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Games

NYT's "Games To Avoid" an Ironic, Perfect Gamer Wish List 189

Posted by Soulskill from the more-or-less dept.
MojoKid writes "From October to December, the advertising departments of a thousand companies exhort children to beg, cajole, and guilt-trip their parents for all manner of inappropriate digital entertainment. As supposedly informed gatekeepers, we sadly earthbound Santas are reduced to scouring the back pages of gaming review sites and magazines, trying to evaluate whether the tot at home is ready for Big Bird's Egg Hunt or Bayonetta. Luckily, The New York Times is here to help. In a recent article provokingly titled 'Ten Games to Cross off Your Child's Gift List,' the NYT names its list of big bads — the video games so foul, so gruesome, so perverse that we'd recommend you buy them immediately — for yourself. Alternatively, if you need gift ideas for the surly, pale teenager in your home whose body contains more plastic then your average d20, this is the newspaper clipping to stuff in your pocket. In other words, if you need a list like this to understand what games to not stuff little Johnny's stocking with this holiday season, you've got larger issues you should concern yourself with. We'd suggest picking up an auto-shotty and taking a few rounds against the horde — it's a wonderful stress relief and you're probably going to need it."
Idle

Canadian Blood Services Promotes Pseudoscience 219

Posted by samzenpus from the type-A-negative-personality dept.
trianglecat writes "The not-for-profit agency Canadian Blood Services has a section of their website based on the Japanese cultural belief of ketsueki-gata, which claims that a person's blood group determines or predicts their personality type. Disappointing for a self-proclaimed 'science-based' organization. The Ottawa Skeptics, based in the nation's capital, appear to be taking some action."

Comment I would say that fits my personal spending habits (Score 4, Interesting) 223

by Qazimov (#28314839) Attached to: Game, DVD Sales Hurting Music Industry More Than Downloads
I have well over 200 CD's that I paid full retail for at legitimate stores. I listen to music all day at work and for many years enjoyed my collection digitized and copied to whatever machine I was working on. That said, I haven't purchased a CD in over 3 years, and I don't download mp3s or touch any torrents of any kind.

I switched to shoutcast streams many years ago, and as of a little over a year ago I started using Pandora.com and haven't looked back.

I buy and play games for my xbox and my PC. I purchase movies (I still haven't paid more than $10 for an HD movie, MPC + HD/BR player FTW).

Anyway, that said - if you were to graph my spending over the last decade 1999-2009 you would see a lot of money going to the music industry (15-25albums /year @$15 each) dwindling down to nothing as of about 2005. Some spending on games (probably 5-8/year @ 50 each) staying pretty consistent with a slight upswing in the last 4 years. Movies, didn't buy all that many VHS, have probably 80 or so DVD's (at probably 10/year) - 20 or so HD/BR movies, all within the last 10 months.
AMD

Submission + - AMD Announces 'SSE5' Instructions (yahoo.com)

Submitted by LWATCDR
LWATCDR writes: Yahoo News is reporting that Advanced Micro Devices on Thursday announced an extension to the X86 instruction set, which the company calls "SSE5".

The set of instruction extensions — 47 base extensions, expanding to a total of 170 instructions — will be included first in the "Bulldozer" processor family, scheduled to be released in 2009.

The new extensions will be optimized for high-performance computing workloads. AMD designers examined existing instruction sets, such as the Apple/IBM/Freescale Altivec instruction set, then identified three software types to optimize SSE5 around: compute-intensive applications, such as financial simulation and life sciences; multimedia applications, like high-definition video encoding and image processing; and security applications, where data is encrypted across the Internet as well as an entire hard drive.

The article has one statement that I found odd, "Traditionally, Intel has issued improvements to the X86 ISA used within PCs, crafting all of the earlier SSE extensions, which AMD has eventually supported. This time, the shoe's on the other foot.". Wow how soon they forget. I guess that whole X86-64 things just slipped their mind.

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