Comment Duh (Score 1) 540
To be able to pierce holes in the font, they had to thicken it by making it bold, hence use more ink. This just defeats the whole purpose. Really stupid!
Comment Warning: Nintendo might screw you in the long run (Score 2, Informative) 59
That's not entirely true. There are many interesting prizes, such as games, which are still available, but the problem is that they cost an awful lot of points. Here's the top items that you can buy at the moment in the European Club Nintendo 's Stars Catalogue with their sale price in points:
- Gold-like statuette of Link riding Epona [15.000]
- DS cases brown (sold out) / pink [5.500]
- Advance Wars 2: Black Hole Rising GBA (sold out) [5.000]
- Metroid: Zero Mission [5.000]
- DS Lite Value Pack (Super Mario) [5.000]
- Mario Power Tennis [5.000]
- Kirby and the Amazing Mirror (sold out) [5.000]
- Super Mario Galaxy soundtrack - platinum edition [4.850]
There are many fashion accessories and cute gadgets among the less expensive items; you can also turn your star points into Wii points.
I registered 10 GameCube games since I joined and barely earned 4000 points. I haven't bought games since then and Nintendo did something that is certainly not going to encourage me to change that: this year, they decided that some games people have registered are now too old! So they withdrew the points from our totals, just like that! For me that's 2800 points vaporized. And they plan to do that every year. Imagine if your banker decided that some of the money you have on your account come from salaries that go back too far in time and just took the money away. I feel that's what Nintendo did. You don't take back what you give, that's plain stealing. Besides, this new system favours kids who can spend a lot of money in games and doesn't reward other patient loyal fans. That really didn't help improve the rather negative image that I've been having of Nintendo lately.
So watch out for Nintendo's nasty tricks in the US too!
Forry Ackerman Dead At 92 83
rrohbeck was one of several readers to note the passing of Forrest J. Ackerman at the age of 92. Ackerman, who coined the term sci-fi in 1954, has been called the 'world's biggest fan.' Over a long career he acted as literary agent for Isaac Asimov, A.E. van Vogt, Hugo Gernsback, and L. Ron Hubbard; he published Ray Bradbury's first short story in a fan magazine in 1938. Ackerman wrote over 2,000 articles and short stories, including, oddly enough, lesbian fiction in the 1940s. In recent years, mounting health bills forced him to sell his home, the 'Ackermansion,' and most of the 300,000 items of memorabilia it stored.
Street Fighter HD Remix Launches With Fan-Made Soundtrack 44
djpretzel writes "OC ReMix just released a free download of our official soundtrack to Capcom's Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix game for the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 consoles. While video game companies have worked with fans in the past, HD Remix is the first major video game with a completely fan-made soundtrack. More than twenty gamers from around the world contributed remixes of the original Street Fighter games' music for inclusion in the updated game, in styles including jazz, hip-hop, reggaeton, spaghetti western, garage rock, big beat and electronica. MP3s and a torrent (also including FLAC) are available at OCReMix."
Magnetic Levitating Trains Get Go-Ahead In Japan 425
An anonymous reader writes "They've been on the drawing board for 40 years but the politicos have finally approved routes for the 500kph maglev trains to replace bullet trains." I wonder if they'll let me test out maglev rollerblades on the track.
Linux As a Model For a New Government? 509
An anonymous reader writes "The hedge fund investor who prided himself on achieving 1000% returns, Andrew Lahde, wrote a goodbye letter to mark his departure from the financial world. In it, he suggests people think about building a new government model, and his suggestion is to have someone like George Soros fund a new government that brings together the best and brightest minds in a manner where they're not tempted by bribery. In doing so, he refers to how Linux grows and competes with Microsoft. An open source government. How would such a system work, and could it succeed? How long before it became corrupt? Would it need a benevolent dictator (Linus vs. Soros)?"
Opera Develops Search Engine For Web Developers 31
nk497 writes "The Metadata Analysis and Mining Application (MAMA) doesn't index content like a standard search engine, but looks at markup, style, scripting and the technology behind pages. Based on those existing MAMA-ed pages, 80.4 per cent of sites use cascading style sheets (CSS), while the average web page has 47 markup errors and 16,400 characters. Should you want to know which country is using the AJAX component XMLHttpRequest the most, MAMA can tell you that it's Norway, with 10.2 per cent of the data set."
Additional coverage is available at Computerworld, and a deeper explanation is up at Opera's Dev site.
Publishing a Commercial iPhone Game, Start To Finish 38
Niklas Wahrman writes with this "motivational story on how a student and part-time developer was able to take an idea and turn it into an Android project and then port to iPhone for commercial release in less than a year. In the article, he focuses on how to get a game done — a problem many independent developers face. During the development of the game, Asterope, he took a lot of screenshots from many of the development stages that show how the game gradually came to life."
Flash Cookies, a Little-Known Privacy Threat 225
Wiini recommends a blog posting exploring Flash cookies, a little-known threat to privacy, and how you can get control of them. 98% of browsers have Macromedia Flash Player installed, and the cookies it enables have some interesting properties. They have no expiration date; they store 100 KB of data by default, with an unlimited maximum; they can't be deleted by your browser; and they send previous visit information and history, by default, without your permission. I was amazed at some of the sites, not visited in a year or more, that still had Flash cookies on my machine. Here's the user-unfriendly GUI for deleting them, one at a time, each one requiring confirmation.
