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$25 Raspberry Pi PC Ramping Up For Launch
Cheating Spreads Like Flu Among Gamers With Cheater Friends
People More Likely To Lie In Text Messaging Than In Face-to-Face Contact: Study
Why Hasn't Safari's Market Share Skyrocketed Like Chrome's Has?
Dolly Drive Launches Family Plan for Online Mac Backup in Time for Holidays
$25 Raspberry Pi PC Ramping Up For Launch
The BBC reports that the U.K. developed Raspberry Pi home computer is about to go into production - a $25 (Ł16) machine that its developers hope will inspire a new generation of young people to start careers in technology.
The report says Pi uses a mobile phone type ARM CPU chip and is intended to run a version of the Linux OS, with early examples of finished devices undergoing electrical, software and hardware testing, and volume production hoped to start in January.
The BBC says Raspberry Pi will ship in two configurations; the base Model A for $25 (Ł16) sans network connector and a Model B for $35 (Ł22) equipped with an Ethernet socket.
For the full report visit here:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-16316439
Cheating Spreads Like Flu Among Gamers With Cheater Friends
If you have friends who cheat, you're more likely to become a cheater yourself, according to computer scientists at the University of South Florida in Tampa in a paper entitled "Cheaters in the Steam Community Gaming Social Network," published by the Cornell University Library, who studied a social network of about 12 million gamers on the Steam Community, some 700,000 of whom have their profiles flagged as cheaters.
Also collected were in-game interaction data of over 10 thousand players from a popular multiplayer gaming server, and the research shows that cheaters are well embedded in the social and interaction networks, their network position largely undistinguishable from that of fair players, and that the researchers discovered that cheating behavior appears to spread through a social mechanism, with the presence and the number of cheater friends of a fair player correlating with likelihood of him orher becoming a cheater in the future.
They also observe that there is a social penalty involved with being labeled as a cheater: cheaters are likely to switch to more restrictive privacy settings once they are tagged and they lose more friends than fair players. Finally, they observe that the number of cheaters is not correlated with the geographical, real-world population density, or with the local popularity of the Steam Community.
The researchers note that online gaming is a multi-billion dollar industry that entertains a large, global population, but cheating poisons the competition and the fun - the costs of which include industry-supported expenditures to detect and limit cheating and victims' monetary losses due to cyber-crime.
For more information, visit:
http://arxiv.org/abs/1112.4915
People More Likely To Lie In Text Messaging Than In Face-to-Face Contact: Study
The Canadian Press's Tamsyn Burgmann reports that a newly-released study by University of British Columbia researchers examined how technology impacts moral behaviour notes that while technology-mediated communication tools are convenient, time-saving, and efficient, but have negative edge to them, according to study co-author Associate Prof. Ronald Cenfetelli, who is quoted observing that the more anonymous you perceive yourself to be, the less aware you are of your own self (and) the more likely it is you will engage in some kind of deceitful behaviour
The study, conducted by the Sauder School of Business and Wichita State University, will be published in the March edition of the Journal of Business Ethics.
For the full report visit here:
http://tinyurl.com/6lvmgzm
Why Hasn't Safari's Market Share Skyrocketed Like Chrome's Has?
TechCrunch's MG Siegler notes that a lot of talk about Web browsers recently got him thinking about Apple's Safari, noting that while Chrome skyrocketed from 0 percent market share in August 2008 to over 25 percent last month, Apple's Web browser languishes at somewhere between 5 and 8 percent, its growth having seemed to stall out in late 2008/early 2009.
Siegler wonders why, given the fact that both browsers are based Apple's WebKit layout engine, that Safari hasn't taken off the way Chrome has.
Based on personal use, your editor's short answer is that the Chrome experience is more pleasurable and efficient than using Safari, notwithstanding Safari's commendable Reader feature and tight integration with OS X. In fact that integration is part of what makes the Safari user experience cumbersome. Chrome updates automatically and frequently in the background. Safari makes you jump through more hoops. Another Chrome feature I love is its automatic, reference to Google Translate on non-English language sites. It's also speedy, stable and epitomizes "just works."
For MG Siegler's full commentary, visit:
http://tcrn.ch/uIEAhx
Dolly Drive Launches Family Plan for Online Mac Backup in Time for Holidays
With the growth of multi-Mac households, Dolly Drive, online backup for Apple's Time Machine, has released a new Family Plan in time for the Holidays that lets families or people with multiple Macs backup online or expand their storage on a single account. The company also announced an upgrade of the inclusion assistant which significantly simplifies the initial backup process. The company will showcase these and other new features this January at the Consumer Electronics Show and MacWorld Expo.
Cirrus Thinking, makers of the Dolly Drive cloud storage for Mac, has unveiled a new family plan that enables multiple Macs to backup online via one paid account.The free admin capability will make it more affordable and easier for multi-Mac users and multi-Mac families to extend Dolly Drives storage services across multiple Macs in a household. Analysts are predicting upwards of 5 million new Mac sales this quarter with many expected to be the second, third and even fourth Mac in a family.
Family plans give people affordable insurance that the digital life on all of their Macs is safe, backed up, and available from the cloud, said Anthony Palermo, CEO of Dolly Drive. Whether its parents making sure their kids are backed up, or multi-Mac owners consolidating their backup efforts, Dolly Drive now lets every household personalize their cloud to match their needs.
Dolly Drive has also introduced a revamped inclusion assistant that automatically selects the folders that are most essential for backup and easily and accurately estimates how much space it will require. Users can add or subtract additional folders as desired.
Dolly Drive is an all-in-one subscription software and online storage service designed for Mac. In addition to providing Mac users offsite cloud storage directly through Apples Time Machine application, and online storage to expand hard drive space, the application allows users to create a bootable clone of their Mac on an external hard drive for local disaster recovery. It works with Apples Lion and Snow Leopard platforms. See more at http://www.dollydrive.com , or this January at CES and MacWorld.
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