sleepophile - Slashdot User

Quake 3 For Android 137

Posted by Soulskill on Thursday February 25, 2010 @03:53AM from the can-i-get-a-hell-yeah dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Over the last two months I ported Quake 3 to Android as a hobby project. It only took a few days to get the game working. More time was spent on tweaking the game experience. Right now the game runs at 25fps on a Motorola Milestone/Droid. 'Normally when you compile C/C++ code using the Android NDK, the compiler targets a generic ARMv5 CPU which uses software floating-point. Without any optimizations and audio Quake 3 runs at 22fps. Since Quake 3 uses a lot of floating-point calculations, I tried a better C-compiler (GCC 4.4.0 from Android GIT) which supports modern CPUs and Neon SIMD instructions. Quake 3 optimized for Cortex-A8 with Neon is about 15% faster without audio and 35% with audio compared to the generic ARMv5 build. Most likely the performance improvement compared to the ARMv5 build is not that big because the system libraries of the Milestone have been compiled with FPU support, so sin/cos/log/.. take advantage of the FPU.''

Submission + - Symbian OS Goes Open Source (linuxplanet.com)

Submitted by Ocean Consulting on Thursday February 04, 2010 @05:14PM

Ocean Consulting writes: Linux Planet is reporting that Symbian OS is now fully open source under the Eclipse Public License. Although the article mentions that Symbian's success has mostly been in Europe, my own experience with Symbian has been quite good, complete with an SSH client for managing remote systems. May this will give Windows Mobile and Android a new competitor.

Submission + - Why innovation dies at Microsoft (nytimes.com)

Submitted by techmuse on Thursday February 04, 2010 @03:15PM

techmuse writes: The New York Times has an opinion article by a former Microsoft manager today on why Microsoft has failed to develop innovative products over the past decade or so. Reasons cited include infighting between internal groups, who want to protect their own territory, poor timing, and lack of willingness to invest in hardware in addition to software. According to the article, good technologies are often developed internally, but then fail to make it to market because the groups responsible for existing products refuse to integrate them.

Submission + - Microsoft’s Creative Destruction (nytimes.com) 1

Submitted by blitzkrieg3 on Thursday February 04, 2010 @02:43PM

blitzkrieg3 writes: Dick Brass, a former Microsoft Vice President, penned a scathing critique of the corporate culture at Microsoft in a New York Times Op-Ed today. Internal power struggles kept technologies like ClearType and the Windows tablet from becoming revolutionary products. He writes:
Internal competition is common at great companies. It can be wisely encouraged to force ideas to compete. The problem comes when the competition becomes uncontrolled and destructive. At Microsoft, it has created a dysfunctional corporate culture in which the big established groups are allowed to prey upon emerging teams, belittle their efforts, compete unfairly against them for resources, and over time hector them out of existence.

Submission + - New Amiga With Programmable Co-Processor (a-eon.com)

Submitted by GuerillaRadio on Tuesday January 05, 2010 @11:22AM

GuerillaRadio writes: A new Amiga — the AmigaOne X1000 has been announced by A-Eon and contains the interesting addition of an onboard XMOS "Software Defined Silicon" chip onboard and the Xorro interface. Amiga fans have been waiting some time for new interesting Amiga hardware and this might be it. More details at OSNews

Submission + - How to photograph the Earth from Space for $150 (technologyreview.com)

Submitted by Oddscurity on Tuesday January 05, 2010 @10:24AM

Oddscurity writes: An interesting hardhack found on MIT's Technology Review which details how two students built a cheap vehicle to take photographs of our planet from low orbit. It includes an illustration of the components used and a video of the construction and launch.

Submission + - Air Strike Tracker, visual record of US airstrikes (ourbombs.com)

Submitted by

Neil Halloran

on Tuesday April 28, 2009 @05:53PM

Neil Halloran writes: "The Air Strike Tracker chronicles every reported U.S. air strike that has affected civilians since September 11, 2001. The visual interface (using Flash 10's 3D functionality) makes information about each incident from numerous sources highly accessible, often providing the ability to view online videos and other relevant media. You can browse incidents by location, date, or tags (e.g. unmanned drones, official investigations, local protest). Note that he Air Strike Tracker is an ongoing project, and we will continue to update the underlying data as new information is obtained."

Submission + - RIM BLackberry service fails in Europe (eweekeurope.co.uk)

Submitted by

judgecorp

on Tuesday April 28, 2009 @05:41PM

judgecorp writes: "RIM's Blackberry service failed for many thousands of users in Europe this afternoon. We don't yet have an explanation from RIM, but a mobile device monitoring company got a good look and it seems this was about an hour's outage, caused when one IP address went down, the network failed over to another one, and the DNS changes had to propagate. Earlier this month, many consumer customers had an outage — this time it was the business users' turn."

Submission + - Mozilla Delivers A Faster Firefox 3.5 Beta 4 (computerworld.com)

Submitted by

CWmike

on Tuesday April 28, 2009 @05:13PM

CWmike writes: "Mozilla late yesterday fired the latest shot in the browser wars by releasing Firefox 3.5 Beta 4, the newest development preview of the company's next-gen browser, which has been delayed several times and now is tentatively slated to ship before the end of June. Computerworld's tests showed that Firefox 3.5 Beta 4 is about 19% faster than Beta 4 in the SunSpider JavaScript benchmark; both betas were considerably faster than the production browser, Firefox 3.0.10, which was also released yesterday."

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