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Math

Ranking Soccer Players By Following the Bouncing Ball 142

Posted by timothy from the well-it-ain't-baseball dept.
sciencehabit excerpts from an interesting report on statistics for soccer, in the stats-obsessed world of sports: "Only a handful of soccer ranking systems exist, most of which rely on limited information: the number of goals scored in a match, the number of goals assisted, and some indices of a match's difficulty and importance. ... So researchers turned to an unlikely source: social networks. Applying the kinds of mathematical techniques used to map Facebook friends and other networks, the team created software that can trace the ball's flow from player to player. As the program follows the ball, it assigns points for precise passing and for passes that ultimately lead to a shot at the goal. Whether the shot succeeds doesn't matter. Only the ball's flow toward the goal and each player's role in getting it there factors into the program's point system, which then calculates a skill index for each team and player."
Piracy

Study Claims $41.5 Billion In Portable Game Piracy Losses Over Five Years 316

Posted by Soulskill from the fair-and-balanced dept.
Gamasutra reports that Japan's Computer Entertainment Suppliers Association conducted a study to estimate the total amount of money lost to piracy on portable game consoles. The figure they arrived at? $41.5 billion from 2004 to 2009. Quoting: "CESA checked the download counts for the top 20 Japanese games at what it considers the top 114 piracy sites, recording those figures from 2004 to 2009. After calculating the total for handheld piracy in Japan with that method, the groups multiplied that number by four to reach the worldwide amount, presuming that Japan makes up 25 percent of the world's software market. CESA and Baba Lab did not take into account other popular distribution methods for pirated games like peer-to-peer sharing, so the groups admit that the actual figures for DS and PSP software piracy could be much higher than the ¥3.816 trillion amount the study found."
Space

Dwarf Planets Accumulate In Outer Solar System 93

Posted by kdawson from the potato-radius dept.
An anonymous reader tips a piece in Australian Geographic indicating that Pluto may be in for another demotion, as researchers work to define dwarf planets more exactly. "[Australian researchers] now argue that the radius which defines a dwarf planet should instead be from 200–300 km, depending on whether the object is made of ice or rock. They base their smaller radius on the limit at which objects naturally form a spherical rather than potato-like shape because of 'self-gravity.' Icy objects less than 200 km (or rocky objects less than 300 km) across are likely to be potato shapes, while objects larger than this are spherical. ... They call this limit the 'potato radius' ... [One researcher is quoted] 'I have no problem with there being hundreds of dwarf planets eventually.'"
Input Devices

iPhone App Developed To Control NASA Robot 26

Posted by Soulskill from the where-do-i-download dept.
andylim writes "At EclipseCon 2010 attendees were challenged to create a robotic control system to drive a NASA-provided robot across a prototypical Mars landscape. To win the EclipseCon e4-rover Mars challenge, developers could either prove their e4 programming skills by creating the best e4-Rover client, or use an e4 client to operate the Rover through a series of tasks to collect points. Software architects Peter Friese and Heiko Behrens built an iPhone client for the EclipseCon challenge which controls the robot around NASA's Mars landscape using the iPhone's accelerometer."
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."

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