Tech news, reviews, and how-tos!
Archive for August, 2006
Try Windows Vista (Beta2) for free!
Aug 20th
Ever wanted to create your own game?
Aug 14th
Now you can, as Microsoft is to offer a consumer version of professional tools used to develop videogames for the Xbox 360.
The software will let non-professionals develop titles and then share them via the Xbox Live online service.
Microsoft executive Peter Moore said: “It’s our first step of creating a YouTube for videogames.”
The program will seek to complement a trend that has seen videogames becoming more like film blockbusters, costing up to £20m to produce.
Users will need a PC running Windows XP – or Vista in the future – to operate the tools program, called XNA Game Studio Express.
The tools will More >
AOL apologise after handing out search data
Aug 8th
Recently, the internet giant handed out to researchers, the serach terms that over 650,000 of its subcribers used, in what was apparently an “innocent attempt to reach out to the academic community with research tools”.
Whilst the terms could not be linked to specific individuals, they could have contained personally identifiable information. This has upset many subcribers as it has not yet been made public who the researchers were, and why they wanted the data.
As if that wasn’t bad enough, after AOL removed the file that contained “information on 19 million queries and included information on what search terms were used, More >
Photos transformed into 3D model
Aug 1st
Technology that transforms digital images into 3D models will be unveiled at a conference on Thursday.
Microsoft’s Photosynth takes collections of images, analyses them for similarities, and then displays them in a reconstructed 3D space.
The system, to be previewed at a computer graphics meeting in Boston, will allow users to walk or fly through a scene to see photos from any angle.
Microsoft says Photosynth should be available for use later this year.
Richard Szeliski, principal researcher at Microsoft Research who developed the technology with Noah Snavely and Steven Seitz, of the University of Washington, said: “The system builds a 3D model just More >