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Comment Re:Unbuntu 9.10 better than... (Score 1) 1231

by atari2600 (#29970302) Attached to: Some Early Adopters Stung By Ubuntu's Karmic Koala
People use Netscape? I upgrade only if I see features useful to me (or support). Used Dapper Drake for 2 years before I switched to Feisty Fawn and switched to Jaunty two months ago. This is all on really decent hardware. Installing the latest and greatest of distributions on ancient hardware just because you can doesn't sound like a remarkably good idea to me.
Games

Should Computer Games Adapt To the Way You Play? 404

Posted by Soulskill from the worked-for-commander-data dept.
jtogel writes "Many games use 'rubberbanding' to adapt to your skill level, making the game harder if you're a better player and easier if you're not. Just think of Mario Kart and the obvious ways it punishes you for driving too well by giving the people who are hopelessly behind you super-weapons to smack you with. It's also very common to just increase the skill of the NPCs as you get better — see Oblivion. In my research group, we are working on slightly more sophisticated ways to adapt the game to you, including generating new level elements (PDF) based on your playing style (PDF). Now, the question becomes: is this a good thing at all? Some people would claim that adapting the game to you just rewards mediocrity (i.e. you don't get rewarded for playing well). Others would say that it restricts the freedom of expression for the game designer. But still, game players have very different skill levels and skill sets when they come to a game, and we would like to cater to them all. And if you don't see playing skill as one-dimensional, maybe it's possible to do meaningful adaptation. What sort of game adaptation would you like to see?"

Comment wtf? (Score 1) 650

by atari2600 (#29568497) Attached to: Bad PC Sales Staff Exposed
Undercover investigation done online? Do you actually know what "undercover" means? The "hot shot investigator" chatted online until there was enough damning text transcripts. This is a story?
Space

Making Babies In Space May Not Be Easy 262

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the just-try-harder dept.
Hugh Pickens writes "Studies of reproduction in space have previously been carried out with sea urchins, fish, amphibians and birds, but Brandon Keim writes in Wired that Japanese biologists have discovered that although mammalian fertilization may take place normally in space, as mouse embryos develop in microgravity their cells have trouble dividing and maturing. The researchers artificially fertilized mouse eggs with sperm that had been stored inside a three-dimensional clinostat, a machine that mimics weightlessness by rotating objects in such a way that the effects of gravity are spread in every direction. Some embryos were ultimately implanted in female mice and survived to a healthy birth, but at lower numbers than a regular-gravity control group. Part of the difference could be the result of performing tricky procedures on sensitive cells, but the researchers suspect they also reflect the effect of a low-gravity environment on cellular processes that evolved for Earth-specific physics. '"These results suggest for the first time that fertilization can occur normally under G environment in a mammal, but normal preimplantation embryo development might require 1G," concludes the report. "Sustaining life beyond Earth either on space stations or on other planets will require a clear understanding of how the space environment affects key phases of mammalian reproduction."'"

Comment Full Story? (Score 1) 427

by atari2600 (#29111253) Attached to: Sony Announces PS3 Slim, Price Cut, Improvements To Home
Here's a rumor posted on the PSN boards: http://boardsus.playstation.com/playstation/board/message?message.uid=42798489 I said rumor but the post raises some questions that no one has addressed so far:

- "OtherOS" support has been removed.
- A Cheaper Blu-ray drive is being used. It wont be any slower, but expect to see similar issues that another competitor had a while ago.
- Touch-sensitive buttons on the front for power/eject are gone in favour of cheaper push buttons.

This makes the first batch of PS3s that came out, the "best" ones to own (backwards compatibility with PS2 games from having the full emotion engine on hardware, ability to swap in drives as big as 500GB and being able to install other OSes)

Comment Re:Don't forget games... (Score 1) 450

by atari2600 (#28906733) Attached to: Why Do Hard Drives Keep Getting Bigger?
I'll provide another extreme. Back in early 2001, the demo for Delta Force (PC) was a little less than 18 MiB. The full game was about 150MiB. I bought The Witcher off Steam last week and the download size was around 14 Gigs. 150MiB vs 14 GiB...I have around 300Gigs of space on my gaming partition taken up by games. Hell, the save data of several games takes dozens of Gigs.

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