BBC News speaks to the creators of Smarpshare, who want employees to become brand ambassadors for their firms.

Paris's world-renowned Picasso museum is reopening after being closed for five years.

One person was killed and four others injured after a student opened fire at a school north of Seattle, in the US state of Washington.

Entering a Facebook "room" requires a QR-type code, which can come in the form of a screenshot or can be harvested from the phone's camera.

After a clash over Facebook's "real-names" policy, the company released an app Friday that encourages communication between anonymous parties. Dubbed Rooms, the app lets users share content based on themes within different chat threads.

The app is in the spirit of other anonymous-sharing apps like Secret or Yik Yak, which consist of threads of short posts based around one's social network or location, respectively. Because of the way they are organized, both apps have caused their share of controversy. Rooms, by contrast, is organized by subject—for instance "Photography Lovers Unite" or "GIFs" (yes,GIFs)—and consist of threads of photos.

The organization harkens back to sites like reddit or AOL chatrooms, with front-facing account names that are defined on a per-room basis. Other users can comment on posts or endorse them with a "like" button that is customizable by the creator of the room.

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Apple

The multi-carrier Apple SIM in the iPad Air 2 and iPad Mini 3 lets US customers purchase data from either AT&T, Sprint, or T-Mobile. But it turns out that if you want the option of switching carriers, you'll either have to avoid AT&T or acquire another SIM card.

When you set up cellular data on a new iPad with the multi-carrier SIM, you'll get this screen, which lets you choose a carrier:

Jon Brodkin

Click on AT&T and you'll see this warning, stating that once the SIM is activated on AT&T's network, it will be locked to AT&T and that you'll need a new Apple SIM to change carriers:

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The TP-Link router that was to be the basis of TorFi. TP-Link

Kickstarter is apparently not the place to go if you’re trying to crowdfund privacy hardware. Just days after the Anonabox project, a highly criticized effort to package the Tor privacy protection service into a portable miniature Wi-Fi router, was suspended by the crowdfunding site, another similar project has met its demise—and its founder’s account has been deleted.

TorFi, which Ars mentioned in a report on October 21, was a project by Jesse Enjaian and David Xu of Berkeley, California, aimed at creating home routers with turnkey Tor protection and support for OpenVPN connections—allowing users to route all their Internet traffic either through Tor's "onion router" network or a virtual private network provider of their choice. The project’s initial pitch was dependent on repurposing routers from TP-Link purchased through retail and re-flashing them with a customized version of the OpenWRT embedded operating system.

But just a day after Ars covered the TorFi project, Kickstarter suspended it. David Gallagher, a member of Kickstarter’s communications team, said that he couldn’t discuss the specific reasons for the suspension. “It’s our policy not to comment on individual projects,” he said in an e-mail.

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Yesterday after an all-day session of benchmarking on Wednesday, we published our initial performance results for Civilization: Beyond Earth. As can often be the case with limited testing, we ran into a problem and were unable to find a solution at the time. In short, while there was a lot of talk about how developers Firaxis had spent some effort to improve latency using a custom Split-Frame Rendering (SFR) approach with Mantle on CrossFire configurations, we were unable to produce anything that corroborated that story. Emails were sent, but it took half a day before we finally had the answer: enabling SFR actually requires manual editing of the configuration file. Oops.

We could ask why manual editing of the INI file is even necessary, and there are other user interface items that would be nice to address as well as I noted in the conclusion of the original Benchmarked article. But that's all water under the bridge at this point, so let me issue a public apology for not having the complete information yesterday.

I've updated the text of the original article (and added a discussion of minimum frame rates in case you missed that), but since many people have potentially read the article already and are unlikely to revisit the subject, I wanted to post a separate Pipeline to update everyone on the true performance of CrossFire with Mantle and SFR. But before we get to that, let me also take this opportunity to provide some of the additional information from Firaxis and AMD on why SFR matters. Firaxis has a couple blog posts on the subject (including one highlighting the benefits of Mantle with multiple GPUs), and here's the direct quote from AMD's marketing folks:

With a traditional graphics API, multi-GPU (MGPU) arrays like AMD CrossFire are typically utilized with a rendering method called "alternate-frame rendering" (AFR). AFR renders odd frames on the first GPU, and even frames on the second GPU. Parallelizing a game’s workload across two GPUs working in tandem has obvious performance benefits.

As AFR requires frames to be rendered in advance, this approach can occasionally suffer from some issues:

• Large queue depths can reduce the responsiveness of the user’s mouse input
• The game’s design might not accommodate a queue sufficient for good MGPU scaling
• Predicted frames in the queue may not be useful to the current state of the user’s movement or camera

Thankfully, AFR is not the only approach to multi-GPU. Mantle empowers game developers with full control of a multi-GPU array and the ability to create or implement unique MGPU solutions that fit the needs of the game engine. In Civilization: Beyond Earth, Firaxis designed a "split-frame rendering" (SFR) subsystem. SFR divides each frame of a scene into proportional sections, and assigns a rendering slice to each GPU in AMD CrossFire configuration. The "master" GPU quickly receives the work of each GPU and composites the final scene for the user to see on his or her monitor.

If you don’t see 70-100% GPU scaling, that is working as intended, according to Firaxis. Civilization: Beyond Earth’s GPU-oriented workloads are not as demanding as other recent PC titles. However, Beyond Earth’s design generates a considerable amount of work in the producer thread. The producer thread tracks API calls from the game and lines them up, through the CPU, for the GPU’s consumer thread to do graphics work. This producer thread vs. consumer thread workload balance is what establishes Civilization as a CPU-sensitive title (vs. a GPU-sensitive one).

Because the game emphasizes CPU performance, the rendering workloads may not fully utilize the capacity of a high-end GPU. In essence, there is no work leftover for the second GPU. However, in cases where the GPU workload is high and a frame might take a while to render (affecting user input latency), the decision to use SFR cuts input latency in half, because there is no long AFR queue to work through. The queue is essentially one frame, each GPU handling a half. This will keep the game smooth and responsive, emphasizing playability, vs. raw frame rates.

Let me provide an example. Let’s say a frame takes 60 milliseconds to render, and you have an AFR queue depth of two frames. That means the user will experience 120ms of lag between the time they move the map and that movement is reflected on-screen. Firaxis’ decision to use SFR halves the queue down to one frame, reducing the input latency to 60ms. And because each GPU is working on half the frame, the queue is reduced by half again to just 30ms.

In this way the game will feel very smooth and responsive, because raw frame-rate scaling was not the goal of this title. Smooth, playable performance was the goal. This is one of the unique approaches to MGPU that AMD has been extolling in the era of Mantle and other similar APIs.

When I first read the above, my initial reaction was: "This is awesome!" I've always been a bit leery of AFR and the increase in input latency that it can create, so using SFR to avoid the issue is an excellent idea. Unfortunately, it requires more work and testing to get it working right, so most games simply stick with AFR. Ironically, while reducing input latency is never a bad thing, it honestly doesn't matter nearly as much in a turn-based strategy game like Civilization: Beyond Earth. What we'd really love to see is use of techniques like SFR to reduce input latency on games from genres where input latency is a bigger deal – first-person games like Crysis, Battlefield, Far Cry, etc. and third-person games like Batman, Shadow of Mordor, Assassin's Creed, etc. being prime examples. With that said, let's revisit the subject of Civilization: Beyond Earth and CrossFire performance, with and without Mantle:

Our graphing engine doesn't allow for sorting on multiple criteria, otherwise I might try sorting by average + minimum frame rate. Regardless, you can see that across the range of options the CrossFire Mantle SFR support is now doing what we'd expect and improving frame rates. But it's not just about improving frame rates; as the above commentary notes, improving input latency is also important. We aren't really equipped to test for input latency (that would require a very high speed camera as well as additional time filming and measuring input latency), but the minimum frame rates definitely improve as well.

What's interesting is that CrossFire without Mantle (which uses AFR) has higher average FPS in many cases, but the minimum frame rates are worse than with a single GPU. The two images above show why this isn't necessarily a good thing. We haven't tested SLI performance, but I have at least one source that says SLI performance is similar to CrossFire AFR: higher average FPS but lower minimum FPS. It's entirely possible that driver updates will improve the situation with D3D, but for now CrossFire with Mantle SFR definitely scores a win over Direct3D AFR as it provides for a smoother gaming experience.

Let's look at the above charts in a different format before we continue this discussion.

We can see that even with just two GPUs splitting the workload, our CPU has apparently become a bottleneck with the R9 290X. Average frame rates still show an increase going from 4K Ultra to QHD Ultra to 1080p Ultra to 1080p High, but when we look at minimum FPS we've apparently run straight into a wall. For the R9 290X with Mantle, CrossFire effectively tops out with a minimum FPS of roughly 65FPS while a single GPU hits a lower minimum of around 50FPS without Mantle, and regular CrossFire on the 290X (i.e. without Mantle) has a minimum of 45FPS. Again, there are likely some optimizations that could be made in both drivers and the game to improve the situation, but it wouldn't be too surprising to find that Mantle and SFR with three or four GPUs doesn't show much of an increase over two GPUs.

I do have to wonder how applicable the above results are to other games. Last I checked, Mantle CrossFire rendering on Sniper Elite 3 was basically not working, but if other software developers can use Mantle to effectively implement SFR instead of AFR that would be nice to see. But didn't we have SFR way back in the early days of multiple GPUs? Of course we did! 3dfx initially called their solution SLI – Scan Line Interleave – and had each GPU rendering every other line. That approach had problems with things like anti-aliasing, but there are many other ways to divide the workload between GPUs, and both AMD (formerly ATI) and NVIDIA have done variations on SFR in the past.

The problem is that when DirectX 9 rolled around and we started getting programmable shaders and deferred rendering, at some point synchronization issues cropped up and basically developers were locked out of doing creative things like SFR (or geometry processing on one GPU and rendering on another). The only thing you can do with multiple GPUs using Direct3D right now is AFR. That may change with Direct3D 12, but we're still a ways out from that release. Basically, AFR is the easiest approach to implement, but it has various drawbacks even when it does work properly.

Of course there are other potential pitfalls with doing alternative workload splitting like SFR. They can require more work from the CPU, and as you add GPUs the CPU already creates a potential bottleneck. AMD informed us that the engine in Civilization: Beyond Earth is actually extremely scalable with CPU cores, so while we're testing with an overclocked i7-4770K, AMD said they even saw a 20% improvement in performance (with Mantle) going from hex-core Ivy Bridge-E to octal-core Haswell-E with R9 290X CrossFire. There are apparently other cases where certain hardware configurations and game settings can result in an even greater improvement in performance thanks to Mantle (e.g. the 50% increase in minimum frame rates on the R9 290X at our 1080p High settings).

The bottom line is that if you have an AMD GPU, games like Civilization: Beyond Earth can certainly benefit. Maybe Direct3D 12 will bring similar options to developers next year, but in the meantime, congrats to both AMD and Firaxis for shining the light on the latency subject once again. NVIDIA made some waves with similar discussions when they released FCAT last year, but the topic of latency and jitters is definitely important – and don't even get me started on silliness like capping frame rates at 30FPS by default (cough, The Evil Within, cough).

During the past 20 years, there has been a growing sense of inadequacy about the "command and control" model for managing IT systems. Years in front of the television with a remote control have left us hard pressed to think of any other way of making machines work for us. more>>

Sunday's presidential run-off vote in Brazil is too close to call and the election battle has centred on the pivotal home state of both candidates, Minas Gerais.

US EIA

Last year, the US Energy Information Agency suggested that emissions of carbon dioxide by the US had peaked in 2005 and were unlikely to return to such heights. So far, that prediction has held up, although there have been some bumps in the road. The year 2013 appears to have been one of those bumps, as emissions increased for the first time since 2010, reaching levels not seen since last decade. But there are many pieces of good news in the details.

To begin with, the EIA blames the boost in emissions, which came in at a 2.5 percent increase, primarily on the heavy use of heating during last year's unusually cold winter. A secondary factor was a rise in natural gas prices that shifted some electricity generation to coal (more on that later). The increase in emissions, however, wasn't tied to economic growth. While the GDP per capita went up by 1.5 percent, the energy use per GDP only went up by 0.5 percent; in turn, the carbon dioxide intensity of energy production actually declined slightly.

So, to an extent, carbon emissions have been decoupled from economic growth. They've also been somewhat decoupled from electricity use. Demand has decreased in recent years, in part due to a decrease in industrial activity, in part due to increased efficiency. A switch to natural gas has also decreased the carbon emissions per unit of generation, although, as noted above, this trend reversed slightly last year.

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Getting an accurate read on how well the new generation of consoles is selling is a difficult job, and it's complicated by sporadic and sometimes vague numbers provided by the console makers themselves. After taking a dive into the most recent numbers, Ars estimates that the PlayStation 4 has sold at least 42 percent more units worldwide than the Xbox One through September. This makes Sony's system responsible for at least 59 percent of hardware sales in the two-console market (PS4 and Xbox One).

Estimating Xboxes

Determining those ratios was not a simple process. As a starting point, we used Microsoft's announcement that it had shipped five million units of the Xbox One as of mid-April. Since then, the company has only released quarterly reports on how many total Xbox systems have shipped, lumping the Xbox 360 and the Xbox One together, which obscures the new console's true market performance.

For the April to June quarter, there were 1.1 million combined Xbox shipments. For the July through September quarter, there were 2.4 million combined Xbox shipments. Add all those numbers together, and you get an absolute ceiling of 8.5 million potential Xbox One shipments through September. For the new system to hit that ceiling, though, you'd have to assume that Microsoft has shipped exactly zero Xbox 360 units in the last six months, which is obviously false.

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New video footage show a US air strike hitting an Islamic State position on a hill near the embattled Syrian town of Kobane.

A Silicon Valley startup said Friday that police agencies were field testing its new product: a wireless sensor that transforms officers' weapons into smart guns with real-time telemetry.

Yardarm Technologies' sensor is a small device that goes inside gun handles and provides dispatchers with real-time geo-location tracking information on the weapon. The Yardarm Sensor also sends alerts when a weapon is unholstered or fired, and it can "record the direction of aim, providing real-time tactical value for commanders and providing crime scene investigators valuable data for prosecution," the company said.

The 10-employee company based in Capitola, California, said it was deploying the technology on a trial basis. The first takers have been the Santa Cruz County Sheriff's Department in California and the Carrollton Police Department in Texas.

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Over the last couple of years, the ultra-compact form factor (UCFF) has emerged as one of the bright spots in the troubled PC market. Intel kickstarted the category with their Sandy Bridge NUC kits in early 2013. Recognizing the popularity of this segment, other vendors also began to promote similar products. GIGABYTE targets this market segment with an extensive lineup of products under the BRIX brand. We recently looked at the high-end Haswell BRIX, the GB-BXi7-4500. Today, we will take a look at the opposite end of the spectrum - the Bay Trail-D Celeron J1900-based GB-BXBT-1900. As a note, due to GIGABYTE's regional marketing policies, this model is currently not being sold in the North American market, but targets price conscious buyers everywhere else.

The presidents of the European Council and European Commission have delivered farewell speeches as they prepare to hand power over to their successors.

Verizon

Cellular communications provider Verizon Wireless is adding cookie-like tokens to Web requests traveling over its network. These tokens are being used to build a detailed picture of users’ interests and to help clients tailor advertisements, according to researchers and Verizon’s own documentation.

The profiling, part of Verizon’s Precision Market Insights division, kicked off more than two years ago and expanded to cover all Verizon Wireless subscribers as part of the company’s Relevant Mobile Advertising service. It appends a per-device token known as the Unique Identifier Header (UIDH) to each Web request sent through its cellular network from a particular mobile device, allowing Verizon to link a website visitor to its own internal profiles. The service aims to allow client websites to target advertising at specific segments of the consumer market.

While the company started piloting the service two years ago, privacy experts only began warning of the issue this week, arguing that the service is essentially tracking users and that companies paid for a fundamental service that should not be using the data for secondary purposes.

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This looks like perfectly moral behavior. Washington Fish and Wildlife

The question of why good people do bad things has fascinated psychologists for decades. Stanley Milgram famously identified deference to authority as a factor pushing people toward unethical behavior, but it seems that something even simpler could be in the mix: fatigue.

A recent study published in Psychological Science found that people are more inclined to cheat on a task at different times of the day, depending on their individual body clocks, or “chronotypes.” Chronotypes affect people’s natural peaks and troughs of physical and cognitive functions throughout the day, making “larks” more alert first thing in the morning and “owls” more wakeful late at night. The new evidence suggests that morning people are more likely to cheat at night, while evening people are more likely to cheat in the morning.

Morality in the morning

Building on research suggesting that people are more dishonest when they are tired, Brian Gunia, Christopher Barnes, and Sunita Sah assessed the chronotypes of participants, classifying them as either morning, intermediate, or evening people. Participants attended morning test sessions that required completing a puzzle task and were paid $0.50 for each puzzle they claimed to have solved correctly. If a participant failed to solve a puzzle but reported having done so, this was counted as a cheat.

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Getty Images

Getty Images, a massive image licensing company, has earned quite a reputation for aggressive copyright enforcement over the past several years. But the company says it wants to turn that around.

Until now, Getty’s strategy has been to comb the Web for illegal reproductions of its images using special software and to send threatening letters to anyone who appears to be infringing. Getty has told the targets of its letters that it will pursue an expensive lawsuit unless those who re-post the images agree to pay settlements that include penalties and licensing fees, sometimes amounting to hundreds or several thousand dollars. Generally, Getty Images tends not to pursue its claims in court, instead favoring the so-called “settlement demand letters” which bill the alleged user of an unlicensed Getty image for the use of the image, as well as a portion of the "enforcement fees."

But that won’t be the case any longer. Earlier this week, general counsel for Getty Images John Lapham told GigaOm that Getty’s "enforcement polices are being ramped down.”

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BBC Africa looks back at Zambia's first five decades through its five presidents.

There are fears that the ancient site of Babylon in present-day Iraq is threatened with destruction by the militant group calling itself Islamic State.