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Input Devices

Is the Line-in Jack On the Verge of Extinction? 411

Posted by timothy from the erasing-the-analog-hole dept.
SlashD0tter writes "Many older sound cards were shipped with line-out, microphone-in, and a line-in jacks. For years I've used such a line-in jack on an old Windows 2000 dinosaur desktop that I bought in 2000 (600 Mhz PIII) to capture the stereo audio signal from an old Technics receiver. I've used this arrangement to recover the audio from a slew of old vinyl LPs and even a few cassettes using some simple audio manipulating software from a small shop in Australia. I've noticed only recently, unfortunately, that all of the four laptops I've bought since then have omitted a line-in jack, forcing me to continue keeping this old desktop on life support. I've looked around for USB sound cards that include a line-in jack, but I haven't been too impressed by the selection. Is the line-in jack doomed to extinction, possibly due to lobbying from vested interests, or are there better thinking-outside-the-box alternatives available?"
Programming

Simpler "Hello World" Demonstrated In C 582

Posted by kdawson from the non-obfuscated dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Wondering where all that bloat comes from, causing even the classic 'Hello world' to weigh in at 11 KB? An MIT programmer decided to make a Linux C program so simple, she could explain every byte of the assembly. She found that gcc was including libc even when you don't ask for it. The blog shows how to compile a much simpler 'Hello world,' using no libraries at all. This takes me back to the days of programming bare-metal on DOS!"

Microsoft Demos Three Platforms Running the Same Game 196

Posted by Soulskill from the pick-up-and-play dept.
suraj.sun writes with this excerpt from Engadget: "Microsoft's Eric Rudder, speaking at TechEd Middle East, showed off a game developed in Visual Studio as a singular project (with 90% shared code) that plays on Windows with a keyboard, a Windows Phone 7 Series prototype device with accelerometer and touch controls, and the Xbox 360 with the Xbox gamepad. Interestingly, not only is the development cross-platform friendly, but the game itself (a simple Indiana Jones platformer was demoed) saves its place and lets you resume from that spot on whichever platform you happen to pick up."
Games

8-Year Fan-Made Game Project Shut Down By Activision 265

Posted by Soulskill from the of-doors-and-ways-out dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Activision, after acquiring Vivendi, became the new copyright holder of the classic King's Quest series of adventure game. They have now issued a cease and desist order to a team which has worked for eight years on a fan-made project initially dubbed a sequel to the last official installment, King's Quest 8. This stands against the fact that Vivendi granted a non-commercial license to the team, subject to Vivendi's approval of the game after submission. After the acquisition, key team members had indicated on the game's forums (now stripped of their original content by order of Activision) that Activision had given the indication that it intended to keep its current fan-game licenses, but was not interested in issuing new ones."

Comment Re:Deadly Spaces (Score 1) 398

by Ravenger (#31286538) Attached to: When PC Ports of Console Games Go Wrong

Being left handed I was dismayed when I found out you couldn't re-bind the arrow keys in Dead Space. Why do developers do this? if you can re-bind one key you should be able to rebind them all.

Luckily a clever guy called Kenny managed to hack the binary control file and allow you to use the arrow keys for movement.

http://www.kennynet.co.uk/2008/12/22/dead-space-with-arrow-keys/

Comment Re:Wrong (Score 1) 247

by Ravenger (#31283372) Attached to: Virgin Promises 100Mbps Connections To UK Homes

I was going to upgrade to 50mb but I was told it would make no difference because there simply isn't enough upstream bandwidth to cope in my area.

Virgin should pull their finger out and upgrade my UBR, it's mainly their fault, but it's also at least partly the fault of those on 50mb who are overly excessive in their use of upstream bandwidth, which is mainly caused by constant torrenting.

I'm fully aware that you've paid for a service you expect to be able to use it to the full, but so do I, and even though my connection is capped I had no chance of even reaching the cap due to the extreme packet loss caused by other users and Virgin's failure to upgrade the system to cope.

Virgin will not be able to deliver 100mb speeds without massive upgrades. Since they can't even upgrade my area to cope with the existing traffic then I have no hope they can do that for 100mb except in a very few areas.

Comment Re:Wrong (Score 1) 247

by Ravenger (#31283106) Attached to: Virgin Promises 100Mbps Connections To UK Homes

I have serious doubts that Virgin will be able to deliver 100mb reliably, as they can't even deliver 10mb in many areas.

I'm on Virgin 10mb and a few weeks ago my connection was constantly unusable due to 50mb users orrenting 24/7 (The upstream bandwidth was over-utilised on my UBR). That's mainly Virgin over-selling the bandwidth, but it's also due to selfish users acting as though they're eating all the pizza at an all-you-can-eat buffet, while the other customers are left fight over the left-overs. I'm not in favour of traffic shaping or bandwith caps, but surely there has to be some form of fair use for customers?

It doesn't help that Virgin won't be upgrading my network to cope with the demand for another FOUR months! Luckily I managed to get my connection off the 50mb network and back onto the 10mb network which isn't as bad.

I'd have left Virgin by now if I could get good ADSL in my area, but I can't, so I'm stuck with them.

Comment Re:The fight is lost (Score 1) 287

by Ravenger (#31256908) Attached to: Avoiding a Digital Dark Age

I used to be a c64 artist back in the 80's and I've still got my artwork from that era. Most have been converted to modern file formats, but I still have some in the original Koala Painter format as well - That's files 24 years old. I also have some print-outs of basic programs from a few years before that.

I did lose some of my artwork over the years, but I managed to get nearly all of it back (bar a couple of my really early pictures) via the internet from various C64 archives or from individual users sending me files. In one case someone sent me one of my pictures I'd totally forgotten about. So archiving digital digital data in a usable format may be a concern, but without the internet I'd never have been able to retrieve my lost work.
Earth

Debunking a Climate-Change Skeptic 807

Posted by kdawson from the so-many-notes-mister-mozart dept.
DJRumpy writes "The Danish political scientist Bjørn Lomborg won fame and fans by arguing that many of the alarms sounded by environmental activists and scientists — that species are going extinct at a dangerous rate, that forests are disappearing, that climate change could be catastrophic — are bogus. A big reason Lomborg was taken seriously is that both of his books, The Skeptical Environmentalist (in 2001) and Cool It (in 2007), have extensive references, giving a seemingly authoritative source for every one of his controversial assertions. So in a display of altruistic masochism that we should all be grateful for (just as we're grateful that some people are willing to be dairy farmers), author Howard Friel has checked every single citation in Cool It. The result is The Lomborg Deception, which is being published by Yale University Press next month. It reveals that Lomborg's work is 'a mirage,' writes biologist Thomas Lovejoy in the foreword. '[I]t is a house of cards. Friel has used real scholarship to reveal the flimsy nature' of Lomborg's work."
PC Games (Games)

Valve's Battle Against Cheaters 336

Posted by Soulskill from the busting-punks dept.
wjousts writes "IEEE Spectrum takes a look behind the scenes at Valve's on-going efforts to battle cheaters in online games: 'Cheating is a superserious threat,' says [Steam's lead engineer, John] Cook. 'Cheating is more of a serious threat than piracy.' The company combats this with its own Valve Anti-Cheat System, which a user consents to install in the Steam subscriber agreement. Cook says the software gets around anti-virus programs by handling all the operations that require administrator access to the user's machine. So, how important is preventing cheating? How much privacy are you willing to sacrifice in the interests of a level playing field? 'Valve also looks for changes within the player's computer processor's memory, which might indicate that cheat code is running.'"
Graphics

How To Play HD Video On a Netbook 205

Posted by timothy from the addressing-that-stuttering-problem dept.
Barence writes with some news to interest those with netbooks running Windows: "Netbooks aren't famed for their high-definition video playing prowess, but if you've got about $10 and a few minutes going spare, there is a way to enjoy high-definition trailers and videos on your Atom-powered portable. You need three things: a copy of Media Player Classic Home Cinema, CoreCodec's CoreAVC codec, and some HD videos encoded in AVC or h.264 formats. This blog takes you through the process."
Australia

Nintendo Wins Lawsuit Over R4 Mod Chip Piracy 146

Posted by Soulskill from the sorry-about-your-luck dept.
schliz writes "The Federal Court has ordered an Australian distributor to pay Nintendo over half a million dollars for selling the R4 mod chip, which allows users to circumvent technology protection measures in Nintendo's DS consoles. The distributor, RSJ IT Solutions, has been ordered to cease selling the chip through its gadgetgear.com.au site and any other sites it controls, as well as paying Nintendo $520,000 in damages."
Games

Ubisoft's Constant Net Connection DRM Confirmed 631

Posted by Soulskill from the enjoy-getting-flamed-by-the-entire-internet dept.
A few weeks ago we discussed news of Ubisoft's DRM plans for future games, which reportedly went so far as to require a constant net connection, terminating your game if you get disconnected for any reason. Well, it's here; upon playing review copies of the PC version of Assassin's Creed 2 and Settlers VII, PCGamer found the DRM just as annoying as you might expect. Quoting: "If you get disconnected while playing, you're booted out of the game. All your progress since the last checkpoint or savegame is lost, and your only options are to quit to Windows or wait until you're reconnected. The game first starts the Ubisoft Game Launcher, which checks for updates. If you try to launch the game when you're not online, you hit an error message right away. So I tried a different test: start the game while online, play a little, then unplug my net cable. This is the same as what happens if your net connection drops momentarily, your router is rebooted, or the game loses its connection to Ubisoft's 'Master servers.' The game stopped, and I was dumped back to a menu screen — all my progress since it last autosaved was lost."

Comment Re:Punched cards - there was a machine for that (Score 1) 731

by Ravenger (#27770957) Attached to: Old-School Coding Techniques You May Not Miss

The first computer program I ever wrote was when I was at school in 1977 in mathematics class. It was a BASIC program to print out a list of numbers, and had to be transcribed onto the equivalent of punched cards, except the 'holes' weren't punched out. Instead you used a soft pencil to colour in the 'holes' to match the binary ascii code of each character in your line of code. There was one card per line of code, each with a max 80 characters that you could encode on them.

These cards were sent off to a university somewhere, and the resulting print-outs would be sent back a week or so later. Unfortunately my program didn't work. If I had got a printout back it'd probably have said 'SYNTAX ERROR'.

As I was a school-kid at the time I didn't really realise exactly what I was doing, but looking back now it's pretty cool to have at least attempted to write a computer program on such an ancient input device. Shows how far we've come since I was a kid.

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