Going Green With New Video Game Cases
Dec/09BC
Source:IGN
Those who recently purchased some of this holiday’s biggest titles for Xbox 360, such as Left 4 Dead 2 and Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2, probably noticed something a little different about their game cases. The circular-style holes behind game discs and instruction manuals are not production errors. It’s a new effort by companies to become more environmentally friendly by reducing excess packaging materials.
Hong Kong-based case manufacturer Viva Group recently rolled style the new style of casing dubbed the ‘Eco-Box’ which significantly reduces CO2 production emissions. The Eco-Box is already being used by movie studios for DVDs, but now it has begun appearing in the videogames industry.
recently spoke with Kyle Sheppard, Manager of Business Development at Viva. He says this initiative to reduce packaging was actually driven by retailers and not game publishers.
“We have had success over the past two years converting the movie studios to the Eco-Box on a large scale and are now working with the various gaming platforms and game publishers on a similar transition for the games market,” Sheppard told IGN. “Retailers are demanding that the entertainment industry and product manufacturers reduce or eliminate the large and wasteful packaging that has become the standard over the last twenty years.’
“Wal-Mart even introduced a packaging scorecard with certain criteria that must be met, including reducing all packaging by 5% by 2013,” Sheppard added. “The Eco-Box already exceeds this goal for the entertainment industry.”
Read more…
Spin-based electronics gets boost
Nov/09BC
Source: BBC News
BBC - The next generation of computers may make use of the “spin” of electrons instead of their charge. Spintronics relies on manipulating these spins to make them capable of carrying data. The technique has been shown in a number of materials at low temperatures before.
But researchers writing in Nature have made use of these “spin-polarised” electrons in silicon at room temperature for the first time. The result could lead to computers that require far less power than conventional ones.
The fact that the effect has been demonstrated in silicon - the material that already underpins the computer industry - means that devices exploiting it could be made on a commercial scale more easily.
The problem with silicon is that, as the individual features on silicon chips get smaller and smaller, they require more and more power to move the charged electrons around to represent 0s and 1s of binary code.
That rise in power also means that future chips will run into problems with heating.
Read More…
“Unfriend” named word of 2009
Nov/09BC
Source: Yahoo!
“Unfriend” has been named the word of the year by the New Oxford American Dictionary, chosen from a list of finalists with a tech-savvy bent.
Unfriend was defined as a verb that means to remove someone as a “friend” on a social networking site such as Facebook.
“It has both currency and potential longevity,” said Christine Lindberg, senior lexicographer for Oxford’s U.S. dictionary program, in a statement.
“In the online social networking context, its meaning is understood, so its adoption as a modern verb form makes this an interesting choice for Word of the Year.”
Other words deemed finalists for 2009 by the dictionary’s publisher, Britain’s Oxford University Press, came from other technological trends, the economy, and political and current affairs.
In technology, there was “hashtag,” which is the hash sign added to a word or phrase that lets Twitter users search for tweets similarly tagged; “intexticated” for when people are distracted by texting while driving, and “sexting,” which is the sending of sexually explicit SMSes and pictures by cellphone.
