Want to read Slashdot from your mobile device? Point it at m.slashdot.org and keep reading!

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×

Comment So much of my youth wasted on pinball (Score 1) 283

Or rather invested in playing with silver balls... Wait that sounded bad. Oh well backspaces are for weenies. Wait that didn't sound to good either. Oh well. Anyway I'm old enough to remember when the bank of EM pins at my local bowling alley was invaded by this strange Pong device. I admit it stole my attention for a bit, but there was no way to win a free game. What fun is that. You could never rule a game, and leave a machine with a dozen free games for the low skill hangers on to wonder how you did it. That Pong thing was then replaced by a Space Invaders, which at least had a high score table. That managed to divert some time away from the pins, but always pins where number one. Well until the Space Invaders was replaced with an Asteroids. Oh dear, that broke the spell. Well at least until solid state pins introduced the speed, multi-ball, gadgetry, and depth of play that just kept improving until it came to a spectacular end with the Bally/Williams Attack From Mars and Medieval Madness games. I was wise enough to acquire an Attack From Mars as my 4th pin, but I still lament being to "grown up" to grab a Medieval Madness when they only went for $3500 instead of the $15,000 they go for today.

Comment Re:2001 (Score 1) 438

THHHHAAAAANNNNKK YOOOOOOOUUUUUU! So many ADHD youngsters can't stay with this film long enough to make it to the space sequences. Also the design and movements of the EVA pods is dead on. There are a few picky errors, like the liquid retreating in the straw in the food tray, but you could argue that vacuum caused it. So it is possible to do right, but it takes a lot of artistic clout to defy the Hollywood formula. Apollo 13 came pretty close, except there did seem to be a lot of sound in space. So I still claim 2001 number 1 in accuracy. They even got where computers turn into our masters right.

Comment Just like new coke... (Score 1) 502

There is an opportunity here if M$ is smart enough to take it. Just like Coke turned the New coke fiasco into a brilliant mistake, M$ could turn this Win 8 failure into a chance to actually differentiate its myriad different versions of Windows products. Win Home versions could come with Metro the default UI, with the classic desktop as an option. The pro and enterprise versions could make the standard desktop the default with metro as an option, but with the option to disable Metro all together. The server versions should not have a metro bone in them at all. Now if they basically give the home versions away, charge a fair amount for the pro/ent/server versions... profit. And the hate may die down.

I don't think they are this smart however, and hope they ride this Win8 turkey all the way to oblivion. It is really entertaining to watch.

Comment Brings back memories of the 1960s (Score 1) 220

This photo is so astounding that it brings back memories of the 1960s moon landing days. I was totally enthralled by the awesome techno-wizardry it took set, not one, but two men on the moon, and bring them back to earth. The techno wizardry needed to pull this shot off seems the equal of the feats of those heady days. Well done NASA, well done.

Comment Re:Slow on Firefox (Score 3, Informative) 356

I had the same experience the first time I attempted to load the page. It was absolutely glacial. Then ,I tried to load the page a second time and it seemed to run just fine. I'm guessing some timing was altered when certain chunks of data got cached on the client. Try letting the page begin rendering, then reload the page. It worked for me on FF 3.6.3 on a MacBookPro3,1 2.6GHz. Curious if anyone else has similar results.
OS X

Apple Patches Massive Holes In OS X 246

Trailrunner7 writes with this snippet from ThreatPost: "Apple's first Mac OS X security update for 2010 is out, providing cover for at least 12 serious vulnerabilities. The update, rated critical, plugs security holes that could lead to code execution vulnerabilities if a Mac user is tricked into opening audio files or surfing to a rigged Web site." Hit the link for a list of the highlights among these fixes.
Graphics

Disney Releases 3D Texture Mapper Source Code 83

dsavi writes "Ptex, Walt Disney Animation Studio's cutting-edge 3D texture mapping library which was first used on nearly every surface in the 2008 animated feature Bolt, was released under the BSD license on Friday. Quoting the announcement on monophyl.com: 'We expect to follow Ptex with other open source projects that we hope the community will find beneficial. We will soon be launching a new Walt Disney Animation Studios Technology page under disneyanimation.com. It will include links to our open source projects as will as a library of recent publications.' This looks good for open source 3D graphics."

Apple Orders 10 Million Tablets? 221

Arvisp writes "According to a blog post by former Google China president Kai-Fu Lee, Apple plans to produce nearly 10 million tablets in the still-unannounced product's first year. If Lee's blog post is to be believed, Apple plans to sell nearly twice as many tablets as it did iPhones in the product's first year."

Slashdot Top Deals

What is research but a blind date with knowledge? -- Will Harvey

Working...