Organized chaos: here's what it takes to build CES For those who've never helped run a booth at a trade show, it's easy to lose sight of the fact that the temporary city – an endless sea of lights, sounds, and humans pressing past one another in search of the next great gadget – takes weeks to assemble before the first attendee even hits the floor. It's a choreographed symphony of thousands of laborers, installing everything from flooring to televisions to washing machines. The Verge

The ARM vs x86 wars have begunin-depth power analysis of Atom, Krait & Cortex A15 Late last month, Intel dropped by my office with a power engineer for a rare demonstration of its competitive position versus NVIDIA's Tegra 3 when it came to power consumption. Like most companies in the mobile space, Intel doesn't just rely on device level power testing to determine battery life. In order to ensure that its CPU, GPU, memory controller and even NAND are all as power efficient as possible, most companies will measure power consumption directly on a tablet or smartphone motherboard. AnandTech

How Internet is going to change the world in next 30 years The internet just turned 30. That might come as a surprise, as the global computer network seems both older and younger than that. Older because it is such a part of life now - roughly a third of humanity is now regularly online, and its use is so ubiquitous, even people over 40 find it hard to remember a world without it. And younger because it's still constantly changing, showing us new games, new programes and new fads. The Economic Times

Dish Network, the meanest company in America For 2012, the website 24/7 Wall St. determined that the worst company to work for in America was the Dish Network (DISH), the Englewood (Colo.)-based company that provides satellite TV to more than 14 million subscribers. To pick its winner, the site began by sifting entries on glassdoor.com, an online service where people gossip about their jobs. It was hardly the most scientific of methods. Still, the volume of miserable tales about Dish is impressive... Bloomberg

Explaining Windows 8 PC sales over the holidays At some point, the cheerleaders – and yes, amazingly, they're out there – are going to have to face reality: Windows 8 is selling slowly. More slowly than Windows 7 at launch, and more slowly than Windows 7 a year ago. And while a peek at NPD's publicly released data for the holiday selling season can provide some clues as to why, I can tell you exactly what happened. First, the publicly-released NPD data... WinSuperSite

Life and death online: who controls a digital legacyAlison Atkins died on July 27 at age 16. Online, her family is losing its hold on her memory. Three days after the Toronto teen lost a long battle with a colon disease, her sister Jaclyn Atkins had a technician crack Alison's password-protected MacBook Pro. Her family wanted access to Alison's digital remains: Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Yahoo and Hotmail accounts that were her lifeline when illness isolated her at home. WSJ

Bitcoin: Making online gambling legal in the U.S.? Michael Hajduk had sunk one year and about $20,000 into developing his online poker site, Infiniti Poker, when the U.S. online gambling market imploded. On April 15, 2011, a day now known in the industry as Black Friday, the U.S. Department of Justice shut down the three biggest poker sites accessible to players in the U.S., indicting 11 people on charges of bank fraud, money laundering, and illegal gambling. Bloomberg

The negative influence of games: an autobiographical essay I spent 803 days unemployed after I left college. Each day I would start by writing to companies to explain how I am just the right person for their position. I would then set about organizing and cleaning an ever-increasingly out-of-date set of thrift-store purchases. Sometimes, I even went to parties where I tried to make being unemployed sound cool. Most of the time, however, I played a lot of video games. Nightmare Mode

Patent trolls want $1,000 – for using scanners When Steven Vicinanza got a letter in the mail earlier this year informing him that he needed to pay $1,000 per employee for a license to some "distributed computer architecture" patents, he didn't quite believe it at first. The letter seemed to be saying anyone using a modern office scanner to scan documents to e-mail would have to pay – which is to say, just about any business, period. Ars Technica

Improving the PC as a gaming platform: the hardware Even die-hard PC gamers will recognize the, shall we say, essential issue with this platform: it's often far too difficult to (a) buy a gaming PC, (b) pop in a disc and play a game. For all their faults, consoles do many things right in this department. As a the quotation goes, "Good artists borrow; great artists steal." So let's see if we can't steal a few good ideas, shall we? The Tech Report

The power of two: Warren Spector talks to Brainy Gamer's Michael Abbott Warren Spector calls himself "the oldest guy still making games in the universe." Over a career spanning 30+ years, with landmark titles like System Shock and Deus Ex to his credit, Spector's love of games has never waned. Since founding Junction Point Studios in 2005, he and his team have released two Disney Epic Mickey games. Paste

Microsoft inks $617 million deal to bring Windows 8 to 330,000 Department of Defense employees The Redmond software giant just inked a three-year, $617 million software deal with the United States Department of Defense to bring Windows 8 to 75 percent of all DoD employees. There are 450,000 total workers, which means 330,000 of them will be using Microsoft's newest software. GeekWire

Google says Maps redirect on Windows Phone was a product decision, and will be removed Today, a Google spokesperson provided The Next Web with a statement indicating that the company intends to remove the redirect that it has in place for Windows Phone users who attempt to access the Google Maps product, ending its practice of sending them to its search homepage. The Next Web

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