Source: http://www.linesandcolors.com/2010/12/27/jake-baddeley/
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Donnerstag, 30. Dezember 2010
Microsoft Buys Maker of ?Fable? Xbox Game
CIO ?
Microsoft has acquired U.K. gaming company Lionhead Studios for an undisclosed amount, ensuring some exclusive content for its Xbox console from the company that designed the popular "Fable" games.
The move may also bring respected game developer Peter Molyneux, Lionhead?s managing director, into Microsoft?s fold. He?s credited with pioneering the so-called "god games" genre with games such as "Populous" and "Black & White," wide-scale fantasy games in which the gamer is lord of all around him.
The acquisition was made by Microsoft Game Studios, its game production group. Financial terms were not disclosed.
Lionhead will now make content exclusively for the Xbox and for Microsoft Windows, Microsoft said. Lionhead?s best efforts for the Xbox so far have been "Fable" and "Fable: The Lost Chapters," which together have sold more than 2 million copies, making "Fable" the best-selling role-playing franchise on the Xbox platform, according to Microsoft.
Microsoft didn?t say what role Molyneux might play in its games group or what projects the Lionhead team would work on next.
Lionhead is one of several game producers Microsoft has acquired to strengthen its Xbox business against rivals Sony Computer Entertainment and Nintendo. Others included the United Kingdom?s Rare, producer of "Donkey Kong 64" and "Golden Eye," which it bought in 2002 for US$375 million.
-James Niccolai, IDG News Service
This article is posted on our Microsoft Informer page. For more news on the Redmond, Wash.-based powerhouse, keep checking in.
Also, have a listen to CIO Publisher Gary Beach?s podcast on Microsoft?s upcoming operating system, Vista, as well as the topic of open source.
Check out our CIO News Alerts and Tech Informer pages for more updated news coverage.
� 2010 CXO Media Inc.
Source: http://www.cio.com/blog_view.html?CID=19988
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Home Treadmills
The Most Effective Home Treadmills
General Conclusion About Home Treadmills by Our Admin
A lot of people looking to find the most effective home treadmills wish one which has the incline. Not every treadmills have the incline. But nowadays,most of home treadmills do have this particular feature.
home treadmills
The variation appears to be within the range number of elevation offered. Have you been fairly healthy? If you do and truly want a challenge, then you?ll most likely wish to get a 15% incline.
Howeverin case you wish to own a home treadmill with slow paced jogging, a 10% elevation may suit you perfectly.
You might have probably heard of the Bowflex Treadclimber. It is fuses a treadmill with stepper machine as one. Every step you?re taking will move every belt while you move.
Nordic Track likewise has the incline tutor available ? known as Nordic Track X5. It is has just one treadbelt (just like a treadmill) while offering elevations for at least 30 %. Although incline trainers are exceptional for burning up calories from fat, the actual downside is you will pay for these things.
Prices start at approximately $1600 for regular treadmills. Because of this, these treadmills are utilized frequently in commercial functions such as fitness centers and office fitness facilities. Normally you?ll use-up more calories when jogging by using an incline. You are able to get rid of two times or three times your calories by jogging by using an incline compared to not. Of course, if you?re trying to build intervals within your regular workout, jogging by using an incline for about half a minute or two minutes is actually an excellent method to interval train as well as improve your post exercise calorie burn. So commonly an elevation on the treadmill is really an excellent gadget to possess.
It?ll help you get a lean body and get rid of fat much quicker than merely jogging on the flat surface. According to which treadmill you choose , remember to use high quality running sneakers or shoes and have fun with obtaining fit! The most effective home treadmills will enable you to make this happen.
Don?t forget to see other informative articles about:
Source: http://sport-and-health.com/home-treadmills
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Akai Professional APC40 Ableton Live Controller
Ableton Live is something of a dichotomy. For live performance and remixing it provides the best possible software interface?which is seriously constrained by the worst possible hardware interface?a screen and a mouse. And if that?s not bad enough, running Live on a laptop, on stage, makes it look more like you?re surfing the web than performing. The answer is a control surface that frees you from the prison of the computer and lets you play ?Live?. Although there are plenty of these around, until recently, none were optimal or optimised for working with Live. However, Akai Professional?s dedicated Live controller, the APC40, changes this.
First Impressions
My initial impression, when unboxing the APC40, was one of (pleasant) surprise. Both the pictures I had seen of it and my experience of other control surfaces to date, had me expecting a smaller, flimsier, plasticy unit. What I got was a nicely proportioned (about the width and twice the depth of a computer keyboard), solidly constructed (metal with rubberised ends) piece of hardware that looks like it can stand up to some serious abuse?which is exactly what it is likely to get on the road and it is clear that in designing it, Akai have paid as much attention to where it is going to be used as to how. Although this metal construction makes the APC40 heavier than it looks, it?s a small price to pay for such ruggedness.
Setup
There ain?t none! Really. The APC40 has been designed, in partnership with Ableton, to work with Live 8 (and 7) straight out of the box. As a result there are no drivers to install, you simply plug it into your computer (via USB, there?s no MIDI sockets), select it as the control surface in Live?s preferences and?that?s it!
Control
Being a Live controller, a substantial part of the APC40 is, unsurprisingly, taken up with a (8�5) grid of clip launch buttons. Live makes it easy to see which of these buttons launches which clip by automatically placing a red rectangle around a corresponding 8�5 grid of clips on screen. Pressing one of the APC40?s four ?bank select? buttons moves this rectangle one clip in any direction and holding down the adjacent shift button whilst doing so moves it by a bank of five vertical and eight horizontal clips at a time. In practice, I found this to be the wrong way round and wish there was a simple way to switch this behaviour so that, by default, the bank select button actually moves everything by?a bank!
The clip launch buttons have four states ? unlit (no clip), orange (unlaunched clip), green (launched i.e. currently playing clip) and red (recording). Pressing an unlit clip button will (provided the track is armed) turn it red and start it recording. Pressing an orange button either makes it blink orange as it prepares to turn green and play, or turn green and play straight away (depending upon how the current song is configured). Each button is about the size of an average fingertip, with enough space either size for the larger than average fingertips.
Below the clip launch grid is a row of stop clip buttons, to its right, a column of scene launch buttons and where they intersect, a stop all clips button. Below the clip stop row is a row of track selection buttons (1-8 and master) that give focus to a track, a row of 8 track activator buttons, a row of 8 solo/cue buttons (which turn blue when pressed, making it easy to see what is soloed) and a row of 8 record arm buttons. To the right of these is a cue level knob and beneath all of this are 9 faders (8 tracks and a master). The tensioning of the these faders is spot on and they work in almost perfect harmony with Live?s on screen faders. I say almost perfect because, for some strange reason, Live does not utilise their full throw, leaving a small amount of play at either end.
This arrangement takes up the full depth and about two thirds of the width of the APC40. The remaining third is taken up by two banks of eight continuous rotary knobs, the former for ?track control?, the latter for ?device control?, a crossfader and some buttons. Beneath the track control knobs are four buttons labelled pan and send (a,b, & c respectively). Press one of these buttons and all 8 track control knobs perform that function, each knob being automatically mapped to one consecutive track, with pseudo total recall courtesy of the greed LEDs encircling them. I would prefer these knobs and buttons to be located in the APC40?s channel strips, as this would be in keeping with Live?s layout and is more logical to those of us used to mixing desks.
Beneath this section are the aforementioned bank select button and for DJs, a tap tempo button (which works very well) and plus and minus tempo nudge buttons (which offer the potential for integration into a deck based DJing setup, though they did give me mixed results).
Next down are the device control knobs which control the parameters of Live?s devices i.e. the Live instruments/effects inserted in a track (and which, like the track control knobs, are laid out in two rows of four). Having used the track selection buttons to give a track focus, you turn on/off and move between instruments/effects within a track using the left/right arrow buttons and device on/off button located beneath them. The device control knobs come pre mapped to the parameters of Live?s devices, which works fantastically well with devices offering less than 8 parameters?however, many offer more than 8 parameters and in these cases, the choice of parameters to which they are mapped can be a little random? added to which, neither Live nor the APC40 indicate which parameters are mapped to which knobs, turning this whole affair into a bit of a craps shoot? This is something that is in urgent need of remedy by way of a software update for Live that enables it to highlight mapped parameters indicating to which knobs they mapped.
Device control extends to third party plug-ins too. Although the APC40 doesn?t automatically map to them, it?s simple to do this yourself by clicking the configure button followed by the parameter you want to change and then twiddling the knob you want to use to use to change it with. Annoyingly though, manual mapping only appears to work on a local basis, so every time you use a fresh instance of a plug-in, you have to configure this instance from scratch. Perhaps Akai should license Novation?s Automap technology?and perhaps Ableton should include configure buttons in Live?s built in effects and instruments so that if you don?t like the way that the APC40 has them configured, it?s easy to change this.
Beneath all of this are clip/track and detail view buttons that toggle the display accordingly, record quantization, MIDI overdub, metronome, play stop and record buttons, which do what they say on the labels and a replaceable crossfader.
Round the Back
In addition to a power socket (for a wall wart unfortunately), power button and USB socket, there are two sockets to which foot switches can be connected, opening up even greater control possibilities.
In Use.
Because the APC40 communicates bi-directionally with Live, all of the pads, knobs and sliders work exactly as you would expect them to, with absolutely no perceptible latency whatsoever. What?s more, they feel good to use and the visual feedback on offer makes it easy to see what?s going on (with the exception of Live?s devices) making the APC40 extremely intuitive to use. Anyone familiar with Live will feel instantly at home with the APC40.
Other Uses
Because the APC40 generates MIDI data over USB, it can double up as a control surface for any MIDI mappable software. I tried mapping it to Resolume Avenue, which turned out to be as easy as it was rewarding. The only fly in the ointment is that when controlling other software, the coloured lights in the APC40?s clip launch buttons do not work?at least not without some serious hackery, as Akai do not support third party usage or even provide the necessary information, which seems like a mistake. Nevertheless, even without the coloured lights, Live, Resolume Avenue & the Akai Professional APC40 are an extremely potent and heady combination!
What?s Missing?
Despite there being clip/track and detail view buttons, somewhat surprisingly there?s no dedicated button for switching between session and clip views. Although there?s a crossfader the A/B crossfader assignment buttons found in Live are not replicated on the APC40. However, the most glaring omissions must be that the APC40 offers no control of Live?s browser and no control over looping and other aspects of audio clips. Sadly, this means you are still reliant upon a mouse to access some of Live?s functionality.
The solution I?d like to see, in a future version, is the inclusion of a trackpad, which would address several of these omissions, completely remove the need for a mouse and provide direct control of the XY pads in Live?s (and third party) instruments & effects, which would, in turn, free up some of the knobs that are currently and somewhat unsatisfactorily assigned to replicating XY pad functionality. Placing the pan/send knobs and buttons in the ?channel strips?, as previously discussed, would provide more than enough space for such a trackpad (be it laptop or chaos pad sized).
The Verdict
The Akai APC40 exceeded my expectations in every respect. As good as it looks in photos and videos, it?s not until you get up close and personal with it that you realise just how good it really is. Sure it?s not 100 per cent perfect, nothing is..except for me of course, but getting hung up upon what?s missing would be missing the point. The simple fact is that the APC40 liberates Live from your laptop, finally enabling it to fulfil its true potential as a live performance instrument and remix tool, thereby taking it to a whole new level. So until such time as Akai bring out an APC80, with a Novation Launchpad sized 8�8 grid, pans in the channel strips, a trackpad, more knobs (preferably with LED/LCD displays), some extra buttons and an APC60 expander to accompany it, the APC40 is simply the best Live controller there is and as such, an absolute must have for anyone using Live, be it in the studio or live!
More info: www.akaipro.com
� 2010, The Technofile. All rights reserved. Moral Rights Asserted.
Source: http://thetechnofile.com/2010/07/24/akai-professional-apc40-ableton-controller/512/
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Opinion: Will 2011 signal a Mac virus onslaught? Not so fast
Is it really true that it's only a matter of time before Macintosh users are under siege by a flood of viruses and malware? McAfee announced recently that 2011 would be a bad year for people using Apple computers, as hackers will be increasingly attracted by growing Mac market share. It's not at all hard to find experts who agree.
The thing is, they also agreed back on July 18, 2010, June 17, 2010, April 9, 2008, and October 20, 2006, among many other dates in the past which I didn't bother excavating from Google. Remember that horrible Christmas of 2006, when all of your Macs broke simultaneously?
Me neither.
How malware hackers eat
It's worth noting how computer malware comes into being. Unlike biological viruses, such as�H1N1, malware doesn't spontaneously create new offspring. New viruses require the effort of "black hat" hackers, who try to create code that is easy to replicate, hard to remove, and does something to benefit of its creator.
That last bit is a crucial part of the malware environment. A few malware hackers write software attacks purely out of malice, but mostly it's done for profit. In theory, the more Mac users there are in the world, the more appealing they become as a target for hackers. This theory is pretty much the sum total of the analysis you'll see about Mac security on many general news sites.
In practice, though, there are three major components that play into the creation of viral attacks:.
Motivation: Hackers will attack where they have reason to do so. Consider the Stuxnet worm that attacked sensitive computers in Iran. If anyone knows for certain who wrote this, or how it was introduced into Iranian nuclear plants, they're not talking to Macworld. But these attacks weren?t motivated by the sudden increase of people walking around carrying programmable industrial logic controllers in their pockets.
Opportunity: When there?s vulnerability in software?from Apple or or any other vendor?the malware hacker community is almost always the first to know. After all, this is their bread and butter?give them a chance to make money, and they?ll race to exploit the vulnerability before it?s found and fixed. Serious computer security experts (who are, alas, less frequently quoted in the general media than software vendors and supposed experts who give good sound bites) classify these opportunities into vulnerabilities (theoretical avenues for attacks) and exploits (actual attacks taking place in the real world).
For example, if you go away for the weekend and forget to lock your door, but you come home to an intact house, that's a vulnerability. But if you came back to find that some scoundrel has made off with your worldly possessions, thanks to your forgetfulness, that's an exploit. Most computer security issues you read about?and especially the ones you see on cable TV news?are vulnerabilities. But we're vulnerable to thousands of things a day, including death rays from outer space which do everything from cause cancer to crash your MacBook. Unless you've already lined both your hat and your laptop bag with tinfoil, you're clearly not too worried about this. (Nor should you be?the odds of this occurring are extremely low. And the tinfoil is unlikely to help.)
Herd immunity: Herd immunity is a concept from biological infection that also applies to computers. Disease relies on a certain critical mass to spread: if your population is dominated by those who are immune to infection, it helps curtail the communication of the disease.�In terms of computers, it means that so long as the vast majority of machines that your computer interacts with aren't subject to the same malware?i.e. when your Mac talks to Windows PCs?you?re less likely to get infected. When your machine talks mostly to computers that�are susceptible, herd immunity is lost.
So, the assumption that is made by almost all of the doomsaying articles linked above?and thousands I didn't link to?is incorrect. There�is no magic number of Macs, above which they suddenly become less secure. There is instead a theoretical protection that is offered by Macintosh market share.�The actual point at which a larger market share becomes dangerous depends entirely on the nature of the threat.
As Macs are built on many of the same technologies as the iPad and iPhone, it is possible that the rapid rise of iOS devices exposes Macs to new vulnerabilities. But until an actual exploit is in circulation, this is simply a conjecture that falls somewhere between "aliens are killing cows in Montana" and "global warming will submerge Manhattan in 2050." It's my opinion that beachfront property in Pittsburgh might be a good buy-and-hold strategy, but there's still considerable debate about how the proven vulnerability of ocean surface rise will play out in human-impact exploits.
How Mac users think
There?s a second flaw in the Macs-are-vulnerable argument: the oft-repeated notion that Mac users believe their Macs are immune to attack. This is mentioned in both the McAfee report as well as the Computerworld coverage.
I beg to differ, on the basis of overwhelming?and purely anecdotal?evidence. As a Mac consultant, writer, and generic "known expert" to a bunch of folks in my community, I regularly field questions about Mac security issues. This demonstrates a general understanding that A) security issues exist on the Mac and B) people are curious enough to ask questions. No one has ever asked me whether a cosmic ray can crash their computer?although it can?or if their MacBook can come to life overnight and raid their fridge. Mac users do seem to assume they're safe from death rays and late night Mac snack raids, otherwise, I'd be asked about those threats. If people ask me about malware?and they do?I take that as proof that they don't assume they're immune.
As for what you should be doing about these attacks, that has been covered by experts numerous times in greater detail than I can address here. Given that you're reading this article, you're already doing the most important thing you can: Staying informed. When a new Mac vulnerability breaks, you'll read about it on Macworld and other Macintosh-specific news sites. When this escalates to the level of a circulating exploit, you'll see even more coverage. If and when an exploit becomes common?which has not occurred since the primary method of moving Mac files around was an 800K floppy disk?then you won't be able to avoid hearing about it if you're keeping up on Mac-specific news.
Conversely, you should take any information you get about the Mac from a general news site with a grain of salt. Unfortunately, many tech and computer news websites can fall into the "general" category here more often than they probably should. If you hear about a threat, but it doesn't seem to concern editors at Macworld and other reputable Mac sites, then those general sites are likely missing something. When something is genuinely dangerous, you'll hear about it here from Mac-specific writers and editors. You'll also be told how to protect yourself, if such a method exists.
Critics often accuse Apple of touting the imperviousness of its systems, but it?s worth noting that the company acknowledges its imperfections. For example, it still recommends that Mac users scan downloads from untrusted sources with antivirus software. (Users looking for an antivirus package have a number of options to choose from.) Apple itself�builds a wide range of security measures into the Mac OS, including?in OS X?s most recent incarnation?a limited malware-detection system. Security requires a proactive approach, but Apple helps users out by enabling most of those measures by default.
In the meantime, despite the many varied technical debates to the contrary, you can generally rest easy?unless you enjoy getting lost in the weeds where Mac experts and geeks like to hang out. You'll find many debates among Mac experts about theoretical dangers, and these can sometimes make it into the general media. But that doesn't mean you need to take action every time the hint of a threat pops up in your RSS reader. The vaunted grain of salt and information from reliable sources should see you right.
Source: http://rss.macworld.com/click.phdo?i=9c1ea62f8575dad8ea2073dfb341d7fc
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