[In a column originally published in Game Developer magazine, former lead designer on Firaxis' Civilization IV and current EA 2D staffer Soren Johnson examines the role of luck in games, which he describes as "a social lubricant – the alcohol of gaming, so to speak."]

One of the most powerful tools a designer can use when developing games is probability, using random chance to determine the outcome of player actions or to build the environment in which play occurs. The use of luck, however, is not without its pitfalls, and designers should be aware of the trade-offs involved – what chance can add to the experience and when it can be counterproductive.

Failing at Probability

One challenge with using randomness is that humans are notoriously poor at accurately evaluating probability. A common example is the Gambler’s Fallacy, which is the belief that odds will even out over time. If the Roulette wheel comes up black five times in a row, players often believe that the odds of coming up black again are quite small, even though clearly the streak makes no difference whatsoever.

Conversely, people also see streaks where none actually exist – the shooter with a ‘hot hand’ in basketball, for example, is a myth. Studies show that, if anything, a successful shot actually predicts a subsequent miss.

Also, as designers of slot machines and MMO’s are quite aware, setting odds unevenly between each progressive reward level makes players think that the game is more generous than it really is. One commercial slot machine had its payout odds published by www.wizardofodds.com in 2008:

* 1:1 per 8 plays
* 2:1 per 600 plays
* 5:1 per 33 plays
* 20:1 per 2,320 plays
* 80:1 per 219 plays
* 150:1 per 6,241 plays

The 80:1 payoff is common enough to give players the thrill of beating the odds for a a big win but still rare enough that the casino is in no risk of losing money. Furthermore, humans have a hard time estimating extreme odds – a 1% chance is anticipated too often and 99% odds are considered to be as safe as 100%.

Leveling the Field

These difficulties in accurately estimating odds actually work in the favor of the game designer. Simple game design systems, such as the dice-based resource generation system in Settlers of Catan, can be tantalizingly difficult to master with a dash of probability.

In fact, luck makes a game more accessible because it shrinks the gap – whether in perception or in reality – between experts and novices. In a game with a strong luck element, beginners believe that, no matter what, they have a chance to win. Few people would be willing to play a chess Grandmaster, but playing a backgammon expert is much more appealing – a few lucky throws can give anyone a chance.

In the words of designer Dani Bunten, "Although most players hate the idea of random events that will destroy their nice safe predictable strategies, nothing keeps a game alive like a wrench in the works. Do not allow players to decide this issue. They don’t know it but we’re offering them an excuse for when they lose ('It was that damn random event that did me in!') and an opportunity to ‘beat the odds’ when they win.”

Thus, luck serves as a social lubricant – the alcohol of gaming, so to speak – that increases the appeal of multiplayer gaming to audiences which would not normally be suited for cutthroat head-to-head competition.

Where Luck Fails

Nonetheless, randomness is not appropriate for all situations or even all games. The "nasty surprise" mechanic is never a good idea. If a crate provides ammo and other bonuses when opened but explodes 1% of the time, the player has no chance to learn the probabilities in a safe manner. If the explosion occurs early enough, the player will immediately stop opening crates. If it happens much later, the player will feel unprepared and cheated.

Also, when randomness becomes just noise, the luck simply detracts from the player’s understanding of the game. If a die roll is made every time a StarCraft Marine shoots at a target, the rate of fire will simply appear uneven. Over time, the effect of luck on the game’s outcome will be negligible, but the player will have a harder time grasping how strong a Marine’s attack actually is with all the extra random noise.

Further, luck can slow down a game unnecessarily. The board games History of the World and Small World have a very similar conquest mechanic, except that the former uses dice and the latter does not (until the final attack). Making a die roll with each attack causes a History of the World turn to last at least three or four times as long as a turn in Small World.

The reason is not just the logistical issues of rolling so many dice – knowing that the results of one’s decisions are completely predictable allows one to plan out all the steps at once without worrying about contingencies. Often, handling contingencies are a core part of the game design, but game speed is an important factor too, so designers should be sure that the trade-off is worthwhile.

Finally, luck is very inappropriate for calculations to determine victory. Unlucky rolls feel the fairest the longer players are given to react to them before the game’s end. Thus, the earlier luck plays a role, the better for the perception of game balance. Many classic card games – pinochle, bridge, hearts – follow a standard model of an initial random distribution of cards that establishes the game’s ‘terrain’ followed by a luck-free series of tricks which determines the winners and losers.

Probability is Content

Indeed, the idea that randomness can provide an initial challenge to be overcome plays an important role in many classic games, from simple games like Minesweeper to deeper ones like NetHack and Age of Empires. At their core, solitaire and Diablo are not so different – both present a randomly-generated environment that the player needs to navigate intelligently for success.

An interesting recent use of randomness was Spelunky, which is indie developer Derek Yu’s combination of the random level generation of NetHack with the game mechanics of 2D platformers like Lode Runner. The addictiveness of the game comes from the unlimited number of new caverns to explore, but frustration can emerge from the wild difficulty of certain, unplanned combinations of monsters and tunnels.

In fact, pure randomness can be an untamed beast, creating game dynamics that throw an otherwise solid design out of balance. For example, Civilization 3 introduced the concept of strategic resources which were required to construct certain units – Chariots need Horses, Tanks need Oil, and so on. These resources were sprinkled randomly across the world, which inevitably led to large continents with only one cluster of Iron controlled by a single AI opponent. Complaints of being unable to field armies for lack of resources were common among the community.

For Civilization IV, the problem was solved by adding a minimum amount of space between certain important resources, so that two sources of Iron could never be within seven tiles of each other. The result was a still unpredictable arrangement of resources around the globe but without the clustering that could doom an unfortunate player. On the other hand, the game actively encouraged clustering for less important luxury resources – Incense, Gems, Spices – to promote interesting trade dynamics.

Showing the Odds

Ultimately, when considering the role of probability, designers need to ask themselves "how is luck helping or hurting the game?" Is randomness keeping the players pleasantly off-balance so that they can’t solve the game trivially? Or is it making the experience frustratingly unpredictable so that players are not invested in their decisions?

One factor which helps ensure the former is making the probability as explicit as possible. The strategy game Armageddon Empires based combat on a few simple die rolls and then showed the dice directly on-screen. Allowing the players to peer into the game’s calculations increases their comfort level with the mechanics, which makes chance a tool for the player instead of a mystery.

Similarly, with Civilization IV, we introduced a help mode which showed the exact probability of success in combat, which drastically increased player satisfaction with the underlying mechanics. Because humans have such a hard time estimating probability accurately, helping them make a smart decision can improve the experience immensely.

Some deck-building card games, such as Magic: The Gathering or Dominion, put probability in the foreground by centering the game experience on the likelihood of drawing cards in the player’s carefully constructed deck. These games are won by players who understand the proper ratio of rares to commons, knowing that each card will be drawn exactly once each time through the deck. This concept can be extended to other games of chance by providing, for example, a virtual “deck of dice” that ensures the distribution of die rolls is exactly even.

Another interesting – and perhaps underused – idea from the distant past of gaming history is the “Element of Chance” game option from the turn-based strategy game Lords of Conquest. The three options available – Low, Medium, and High – determined whether luck was only used to break ties or to play a larger role in resolving combat.

The appropriate role of chance in a game is ultimately a subjective question, and giving players the ability to adjust the knobs themselves can open up the game to a larger audience with a greater variety of tastes.

BRUXELLES Que se passe-t-il là-haut lorsque les astronautes prennent des libertés avec la Terre ? Certains experts scientifiques viennent d'apporter une réponse. La semaine dernière, la firme japonaise First Avantage et la société privée américaine de ...

Ailleurs, certains diraient que nous avons un petit côté « têtes brûlées » : quitter le Vieux-Lille, haut-lieu de la vie gaie nordique française pour venir nous installer, nous, deux bears, bons trentenaires, avec notre jeune fils de sept ans dans une campagne islandaise, autrement plus nordique et désolée, en aurait refroidi plus d'un. Source: Minorités

Nous ne sommes pas certains du pourquoi, mais apparemment Apple retarde les livraisons de plusieurs accessoires pour iPad. Sont notamment concernés le dock clavier et l’adaptateur USB 10W, qui ne seront disponibles qu’en mai. Oh, et la housse souple ne sera pas dispo avant fin avril. [Apple Insider via CNN]

La Fédération des entreprises de Belgique est prête à accepter un certain assouplissement du contrôle des chômeurs mais plaide, de son côté, pour un assouplissement du « plan Rosetta » .CHATTEZ CE MERCREDI DE 12 À 13H AVEC JOËLLE MILQUET

Nous ne sommes pas certains du pourquoi, mais apparemment Apple retarde les livraisons de plusieurs accessoires pour iPad. Sont notamment concernés le dock clavier et l'adaptateur USB 10W, qui ne seront disponibles qu'en mai. Oh, et la housse souple ne sera pas dispo avant fin avril. [Apple Insider via CNN]

La Fédération des entreprises de Belgique (FEB) est prête à accepter un certain assouplissement du contrôle des chômeurs mais plaide, de son côté, pour un assou...lire la suite

Aujourd’hui, Google célèbre la fête de la Saint-Patrick , saint patron Irlandais. Pour l’occasion, les pages d’accueil Google de certains pays (dont la France) ont revêtu un logo vert paré de signes celtiques traditionnels Irlandais : La tradition veut qu’au cours de la Saint Patrick, l’on porte des vêtements verts, que l’on assiste à des parades [...]

Source : Goopilation (s'abonner)

Explorer : High-tech, Internet

As the features on computer chips become increasingly smaller, finding ways to fabricate the chips has become a big challenge. In a new study, researchers from MIT have demonstrated that certain molecules can be deposited on mostly empty chips, where they arrange themselves into patterns ...

Voici quelques exemples de croquis de sites Internet, dont certains très connus comme Twitter ou Flickr. Et oui, car il faut bien coucher sur le papier une vision, avant de passer à l’étape de la modélisation. Personnellement, j’aime beaucoup cette phase, très riche en réflexions.

Lire l’article original

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During a press event at the Game Developers Conference, Sony finally showed its motion controller to the gaming press. Welcome to the world of the PlayStation Move.

We were shown a number of videos and demos, and they all looked uncomfortably similar to what we've already played on the Nintendo Wii. Even the models, with a focus on females and families, made it look like we were in the realm of Nintendo. The reveal of the secondary controller with an analog stick—a product that again looked like a direct rip-off of a Nintendo product—drew either ambivalence or titters from the crowd. At a cocktail mixer directly after, we were able to get our hands on the Move directly, and play through the offerings.

How did people react? There is a distinct lack of enthusiasm for the product, and people were talking about similarities to Nintendo titles and about the price of the product in hushed tones. There were jokes made about the look of the Move; many people compared it to a certain sexual toy. Others placed the glowing orbs on their crotch, to mimic testicles. In short, there wasn't a lot of love for the Move at the launch.

But we've played the games, handled the hardware, and given the whole thing a long think, and we believe that the Move may not flop, although it could have had a stronger first showing. Here are the things we like about the hardware, and where Sony may have gone wrong.

Read the comments on this post

During a press event at the Game Developers Conference, Sony finally showed its motion controller to the gaming press. Welcome to the world of the PlayStation Move.

We were shown a number of videos and demos, and they all looked uncomfortably similar to what we've already played on the Nintendo Wii. Even the models, with a focus on females and families, made it look like we were in the realm of Nintendo. The reveal of the secondary controller with an analog stick—a product that again looked like a direct rip-off of a Nintendo product—drew either ambivalence or titters from the crowd. At a cocktail mixer directly after, we were able to get our hands on the Move directly, and play through the offerings.

How did people react? There is a distinct lack of enthusiasm for the product, and people were talking about similarities to Nintendo titles and about the price of the product in hushed tones. There were jokes made about the look of the Move; many people compared it to a certain sexual toy. Others placed the glowing orbs on their crotch, to mimic testicles. In short, there wasn't a lot of love for the Move at the launch.

But we've played the games, handled the hardware, and given the whole thing a long think, and we believe that the Move may not flop, although it could have had a stronger first showing. Here are the things we like about the hardware, and where Sony may have gone wrong.

Read the comments on this post

Alors que des affrontements ont éclaté mardi à Jérusalem-Est, la montée des violences au Proche-Orient rappelle à certains les débuts de la seconde intifada palestinienne.

Online competitive intelligence service Experian Hitwise has concluded that the week ended March 13 has seen Facebook pass Google in terms of popularity, in the US.The super popular social network (Facebook) has claimed the top spot in the US before but only on certain days (Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, and New Year' Day), so beating Google for a whole week is certainly a big milestone.

Both sites were head-to-head though, with Facebook.com capturing 7.07% of all visits made by US web surfers, while Google.com held a 7.03% share. Looking at growth, Facebook has jumped 185% compared to the same week in 2009, but Google only went up 9% and the trend is likely to continue. Google will probably just have to get used to being number two.

[In a GameSetWatch-exclusive set of blog posts covering the week of GDC 2010, Magical Wasteland blogger and Game Developer magazine columnist Matthew Burns continues his journey through the show. Previously: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4 and Part 5.]

My thoughts are shattering into fragments before I have the chance to capture them; I’m often pausing mid-sentence to ask people what their questions were again.

The conference won’t let up just yet, though, and neither will the city itself. As if the crowd, spectacle and intellectual stimulation of GDC hasn’t reached surreal qualities already, my route to the Moscone on this late morning takes me straight into the middle of San Francisco’s 159th Annual St. Patrick’s Day Parade.

I cross to the other side of the parade route along Market Street after a pair of marching bands pass by, and see next to me a car in the motorcade carrying California State Senator and longtime anti-game advocate Dr. Leland Yee.

(In an amicus brief filed in 2009 in support of Governor Schwarzenegger’s appeal to the Supreme Court to criminalize the sale of “violent” video games, Senator Yee bizarrely claimed that among other things games are impossible for parents to check because they “can contain up to 800 hours of footage with the most atrocious content often reserved for the highest levels and can be accessed only by advanced players after hours upon hours of progressive mastery.”)

Today, however, our state senator is waving to the crowd with both hands, smiling, apparently unconcerned about the largest video game development confab in the world going on a block over. I wave back with a newfound manic energy and head to the conference for its last day, and to see Vincent Diamante and Steve Johnson describe their work creating the music and sound for Flower.

The pair are so clearly excited about the chance to share their experiences that struggle to get everything they want to say in an hours’ worth of talking. Vincent explains his carefully layered music tracks, about how most of the game is in D Major (“Beethoven said that D Major was the key of royalty”), and the jazz theory he asked to be coded into the game to inform the note next chosen for a petal pickup sound.

Steve describes the components of the different city ambiances, each individually created to reflect a certain mood that conveys the ambiguous (yet clearly present) narrative, and the wide range of tonal qualities in the game’s grass and wind. Even though Vincent had told me earlier he was worried the talk was going to be too technical and detail-oriented to draw much of an audience, the room is packed.

Sound plays an equally important role in Trauma, a game that I try in the IGF booth, and about which I have a long conversation with its creator, Krystian Majewski. It is an intense kind of adventure game, stitched together out of hundreds of haunting photographs of his native Cologne, with three-dimensional navigation reminiscent of Microsoft’s Photosynth technology and a gestural interface that heightens the emotional feel. Even what little I play of it on the bright, loud expo floor lingers in the memory.

I came away reeling at the passion and creativity on display. It is so easy to become jaded when one’s hopes and expectations crash up against the wall of reality, but the energy of others pursuing their own dream helps immeasurably. At dinner that night my companions and I talk about games– games of all genres and budgets and countries of origin: Battlefield: Bad Company 2 and one-button GAMMA IV entries, the Mass Effect franchise and Warcraft 3’s free Defense of the Ancients mod.

The last night in San Francisco ends in a way of which I have little memory. I have stayed up late all week, collapsed on floors, survived on momentum, and now I have to rush to the airport hung over, coughing, with gothic circles under my eyes and a crimson-red cut on my face that I was unaware of receiving. Video games, I think. I of course blame video games.

My waxy pall causes the gate attendant on the flight to recoil at my visage, asking me to wait until more important people have boarded before me– a first in my decades of flying. I am initially offended, but later forgive the man; how else could he react upon viewing the disreputable person I had instantly become?

People walk past me like I’m not there, and in my half-dazed stupor I feel as though I am video games, somehow, knowing deeply that I have important things to do and say, prejudged and shunned by the world around me.

The flight home, luckily, is short.

Today Microsoft released the developer preview of Internet Explorer 9. It’s the first look we’ve had at Microsoft’s flagship browser since it first revealed details late last year.

The preview is bare-bones: after playing around with it, I can tell you that it doesn’t have much in terms of user interface — or anything else for that matter. This is more of a proof-of-concept than a web browser (there isn’t even an address bar). Still, it provides a good glimpse into what we can expect from IE9: a complete reboot.

For one thing, it supports HTML5, the new version of the mark-up language that supports more dynamic web pages, video embedding, and geolocation. That becomes apparent when you test things such as the “HTML5 T-Shirt designer,” which uses HTML5 and XHTML to let you paint your own shirt. It definitely brings Internet Explorer closer to rivals Firefox, Safari, and Chrome in terms of functionality.

Microsoft also focused on adhering to web standards. IE9’s Acid3 test — a measure of how well a web browser follows certain web standards — achieves a score of 55/100. Firefox 3.7, for comparison, scores a 97/100. It also shows off its improved compliance with CSS, including rounded corners (if you’ve ever developed for previous version of IE, this is definitely a sore spot). Microsoft also seems intent on being compatible with CSS3, which is currently under development.

In order to bring IE9 into the new era of the web, Microsoft had to sacrifice a few things. The big one: IE9 will notsupport Windows XP. It could prove to be a smart move, as it might help push more people to upgrade to Windows 7. More importantly, it makes IE9 as web-compliant and advanced as possible.

Microsoft still has a lot to do to win back web users and developers; its market share continues to erode as other browsers with stronger developer ecosystems and more standard-compliant features. This is a strong start though, and a good sign that Microsoft is taking its web browser rivals very seriously.

Tags: chrome, IE9, internet explorer, Internet Explorer 9, microsoft, safari, web browser

Union européenne / PAC La Commission européenne a pointé mardi 16 mars 2010 un certain nombre d’irrégularités dans la gestion des dossiers agricoles des Etats membres. Une vingtaine de pays ont fait preuve de laxisme et sont priés de rembourser les sommes indûment perçues, soit plus de 346 millions euros. La France pour sa part, devra rembourser un peu moins de 20 millions d'euros, pour des dépenses injustifiées ou excessives dans le secteur des fruits et légumes et pour des irrégularités dans le domaine des primes aux bovins. (Photo : Union européenne)

This week marks the one-year anniversary since the Seattle Post-Intelligencer newspaper stopped printing on paper and moved completely online. http://www.seattlepi.com/

Monica Guzman, at the Seattle PI, has written an excellent roundup of how other digital news ventures in the Seattle area are doing.

Here are some extracts from: New media ventures blossom in Seattle

West Seattle Blog
Independent neighborhood news site covering West Seattle.

The site is profitable, and more than 60 paying businesses known as sponsors support it, editor and publisher Tracy Record said.

...Apart from having to beat down an early stigma that independent news "bloggers" were not to be taken seriously (she's a journalist, so she prefers you call her that), Record didn't take a vacation until August 2009, when she could pay enough freelancers to keep an eye on things back home.

"All the people who send story ideas, crime reports, texts about traffic, a picture of a cool event at a school -- that's the part that grows exponentially," Record said. "That's the part that's always humbling, every day."

Techflash
Tech news site owned by The Puget Sound Business Journal.

"It's not something I imagined I'd ever be doing back when I was in J-school (journalism school)," said Bishop.

"It shows you can be entrepreneurial and still be a journalist."

"Journalism isn't only about giving a community information. It's about helping to build that community up."

"I laugh when I think about coming into the Seattle Post-Intelligencer at 9 and leaving at 6. It's almost comical. Twelve hours a day is probably the norm."

Neighborlogs
Seattle-based community news platform and ad-sharing network.

"We see room for something that lets people be journalists, lets people focus on newsgathering, lets us worry about the technology," said Carder.

"The cost of content is so high, you have to find ways to pinch technology and all the tools as tightly as possible. Plenty of players will be gone because they don't know how to do that," he said.

Next Door Media
Seattle collaborative community news network.

"We believe there's a natural balance between journalism and the community. For too long journalism hasn't listened, and it really caught up with the industry," said co-founder Cory Bergman.

"A lot of companies take a tech approach. We're taking a more people-centered and community building approach."
All Next Door Media authors happen to have either worked in journalism or have a journalism degree, Bergman said -- though that's by no means a requirement.

PubliCola
Seattle civic and cultural news site.

"We are reporters who are changing blogging, as opposed to blogging dumbing down reporting," said Feit, a longtime political writer.

InvestigateWest
Northwest nonprofit investigative reporting shop.

"Our model is to sell in-depth journalism at the price that existing news outlets would pay for plain old journalism," said Robert McClure, the Northwest reporting shop's chief environmental correspondent and one of several former Seattle Post-Intelligencer reporters behind the nonprofit.

"It's kind of scary," McClure said. "You're a little mouse on a wheel. You've got to keep going. You can never relax and say, 'We have enough.'"

"I just can't believe that people in this country are going to let in-depth journalism go away completely," he said. "To what degree we can sustain what we have and modernize it in a way that gets the public engaged and keeps them engaged -- that's the big thing."

Crosscut
Northwest nonprofit news site.

... if you want short, flashy treatments of tough local issues, you're in the wrong place. The site's often lengthy analytical pieces aim for a certain audience...

Crosscut is out to activate local discussion ..."Our tagline, 'news of great nearby,' is partly an attempt to say that local can be big local," Brewster said. "We want to have people feel like they're a part of something big."

You can read the whole of this excellent report here: New media ventures blossom in Seattle
(I think my headline is better :)

Editor’s note: Big Data has been around for a long time between credit card transactions, phone call records and financial markets. Companies like AT&T, Visa, Bank of America, Ebay, Google, Amazon and more have massive databases they mine for competitive advantage. But lately, Big Data is finding its way to the smallest startups. The Web and cloud computing brings Big Data everywhere. But what exactly is pushing Big Data forward?

To answer that we brought in an expert, Bradford Cross. Bradford is the Co-Founder and Head of Research at FlightCaster. FlightCaster is backed by Y Combinator, Tandem Entrepreneurs and Sherpalo Ventures. The company analyzes large data sets to predict flight delays. Bradford is chair of the Dealing with Big Data track at Cloud Connect this week.

We are in a Renaissance for computer science, engineering, and learning from data right now. The scale of data and computations is an important issue, but the data age is less about the raw size of your data, and more about the cool stuff you can do with it. Now that there is so much data, it is time to unlock its value. Really neat things are happening already—like the way the people of the world can educate themselves on all manner of issues and topics, or the way data and computing serves as leverage in other scientific and technical endeavors. There will be lots of amazing stuff on the web, but innovation will come in other domains as well.

The recent big data trend is about the democratization of large data more than its growth. In articles like the Economist’s recent piece on the data deluge, we hear about big data everywhere. We hear about what big data and the cloud mean for the enterprise, but they have had big data for a long time. eBay manages petabytes in its Teradata and Greenplum data warehouses. Sophisticated startups extracting value from big data is also nothing new—it has been happening at least since the days of Yahoo! and Google, and they have done it without the data warehousing folks.

Now focused early stage startups can get up and running faster than ever. Less technical analysts at companies like Facebook and Twitter can access massive amounts of data easily. Even individuals can undertake cool projects with big data, such as Pete Skomoroch of Data Wrangling did with trending topics for Wikipedia.

Why Now?

We do not have to build all our own hardware and software infrastructure anymore.

Pioneers such as Amazon have given us the cloud, where we have the capability to run very large server clusters at a low startup cost. Pioneers like Google have paved the way for open source projects like Hadoop and HBase, that are backed by big company contributors like Facebook.

The combination has paved the way for a new class of data driven startup like Aardvark (just acquired by Google) and Factual, it has reduced both cost and time to market for these startups, as we showed with Flightcaster. And, it has allowed startups that were not necessarily data driven to become more analytical as they evolved, such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and many others.

So we have big data, the cloud, and open source facilitating new data-driven startups. I like to break this trend down from the technical perspective into three chunks; storing data, processing data, and learning from data. I define “learning from data” to mean data mining, AI, machine learning, statistics, and so on.

Supersize my data. Oh wait, I’ll just have a Medium.

The first time I heard the “Medium Data” idea was from Christophe Bisciglia and Todd Lipcon at Cloudera. I think the concept is great. Companies do not have to be at Google scale to have data issues. Scalability issues occur with less than a terabyte of data. If a company works with relational databases and SQL, they can drown in complex data transformations and calculations that do not fit naturally into sequences of set operations. In that sense, the “big data” mantra is misguided at times. For instance, a GigaOm article about big data in the cloud states:

What is becoming increasingly clear is that Big Data is the future of IT. To that end, tackling Big Data will determine the winners and losers in the next wave of cloud computing innovation.

The big issue is not that everyone will suddenly operate at petabyte scale; a lot of folks do not have that much data.

The more important topics are the specifics of the storage and processing infrastructure and what approaches best suit each problem. How much data do you have and what are you trying to do with it? Do you need to do offline batch processing of huge amounts of data to compute statistics? Do you need all your data available online to back queries from a web application or a service API?

Once your data and its processing are large enough to require distributing the data and the work among machines across network boundaries, things get a lot harder. You have to deal with distributed computing and make tradeoffs like a real computer scientist.

Big Data & The Cloud: Viral Buzzwords 4.0!

The cloud, and hosted services, present very interesting opportunities. One of the greatest is that people can leverage the a la carte economics of elastic computing to do things that were prohibitively expensive due to the requirements of building and maintaining their own hardware infrastructure. The interesting parts about the current cloud are its lack of entrance friction and elastic cost efficiency, the speed with which new entrants can set up, and the elastic capability to run 100 machine clusters for 1 hour if that is what is needed.

We started Flightcaster almost a year ago, and it is a good example of how startups can leverage cloud compute and storage resources, mix some open source like Hadoop with some data mining, and create interesting new technologies with relatively low capital upfront.

The cloud is not cheaper in general. Once people scale to a certain point, they move off the cloud onto dedicated hardware—not the other way around. That may change, and better hosted services may play a role in the transition, but that will take a while. In the meantime, the interesting part of the cloud is the use of elastic resources and the ability to get up and going quickly. The interesting part is the freedom it gives startups to try things they would never otherwise do.

Another notable thing about the cloud is the new architectures emerging as a result of economic and resource tradeoffs.

Storage of large amounts of data in the cloud is much cheaper with blobstores like Amazon S3 than it is to maintain an always-up cluster for a distributed datastore. If you do mostly offline batch processing and you do not need bulk storage to be online, then it is an attractive setup.

Storage and NoSQL

Taking another glimpse from the future of big data in the cloud.

A Big Data stack…will also need to emerge before cloud computing will be broadly embraced by the enterprise. In many ways, this cloud stack has already been implemented, albeit in primitive form, at large-scale Internet data centers, which quickly encountered the scaling limitations of traditional SQL databases as the volume of data exploded. Instead, high-performance, scalable/distributed, object-orientated data stores are being developed internally and implemented at scale…large web properties have been building their own so-called “NoSQL” databases, also known as distributed, non-relational database systems (DNRDBMS).

There are several misguided points here. First, there is not going to be a big data or cloud stack. Distributed systems are about making trade offs and a move toward problem-specific solutions rather than one-size-fits-all stacks. Second, enterprises already have their solution—expensive data warehousing and consulting support. Will open source projects like Hadoop supported by people like Cloudera take a chunk of the business? Sure. But as I mentioned earlier, the most interesting part about big data and the cloud is not cheaper alternatives for the enterprise, it is the opportunities it facilitates for data-driven startups.

There is a lot of talk about the NoSQL movement. The big idea here is that distributed systems are hard, require tradeoffs, and sometimes we are better off with data storage and processing that are specific to what we are doing with the data. Sometimes even with a small amount of data on a single node, there are better alternatives to SQL queries and relational databases—time series data has long been a good example.

Processing and Hadoop: The Elephant In The Room

There is a broad range of needs for processing large amounts of data. These range from simple needs like calculations for log analysis that just need to occur at scale, to middle of the road needs like BI, to complex needs like scalable modern machine learning and retrieval systems.

There are a different approaches one can use to service specific needs. Again, we see the pattern of moving away from one-size-fits-all stacks, and toward building for your needs. That said, there are very generic abstractions like Map-Reduce that work well for a lot of use cases. Distributed systems are hard to get right, so when something like Hadoop gets a lot of momentum, it retains that momentum until alternatives have the time to mature enough to solve the hard problems with fault tolerance, performance, and so forth. Not everyone is Leonardo da Vinci, so people should not attempt to create these systems on their own unless they really know what they are doing. In that sense, the cloud and big data are facilitators of open source.

An important aspect of processing at scale is abstraction. Writing complex or even simple computations in raw Map-Reduce is verbose for programmers and intimidating for others who might want to play with the data. Abstractions over Map-Reduce like Pig and Hive make simple things easy, and abstractions like Cascading make hard things possible. The Map-Reduce paradigm, and Hadoop in particular, have been a big success. That said, Map-Reduce is not the only important piece of compute infrastructure. Message queues serve as the backbone of a lot of compute architectures – implementations of AMQP, such as rabbitmq, are a prime example. You can accomplish a lot with producers, consumers, and a messaging system. Distributed storage and processing systems can also be very tricky to configure and deploy, requiring a pretty deep understanding of the system – hence the business case for folks like Cloudera.

Learning from Big Data

Hal Varian, Google’s Chief Economist, recently said,

The sexy job in the next ten years will be statisticians... The ability to take data—to be able to understand it, to process it, to extract value from it, to visualize it, to communicate it

Unfortunately for those of us working on these problems in real life, it is not so simple. The archetypal data-renaissance man is mathematician, statistician, computer scientist, machine learner, and engineer all rolled into one. There are opportunities where you can lack some of these skills and work with a team that supplements your weak points—a startup is not one of those.

Now that we can store so much data, it is attractive to do previously unimaginable things with it. We are sure to see cool applications in fields from the internet to biotechnology to nanotechnology and fundamental materials science research. Almost all advances in every field of science and technology are now heavily dependent upon data and computing. Machine learning is serving a fantastic role as a bridge between mathematical and statistical models and the worlds of AI, computer science, and software engineering. We are exploring applications in learning from text, social networks, data from scientific experiments, and any other data sources we can get our hands on.

The data renaissance does present some difficult issues. There are not many places one can recieve a good education on working on these problems at large scale. Scaling our modeling and optimization algorithms is hard. We need to figure out how to partition and parallelize, or sometimes trade speed and scale for approximately correct calculations. Another issue is that we are often using simplistic models, albeit with pretty good results in many cases. We would like to move toward a deeper approximation of real intelligence.

But the data renaissance is here. Be a part of it.

CrunchBase InformationBradford CrossFlightCasterClouderaInformation provided by CrunchBase

As advertised, Namco Bandai brought a prototype of its new Pac-Man Battle Royale to the 2010 Amusement Expo. Arcade Heroes captured some off-screen footage of the multiplayer arcade title (posted after the break), revealing a cross between the GameCube's Pac-Man Vs. and the XBLA hit Pac-Man: Championship Edition.

Instead of putting certain players in the roles of ghosts as Pac-Man Vs. did, however, Battle Royale takes the direct approach and pits four cannibalistic Pac-Men against each other, as they compete to eat the most dots, ghosts and even each other. The game would be totally brutal if the cocktail-style cabinet didn't make it all appear so classy. Hopefully, Namco Bandai will use that cabinet for the final version of the game, due for a September release, as well.

[Via GameSetWatch]

Continue reading Pac-Man Battle Royale: competitive Pac-Man for omnivores

Pac-Man Battle Royale: competitive Pac-Man for omnivores originally appeared on Joystiq on Tue, 16 Mar 2010 19:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

As advertised, Namco Bandai brought a prototype of its new Pac-Man Battle Royale to the 2010 Amusement Expo. Arcade Heroes captured some off-screen footage of the multiplayer arcade title (posted after the break), revealing a cross between the GameCube's Pac-Man Vs. and the XBLA hit Pac-Man: Championship Edition.

Instead of putting certain players in the roles of ghosts as Pac-Man Vs. did, however, Battle Royale takes the direct approach and pits four cannibalistic Pac-Men against each other, as they compete to eat the most dots, ghosts and even each other. The game would be totally brutal if the cocktail-style cabinet didn't make it all appear so classy. Hopefully, Namco Bandai will use that cabinet for the final version of the game, due for a September release, as well.

[Via GameSetWatch]

Continue reading Pac-Man Battle Royale: competitive Pac-Man for omnivores

Pac-Man Battle Royale: competitive Pac-Man for omnivores originally appeared on Joystiq on Tue, 16 Mar 2010 19:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

The Guardian.uk has an article about how the New York Times and CNN are becoming technology companies.

How the New York Times and CNN try to keep up with the tech companies

"The New York Times is now as much a technology company as a journalism company," its executive editor Bill Keller said recently.
...
While CNN.com closely collaborates with technology companies like Facebook, Apple or Google, the New York Times anticipates technical change in-house with the help of its research and development department.
...
"We made an experiment and put an RFID chip into the phone, the computer and the television. The chip was there to track the user's reading. When a user stopped reading a story on the phone as he or she arrived at work, it opened it again on the desktop. When the user entered the living room, related videos to the story were presented on the television screen," explains the NYT's Nick Bilton.
...
CNN has launched an iPhone application, redesigned its website and reached out more to social media. CNN was among the first TV broadcasters to understand the full impact of social media on television, and teamed up with Facebook for the presidential inauguration.
...
Today, CNN's iPhone app is as much a news-making as a news delivering application, and as the iReporters can add their telephone number, email and location to their report, CNN's editors can get back to them or even assign them to certain content CNN is looking for.
...
...it looks like the news organisations that tear down the wall and build a bridge between editorial and technological thinking will be most likely to survive.

I'm glad to see these types of stories. For the past five years I've been writing about the need for 'media engineers' - part software engineer and part media professional. And also 'media architects' the people the create the media technology infrastructure for media companies (BTW every company is a media company.)

Media engineers will be better paid than software engineers because you need a broader skills set.

- - -
Please see my PearlTree on 'media engineers.' [PearlTrees is an SVW client and its a great media technology that organizes web pages in a visual way.]

  

On se répète, mais on ne se lassera jamais de ce bon vieux Reggie Fils-Aimé. Est-il besoin de rappeler ses fonctions ? Pas besoin selon nous, donc autant se concentrer sur la beauté de ses paroles que l'on boit, on boit, on boit... sans se laisser endormir par un discours et un technique bien rodée. D'autant qu'après chaque salon se déroulant dans sa terre d'asile, le président de la division américaine de Nintendo s'épanche dans pléthore de médias et nous donne l'occasion de tenter de lire en filigrane. Cette fois-ci, c'est le site Industrygamers.com qui s'y colle. Et nous aussi par la même occasion.  Outre le fait que l'on apprenne qu'il n'a pas encore pu tâter à Zelda Wii (qui a dit qu'on s'en fichait un peu ?) et qu'il se rendra prochainement au Japon pour cela, on sent que l'homme analyse son marché et essaie de trouver réponse bien calibrée à chaque question. Notamment en ce qui concerne le fait que les éditeurs consacrent plus d'argent au développement de jeux sur consoles HD. Manque de chance pour elles, les chiffres du NPD (qui se charge de quantifier les ventes sur le sol américain) pour le mois de février ont fourni des arguments à notre cousin éloigne de Chuck Norris. Il évoque notamment les ventes pas forcément "encourageantes pour le long terme de titres comme Dante's Inferno ou BioShock 2" en mettant notamment en avant le fait que "les éditeurs auraient du mal à rentrer dans leurs frais", "contrairement à des titres Wii qui eux arrivent à maintenir un écoulement des stocks sur la durée". Il se pose donc une fois la question fatidique : pourquoi les éditeurs ne créent-ils pas de contenu du même acabit sur la console de salon de Nintendo ? Si le journaliste en face de lui met en exergue les limites techniques du support, Fils-Aimé élude la chose en pointant du doigt des jeux comme Smash Bros. ou Zelda et qu'il ne faut pas se contenter simplement de produire des portages de titres existants mais d'avoir une approche singulière de la console. On connait bien évidemment la chanson, reste à ce qu'elle tourne aussi dans le mange-disque de tous les éditeurs du marché. Mais qui dit jeu pensé pour le support ne dit pas forcément pari gagnant. Selon Reggie, les échecs relatifs de certains titres "ambitieux" est plus dû à un manque de marketing efficace que de réel engouement pour le genre. Il prend à titre d'exemple un jeu comme Mario & Sonic aux Jeux Olympiques boosté par une campagne publicitaire de première ordre et qui a permis au titre de SEGA d'asseoir sa popularité au fil du temps. Il encourage évidemment les éditeurs tiers à être moins frileux et à s'inspirer de ce que peut faire Nintendo avec ses jeux, notamment New Super Mario Bros. Wii ou Mario Kart.Il enchaîne en répondant aux dires de Michael Pachter comme quoi la Wii serait en plein déclin, chiffres de ventes de Wii Fit Plus, de Wiimote et de la plate-forme en elle-même assez bas en février à l'appui, et que la firme de Kyoto n'aurait rien de "cataclysmique à proposer pour le second semestre". Quand on attaque Reggie, Reggie contre-attaque. Il confirme le fait que Nintendo est tombé en rupture de stocks sur pas mal de produits suite à une période de fin d'année bien plus juteuse que prévue, rendant le réapprovisionnement difficile pour certains articles de la firme. Bon, pas besoin d'un dessin, Nintendo le vit bien. Quant aux six derniers mois de l'année, rendez-vous est donné à l'E3 2010 puisque le présent se conjugue avec du Monster Hunter Tri, du Red Steel 2 et surtour du Super Mario Galaxy 2 et Metroid Other M.Une fois encore, la Wii 2 ou Wii HD est remise sur le plat, telle une Clara Morgane sur laquelle on fantasmerait et qu'on n'aurait jamais. Quand on avance au président le fait que les développeurs se risqueraient plus volontiers à sortir du GTA, du BioShock ou du Mass Effect sur une console plus puissante, il rétorque sa rengaine à la mode : "la prochaine plate-forme de Nintendo n'amènera pas que de la haute-définition, mais sera totalement innovante".  Reggie in the Move Forcément, le journaliste s'est senti l'âme d'un preux chevalier et a dégainé sa joute estampillée "PlayStation Move". Sans peur et sans reproche, Bayard Fils-Aimé dit se mettre à la place du consommateur Wii basique et voit mal "ce dernier débourser 400 bucks pour disposer de ce qu'offre déjà la console de Nintendo ? Autant investir dans de nouveaux jeux". Pas bête la guêpe, mais est-ce que tout le monde aurait la même façon de penser ? La force de Nintendo selui lui, c'est que la firme se place justement en consommateur et tente d'innover et d'apporter quelque chose de frais. Un produit comme le Move serait-il donc amené à n'être qu'une chimère ? Le temps nous le dira. Il terminera cette longue interview (et retranscription partielle...) en évoquant le fait que Nintendo a effectivement un oeil, voire des yeux, attentif au développement du jeu social en ligne comme un FarmVille par exemple. Mais il rassure tout le monde en disant que les franchises majeures resteraient sur leurs supports de prédilection. Un point, c'est tout. Mes ouailles, si vous avez tenu la lecture jusqu'ici, vous avez ma gratitude éternelle. Ou pas. 

If I were to describe the attributes of a smartphone platform to you, could you guess which platform it is? Let’s try it and see. Here’s your first clue: Applications for it can only be installed through one specific app store. Since everyone has an app store these days, I’ll give you another hint. This phone family doesn’t support storage expansion through small memory cards. That should rule out a few contenders, but let’s take it one step further. The operating system doesn’t allow third-party applications to run in the background, but does allow notifications for these apps to make up for it. Think you know now? If you answered Apple’s iPhone, then you’re technically correct, but there’s a surprising answer that’s equally correct.

The phone I am talking about is not an iPhone, but the new Microsoft Windows Phone.

The very same Apple attributes are causing some iPhone critics to say “I hate it” are, as Sacha Segan of PC Magazine notes, the same attributes that Microsoft is embracing. On the one hand, it’s difficult to argue with Apple’s success. The total control of hardware and software allows the Cupertino company to offer a consistent end-user experience — something that can’t be said of Microsoft’s current Windows Mobile handsets. With Windows Phone 7 however, Microsoft is taking over the overall experience in a very Apple-like way. In order to illustrate the similarities between Apple’s iPhone and Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7 approaches let’s look a look at some key attributes among the current and planned smartphone platforms:

Only two platforms share the exact same set of attributes: Apple’s and Microsoft’s.

Some of these new Microsoft approaches are surprising. For example, software for Windows Mobile 7 devices can only be installed directly from a Microsoft-controlled marketplace. That marketplace opened only four months ago and it wasn’t an exclusive storefront – at launch time, Microsoft still allowed third-party developers and stores to operate on their own. Some of these e-tailers — Handango, PocketGear and others come to mind — are what helped Windows Mobile growth to begin with, so they can’t be happy about this. Sure they can still support Windows Mobile handsets, but the future is with Windows Phone 7. Colin over at GigaOM agrees, saying, “It’s a move that’s sure to destroy some of the developer goodwill Microsoft has worked so hard to build up in recent weeks.”

Microsoft is also implementing a third-party app multitasking ban and using a push notification system to mitigate the limitation. Critics and fans of Windows Mobile alike have railed against Apple for only allowing certain native apps to run in the background — one of the strengths of the current Microsoft platform, not to mention something that all other major mobile platforms support. It’s something I enjoy with my Google Nexus one — far more than I expected to after nearly three years of iPhone ownership. Kiss it goodbye if you’re planning to use the newest Microsoft phones when they arrive before year-end. Ironically, as smartphone hardware matures, it’s rumored that Apple’s next iPhone OS version will bring multitasking to the table. If Apple has figured out a method to efficiently manage memory and multiple tasks without unduly taxing a phone battery, will Microsoft follow suit again?

Windows Phone 7 reportedly won’t support memory card storage, either. If you buy a phone with 16 GB of memory and need more room, you’ll be forced to do what iPhone owners do — either remove certain files to make more space or upgrade to a device with greater capacity. This lack of a storage upgrade is a terrible limitation, on any smartphone. Consumers are buying more digital media and creating vast amounts of digital content. And as our smartphones become used more like pocketable computers, we should be able to expand them like we do with computers. It’s not an expensive or difficult process to purchase a higher capacity memory card and place it in a phone if the device supports memory expansion. The hardest part is moving your data from one memory card to another, but with the right tools, even that’s a simple process. I think Microsoft is throwing away a key advantage over the iPhone here and I hope it considers changing this policy before Windows Phone 7 devices arrive.

On the plus side, I do think Microsoft has taken a strong, middle-ground approach with hardware requirements. Microsoft previously announced that it will specify minimum hardware requirements for the three Windows Phone 7 chassis designs. So handset makers and carriers can customize or differentiate devices as they see fit, provided they build upon minimum specifications. That ensures a measurable standard in terms of phone performance and user experience. Apple takes it one step further by designing and dictating the hardware models. Since Microsoft doesn’t build any of the phones that run its operating system, it’s doing what it can to offer a positive experience while allowing for choice in design.

Although this it isn’t an alleged Zune Phone, the new Windows Phone 7 works with content from the Zune Marketplace. Songs, videos, podcasts and more are available for download and purchase from a centralized shop, just like Apple offers with iTunes. Both devices work with media standards like MP3s, but some store purchases could be tied to the device platform. Yes, the iTunes store went DRM-free for music, but what happens when you buy a movie? You’re only going to watch that movie on Apple hardware. Microsoft has an advantage here in that the Zune store is bit more open — but just barely. Content is playable across Microsoft’s mobile devices, Xbox 360 and PCs that run the Windows operating system.

All in all, I’ve been impressed by the Windows Phone 7 software demos and new user interface. It’s exactly what Microsoft needs to revive its flagging smartphone market share. Much of what I see brings the new platform to a level of parity with what’s already out there and the competitors are unlikely to stand still. So we’ll have to take stock of the mobile platforms again when the new Windows Phone 7 devices arrive to see how well Microsoft is or isn’t doing as compared to its peers. For now, it looks like the game of “catch-up” is on in a big way — and sometimes the best way to catch-up is to emulate the success of others.

Given these developments, I’m curious if Windows Mobile fans are turned off by the strategy. Do you see differences between the Microsoft and Apple approach? If you don’t like the closed Apple ecosystem, will you embrace a similar one offered by Microsoft? And might the more controlling and closed nature of both Apple and Microsoft move you towards a more open platform like Android?

Related research on GigaOM Pro (sub req’d):

• Is an iPhone- and Android-Only World the Best We Can Do?
• Could Games Redeem Windows Mobile and Palm’s webOS?
• Isn’t It Time Apple Allowed Others To Sell iPhone Apps?
• Company profile: Microsoft (free)
• Company profile: Apple (free)

Certains d'entre vous l'ont constaté. Depuis l'annonce de l'iPad, Apple semble être rentré dans une étrange léthargie:

• On attend depuis deux mois le renouvellement des portables.
• Bien qu'elle semble presque prête, la mise à jour 10.6.3 semble bloquée quelque part au stade bêta.
• On attend une mise à jour salvatrice des bornes Airport.
• Alors qu'Apple prenait un malin plaisir à lancer ses Mac Pro Xeon avant les annonces Intel, ces derniers sont arrivés, mais point de Mac Pro.

Nous aurions pu citer d'autres choses en attente, mais celles-ci suffisent. Elles ont toutes en commun une chose, devoir de près ou de loin nécessiter de l'ingénierie système. Nous avons la très nette impression que l'iPad, comme l'iPhone à une autre période a aspiré totalement le potentiel d'ingénieurs d'Apple qui seraient en train de mettre les dernières touches au produit et à son système avant son arrivée dans le commerce.
Il faut savoir que pour une société aussi innovante Apple n'a pas d'équipes pléthoriques à l'image d'un Microsoft. Ce sont des équipes restreintes qui naviguent en fonction des besoins de projets en projets. Nous savons qu'Apple s'évertue depuis pas mal de temps à les étoffer, mais il est très difficile de faire rentrer et de former des personnes dans de petites équipes très soudées avant de pouvoir les scinder, surtout lorsque l'on sait qu'il n'existe pas aujourd'hui de filières formant des ingénieurs spécifiquement pour Mac OS X.
Ce n'est qu'une supposition, mais nous avons la nette impression que l'iPad est devenu LE projet qu'Apple veut voir aboutir au détriment de tout le reste. Pour Apple ce n'est pas si grave, les affaires vont très bien et les Mac continuent à se vendre. En revanche, pour ceux qui attendent et pour qui l'iPad est... un gros iPod Touch, c'est plus désagréable. Mais bon, là encore ce n'est pas très grave pour Apple, ceux qui attendent font partie des clients captifs à la marque.
Vivement que la situation se débloque ! 

Certains d'entre vous l'ont constaté. Depuis l'annonce de l'iPad, Apple semble être rentré dans une étrange léthargie:

• On attend depuis deux mois le renouvellement des portables.
• Bien qu'elle semble presque prête, la mise à jour 10.6.3 semble bloquée quelque part au stade bêta.
• On attend une mise à jour salvatrice des bornes Airport.
• Alors qu'Apple prenait un malin plaisir à lancer ses Mac Pro Xeon avant les annonces Intel, ces derniers sont arrivés, mais point de Mac Pro.

Nous aurions pu citer d'autres choses en attente, mais celles-ci suffisent. Elles ont toutes en commun une chose, devoir de près ou de loin nécessiter de l'ingénierie système. Nous avons la très nette impression que l'iPad, comme l'iPhone à une autre période a aspiré totalement le potentiel d'ingénieurs d'Apple qui seraient en train de mettre les dernières touches au produit et à son système avant son arrivée dans le commerce.
Il faut savoir que pour une société aussi innovante Apple n'a pas d'équipes pléthoriques à l'image d'un Microsoft. Ce sont des équipes restreintes qui naviguent en fonction des besoins de projets en projets. Nous savons qu'Apple s'évertue depuis pas mal de temps à les étoffer, mais il est très difficile de faire rentrer et de former des personnes dans de petites équipes très soudées avant de pouvoir les scinder, surtout lorsque l'on sait qu'il n'existe pas aujourd'hui de filières formant des ingénieurs spécifiquement pour Mac OS X.
Ce n'est qu'une supposition, mais nous avons la nette impression que l'iPad est devenu LE projet qu'Apple veut voir aboutir au détriment de tout le reste. Pour Apple ce n'est pas si grave, les affaires vont très bien et les Mac continuent à se vendre. En revanche, pour ceux qui attendent et pour qui l'iPad est... un gros iPod Touch, c'est plus désagréable. Mais bon, là encore ce n'est pas très grave pour Apple, ceux qui attendent font partie des clients captifs à la marque.
Vivement que la situation se débloque ! 

Nothing like a late day ninja check-in. A trusted source has come through with a Verizon memo outlining an early upgrade program for those users looking to upgrade from a feature phone to a smartphone a bit early. Our source indicates this promotion is for Sam’s Club and Target kiosks and is only available in certain locations… but hey, an early upgrade is an early upgrade. The move is aimed to rope feature phone users into a more luxurious, and expensive, smartphone with the accompanying data plan, but that doesn’t mean those ready to upgrade can’t take advantage. Terms of the deal include:

• Available in Northern California Region, Central Texas, Upstate New York, and Ohio/Pennsylvania
• User can not already have a 3G smartphone
• User will not be eligible for another upgrade for 12 months
• Customers can’t already be eligible for a standard upgrade
• Can’t be combined with other offers
• $29.99+ data plan required
• New 2-year contract must be signed

Any takers? Larger image after the break.

A country's disease rates influence women's preference for masculine or feminine-looking faces, claim psychologists

Women who live in healthier countries prefer more feminine-looking men, compared with women living in regions where life-threatening diseases are rife, psychologists say. Their research suggests masculine men have the greatest appeal for women who live in areas where a strong genetic make-up is critical for survival.

A study of women in 30 countries found they were more likely to choose a masculine-looking partner if their country scored low on a health index based on World Health Organisation mortality figures. By contrast, in countries where people have a longer lifespan, women favoured more feminine-looking men, even though they might not have the healthiest genes available.

The research challenges the long-held belief that beauty is largely determined by culture.

"When women are choosing a mate, they're weighing up two different things. On the one hand a really attractive, high genetic quality mate will give them very healthy offspring. On the other, there is getting "investment" from a mate – one who'll be a good dad," said Lisa DeBruine, who led the study at Aberdeen University in the UK.

"Men who are really attractive tend to be able to pursue whatever mating strategy is best for them," she added. "They are more likely to prefer short-term relationships. More feminine men tend to be better providers."

DeBruine's team used a computer to create average male and female faces by merging photographs. The computer then used these to work out how the features of a masculine face differ from a feminine face. The most obvious differences are the larger jaws and deeper brows of more masculine men.

Next, DeBruine recruited 4,794 heterosexual Caucasian women from around the world to take part in the online experiment. Each of the women was asked to look at 20 pairs of male faces and indicate which was the more attractive of the two. In each case, one of the pair was digitally manipulated to make it 50% more feminine than the original, while the other in the pair was made 50% more masculine.

When DeBruine compared the women's answers with the health index score for their country, she saw a strong preference for more masculine faces in less healthy areas. Women in Mexico, one of the least healthy countries in the study, preferred masculinised faces 54% of the time, compared with only 32% of the time for women in Sweden, which is one of the healthiest countries in the world. In Britain, women preferred the more masculine faces 43% of the time.

The study is published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

"Certain environmental factors shift the balance when a woman is choosing a mate, and health is one of those. If a woman lives in an environment where there are lots of pathogens and disease, they are more likely to trade off a good investment in favour of better health for their children," DeBruine said. "In places where health is less of an issue, women are not so willing to do that."

• Psychology
• Reproduction
• Genetics
• Biology
• Evolution
• Medical research
• Health
• Health & wellbeing
• Relationships

Ian Sampleguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Alcatel présente aujourd'hui dans une vidéo toute sa nouvelle gamme 2010 de mobiles. Pas moins de 22 produits sont représentés dans cette vidéo ! Certains sont annoncés depuis plusieurs mois d'autres

Laser engraving is the practice of using laser to engrave or cut an object. A computer system is used to drive the movements of the laser head. Very precise and clean engravings can be achieved at a high rate. The technique does not involve toolbits which contact the engraving surface and wear out. This is considered an advantage over alternative engraving technologies where bit heads have to be replaced regularly.

This machine is suitable for advertisement, arts and crafts, garment, leather, toy, upholster, embroidery, packing and printing, paper product, tailoring, , shoemaking, furniture , model industry,and other industies,can be used to handle wood, bamboo, double-color planks,organic glass, crystal, plastic, garments, paper, leather, rubber, glass and other nonmetal materials.If you want to make sure if this laser engraver can engrave or cut a certain item, welcome to send us a sample and we will test it for you.

Main features:

* Electric rise-down platform: Max thickness of material to reach 11.8"(300mm),with a funnel to 3.9"(100mm)
* Built-in cooling systerm with temperature display: This machine will give alarm signal until user add enough water and contrl board shows actual water temperature; if coolen water is not circulatory, this machine will also give alarm signal to protect laser tube
* Air pum: blow away the waste and coolen proceed material surface
* With a big funnel to collect smog
* Red pot point of position: realize simulation engraving,fast find the position without laser
*Adopt high accuracy stepping belt which makes the engraving more precise
* The reinforced and thickened machine body make transportation safer


Specification:

* Engraving area:24"X35"( 600 x900mm )
* External dimension : 56"X39"X37"(1430x990x935mm)
*Laser power: 60w
* Engraving speed: 0-39"/s(0 - 1,000mm/s)
# Gross power: