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Star Wars Prequels

LucasArts, Bioware Announce Star Wars MMO 346

Posted by Soulskill from the in-a-galaxy-not-so-far-away-after-all dept.
LucasArts and Bioware held a press conference today to confirm what has been suspected for a long time: they're working on a Star Wars MMO. It will be called Star Wars: The Old Republic, and it will be a continuation of the Knights of the Old Republic franchise. Further coverage is available at Gamespot, and IGN has some of the concept art. An official website for the game was launched as well. "According to the game's official announcement, Star Wars: The Old Republic is set thousands of years before the rise of Darth Vader, with the galaxy divided by war between the Empire and the Sith. That's about 300 years after the events of KotOR, a time frame that, according to Zeschuk, 'is completely unexplored in the lore.' Players can take the role of either a Jedi, a Sith or other classic Star Wars characters -- and, as perhaps can be expected from BioWare, Muzyka says story will be a major component, underlying and driving all of the player's actions."
Games

MUDs Turn 30 Years Old 238

Posted by Soulskill from the still-waiting-on-mod-10 dept.
Massively points out that today marks the 30th anniversary of the first Multi-User Dungeon (MUD) going live at Essex University in the UK. The game, referred to as MUD1, was created by Roy Trubshaw. Richard Bartle, a man who also worked on the game as a student at Essex, has a post discussing the milestone and talking about how MUDs relate to modern MMOs. What MUDs did you play?
Microsoft

Microsoft Calls Today Global Anti-Piracy Day 500

Posted by timothy from the pirates-live-for-live-cd-distros dept.
arcticstoat points out an article at Custom PC, according to which: "Microsoft has announced that today is Global Anti-Piracy Day. Launching several global initiatives, the aim is to raise awareness of the damage to software innovation that Microsoft says is caused by piracy. ... As well as educating people about piracy, Microsoft has also initiated a huge list of legal proceedings that it's taking out against pirates. Microsoft isn't messing about when it says 'global' either. The list of 49 countries that Microsoft is targeting spans six continents, and ranges from the UK and the US all the way through to Chile, Egypt, Kuwait, Indonesia and China." Interestingly enough, unauthorized copies of Vista might not be harming the company all that much: reader twitter was among several to contribute links to a related story at Computer World which highlights Microsoft attorney Bonnie MacNaughton's acknowledgement that pirates prefer Windows XP over Vista and Office 2003 over 2007.

Comment Re:Mediasentry issues (Score 1) 342

by Wylfing (#25153615) Attached to: RIAA Loses $222K Verdict

Whether or not MediaSentry was authorized to download the file is irrelevant...it's still illegal for Jammy Thomas to do the (alleged) uploading.

Correct. Since we are only talking about civil matters, not criminal, there is no burden upon the plaintiff to apply uniformity among whom they choose sue. Put another way, civil suits are about redressing harm, and the plaintiff himself is the sole party in charge of saying who has harmed him and who hasn't. The RIAA can merely say "We see no harm in MediaSentry's filesharing" and that's the end of it.
Operating Systems

Negroponte vs. Open-Source Fundamentalists 414

Posted by CmdrTaco from the fundies-have-more-fun dept.
fyoder writes "Within the world of One Laptop per Child, both the Negropontistas and the Benderites envision a future for Sugar where it runs on multiple platforms, but the latter don't want Windows (or closed source anything) as part of that future. OLPC's emphasis has always seemed to me to be on Sugar, with Linux simply being a smart technical choice for the underlying OS. Yet what is becoming more explicit with the resignation of Walter Bender is that for many involved in the project there was a strong element of Linux advocacy, such that Negroponte's flirtation with Microsoft is felt to be pure sacrilege."
Technology

Nanotechnology-Powered Wiper-Less Windshield 178

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the plenty-of-room-at-the-bottom dept.
fab writes "Italian car designer Leonardo Fioravanti (who worked for Pininfarina for a number of years) has developed a car prototype without windshield wipers. This amazing technological feat is made possible thanks to the use of 4 layers of glass modified using nanotechnology. The first layer filters the sun and repels the water. The second layer, using 'nano-dust' is able to push dirt to the side. The third layer acts as a sensor that activates the second layer when it detects dirt, while the fourth layer is a conductor of electricity to power this complex mechanism. I haven't been able to find an English article, but there is always a google powered translation of the Italian article."
Science

Laser Light Re-creates 'Black Holes' in the Lab 245

Posted by Zonk from the i-have-dubbed-my-discovery-zonkinium dept.
yodasz writes "The New Scientist reports that a team of researchers from the UK were able to recreate a black hole's event horizon in the lab by firing a laser pulse down an optical fibre. The team's observations confirm predictions made by cosmologists and now they are trying to prove Hawking's hypothesis of escaping particles, dubbed Hawking radiation. 'The first pulse distorts the optical properties of the fibre simply by traveling through it. This distortion forces the speedy probe wave to slow down dramatically when it catches up with the slower pulse and tries to move through it. In fact, the probe wave becomes trapped and can never overtake the pulse's leading edge, which effectively becomes a black hole event horizon, beyond which light cannot escape.'"
Software

Python 3.0 To Be Backwards Incompatible 438

Posted by kdawson from the it's-broke-jim dept.
Stony Stevenson writes "Organizations using Python will be affected in a major way by changes in store for the language over the course of the next twelve months, Linux.conf.au attendees were told this morning. The Python development community is working towards a new, backwards-incompatible version of the language, version 3.0, which is slated for release in early 2009. Anthony Baxter, the release manager for Python and a senior software engineer at Google Australia, said "We are going to break pretty much all the code. Pretty much every program will need changes." Baxter also added another tidbit for attendees, saying that Python accounts for around 15 percent of Google's code base."
The Courts

RIAA's Watchdog Affidavits For Your Reading Pleasure 22

Posted by kdawson from the fact-based-witness dept.
NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "MediaSentry, in an attempt to stonewall discovery in UMG v. Lindor, has turned over nothing other than a collection, apparently a complete collection, of its publicly filed affidavits. However, these do make interesting reading indeed, and as comments started trickling in on my blog, I realized that for the technically minded among you there are probably a number of good laughs in these materials. So in keeping with the Slashdot community's analysis of the RIAA's not very expert, 'expert' witness, I thought you might like to take a shot at its not very factual, 'fact' witness."
Space

Messenger Discovers "Spider" Crater on Mercury 74

Posted by Soulskill from the hey-look-at-that dept.
I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property brings us a Washington Post story which discusses how scientists are finding surprises among the pictures sent back from Mercury by the Messenger spacecraft. In particular, images depicting a crater with over 100 troughs radiating out from it are stumping researchers. The crater is referred to as 'The Spider', and it occupies a basin that has turned out to be larger than once thought. NASA also has a discussion of the crater. The Messenger craft began taking the up-close photos earlier this month. From the Post: "Scientists were also surprised by evidence of ancient volcanoes on many parts of the planet's surface and how different it looks compared with the moon, which is about the same size. Unlike the moon, Mercury has huge cliffs, as well as formations snaking hundreds of miles that indicate patterns of fault activity from Mercury's earliest days, more than 4 billion years ago."
E3

E For All Attendance Lackluster 50

Posted by Zonk from the e-for-not-that-many-people-really dept.
Despite the upbeat tone of IDG's official release about the first 'E for All', commentators are noting that the reported figure of 18,000 attendees is lower than expected. Wired is blunt about it: E For All has nothing on PAX. "Penny Arcade Expo was everything E For All dreams of being: a well-attended show packed wall-to-wall with crazy game fans. But it's also inexpensive: three days and two nights of musical performances for way, way less money than an E For All ticket, let alone the additional cost of Video Games Live. And it's got a whole mess of community events, like panels, gaming rooms, and other opportunities that make E For All's extracurriculars look slim. The show floor is just one part of PAX, but it's practically all of E For All."
Media

The Pirate Bay Files Suit Against Big Media 422

Posted by CowboyNeal from the turnabout-still-fair-play dept.
Join the Pirate Party writes "Having found the necessary proof via the leaked MediaDefenders documents, the Pirate Bay is filing suit against the big record and movie labels operating in Sweden who have allegedly been paying professional hackers, saboteurs and DDoSers to destroy their trackers. They also claim to have filed a police report."

Feed Engadget: Lenovo says "no thanks" to Vista for 2008 Olympics (engadget.com)

From feed by engfeed

Filed under: Desktops, Laptops

Poor Vista, you really can't buy a break. First you've got legions of users angrily awaiting a decent update for a whole slew of problems, then there's the CEOs taking pot-shots at you, and now, Lenovo, supplier of the 2008 Olympic Games' computer systems says it's sticking with XP. Word on the street is that all vital computing tasks for the Games will be handled on XP-enabled PCs, while some internet lounges used by athletes will be equipped with Vista systems. According to Yang Yuanqing, chairman of Lenovo, "the Olympic Games require mature, stable technologies and it's not a place to try new technologies." Yang, we're pretty sure a legion of Vista users feel similarly about their desktops. You can almost hear Microsoft's sharp intake of breath from here.

[Via Slashdot]

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