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First Person Shooters (Games)

Submission + - The Orange Box

Submitted by gunnaraztek
gunnaraztek writes: Now the Orange Box will be released within a week, users might be interested to read about it.

The orange box includes:

Half-Life 2 | Half-Life 2 Official Site | On Wikipedia

Half-Life 2: Episode One | Half-Life 2: Episode One Official Site | On Wikipedia

Half-Life 2: Episode Two | Half-Life 2: Episode Two Official Site | On Wikipedia

Portal | Portal Official Site | On Wikipedia

Team Fortress 2 | Team Fortress 2 Official Site | On Wikipedia



Orange Box Official Site

Orange Box Steam Store Page

Countdown to the Orange Box Release
Music

Submission + - Amazon Launches DRM Free Music Service

Submitted by friedmud
friedmud writes: As covered by Reuters, Amazon has launched their new DRM Free (all files are 256kbps MP3) music service called (imaginatively): AmazonMP3. They currently have over 2 million songs from both independent and major labels. Most songs are $0.89 with albums mostly falling in the $9 range (but as cheap as $5). The selection appears to be far superior to E-Music while being much less restrictive than most of the music on iTunes. Is this the holy grail of online music stores that we've all been waiting for?
The Almighty Buck

Submission + - Five-acre ads coming to your friendly skies (networkworld.com)

Submitted by
coondoggie
coondoggie writes: "UK-based Ad-Air launched a service today that will let companies advertise on five-acre plots near the runways of some of the world's busiest airports. On its Web site, the company proudly proclaims its ads are nearly 4 times the size of the Dallas Cowboys' football field and that "such size leads to an unprecedented audience impact; they are quite simply overwhelmed by the scale of the advertisement." Overwhelmed is indeed the understatement of the week so far. Ad-Air said it had spent five years securing sites around the world's busiest airports including London Heathrow, Paris, Geneva, Atlanta, Los Angeles, Tokyo and Abu Dhabi. http://www.networkworld.com/community/node/19900"
Data Storage

Submission + - Seagate: Vista requires 250GB to 1TB of storage (computerworld.com) 1

Submitted by
Lucas123
Lucas123 writes: "Seagate is saying the increased demands of the Windows Vista OS and the increasing storage of songs, pictures and videos, means to fully leverage your OS you need 250GB to 1TB of hard drive storage. "And with the need for backup, that becomes 500GB to 2TB," says Pete Steege, a senior marketing manager with Seagate. Not surprisingly, Seagate's just launched an education program for channel partners dubbed "Learn, Market, Sell," to help partners "assess the right storage options based on customer needs.""
Supercomputing

Submission + - Folding@Home hits petaflop milestone (lockergnome.com)

Submitted by
knight17
knight17 writes: "Folding@Home, the Stanford University's ambitious distributed computing project aimed at unlocking the mysteries of protein folding has hit another great milestone. It is the first to achieve a petaflop mark by a distributed computing initiative. The lions share of the processing power is contributed by Sony's Playstation 3 game consoles. Current statistics on the project's home page show processing capacity at 1P Flops with 804T Flops from the PlayStation 3. A further 163T Flops are from Windows-based computers and 43T Flops from graphics processors."
Power

Submission + - 16 Reasons Why It's Time for a Four Day Work Week (theoildrum.com)

Submitted by
Prof. Goose
Prof. Goose writes: "The notion of our standard work week here in America has remained largely the same since 1938. That was the year the Fair Labor Standards Act was passed, standardizing the eight hour work day and the 40 hour work week. Each Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday workers all over the country wake up, get dressed, eat breakfast and go to work. But the notion that the majority of the workforce should keep these hours is based on nothing more than an idea put forth but the Federal government almost 70 years ago. To be sure it was an improvement in the lives of many Americans who were at the time forced to work 10+ hours a day, sometimes 6 days of the week. So a 40 hour work week was seen as an upgrade in the lives of many of U.S. citizens. 8 is a nice round number; one third of each 24 hour day. In theory it leaves 8 hours for sleep and 8 hours for other activities like eating, bathing, raising children and enjoying life. But the notion that we should work for 5 of these days in a row before taking 2 for ourselves is, as best I can tell, rather arbitrary.

The idea of a shorter work week is not a new one to anyone old enough to have lived through the energy shocks of the 1970's. It should be fairly obvious to anyone interested in conserving oil that reducing the number of daily commutes per week would reduce the overall demand for oil. There are about 133 million workers in America. Around 80% of them get to work by driving alone in a car. The average commute covers about 16 miles each way.

So let's stop and do some math...and I'll try to argue for 16 reasons why a four day work week is a good idea.

http://www.theoildrum.com/node/2996"
Data Storage

Submission + - Memory a thousand times faster 1

Submitted by paleshadows
paleshadows writes: Researchers from the University of Pennsylvania developed a memory device that is more energy efficient and a thousand times faster than existing portable memory devices (such as Flash memory and micro-drives) and that can store data for 100,000 years. At the heart of the new device are nanowires that are 30-50 nanometers (100 atoms) in diameter and 10 micrometers in length, fabricated on silicon substrates. With very low per-bit power consumption during data encoding (0.7mW) and data writing/erasing/retrieval at 50 nanoseconds (1000 times faster than conventional memory devices), the announcement made by Penn University says that "this new form of memory has the potential to revolutionize the way we share information, transfer data, and even download entertainment as consumers."
Space

Submission + - Three killed in SpaceShipTwo explosion (vnunet.com)

Submitted by llZENll
llZENll writes: VNUNET reports that "An explosion at the factory of Scaled Composites, which made the first private trip into space with SpaceShipOne, has killed three people and injured three more. The explosion occurred during testing of the rocket engine systems for SpaceShipTwo, which will take passengers into low earth orbit with Virgin Galactic."

There is more information at Space.com and ABC news and an image at KOMO TV.
PlayStation (Games)

Submission + - Metal gear solid online confirmed (wordpress.com)

Submitted by buelldm
buelldm writes: Konami has announced at a convention in Japan, that there will in fact be MGS (Metal Gear Solid) Online game play. The online game-play will have some special features, such as linking your nanomachines for teamwork. Closed beta is expected to start on August 20th and end September 3rd.
The Internet

Submission + - Facebook tries to fend off copyright-infringement

Submitted by StonyandCher
StonyandCher writes: Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg will defend against copyright-infringement allegations on Wednesday, when his lawyers ask a judge to dismiss a complaint filed by three former classmates of Zuckerberg who say he stole the idea for the social-networking site while they attended Harvard University.

Brothers Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, and Divya Narendra say Facebook was their idea and are asking a judge to give them all of the assets and ownership rights to the site, which could be worth several billion dollars. In 2002, they say, they began developing a business plan for a Web site originally called the Harvard Connection and later renamed ConnectU. The next year they engaged Mark Zuckerberg to complete the computer program software and other work for the Web site. But they accuse Zuckerberg of using their ideas and code to launch Facebook before finishing the work he promised to do for ConnectU and claiming the idea as his own.
Security

Submission + - Amero Sentencing delayed...again

Submitted by
i_want_you_to_throw_
i_want_you_to_throw_ writes: "For a while it looked as if legions of IT pros might descend on Connecticut like a plague of locusts however, short attention span syndrome has pushed the case to somewhere below, "iPhone.. ooh, shinny" on the radar of most geeks. To recap, Julie Amero has hung in limbo since January waiting for the Connecticut DA to either put up ( and put her away for up to 40 years ) or shut up and let her return to picking up the pieces of her shattered life. Her conviction on 4 felony counts came after an unprotected classroom computer running Windows 98 began spewing porn pop-ups."
Bug

Submission + - Git bisect & semi-automatic debugging

Submitted by
An anonymous reader writes: Juno Hamano, git maintainer, just used git-bisect to semi-automatically find the commit which introduced a bug. May we foresee a future where testers can submit testcases together with bug reports, and a bot runs these testcases to find the bugged code, leaving developers only with the task of actually fixing?

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