Comment Re:Recycling skins and textures from other games? (Score 2, Informative) 101
It is, read this for some more info on the DLC.
Comment Drupal (Score 2, Interesting) 434
I wonder if they're going to replace Drupal or if they are cashing out $18 million for an interface/theme overhaul.
Bethesda Speaks On Gamebryo Engine, Final Fallout 3 DLC 101
PsxMeUP writes "Game Observer conducted an interview with Ashley Cheng, Production Director at Bethesda. He answered questions about the Gamebryo engine, why they prefer it over other engines and the advantages it presented while making Fallout 3. Cheng also talks a bit about what inspired their designers while making Fallout 3 and what is in store for the PS3. Apparently, much of the team has read Cormac McCarthy's The Road, which inspired the look and story of Fallout 3. Bethesda, according to Cheng, will never create a game like Final Fantasy because the Gamebryo engine is better at handling 'open ended worlds ripe for exploration.'"
Meanwhile, Bethesda's Jeff Gardiner spoke recently about the game's fifth and final DLC release, Mothership Zeta, which finds players aboard an alien spaceship in orbit. He said, "The player will have a handful of tasty alien technologies to play with. There are new fire arms and melee weapons, which will comprise the most powerful weaponry in the game."
Submission + - Schneier Calls Google OS Security Claims 'Idiotic'
The Narrative Fallacy writes: "While Google says that that it is "going back to the basics and completely redesigning the underlying security architecture of the OS so that users don't have to deal with viruses, malware and security updates," according to security expert Bruce Schneier, such claims are "idiotic." adding that "it was mathematically proved decades ago that it is impossible — not an engineering impossibility, not technologically impossible, but the 2+2=3 kind of impossible — to create an operating system that is immune to viruses." Other security experts suggest that it's at least possible for Google to make a more secure and user-friendly operating system. "With the caveat that nothing out there is going to be 100 percent secure, and new systems ... are going to have more problems than code that's been battle-tested for a long time, I think the Google guys are right," says Brian Chess, cofounder and chief security officer at cybersecurity vendor Fortify Software. "They could make a system that is significantly better from a security standpoint than the systems most people use today." Google has a chance to start over from a user expectation point of view and could, for example, make top security a default setting in the OS, instead of requiring users to change their setting to make their OS more secure, says Chess. "The question is, is the system going to be able to do a reasonable job of defending itself even in the face of a certain amount of user error? I think they've got a pretty good shot at it.""
Comment Re:Bzzzt Bang Crash (Score 1) 100
Yeah, I wonder why this was labeled Entertainment?
World's Biggest Alarm Clock Shakes You Out of Bed
100
tugfoigel writes "Built by "Kevin" for a contest, this computer-controlled alarm clock is touted as the world's largest. To be more specific, he 'mounted a large air cylinder to the head of [his] bed and a valve, controlled by a computer, which [he programmed] to wake [him] up in the morning.'"
Submission + - How heavy is a Petabyte? (matrixstore.net) 1
Jon Morgan writes: "Whilst heaving around numerous data storage systems to sell (they weigh A LOT!), we got to wondering: How heavy is a Petabyte of data storage?
Our best guess is 365KG (How heavy is a Petabyte?) which is 6 million times lighter than in 1980! But is there a lighter way to store a Petabyte?"
Submission + - Extra dimensions? Only if smaller than 3*10^-6 m!
Vincenzo Romano writes: The website of the fortnightly scientific magazine Science News is reporting today an interesting article about the maximum size of any extra dimension, if any.
A team of theoretical physicists and astronomers has calculated that any hidden extra dimension beyond our familiar three-dimensional space, a world known in physics parlance as a 3-brane, must be less than 3 micrometers.
The study has been submitted online by Oleg Gnedin, Assistant Professor of Astronomy at the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts of the Univesrity of Michigan and is based on observations on one of the oldest black holes ever found in our universe, lurking deep inside the NGC 4472 galaxy.
Basically, that black hole has not evaporated yet by the Hawking radiation on the predicted "short" short timescale, thus posing an upper limit to the size of any extra dimensions to less thab 0.003 mm.
So what? String theorists must buy better magnifying lenses if they want to prove to be right.
A team of theoretical physicists and astronomers has calculated that any hidden extra dimension beyond our familiar three-dimensional space, a world known in physics parlance as a 3-brane, must be less than 3 micrometers.
The study has been submitted online by Oleg Gnedin, Assistant Professor of Astronomy at the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts of the Univesrity of Michigan and is based on observations on one of the oldest black holes ever found in our universe, lurking deep inside the NGC 4472 galaxy.
Basically, that black hole has not evaporated yet by the Hawking radiation on the predicted "short" short timescale, thus posing an upper limit to the size of any extra dimensions to less thab 0.003 mm.
So what? String theorists must buy better magnifying lenses if they want to prove to be right.
Firefox To Get Multi-Process Browsing 383
An anonymous reader writes with news that multi-process browsing will be coming to Firefox. The project is called Electrolysis, and the developers "have already assembled a prototype that renders a page in a separate process from the interface shell in which it is displayed." Mozilla's Benjamin Smedberg says they're currently "[sprinting] as fast as possible to get basic code working, running simple testcase plugins and content tabs in a separate process," after which they'll fix everything that breaks in the process. Further details of their plan are available on the Mozilla wiki, and a summary is up at TechFragments.
Submission + - United Breaks Guitars
The Narrative Fallacy writes: "When United Airlines broke Dave Carroll's $3500 Taylor guitar in the the spring of 2008, he contacted them to ask for compensation. After all, he and other passengers watched from the plane as United baggage handlers actually threw his guitar around on the tarmac. United said they wouldn't pay for the damages, so Carroll wrote a catchy song about how much United sucks."
Submission + - 'Whiz Kid' DOD Secretary Robert McNamara is Dead
Hugh Pickens writes: "Robert Strange McNamara, perhaps the most influential defense secretary of the 20th century, who helped lead the nation into the Vietnam war and spent the rest of his life wrestling with the war's moral consequences, died early Monday at his home in Washington. President Kennedy called McNamara the smartest man he had ever met as McNamara used his mastery of systems analysis, the business of making sense of large organizations — taking on a big problem, sorting it out, studying every facet, finding simplicity in the complexity. McNamara sent teams of bright young civilians — the whiz kids, as they were known — out across the Pentagon to "to bring efficiency to a $40 billion enterprise beset by jealousies and political pressures." McNamara's moment of truth came when he told his aides to begin compiling a top-secret history of the war — later known as the Pentagon Papers — and he began asking himself what the United States was doing in Vietnam and concluded that the United States could not win the war. In retirement, he listed some of the reasons: a failure to understand the enemy, a failure to see the limits of high-tech weapons, a failure to tell the truth to the American people, and a failure to grasp the nature of the threat of communism. "What went wrong was a basic misunderstanding or misevaluation of the threat to our security represented by the North Vietnamese," McNamara said. "So the first lesson is know your opponents. I want to suggest to you that we don't know our potential opponents today.""
Comment Source (Score 1) 1
Here's the original source rather than someone's spam blog.
Submission + - Apple rejects iPhone app, files a patent for it (tuaw.com) 1
recoiledsnake writes: Yet another app has been buried in the iPhone Application Graveyard . While this is nothing new, the kicker this time is that Apple has filed a patent on karaoke functionality in the iPod application a few weeks after rejecting the iKaraoke app for duplicating functionality that doesn't exist... yet. Maybe the $99 iPhone Developer Program fee should include a crystal ball for testing apps for duplicating Apple programs' functionality before submitting them so that precious time and resources of app developeres is not unnecessarily wasted. Jobs himself had responded to accusations of political censorship of iPhone applications in the past.
Submission + - Browser Vendors Force W3C To Scrap HTML 5 Codecs (infoworld.com)
snydeq writes: "Major browser vendors have been unable to agree on an encoding format they will support in their products, forcing the W3C to drop audio and video codecs from HTML 5, the forthcoming W3C spec that has been viewed as a threat to Flash, Silverlight, and similar technologies. 'After an inordinate amount of discussions on the situation, I have reluctantly come to the conclusion that there is no suitable codec that all vendors are willing to implement and ship,' HTML 5 editor Ian Hickson wrote to the whatwg mailing list. Apple, for its part, won't support Ogg Theora in QuickTime, expressing concerns over patents despite the fact that the codec can be used royalty-free. Opera and Mozilla oppose using H.264 due to licensing and distribution issues. Google has similar reservations, despite already using H.264 and Ogg Theora in Chrome. Microsoft has made no commitment to support <video>."
What Are the Best First Steps For Becoming a Game Designer? 324
todd10k writes "I've recently decided to go back to college. I have a lot of experience with games, having played them for most of my adult life, and have always toyed with the idea of making them one day. I've finally decided to give it my best. What I'd like to know is: what are the best languages to study? What are the minimum diploma or degree requirements that most games companies will accept? Finally, is C++ the way to go? ASP? LUA?"
