How video games are becoming the next great North American spectator sport

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They’re all here to watch professional gaming teams battle it out in the North American regional finals in League of Legends, a PC action-strategy game that has exploded in the competitive video gaming scene over the past year. The tournament’s winning team will take home $40,000 and a trip to the World Championship in October, where the victor will net $2 million and international fame.

via How video games are becoming the next great North American spectator sport | Ars Technica.

In the last year or so, though, eSports has undergone a sudden exponential growth. The Major League Gaming Spring Championship in June (which featured tournaments in four high-profile games like Starcraft II and Mortal Kombat) attracted 4.7 million online viewers over three days in June, peaking at 437,000 concurrent viewers. That’s substantially more than all of their 2011 events combined. Over 2.2 million viewers tuned in to Ustream internet broadcast of the 2011 EVO fighting game championships from a packed ballroom in Las Vegas.

State of the NAS: private clouds and an app platform

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Just as significantly, the firmware that many companies are offering is now extensible. Most NAS boxes are Linux systems, and it’s often been possible to ssh in and install software on them. But several companies are currently offering something that looks suspiciously like an app store, where NAS users can do one-click installs of additional features.

via State of the NAS: private clouds and an app platform | Ars Technica.

The main challenge is that all these options add a degree of complexity to managing things, some on the NAS itself, and some in terms of integrating it with your router, software, etc. Finding the software and firmware with the right balance for you is probably more important than picking your hardware. Of the ones we’ve tried, we’re partial to Synology’s firmware (some of us exceedingly fond) because of its huge range of capabilities and frequent updates that add even more. But if you can, try a few

New Comet Discovered—May Become “One of Brightest in History”

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The comet is already remarkably bright, given how far it is from the sun, astronomer Raminder Singh Samra said. What’s more, 2012 S1 seems to be following the path of the Great Comet of 1680, considered one of the most spectacular ever seen from Earth.

“If it lives up to expectations, this comet may be one of the brightest in history,” said Samra, of the H.R. MacMillan Space Centre in Vancouver, Canada.

via New Comet Discovered—May Become “One of Brightest in History”.

Because 2012 S1 appears to be fairly large—possibly approaching two miles (three kilometers) wide—and will fly very close to the sun, astronomers have calculated that the comet may shine brighter, though not bigger, than the full moon in the evening sky.

Open Networking Foundation

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The Open Networking Foundation (ONF) is a non-profit consortium dedicated to the transformation of networking through the development and standardization of a unique architecture called Software-Defined Networking (SDN), which brings direct software programmability to networks worldwide. The mission of the Foundation is to commercialize and promote SDN and the underlying technologies as a disruptive approach to networking that will change how virtually every company with a network operates.

via Open Networking Foundation

FFmpeg Reaches Version 1.0

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The initial release of this open-source multi-media library came in December of 2000, but only now twelve years later has it hit the over-emphasized 1.0 milestone. Michael Niedermayer, the official FFmpeg maintainer since 2004, mentioned on the developers list that he uploaded the 1.0 release. However, he’s not updating the FFmpeg main page until after he’s got “a bit of sleep”, so the official announcement is likely still a couple of hours out.

via [Phoronix] FFmpeg Reaches Version 1.0.

Growing anger over Dotcom fiasco

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If provincial newspaper editorials are anything to go by, there is growing anger about the authorities’ handling of Kim Dotcom. The Waikato Times’ editorial entitled, NZ: 51st state of the US, is particularly worth reading. It says that the announcement of the illegal spying has ‘heightened suspicions that this country’s relationship with the United States has become one of servility rather than friendship’. The editorial’s conclusion is worth quoting at length: ‘Dotcom is wanted in the US to face nothing more threatening than breaches of copyright laws.

via Bryce Edwards: Political round-up: Growing anger over Dotcom fiasco – Politics – NZ Herald News.

She says ‘If the authorities are so supine in their relationship with their US counterparts and so eager to corral an alleged copyright criminal – allegations which Dotcom is strongly contesting – that they don’t check the basics before mounting their interception, what guarantees do other businesses have that this is a one-off affair?’

Why Your Phone, Cable & Internet Bills Cost So Much

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In his new book, The Fine Print: How Big Companies Use ‘Plain English’ to Rob You Blind, Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter David Cay Johnston highlights these astounding facts:

  • Americans pay four times as much as the French for an Internet triple-play package—phone, cable TV and Internet—at an average of $160 per month versus $38 per month.
  • The French get global free calling and worldwide live television. Their Internet is also 10 times faster at downloading information and 20 times faster uploading it.
  • America has gone from #1 in Internet speed (when we invented it) to 29th in the world and falling.
  • Bulgaria is among the countries with faster Internet service.
  • Americans pay 38 times as much as the Japanese for Internet data.

via Why Your Phone, Cable & Internet Bills Cost So Much | Daily Ticker – Yahoo! Finance.

Air Force sets first post in ambitious Space Fence project

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The Space Fence will use multiple S-band ground-based radars — the exact number will depend on operational performance and design considerations — that will permit detection, tracking and accurate measurement of orbiting space objects. The idea is that the Space Fence is going to be the most precise radar in the space situational surveillance network and the S-band capability will provide the highest accuracy in detecting even the smallest space objects, the Air Force stated. The Fence will have greater sensitivity, allowing it to detect, track and measure an object the size of a softball orbiting more than 1,200 miles in space. Because it is an uncued tracking system, it will provide evidence of satellite break-ups, collisions or unexpected maneuvers of satellites, the Air Force said.

via Layer 8: Air Force sets first post in ambitious Space Fence project.

iSNS: Technical overview of discovery in IP SANs

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The three main protocols for IP SANs are Fibre Channel over IP (FCIP), Internet Fibre Channel Protocol (iFCP), and Internet SCSI (iSCSI). As shown in Figure 1, the iSCSI, iFCP, and FCIP protocols support a serial SCSI-3 interface to the standard SCSI command set expected by the operating system and upper-layer applications. This allows conventional storage I/O to be performed over a high-performance gigabit transport. Serial SCSI-3 transactions are carried over TCP/IP, although only iFCP and iSCSI leverage native TCP/IP for each storage end device. Each IP storage protocol has unique requirements for discovery.

via iSNS: Technical overview of discovery in IP SANs.

Barnes & Noble’s Nook HD Tablets Face iPad, Kindle Fire HD

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The Nook HD features a 7-inch display (1440 x 900 resolution), a dual-core 1.3GHz processor, 1GB of RAM, expandable microSD storage, an 11.1-ounce weight, and advertised battery life of 10.5 hours of reading and 9 hours of video. In its publicity materials, Barnes & Noble didn’t exactly pull its punches against archrival Amazon, claiming the Nook HD is 20 percent lighter, a half-inch narrower, and armed with a sharper-resolution screen than the Kindle Fire HD.

via Barnes & Noble’s Nook HD Tablets Face iPad, Kindle Fire HD.