Magic Carpet is one of my all time favourite games and, to my knowledge, no game since it's release back in 1994 has similar gameplay.

The game is very much an FPS at its core, and, like a good FPS, there is a lot of strategy in it. You fly around on a carpet trying to build your castle while you fight off enemy wizards, which are either controlled by AI or other players. Killing monsters drops balls of mana which you cast a possession spell on so that balloons from your castle will go out and pickup the mana. Enemy wizards can re-possess the mana for their own balloons, so it's a constant fight over trying to get the mana to your castle. When you have enough mana you can increase the size of your castle, and you usually have to get a certain amount of total mana to win. As a wizard you have possibly the coolest arsenal of spells I've ever seen in any game, and these are detailed fairly well in the Wikipedia entry (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_Carpet_%28video_game%29#Spells).

Nothing gives me a better feeling of power then having just gained a volcano spell and rushing over to my enemies castles to cast a big f’ing volcano on it, followed by some storm lightning and meteors. As the enemy castle is destroyed, bit by bit, it releases mana which you try to possess for your own castle. Of course, just like fresh blood attracts sharks, there will be other wizards there fighting for the released mana. The game is very fun to play even today.

Many years ago I pleaded with them to open source it, but was denied. I see they’ve recently ported it to the Playstation network 16 years after the game came out, which I thought was surprising.

There are some gameplay videos on YouTube such as this one: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VnHRiHCxtOE

Magic Carpet 1 is awesome and MC2 sucks. MC2 was easy and boring--it just didn't have the same wizard-vs-wizard battles and cool levels as the first one. So if you give it a shot just make sure you play the first one.

Linux will likely have the majority of the smartphone market soon now that Nokia is switching to MeeGo. Since smartphones are the future, Linux's future is looking very bright.
Android - Linux
MeeGo - Linux
webOS - Linux
iOS - Not Linux
Win Phone 7 - Not Linux
BlackBerry OS - Not Linux

That sort of information is redacted by Wikileaks. This is the main reason it takes them so long to release information after it has been given to them.

That mentality is a slippery slope. Do you believe in sterilization of mentally challenged people? How about sterilization of dumb people, which I might add was still done in North America up until the 70s? How about government efforts to promote the dissemination of DNA in those individuals deemed "stronger"? Take these ideas further and you end up with the Holocaust.

Oh really? They didn't seem to learn anything from an oil spill in 1979 that was very similar other than the depth.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GHmhxpQEGPo

It's not that simple. You're ignoring statistics. You'd need a certain number of monkeys and some of them would have to be controls. If the effect is predicted to be small you may need thousands of monkeys. Animal rights groups would have a fit over this.

The monkeys would also have to experience the cellphone radiation in a similar way that humans would. The radiation would have to be emitted as if a cellphone were pressed up against their ear, and it would have to be intermittent as to simulate a human taking calls throughout the day.

Different cellphone systems run on different frequencies. If there was strong evidence to suggest that one caused cancer we couldn't necessarily assume that they all do, including future networks running on different frequencies. The same could be said about the power of the transmitter--different phones transmit at different levels of power, and future phones may be very different.

Some researchers believe that some cancers may take much longer than 10 years to show, so a thorough experiment may need to last 30 years or more. By the time good data is collected the cellphone networks would probably be using different frequencies and possibly lower power transmitters.

I'm sure there are other factors that I'm not even thinking about. Setting up a bulletproof experiment of this nature and getting solid results in a reasonable period of time is at least difficult and maybe impossible.

What this article should say is that new lower-power dual-core Atoms are about to be released.

Allowing people to make words in any direction (up, down, left, right, but not diagonally) is what I do to add another dimension to the gameplay. This doesn't change the game much but adds another level of strategy.

Give it a shot.

3d games before Quake 1 used integer, fixed-point math and worked just fine (e.g., Doom). The trig was all done using look-up tables. Fixed-point allows you to retain enough of the precision for everything to work smoothly.

Quake 1 used floating point because they (id) found that with the introduction of the Pentium that floating-point was actually faster for the Quake 1 game engine.

For modern-day portable devices I wonder if this is still true. I also wonder how well trying to mix fixed-point math and 3d hardware APIs would work. Switching to integers could be done, but it would complicate the code and would likely be slower.

"The scientists found the DNA code for a skin cancer called melanoma contained more than 30,000 errors almost entirely caused by too much sun exposure."
This is obviously such a ridiculous statement that I'm surprised it made it into the BBC article.
Show me the evidence that almost 100% of DNA errors in skin cells or skin cancer cells are caused by sun exposure...

I'm surprised I haven't seen this mentioned yet, but one of the main reasons netbooks with Windows XP are doing so well is becuase Microsoft started offering netbook manufacturers lower prices on XP Home. I can't seem to find the article right now but XP Home may be offered to large ODMs for around $20-$30, with some claiming it's around the $20 mark. I think the cheapest it ever got before these new netbook-only prices was around $40.