London ambulances on second try with CommandPoint 999 software
The London Ambulance Service has quietly phased in its CommandPoint 999 dispatch system.
The service began using the package, built by US defence giant Northrop Grumman, at 3am on 27 March. The introduction follows three live tests in the past few weeks and decommissioning of the previous in-house ambulance dispatch software.
A LAS spokesperson told The Reg that so far there have been no reported hiccups, although the new tech is regularly monitored for problems.
The Big Smoke's service believes lessons have been learned from the first abortive attempt to deploy CommandPoint in June 2011 and that problems have been corrected. Read more...
Amazon Web Services updates Linux implementation
Amazon Web Services has upgraded the Linux image that runs in its cloud to include newer versions of Tomcat, MySQL, and Python, while at the same time allowing enterprises to stay on older versions, the company said in a blog post on Wednesday.
Allowing enterprises to run different versions of applications and programming languages has been one of the major goals with version 2012.03 of the Amazon Linux AMI (Amazon Machine Image). It allows code that relies on different versions to migrate from older AMIs with minimal changes, according to Amazon. Read more...
Distributors refuse to sell Raspberry Pi without CE mark
Have you been waiting patiently for your Raspberry Pi to turn up in the post? Me too. I was expecting to get it late last week, but a check on my order status shows it is on back order. But the reason for the delay isn’t just high demand anymore. The distributors of the tiny PC have thrown another problem into the mix: they are refusing to sell the device until it receives CE compliance. Read more...
Unreal game engine licensed to US government
The Unreal Engine powers numerous top-tier games like Mass Effect 3, Batman: Arkham City, and the Gears of War series. It appears that the newest Unreal Engine is going to be making an appearance in some unexpected places; specifically the US government. No, the folks in Washington haven’t been passing Xboxes around — get ready for Unreal-based simulations designed by the FBI, US Army, and other government agencies. Read more...
Microsoft joins Google in the race to speed up the web
The Internet Engineering Task Force is meeting this week to discuss the future of the internet, and ways to make it faster and more responsive. If Microsoft has anything to say about it, that future will involve the replacement of the familiar HTTP standard with something much faster.
The existing HTTP (hypertext transfer protocol) is the computer language by which computers communicate with each other on the web. It's been the workhorse of the internet for over 15 years, but with the internet having evolved so much since, it's generally agreed by tech experts that a more modern, faster approach is needed — an HTTP 2.0, if you will. Read more...
Amazon CEO wants to raise sunken Apollo 11 engines
For more than four decades, the powerful engines that helped boost the Apollo 11 mission to the moon have rested in the Atlantic. Now Internet billionaire and space enthusiast Jeff Bezos wants to raise at least one of them to the surface.
An undersea expedition spearheaded by Bezos used sonar to find what he said were the F-1 engines located 14,000 feet deep. In an online announcement Wednesday, the Amazon.com CEO and founder said he is drawing up plans to recover the sunken engines, part of the mighty Saturn V rocket that launched Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins on their moon mission.
The five engines, which produced nearly 7.7 million pounds of thrust, dropped into the sea as planned minutes after liftoff in 1969. Four days later, Armstrong and Aldrin walked on the moon. Read more...
Developers Are Divided Over Adobe’s Plan to Take Revenue Share For Higher-End Flash Games
Developers are at odds over Adobe’s plan to charge a 9 percent revenue share for higher-end Flash games that make more than $50,000 in revenues.
So today, Adobe announced a new set of features for developers who create very graphics-heavy games with the launch of Flash Player 11.2. It also unveiled a partnership with Unity Technologies, the Sequoia-backed company with a popular gaming engine that powers titles like Mika Mobile’s Battleheart.
This could bump up the overall quality of browser-based games, considering that the new version of Flash has powers to tap into hardware for rendering 3-D graphics. Read more...
Duqu malware resurfaces after four-month holiday
Duqu, the malware that has been compared to 2010's notorious Stuxnet, is back, security researchers said today.
After a several-month sabbatical, the Duqu makers recompiled one of the Trojan's components in late February, said Liam O Murchu, manager of operations at Symantec's security response team.
The system driver, which is installed by the malware's dropper agent, is responsible for decrypting the rest of the already-downloaded package, then loading those pieces into the PC's memory.
Symantec has captured a single sample of the driver, which was compiled Feb. 23, 2012. Before that, the last time the Duqu gang updated the driver was Oct. 17, 2011. Read more...
Smartphone growth set to double the Asia-Pacific games market to $30bn by 2016
Asia Pacific’s growing smartphone market is tipped to drive the region’s digital gaming industry to more than double its current value by 2016, according to new research from Ovum.
The research firm is predicting that the industry’s value in Asia Pacific will be worth more than $30 billion in 2016, thanks to annual grow of 18 percent, which is “a healthy” 2 percent more than the worldwide average.
Ovum’s figures estimate that, by 2016, Asia Pacific will have more than 1 billion gamers, of which close to 900 million will play games on a mobile device, either solely, or in addition to a PC. Read more...