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Education

Game-Related Education On the Rise At Colleges 178

The LA Times has a story about the increased interest in learning how to make video games amongst college students, and the subsequent rise in game-related education as the schools respond to that demand. Some programs are gaining legitimacy, while others do perhaps more harm than good. Quoting: "The surge in interest has led schools to add games to their menu — but not always to the benefit of its students. Recruiters say they often see 'mills' that run around-the-clock sessions to quickly churn out as many students as possible. Other programs teach specific skills but not how games are pulled together. 'It's a very hot academic growth area,' said Colleen McCreary, who runs EA's university relations program. 'I'm very worried about the number of community colleges and for-profit institutions, as well as four-year programs, that are using game design as a lure for students who are not going to be prepared for the real entry-level positions that the game industry wants.'"
United States

National Debt Clock Overflowed, Extended By a Digit 696

hackingbear writes "The National Debt Counter, erected in 1989 when the US debt was 'merely' a tiny $2.7 trillion, has been moving so much that it recently ran out of digits to display the ballooning figure: $10,150,603,734,720, or roughly $10.2 trillion, as of Saturday afternoon. To accommodate the extra '1,' the clock was hacked: the '1' from "$10.2" has been moved left to the LCD square once occupied solely by the digital dollar sign. A non-digital, improvised dollar sign has been pasted next to the '1.' It will be replaced in 2009 with a new clock able to track debt up to a quadrillion dollars, which is a '1' followed by 15 zeros. That should be good enough for a few more months at least, I believe." Adds reader MarkusQ, "I know Dick Cheney has assured us that 'Deficits don't matter' but I can't help wondering if we should be fixing the problem rather than the sign."

Comment Re:So, how does one accumulate that much gold? (Score 2, Insightful) 479

One does not get that much gold. But that's the good thing about MMO's, you're rarely ever alone.

The first screenshot in the article is of Zxtreme, a guild master of the Blood Legion guild. http://bloodlegion.com/wow/
I believe this is the first guild to reach the gold limit and it was done simply through trade of rare items in the game. It is the money from the guild bank he is showing off.

A regular WoW guild got anywhere between 40 to 60 active players. If you take the gold limit of ~217k and divide it by 40 people, then it's only about ~5500 gold per player. I currently got around 8500 gold on my account and we got members in the guild with 20-30k gold on their accounts.

This article is a lot of fuss about nothing, gold in WoW has devaluated by a lot since the expansion pack.
The Almighty Buck

Is Commercialization Killing Open Source? 162

An anonymous reader writes "IBM, Sun, Novell, and Red Hat all have a very significant open source element to their businesses. In addition to these juggernauts, there is growing investment in various open source models. Will money flowing into open source destroy its roots? Mark Hinkle just posted an editorial asking the questions Is Commercialization Killing Open Source? in which he comments on 'opensville' and gives some actual investment data, and a lot of insight into the growing trend in 'open source commercialization'. Is there such a thing as 'too much money' when it comes to developing software?"
Programming

Submission + - Open Source alternative to Java/Flash/Silverlight

dgym writes: Having applications that can be deployed on the net and run either in a browser or from a standalone player is an old idea, but still not one that has been done really well.
Java is one solution, but for various reasons hasn't attained ubiquity. Now that it is being open sourced it might find itself on more platforms, but it still may be too big for some devices, and too slow to start up to not be annoying.
Flash is geared towards video and animation, but can also lend itself to RIAs and it is certainly a very popular plugin. However, like any closed standard, it is only available on the platforms Adobe decide to support.
Silverlight might be a better platform for RIAs from a technical perspective, but is otherwise in the same position as Flash (only with even fewer platforms).

So why are there so many poor choices for such a simple problem? After all the requirements for developing applications are rather low:
  • A sand boxed virtual machine for running client side code.
  • A means to display information, i.e. graphics drawing primitives.
  • Event handling for user input.
  • Networking back to the originating server.
Can we not have an open standard for these, and open source plugins implementing it? The "virtual machine" could either be defined in terms of a language (e.g. ECMAScript), or be a true byte code engine such as Parrot or Mono. The graphics are straight forward, and using a cross platform library such as Cairo would help make these plugins extremely portable. Networking is almost trivial, although being able to make HTTP requests using the browser's proxy settings would be an important consideration.

The need is there, where is the open standard?
Security

Submission + - How safe is my webmail?

gnkieffer writes: "Recently a tiny number of GMail users lost their mailbox content. Apparently Google was able to restore most (or all?) of the e-mails from their backup systems.
I wonder what security measures webmail providers like Yahoo or Hotmail are taking to secure their customer's e-mails; tape backups? RAIDs? do they backup live or once a week? This seems to be a subject no one wants to talk about. Until now I guess that webmail losses have been something like thousand times less frequent than... let's say hard drive crashes, so one could say that webmail is *very* safe.
Still, e-mail providers advertise with big storage space and lifelong e-mail addresses but I have not seen one praising with e-mail safety."
Enlightenment

Submission + - Work unhappy or move on?

dunnowhat2type writes: "I grew up around a big city (suburbs of NY) and went to college in a relatively different area (upstate NY.) After graduating last May, I took a job in the area where I went to college. I started in July and was given a relocation package contingent on me staying for a year. Since August I haven't been happy with the area I have been living in and have actively been pursuing employment back in the city. In January, the program I was working on got cancelled and my manager didn't want to commit me to something long-term with the knowledge that I didn't plan on staying more than six months. He made me a time-based offer (probably expiring soon) that he'd take every effort to get the relocation payback waived if I were to resign, find an internal transfer, or another job. I had a couple of interviews a month ago, but nothing else has happened, and this uncertainty, with the pressure of having to make this decision has made the last two weeks really hellish. I wanted to make this decision within the next couple of days and have spoken to friends, but I wanted to pose the question here. What am I better off doing, being miserable around here, but at least having money, work experience, and health insurance, or going home and being happy, but being unemployed?"
Programming

Adventuresome or "Hands On" Careers in Tech? 72

omission9 asks: "For about 10 years I have worked mostly behind a desk in a cubicle and am starting to feel that this environment is making me miserable. The cheap fluorescent lights, the stuffy air, and the restless feeling I get from just sitting so long are starting to really annoy me. My background is mainly as a programmer but I started my career as a network engineer/network administrator. I am also a member of the US Naval Reserve and am cleared as high as Top Secret. Are there any jobs out there that match this sort of skill set (more or less programmer but generally excellent tech skills) that don't require being stuck behind a desk? Paying relatively well would be a major plus as would something that provides a solid career (20+ years of work). Is there anyone out there, from anywhere other than a cube farm, that may have some advice?"
Microsoft

Submission + - Visual Studio: Industry Leading IDE, but in what?

Yoooder writes: "I've used Visual Studio 2005 for some time, but the longer I use it the more frustrated I get with it. Amid all it's wonderful features there's something smelly, something that oozes from the cracks and lets me know that underneath me there is something disturbing and wrong. Random crashes, out of control memory usage, a finicky designer, and a lack of updates all plague this IDE — and the grand-daddy of them all is a Service Pack that runs umpteen times, requiring user interaction the whole way through and lacking proof of any real fixes.

Does anyone else have the feeling that Microsoft's flagship programming tool is a victim of Too Much Too Fast? What are your horror stories within the unpredictable vessel of vs2005?"
Programming

Submission + - Software Development Tracking System

stry_cat writes: We've been using Bugzilla to track bugs in our software. It is really great. However we need something that is more. Something to track the tasks of the entire software development process, not just bugs. I was wondering what y'all use?
Microsoft

Submission + - IE 7 now an Optional Update?

DikSeaCup writes: "I've been noticing over the past week or so that the previously (unless I was hallucinating) "Critical Update" of "Internet Explorer 7" on the Microsoft Update site was no longer listed as a "Critical Update", and is now listed under the "Optional Software" category. Is it just me, or has anyone else noticed this? I haven't seen any relevant news items about it — have I suddenly been transported to Japan without realizing it?"
Television

Where Are All of the HDTV Tuners? 208

An anonymous reader asks: "Today I read about rabbit ears making a comeback with OTA HTDV. I want to purchase a standalone ATSC HDTV tuner to go with my projector, but I am having a very hard time finding one. The big-box stores seem to only stock one or two models and are frequently sold out. Searching online yields similar results. It would seem that there would be ever increasing demand for these tuners given that many HDTVs were sold without internal tuners in years past, and these tuners will be necessary for all old NTSC TVs after the February, 2009 shutdown of analog broadcasts. Where should I look to buy one of these devices? Of the currently available models, which are the best? Will the standalone HDTV tuner become a ubiquitous item as the 2009 deadline approaches?"

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