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'Homo Machina' toys with industrial body metaphors
Homo Machina begins when you wake up. Your body's director of operations must get your eyes open and your cognitive systems online so that you can get out of bed, feed yourself, get to work and -- eventually -- go on a date with a lovely lady later in the evening.
Neverwinter releases post-Shadowmantle infographic
So how is Neverwinter doing these days? The game's been a little quiet since the launch of Shadowmantle. But it looks as if it's doing fairly well, judging by a brand-new infographic, which is embedded just past the cut. More than 2 million new characters have been created since the launch of Shadowmantle, with Hunter Rangers turning up as the most popular new character and Devoted Clerics as the least. Beyond that, over 3 million characters have died in PvP matches and a combined total of 405 years' worth of experience has been gained. If you can't get enough of numbers about games, go ahead and jump past the cut to see exactly how the game has been doing since its last update. On a numerical level, it seems pretty solid. [Source: Perfect World Entertainment press release]
Eerie comparisons between MMOs and real life surface
We all joke about how unrealistic MMOs are to our mundane, tax-filled lives, but Redcentric did a little digging to compare how virtual worlds and the real one stack up in various ways. Some of the results proved astounding. With World of Warcraft, Redcentric noted that the population in both the game and the US military have about the same percentage of males (84% to 83%), while EVE Online's male population (96%) is more similar to that of the astronaut crowd (90%). The agency also noted how Second Life has 10 real-world embassies in it and that a previous ban of real-money trading in the game caused a very real financial crisis for a bank that wiped out $750,000. So how do these three titles compare to real-world cities in regards to population? World of Warcraft at its peak was close to Moscow's population (11.5 million), while Second Life almost hit the levels of San Fransisco (825K) and EVE Online barely surpassed Edinburgh's 495,000.
Visualized: ThreadWatch tracks daily workflow on a Mac, turns the data into eye candy
Sure, time tracking comes in handy when trying to make your workflow as efficient as possible. Perhaps you're looking for a more visual indication of how your time is spent on that MacBook Pro. That's where ThreadWatch comes in handy. Thanks to developer Alex Milde, you can visually analyze your daily task habits on a Mac. After a rather quick and painless app download, the tech monitors software being used on the desktop, taking notes on their individual memory and CPU consumption. The collected info is placed in a text file that you'll then upload to ThreadWatch to create the graphical splendor you see above. Each color indicates a different application and you won't have to worry about having your tracked data catalogued. To take the kit for a spin, hit the source link below to start monitoring your procrastination... er, work sessions.
The history of games, told through colors
In our latest installment of Kids These Days Don't Know How Good They've Got It, we'd like to use this incredibly informative infographic to remind all you whippersnappers out there that back in our day, games were dark, blurry and required imaginations. Click on through, you might learn something!
Visualized: a zettabyte
Remember the good old days when a gigabyte was considered a lot of space? Improvements in hard disk technology have allowed the humble magnetic drive to reach the dizzying heights of multiple terabytes of storage, but Cisco foresees a future that's a few orders of magnitude more impressive. Pinpointing 2015 as the commencement of what it calls the zettabyte era, the company has put together a handy infographic to show us just how much data can be fit into one: you can alternatively think of it as the equivalent of 250 billion DVDs, 36 million years of HD video, or the volume of the Great Wall of China if you allow an 11oz cup of coffee to represent a gigabyte of data. So "zetta" must be Greek for one hell of a lot, but what Cisco expects is that we'll be pushing that much information around the web each year by 2015. Any bets on how many exabytes of it will be to stream videos of cats diving into cardboard boxes?
Survey says: most teens don't have a data plan, almost all send texts
Microsoft and Verizon might think all the kids want to do with their new Kin phones is pay absurd data rates for a half-baked Twitter experience, but it turns out Generation Upload is still actually just Generation Text Message. That's at least the word according to a Pew Internet Research survey published on April 20th and neatly summed up by a new Flowlogic infographic published today -- only 23 percent of American teenagers with cellphones use social networks with their phones, while 72 percent of all teens use text messaging. You might argue that Kin seeks to flip that balance, but Pew found that 63 percent of teens with cell phones don't have data plans and the vast majority of teen cellphone plans are part of a larger family plan, so the Kin's $30 / month data rate might be a hard sell to Mom and Dad. We also thought voice calling on the Kin seemed like an afterthought to texting and social networking, but it turns out more and more older kids simply turn to the phone: 77 percent of 17 year olds text each other, but 60 percent of them call each other's cell phones -- and only 33 percent of them connect over social networking sites. Perhaps most damningly, Pew says nearly half -- 46% -- of teens play games on their phones, but Kin has no games at all. The report is actually full of other interesting tidbits like this and the infographic is quite nice, so hit the read links to check 'em out -- perhaps Microsoft and Verizon should do the same.
