Nintendo DS jogs the 'Brain'

If you're an adult who loves to challenge your brainpower with mind-boggling, brain-teasing puzzles, riddles and questions, you can do all that with Brain Challenge for the Nintendo DS.

The game was released for the Nintendo DS earlier this year and is featured on other platforms. These include the Xbox 360, the N-Gage 2.0, mobile phones and the iPod.

What's hot:

# Variety of puzzles that may offer a challenge to gamers.

# Both single and multi-player gaming.

What's not:

# Puzzles may resemble those of Big Brain Academy and Brain Age.

Game play

Much like the game structure in Big Brain Academy, the structure in Brain Challenge is divided into four sections, which includes math, logic, visual and focus.

There is also a fifth category which has been added to the Nintendo DS: Memory. Puzzles are also played at three different difficulty levels, and as you go along you unlock more complex puzzles.

Now, if you have played Big Brain Academy or Brain Age, certain puzzles present in Brain Challenge bears some resemblance to the two. Take, for instance, 'Balance', which shows various items on a scale, gamers must decipher based on the relationship of the items, which is the heaviest.

Graphics

The graphics are quite colourful and appealing. The menus and charts are easy to navigate and are presented very clearly and logically. Also, it's apparent that much consideration had gone into this game, as the graphics are of higher quality than its competition.

At times it can be a bit of a challenge to accurately draw numbers using the stylus. However, the DS is quite capable of recognising that the figure drawn could be a 'zero' or a 'four'.

Sound

The sound is simple enough. There are some instances in the game in which a tutor or the psychologist actually speaks to you, and at other times there are quite distracting noise.

Bottom line

The Nintendo DS is a console that appeals to many, because it helps to enhance your memory, and is great fun.

I must warn you, though, if you have played Brain Age and or Big Brain Academy, it might be a waste, considering what was said earlier. The game gets a rating of 3 out of 5.

Source : http://www.jamaica-gleaner.com/

Nuance, Nokia Team for Mobile Speech, Predictive Text Capabilities

Nuance Communications Inc., a provider of speech and predictive text solutions, and Nokia have entered into a multi-year agreement to deliver innovative mobile speech and predictive text capabilities across a broad range of Nokia mobile devices worldwide.

The agreement also establishes a collaboration to advance an open integration framework for advanced input technologies that will foster innovation in the broader mobile developer ecosystem.

Nokia will leverage Nuance's mobile input solutions to provide users with a new class of intuitive mobile user interface enabling improved access to the many mobile applications and services that drive productivity, convenience, safety and consumer experience.

Source : http://www.itvoir.com/

Is AMD the next big thing? Page 1

MALTA — Gov. DeWitt Clinton was considered nutty for proposing to spend $7 million in 1817 to build a 363-mile canal from Albany to Buffalo, a public works project mocked as "Clinton's folly."

     
Thomas Edison's decision to relocate from New Jersey and establish the General Electric Co. in godforsaken Schenectady in 1886 raised eyebrows.

Derided by naysayers and considered ill-advised initially, the Erie Canal and GE proved to be two of the greatest transformative developments in the Capital Region's economic history, solid anchors of the local economy for generations.

History will be the judge whether AMD's plan to build a $4.6 billion chip fab plant in Saratoga County will live up to the hyperbole of boosters who tout it as "an Erie Canal for the 21st century."

Historians and academics are unwilling to declare AMD an epic addition at this point. They seem dubious about declaring it a rising tide that will life the fortunes of all Capital Region residents. There is consensus that it's a major investment, but not a Top 5 transformational project. Yet.

"At this point, nobody can say for sure whether AMD really will be the next big thing, although it will create follow-on businesses and it helps legitimize this area as a high-tech center," said P. Thomas Carroll, executive director of the Hudson Mohawk Industrial Gateway in Troy and an authority on America's 19th-century industrial history.

To add some perspective, the Burden Iron Works in Troy sold out about $1 million worth of horseshoes annually for four decades starting in the mid-1800s, or about $500 million in today's dollars.

Iron manufacturing was a durable local economic engine for more than two generations, while Carroll is not convinced that the here today, gone tomorrow mentality of Silicon Valley will allow AMD to make a lasting mark.

"My concern is that tech boom cities can die out quickly. I think we need to be wary that we're not getting into a Gold Rush mentality where you end up with a ghost town in 10 years," Carroll said.

Iron and railroads and the brawn of the Industrial Revolution muscled their way to the top of the heap in the local economy, but W. Douglas McCombs, curator of history at the Albany Institute of History and Art, finds that subtler, more diffuse developments can be equally transformative.

McCombs pointed to thousands of women employed in the textile industry in the late 19th- and early 20th-century in Troy shirt-collar factories and Cohoes woolen mills. "For the first time, average business people were buying stiff collars to create a show of respectability, which represents the middle class emerging as an economic force," he said.

Severin Carlson, dean of the School of Business at the College of Saint Rose, sees parallels between AMD's plans and a sprawling science-based industrial park developed in Hsinchu, Taiwan in the early 1980s that he visited. The town-sized Hsinchu complex is still going strong two decades later.

Continues : http://www.timesunion.com/