In the gaming world, there are many options to choose from when it comes to the platform the sport is becoming performed on. There are Pc video games, and there are console games. The difference lies within the way in which the sport is played.
Gaming is literally a lifestyle option so each person prefers a slightly various method when it comes to the way they perform a game. Some like pc video games, simply because computer systems permit them to personalize the way they perform the game together with certain tweaks in visible details and controls.
Consoles don?t demand which you make this kind of tweaks, since they are constructed with only games in thoughts. So whenever a game comes out and it is destined for PlayStation, then, if you personal this kind of a console, you?re certain you are able to play that sport.
But whenever a sport comes out and it?s produced for PCs, you then need to verify on exactly what the system requirements that sport has in order to be performed properly. Because video games depend seriously on the specs, or components from the ?console? they?re operate, for Pc users this could imply there?s a constant struggle to stay forward from the gaming developer world and construct or buy the ultimate gaming computer.
In particular cases, it is a great deal simpler to escape this struggle by purchasing a console rather than needing to worry in case your system meets the necessary minimum components to be able to run a sport.
The downside to consoles is, in my view, the insufficient accuracy in movements and manage. For instance, in the event you were to play a shooter sport or FPS for short, it would be truly hard to aim in the opponents using a game pad.
On the other hand, when using a pc, it?s really simple to aim using your mouse in the opponents since you can fine tune the mouse sensitivity and really get the mouse to work at what speed you require.
Some peripherals allow you to modify that sensitivity correct within the gaming atmosphere and those are known as gaming peripherals. They are built only with PCs in thoughts.
Consoles however have created in recent years to create a more participating environment for your participant.
We have observed a great deal of latest advancements in this area in the Wii remote, allowing you to bodily ?swing? a golfing club, or within the Kinect globe, really detecting the body movements to interact within the gaming world. This implies that a console user might obtain a bit much more physical exercise than the usual regular Computer gamer.
Also, there are certain video games which might not work on consoles, like technique video games. These video games rely seriously on the utilization of a computer mouse for device choice and issuing commands.
There are a lot of benefits to Computer gaming in addition to console gaming, and you will find particular video games that can be performed on both platforms, with out the potential for moving from one kind towards the other. It?s a make a difference of level of engagement or immersion that every gamer demands that he get from the sport itself.
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Facebook?s initial public offering has all the hallmarks of becoming a milestone in financial history. Depending on current estimates, it could well become the technology IPO of the decade.
In its eight years of existence, the company founded in a Harvard dormitory room by Mark Zuckerberg has managed to connect people virtually in a way no one had thought was possible. Facebook has been associated with revolutions: the events that led to Hosni Mubarak?s fall started in Egypt with a Facebook page by Wael Ghonim. And it was used successfully by US President Barack Obama?s campaign to get him elected in 2008. Four years later, both President Obama and his opponent Mitt Romney now run important parts of their campaigns on Facebook.
Estimates say that Americans spend, on average, up to 20 per cent of their online time on Facebook. Some 300m photos and videos are uploaded onto it daily. With such a wealth of data waiting to be mined, advertisers and marketers have become some of the most ardent fans of Facebook, for it allows them to reach audiences, understand trends and changing customer needs. It also allows them to customise offerings on an unprecedented scale.
Imagine the power of social networks once they will be part of daily business and not mainly being used by consumers only. In spite of Facebook?s remarkable success so far, the truth is that we have thus far witnessed just the earliest beginnings of social networking?s power to fuel the real economy. Social networking will revolutionise business interactions, just as the Internet revolutionised retailing more than a decade ago. And the result will be a game-changing surge in innovation and productivity and a big leap forward in job creation and new growth opportunities.
Consider for a moment what social networks do: they bring together the traditional features of a person?s personal life ? friends, family, events, memories, conversations, fun and games ? and centralises them in a convenient dashboard that enables us to interact with anyone we know, at any time, from almost anywhere on the planet. The efficiency of these tools allows people to maintain broader networks of friends with less time and effort than was ever before possible.
Today, many of us have adjusted our social lives to make the best use of the online networking tools that have been made available to us. Businesses will soon undergo that same process. And the inevitable result will be more business.
A fully networked business environment means better access to customer profiles and preferences, resulting in a stronger ability to deliver individualised products that consumers want. Broader knowledge of health data and energy consumption patterns will lead directly to more efficient use of scarce resources. Direct access to all of the suppliers in a product category will lead to stronger supply chain and supplier relationship management. That in turn will result in more competitive pricing, greater flexibility and less capital tied up in inventory.
When data generated at the level of an individual ? whether they are shopping preferences, energy consumption patterns, social relationships or health data ? can be captured and analysed along with other relevant datasets in real-time, existing value chains are turned on their head. It benefits the consumer, because the consumer gets more directed, more personal, more economical offerings.
On an everyday basis, we envision an intelligent network of businesses ? what I like to call the ?Intelligent Business Web?. The Intelligent Business Web will be most important to small and medium sized businesses because it allows them to tap into the collective knowledge of their cohorts. These businesses are very important to the health of economies, particularly in challenging economic times. Studies have shown that time and again, they are the ones that are responsible for creating jobs coming out of recessions.
Like Facebook?s social networking the key value of the business web will be the network effect for all businesses. It will allow them to increase the speed of innovation and productivity like never before. With the Intelligent Business Web boundaries between individual businesses and even entire industries as we know them today will blur.
Telecom providers could offer banking products on SIM-cards and automotive companies could offer financing and insurance or even rental cars. But the telecom provider does not have to become a bank ? they can consume the service from a bank through the business web. Manufacturing companies can manufacture products for many different companies ? like we see in high tech and automotive already today. They do this by forming networks that combine various services and capabilities from different companies.
Secondly the business web will offer real-time intelligence like never before. We have been working with a large distribution company in China to help them optimise their ocean transportation. In a world of increasing oil prices and new objectives like reduction of carbon dioxide emission, this company wanted to connect the demand, the ships, the oil prices and the CO2 emissions to optimise their logistics business. Today we can optimise entire value chains for minimum cost and consumption of scarce resources and in the future this will be common.
The latest generation of sales tools for businesses, such as SAP?s Sales OnDemand, and new environments for collaborative decision making, such as SAP StreamWork already make use of social networking. Our customer relationship management software offerings already monitor online sentiment. Similar business applications will soon be everywhere, changing the way business is conducted on every continent and in every industry.
The business networks of the future will be not just comprehensive, but mobile, reaching out to all of the world?s six billion mobile devices. Mobile has become an integral part of our lives, and is rapidly transforming the way we work. The marriage of mobile technology and social networking will only hasten further change in business.
The world will not get more productive because we can watch videos on Facebook, chat with friends and family or upload personal content ? but if we leverage social networking for business processes and real-time information flow, we can change the world.
The Arab Spring was an example of the latter. I believe that the excitement over Facebook is a harbinger of the evolution we will see in business becoming social and traditional value chains becoming social value networks. The impact of these changes will extend well beyond Facebook?s remarkable achievements. And in the very near future they will generate innovation, growth and jobs on an unprecedented scale.
Jim Hagemann Snabe is co-CEO of business software maker SAP
Getting news from the Internet not as divisive as many assumePublic release date: 15-May-2012 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: Craig Chamberlain cdchambe@illinois.edu 217-333-2894 University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
CHAMPAIGN, Ill. The Internet is changing the way people get their news, but there's little proof that it is fragmenting or polarizing the news audience the way many assume, says professor David Tewksbury, the head of the University of Illinois department of communication.
"Many things that we thought were going to be really horrible have not yet happened," Tewksbury said.
Five years ago he was very worried. He feared the wide-open choice the Internet provided would encourage people to put on "intellectual blinders."
They would personalize their news habits and pay attention only to what they cared about, ignoring other news, especially about government and public affairs, he thought. They would be shaped by highly segmented and opinionated news sources.
But that was before he reviewed the research to co-write "News on the Internet: Information and Citizenship in the 21st Century," with former Illinois doctoral student Jason Rittenberg. The book was published recently by Oxford University Press.
The research does suggest that maybe half of online news consumers are very selective in what they follow, with more than half of those focused on sports, Tewksbury said. But the other half are seeking out a broad cross-section of news, which is better than what he and other researchers believed and feared, and in keeping with how people read newspapers.
"We don't have a lot of evidence that public affairs knowledge is going down because of audience fragmentation," Tewksbury said. "Many people know quite a bit about what's going on. They are attending to news in a relatively uniform fashion. It's not as if everyone has suddenly become more ignorant than they used to be."
Many previous books have looked at how online journalism gets done, and others at how audiences consume online news, Tewksbury said, but he and Rittenberg tried to bring the two together and look at the larger picture.
"We're trying to cover a large territory with this book," Tewksbury said. "We integrate huge areas of research, where we're trying to talk about content and audiences and how they fit together."
The book also plays out a tension between the co-authors' perspectives, Tewksbury said. Rittenberg, in his late 20s, was focused more on the possibilities of the technology, including its benefits for democracy. Tewksbury, in his late 40s, was more concerned with how people interact with the technology. He was worried about factors that might be segmenting, fragmenting and polarizing the news audience and society.
One of his goals in the book, in fact, was trying to describe how those factors and trends might interact, Tewksbury said.
Most researchers "are taking just a bite out of what is really a big picture," rather than "nailing down all the parts of that picture," he said. They are jumping to conclusions, for instance, about how news preferences connect with or influence news consumers' views (that is, people who watch Fox News will believe A, and those who watch CNN will believe B).
Tewksbury instead sees it as a process. "We can talk about fragmentation and polarization as being sort of steps," he said.
"If you attend to a particular kind of content in a consistent fashion, you'll learn different facts than others in that consistent fashion, and you'll form opinions that are based on that difference in the facts," he said.
The problem in connecting the dots, however, is that it's usually not that clean and straightforward, Tewksbury said.
"The biggest problem here is that people choose, and the Internet is an environment that lets people choose, actively and all the time," he said. That makes determining how people might be polarized by their news choices a tough assignment.
Someone can watch a partisan news source and have opinions that match with its news, he said, "but we really have a hard time pinning down which came first. That is exactly where future research needs to go."
###
Tewksbury talks about his research interests in this
five-minute video biography: http://www.communication.illinois.edu/video/?destinationID=jaRYIE6ncUSyNPHSzc8G5g&contentID=18WhFQqyNkWiE7HHv7CzdQ
[ | E-mail | Share ]
?
AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
Getting news from the Internet not as divisive as many assumePublic release date: 15-May-2012 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: Craig Chamberlain cdchambe@illinois.edu 217-333-2894 University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
CHAMPAIGN, Ill. The Internet is changing the way people get their news, but there's little proof that it is fragmenting or polarizing the news audience the way many assume, says professor David Tewksbury, the head of the University of Illinois department of communication.
"Many things that we thought were going to be really horrible have not yet happened," Tewksbury said.
Five years ago he was very worried. He feared the wide-open choice the Internet provided would encourage people to put on "intellectual blinders."
They would personalize their news habits and pay attention only to what they cared about, ignoring other news, especially about government and public affairs, he thought. They would be shaped by highly segmented and opinionated news sources.
But that was before he reviewed the research to co-write "News on the Internet: Information and Citizenship in the 21st Century," with former Illinois doctoral student Jason Rittenberg. The book was published recently by Oxford University Press.
The research does suggest that maybe half of online news consumers are very selective in what they follow, with more than half of those focused on sports, Tewksbury said. But the other half are seeking out a broad cross-section of news, which is better than what he and other researchers believed and feared, and in keeping with how people read newspapers.
"We don't have a lot of evidence that public affairs knowledge is going down because of audience fragmentation," Tewksbury said. "Many people know quite a bit about what's going on. They are attending to news in a relatively uniform fashion. It's not as if everyone has suddenly become more ignorant than they used to be."
Many previous books have looked at how online journalism gets done, and others at how audiences consume online news, Tewksbury said, but he and Rittenberg tried to bring the two together and look at the larger picture.
"We're trying to cover a large territory with this book," Tewksbury said. "We integrate huge areas of research, where we're trying to talk about content and audiences and how they fit together."
The book also plays out a tension between the co-authors' perspectives, Tewksbury said. Rittenberg, in his late 20s, was focused more on the possibilities of the technology, including its benefits for democracy. Tewksbury, in his late 40s, was more concerned with how people interact with the technology. He was worried about factors that might be segmenting, fragmenting and polarizing the news audience and society.
One of his goals in the book, in fact, was trying to describe how those factors and trends might interact, Tewksbury said.
Most researchers "are taking just a bite out of what is really a big picture," rather than "nailing down all the parts of that picture," he said. They are jumping to conclusions, for instance, about how news preferences connect with or influence news consumers' views (that is, people who watch Fox News will believe A, and those who watch CNN will believe B).
Tewksbury instead sees it as a process. "We can talk about fragmentation and polarization as being sort of steps," he said.
"If you attend to a particular kind of content in a consistent fashion, you'll learn different facts than others in that consistent fashion, and you'll form opinions that are based on that difference in the facts," he said.
The problem in connecting the dots, however, is that it's usually not that clean and straightforward, Tewksbury said.
"The biggest problem here is that people choose, and the Internet is an environment that lets people choose, actively and all the time," he said. That makes determining how people might be polarized by their news choices a tough assignment.
Someone can watch a partisan news source and have opinions that match with its news, he said, "but we really have a hard time pinning down which came first. That is exactly where future research needs to go."
###
Tewksbury talks about his research interests in this
five-minute video biography: http://www.communication.illinois.edu/video/?destinationID=jaRYIE6ncUSyNPHSzc8G5g&contentID=18WhFQqyNkWiE7HHv7CzdQ
[ | E-mail | Share ]
?
AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
Voting in the final round begins now, and the winner will be announced Monday. By Christina Garibaldi
Joe Jonas and Westlife's Shane Filan Photo: Getty Images
After nearly two weeks, some shocking eliminations and more than 10 million votes, MTV's Battle of the Boy Bands has gone from a field of 32 down to the final two. And the matchup will be a face-off between old and new. Irish boy band and international favorites Westlife will square off against the Jonas Brothers in the championship.
Voting in the final round begins now and will continue until Monday, May 7, at noon ET, and the winner will be announced shortly after.
Keep in mind that during the championship match-up, the results will be kept secret until we crown a winner.
It's been a long, hard-fought battle for both of these bands to make it to the championship. Westlife came into this competition as a true underdog. The guys, who had minor success in the United States with their 1999 single "Swear It Again," are calling it quits after 14 years once they complete their upcoming farewell tour.
Early in this battle, Westlife stunned voters when they took down fan favorites in the first round. Their fans didn't let up after that, easily making it past MTV's own O-Town, garnering 85 percent of the votes. In what we thought would be a tough match-up for Westlife in the Elite Eight, the group eliminated their own ultimate boy band, the Beatles, whom they marched past to get to the Final Four, where they beat out .
So after 14 years, will Westlife finally get the success that they have wanted in the U.S. with a Battle of the Boy Bands win?
Well, they still have one more opponent to take down, the Jonas Brothers. The JoBros, who haven't made an album together since 2009, have certainly made their presence known in this competition. They easily made it past Menudo in the first round, but barely got by the other brother band, Hanson, in round two. In the Elite Eight, the Jonas Brothers coasted by British boy band 5ive, but in the Final Four they barely edged out Mindless Behavior, who made a late comeback.
Clearly, both fanbases have proven that they are determined to get their favorite bands crowned victor, so don't stop voting now!
Voting in the Championship Round of MTV's Battle of the Boy Bands runs until noon ET on Monday, May 7. Winners are determined by fan votes, so if your favorite band made the cut, make sure you keep voting. Tune in to AMTV and MTV Hits for their boy-band video takeovers each day and make sure to spread the word on Twitter using the hashtag #BBB and like us on Facebook for updates! We will reveal our winner on Monday, May 7.
Comcast already reported its Q1 results earlier today but on the earnings call CEO of the cable division Neil Smit revealed its next generation X1 cloud DVRs (previously called Xcalibur and promised for a wide rollout to "hundreds of thousands" of customers this year) will launch in a major market in the second quarter. Light Reading cites sources indicating field testing is already under way in Boston and that it could launch in May which fits all too well because The Cable Show will take place there May 21st. In case you've forgotten, the quad-tuner X1 DVRs have an all new UI with support for third party apps and social media tie-ins, and will reportedly precede the company's eventual push towards IP video. While that's the rumor, what we do know is that TiVo has completed the rollout of Comcast video on-demand support to Premiere DVRs in the Bay Area, and also let us know that Boston, coincidentally, will be next. Customers in other areas can sign up on TiVo's site at the link below for notifications when the feature goes live in their neck of the woods.
[unable to retrieve full-text content]A video of Al Armendariz saying he sought to ?crucify? companies breaking regulations as a deterrent to others had been circulated by Republican foes of President Obama?s environmental policy.
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Public release date: 15-May-2012
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