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Games

Submission + - Smithsonian To Feature Video Game History (ibtimes.com) 1

Submitted by RedEaredSlider
RedEaredSlider writes: The Smithsonian American Art Museum has featured everything pop culture from Dorothy's ruby red slippers to Seinfeld's puffy shirt. Now it will exhibit a history of video games.

The Smithsonian American Art Museum said that an exhibit called the "The Art of Video Games," will open to the public in Washington, D.C. on March 16, 2012. The exhibit will explore the 40-year evolution of video games as an artistic medium, with a focus on striking visual effects and the creative use of new technologies.

Submission + - German Foreign Office Abandoning Desktop Linux (h-online.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: According to a report last week. it looks like the German Foreign Office government department are switching back to Windows from Linux. Their primary reason is the cost of producing drivers for printers and scanners, and for training users. No concrete figures have been released, and in 2007 the department's switch was touted as being a huge success. The opposition party are pressing for the government to reveal how much each option will cost and to prove that moving to Windows is really going to bring any cost saving benefit.

Submission + - Developing world: send Kindles not PCs (pcpro.co.uk)

Submitted by
Barence
Barence writes: "PC Pro's Stuart Turton has a fascinating blog on how the local children reacted to the Amazon Kindle on a recent visit to the Nagpur region of India. "About 20 kids stood in a big group, just watching me: big eyes, curious expressions, ridiculously cute and all intent on the Kindle," he writes.

"Just turning the page caused them to drag their friends over, and there’s no reality where changing the font size of your book should make you cooler than a Jimmy Hendrix guitar solo. That was just the warm-up act though, it was the text-to-speech feature that pretty much made me the best friend of the entire village."

"A charity could do a lot worse than to load a few up with dictionaries, school books and novels and send them to some remote schools in developing nations," he observes."

Submission + - Late Night Gaming Banned in Vietnam (vnanet.vn)

Submitted by R3d M3rcury
R3d M3rcury writes: Vietnam's Ministry of Information and Communication has asked ISPs to block access to on-line games between 10:00PM and 8:00AM. 'The request, made on Wednesday, is another move from the authority to mitigate the side effects of online games. The request follows numerous stiff measures by the ministry to tackle the issue, including cutting internet access to agents at night beginning last September.'
Software

Submission + - Original Doom Ported To A Calculator (omnimaga.org)

Submitted by
Anonymous Coward
Anonymous Coward writes: "For years, students could spend their math classes playing various stripped-down clones of Doom and on their graphing calculator, but thanks to MRaklopaz, now they can even play the real game from ID software on the TI-Nspire. A video of the game in action is available there. It seems that Doom is on anything with a screen, these days."

Submission + - Is MS cheating on its own HTML 5 test? 1

Submitted by itamblyn
itamblyn writes: I just upgraded to the IE 9 RC and decided to see how it did on HTML 5 speed tests compared to the most recent dev channel build of Chrome (11.0.672.2). The result was more than x3 faster performance by IE (using a test created by MS in fairness). Interestingly though, the images and text were somewhat blurry, as if it wasn't being rendered at the full resolution of the window. Is this "legal"? Is Chrome losing because it's not cutting corners, or is this trick fair game and Chrome should be doing it as well. If you have a windows machine, you can do the comparison yourself here: http://ie.microsoft.com/testdrive/Performance/SpeedReading/default.html
Lord of the Rings

Submission + - LOTR Rewritten from Perspective of Mordor

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens writes
Hugh Pickens writes writes: "It's been said that history is written by the winners but Laura Miller writes in Salon about a counterexample as she reviews a new version of "Lord of the Rings" published to acclaim in Russia by Kirill Yeskov, a professional paleontologist whose job is reconstructing long-extinct organisms and their way of life from fossil remnants. Yeskov performs essentially the same feat in "The Last Ring-bearer," reconstructing the real world of Tolkien's Arda from "The Lord of the Rings" set during and after the end of the War of the Ring and told from the perspective of the losers. In Yeskov's retelling, available in translation as a free download, the wizard Gandalf is a war-monger intent on crushing the scientific and technological initiative of Mordor and its southern allies because science "destroys the harmony of the world and dries up the souls of men" and Aragorn is depicted by Yeskov as a ruthless Machiavellian schemer who is ultimately the puppet of his wife, the elf Arwen. Sauron's citadel Barad-dur is, by contrast, described as "that amazing city of alchemists and poets, mechanics and astronomers, philosophers and physicians, the heart of the only civilization in Middle-earth to bet on rational knowledge and bravely pitch its barely adolescent technology against ancient magic." According to Miller "in Yeskov's scenario, "The Lord of the Rings" is a highly romanticized and mythologized version of the fall of Mordor, perhaps even outright propaganda; "The Last Ringbearer" is supposed to be the more complicated and less sentimental true story.""
Android

Submission + - Google requests review of Oracle's patents (computerworld.com.au)

Submitted by
angry tapir
angry tapir writes: "Google's decision this week to ask the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office to re-examine a number of the Oracle patents at issue in the companies' ongoing intellectual-property case could have a significant effect on how the dispute plays out. Oracle has sued Google, claiming the Google-backed Android OS violated a number of Oracle-held Java patents and copyrights."
IT

Submission + - The Uk Government Playing With Time (telegraph.co.uk)

Submitted by
Anonymous Coward
Anonymous Coward writes: "In England it has been proposed that the clocks move forward by 2 hours this summer time to give us more daylight time in the day, and hopefully in turn stimulate the economy. My question is what impact will this hold for computers that automatically adjust the time to British Summer Time? Could this cause another 'millennium Bug' fiasco?"

Submission + - Hacker takes stance against Sony in PS3 lawsuit (geohot.com)

Submitted by mede
mede writes: In an interesting turn of events, Sony might have stumbled into ahttp://www.geohot.com/>tough nut to crack. George Hotz (aka GeoHot) famous for his iPhone hacking achievements, is planning on fighting the big corporation on removing his free speech rights at utilizing his fully paid for hardware. Hotz has always claimed being anti-piracy (since iPhone activities) and expresses has never pirated any game or even signed to PSN agreements. He's asking for donations to fight Sony back and try to achieve something similar to what was previously accomplished by the EFF in regard to cellphones. I've already donated.

Comment Problems posting submissions (Score 1) 39

by JR0cket (#35253532) Attached to: Book Review: jBPM Developer Guide
Is anyone else having problems posting book reviews to slashdot? I have tried four times in the last week and each time the book never shows up in the pending list of book reviews. The reviews have the bookrevew tag and the book review topic icon appears on the submission. The book details never show up on the preview of the submission or after I have pressed the "Save" submission button. I have read through the book review page several times, very carefully. There are several inaccuracies in the book review page about submissions, as there is not a drop down box to select book review, the only way I get the relevant fields is by entering bookreview as a tag. Any advice would be welcome. Thank you

Comment Book review submissions not showing up in list (Score 1) 1

by JR0cket (#35253494) Attached to: Book Review: Inkscape for Web Designers
I have tried on several occasions to submit a book review of the Inkscape for Web Designers book, but it never shows up in the book review list of pending submissions. Having read through the book review instructions several times, I am no wiser as to why my submissions never list where they should or what is happening to all the book details.
Book Reviews

Submission + - Book Review: Inkscape for Web Designers 1

Submitted by
Anonymous Coward
Anonymous Coward writes: "Inkscape is an open source 2D drawing tool that helps you create graphic designs, from simple buttons and logos to full blown posters and web page designs. Inkscape is similar to Adobe Illustrator or CorelDraw and gives you a vector based graphics tool that uses the W3C Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) format. Inkscape is easy to use, although learning the tricks that make designing a web site look great are more involved. The Inkscape 0.48 Essentails for Web designers is specifically focused on helping you to create your first web site designs and does a great job of getting you started. Most if not all the techniques covered are relevant to creating other graphic works too, so its useful as a general Inkscape tutorial.

I should say up front that If you are a web designer by trade you will know all the design aspects covered in the book, although the book will help you apply that knowledge in the latest version of Inkscape (version .048).

For those wanting to get into graphic design or start creating their own works, the book is quite a useful starting point to learn about a few important design concerns. Also, if you are a developer who works with graphic designers, you will find interest in understanding how graphic designs are created. No technical skills are really required except the basics of using desktop software with a modern graphical user interface. With no prior design knowledge, I was able to use Inkscape to do some basic posters, using the book has helped me do more involved designs and uses the more advanced features of Inkscape.

Inkscape is open source software and is licensed under GNU General Public License (GPL) and there are many examples of works create with Inkscape under the creative commons licences — eg SpreadUbuntu.org

While the focus on the book is Inkscape for web design, all the techniques are useful if you want to create advertising posters, desktop wallpapers, company logos, single page comics, etc. The only limitation to using Inkscape, apart from your creativity and imagination, is that it only does a single page graphic in each inkscape window, but each graphic can be saved as individual images and made into a document using Scribus or OpenOffice / LibreOffice as Inkscape can save your designs using standard image formats (png, jpeg, svg, etc.)

The book content is nice and clean, with content on pages nicely spaced out making the book really easy to read and follow, so no need to be daunted by the 316 page count.

As the book progresses it assumes you have read earlier chapters so does not repeat exact details, for example the exact steps to create drop shadows is shown only once, keeping the book nice and to the point. You will therefore get the most out of the book by following along with the exercises in Inkscape.

So the book covers simple design techniques useful for any graphic design, along with lots of good ideas on how to design and enhancing your website, from site layouts, templates to animations.

An important starting point in the book is the overview of vector graphics and how they differ from raster graphics (eg. vector graphics scale uniformly and you dont get blur when scaling images). This concisely sets the scene as to why vector graphics are better for web design — flexibility, quality and small file sizes.

The Inkscape install guidance is nothing more than download and install but this is probably all you need. There are a few hints for Mac Users to help them out. There are packages available for Ubuntu and Debian based distributions in their respective distribution repositories. A Microsoft Windows installer is also available from the downloads section of the Inkscape website

The tour of the Inkscape user interface is very detailed with a good indication of what you can do with all the controls that make up Inkscape. There are just about enough drawings provided as examples, although I would have liked a few more images to make the tour a little clearer. I recommend you read the Inkscape tour in dual page view if you are reading the ebook (pdf) version.

The design concepts in the book start with web site layouts in chapter 2, steadily building each of the design aspects onto the site layout (images, text, patterns, icons, buttons and logos, site maps). The book covers four basic design principles of Proximity, Alignment, Repetition, Contrast and suggests reading The Non-Designer's Design Book: Design and Typographic Principles for the Visual Novice by Robin Williams for more detailed study.

You are walked through step by step construction of a basic web page design — including header, footer, sidebar, content, navigation. Using guides, grids and aligning techniques to manage your web page layout. Pulling all the design work together to create a store-front for a website. Its pretty hard to go wrong following these steps. The book use the same web design jargon you get in industry and any jargon used is explained well enough.

When you have created your web page design, you are shown how to slice up that design and export it as a series of image files (png) for use in the HTML code of the actual web page. This is the same basic process as used in industry.

Throughout the book there are specific chapters on working with images, styling text, creating logos and buttons, using patterns for background images and more details on creating flow diagrams such as for creating web site maps.

Each chapter again builds on the previous information to give you an easy to follow guide and provides examples of why the design techniques covered here are important along with approaches to create the most suitable designs for your clients.

There is nice coverage of how to use Inkscape and GIMP in collaboration to create your own animations for your website. The animations are relatively simple but effective, scrolling text and a sailing boat on the sea, showning you the technique in more than enough detail for any website design using animated GIF images.

Getting a little more technical at the end of the book, though still easy to follow, it covers the XML structures that Inkscape uses to hold your graphic designs. These XML structures let you tweak your designs using Inkscapes XML editor. There is also a reference section on the various plugins available for Inkscape, mentioning specifically Agave for colour palette management and Export to PDF CMYK for color separation for the CMYK standard. There is also a section on how to create your own custom page templates.

I would have liked to see more information about filters that you can apply to your designs. There are a nice range of filters you can use in Inkscape and some are simple enough to use, but there are some that give great effects but have quite a few options you can tweek. There is plenty of scope for doing a whole chapter on using filters that would make the book more complete.

Inkscape 0.48 essentials for Web Designers is a great book to get started with Inkscape, especially if you are designing your own site. For example, If you have installed wordpress and want to create some custom themes, then this book would be very helpful to make your site stand out from the crowd.

There is an Inkscape Illustrators Cookbook by Packt Publishing out in April 2011 that seems more general compared to web developers book but as mentioned before, all the concepts presented in the web developers book are relevant for creating other graphic designs.

The book never attempts to teach you all about design, that would require a much larger book. There is enough design information in here to get you started on a good path and give you a good steer in the right direction. The coverage of Inkscape is very detailed and will help you get the most out of the tool, whether you are using it for web development or other graphical design activities.

This book makes a nice addition to the online resources available for Inkscape and with its tutorial style is a good contrast to other Inkscape books available which may contain more reference material but are more general in nature.

About the reviewer

John coaches Lean Agile practices, organises London technical communities and is an OSS advocate (since running Debian in 1995). @JR0cket"
Book Reviews

Submission + - Inkscape for Web Designers (blogspot.com)

Submitted by
JR0cket
JR0cket writes: "Inkscape is an open source 2D drawing tool that helps you create graphic designs, from simple buttons and logos to full blown posters and web page designs. Inkscape is similar to Adobe Illustrator or CorelDraw and gives you a vector based graphics tool that uses the W3C Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) format.

Inkscape is easy to use, although learning the tricks that make designing a web site look great are more involved.

The Inkscape 0.48 Essentails for Web designers is specifically focused on helping you to create your first web site designs and does a great job of getting you started. Most if not all the techniques covered are relevant to creating other graphic works too, so its useful as a general Inkscape tutorial.

Overview of the book

I should say up front that If you are a web designer by trade you will know all the design aspects covered in the book, although the book will help you apply that knowledge in the latest version of Inkscape (version .048).

For those wanting to get into graphic design or start creating their own works, the book is quite a useful starting point to learn about a few important design concerns. Also, if you are a developer who works with graphic designers, you will find interest in understanding how graphic designs are created. No technical skills are really required except the basics of using desktop software with a modern graphical user interface. With no prior design knowledge, I was able to use Inkscape to do some basic posters, using the book has helped me do more involved designs and uses the more advanced features of Inkscape.

Inkscape is open source software and is licensed under GNU General Public License (GPL) and there are many examples of works create with Inkscape under the creative commons licences — eg SpreadUbuntu.org

While the focus on the book is Inkscape for web design, all the techniques are useful if you want to create advertising posters, desktop wallpapers, company logos, single page comics, etc. The only limitation to using Inkscape, apart from your creativity and imagination, is that it only does a single page graphic in each inkscape window, but each graphic can be saved as individual images and made into a document using Scribus or OpenOffice / LibreOffice as Inkscape can save your designs using standard image formats (png, jpeg, svg, etc.)

The book content is nice and clean, with content on pages nicely spaced out making the book really easy to read and follow, so no need to be daunted by the 316 page count.

As the book progresses it assumes you have read earlier chapters so does not repeat exact details, for example the exact steps to create drop shadows is shown only once, keeping the book nice and to the point. You will therefore get the most out of the book by following along with the exercises in Inkscape.

So the book covers simple design techniques useful for any graphic design, along with lots of good ideas on how to design and enhancing your website, from site layouts, templates to animations.

The book in more detail

An important starting point in the book is the overview of vector graphics and how they differ from raster graphics (eg. vector graphics scale uniformly and you dont get blur when scaling images). This concisely sets the scene as to why vector graphics are better for web design — flexibility, quality and small file sizes.

The Inkscape install guidance is nothing more than download and install but this is probably all you need. There are a few hints for Mac Users to help them out. There are packages available for Ubuntu and Debian based distributions in their respective distribution repositories. A Microsoft Windows installer is also available from the downloads section of the Inkscape website

The tour of the Inkscape user interface is very detailed with a good indication of what you can do with all the controls that make up Inkscape. There are just about enough drawings provided as examples, although I would have liked a few more images to make the tour a little clearer. I recommend you read the Inkscape tour in dual page view if you are reading the ebook (pdf) version.

The design concepts in the book start with web site layouts in chapter 2, steadily building each of the design aspects onto the site layout (images, text, patterns, icons, buttons and logos, site maps). The book covers four basic design principles of Proximity, Alignment, Repetition, Contrast and suggests reading The Non-Designer's Design Book: Design and Typographic Principles for the Visual Novice by Robin Williams for more detailed study.

You are walked through step by step construction of a basic web page design — including header, footer, sidebar, content, navigation. Using guides, grids and aligning techniques to manage your web page layout. Pulling all the design work together to create a store-front for a website. Its pretty hard to go wrong following these steps. The book use the same web design jargon you get in industry and any jargon used is explained well enough.

When you have created your web page design, you are shown how to slice up that design and export it as a series of image files (png) for use in the HTML code of the actual web page. This is the same basic process as used in industry.

Throughout the book there are specific chapters on working with images, styling text, creating logos and buttons, using patterns for background images and more details on creating flow diagrams such as for creating web site maps.

Each chapter again builds on the previous information to give you an easy to follow guide and provides examples of why the design techniques covered here are important along with approaches to create the most suitable designs for your clients.

There is nice coverage of how to use Inkscape and GIMP in collaboration to create your own animations for your website. The animations are relatively simple but effective, scrolling text and a sailing boat on the sea, showning you the technique in more than enough detail for any website design using animated GIF images.

Getting a little more technical at the end of the book, though still easy to follow, it covers the XML structures that Inkscape uses to hold your graphic designs. These XML structures let you tweak your designs using Inkscapes XML editor. There is also a reference section on the various plugins available for Inkscape, mentioning specifically Agave for colour palette management and Export to PDF CMYK for color separation for the CMYK standard. There is also a section on how to create your own custom page templates.

Conclusion

Inkscape 0.48 essentials for Web Designers is a great book to get started with Inkscape, especially if you are designing your own site. For example, If you have installed wordpress and want to create some custom themes, then this book would be very helpful to make your site stand out from the crowd.

There is an Inkscape Illustrators Cookbook out in April 2011 that seems more general compared to web developers book but as mentioned before, all the concepts presented in the web developers book are relevant for creating other graphic designs.

The book never attempts to teach you all about design, that would require a much larger book. There is enough design information in here to get you started on a good path and give you a good steer in the right direction. The coverage of Inkscape is very detailed and will help you get the most out of the tool, whether you are using it for web development or other graphical design activities.

This book makes a nice addition to the online resources available for Inkscape and with its tutorial style is a good contrast to other Inkscape books available which may contain more reference material but are more general in nature.

About the reviewer

John coaches Lean Agile practices, organises London technical communities and is an OSS advocate (since running Debian in 1995). @JR0cket"

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