Parents Beware Gaming May Be Beneficial To Your Child’s Career!
Today’s tech-savvy kids and young adults spend more text messages everyday than there are people on the planet. They grew up tethered to multiple electronic devices while juggling text messages, surfing the Net and listening to iPods – all while doing their homework. They mix learning, communicating and playing.
By age 21 years of age, it is estimated that the average child will have:
– Spent 10,000 hours playing video games
– Sent 200,000 emails
– Spent 20,000 hours watching TV
– Spent 10,000 hours on their cell phone
– Spent under 5,000 hours reading
As more and more adults worry that children are wasting time online, texting, or playing video games, social network and video sharing sites, online games, and gadgets such as iPods and mobile phones are becoming more mainstream fixtures of youth culture. Is our next generation of workers frittering their lives away – or is it just possible that resistant parents and employers are the ones becoming more out of touch with reality. New research just released by the MacArthur foundation might serve as a wake-up call…or at least force adults to pause before they pull the plug on their kids.
According to findings published in the study Living and Learning with New Media, this digital world is not sending our youth back to the age of caves and dinosaurs but creating new opportunities for youth to grapple with social norms, explore interests, develop technical skills, and experiment with new forms of self-expression.
Today’s youth are almost always “on,” in constant contact with their friends through private communications like MySpace and Facebook. But contrary to popular opinion that complete strangers are stalking and dominating these relationships, most youth are almost always associating with people they already know in their offline lives. The majority of youth use new media to “hang out” and extend existing friendships in these new ways just like generations before did with pen pals and tree houses.
A smaller number of youth do use the online world to explore interests and find information that goes beyond what they have access to at school or in their community. They form online groups, driven by common interests, to network with peers outside the boundaries of their local community. They can also find opportunities to publicize and distribute their work to online audiences, and to gain new forms of visibility and reputation. By exploring new interests, tinkering and “messing around” with new forms of media, they acquire various forms of technical and media literacy.
And to a lesser degree, some youth “geek out.” They dive into a topic or talent. But contrary to popular images, geeking out is highly social and engaged. Geeks tend to be highly specialized and seek the knowledge of both teens and adults from around the country or world. But in the digital world, experts aren’t automatically recognized by age. In many respects, geeking out erases the traditional markers of status and authority. In the digital world, expertise is what demands respect and they are more motivated to learn from their peers than from adults.
Again contrary to adult perceptions, youth who are hanging out online are picking up basic social and technical skills they need to participate in contemporary society. New media forms are altering how youth socialize and learn and if adults don’t choose to keep up with today’s new media, it is very likely that they will be the ones left disconnected and out of tune with reality.
Copyright (c) 2009 Success Performance Solutions
Playstation 3 Vs Xbox 360 Analyzing The Two Best Gaming Consoles
There have been lots of confusions whether Sony playstation 3 is better than Microsoft Xbox 360 or the other way round. Both consoles boast good indy support with games like Braid on XBLA and PixelJunk games on PSN. Both are available with big titles like Street Fighter HD and Mega Man. So, what are the differences between the two consoles?
CPU:
The CPU of Xbox 360 has vector processing power and a dot product instruction. The console also has three general purpose CPU cores and each core has 128 vector registers per hardware thread with a shared 1 MB L2 cache and a dot product instruction. The CPU of Sony Playstation 3 allows an environment where 87.5% work is DSP calculation and 12.5% work is general purpose computing.
GPU:
The GPU of Xbox 360 is more powerful than that of Sony playstation 3. The Xbox 360 GPU has larger number of transistors and the total programmable GFLOPs number is almost equal. In order to add additional floating point options for graphics rendering the PS3 has extra seven DSPs on the Cell. On the other hand the three general purpose cores of Xbox 360 with dot products instructions and custom D3D are tailored for true graphics related calculations.
Multithreading and balanced designs are other features of the Xbox360`s GPU. the automatic shader load balancing, full rate texture fetching in the vertex shader, programmable triangle tesselator, memory export features, programmable vertex fetching are the other features of the Xbox 360 that contribute to the rendering performance of the gadget.
Bandwidth:
For a total system bandwidth of 48 GB/s, the Playstation 3 has 25.6 GB/s of RDRAM bandwidth and 22.4 GB/s of GDDR3 bandwidth. On the other hand, for a 278.4 GB/s total system bandwidth the Xbox 360 has a 256 GB/s of EDRAM bandwidth and 22.4 GB/s of GDDR3 bandwidth. PS3 try to compensate the lack of memory by using Z and color compression.
Multimedia:
When it comes to multimedia, the major advantage of PS3 is that it can stream media and also allow the users to store media on it. In case of Xbox 360 it is like a media extender and does not allow you to save your AVI files on the hard drive. Again, PS3 is, till date, the only Blu-Ray playing video game console. It has high video quality, responsive controls and also it supports all the latest features.
Backwards Compatibility:
In case of backwards compatibility Xbox 360 excels PS3. The PS3 does not support any PS2 library as it does not have PS2 functionality. Alternatively, you can buy a used 20GB or 60GB if you want a backwards compatible PS2. This can be considered as one of the drawbacks of PS3. However, Microsoft has allowed backwards compatibility for Xbox 360 and the online library if the console is adding original XBOX games regularly.
Open Source Operating System:
Playstation3 is the only gaming console that allows the user to install Linux, it does not allow to play games while operating in Linux though. Microsoft is planning to upgrade Xbox 360 and working on a version of Linux that can be installed on the console.
PS3 simplifies the choice for import gamers and is a completely region free gaming console. Xbox 360 has superior graphic power and its GPU allows it to perform at high resolution. With Playstation 3, some of the games require mandatory installation to the hard drive, whereas with Xbox 360, you have the choice of installation.
Both the video game consoles have their own strengths and shortcomings, and both are tremendously successful.
You can have access to articles in portuguese language from the article section of page Jogos
Roberto Sedycias works as IT consultant for Polomercantil
[Top]Finding A Reliable Gaming Laptop Comparison Shopping Site
Comparison shopping is the technique you should adopt while shopping for any electronic device. It is a technique that lets you compare and understand the pros and cons of any laptop. Since gaming laptop is in great demand these days, many people are trying to purchase a good laptop for gaming at an affordable price.
There are plenty of sites on the web that lets you compare laptops. Some of these sites even allow you to purchase laptops from their site. Are they reliable? You may not have a good answer to this question. Hence, you should find a reliable comparison shopping site for purchasing gaming notebooks.
Here are some qualities that will help you determine whether a comparison site is good or not:
Should not biased
They should not be biased to a particular brand and try to upsell it. A honest site will always provide you with genuine information according to your requirements.
Easy to understand
Many people cannot easily understand the jargons mentioned on such site. So, it should provide enough information on understanding basic things like what is a graphic card, what is a processor and so on. They should be able to answer all the sales related question. Technical support can be considered as an added benefit.
Should be in business since a long time
Many comparison shopping sites have started in the recent past. However, the ones that are in business since a long time understand the customers requirement and can be considered reliable. If you are able to trust that site, you wont be having any issues in purchasing a laptop from that site.
Testing
If the site sells laptops, it should also make sure that its customers receive the machine they have ordered in working condition. That is the reason why, they should do performance testing and various kinds of test to make sure the notebook is working properly.
Return policy
Other than providing comparison shopping on gaming laptop, if the site also sells the laptops, then it should also provide with a money return policy. If the site is authentic, it will never hesitate to mention its money return policy. So, if you are not satisfied with the laptop, you can return them back and get money back without answering any questions.