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PC Games (Games)

Submission + - Why do games still have levels? (blogspot.com) 1

Submitted by a.d.venturer
a.d.venturer writes: Elite, the Metroid series, Dungeon Siege, God of War I and II, Half-Life (but not Half-Life 2), Shadow of the Colossus, the Grand Theft Auto series; some of the best games ever (and Dungeon Siege) have done away with the level mechanic and created uninterrupted game spaces devoid of loading screens and artificial breaks between periods of play. Much like cut scenes, level loads are anathema to enjoyment of game play, and a throwback to the era of the Vic-20 and Commodore 64 when games were stored on cassette tapes, and memory was measured in kilobytes. So in this era of multi-megabyte and gigabyte memory and fast access storage devices why do we continue to have games that are dominated by the level structure, be they commercial (Portal, Team Fortress 2), independent (Darwinia) and amateur (Nethack, Angband)? Why do games still have levels?
Intel

DDR3 Isn't Worth The Money - Yet 120

Posted by Zonk from the zoom-but-not-that-much-zoom dept.
An anonymous reader writes "With Intel's motherboard chipsets supporting both DDR2 and DDR3 memory, the question now is whether DDR3 is worth all that extra cash. Trustedreviews has a lengthy article on the topic, and it looks like (for the moment) the answer is no: 'Not to be too gloomy about this, but the bottom line is that it can only be advised to steer clear of DDR3 at present, as in terms of performance, which is what it's all about, it's a waste of money. Even fast DDR2 is, as we have demonstrated clearly, only worthwhile if you are actually overclocking, as it enables you to raise the front-side bus, without your memory causing a bottleneck. DDR3 will of course come into its own as speeds increase still further, enabling even higher front-side bus speeds to be achieved. For now though, DDR2 does its job, just fine.'"
Power

Submission + - Burning salt water - the ultimate in green fuel? (yahoo.com)

Submitted by
Z0mb1eman
Z0mb1eman writes: "According to this article, "An Erie cancer researcher has found a way to burn salt water, a novel invention that is being touted by one chemist as the "most remarkable" water science discovery in a century. Rustum Roy, a Penn State University chemist, has held demonstrations at his State College lab to confirm his own observations. The scientists want to find out whether the energy output from the burning hydrogen — which reached a heat of more than 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit — would be enough to power a car or other heavy machinery.""
Privacy

Submission + - UCLA Probe Finds Taser Incident Out Of Policy (ucla.edu)

Submitted by Bandor Mia
Bandor Mia writes: Last November, it was reported that UCLA cops Tasered a student, who forgot to bring his ID, at the UCLA library. While an internal probe by UCLAPD cleared the officers of any wrongdoing, an outside probe by Police Assessment Resource Center has found that the police actions on Mostafa Tabatabainejad were indeed out of UCLA policy. The probe was conducted at the behest of acting UCLA Chancellor Norman Abrams.

From the report:
"In light of UCLAPD's general use of force policy and its specific policies on pain compliance techniques, Officer 2's three applications of the Taser, taken together, were out of policy. Officer 2 did not take advantage of other options and opportunities reasonably available to de-escalate the situation without the use of the Taser. Reasonable campus police officers, upon assessing the circumstances, likely would have embraced different choices and options that appear likely to have been more consistent both with UCLAPD policy and general best law enforcement practices."
It's funny. Laugh.

Smarter Teens Have Less Sex 1285

Posted by CmdrTaco from the still-no-excuse-for-you dept.
Tech.Luver writes "Gene Expression reports, "Tyler Cowen quotes from a new study testing the relationship between grades and delayed sexual activity. Last December I passed a paper along to Razib showing that high-school age adolescents with higher IQs and extremely low IQs were less likely to have had first intercourse than those with average to below average intelligence. (i.e. for males with IQs under 70, 63.3% were still virgins, for those with IQs between 70-90 only 50.2% were virgin, 58.6% were virgins with IQs between 90-110, and 70.3% with IQs over 110 were virgins) In fact, a more detailed study from 2000 is devoted strictly to this topic, and finds the same thing: Smart Teens Don't Have Sex (or Kiss Much Either). ""
Music

Submission + - Pandora blocked outside of U.S.

Submitted by
Skidge
Skidge writes: "Pandora, the popular personalized internet radio station, has blocked users outside of the US, UK, & Canada from accessing their music streams. From Pandora blog post, "It's hard to think of anything more anathema to who we are than turning off someone's radio, but the current legal realities leave us no choice. While the DMCA provides us a blanket license in the U.S., there is no equivalent in other countries.""
Censorship

Submission + - HD-DVD processing key and massive censorship

Submitted by
Rudd-O
Rudd-O writes: "After successful discovery of the HD-DVD processing key, massive unprecedented amounts of censorship, in the form of DMCA takedown notices (by the MPAA), have begun to circulate around the Internet. For example, Spooky Action at a Distance was killed. More disturbingly, my story got Dugg twice, with the second wave hitting 15.500 votes, and today I found out it had simply disappeared from Digg. How long until the long arm of the MPAA gets to my own site (run in Ecuador) and the rest of them holding the processing key? How long will we let rampant censorhip go, in the name of economic interest?"
Communications

Submission + - Verizon Vs. Vonage: Prior Art found in 12 YO post

Submitted by kamikaze-Tech
kamikaze-Tech writes: A recent Vonage Forum Post locates a 12 year old comp.dcom.telecom newsgroup post that establishes new prior art in the Verizon Vs. Vonage patent case, years before Verizon filed for the patents. In the newsgroup post dated Sep 22 1995, author Jack Decker states: "I want to go on record as proposing this now so that when someone gets the bright idea in a few months or years, I can point to this as "prior art"...."
Upgrades

Submission + - OGRE 1.4.0 Released!

Submitted by Game_Ender
Game_Ender writes: The OGRE Team is proud to announce the release of OGRE 1.4.0, codenamed 'Eihort'. OGRE is an open-source, cross-platform real-time 3D rendering engine including all the latest features you would expect, and this version introduces such things as SSE/SIMD support, more advanced lighting and shadowing techniques, threaded loading and much more. Full details can be obtained from the official announcement and change log.
The Internet

Submission + - Charter Communications Hijacks Windows Live Search

Submitted by
Tony Bradley
Tony Bradley writes: "There are plenty of spyware and malware programs out there that will hijack your default home page or search engine. Antivirus and anti-spyware software will typically identify and block such attempts because they are illegal, or at least unethical. Imagine my dismay then when my default Web browser search engine was hijacked...by my ISP!! I did some investigating and found that they rationalized their browser hijacking by calling it an opt in "feature". The problem is that they opted everyone in by default and never gave users the opportunity to choose. I also discovered that this "service" only seems to apply if you use Microsoft's search engine. If you are a Google or Yahoo user, apparently you don't need to be forced to opt in to Charter's new "feature". Check out my walk-through of my investigation into this browser hijacking, complete with screen shots to illustrate the story. http://netsecurity.about.com/od/webbrowsersecurity /ss/charterhijack.htm"
The Courts

Submission + - Canadian company joins iPhone trademark row

Submitted by
Z0mb1eman
Z0mb1eman writes: "Canadian newspapers are reporting that a Toronto company has been using the iPhone brand for voice-over-IP services since 2004, before Appple applied for the iPhone trademark.

"There's no confirmed reports that Apple will launch iPhone in Canada," [Comwave president Yuval Barzakay] said in an interview. "And there's no trademark designation on their iPhone logo. So we're not quite sure where they're headed with that."

It will be interesting to see how this will affect Apple's iPhone rollout in Canada, for which a date hasn't been announced yet."
Data Storage

Disk Drives Face Challenge From Chips 235

Posted by Hemos from the the-growth-of-hard-storage dept.
WSJdpatton writes "Researchers are reporting significant progress in perfecting a different way to store data in semiconductors, which could replace one widely used type of memory chip and possibly become a credible competitor to disk drives. The researchers, in a paper being delivered at a technical conference in San Francisco, say they used a novel combination of materials to create prototype phase-change components that are more than 500 times as fast as flash chips, while requiring less than half of the electrical power to record data."

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