PlaySta­tion Plus
© 2010, Sony

Dur­ing E3 Sony announced that it will launch a new pre­mium sub­scrip­tion ser­vice called PlaySta­tion Plus on June 29th. The PlaySta­tion Net­work as we know it will still be free to join and all the cur­rent fea­tures will remain free. PlaySta­tion Plus expands on the ser­vice already in place and offers loads of con­tent to sub­scribers. Start­ing on June 29th Sony will offer a one year or 90-​​day mem­ber­ship from PlaySta­tion Store.

As an incen­tive they throw in a full copy of Lit­tleBig­Planet if you sign up for a one year mem­ber­ship between June 29th and August 3rd. The one year sub­scrip­tion will be avail­able for €49.99 while three months will cost you €14.99. What do we get for our money?

Sony says that mem­bers will get their hands on at least four games a month at no extra charge. That sounds good but the four games will be com­prised of one PSN game, two minis and one PS one clas­sics. Sub­scribers also get pre­mium avatars and dynamic themes each month as well as dis­counts on loads of PlaySta­tion Store con­tent. The dis­counts will change each month as well.

The pre­mium fea­ture also allows for full game tri­als. Mem­bers can down­load a full copy of a game and play it for a cer­tain amount of time as if they owned it. The time­frame depends on the game but you should have approx­i­mately one hour to check out the game. If you decide to buy the game, your progress and tro­phies will all be unlocked so there’s no need to start again.

The most use­ful perk, how­ever, seems to be what Sony calls auto­matic down­load. Sub­scribers can set their PS3 to auto­mat­i­cally receive game and firmware updates, and down­load game demos. All you have to do is to set the time when you want to receive them and your PS3 will wake up and down­load every­thing. That sounds really use­ful to me.

Check out PlaySta­tion Plus and see for your­self. You need at least ver­sion 3.40 of the PS3 sys­tem soft­ware to make it work. I think that’s just what I need. Per­haps updates will get a bit faster then.

An Israeli research team has devel­oped a machine algo­rithm that can rec­og­nize sar­casm. Tested on Ama­zon, SASI (Semi-​​supervised Algo­rithm for Sar­casm Iden­ti­fi­ca­tion) can detect sar­cas­tic sen­tences in prod­uct reviews with 77 per­cent pre­ci­sion. The results are even bet­ter on Twit­ter where SASI iden­ti­fied sar­casm with 94 per­cent pre­ci­sion. Basi­cally, the researchers had human anno­ta­tors tag­ging sen­tences for sar­casm. The team then iden­ti­fied cer­tain sar­cas­tic pat­terns and cre­ated a clas­si­fi­ca­tion algo­rithm that puts each state­ment into a sar­cas­tic class.

The algo­rithm were then trained and turned loose on an eval­u­a­tion seet. Con­sid­er­ing the over­all pre­ci­sion SASI scored, that’s not a bad shot at inter­pret­ing the human sense of humor. It almost imme­di­ately reminded me of a project called Stu­pid­Fil­ter. If they could incor­po­rate this algo­rithm … but then, they haven’t updated their web­site for nearly two years. Too bad. Any­way, if you really want to know more about how the algo­rithm works, you should check out this PDF (~93 kB).

So what’s the use of rec­og­niz­ing sar­cas­tic state­ments? The researchers believe that SASI could be instru­men­tal in gen­er­at­ing bet­ter per­son­al­ized con­tent and make bet­ter rec­om­men­da­tions to human users. They also think that the algo­rithm could ben­e­fit opinion-​​mining systems.

Ques­tion of the day: Who needs an iPad? I sure don’t.  I mean, what’s it gonna be? An eBook reader? Just a big­ger iPod Touch? It’s too big to take with you on a whim, it’s too energy hun­gry to use it as an eBook reader, and it sucks way too much to use the built-​​in vir­tual key­board. So what exactly does the iPad do? Well, I’m not here to tell you that.

I do like the dis­play, though, which is using liq­uid crys­tal dis­play tech­nol­ogy. The IPS LCD offers a very wide view­ing angle – up to 178 degrees – and bril­liant color. It uses a 4:3 aspect ratio with a 1.024 × 768 dis­play res­o­lu­tion. Ah, yes, I almost for­got the won­der­ful fingerprint-​​resistant oleo­pho­bic coat­ing which Apple had intro­duced in the iPhone 3G S. Any­way, even though the IPS panel is quite good, it’s still not enough to turn the iPad into a good eBook read­ing device.

LCD screens get washed out in bright sun­light. Try to turn on the back­light to improve con­trast and you’re sure to drain the bat­ter­ies much faster than the LCD already does.  Also, star­ing into a light source only pro­duces more strain on the eye than read­ing words by reflected light.

Apple has already formed a con­tent part­ner­ship with Hachette, Harper Collins, Macmil­lan, Pen­guin, and Simon and Schus­ter to offer ini­tial eBooks in its iBooks store – in the U. S. only, of course. What a waste. Just as well that I dis­cov­ered an inter­est­ing sur­vey today. Just look at the chart. Do I see some light at the end of the tunnel?

In the movie Minor­ity Report, based on the short story The Minor­ity Report by Philip K. Dick, a spe­cial­ized police depart­ment appre­hends crim­i­nals before they even break the law. Three psy­chics called “pre­cogs”, mutated humans with pre­cog­ni­tion abil­i­ties, gen­er­ate future visions which allow the spe­cial police unit “Pre­crime” to take the future crim­i­nals into cus­tody even before they them­selves know that they will break the law. As such the movie heav­ily touches the philo­sophic ques­tions sur­round­ing fore­knowl­edge and free will vs. deter­min­ism.

Now, sci­en­tists at the Uni­ver­sity of Darm­stadt have devel­oped a sim­i­lar sys­tem called DyR­iAS. This acronym stands for Dynamis­che Risiko Analyse Sys­tem (Dynamic Risk Anal­y­sis System). Allegedly, the soft­ware could have accu­rately pre­dicted every known ram­page in the US or Ger­many, accord­ing to Dr. Jens Hoff­man. As far as I under­stand, the pro­gram should be used by the police, school psy­chol­o­gists, teach­ers and sim­i­lar per­son­nel. The user has to anser ques­tions and the pro­gram will pro­vide the user with a pro­file. There are 32 known fac­tors that indi­cate a higher risk of a per­son going postal and DyR­iAS will check the answers against these factors.

Since March 2009 the sys­tem is being tested in a few schools in Ger­many. Addi­tion­ally, it is being tested by the Swiss police in Zurich. There are plans for fur­ther ver­sions of the pro­gram, espe­cially for mar­i­tal vio­lence and stalk­ing. Accord­ing to Dr. Hoff­man, this pro­gram is only intended for use with con­spic­uos per­sons. DyR­iAS can only be fed with anonymized data, no per­sonal data will be stored.

Sounds nice, doesn’t it? I admit to being a pes­simist so I don’t have any qualms what­so­ever to pre­dict­ing that after this piece of soft­ware has been estab­lished in our soci­ety it will be improved and it will get used in more sit­u­a­tions. Peo­ple will be tested when apply­ing for a new job, for instance. Sure, every­thing is fine, isn’t it? Nei­ther of us wants wo work with a sociopath who might go postal at any moment. I can appre­ci­ate that thought. But what if you’re not totally in the clear? Will you be flagged as a poten­tial risk? What’s more impor­tant: Will it stick? I don’t believe in data pri­vacy. It’s nice to have, it’s worth to fight for, but it is, ulti­mately, not to be taken for granted. Peo­ple still stick to the thought that knowl­edge is power with­out real­is­ing that knowl­edge is only pow­er­ful if you know why that is.

Any­way, never mind. DyR­iAS isn’t used for appre­hend­ing a poten­tial crim­i­nal. Yet.

Well, this topic came up at work today – twice – so I thought it’s about time to write a few lines about it. Puh, where do I begin? How about this: Don’t even think about a plasma TV if you intend to buy a model with a size of less than 42 inches. It’s sim­ply not worth it. Why? Because man­u­fac­tur­ers haven’t yet fig­ured out how to cram mil­lions of pix­els on a smaller dis­play. There’s no way you’re going to enjoy HDTV on a screen with so few pix­els. Because LCD and plasma TVs are very dif­fer­ent in the way they deliver the image to the viewer, the same restric­tion doesn’t apply to LCD TVs.

So, if you want to buy a 43” or larger flat panel HDTV, there are quite a few things to con­sider. First, there’s the color. A plasma dis­play cov­ers a far greater area of the vis­i­ble light spec­trum and deliv­ers more dynamic col­ors than a LCD does. Plus, a plasma dis­play has supe­rior black lev­els. Good black lev­els are impor­tant to pro­vide a sense of depth. As far as the con­trast and the black lev­els are con­cerned, the plasma is supe­rior. Color accu­racy is not so eas­ily deter­mined, though. That depends on room light, man­u­fac­turer and model, but as a rule you can assume that a plasma will pre­vail in a room with nor­mal or lower light­ing. LCDs should per­form bet­ter in brightly lit rooms. (That hap­pens because plasma TVs have a glass sur­face where a mir­ror effect can take place when extremely bright light shines on it.) Then again, your liv­ing room shouldn’t be as brightly lit as it is the case with many show-​​rooms. All in all, the plasma has the advantage.

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Dur­ing my recent vaca­tion I was asked to con­fig­ure the wire­less LAN of a friend. I com­plied and did as I was asked. At the same time I thought I’d share a few of the most basic things with you. Since the most com­monly used routers on the mar­ket today are 802.11g/802.11 draft-​​n routers, I will focus on them. Most of the fol­low­ing infor­ma­tion should be applic­a­ble to older mod­els (802.11b or 802.11a routers) as well, pro­vided the man­u­fac­turer has made the appro­pri­ate firmware avail­able. That said, let’s get started.

First thing you should do is to look for a firmware update, espe­cially if you own an older model. After hav­ing installed the lat­est firmware, you should change your default router pass­word which is almost always some­thing along the lines of “admin”, “pass­word”, “changeme”, “pub­lic”, “pri­vate”, or “1234″. A more com­pre­hen­sive list of default router pass­words can be found at Default Router Pass­words. Addi­tion­ally, most routers come pre-​​configured with an IP address of 192.168.x.y, where x stands for “0″, “1″, “2″, “8″, “11″, or “15″, and y mostly stands for “1″ or “2″. Note that some routers have an IP address of 10.0.0.z where z often enough stands for “1″ or “2″. A strong pass­word doesn’t really pro­tect your net­work but it should ensure that nobody will mess with your settings.

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