Surmounting the insurmountable: Wikipedia is nearing completion, in a sense For about the last five years, Wikipedia has had trouble getting and keeping new volunteer editors. The foundation behind Wikipedia has made building up the editor base a major goal, and is attacking it from all angles, such as encouraging a culture that is friendlier to newbies, creating an easier sign-up page, and making the editing process more intutitive. But what if the decline in engagement has little to do with culture or the design of the site? What if, instead, it's that there's just less for new Wikipedians to do? The Atlantic
Consolation prize: The game console is dead. What will replace it? In November, Nintendo will release Wii U, the first update to the groundbreaking motion-controlled gaming console that took the industry by storm in 2006. Pundits and developers presume Sony and Microsoft will quickly follow suit with their own updated game consoles – also the first in years – though neither have confirmed it. Assuming all of these new machines arrive as predicted, they'll hit store shelves at nearly the exact moment when the venerable game console, and the business model that sustained it, became obsolete. Wired
Researchers develop surveillance system that can watch & predict Carnegie Mellon university researchers have developed a surveillance system that can not only recognize human activities but can also predict what might happen next. Researchers, through the Army-funded research dubbed Mind's Eye, have created intelligent software that recognizes human activities in video and can predict what might just happen next; sounding an alarm if it detects anomalous behavior. The high-level artificial visual intelligence system that has been presented in the paper (PDF)... Parity News
LG launches 84-inch, Ultra HD television at $19,999 Earlier this week, LG held a launch event in Southern California to debut the company's first Ultra HD (4K) television at a sizable list price of $19,999. The LG 84LM9600 has a native screen resolution of 3840 x 2160, four times the resolution of a typical 1080p television. While the amount of content available in Ultra HD resolution is incredibly scarce at the moment, the 84-inch LED Ultra HD panel also includes LG's proprietary "Resolution Upscaler Plus" technology to up-convert 1080p content to the Ultra HD resolution. Digital Trends
On ultraviolence in games and the lessons of porn The gaming sphere (myself included) debated about whether E3 had gone too far and had the ultraviolent kinds of game on show were representative of games any more. Many a journalist reflected on their personal feelings of depression in the wake of the show, thinking that for all the high talk games had not really moved on. All fair points, but studios go to the extreme like that for a reason. What Games Are
Hurricane Sandy prompts Google to cancel Android event As a result of Hurricane Sandy, Google cancelled its big Android event, which was set to be held in New York City at 9:00 a.m. Monday. The effects of the hurricane are expected to be felt in the New York City area as early as Monday morning. New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo has already declared a state of emergency, and New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg warned residents to brace themselves. ABC
The classic games we can't play In many ways, we're in a golden age for classic gaming. With digital downloads and emulations of many of the best games out there, it's entirely possible to recommend to someone that they play, say, Ultima VII, and with downloading and at the cost of a few dollars, they can be playing it within 15 minutes (also with much less hassle to load up than it's ever been to play that famously picky-at-release game). Gameranx
Storage Spaces explained: a great feature, when it works Windows Home Server was never a particularly popular product, but it did bring some interesting features to the table for the few who used it and became fans. One of these features was called Drive Extender, and its claim to fame was that it allowed users to pool their system's hard drives so that they were seen by the operating system as one large hard drive. Ars Technica
Kinect genealogy - a brief history of gestural interfaces In honor of the approaching second birthday of the release of Microsoft's Kinect, we will take a brief tour of the experimental technology that preceded it. But before we begin, it is worth noting a few facts about the Kinect we know today, a piece of technology that almost overnight changed the development of contemporary interactive art by being powerful and affordable. Rhizome
Steve Jobs's yacht makes its first appearance Steve Jobs's yacht is making what looks to be its first public appearance in the Dutch city of Aalsmeer, a bit more than one year after his death. The photographs first appeared on the Apple news site One More Thing and closely resemble the description given by Walter Isaacson in his Steve Jobs biography. The Verge
10,000,000,000,000,000 bytes archived! On Thursday, 25 October, hundreds of Internet Archive supporters, volunteers, and staff celebrated addition of the 10,000,000,000,000,000th byte to the Archive's massive collections. We also announced: full 80 Terabyte web crawl to researchers and the first complete literature of a people went online: Balinese. Archive
'The whole room will be the computer' With Windows 8, its own tablet and a new smartphone system, Microsoft has launched an offensive against Apple and Google. The company's development director Craig Mundie tells SPIEGEL ONLINE what went wrong at the IT giant in the past, and how it plans to catch up with its competitors. Spiegel