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Comment Re:Was it taken out of context? (Score 3, Informative) 306

Sigh. This old canard again? Every mouse and trackpad sold by Apple since the mighty mouse and the glass trackpad has had right-button functionality built-in. OSX has supported right mouse clicks since forever.

Of course modern Apple pointing hardware only has one microswitch and relies on capacitance multi-touch technology to identify if the user is clicking on the right hand or left hand side of the device.

Being charitable i'll assume that's what you meant by one button. Why not try using the hardware to discover its actual functional capabilities? You never know, you might like it. I did despite my initial prejudices (as a dremel-wielding, cryo-cooling, case-modding hardcore PC fan).

Graphics

DirectX 11 Coming To Browser Games 200

arcticstoat writes "Forget Farmville, Flash puzzlers and 8-bit home computer emulators. The next generation of browser games will be able to take advantage of DirectX 11 effects, not to mention multi-core processing and both Havok and PhysX physics effects. A new browser plug-in called WebVision will be available for Trinergy's new game engine, Vision Engine 8. This will enable game developers to port all the advanced effects from the game engine over to all the common browsers. Of course, any budding 3D-browser-game dev will face the problem that not every PC has a decent graphics card that can handle advanced graphics effects. Not only that, but limited bandwidth will also limit what effects a developer can realistically implement into a browser game. Nevertheless, this is an interesting development that could result in some tight 3D programming, as well as some much more interesting browser games."

Comment Re:What is your agenda? (Score 3, Insightful) 141

Whoa, time out! NYCL is the local Slashdot guru on all things RIAA and IIRC, been personally involved in the good fight for quite some time. I don't recall him ever advocating Scientology in the past. Several thousand knowledgable and well-researched posts to Slashdot on RIAA matters over a period of many years just to trick people into clicking on a Scientology ad today would have to constitute the most over-engineered setup of all time.

Remember... never attribute to bad Thetans that which can be adequately explained by the vagaries of third party ad servers. (with apologies to Hanlon's razor)

Comment Re:Have you every programmed a gravity sim? (Score 1) 290

Hmmm. By and large, *thinking* before *you* post helps you to make your point more clearly. That way the grumpy folk don't have to pick their way through your careless and imprecise language in order to understand your meaning.

Indeed, if you took more notice of the trees once in a while, you might actually read what other people write before over-emoting in response.
Notice, for instance, the emphasis deliberately placed on the phrase "Earth's winter" in my post? See there it is, hidden in full sight in the first line.

My point (in case the reference to Sydney passed you by) was that *Earth doesn't have a winter*. Hemispheres of the Earth do. As we define them in this reality, 'winter' and 'summer' are effects of the axial tilt therefore there can be no such thing as *Earth's winter*

Your initial post referred to "Earth's winter taking it out past Mars", did it not? But "Earth's winter" could not carry it out past Mars because: (i) "Earth's winter" doesn't exist (see above); and, more fundamentally (ii) any season is a consequence of solar radiation incident upon the planet *not* a driver of orbital dynamics - winter (of any kind) can't *take* Earth anywhere.

See how a posting without thinking lead to poor phrasing which hindered the point you were trying to make?

Now after all that sighing and harumphing you finally rephrased yourself and properly enunciated your original point. And, guess what? It's actually a reasonably sensible point. Yes, if the Earth's orbital eccentricity were substantially greater, it might indeed have a comparable or greater effect upon the climate than axial tilt (though, as others have pointed out, climate is not merely a linear function of instantaneous distance from the Sun). Indeed, our definitions of 'seasons', 'winter' and 'summer' might well be different in such an alternate reality. Fortunately for our health (but unfortunately for the clarity of your post), we don't live in that reality.

So please, enough of the name calling. Just THINK before you post and the grumpy people will go away. Hell they might even agree with you and mod you informative.

The Internet

Olympic Web Site Features Pirated Content 235

An anonymous reader writes "Despite all the emphasis on protecting Olympic copyrights in China this year, the official web site of the Beijing Olympics features a Flash game that is a blatant copy of one of the games developed at The Pencil Farm. Compare the game on the Olympic site with 'Snow Day' at The Pencil Farm."

Feed McAfee’s Ex-Lawyer Indicted (nytimes.com)

The former top lawyer of McAfee Inc. was charged with stock options tampering that muddied the finances of the computer security software maker.
User Journal

Journal Journal: Are distros worth the headaches? 6

One of my (oft repeated) complaints about standard distributions such as Gentoo, Debian or Fedora Core, is that I slaughter their package managers very quickly. I don't know if it's the combination of packages, the number of packages, the phase of the moon, or what, but I have yet to get even three months without having to do some serious manual remodelling of the package database to keep things going. By "keep things going", I literally mean just that. I have routinely pushed Gentoo (by doing n
PC Games (Games)

Submission + - Avelia Pet Adventures wecomes over 1,000 players

Techbear writes: "Austin, TX — Aggressive Game Designs is happy to announce that over 1,000 unique accounts have been created in it's brand new pet-raising MMOG. Avelia Pet Adventures is a free and unique massively-multiplayer adventure for the PC. Avelia Pet Adventures lets you design, breed, and raise your own pets. You can trade your pet designs, play mini-games with your pets, and collect magic potions. The official website is http://www.aggressivegames.com/avelia.htm Avelia Pet Adventures has a full-featured editor which you can use to design any pet you can imagine. The editor is intuitive, yet powerful, and most of all fun to use. You can choose heads, eyes, wings, and more, from a palette of hundreds of unique parts. Once you design your pet's shape, you can create a new version of that pet at home on your personalized farm. Once you have a new pet, you can take it out into the world, a side-scrolling common area. There you'll see other players and their pets. You can talk, wander around, and play mini-games throughout the world. Mini-games are simple, varied, and challenging, and you can win money and special magic potions. Back home on the farm, use the magic potions you've collected to create new pets, with special colors, patterns, and stats. "I've been working on pet games for many years," said the game's creator. "And I've always recognized that bringing multi-player communities and pet raising together would result in an explosion of creativity and fun. So finally, I embarked on this very special project." Avelia Pet Adventures includes a robust economy that supports the artist. When you've created your pet design, you can make it publically available for a small amount of game money. Then, other players who like your design can create their pets from your design, adding their own colors and patterns, and upping the stats, using their collected flowers. When they pay for your design, you get some of that game money! Good artists can make a fortune in game money. Avelia Pet Adventures will soon feature micro-payments, so users can pay for an extended list of special potions and pet parts."
Software

Submission + - Work expirience at Yahoo, Google and MS compared

dgtlmoon writes: "Fun and juicey short article on various work expiriences at Yahoo, MSN and Google as an internet, dont miss the fab graph at the bottom comparing them! And the classic interview questions — "Can you tell me what was the most difficult bug you faced while programming and what you did to resolve it?" isn't "My programs don't have bugs.""
Input Devices

Submission + - Do-It-Yourself Steampunk Keyboard

An anonymous reader writes: Who said there's no use for your old IBM "M Series" keyboards anymore? This

creative fellow shows us step by step how to convert the keyboards of yesteryear into keyboards of an even further distant, fictional time. H. G. Wells would be proud.

Software

Submission + - Is Software Piracy Killing Jobs?

Murthy DN writes: During his visit to India, Steve Ballmer (CEO, Microsoft)said "By reducing piracy by just 10%, it would lead to the creation of 50,000 new jobs in India.". The full article is here.
Do you think software piracy is killing jobs?

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