankings.” But others wonder if a Flappy Bird lawsuit is in the works. After all, it’s rather obvious that Flappy Bird heavily borrowed from the famous Mario Bros. pipes, never mind the coin sound effects. But some people might not be aware the basic gameplay mimics a 2011 game called Piou Piou that also happened to feature a big-lipped bird dodging between objects.
Labels:
Asia Connection,
Ethical,
Game,
Intellectual Property
06 February, 2014
16 December, 2013
13 December, 2013
11 December, 2013
10 December, 2013
President Barack Obama kicked off Computer Science Education Week on Monday with a simple message: “Don’t just play on your phone. Program it.” “Learning these skills isn’t just important for your future, it’s important for our country’s future,” Obama said in a YouTube video. “If we want America to stay on the cutting edge, we need young Americans like you to master the tools and technology that will change the way we do just about everything.”
Design by Victorian firm Slash judged best plan for rebirth of Royal Adelaide Hospital site. "The jury was impressed by the depth and breadth of research Slash and Phillips/Pilkington Architects took into the social and physical history and condition of the RAH site," she said. "The winner's scheme offers a vision for an evolving, dynamic civic place and it offers a high degree of economic viability. "Their proposal presented a sustainable proposition by minimising energy and waste.
08 December, 2013
An Australian surveillance executive whose firm was contracted by several clients to sweep for hidden mobile interceptors and other spying devices in Australia and Asia has found dozens of them. Les Goldsmith, chief executive of ESD Group, told Fairfax Media his company found about 20 physical bugs when conducting sweeps in Australian business and local government offices, and another 68 in Asia between 2005 and 2011. The firm found 47 bugs in Papua New Guinea, ten in Singapore, three in the Philippines, five in Thailand, two in India and one in Fiji in several searches.
07 December, 2013
04 December, 2013
Another online drug marketplace bit the dust over the weekend and another massive Bitcoin heist shook the deep web. Sheep Marketplace, one of the two most prominent Silk Road competitors, went down on Saturday in the US. A message posted briefly on the site on Saturday claimed that one of Sheep Marketplace's vendors exploited a security flaw and stole 5400 Bitcoin (BTC), or $6.3 million at its current value. The heist could be even larger than that, though; it may have involved up to 96000 BTC ($112.1 million), which would be by far the largest Bitcoin theft given that Bitcoin's value is currently at an all-time high.
Spotify, the world's most popular music streaming service, has revealed how much an artist makes from each song listened to in an effort to fight criticism it shortchanges musicians. if a hit by a US singer is listened to one million times, the artists will receive about $US1500, Spotify said.
Labels:
Intellectual Property,
Sustainability
A WEBSITE to be launched in Queensland today will house the world's first specialist language MOOC. Dubbed the Massive Open Online English Course, the site features more than 50 free lessons developed by 15 Queensland colleges and universities. Its creators expect the offerings to double by mid-next year as institutions join up from interstate, and hopefully overseas. MOOEC is the brainchild of non-profit agency International Education Services, which created Australia's first MOOC - a course for education agents - in 2005
AUSTRALIAN teenagers' reading and maths skills have fallen so far in a decade that nearly half lack basic maths skills and a third are practically illiterate. The dumbing down of a generation of Australian teenagers is exposed in the latest global report card on 15-year-olds' academic performance. Migrant children trumped Australian-born kids while girls dragged down the national performance in maths, the 2012 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) report, released in Paris last night, reveals.
03 December, 2013
27 November, 2013
The Justice Department has all but concluded it will not bring charges against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange for publishing classified documents because government lawyers said they could not do so without also prosecuting US news organisations and journalists, United States officials say.
Labels:
Critical + Creative Thinking,
Ethical
WIFI is one of the great inventions of the digital age and for Australia's CSIRO, the flow of millions of dollars in royalties from the WiFi project finally has come to a close. CSIRO yesterday confirmed that all 19 international patents in the WiFi family had expired by November 24, 21 years after the first patent was filed in 1992.
26 November, 2013
SOUTH Australia's teachers of the future will have to study longer than students in any other state in a radical shake-up of university standards aimed at improving the quality of education in our schools. From 2020, all new teachers will need to have a Master degree qualification and have studied for at least five years - as long as a double degree in law and commerce.
Labels:
Education
25 November, 2013
THE most ambitious effort to drag US schools into the digital age is in danger of being derailed by hacker students, disgruntled teachers and tens of millions of dollars in unforeseen costs. Within days, however, more than 300 teenagers from three of the first high schools to receive the iPads found a way to bypass pre-installed security measures. Instead of studying, they were accessing social media websites such as YouTube, Twitter and Facebook
RESEARCHERS are trying to plant a digital seed for artificial intelligence by letting a massive computer system browse millions of pictures and decide for itself what they all mean. The system at Carnegie Mellon University is called NEIL, short for Never Ending Image Learning. In mid-July, it began searching the Internet for images 24/7 and, in tiny steps, is deciding for itself how those images relate to each other. The goal is to recreate what we call common sense - the ability to learn things without being specifically taught.
21 November, 2013
In a move that will be hailed both as in the interest of preparing children for the workforce and as a commercial creep into the school yard, Microsoft has won the right to be featured in the Queensland's high school curriculum. From next year, students in 275 high schools will be able to gain credit toward their leaving certificates for completing units from the Microsoft IT Academy’s suite of 400 online courses. However, the vocational skills delivered by vendor courses should not be confused with the “deeper computational thinking” needed to pursue careers in computer science and engineering,
For the first time this summer cricket fans watching matches on mobile devices will have to pay data streaming fees, because the sport no longer has a mobile network broadcasting partner. Watching for one hour at a download speed of three megabits per second would use up 1.3 gigabytes of data. But watching for one hour at much slower speeds, and therefore a lower quality, would use about a tenth of that, or 150 megabytes of data.
Labels:
ICT Capability
Google's chief internet evangelist, Vint Cerf, suggests that privacy is a fairly new development that may not be sustainable. "Privacy may actually be an anomaly," Cerf said at an FTC event yesterday while taking questions. Elaborating, he explained that privacy wasn't even guaranteed a few decades ago: he used to live in a small town without home phones where the postmaster saw who everyone was getting mail from. "In a town of 3,000 people there is no privacy. Everybody knows what everybody is doing."
Labels:
Critical + Creative Thinking,
Ethical,
History,
Privacy,
Sustainability
20 November, 2013
The U.S. government believes that some scary people are using bitcoin. But here’s another scary prospect: If the government goes overboard with a hard-line approach on bitcoin and other emerging digital currencies, it may merely push them overseas, where they will surely flourish outside of its control.
Not a month goes by without security researchers finding new malicious apps on Google Play. According to BitDefender, more than one percent of 420,000+ analyzed apps offered on Google’s official Android store are repackaged versions of legitimate apps. In the long run, their existence hurts the users, the legitimate developers, and Google’s reputation in general.
Labels:
Critical + Creative Thinking,
Cybersafety,
research
Australians making the most of E3 visa opportunities in the US. Australians dreaming of working in the technology sector in the US have the country’s immigration policy firmly on their side. Visa restrictions for Australians seeking work are now so loose that American companies cannot seem to hire enough Australian talent.
Labels:
ICT Career,
Intercultural Understanding
Optus has started a fixed wireless broadband trial in four capital cities to see whether a reliable 4G signal can replace fixed broadband connections in urban areas. Optus expects the fixed wireless service would be priced similarly to its other fixed products and offer download speeds of about 12 megabits per second, which was comparable to a fast ADSL connection.
Labels:
ICT Capability
19 November, 2013
18 November, 2013
Telstra has followed in the footsteps of one of its biggest competitors and launched an entirely new low-cost broadband brand. Called Belong, the ISP offers plan significantly cheaper than its parent, but is it actually cheap enough to compete with the rest of the market?
Labels:
Critical + Creative Thinking
15 November, 2013
Why Facebook Would Pay $3 Billion for Snapchat. for teens, much of the value in Snapchat is precisely its distance from Facebook: If you’re friends with your parents and relatives on Facebook, you don’t want to share your most candid pictures there. Snapchat is a safe space away from the judgmental eyes on Facebook
13 November, 2013
The Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California, is not just a museum of hardware, but also of software. The Museum has made public such gems as the source code for MacPaint, Photoshop, and APL, and now code from the Apple II. As their site reports: 'With thanks to Paul Laughton, in collaboration with Dr. Bruce Damer, founder and curator of the Digibarn Computer Museum, and with the permission of Apple Inc., we are pleased to make available the 1978 source code of Apple II DOS for non-commercial use.
Labels:
Education,
History,
Intellectual Property
Nokia shows us how quickly a dominant tech company can fall from market grace. Ollila had been surrounded by "sycophants who had no competence to address software challenges". Nokia kept developing its Symbian operating system but was slow to introduce touchscreen capability.
Labels:
Critical + Creative Thinking,
History
12 November, 2013
A computer security firm has uncovered data it says belongs to 152 million Adobe user accounts, suggesting that a breach reported a month ago is far bigger than Adobe has so far disclosed and is one of the largest on record. LastPass, a password security firm, said it found email addresses, encrypted passwords and password hints stored in clear text from Adobe user accounts on an underground website frequented by cyber criminals.
08 November, 2013
Australian Bitcoin bank hacked: $1m+ stolen. The alleged hacking incident happened on October 26, with the service’s operator, known only as ‘‘Tradefortress’’, saying hackers have stolen all 4100 Bitcoins held by the wallet service, or $1.3 million at time of writing. It wasn’t until this week that he decided to notify customers.
Labels:
Cybersafety,
ICT Capability,
Sustainability
AUSTRALIA'S video game industry body has slammed a decision to review the MA15+ rating given to 12 games in Australia, which could cost more than $300,000 and cause nationwide recalls. The games, all of which have been classified in Australia this year, include Gears of War: Judgment, Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell: Blacklist, The Walking Dead, and Borderlands 2: Add-on Content Pack.
A VIRTUAL high school will be established for students living in rural areas in NSW to ensure they are offered the same wide range of subjects up to year 12 that are available to city students. The virtual school will operate alongside bricks and mortar schools as an adjunct to existing classrooms rather than replacing regular schooling, and will also offer selective classes for bright kids.
06 November, 2013
04 November, 2013
Android 4.4 KitKat: The most significant Android update in years (better cross device support). Beginning with this release, Android will have streamlined support for devices with as little as 512MB of RAM. Google is implementing developer features like Dalvik JIT code cache tuning, kernel samepage merging, and swap to zRAM to make apps more responsive in a resource-constrained environment. Android itself will also aggressively protect memory to keep things running smoothly. This means more inexpensive phones could launch with fully updated software and stay up to date longer.
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