Gamification: Turning Work Into Play An Interview with David Helgason, CEO of Unity

Last month, h+ covered the work of Professor Byron Reeves, who champions the adaptation of gaming technologies for the workplace. Around the same time, David Helgason of Unity, a company that produces game development tools for the Web, mobile phones, and the Wii announced “The Year of Gamification” on the Unity blog (See Resources). For Helgason, gamification is the application of game technology and game design outside “gamespace” and the acceptance of games in non-gaming sectors. Usually, Helgason’s customers use his technology to create games like Zombieville for the iPhone. But lately, he’s noted an increase in customers using Unity to create employee training programs, among other things. h+ talked with Helgason to get a sense of the practical consequences of gamification.

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Fedor 11: Making a Way Out

Since i have been a fan of fedora since fedora 8 it has added its newest release fedora 11. Since fedora is one of the most user friendly and stable linux distributions avaliable fedora 11 seems to come handy.

As noted these are few of the best features in Fedora.

1) Fast Boot: Fedora developers' goal was to get users from turning on their PC to a GNOME login screen in 20-seconds or less.

2) Ext4 file system by default. Ext4 is the latest official Linux file system, and its biggest advantage is for servers.

3) Better graphics. Fedora 11 uses X.server 1.6 for graphics and that means you'll see an overall better and more stable display.

4) Synaptics touchpad improvements.

5) Fingerprint - Extensive work has been done to make fingerprint readers easy to use as an authentication mechanism.

6)Virt Improved Console - In Fedora 10 and earlier the virtual guest console is limited to a screen resolution of 800x600. In Fedora 11 the goal is to have the screen default to at least 1024x768 resolution out of the box.

So why not try it out for your self .................

Yarl Devi : The train of HOPE

The media of the last week was full of the launch of the Peace Train to Vavuniya on the 20th of May. Looking back at the protracted armed conflict in this country, the `moments of peace` or more accurately, the `the moments when war is absent` have been few and far between.

The Yarl Devi intercity express train was the train which connected the Jaffna peninsula with the rest of the country. And she had two sisters one moving to southern sriklanka and the other moving to hill country. This is the first advertisement published by the Srilanka Railway department is the following.



Last train moved to the jafna peninsula in 1987 and never returned until it was shipped to Colombo when the armed forces took control of the jaffna pennisula in 1996. There after the train opperated only to vavniya.

Both Tiger Air Crafts Downed

The confirmed sources says both LTTE aricrafts had been shot down. Sources say the first plane downed on the IRD building following anti-aircraft gunfire. over 40 persons, majority civilians were injured in the downing of the plane. One person later died. The other plane went down at Anamaduwa following F7 attack.

LTTE aircraft shot in the skies of colombo

Unconfirmed reports form Colombo indicates that one of the two aircraft's carried the air strike had been shot down by the sri lanka air force.

the following link provides an insight of the usage of light aircraft's by the LTTE. Click here to view the article.

LTTE Aircrafts attacks Colombo 20/02/2008

Latest reports form colombo Says that two tiger air crafts have bombed the city of Colombo. The location was a civilian settlement and the inland revenue department. 28 Civilians are reported injured and one civilian killed. The location of the explosion is in close proximity to the capital Colombo.

The anti aircraft guns was heard firing form the roof tops of the secured buildings. The attack
comes after few hours the defense ministry has announced that it had finally encircled the tigers last bastion.

"Two aircraft came and the engagement is still going on," said Lankan air force spokesman, Wing Commander Janaka Nanayakkara.

The LTTE aircraft was spotted over the skies in northwestern Mannar forcing the authorities in Colombo to activate air defenses system and shut down power supply in the national capital.

According to sources, the radar in Mannar detected the LTTE aircraft short while ago following which the air defense system in Colombo was activated.

Anti-aircraft guns were heard firing in the air in Colombo.

Power was cut off and searchlights pointed to the sky to detect any suspected LTTE aircraft, he said.

Troops in the north reported that two unidentified aircraft were heading towards Colombo, the sources said.

In the last few months the Tamil tigers of Elam (LTTE) conducted 9 air raids at Colombo and suburbs. The Srilankan Air force if equipped with Chinese made F7 interceptors and radars to counter the treat.

The latest reports indicated one aircraft was shot down by the air force.

More information will follow.

AMD Phenom II Overclocked to 6.5GHz - New World Record

The story sounds familiar: Intel hits a new milestone in nanometer architecture, and AMD waits a while to follow up. It happened with 65nm processors, and it's happening again now. Two days shy of a year since Intel launched Penryn, its first 45nm chip, AMD is finally ready to counter with a few 45nm CPUs of its own--Phenom II has finally arrived. But based on our hands-on testing of two Phenom II machines--the Dell XPS 625 and the Maingear Dash--the chip isn't quite as dominating as AMD would have you believe.

AMD Phenom II Explained

AMD is positioning Phenom II in between Intel's Core 2 Quad and Core i7 offerings. Phenom II chips are available in two versions, the X4 920 and the X4 940 Black Edition, which compete tit-for-tat against Intel's highest Core 2 Quad CPU frequencies at 2.8 and 3.0 GHz, respectively.

AMD Phenom II CPUAMD bumped the shared L3 cache of the Phenom II processors up from 2MB to 6MB, giving each CPU a total cache of 8MB. L3 cache serves as a shared memory space for the cores to draw from. Increasing the amount improves the CPU's ability to pull data from this faster memory space instead of having to issue slower requests to the system's main memory. The move puts Phenom II processors right in the middle of Intel's Core 2 Quad lineup for cache size, but the result is still short of the 12MB caches found on higher-end Core i7 chips.

Though limited overclocking of the 920-edition processors is available through AMD's OverDrive software, the company is tipping its hat toward the extreme-performance crowd with its Black Edition processors. These CPUs run multiplier-unlocked, which liquid-nitrogen-armed enthusiasts have been able to exploit to frequencies above 6 GHz, surpassing the world record for Intel Core i7 processors, which stands at 5.5 GHz. 

The new world Record

In the past, the AMD Phenom II has been overclocked to an extremely impressive 5 GHz. And while this was extremely impressive, it would seem that AMD wouldn’t want to be outdone.

AMD’s own Pete Hardman and Sami Makinen were able to overclock an AMD Phenom II to a blazing 6.5GHz, at an operating temperature of –230 degrees Celsius using liquid nitrogen and liquid helium as their cooling agents.

Should you be interested in seeing the whole process play out, be sure and check out the video here (and, as is usual with videos of this nature, prepare your ears for some awful trance music).