Please create an account to participate in the Slashdot moderation system

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×

Comment Re:What's the point of winning ... (Score 1) 507

I see where you're coming from, looking at the popularity of cheat cartridges/discs or "trainers" for cracked games there are many people who just want to run through the game without any danger for themselves.
The question is, is it a sign of quality to target those people exclusively? All games are entertainment, but not like a movie they are a game. And part of a game is that you win or loose. Where is the reward for finally completing a risky section, if you haven't failed half a dozen times beforehand? What is worth fixing are unnecessary delays like long loading times to play what should be already in memory or a cutscene you can't skip. But removing the risk means removing the reward as well.

Television

Submission + - Co-Inventor of the TV Remote Dies

poorting writes: http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/O/OBIT_REMOTE _CONTROL?SITE=WIRE&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT

Co-Inventor of the TV Remote Dies

BOISE, Idaho (AP) — Hit the mute button for a moment of silence: The co-inventor of the TV remote, Robert Adler, has died. Adler, who won an Emmy Award along with fellow engineer Eugene Polley for the device that made the couch potato possible, died Thursday of heart failure at a Boise nursing home at 93, Zenith Electronics Corp. said Friday.

In his six-decade career with Zenith, Adler was a prolific inventor, earning more than 180 U.S. patents. He was best known for his 1956 Zenith Space Command remote control, which helped make TV a truly sedentary pastime.

In a May 2004 interview with The Associated Press, Adler recalled being among two dozen engineers at Zenith given the mission to find a new way for television viewers to change channels without getting out of their chairs or tripping over a cable.

But he downplayed his role when asked if he felt his invention helped raise a new generation of couch potatoes.

"People ask me all the time — 'Don't you feel guilty for it?' And I say that's ridiculous," he said. "It seems reasonable and rational to control the TV from where you normally sit and watch television."

Various sources have credited either Polley, another Zenith engineer, or Adler as the inventor of the device. Polley created the "Flashmatic," a wireless remote introduced in 1955 that operated on photo cells. Adler introduced ultrasonics, or high-frequency sound, to make the device more efficient in 1956.

Zenith credits them as co-inventors, and the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences awarded both Adler and Polley an Emmy in 1997 for the landmark invention.

"He was part of a project that changed the world," Polley said from his home in Lombard, Ill.

Adler joined Zenith's research division in 1941 after earning a doctorate in physics from the University of Vienna. He retired as research vice president in 1979, and served as a technical consultant until 1999, when Zenith merged with LG Electronics Inc.

During World War II, Adler specialized in military communications equipment. He later helped develop sensitive amplifiers for ultra high frequency signals used by radio astronomers and by the U.S. Air Force for long-range missile detection.

Adler also was considered a pioneer in SAW technology, or surface acoustic waves, in color television sets and touch screens. The technology has also been used in cellular telephones.

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office published his most recent patent application, for advances in touch screen technology, on Feb. 1.

His wife, Ingrid, said Adler wouldn't have chosen the remote control as his favorite invention. In fact, he didn't even watch much television.

"He was more of a reader," she said. "He was a man who would dream in the night and wake up and say, 'I just solved a problem.' He was always thinking science."

Adler wished he had been recognized for more of his broad-ranging applications that were useful in the war and in space and were building blocks of other technology, she said, "but then the remote control changed the life of every man."

© 2007 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. Learn more about our Privacy Policy.
Programming

Submission + - Advanced Perl XML tips using XSLT, SAX, and SQL

An anonymous reader writes: This article shows you more powerful tools for parsing XML using Perl: DOM-style tree parsers and the SAX event-based parsers. You will learn about XML::SAX::Base and how you can use it to build sources, handlers, and sinks of SAX events. See how to feed transformed parse trees into SAX pipelines, further transform them, and write them as text or to SQL databases. Finally you will learn how to reverse this, using database content to drive SAX pipelines.

Stallman Convinces Cuba to Switch to Open Source 582

prostoalex writes "It's a big victory for Richard Stallman in North America, as Cuba decided to adopt open source software on the national level. Both Cuba and Venezuela are currently working on switching the entire government infrastructure to GNU/Linux operating system and applications, the Associated Press reports from Havana: 'Both governments say they are trying to wean state agencies from Microsoft's proprietary Windows to the open-source Linux operating system, which is developed by a global community of programmers who freely share their code.' The AP article doesn't mention the distro used for government workers, but says that the students are working on a Gentoo-based distro."
Wii

Submission + - will wheaton

An anonymous reader writes: would be nice to see him naked
OS X

Submission + - Where's Java 6 for Mac

Jari Mustonen writes: Time to hide your Mac-fanboy hat. Or maybe you are beliver enough to defend Apple even on this one. The question is simple: Where is the Java 6 for OS X? Let the gossips fly and let the slashdot do what it is best at: to summon an anonymous coward from Apple to tell us what is happening and where is my Java? But in the mean time, let's hear your theory.
It's funny.  Laugh.

Submission + - What's the biggest turn-off for you, the geek?

Dystopian Rebel writes: new person smokes new person watches TeeVee new person is biased against Flying Spaghetti Monster new person will not bring Cheetos while I am gaming new person says "LOL" in conversation new person says my binary clock is "weird" new person has dated Cowboy Neal I take what I can get, but the Cheetos thing gives pause

Slashdot Top Deals

"More software projects have gone awry for lack of calendar time than for all other causes combined." -- Fred Brooks, Jr., _The Mythical Man Month_

Working...