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Top Console Usage (by percent of minutes played)
PlayStation 2 (30.2 percent)
Xbox 360 (18.3 percent)
Wii (13.5 percent)
Xbox (9.1 percent)
PlayStation 3 (7.7 percent)
GameCube (4.4 percent)
Other (16.9 percent)

(Credit:
Sony)

Admittedly, these PS2 numbers are surprising and very impressive. The PS3 is still struggling against the Wii and Xbox, and this data certainly doesn’t let the PS3 off the hook, but it does show that there might be a long-tail effect in place for console games.

The
PlayStation 2 received 30.2 percent of all console-gaming minutes in 2008 (January to October), according to the Nielsen Media Research.

That statistic is a bit surprising, until you consider that Sony has sold more than 140 million PS2s since its launch. With the largest footprint, the PS2 should have the largest usage base.

Even more impressive data from Nielsen is the fact that World of Warcraft, or WoW, players average 671 minutes (more than 11 hours) per week. In any given minute, “almost 1 percent (0.723 percent) of all PC gamers are playing WoW.”

Ballmer dismisses Google Android

Feature films coming to YouTube

FCC investigates cable’s channel drops, price hikes

That, and other headlines of the day, on the CNET News Daily Podcast.

Jilted Yang desperate to deal?

Former Intel worker faces more charges in alleged trade secrets theft

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Today’s stories:

Apple adding wireless podcast downloads to iPhone?

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YouTube tweaks its embedded video player

Obama names tech execs to transition team

As you’ve likely heard, Google decided Wednesday to pull the plug on a search-ad partnership with Yahoo due to antitrust concerns. Now it appears Yahoo’s jilted CEO Jerry Yang is leaving the door open for an old suitor: Microsoft. CNET News reporter Stephen Shankland assesses the chances that we’ll see Microhoo negotiations resurrected.

The Superior Court judge in Norwich on Friday tossed out the charges that she had endangered children by intentionally causing “pop-up” pornography to display on her computer and ordered a new trial after computer forensics experts presented evidence about the spyware. Judge Hillary B. Strackbein said the conviction was based on “erroneous” and “false information.”

Julie Amero, 41, agreed to plead guilty to a misdemeanor count of disorderly conduct, pay a $100 fine, and surrendered her teaching license, according to the Hartford Courant. The ordeal left her hospitalized for stress and heart problems, the report said.

(Via Brian Krebs’ Security Fix blog at The Washington Post.)

The case serves as an important lesson for everyone–use antivirus, antispyware, and other security software and update it regularly.

“Regan’s pronouncement of his certainty of her guilt speaks to his ignorance and unwillingness to learn the facts of this case, and the facts of what PC viruses can do to a computer and, in some cases, a life,” Alex Eckelberry, chief executive of security firm Sunbelt Software, wrote on The Julie Blog, a site spawned by the Amero case and which is focused on seeking fairness in the intersection of law and technology.

The security expert who led a team of forensic volunteers in the case is outraged that officials are dismissing the evidence about the dangers of spyware.

A Connecticut substitute teacher arrested four years ago for allegedly showing students porn on a classroom computer has been cleared of the felony charges–for now–after experts pointed the finger at spyware.

Amero suffered because the school system failed to keep the computer updated with software to block the pornography, experts said.

“All of our forensic investigators felt it was a complete miscarriage. It was clear she was absolutely innocent,” he told the Hartford Courant. “The mistakes and misinformation that occurred in that courtroom were astounding.”

Despite the expert evidence, and the fact that state prosecutors never conducted a forensic examination of the hard drive, New London County State’s Attorney Michael Regan said he remained convinced of Amero’s guilt and was prepared to take the case to trial again.

Swedish video start-up, Bambuser, launched an updated site design Tuesday that now allows users to stream videos from mobile phones and syndicate those videos across the Internet. According to the company, the most important update to its service is the better interface, which it believes will keep more users on the site.

Online marketing firm, Hubspot, released a report Tuesday that details the “State of the Twittersphere” for the fourth quarter of 2008. According to the report, 70 percent of all Twitter users joined during 2008 and approximately 5,000 to 10,000 new accounts are opened each day. Thirty-five percent of Twitter users have ten or fewer followers and just 9 percent of all Twitter users don’t follow anyone. The full report is available on Hubspot’s research page.

Custom slideshow service, Animoto, announced Tuesday that it has brought its offering to the iPhone. According to the company, users can now create their own Animoto videos directly on the iPhone by accessing the iPhone’s images. Animoto for the iPhone currently allows users to upload eight to 16 photos and pick a song to create the video. Once complete, users can view the video on their iPhone or email it to friends. The free app is available now in the iTunes App Store.

Free eBook service Project Gutenberg, announced Tuesday that it has introduced a mobile version of its hosted content. Dubbed Project Gutenberg Mobile Edition, the company’s software converts the service’s files into a format that is easily read on mobile displays. The app is based on Java, so it won’t work with the
iPhone.

HP announced its first App Store application Monday, which helps users easily print photos from their iPhone’s image library when within range of a wireless network and HP printer. Dubbed iPrint Photo, the app allows users to print 4 x 6 photos to HP Inkjet printers directly from an iPhone and is fully compatible with Apple’s zero-configuration service, Bonjour. iPrint Photo is free and available now in the App store.

As reported in the latest issue of the journal Science, Adam autonomously hypothesized that certain genes in the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae code for enzymes that catalyze some of the microorganism’s biochemical reactions. The yeast is noteworthy, as scientists use it to model more complex life systems.

Adam (shown in background) may not look like its two colleagues in the white coats, but it’s starting to act like them.

Adam is a still a prototype, but King’s team–which is funded by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council–says they believe their next robot, Eve (don’t leave those two in the lab alone together) holds promise for scientists searching for new drugs to combat diseases such as malaria and schistosomiasis, an infection caused by a type of parasitic worm in the tropics.

While we’ve become accustomed to robots built to repeat a given task many times over, scientists at Aberystwyth University in Wales and the U.K’s University of Cambridge designed Adam to take a more human approach to scientific inquiry. And while it may not win the Nobel Prize for physics just yet, Adam appears to be doing impressively well for a young scientist, carrying out scientific research automatically, without the need for further human intervention.

(Credit:
Aberystwyth University)

Earlier this week, we told you about a robot that could be controlled by human thought alone. Now comes news of a bot that doesn’t need to bother with any human thought at all, thank you very much. It’s a “robot scientist” that researchers believe to be the first machine to independently come up with new scientific findings. Aptly, the bot is named Adam.

“This is one of the first systems to get (artificial intelligence) to try and control laboratory automation,” Ross King, a professor of computer science who led the research at Aberystwyth University, told Live Science. Current robots, he noted, “tend to do one thing or a sequence of things. The complexity of Adam is that it has cycles.”

Adam then devised experiments to test its prediction, ran the experiments using laboratory robotics, interpreted the results, and used those findings to revise its original hypothesis and test it out further. The researchers used their own separate experiments to confirm that Adam’s hypotheses were both novel and correct–all the while probably wondering how soon they’d become obsolete.

“Ultimately,” King said, “we hope to have teams of human and robot scientists working together in laboratories.”

(Credit:
Daniel Terdiman/CNET News)

The rest of the time, the service seemed to be working mainly as it should, though from time to time, the search page would only partially load.

The site Pingdom.com reported earlier Wednesday morning that Wikia Search’s problems had been happening since Monday, and were occurring about a third of the time, but my tests revealed that it wasn’t that severe.

The rest of the time, the service worked as normal.

The error message would return when loading the Wikia Search home page, and read, “Error 503 Service Unavailable.” It continued, “Guru Meditation:” and then “XID:” and a nine-digit string that changed each time I found it.

The search portal, run by Wikia, the for-profit wiki service co-founded by Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, was returning “Service Unavailable” error messages about 10 percent of the time, during a test I ran on both
Firefox and
Safari.

When the site’s home page did run, it then returned search results with no problem.

This error message was coming up some of the time Wednesday morning after attempting to load the Wikia Search home page. The problem was found on both Firefox and Safari, but only about 10 percent of the time.

Pingdom.com also had a chart suggesting that the search site’s uptime was only about 65 percent.

It looks like there’s a bit of trouble over at Wikia Search this morning.

A call to Wikia for comment wasn’t immediately returned.

(Credit:
Daniel Terdiman/CNET News)

In October, Valleywag reported that Wikia had laid off about a third of its 43-person workforce.

Some industrial partners who are working with custom-built versions of Freescale’s chip in military applications, sensors, and RFID tags, Parmenter said. One company is looking to equip portable thermostats with a solar cell to power the device, rather than batteries, and a Zigbee wireless connection.

The chip is a “voltage booster,” which means it can convert a low-voltage current to a higher voltage so that a small solar cell could charge a cell phone, for example.

Freescale has developed a specialized chip that could lead to distributed energy sources like miniature solar cells powering indoor thermostats, consumer electronics, and garage door openers.

Freescale intends to introduce a family of voltage-booster chips in the third quarter this year. “We believe we’re going to run into all kinds of people who have a low-voltage power sources that we haven’t even thought of who are going to work with us on this,” Parmenter said.

The chip manufacturer this week at a power electronics conference in Washington, D.C., plans to demonstrate a prototype of a device that can squeeze usable electricity from low-voltage energy sources.

Those energy sources could be a solar cell embedded on an electronic appliance. But the chip could also harvest energy from other low-power sources, like ambient electromagnetic radiation, waste heat, or mechanical motion, said Kevin Parmenter in Freescale’s applications engineering

(Credit:
Opera Software)

Want to reload the page? Just shake your head.

If you’ve got a Webcam and a working F8 key, you’ll be able to open new browser tabs, navigate around, and even compose an e-mail using one of 45 different facial gestures, like puffing out your cheeks to zoom out, or craning your neck to scroll up or down. Try it with us now.

Microsoft has scratched at the idea of taking Webcams beyond their voyeuristic tendencies in Windows Live Messenger beta, which can beam out images you prerecorded with your Webcam of various moods when you type certain emoticons. And for people with severe physical limitations or disabilities, an alternate browsing mechanism could wield liberating browsing powers (we bet you didn’t think of that one, Opera.)

But before we ruin all the yuks with our altruistic turn on a good joke, check out Opera’s hilarious demo video to see just what it would take to navigate a Web page with your eyes. Wink, wink.

Speed has been the heat behind the desktop browser battle, and not much else. On Wednesday, Opera Software decided to throw an innovative curve ball by introducing a feature into the version 10 alpha of the Opera browser that lets you surf the Web by flaring your nostrils. They call it Opera Face Gestures.

Though it’s Opera’s idea of an April Fool’s joke, the face gestures concept is one of those kooky, geeky-cool experiments you just might find cropping up in MIT’s Lab, or in a futuristic sci-fi flick a la “Minority Report.” But when we thought about it, we realized there is some precedent in the software world, and some hypothetically practical application.

The results appear to mirror those in a 2007 study that found people who played action video games for a few hours a day over the course of a month improved their spatial resolution by about 20 percent.

“To the best of our knowledge, this is the first demonstration that contrast sensitivity can be improved by simple training,” Bavelier said. “When people play action games, they’re changing the brain’s pathway responsible for visual processing. These games push the human visual system to the limits and the brain adapts to it, and we’ve seen the positive effect remains even two years after the training was over.”

“Normally, improving contrast sensitivity means getting glasses or eye surgery–somehow changing the optics of the eye,” Daphne Bavelier, professor of brain and cognitive sciences at the University of Rochester, said in a statement. “But we’ve found that action video games train the brain to process the existing visual information more efficiently, and the improvements last for months after game play stopped.”

Playing action video games may help adults improve their eyesight, according to a study released Sunday.

(Credit:
Activision)

People who used a video-game training program saw improvements in their contrast sensitivity, or the ability to notice subtle differences in shades of gray, according to a study published in the journal Nature Neuroscience. The training could be beneficial to people who have amblyopia–commonly known as lazy eye–and those who have trouble seeing while driving at night, the study said.

A new study finds that playing action video games such as "Call of Duty 2" can help improve eyesight.

Researchers suggested that the video game training’s effect could last for years and could be a useful complement to other eye-correction techniques such as eyeglasses, contact lenses, or surgery. The study, which was funded by the National Eye Institute and the Office of Naval Research, noted that not all action games have such a benefit to the visually impaired.

Researchers studied two groups that played video games for 50 hours during a nine-week course. One group played action games such as “Call of Duty 2″ and “Unreal Tournament 2004.” Another group played non-action games such as “Sims 2,” which doesn’t require precise, visually guided aiming actions. People who played the action games showed enhanced contrast sensitivity compared with those in the non-action game group, with improvements ranging from 43 percent to 58 percent, according to the study.