The World Health Organization is on the verge of officially recognizing a phenomenon that researchers have been studying since the Super Nintendo era: video game addiction. Scientists and public health advocates who back the move say that compulsive video-game playing is a discrete disorder that can seriously damage a…
Source: Gizmodo – Is Video Game Addiction Unscientific Bullshit?
An anonymous reader shares a report: The South Carolina lottery game is called Holiday Cash Add-A-Play, and the rules are pretty simple: Get three Christmas tree symbols in any vertical, horizontal or diagonal line, and you win a prize. Monday was Christmas, and some folks in the Palmetto State were feeling jolly. “I don’t play the lottery that much,” Nicole Coggins of Liberty, S.C., told local NBC affiliate WYFF. “Every once in a while, I’ll buy a Powerball ticket, but something told me to buy a lottery ticket.” She paid an extra dollar to add a play. The ticket was a winner, and she was excited. The station says that as word got out about the sudden proliferation of winning tickets, a frenzy ensued. One store manager told WYFF that “it was crazy” as people hurried to buy the tickets. But the Christmas miracle was too good to be true. The South Carolina Education Lottery says a programming error in its computer system vendor is to blame for so many winning tickets. “From 5:51 p.m. to 7:53 p.m., the same play symbol was repeated in all nine available play areas on tickets which would result in a top prize of $500,” the lottery said in a statement Wednesday. “No more than five identical play symbols should appear for a single play. As soon as the issue was identified, the Add-A-Play game was suspended immediately to conduct a thorough investigation.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot – A Glitch Stole Christmas: S.C. Lottery Says Error Caused Winning Tickets
If you’ve been putting off replacing your wiper blades for far too long, Amazon’s throwing in a $5 credit when you purchase any two Rain-X Latitude blades, from now until the New Year. Just note that the credit is towards your next Amazon purchase, it’s not a discount on the blades themselves. You’ll also need to be…
Source: LifeHacker – Buy Two Wiper Blades, Get a Amazon Credit
Three weeks ago, Yukai Engineering wrapped up a successful Kickstarter campaign in which it raised approximately $110,000 for the Qoobo, which is a pillow with a robotic cat tail that responds to physical interaction with the user. Now, interested bu…
Source: Engadget – The cat pillow you’ve always wanted is now available for pre-order
This is a video of some young BMX’r attempting a pool to over-the-fence front flip when he comes up a little short and somehow manages to land with both legs between fence posts instead of an extra butthole. Lucky. Also, after seeing this there’s no way this kid’s mom is ever letting him ride a bike again.
Keep going for the whole video, complete with double “OOOH MYYY GOSH” from the cameraman.
Source: Geekologie – Risky BMX Trick Ends With Luckiest Landing Ever
Online dating service OkCupid made two big changes to their platform recently, one of which involving usernames. In short, you can no longer hide behind AIM-like screen names akin to “HoneyBabe37" or “StudddMuffin96.” That’s right, they want real names now. Fortunately, there’s a simple way to still maintain your…
Source: LifeHacker – How to Get Around OkCupid’s Stupid New ‘Real Name’ Policy
Eddie Bauer makes great stuff all year ‘round, but their wares really shine in the winter, and you can stock up on coats, pants, boots, and pretty much everything else from their semi-annual sale, including a rare deal on the iconic Downlight Stormdown jacket for men and women, which can keep you warm in temperatures…
Source: LifeHacker – Eddie Bauer’s Semi-Annual Sale Is Overflowing With Winter Wear
A New York Times report out Friday identifies more than 250 mobile games in Android’s Play Store that use always-on audio recognition software to track users’ TV- and ad-viewing behavior. Experts cited in the report also say the software’s developer, a startup called Alphonso, does not clearly describe how the games,…
Source: Gizmodo – Hundreds of Creepy Mobile Games Can Use Your Mic to Track What You Watch on TV
I’m pretty sure I could spend every day of the next three months in long johns, and with this 30% off Amazon coupon, I could probably afford to. Choose from multiple sizes and colors, all for about $8 at checkout.
Source: Gizmodo – Bundle Up All Winter With Long Johns From Amazon
That innocent-looking mobile game you just downloaded might just have an ulterior motive. Behind the scenes, hundreds of different apps could be using your smartphone’s microphone to figure out what you watch on TV, a new report from The New York Times reveals. Here’s what you need to know about these eavesdropping…
Source: LifeHacker – How to Stop Apps From Listening in on Your TV Habits
From magical mushrooms to carbonated coffee, these tastes will be in your mouth before long.
Source: TreeHugger – 10 food trends you’re going to see in 2018
I have good news for all of you Kodi fans that own an Xbox One. Kodi is now available worldwide on the Windows and Xbox Store. If you’ve been wanting to cut down on the number of devices connected to your TV this might be the app that does it for you. Try it out and let us know how it’s working.
What you should really understand and keep remembering is that it is still in early stages of development and has very rough edges, might not be as stable as the regular version and may even be missing some functions. Due to the nature of how UWP works our hands are tied in some areas. Some parts are not even finished yet and our developers are still working on getting it up to the regular standard.
Discussion
Source: [H]ardOCP – Kodi Now Avaiable for the Xbox One
It appears that over 100K users have downloaded a Chrome extension call Archive Poster and is mining Monero whenever the browser is open. It seems like everyday there’s a new cryptoming malware release and all the browsers are being hijacked one way of the other. Also, this thing has been reported to Google for weeks and it’s still available for download on the Chrome Web Store. At this time it’s not known if it’s an intentional addition to the extension or not.
Google doesn’t seem to care, allowing the extension to continue to be available on the official Chrome Web Store. A user even reported Archive Poster on the Google Chrome Help Forum, but a Google staffer told the user “to get in touch with the extension developer for further assistance.”
Discussion
Source: [H]ardOCP – Chrome Extension Pushing Out Cryptominer
An anonymous reader shares a report Apple opened its new flagship retail store in Chicago earlier this year to much acclaim, but as the weather turns from fall to winter, a design oversight is causing some problems. As reported by Chicago blog Spundart, Apple seemingly didn’t design the MacBook Air-like roof of the store to account for snow… in Chicago. Apple’s newest Chicago store garnered earlier attention for its roof design that mimics a MacBook Air, but one clear oversight is that there are no gutters to catch snow or ice. Furthermore, as the multi-level store sits along the Chicago River, the roof is sloped downward, meaning that anyone standing on the walkway along the river gets hit with falling snow and ice. Further reading: Apple is really bad at design.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot – Apple’s MacBook Air-like Store Roof Wasn’t Designed To Handle Snow… in Chicago
Bloodborne might be a couple of years old now, but that doesn’t mean it’s unveiled all of its secrets. Its chalice dungeons give players countless areas to explore and enemies to fight. Now, a group of data miners have found unused bosses, along with…
Source: Engadget – ‘Bloodborne’ is still hiding boss battles almost three years later
Seagate introduced its new Multi-Actuator Technology (MAT) for hard drives earlier this month. It promises to increase hard drive performance by using two or more sets of actuator arms that operate independently from a single pivot point. Seagate claims that next-gen HDDs will require higher performance to effectively take advantage of their increased capacities. It plans to use MAT in their datacenter hard drives going into pilot production in 2018.
To improve the performance of next-generation hard drives, Seagate proposes to install not one, but two (or more) sets of actuators into a single HDD. The actuators are to be equipped with their own arms/heads as well as magnets to position them, but will use one pivot. As a result, the actuators will be able to act completely independently, essentially creating parallelism within a single hard drive. With an architecture like this, IOPS performance will scale with the number of actuators. Aggregate read/write performance of hard drives will also increase, but since it will depend on many factors, it is too early to make predictions regarding throughput of next-gen HDDs. The additional components required for two independent actuator assemblies (and a considerably more sophisticated HDD controller) will make such hard drives more expensive to build when compared to today’s models. This could be one of the reasons why Seagate plans to use its Multi-Actuator Technology only for hard drives designed for datacentres, where hardware costs are not as crucial as performance and features.
The first-generation MAT-enabled HDDs are to use two actuators operating on a single pivot point (along with 8 platters and 16 heads), but going forward the number of actuators may grow. Seagate says that the host computer can “treat a single Dual Actuator drive as if it were two separate drives”, but stresses that logically the HDD will remain a single device with two access streams for communication, just like dual-port SAS drives do. Meanwhile, Dual Actuator HDDs will be able to use not only SAS, but also NVMe and SATA interfaces. In the best-case scenario, a hard drive with two actuators can double the random read/write performance and almost double the sequential read/write performance compared to today’s hard drives. The sequential access case is a bit tricky, since the cylinder height gets halved with two actuators, and a lot depends on how the addresses are translated to the actual physical sectors.
The arrival of new magnetic recording technologies in the coming years will significantly increase capacities of hard drives for cloud/exascale datacenters to over 20 TB by 2020 and to 40 TB within the next five or seven years. The upcoming HDDs will increase their sequential read/write performance along with the increase of their areal densities, but when it comes to latencies and random read and write operations, things get more complicated. The current HDD architecture uses a single actuator that synchronously moves all the arms with read-write heads over the media together for reading and writing data. With such an architecture, the platters can only work on one request at a time. Meanwhile, the more data an HDD stores, the more requests it gets and the more time it spends seeking the right track/sector. If/when fulfilling a request takes too long, quality of service (a metric dear to datacenter operators) suffers. Today, the performance bottleneck is solved by using either NAND flash or multiple hard drives in parallel, effectively combining their performance for certain access traces. At some point, this approach may become inefficient due to power/complexity and other factors. Therefore, it is imperative that HDDs get faster in order to cope with tomorrow’s workloads.
Seagate says that the Multi-Actuator Technology is to be deployed on products in the near future, but does not disclose when exactly. As the company’s blog post on the matter mentions both MAT and HAMR, it is highly likely that commercial hard drives featuring HAMR due in late 2019 will also have two actuators on a single pivot. At the same time, it does not mean that the MAT is not going to find itself a place in products using conventional PMR.
Source: AnandTech – Seagate’s Multi Actuator Technology to Address HDD IOPS Woes
Anticipating some overindulgence this New Year’s Eve? Plan ahead: There’s a clever new anti-hangover vitamin supplement called Over EZ. It’s designed to help take some of the sting out of the morning after when you’ve done too much drinking the night before. Granted, Over EZ won’t stop you from getting drunk, feeling…
Source: LifeHacker – Don’t Drop the Ball: Hangover-Proof Your New Year’s Eve
New Year’s Eve is the time for indulgent, booze-based frivolity, and nothing is quite so extra as doling out little bottles of spirits, frozen in a cube of ice fit for a Collins glass. It’s a very “bottle service” party trick, and it’s not that difficult to execute.
Source: LifeHacker – Freeze Mini Liquor Bottles in Blocks of Ice for Fancy Party Favors
When I was in grade school, the only reason I took band class was to avoid spending two hours in study hall every week. My motivations would have been completely different, however, were I raised in South Korea where fourth graders get to perform Daft Punk tracks instead of Sousa’s greatest hits.
Source: Gizmodo – Fourth Grade Band Class Is Way Better With Vocoders, Drum Machines, and Daft Punk
We’ve been hearing for a while that people just aren’t going to the movies as much as they used to. For some, the reasons are obvious: It’s almost prohibitively expensive in some cities, and when your only options are the latest superhero flick or a slightly older superhero flick, there’s not a ton of appeal for a lot…
Source: LifeHacker – Here’s What Would Make Going to the Movies Worth the Money