Some researchers, including the Harvard psychologists, even suggest that video games have a positive effect on the brain. Steven Johnson explores this concept in his book Everything Bad is Good for You: How Today’s Popular Culture is Actually Making Us Smarter.

(Source: TG Daily)

Two Harvard researchers have concluded that there’s no data to support the notion that violent video games cause the kids who play them to act out violence in real life, contrary to the vast majority of media outlets that would have the public thinking otherwise. The $1.5 million study, which began in 2004, closely examined 1,200 children after bouts with violent games like Grand Theft Auto and not-so-violent titles like The Sims.

(Credit:
Simon & Schuster)

Psychologists Lawrence Kutner and Cheryl Olson found that for most kids, playing these games was nothing more than a stress reliever. Sure, some children displayed a playful aggressiveness after hours spent with a violent game, but this was no different than what children experience after seeing a martial arts action movie.

Go to a true Seattle coffee house and you might not feel as comfortable with the black-painted walls and ugly art and urban-weirdo clients. But the coffee will almost certainly be stronger, and you’ll probably hear more interesting music as well–personally, I have Seattle baristas to thank for introducing me to ’70s soul act MFSB, Seattle dance combo United State of Electronica (yes, “State”), and Yann Tiersen’s beautiful soundtrack to the movie Amelie. The best music I ever heard from Starbucks was a compilation of the Rolling Stones’ favorite songs–a solid set, but nothing too surprising or new.

Why is anybody surprised? Look at their history in the coffee business. Espresso used to be a niche product that was hard to produce properly and varied widely in quality. Starbucks’ great triumph was turning it into a assembly line product (push-button espresso machines!) with much better margins (sugar and milk!), then packaging it in a non-threatening imitation of cafe culture. The ambience in Starbucks has always been carefully calculated to soothe and comfort rather than challenge or provoke. And I have it on good authority that one big key to their success was getting Pepsi to distribute their bottled coffee drinks to convenience stores nationwide. It was only a matter of time before their music, like their beverages, aimed squarely for the lowest common denominator.

(Credit: Amazon.com)

The best music I ever heard from Starbucks was a compilation of the Rolling Stones' favorite songs.

(Credit:
Gefen)

When contacted for comment last week, Gefen specified that the device was “preserving HDCP [High-Definition Copy Protection] on output.” But a subsequent communication from the company’s representative has since clarified the issue:

The addition of encryption follows a dialogue with CNET that was initiated after the Gefen HD PVR was highlighted on Zatznotfunny. Blogger Dave Zatz noted that the Gefen was a unique product: not only did it have HDMI inputs–a usually unseen rarity–its recordings were completely unencrypted. That meant that enterprising techies such as Zatz (and fellow enthusiast “AVeNVy”) who were willing to crack open the Gefen and yank out the hard drive were able to view high-def recordings from their cable box as standard (albeit undoubtedly massive) H.264 video files when they connected the drive to a PC. Such unencrypted/non-DRM video files are the holy grail of video pirates, who could take those files and put them on file-sharing networks. Imagine, for instance, a whole month of high-def HBO movies as Pirate Bay torrents, and it’s easy to see why Hollywood studios tend to demand tough encryption standards from hardware manufacturers.

Gefen did not anticipate that users would void warranty to crack the unit and use the internal drive in this fashion. The company is currently in the process of encrypting every internal drive of every HD PVR so this situation will be corrected.

Gefen's HD video recorder still has HDMI inputs, but the recordings will now be encrypted.

The product is brand new, so it’s unclear how many of the pre-encryption models are already in the wild. But if you see one of them on eBay going for more than the $1,000 list price, you’ll know why.

Nvidia said Monday that its multichip technology will be architected to work on Intel’s upcoming Nehalem chip platform.

Nvidia SLI technology supports multiple graphics boards.

(Credit:
Nvidia)

This announcement may help Nvidia to work around a standoff with Intel over whether Nvidia can make chipsets that work with Intel’s next-generation Nehalem platform, due later this year. And also demonstrates that despite Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang’ s rhetoric, Nvidia must cooperate with Intel in order to thrive.

Monday’s announcement has no relation to separate licensing negotiations, according to sources familiar with the discussions. In other words, Nvidia is not announcing a chipset for Nehalem–which would require a license. It is simply a statement that Nvidia will support Nehalem with its nForce 200 Scalable Link Interconnect (SLI) chip.

However, some reports say Nvidia has reached an agreement with Intel to license Intel’s Quick Path Interconnect (QPI) technology, paving the way for Nvidia to design chipsets for Nehalem.

The nForce 200 chip will work with Intel’s “Bloomfield” line of Nehalem processors and the accompanying Intel chipset. SLI allows Nvidia to use multiple graphics boards in one system.

Upcoming SLI motherboards will use Nvidia nForce 200 SLI silicon, Intel Bloomfield processors, and Intel Tylersburg (X58) chipsets, Nvidia said in a statement.

“The nForce 200 SLI processor features patented SLI technology for graphics bandwidth management and multi-GPU peer-to-peer communications, both required to optimize graphics performance,” Nvidia said. GPU stands for graphics processing unit.

Future systems “can be powered by one, two, or even three Nvidia GeForce GPUs, including the new…GeForce GTX 280 and GTX 260 GPUs,” according to Nvidia.

Nvidia included statements from system suppliers in the Monday release. “It’s great to see that Nvidia opted to enable SLI on the future Intel Bloomfield platform,” said Rahul Sood, CTO Voodoo Business Unit, HP. “Make love not war I say…and Nvidia’s (enabling) of Intel chipsets to support SLI will make our jobs much easier.”

Nvidia claims that nForce 200 SLI silicon with Intel’s new Bloomfield processor and Tylersburg chipset core logic chipset will deliver up to a 2.8X performance boost over traditional single graphics card platforms.

Motherboards and PC systems that will use the Nvidia nForce 200 SLI chip, Nvidia GeForce GPUs, and Nvidia SLI technology will be available from companies such as Acer, ASUS, Dell, Falcon Northwest, Legend, and Velocity Micro.

We’ve put together a small guide to help you take advantage of bookmarking in
Firefox 3. If you put these lessons to use, you’ll go from having a big, clumsy menu of sites you like to an ever-changing list that can quickly be parsed and prioritized with minimal effort.

Step 1: Master the quickie
On a site you like? Don’t bother with keyboard shortcuts (although Ctrl+Shift+L is dead easy); just hit the new star button in the address bar. It’ll quick-save it to your bookmarks list the same way the keyboard shortcut does, although it saves a click or two by skipping the “edit this bookmark” dialogue that usually pops up when you try to squirrel a link away.

If you do want to access that dialogue without having to delve into the full-fledged bookmark editor, just click on the star again and you’ll get that same drop-down menu with quick fields you can fill in to edit tags or simply remove the link from your bookmarks.

With tags, save typing and a visit to figure out what a site is about.

(Credit:
CNET Networks)

Step 2: Use tags
Tags are helpful. If you’re bookmarking a site you think you’re going to keep around, it’s worth tagging. The biggest reason is that Firefox will now use tags as shortcuts in the address bar, meaning that if you tag this article “awesome,” typing awesome into the bar will automatically pull up this page as one of the top results. It’ll also take any tags you’ve previously added and autofill them for you as you type. This makes it easy to fill in some simple descriptions quickly and efficiently.

To quickly add pre-existing tags without typing anything, just hit the little down arrow in the bookmarking menu. This will list all of the tags you’ve typed in before, and simply clicking on any one of them will add it as a tag.

Step 3: Use smart bookmarks and folders to discover new content
Are you an iTunes user? If so, you may be familiar with smart playlists, the playlists that will automatically fill with tracks based on what boolean values you set up. Firefox 3 has two similar features called smart bookmarks and smart folders that let you do this using query strings or simple searches. Now as a warning, this isn’t as simple to do as it is in iTunes, which has drop-down menus, but the good news is that there a ton of pre-built options you can simply copy and paste.

Smart bookmarks: Smart bookmarks are a grouping of links that change based on what values you plug into them. To make your own, click on bookmarks, then “organize bookmarks” (you can also hit Ctrl+Shift+B). Highlight “bookmarks menu” from the source list below, then right-click on it and select “new bookmark.” All the magic for making a smart bookmark is in the location field, which is where you’ll be dropping in a line of code that does all the heavy lifting. These codes can range from simple queries to a string that will search a domain and give you the latest stories, or simply those related to a keyword. The possibilities are nearly endless. The sad truth is that this method is complicated. MozillaZine has a huge thread on the ins and outs of building your own code strings, as does CyberNet News. Just keep in mind that you’ll have to have some basic coding knowledge to build your own from scratch.

Saving sites you've been to in a certain genre can be a time saver. Smart bookmark folders let you do this the easy way.

(Credit:
CNET Networks)

Smart folders: Smart folders are similar to smart bookmarks but require far less work. There are a few ways to make smart folders for things like your browser history and browsing habits, but one of my favorite uses is to create little folders of bookmarks based on where you’ve been.

To start, just get back to that organize bookmarks menu (Ctrl+Shift+B) and use the search box on the top right. When you type a name it’ll search both history and bookmarks. You can pick either of those, or both categories, and save it as a search, which will now reside in your bookmarks toolbar as a smart folder. If you add or visit a site with that word or domain in the name it will automatically show up in that list, saving you from having to re-categorize it. These are incredibly useful if you drop them down into the bookmarklets bar, since they’ll act as drop-down menus that will save you crucial screen real estate.

Firefox 3 keeps multiple backups of your bookmarks, but so should you.

(Credit:
CNET Networks)

Step 4: Import/export and backing up your bookmarks
There’s nothing worse than having to try and remember all the things you’ve bookmarked in case of a hard drive crash or corrupted file. Save yourself the trouble and make backups from time to time.

My way of doing this is to use two of Google’s services, Gmail and Google Calendar, to bundle reminders and file storage in one place. Step one is setting up a Google Calendar reminder every month for a backup. Now, every time you get the reminder just go organize bookmarks, then click on “import and backup.”

Save the backup JSON file to your desktop and e-mail it to yourself in Gmail. Be sure to set up a bookmarks label and tag every backup with it so you’ll save yourself some time searching later on.

Now, what if you lose everything and need to re-import? If you’ve got a copy of that JSON file laying around you just import it using that same menu you just used to do the backup. Likewise, you can go back to previous versions of your bookmarks by selecting an earlier date from the drop-down list, although I wouldn’t recommend doing that unless you’ve made a mess of the ones you have.

Step 5: Make it social
OK, so you don’t want to use Gmail and Google Calendar while saving and uploading files. I really can’t blame you. A far simpler solution is tying in your bookmarks with a service like Delicious, Magnolia, or Mister Wong.

Of the three, my personal preference is Delicious, if only for its community and browser plug-in that was recently updated to work in both Firefox 3 and IE7. We’ve written about Delicious many times before, but the gist is that you can access your bookmarks from anywhere, and when saving a bookmark it’ll automatically suggest tags for you based on what other people have saved that same link with. It’s a huge time-saver, and if you’re seriously into Firefox 3’s tagging system, you’ll end up saving a lot of time by integrating it with Delicious.

If you don’t feel like sharing with anyone else you can also check out Foxmarks, which also has multi-browser bookmark sync and backup.

These were just a few tips on how to manage and master bookmarks in Firefox 3. If you’ve got any of your own, feel free to share them in the comments.

Related:
Set Web e-mail as default Firefox e-mail
Three useful Firefox 3 ‘awesome bar’ hacks

I spent my lunch today in Buenos Aires with Red Hat’s general manager of South America, which I’ll report on tomorrow. Meanwhile, on the other side of the planet, Red Hat announced a cool deal with Munich Airport, thrice-named “Airport of the Year” in Europe.

Why? Because Unix couldn’t deliver the performance that Munich Airport needed, so the organization went with Red Hat Enterprise Linux to “provide both the savings and performance benefits desired.” Thirty servers and 40 desktops later, Munich Airport is running smoothly and at lower cost than before.

While this may not sound like a lot of servers and desktops, it’s important to remember their purpose: keep air and ground traffic running efficiently and productively. In other words, it’s true mission-critical deployment, however small.

If you’re a fan of those John Carmack interviews that pop up every once in a while, you’ll probably enjoy the interview with Tim Sweeney over at Ars Technica. Tim is one of the co-founders of Epic Games, and also one of the creators of the technology behind the Unreal and Gears of War series. We think we even understood most of it.

The gist of the interview focuses on the future of 3D-graphics programming, but this one section we found particularly interesting:

Jon Stokes (from Ars): I’d like to chat a little bit about Larrabee and software rendering. I’m sure you’re NDA’d on it, but Intel just did a pretty substantial reveal so we can talk in more detail about it. So first off, I’m wondering if you’re looking at any of the Larrabee native stuff. What do you think about the prospects of this whole idea of not doing Direct3D or OpenGL, but writing directly to Larrabee’s micro-OS?

Tim Sweeney: I expect that in the next generation we’ll write 100 percent of our rendering code in a real programming language–not DirectX, not OpenGL, but a language like C++ or CUDA. A real programming language unconstrained by weird API restrictions. Whether that runs on NVIDIA hardware, Intel hardware, or ATI hardware is really an independent question. You could potentially run it on any hardware that’s capable of running general-purpose code efficiently.

Correct us if we’re wrong (and we’re not programmers), but if the need for DirectX 3D goes away, doesn’t that effectively remove one of the traditional barriers to gaming on the
Mac?

Game developers typically focus their programming efforts on Windows-based DirectX in order to reach the largest audience. Occasionally, you’ll see a developer release a game simultaneously for Windows and Macs, but more often, Mac versions of Windows titles come out after the Windows version, if they happen at all. But if the future of graphics programming goes straight to the hardware and you’re no longer tied to a Windows-specific programming interface, all of a sudden a major reason for OS segmentation goes away.

So, you’re doing the colored/crazy-designed notebook thing now, huh? Yeah, so is, well, everyone else.

(Credit:
Gateway)

It’s pretty well-established now that the masses see their computer as an extension of their personalities. First, it was the brightly hued notebook trend that all the top-tier PC makers were latching on to, including Gateway. Now as a laptop vendor, it seems you have to offer some artsy-looking version of a standard notebook to even get noticed anymore. (With the exception of Apple, which garners plenty of attention with its commitment to minimalism.)

Cases in point: Sony, which already has a deserved reputation for making good-looking laptops, did these limited-edition artist-designed notebooks last fall. Hewlett-Packard had this eye-catching one on display at the Consumer Electronics Show last week–designed by a 21-year-old kid, no less. Even conservative, buttoned-up Dell has been experimenting in color and customized lids–OK, so World of Warcraft themes aren’t exactly high art, but they count–for the last six months. Heck, start-ups like NVousPC are trying to make a business out of the unique-looking laptop trend.

Will this year's notebook trend be textured lids?

(Credit:
Lenovo)

Gateway’s addition to the pack is taking its M- and T-series notebooks, slathering them in more colors–besides Garnet Red and Pacific Blue there will also be Merlot and Silver options–and adding a new design called Arctic Bloom. Gateway says there will be no price premium if you order one of the notebooks (which cost between $800 and $1,400) with that design. All new colors and designs will be available beginning Thursday.

For this year, I’d venture to guess that interesting textures are going to be the next must-have design detail. Lenovo threw down the gauntlet with its striking red, vine-patterned 11-inch IdeaPad earlier this month.

So…who’s next?

Ralph de la Vega, head of AT&T’s wireless unit, told the Journal he has reviewed the technology closely and is “confident it is something we are going to want in our portfolio.”

This is good news for Google, which benefits greatly from having as many carriers and handset makers as possible using its new operating system.

When Google announced it was developing the open-source, Linux-based Android platform last year, the company also announced the Open Handset Alliance, a consortium of handset makers, carriers and chip designers that will work to implement Android.

Sprint Nextel and T-Mobile signed on as part of the consortium, but AT&T and Verizon Wireless, the No. 1 and No. 2 operators in the country, had not committed to using Android.

That said, it’s not surprising that AT&T has expressed interest in Android. Verizon executives have also said they are looking at Android for their consumer branded phones but, like AT&T, they are not willing to commit to Android. Still, Verizon’s newly launched open device program would allow device makers to use Android. My guess is that if a handset maker comes up with a compelling phone that uses Android, Verizon and AT&T will surely offer them on their networks. But for now, it’s hard to say what those phones will look like since no manufacturer is actually selling Android handsets yet.

While there’s been a lot of hype surrounding Android, the reality is that Android is simply an operating system just like Windows Mobile and Symbian, which are operating systems designed for smartphones. Operators also use dozens of other operating systems on their regular phones. This has turned into a bit of a problem for operators because it’s difficult for developers to come up with new applications and services quickly. Arun Sarin, CEO of Vodafone, the biggest cell phone company in the world, addressed this issue during his keynote at the CTIA show. And he urged the industry to work with fewer operating systems.

Google’s Android is one of many Linux-based operating systems designed for mobile phones. But because the software is backed by Google, it might actually have more legs than other versions of the software. Ultimately, Android’s success will be determined by what phone manufacturers and application developers do with the software. After all, consumers don’t buy operating systems. They buy cool devices that can do really cool things.

In my estimation, the GPL is by far the world’s best open-source license for business. If Palamida’s recent count of GPLv3-licensed projects is any indication, business in open source is very, very good:

Our database now contains over 2,000 projects that are using the GPL v3. At this rate the GPL v3 is being adopted by 1,000 projects every 4-5 months, and if the trend continues, the license will be used by 5,000 projects by the end of the year.

It will take time for GPLv3 to achieve the same level of trust that GPLv2 has enjoyed, but at this rate it may be happening sooner rather than later.

In the meantime, Palamida, a request: Could we get a count on the number of projects using the Affero GPL (AGPL)? It will be miniscule today but I’d be interested in following its growth.