Gaming dulls brains

Gaming dulls brains

Too many video games make Jack a dull boy, according to Professor Aki Mori of the Nihom University College of Humanities and Sciences. Mori has completed a study of human beta brainwaves, indicators of liveliness tension in the prefrontal region of the brain, in 240 people aged between six and 29. He found that the beta waves in the non-game-playing sample were always stronger than the game-playing section. And those who spent between two and seven hours a day playing games exhibited extremely low, and often zero, levels of beta waves, even when they weren`t playing. Occasional gamers who played a few times a week had roughly equal alpha and beta waves, although the beta waves decreased rapidly once they started playing. [More]

The music arm of struggling media conglomerate Vivendi Universal says it will work with the company`s digital music operation to offer subscription music downloads. The company plans to provide about 1 000 of its albums through EMusic.com. The music on offer will include BB King, Jimmy Buffet, Joe Cocker and Stevie Wonder. The move could be good for consumers as well as the company because the back catalogue music is the stuff that "has trouble getting into the racks these days", the company says. The music is to be made available in MP3 format and subscribers will have the right to burn their music selections to CD or transfer them to portable players.

Cellphone users are still easily sold on fancy new features, according to a US study released yesterday. Nearly a third of the respondents to the survey, run by wireless research company Telephia, say they plan to upgrade their handsets within a year to get new features such as voice recognition, text messaging and downloadable ringtones. In a related study, Telephia and Harris Interactive found that 31% of cellphone subscribers plan to buy a new handset within a year, up from 27% a year ago. And as far as feature desirables go, more than 80% say a full address book application on their phones is a must-have, while more than 65% want voice recognition and short text messaging features.

The Open Source Initiative, a non-profit organisation pushing the "true" definition of open source software, has released the Open Source Initiative (OSI) certification mark. The mark, which looks a little like a keyhole, is meant to certify that the software it is attached to is truly open source software, which is probably a good idea, considering just about everyone in the software development business is pushing their own brand of "open source". The first organisation to jump on the OSI certificate bandwagon has been Python.org, developer of the Python programming language. [More]

Cashing in on the launch of the Itanium 2 processor yesterday, Microsoft has announced that it plans to ship Windows Advanced Server Limited Edition 1.2 to OEMs later this month. Advanced Server 1.2 is based on the same 64-bit code that is due to be shipped with the .NET server family and is optimised to take advantage of the enhancements of Intel`s Itanium 2 processor.

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