Tech Brief
On Tech Brief today: Frash on a phone, a bus goes whoosh and cash goes bang.
• All those iPhone owners keen to get Flash working on their handset can now rest easier. Well, a little. Renowned coding whizz Comex (he of the Jailbreakme tool) .
"... once Frash is installed the iPhone user is able to tap on (reasonably basic) Flash animations in a web page to see them rendered in all their animated glory. Most of those embedded animations are advertisements of course, so you might be happier missing them. But enabling Flash is, for many people, about choice rather than utility, not to mention shutting up all the whining from those people who don't have an iPhone."
• Gaming has a vocabulary all its own. FTW, gib, frag and noob are neologisms that owe their currency, in part, to games and gaming. Microsoft's for the Xbox 360 might be about to add a visual element to this if a patent filed by the Redmond behemoth is to be believed. .
"[W]hen the user kills another user's character, that victorious, though speechless, user would be able to tell the other user that he had been 'PWNED'."
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"In another embodiment, a user may be able to speak or make the facial motions corresponding to speaking words. The system may then parse those facial motions to determine the user's intended words and process them according to the context under which they were inputted to the system."
• School may be out for summer but the work of Paul Stender may make some children wish they were back in uniform. Mr Stender has added a jet to the humble school bus. From a Phantom jet fighter no less. It can do the school run in a trice as it can reach speeds in excess of 360mph.
"I built the bus for two reasons. The first is to entertain people because, come on, it's a jet bus. The second, is to keep kids off drugs. Jets are hot, drugs are not."
• Games are full of random destruction and explosions that amuse the child in all of us. In serious an explosion can be costly. Very costly. In Eve cash can be converted to game time in the form of objects known as Plex. Steal a Plex and you get game time for free. . Plex and all.
"At current prices, the 74 PLEX destroyed would have sold for a total of over 22 billion ISK, or they could have fueled an EVE subscription for six years and two months. The huge cache of licenses represented approximately $1,295 US worth of game time that someone purchased."
• Robots. Soulless, metal creations that understand nothing of human life and emotion. Until now. .
"Nao can also work out where his human companions are looking, follow their gaze and memorise different people's faces. Using a neural network brain, he can remember interactions with different people. This understanding, plus some basic rules of what is good and bad for him learned from exploring his environment, allows Nao to indicate whether he is happy, sad or frightened with what is going on around him."
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