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Cellphones

Duke Nukem 3D Ported To Nokia N900 95

Posted by Soulskill from the all-outta-gum dept.
andylim writes "It looks as if Duke Nukem isn't completely 'nuked' after all. Someone has ported the 90s classic on to a Nokia N900. As you'll see in the video, you control Duke using the Qwerty keypad and shoot using the touchscreen. I'm wondering how long it will take for this to get on other mobile platforms." In other Duke news, reader Jupix points out that 3D Realms' CEO Scott Miller recently said, "There are numerous other Duke games in various stages of development, several due out this year. We are definitely looking to bring Duke into casual gaming spaces, plus there are other major Duke games in production."

Comment Re:Fad. (Score 1) 405

by Methlin (#30356192) Attached to: Not All iPods — Vinyl and Turntables Gain Sales

96khz is major overkill. Find out for yourself, get a tone generator and I can almost guarantee you won't be able to hear 32khz, much less 96. The only reason I know this is because I've done it myself, curious about the whole 32/96 audio thing. Even with a brand new high quality record and a fully capable recording chain I've never seen frequencies much higher than 32khz (even though practically nobody could hear it anyway), in fact they often have considerably worse frequency response than digital audio. By extension, dvd-audio and SACD are a scam (as with most audiophile garbage).

That would be true if you never intended to do anything with the recording other than play it back at exactly the same rate it was recorded. Is it better to have the sampled data at the point you're resampling, or to guess what might have been there from interpolation?

Comment Re:Issues I've had. (Score 1) 410

by Methlin (#30348046) Attached to: Multiple-Display Power Tools For Linux?

According to that article heterogeneous multi-adapter will work in Vista/W7 if you use XPDM drivers instead of WDDM drivers.

At least that's my understanding of this:

A user could force the installation of a XPDM driver for each of these devices, and therefore get heterogeneous multi-adapter multi-monitor to work as in Windows XP.

And when you do that you won't be able to play DVDs or BluRay or other DRM'd video, either at all or only at reduced resolution, DX10/11 will no longer be available, and depending on your monitor it might stop working because HDCP isn't on. In other words, using XPDM is *not* a viable option.
Programming

The State of Ruby VMs — Ruby Renaissance 89

Posted by Soulskill from the take-your-pick dept.
igrigorik writes "In the short span of just a couple of years, the Ruby VM space has evolved to more than just a handful of choices: MRI, JRuby, IronRuby, MacRuby, Rubinius, MagLev, REE and BlueRuby. Four of these VMs will hit 1.0 status in the upcoming year and will open up entirely new possibilities for the language — Mac apps via MacRuby, Ruby in the browser via Silverlight, object persistence via Smalltalk VM, and so forth. This article takes a detailed look at the past year, the progress of each project, and where the community is heading. It's an exciting time to be a Rubyist."
Businesses

EA Shuts Down Pandemic Studios, Cuts 200 Jobs 161

Posted by Soulskill from the say-goodnight-folks dept.
lbalbalba writes "Electronic Arts is shutting down its Westwood-based game developer Pandemic Studios just two years after acquiring it, putting nearly 200 people out of work. 'The struggling video game publisher informed employees Tuesday morning that it was closing the studio as part of a recently announced plan to eliminate 1,500 jobs, or 16% of its global workforce. Pandemic has about 220 employees, but an EA spokesman said that a core team, estimated by two people close to the studio to be about 25, will be integrated into the publisher's other Los Angeles studio, in Playa Vista.' An ex-developer for Pandemic attributed the studio's struggles to poor decisions from the management."

Comment Re:More reason to be a ZFS fanboy (Score 4, Informative) 386

by Methlin (#29957380) Attached to: ZFS Gets Built-In Deduplication
Mod parent up. These are all legit deficiencies in ZFS that really need to be fixed at some point. Currently the only solutions to these is to build a new storage pool, either on the same system or different system, and export/import; big PITA and potentially expensive. Off the top of my head I can't think of anyone that lets you do #2 except enterprise storage solutions and Drobo.

Comment Re:Does that mean... (Score 2, Insightful) 386

by Methlin (#29957036) Attached to: ZFS Gets Built-In Deduplication

Er, isn't block deduplication really really bad at a hard drive block failure point of view? You'd have to compress or otherwise change the data to have a copy now, or it'd just be marked redundant; if that block where all those redundant nodes are pointing to go bad, all of those files are now bad.

If you were concerned about block level failure or even just drive level failure, you wouldn't be running your ZFS pool without redundancy (mirror or raidz(2)).

Comment Re:Is this statement misleading? (Score 1) 97

by Methlin (#29842045) Attached to: First Public White-Space Network Is Alive

Rather than guessing you could just google "width of TV channel".

The answer is 6 megahertz. That's how much room these TV Band Devices (TVBD) will have for communicating over the internet. That's approximately 40 Mbit/s using 16VSB with a theoretical max of 96 Mbit/s if you strip all error correction.

16VSB would be 4 bits/symbol @ 6Msymbols/sec = 24Mbit without error correction (25.85 if you stay with ATSC's symbol rate of 6.46Msymbols/s). The wikipedia article on 16VSB is correct about bits/symbol then fails to get the math right about being "twice the data capacity of 8VSB" which is 3 bits/symbol.

Comment Re:Its a Server OS... (Score 1) 303

by Methlin (#29442793) Attached to: OpenSolaris vs. Linux, For Linux Users

Its not quite that easy to add more space. RAIDZ and RAIDZ2 pools don't support expansion yet, so you have to be using mirroring to achieve expandability. And when you are using mirroring you have to add 2 more drives to expand an existing pool. Even when using mirroring I don't think you can remove drives like you say.

RAIDZ/RAIDZ2 pools are just as expandable as mirror pools in exactly the same way. Either:
A. Add an additional RAIDZ/RAIDZ2/Mirror VDEV to the pool at which point the pool automatically expands and you automatically get striping across all VDEVs in the pool.
B. Replace all devices that comprise a single VDEV with larger devices one at a time, waiting for a resilver between each device replacement, once all devices are replaced the pool automatically expands.
Games

How APB's Persistent World Will Work 33

Posted by Soulskill from the very-carefully-and-with-guns dept.
Edge Magazine recently sat down with David Jones, creative director for Realtime Worlds, the studio behind upcoming action MMO APB. He spends some time talking about their thinking behind the game, and he also gets into how their persistent online worlds will work. Quoting: "... you absolutely want 'moments' in the game. Even if it's just for thirty minutes, you want people to become celebrities — OJ Simpson on TV with the police chasing after him: you want those kind of moments in the game. We can't create them, so it's about what mission can ultimately lead to those kinds of experiences. We have what we call heat mechanics in the game, so if a criminal has just been on a complete rampage, recklessly blowing stuff up and killing people, heat builds up until eventually we unlock him to every single enforcer on the server. It's not part of their missions, it's just that this guy has become number one wanted and everyone has the authority to take him down. That's a fun mechanic from both sides; everybody who's a criminal is going to want to reach that and if you're on a mission for the enforcers you'll see that guy and wonder whether you should break away to get him. You get a lot of compound stuff which we never planned for, because it's a hundred real players interacting in ways we don't expect."

Comment Re:Not happening to me (Score 1) 527

by Methlin (#28273969) Attached to: Comcast Intercepts and Redirects Port 53 Traffic

Not if he's using his nameserver as an authoritative nameserver for one or more domains. You can't list those by hostnames, you have to list them by IP address.

Since when? The NS records of a domain registration are hostnames, the NS records in a zone file are also hostnames. There's nothing stopping you from using somehost.dyndns.org as your NS record in both your domain registration and zone file, and it will work just fine.

Comment Re:No expansion slot... (Score 1) 106

by Methlin (#27928219) Attached to: Zotac's Ion-Based Mini-ITX Board For Atom Debuts

A regular PCIe slot would be good for a tv tuner, hba, etc.

How so? It has 10 USB ports and there are dozens of USB tv tuners out there, so that leaves you with network cards and HBA. You won't be adding an HBA to a mini-ITX system which lives in a case barely big enough to hold one 3.5" drive and slim optical. You might have an argument for a network card to turn this into some sort of stupidly over-featured gateway, but there's far better suited mini-ITX boards for doing that.

This board is aimed directly at HTPC, and for that it's only lacking a few things: replace that VGA port with a break-out connector for svideo+composite+component (TV-OUT) so you can use pre-HDCP HDTVs (3 million+ of those) and projectors, and old TVs; toss in a DVI-I->VGA adapter, and replace that eSATA with FireWire so you can record/stream from cable STBs.

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