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Comment John Christopher & John Wyndham (Score 1) 1130

by Zalgon 26 McGee (#40926969) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: Most Underappreciated Sci-Fi Writer?

The Tripods trilogy (now in four books) is a good set to get your 10-12 year old boys hooked on the genre.

And I enjoy the "cosy catastrophes" of John Wyndham's works - The Day of the Triffids and Chrysalids are his two best known, but the story of the Troon family in "The Outward Urge" is wonderful as well (one of the best SF examples of bluffing at a national level in one of the stories), and my personal favourite was his first posthumous work, "Web" - unlike its predecessors, there's no "Well, things are getting better" at the end...
Crime

Girls Bugged Teachers' Staff Room 227

Posted by samzenpus from the making-the-grade dept.
A pair of enterprising Swedish schoolgirls ended up in court after they were caught bugging their teachers break room. The duo hoped they would hear discussions about upcoming tests and school work, allowing them to get better grades. It worked until one of them decided to brag about it on Facebook, and the authorities were called in. The girls were charged with trespassing and fined 2,000 kronor ($270) each in Stockholm District Court.
Classic Games (Games)

How Death Rally Got Ported 89

Posted by Soulskill from the not-the-opposite-of-starboarded dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Last year, I got the opportunity to port Remedy Entertainment's Death Rally to modern platforms off its original MS-DOS sources. I wrote an article about the porting process for Game Developer magazine, and now I've posted the text of the article for general consumption. 'The source software platform was DOS, Watcom C, and some Dos4GW-style DOS extender. The extender basically meant you could use more than 640k of memory, and would not need any weird code for data larger than 64k. The game displayed in VESA 640x480 and MCGA 320x200 graphics modes, all with 8-bit palettes; there was no true color anywhere. There were also some per-frame palette change tricks that emulators have trouble with. The source code was mostly pure C with a couple dozen inline assembly functions. There were a few missing subsystems, specifically audio and networking, which would have to be replaced completely anyway, as well as one file for which the source code was lost and only a compiled object was available.'"
Biotech

Doubled Yield For Bio-Fuel From Waste 97

Posted by timothy from the what-about-the-oil-from-anything-guy? dept.
hankwang writes "Dutch chemical company DSM announced a new process for production of ethanol from agricultural waste. Most bio-fuel ethanol now is produced from food crops such as corn and sugar cane. Ethanol produced from cellulose would use waste products such as wood chips, citrus peel, and straw. The new process is claimed to increase the yield by a factor of two compared to existing processes, thanks to new enzymes and special yeast strains."
Security

Stand-Alone Antivirus Software? 159

Posted by timothy from the lonely-job dept.
An anonymous reader writes "I work for a company that repairs specialty devices that have an embedded Mini-ATX motherboard without a CD-ROM drive and run Windows XP Home. And while the USB flash drives we insert into them have a physical write-protect tab, we still encounter a (rather annoying) display dialog from malware/viruses to remove the write-protect so the malware can infect the flash drive. We don't remove the write-protect, obviously, but would like to offer our customers the option of removing the malware/virus without having to install any software. We would rather not install/uninstall antivirus software even for one-time use, due to various licensing issues, nor do we want to connect to the Internet to use web-based online scanners. Is there any stand-alone anti-virus/anti-malware software for Windows that can be run directly from the write-protected flash drive itself?"
Medicine

Cutting Umbilical Cord Early Eliminates Stem Cells 139

Posted by timothy from the just-leave-it-on-a-few-years dept.
GeneralSoh writes "Delaying clamping the umbilical cord at birth may have far-reaching benefits for your baby, according to researchers at the University of South Florida's Center of Excellence for Aging and Brain Repair — and should be delayed for at least a few minutes longer after birth. This new recommendation published in the most recent Journal of Cellular and Molecular Medicine (14:3) notes that delaying clamping the umbilical cord allows more umbilical cord blood and crucial stem cells to transfer from mama to baby."
Image

Son Sues Mother Over Facebook Posts 428

Posted by samzenpus from the check-your-family-status dept.
Most kids hate having their parents join in on a discussion on Facebook, but one 16-year-old in Arkansas hates it so much he has filed suit against his mother, charging her with harassment. From the article: "An Arkadelphia mother is charged with harassment for making entries on her son's Facebook page. Denise New's 16-year-old son filed charges against her last month and requested a no-contact order after he claims she posted slanderous entries about him on the social networking site. New says she was just trying to monitor what he was posting." Seems like he could just unfriend her.
Censorship

Venezuela's Last Opposition TV Owner Arrested 433

Posted by timothy from the or-in-this-case-on-air dept.
WrongSizeGlass writes "AP is reporting the owner of Venezuela's only remaining TV channel that takes a critical line against President Hugo Chavez was arrested Thursday. 'Guillermo Zuloaga, owner of Globovision, was arrested on a warrant for remarks that were deemed "offensive" to the president,' Attorney General Luisa Ortega said. This comes on the heels of last week's story titled Venezuela's Chavez To Limit Internet Freedom."
Bug

Outlook 2010 Bug Creates Monster Email Files 126

Posted by timothy from the rodents-of-unusual-size dept.
Julie188 writes with this snippet from Network World "Office 2010 is still in beta and a patch is already out. Microsoft is trying to fix a bug in the email program Outlook 2010 Beta that creates unusually large e-mail files that take up too much space. The Outlook product team has offered a bug fix for both 32-bit and 64-bit systems that fixes the problem going forward, although previous emails will remain super-sized. This could be a problem for email programs that limit message sizes, such as Gmail or BlackBerry."

Comment Re:Anyone else want a network enabled version of.. (Score 1) 381

by Zalgon 26 McGee (#26265033) Attached to: Resurrecting Old Games, What Works?

Use your google-fu and look up some of the stories told by the late Dani Bunten about attempts to re-do M.U.L.E.

Shortly after her sex-change operation, she met a friend who asked "How did it go?" "Not so well. They wanted to put in guns and bombs." The friend: asking about the sex change. Dani: as always, focussed on the game (I think the Sega remake "Son of M.U.L.E.")

I have heard of rumours of patched versions of MULE on Atari emulators that do permit networked play.
User Journal

Journal Journal: Royalties For Hardware

Journal by JrOldPhart
Imagine if hardware manufacturers used the same business model
as the Movie and Music Industries. You get a license to use the hardware
each time you put in a piece of media you pay royalties to the manufacturer
for the use of the equipment.

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