SpuriousLogic brings us this excerpt from a BBC report: “Prof. Heeks said very accurate figures for the size of the gold farming sector were hard to come by, but his work suggested that in 2008 it employs 400,000 people who earn an average of $145 (£77) per month creating a global market worth about $500m. …Already, he said, gold farming was comparable in size to India’s outsourcing industry. ‘The Indian software employment figure probably crossed the 400,000 mark in 2004 and is now closer to 900,000,’ said Prof Heeks. ‘Nonetheless, the two are still comparable in employment size, yet not at all in terms of profile.’ Prof Heeks suspects gold-farming might be an early example of the ‘virtual offshoring’ likely to become more prevalent as people spend more time working and playing in cyberspace. ” We discussed the life of a gold farmer last year.
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monkeymonkey writes “Mozilla has integrated tracing optimization into SpiderMonkey, the JavaScript interpreter in Firefox. This improvement has boosted JavaScript performance by a factor of 20 to 40 in certain contexts. Ars Technica interviewed Mozilla CTO Brendan Eich (the original creator of JavaScript) and Mozilla’s vice president of engineering, Mike Shaver. They say that tracing optimization will ‘take JavaScript performance into the next tier’ and ‘get people thinking about JavaScript as a more general-purpose language.’ The eventual goal is to make JavaScript run as fast as C code. Ars reports: ‘Mozilla is leveraging an impressive new optimization technique to bring a big performance boost to the Firefox JavaScript engine. …They aim to improve execution speed so that it is comparable to that of native code. This will redefine the boundaries of client-side performance and enable the development of a whole new generation of more computationally-intensive web applications.’ Mozilla has also published a video that demonstrates the performance difference.” An anonymous reader contributes links the blogs of Eich and Shaver, where they have some further benchmarks.
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PlayStation Home (PS3)
Don’t worry: we’re almost home.
Tales of Vesperia (X360)
Namco Bandai chats about the new battle system and the unique visuals found in its new RPG.
MojoKid writes “Intel’s next-generation CPU microarchitecture, which was recently given the official processor family name of ‘Core i7,’ was one of the big topics of discussion at IDF. Intel claims that Nehalem represents its biggest platform architecture change to date. This might be true, but it is not a from-the-ground-up, completely new architecture either. Intel representatives disclosed that Nehalem ’shares a significant portion of the P6 gene pool,’ does not include many new instructions, and has approximately the same length pipeline as Penryn. Nehalem is built upon Penryn, but with significant architectural changes (full webcast) to improve performance and power efficiency. Nehalem also brings Hyper-Threading back to Intel processors, and while Hyper-Threading has been criticized in the past as being energy inefficient, Intel claims their current iteration of Hyper-Threading on Nehalem is much better in that regard.” Update: 8/23 00:35 by SS: Reader Spatial points out Anandtech’s analysis of Nehalem.
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Two Worlds: The Temptation (X360)
New pre alpha footage for you to enjoy.
People are working hard in this demo. Save the world!
Compiere is an integrated ERP and CRM business solution for automating financial, distribution, sales, and service processes, including: financial management, purchasing, materials management, manufacturing, order management, project accounting, customer management, sales, service requests, ecommerce, reporting, and performance management. Compiere utilizes a powerful model-driven application platform that provides customers with unprecedented adaptability, rapid deployment, and low cost of ownership.
License: GNU General Public License v2
Changes:
This release includes more than 400 new and enhanced features across its global financial management, purchasing, materials management, manufacturing, order management, sales, and service application suite. It adds compatibility with Oracle 11g, EnterpriseDB Postgres Plus 8.3, Red Hat JBoss 4.2.2, Sun Java Runtime Environment 6, and Mozilla Firefox 3.0. It provides continuing support for Microsoft Windows and Linux operating systems, the Oracle 10g database, and Internet Explorer 6 and 7 and Firefox 2 browsers.
palegray.net writes “The National Center for State Courts, a nonprofit organization, has sent file-sharing propaganda to thousands of students. The supposedly ‘educational’ materials, presented in the form of a comic strip, are intended to frighten students with gross exaggerations of the legal consequences of sharing music online (lose your scholarship to college, go to jail for two years, and more). From the article: ‘”The Case of Internet Piracy,” however, reads like the Recording Industry Association of America’s public relations playbook: Download some songs, go to jail and lose your scholarship. Along the way, musicians will file onto the bread lines. “The purpose is basically to educate kids — middle school and high school-aged about how the justice system operates and about what really goes on in the courtroom as opposed to what you see on television,” said Lorri Montgomery, the center’s communications director.’ I’m not encouraging anyone to break any laws, but this is ridiculous. What’s truly discouraging is the fact that several judges appear to be in full support of this sort of ‘education.’ The propaganda material is available in PDF form, and it lists the judges and others involved in its creation. Wired’s post has a summary of the story (which is good, since the story is awful), and Techdirt notes a couple of the legal inaccuracies.
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Grand Theft Auto IV (PS3)
More bad news for the Liberty City Sluggers.
Supersonic Acrobatic Rocket-Powered Battle-Cars (PS3)
Feel the speed!
Tales of Vesperia (X360)
The long-running Japanese RPG series makes its hi-def debut.
Strong Bad’s Cool Game for Attractive People — Episode 2 (Wii)
Viva Strong Badia!
Goosebumps Horrorland (Wii)
Horrifying new videos.
Tom Mc Shea gives Ratchet a turn in this video review.
TNA iMPACT! (X360)
Big Sexy is here.
An anonymous reader writes “Intel gave the press a sneak preview of its 3rd generation Classmate PC at IDF. It looks like this guy managed to kidnap the only working sample for a while and write up a full report. It looks like a major departure from the original, with a rotating touch screen and Atom processor. There’s no official word on pricing yet, but no doubt the OLPC guys will try to rain on Intel’s parade.”
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Resistance 2 (PS3)
A new weapon and videos emerge from Leipzig.
So Blonde (Wii)
How blond?
Stoked (X360)
Own the mountain.
I Don’t Believe in Imaginary Property writes “Attorney General Michael Mukasey has agreed to allow Congressional hearings, but not to delay, the implementation of new FBI regulations that would allow them to spy on American citizens who are not suspected of any crime. As an editorial in the New York Times points out, this is a power that has a history of abuse. In times past, it was used to wiretap Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. and to spy on other civil rights and anti-war protesters.” As Dekortage points out, “Several senators have formally complained that citizens could be investigated ‘without any basis for suspicion,’ which the Justice Department denies.”
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