Comment Wow "Turbo Boost Mode" (Score 1) 116
How do I turn it off? I'm blinded by the SPEED!
Is Intel stealing 15 year old marketing shtick from Gateway?
Thousands of Blackbirds Fall From Sky Dead 577
Dan East writes "In a fashion worthy of a King or Hitchcock novel, blackbirds began to fall from the sky dead in Arkansas yesterday. Somewhere between 4,000 and 5,000 birds rained down on the small town of Beeb, Arkansas, with no visible trauma. Officials are making wild guesses as to what happened — lightning strike, high-altitude hail, or perhaps trauma from the sound of New Year's fireworks killed them."
Denver Rejects UFO Agency To Track Aliens 80
Republicans weren't the only ones to win big yesterday. Aliens in The Mile-High City can breathe easier thanks to voters rejecting a plan to officially track them. From the article: "The proposal defeated soundly Tuesday night would have established a commission to track extraterrestrials. It also would have allowed residents to post their observations on Denver's city Web page and report sightings." Let the anonymous probings begin!
Infinite Mario With Dynamic Difficulty Adjustment 103
bgweber writes "There's been a lot of discussion about whether games should adapt to the skills of players. However, most current techniques limit adaptation to parameter adjustment. But if the parameter adaptation is applied to procedural content generation, then new levels can be generated on-line in response to a player's skill. In this adaptation of Infinite Mario (with source [.JAR]), new levels are generated based on the performance of the player. What other gameplay mechanics are open for adaptation when games adapt to the skills of specific players?"
NCsoft Sued For Making Lineage II 'Too Addictive' 360
An anonymous reader writes "South Korean MMO game publisher NCsoft is finding itself facing another lawsuit, this time for making games that are 'too addictive.' US Lineage II player Craig Smallwood is suing the publisher for $3 million because he found himself playing Lineage II for 20,000 hours over a period of 5 years. At times, his average play session would persist for over 11 hours, crippling his life and ability to function. A federal judge is allowing the court case to go forward (PDF), stating that the plaintiff has a claim for negligence and gross negligence against the publisher."
Lego 'CubeDudes' By PIXAR Animator 34
An anonymous reader writes "PIXAR Animator Angus MacLane has created an incredible series of LEGO 'CubeDudes' modeled after beloved characters from sci-fi movies and comic books. From Star Wars heroes R2D2 and C-3PO to Toy Story's Buzz Lightyear and Jessie, the pixellated creations bear a remarkable likeness to their forebears. MacLane says, 'When I had a moment here and there I chip away at a few at a time. I'll have the body of one Dude and a head of another that I will be working on at the same time. It takes me about 10-15 minutes to make one CubeDude and I average about two a day.' The hardest part is the color palette — LEGO doesn't make purple bricks, so villains like Lex Luthor, The Joker, and Grimace are a challenge."
Comment We're talking blank space (Score 1) 814
We hear copy editors, but more often typesetters whining about the two spaces contributing to the vertical river thing. Look. If you want the reader to logically follow your argument on the page and you respect your own thought process enough to trust the reader to come back and reread your sentences, then use the the two spaces. Individual sentences are easier to find that way. If all you care about is achieving a uniformly gray page, then try the single space.
I can still picture the side of the page (left or right) and approximate position on the page of passages of text I read as an undergraduate in certain books. I looked up just now two such passages I could think of and still have the books and both were from books with extra space between sentences. The pages of such books have distinct features. If all pages just look evenly gray memory is destroyed or not created to begin with in the reader. Either way two spaces is better.
The issue at hand has been with us for a very long time, but at the core it has nothing to do with keyboards or quantities of "spaces." It has to do with the display of symbols on printed pages. And in particular the failure to adequately include display information into the logical encoding of the symbols as distinct from their appearance on a page.
If we are just looking at words on a page, the question might be simply, should the white space between words be equal to the white space between sentences? If both sentences and words are demarcated only by space, then the answer must be no, for some method is needed to distinguish the logical structure of a sentence from a mere grouping of words. Given that we have additional sentence ending symbols, the answer should be effortless, but the symbols are vague. Ages ago, someone fucked up and used a period to indicate an abbreviated series of characters. Because of this, the character series period-space cannot sufficiently mark the logical ending of a sentence.
To restate the original question: "What character (or series of characters) is correctly used to indicate the end of a sentence structure within a series of symbols?" The correct answer is, and must by necessity always be, "The end-of-sentence-character(s)." Unfortunately we are confronted with an Adamsian Total Existence Failure with respect to such a standard.
Should the white space between an abbreviation ending in a period and the following word be equal to the white space between the end of a sentence and the following sentence? I think the answer is clearly no. Why would they be? The ending of a sentence indicates the end of a logical construct. The ending of an abbreviation is something wholly of a different character. If you must choose between ending a sentence in one or two spaces, use two.
Microsoft Sends Flowers To Internet Explorer 6 Funeral 151
Several readers have written with a fun followup to yesterday's IE6 funeral. Apparently Microsoft, in a rare moment of self-jest, took the time to send flowers, condolences, and a promise to meet at MIX. The card reads: "Thanks for the good times IE6, see you all @ MIX when we show a little piece of IE Heaven. The Internet Explorer Team @ Microsoft."
Unreleased Atari 2600 Game Found At Flea Market 253
VonGuard writes "I was at the flea market in Oakland yesterday when a pile of EPROMs caught my eye. When I got them home I found that they were prototypes for Colecovision games. A few were unpublished or saw limited runs, like Video Hustler (billiards). Others were fully released, like WarGames. But the crown jewel is what look to be a number of chips with various revisions of Cabbage Patch Kids Adventures in the Park for Atari 2600. This game was never released and has never been seen. It was a port of the version for Colecovision, and this lot of chips also included the Coleco version. So now I have to find someone who can dump EPROMs gently onto a PC so we can play this never-before seen game, which is almost certainly awful."
Submission + - Happy Birthday, iPod! (srslycool.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Sunday will mark 6 years of the Apple iPod being available to us eager consumers. Enjoy a gallery that looks at the evolution of the iPod through this time.
Submission + - Lying Admin No Longer at Wikipedia
abscissa writes: Essjay, the one of highest level ups on Wikipedia who lied about his credentials in an effort to "protect his identity" (though he later announced his real name, age, and place of residence), announced that he will be leaving Wikipedia. He claimed to have several advanced degrees in theology and even went so far as to pretend to be a professor and write in support of a student (that content has now been permanently erased). He had been promoted to a paid Wikia position by Jimbo Wales, but after an outpouring of anger he was asked to resign by Jimbo (who claimed not to have all the facts until very recently).
Ocean Floor Crust Wound to Be Explored 148
eldavojohn writes "A group of scientists are disembarking right now to study an open gash in the ocean floor where earth's mantle lays exposed without any crust covering it. The scientists describe this as the result of the mantle moving too quickly for the crust to keep up. Either that, or the mantle was never covered by the crust and just has always been like this. From the article, 'Regardless of how they formed, the exposed mantle provides scientists with a rare opportunity to study the Earth's rocky innards. Many attempts to drill deep into the planet barely get past the crust.'"
