Month: February 2016

With the news that Remedy Entertainment's upcoming Xbox One and PC exclusive Quantum Break would only be be available for Windows 10, and only run under DirectX 12, there's been something of an uproar in the PC gaming community. Along with lamenting the cessation of support for the likes of Windows 7, of course—a sadly inevitable decision given Microsoft's aggressive push of its latest OS—there's also some incredibly steep recommended system requirements, which call for a Core i7, Nvidia GTX 980 Ti or AMD Fury X, and 16GB of system memory.

But the biggest problem stems from Microsoft's distribution method of choice: the Windows Store. The Windows Store is Microsoft's own platform for selling apps and games directly to consumers, which some may remember Valve's Gabe Newell calling "a catastrophe for everyone in the PC space" when it debuted with Windows 8 back in 2012. Steam OS arrived just a year later. Games and apps sold through the Windows Store differ from those sold on the likes of Steam and GOG in that they're built as a Universal Windows Platform (UWP) app, rather than as a standard desktop app.

That's fine for downloading the likes of Candy Crush, Minecraft: Pocket Edition, and Dropbox—even if the latter has some issues—but UWP apps have some limitations that dramatically affect top-tier PC games. Square Enix's Rise of the Tomb Raider recently debuted on PC both on Steam and on the Windows Store. Those that forked over for the Windows Store version were disappointed to find a host of limitations, including not being able to turn v-sync off, no SLI or Crossfire support, and no .exe file that can be loaded into Steam for use with its overlays or Big Picture mode.

(credit: Greenpeace)

The European Commission has published details of its transatlantic "Privacy Shield" agreement, which is designed to ensure that personal information of citizens is protected to EU standards when it is sent to the US—even though it would appear that the NSA will continue to carry out bulk collection of data under the new pact.

The new deal replaces the earlier Safe Harbour framework, which was struck down by the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) following a complaint by privacy activist Max Schrems.

An accompanying Privacy Shield FAQ released by Brussels' officials explained that there are four main elements. According to the commission, the new agreement will "contain effective supervision mechanisms to ensure that companies respect their obligations, including sanctions or exclusion if they do not comply."

HoloLens Development Edition. (credit: Microsoft)

If you want to get your hands on Microsoft's holographic headset, the company is now taking pre-orders for the HoloLens Development Edition. Hardware will be shipping to the US and Canada on March 30, just scraping in to Microsoft's first-quarter deadline. As previously announced, the hardware will cost $3,000.

As pictured, the development kit appears to be relatively barebones, containing the HoloLens, a charger, the Bluetooth 4.1 Clicker that leaked earlier this week, a carrying case, a microfiber cloth, and replacement nose pieces. While the HoloLens itself is fully self-contained, running wirelessly and independently, developing HoloLens software will require a PC that can run Windows 10 and Visual Studio 2015.

Microsoft is being a little more forthcoming with some of the HoloLens hardware specs, though there are some oddities in there. We learned last year that the system was x86 powered with 2GB RAM, 802.11ac, and a 60Hz refresh rate. That hasn't changed, but now we have some more detail, particularly around its sensors. The headset is chock full of cameras—four to "understand" the environment, one to build depth maps of the world, and a 2MP camera for photography and video capture. It also incorporates four microphones, an ambient light sensor, and an inertial measurement unit that combines accelerometers and gyroscopes to detect movement.

A composite face averaged from nine men. (credit: flickr user: Jun'ichiro Seyama)

People often make assumptions about each other’s character traits based on facial features. While, to a limited extent, it seems like we can actually glean some reliable info about personality traits from someone’s face, we can also add a heaping pile of bias on top of that too. A paper in PLOS One explores one of these biases: the more attractive we think a person is, the more we’re inclined to think they’re intelligent. This “attractiveness halo” means that we’re likely to overestimate the intelligence of people we find attractive.

One of the complications in assessing something like this is that people vary in what they believe “intelligence” is. This is an entirely separate question from what any scientific consensus actually says about the concept of intelligence and how we measure it. Regardless of what science says, people will still have their own understanding of what the idea means, believing that intelligence is the result of things like a “growth mindset,” of conscientiousness, or of genetics.

This makes it a bit difficult to do an experiment. These different definitions of intelligence, the authors write, suggest that people will consider different things in a face to signal intelligence, leading to “less accurate perceptions of intelligence.” So just asking for people to rate the intelligence of a series of faces would be unlikely to identify our perceptions with a huge amount of accuracy. To account for this, the researchers decided to also ask about other ratings that could capture various beliefs about intelligence: conscientiousness, and academic performance.