5262751
submission
Tweetman writes:
E-mail response from Mr Carmack on 20/07/09:
'Wolfenstein is pretty unlikely, since it was developed at Raven, and published by Activision. There are no firm plans for linux ports of the idTech 5 titles, but it certainly isn't off the table. I don't think it will be very difficult to gt them running on the binary nvidia drivers, but bringing them up to functionality and acceptable performance on other OpenGL drivers would probably be a more significant undertaking than we could afford.'
Good news that the Zenimax deal has not thrown Linux ports out the window for definite.
No surprise about Nvidia and the superior quality of their GLX drivers under Unix based OS's.
5246489
submission
iggymanz writes:
Oracle has hiked the price of diagnostic and administration tools that are used by all serious Oracle customers 40%, a strategy of vendor-lock and then squeeze. Sun customers take note.
3970627
story
Al writes
"A super-cheap, thin and flexible touch interface developed by researchers at New York University and could be used to add touch sensing to all sorts of gadgets and devices. It measures a change in electrical resistance when a person or object applies different pressure. The "Inexpensive Multi-Touch Pressure Acquisition Devices (IMPAD)" consists of two sheets of plastic containing parallel lines of electrodes. The sheets are arranged so that the electrodes cross, creating a grid and each intersection acts as a pressure sensor. The sheets are also covered with a layer of force-sensitive resistor (FSR) ink, a type of ink that has microscopic bumps on its surface. So, when something coated in the ink is pressed, the bumps move together and touch, conducting electricity."
3970429
story
Barence writes
"The Guardian Media group is asking the British government to investigate Google News and other aggregators, claiming they reap the benefit of content from news sites without contributing anything towards their costs. The Guardian claims the old argument that 'search engines and aggregators provide players like guardian.co.uk with traffic in return for the use of our content' doesn't hold water any more, and that it's 'heavily skewed' in Google's favour. It wants the government to explore new models that 'require fair acknowledgement of the value that our content creates, both on our own site (through advertising) and "at the edges" in the world of search and aggregation.'"
3969501
story
Al writes
"Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania have created a protein that can carry and deliver oxygen — a useful step towards developing artificial blood. This would avoid the problems involved with donor blood — contamination, limited storage, and short supply — and lead to easier and faster blood transfusions on the battlefield and in trauma cases. The Penn researchers used three amino acids to make a four-helix columned protein structure put a smaller structure, called a heme, inside it. The heme is a large flat molecule that has an iron atom at its center, which oxygen binds to. The researchers also made the protein structure flexible, so that it can open to receive the oxygen and close again without letting any water in. They did this by linking together the helical columns with loops to restrict their motions, giving the final structure a candelabra shape."