Bongo Bill - Slashdot User

NASA Delays Shuttle Launch Until Monday 43

Posted by Zonk on Saturday August 26, 2006 @06:41PM from the lightning-is-a-good-excuse dept.

rfunches writes "The Associated Press and the New York Times are now reporting that Atlantis will not launch Sunday. The delay will 'give engineers more time to determine whether one of the most powerful lightning strikes ever at a Kennedy Space Center launch pad caused any problems. The lightning Friday didn't hit the shuttle — it struck a wire attached to a tower used to protect the spacecraft from such strikes at the launch pad — but it created a lightning field around the vehicle, NASA managers said. The launch, planned for Sunday, now won't happen until at least Monday.'"

Should Servers be Mono-Process or Multithreaded? 96

Posted by Cliff on Wednesday July 12, 2006 @08:50PM from the your-preferred-architecture dept.

An anonymous reader wonders: "How would you design the fastest possible Linux-based server application today? A few years ago, the thinking was that multi-threading was not the way to go — instead, high-performance servers used an event-driven, mono-process model (consider lighttpd and haproxy). However, things have changed. Today CPUs have dual cores, and over the next few years this is only likely to increase. Also, the 2.6 Linux kernel has made multi-threading much more efficient. So I'm wondering, does Slashdot think that modern high performance server software should be designed to be multi-threaded, or does it still make more sense to use an event driven, mono-process architecture, despite the advances in the Linux 2.6 threading and the arrival of multi-core CPUs?"

FSF, Political Activism or Crossing the Line? 567

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Wednesday May 31, 2006 @03:34AM from the keeping-em-honest dept.

orbitor writes to tell us InfoWorld's Neil McAllister is calling into question some of the recent decisions by the Free Software Foundation. From the article: "All the more reason to be disappointed by the FSF's recent, regrettable spiral into misplaced neo-political activism, far removed from its own stated first principles. In particular, the FSF's moralistic opposition to DRM (digital rights management) technologies, which first manifested itself in early drafts of Version 3 of the GPL (Gnu General Public License), seems now to have been elevated to the point of evangelical dogma."

Warcraft Movie In The Works? 122

Posted by Zonk on Tuesday May 09, 2006 @09:32AM from the very-big-zug-zug dept.

The New York Times is reporting that World of Warcraft maker Blizzard plans to make a big-screen adaptation of its very popular gameworld. From the article: "Many details of the film deal remained unsettled or undisclosed on Monday, including the choice of director, cast, the planned release date and the exact budget (rarely a firm number in the movie business anyway). But Blizzard and Legendary appeared united in wanting the project to be a major departure from Hollywood's undistinguished record in turning games into films. 'We try to make big, epic, immersive games at Blizzard, and we have a track record of making some of the best games in the world,'" Paul Sams, Blizzard's chief operating officer, said in an interview. 'Similarly, our goal is to make one of the best films in the world. With Legendary, they have a creative and management team that is so attuned with us it was like we were separated at birth. We want to make a movie that will not only appeal to our existing fans, but will also bring in people that have never heard of Warcraft before.'"

Day of the Robotic Tentacle 199

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Monday May 08, 2006 @04:16PM from the of-course-they-will-do-a-sequel dept.

holy_calamity writes "New Scientist is reporting on a robotic tentacle developed thanks to funding from military agency DARPA. From the video it looks to have a lot of potential, I can almost feel it fastening around my ankle right now."

An Elder Scrolls Retrospective 91

Posted by Zonk on Wednesday March 29, 2006 @05:25PM from the too-busy-playing-oblivion-to-read-it dept.

With the release of the fourth chapter in the Elder Scrolls saga last week, UGO has put together a piece looking back on the long and successful history of Bethesda's Elder Scrolls series. From the article: "Some RPGs take the restricted world premise so far that they are practically on rails. Thankfully, the team at Bethesda Softworks decided back in 1994 that that wasn't the way things would be for their series The Elder Scrolls. Now at its fourth installment, we have decided it was about time to take a look back at the series that broke the mold on what an RPG should be and that gave players the most important ability of all - the ability to choose how to play the game. So ready your horse, grab your finest set of gauntlets, and prepare to embark on a journey through the history of the series that brought the amazing world of Tamirel to life, and don't be afraid to slay an orc or two in the process."

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