train

Report: Army to sink $50 million into combat training games

The Army is investing $50 million into video combat training games and gaming systems over the next five years, in a move to prepare soldiers for battle.

Soldiers, via the video games, will face ambushes and roadside bomb attacks while traveling in convoys, along with a host of other situations that mimic battle under a number of conditions and terrain, according to a report in Stars and Stripes.

The Army's Peo-Stri and gaming unit will monitor the industry, seeking out commercial games and systems it can use for low-cost training, the report noted.

Darwars Ambush is one of the … Read more

Digital City: Episode 4

Mass transit is our theme this week, along with Comcast's new comcastic download speeds, some breaking video game news, and a brief discussion on the merits of the Incredible Hulk on Blu-ray. Listen now: Download today's podcast

DIGITAL CITY RUNDOWN EPISODE 4

L Subway Line To Show Trains' Locations For the past year and a half, riders on the L train have had the unique advantage of knowing how long till the next train arrives. And in a few weeks, some of those riders will even know the exact location of every train along the line, thanks to … Read more

Report: DarkMarket was FBI sting operation site

A notorious Internet underground site that ceased operation last week has turned out to have been used since 2006 by the FBI as part of an elaborate sting operation.

DarkMarket was an online forum for "carders", those who buy and sell stolen identities and credit card information online. The site was recently made public with the arrest of "Chao," a Turkish criminal who allegedly stole personal information from devices mounted over the card slots and keypads of ATMs.

In a story on Monday, Wired revealed DarkMarket's primary operator "Master Splynter" to be J. … Read more

IBM invests in business partners' training

IBM, which expects to unveil better-than-expected quarterly figures, has announced it will spend some of its cash on incentives to encourage some of its largest partners to invest more in training and other areas.

On Wednesday, the company introduced a scheme to help its business partners who are cooperating on its New Enterprise Data Center strategy. The scheme involves incentives for IBM partners to improve their knowledge in three specific areas: virtualization and consolidation; energy efficiency; and business resiliency.

And Mike Bernard, general business and channels marketing leader at IBM, told ZDNet.co.uk that there is also a fourth … Read more

Astronaut training awaits Esther Dyson

While many in the tech industry have their eyes on the cloud, Ester Dyson has set her sights on the stars.

The longtime tech pundit and investor on Tuesday said she is putting aside most of her day-to-day activities to undergo full-time astronaut training. She'll be a backup to another member of the tech industry, Charles Simonyi, who is set to make a second trip to the International Space Station next spring.

Dyson and Simonyi are indulging their cosmic interests under the auspices of Space Adventures, a company that arranges space flights for private citizens and in which Dyson … Read more

Trains to answer traffic, cost, pollution cries?

Shifting a fourth of U.S. freight from trucks to railroads by 2026 would spare each American an average of 41 hours of travel time, 79 gallons of fuel, and $985 in gas expenses each year, according to the seventh annual Congestion Relief Index on Tuesday.

"Freeing up space on our highways increases the flow of traffic and saves commuters' time, money, and gasoline," said Wendell Cox, who wrote the study, backed by the Association of American Railroads, and is the principal of market research firm Demographia.

In addition, the report estimated that more reliance on rail transport … Read more

Coming soon: A holodeck in your home

The day is fast approaching when a holodeck in our living room may not be so far-fetched. First shown at CeBIT 2008, the Fitness@home virtual training system (PDF) is a first step toward a simulated reality facility, though we can hear Star Trek fans snorting at its baby steps. Still, this brainchild of Berlin's Fraunhofer Institute for Computer Architecture and Software Technology (FIRST) is the closest we've seen in conjuring up some virtual-reality wizardry to place you anywhere you fancy: Mt. Everest, if you plan to do some serious StairMaster climbing, National Geographic-style; the Beijing Olympics, if … Read more

Learn the secrets of HDR photography

Want to learn the secrets to creating beautiful HDR photographs? xTrain, a provider of online video training courses has announced a new high dynamic range (HDR) Mastery online video course by Photoshop expert Ben Willmore. HDR is the process of taking a sequence of exposures, allowing you to lighten the underexposed areas and darken the overexposed areas of a digital image to better simulate what the human eye would actually see.

The online course shows learners step-by-step the best practices of creating HDR photos. Students learn how to best choose subjects for HDR, such as watching for movement and clouds, … Read more

'MonoTracer' on the way, training wheels or not

Anyone who saw Craver Brian Cooley's video of this bizarre vehicle at last year's Geneva Auto Show will notice that something is conspicuously absent from the photo above: There are no training wheels. The reason that the "MonoTracer" needs those is that it has only two wheels--something else that may not be entirely clear at an initial glance.

Though it may look like an anorexic car, this futuristic vehicle from Germany's Peraves is an enclosed motorcycle that is supposedly far more aerodynamic than its naked counterparts. Even so, when it's taking sharp corners on … Read more

Lumosity keeps you from getting dumber

I'm a happy owner of a Nintendo DS and one of my favorite games for it is Brain Age, which lets you do a variety of small puzzles and arithmetic to hone your mental fitness. If you don't feel like shelling out $130 for Nintendo's hardware, there's Lumosity from Lumos Labs, a Web service that offers a similar multitude of small mental exercises that run right in your browser and are actually really fun.

Lumosity comes with nearly a dozen "games" to play, with each one working out a different aspect of your mental … Read more