Nintendo 3DS bothers Brits about blinkers Research suggests over a third of Brits are concerned about the effect Nintendo's upcoming auto-stereoscopic handheld games console, the 3DS, will have on their eyes. Shopping website VoucherCodes.co.uk says it questioned 3000 UK adults and found 37 per cent of them were worried about the health alert Nintendo issued in …
"Shopping website Voucher Codes says it questioned 3000 UK adults and found 37 per cent of them were worried about the health alert Nintendo issued in January this year."
I strongly doubt that a third of Brits even knows about the coming of the 3DS, let alone have heard of a health warning from Nintendo.
There's lies, damned lies and statistics.
3D does tax the eyes more than 2D. I expect autostereoscopic systems even more so since you must be positioned exactly or suffer double vision. The 3DS perhaps even more so because the screen is so small and must be held exactly right. I wouldn't be surprised if many people dial the 3D down to its lowest setting or turn it off entirely. At that point, what was the point of the thing again?
... to provide a mechanism to generate more sales, a significant proportion of which will come courtesy of the "must have new shiny shiny, bye bye old(ish) shiny shiny" brigade. And to stymie the efforts of R4DS et al (or whatever the kids are using to play "homebrew" these days). You didn't think it was all about jumping on latest ill-fated iteration (mark my words) of the 3D fad bandwagon, did you? Ah the innocence of yoof.
That kind of survey is only ever done to get the name of the company who commissioned it into the news.
Here's a press release about a health concern. On a scale of 1 to 5, how much does this press release about a health concern, concern you?
1) Not at all concerned.
2)
3) Somewhat concerned
4)
5) Very concerned
Most people will of course, pick a response somewhere in the middle and all responses >1 can be used to describe the person as "concerned"
Then of course, there's the relevance of who they surveyed ("3000 adults" isn't exactly clear).... If it's 3000 parents of young kids (the target of Nintendo's advisory) then the result is going to be skewed more in the direction of 'concerned' than if they asked 3000 parents of teenagers.
Crappy question, crappy survey, cheap publicity... Simples!
How do those people feel about the current £196.99 now currently on Amazon: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Nintendo-Handheld-Console-Cosmos-Black/dp/B004ISLDV0
Under £200 is a little more tempting...but that may be due to them starting the price at £250 rather than think it is actually work £197.
I tested the 3DS in Japan last week. Even after a couple of minutes I was wanting to turn the 3D effect off because my eyes were feeling so tired. Plus as someone else said, holding it in an exact position becomes a pain and invariable you'll move it now and then and get a nice painful double vision. Moving it up and down is pretty much okay but move it more than 1cm left or right and you'll get a harsh shock to your eyes.
As for the price of the games, I don't think anyone really buys them, do they? I thought 98% of DS owners used an R4 (or similar) cart and downloaded the games?
35 quid for a game that can (usually) be completed in an hour. No thanks
You sound like you have no idea what you're talking about. Which DS games can be completed in an hour?
If 98% of owners are bootlegging all their games then why do Nintendo bother? I suspect the figure is quite a lot smaller than that, it wouldn't be worth the effort otherwise, would it?
I just spent £50 on two copies of pokemon (black for me, white for the boy) and I expect, based on previous games, to get at least 40 hours each out of them. More likely, as I like to just chill and nose around a bit, I'll get closer to 80 hours out of mine. So at around 50p an hour that's not a bad rate.
A 95p mobile game might last you an hour, but I don't have any DS games I have that can be completed in anything like that time.
Curious about the history of home computing both west and east of the iron curtain? Berlin's ComputerSpieleMuseum in Germany's capital has you covered.
Museum director Matthias Oborski was The Register's guide around the ground floor site of the museum, which is located among the Soviet buildings of Berlin's Karl-Marx-Allee (a five-minute metro ride from Alexanderplatz, or 25-minute walk if you want to take in the brutalist architecture).
After the reception, with its impressive Soviet-era mosaic still in-situ behind the cheerful staff, there is a temporary exhibition celebrating the role of food in computer games. Oborski winced a little at the word "temporary" – it had been set up in 2019 and was still in place due, mainly, to the events of the last few years.
What are your peers doing to stave off burnout? Research from Stack Overflow suggests about half of developers are still spending their breaks in front of a screen.
The Q&A programming resource surveyed 800 devs, and found most of the top five things they do when they need a break involve screens: listening to music (46 percent), visiting Stack Overflow (41 percent), browsing social media (37 percent), and watching videos (36 percent).
Actually talking with fellow humans did not make the top five, and 4 percent of respondents had some other outlet for stress (possibly angrily banging some really terse comments into the source).
Special report AI can study chemical molecules in ways scientists can't comprehend, automatically predicting complex protein structures and designing new drugs, despite having no real understanding of science.
The power to design new drugs at scale is no longer limited to Big Pharma. Startups armed with the right algorithms, data, and compute can invent tens of thousands of molecules in just a few hours. New machine learning architectures, including transformers, are automating parts of the design process, helping scientists develop new drugs for difficult diseases like Alzheimer's, cancer, or rare genetic conditions.
In 2017, researchers at Google came up with a method to build increasingly bigger and more powerful neural networks. Today, transformer-based models are behind some of the largest AI systems and typically learn patterns from vast amounts of text. They're versatile and can process different forms of language from code to ancient scripts scribbled thousands of years ago.
AI algorithms can predict whether a patient will develop pancreatic cancer years before an official diagnosis, or so this research suggests.
Tens of thousands of people in the US are diagnosed with pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma – the most common type of pancreatic cancer – every year. Less than 10 percent of patients live more than five years after diagnosis.
Detecting the disease earlier could boost survival rates by up to 50 percent, it is believed. But doctors don't right now have any methods that screen patients for early signs of pancreatic cancer. Now, a team of researchers led by Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, a top non-profit hospital based in Los Angeles, California, believe AI could be up to the task.
After a nine month pause, Beijing has finally granted new video game licenses to 45 titles.
The approvals arrived on Monday through China's National Press and Publication Administration (NPPA). The newly approved titles hail from video game makers Lilith Games, Baidu, XD, and Seasun Entertainment – but curiously not Chinese gaming giants NetEase nor Tencent.
China uniquely requires video game publishers to secure regulatory approval ahead of release, and NPPA suddenly ceased granting approvals back in July 2021. Prior to the halt, between 80 and 100 video games were approved monthly. The last batch, released in July, contained 87 titles.
Deep-learning algorithms have shown themselves equal to humans in detecting patients at high-risk of developing Type-2 diabetes by analyzing CT scans of their pancreases, according to a research paper published on Tuesday.
Type-2 diabetes is estimated to affect 11.3 percent of the US population, or at least 37 million people. Type-2 diabetes can lead to issues with circulatory, nervous, and immune systems, increasing the risk of heart disease and strokes.
Those with the initial form, prediabetes, can repair their body's insulin resistance, so they don't develop the full-blown condition, if they change their diets and exercise habits. American health officials reckon 38 percent of the US adult population, some 96 million people, have prediabetes.
AI algorithms designed to generate therapeutic drugs can be easily repurposed to invent lethal biochemical weapons, a US startup has warned.
Experts have sounded alarm bells over the potential for machine-learning systems to be used for good and bad. Computer-vision tools can create digital art or deepfakes. Language models can produce poetry or toxic misinformation.
Now, Collaboration Pharmaceuticals, a company based in North Carolina, has shown how AI algorithms used in drug design can be rejigged to create biochemical weapons.
Fujitsu has been hailed as the world's leading company by the International Headache Society's World Patient Support Association.
So yeah, it turns out there's actually an International Headache Society. But that's not even the big news.
An announcement on Fujitsu Japan’s web site explains that the company surveyed staff and found 85 per cent were aware of headaches or migraines, but 84 per cent had never had them treated. Internal calculations found the total cost of headaches was $22.5 million a year, or $866 per worker with headaches and $2,250 for migraine sufferers.
Viral online puzzle game Wordle has been acquired by The New York Times Company (NYTCo), publisher of The New York Times.
The game requires players to guess a five-letter word within six turns – a task made easier by Wordle offering clues that players have chosen letters used in the word, and whether or not they are in the right position. Gameplay is similar to codebreaking pegboard game Mastermind, but with 26 different "pegs" – and of course the answer has to be an English word. A single puzzle is offered daily.
Wordle was created by a sole developer, Josh Wardle, as a lockdown distraction for his partner. It took off when Wardle added a feature allowing players to share their results, and is now thought to have millions of daily users – up from mere thousands in October 2021.
A software upgrade will disable a "feature" that allows the touchscreen on Tesla cars to play video games - even while the vehicles are in motion- after the USA's National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) investigated a complaint about the tech.
The feature, called "Passenger Play", has been available since 2020 in the Tesla Model 3, S, X, and Y. As the name implies, it was aimed at passengers. Prior to 2020, occupants of the car could only play games while the vehicle was in park.
“Following the opening of a preliminary evaluation of Tesla’s ‘Passenger Play,’ Tesla informed the agency that it is changing the functionality of this feature. In a new software update, “Passenger Play” will now be locked and unusable when the vehicle is in motion,” said a statement from NHTSA.
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