Forgot your password?

Close
typodupeerror

Comment: Re: Contracts will never go away in the USA (Score 1) 329

by Spliffster (#43693893) Attached to: The Days of Cheap, Subsidized Phones May Be Numbered

Hello. I am living in a country where cellphone network providers are regulated by the state. They must offer sim cards without phone contracts. I get 100% coverage in my country with all carriers and pay 69$ a month for unlimited text, speech and internet. The phone i bought (Galaxy Nexus) has cost me $380 and will last for 2 years.

Before we had this regulations I payed at least twice the price per year. I took about 2 years for the market to adjust and priced dropped significantly. Our telcos are still reporting huge profits every year so the must have made much more before.

Basically because most f the people here started buying the phones, the cellphone providers became just another data provider (utility). Subsidized phones have kept the prices artificially high in the past.

Best
-S

Comment: Re:Grow Up (Score 1) 965

by Spliffster (#43168641) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: Mac To Linux Return Flow?

I feel your pain. My primary desktop computers run linux since 2001. The last couple of years has been a real PITA with change for changes sake. I've been through KDE, Gnome, XFCE and various light weight DMs. With the release of e17 I switched to Bodhi and am pretty happy. If they keep their release cycle, e18 will be out around 2020 ;)

Best
-S

+ - Command & Conquer recreated in HTML5, with multiplayer!!->

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes "Back in the deep dark days of 1995, computer gaming was very different from what we know today. It was slower, blockier, and everything was a pain to install. Still, many gamers of the era have fond memories of the original Command and Conquer, later renamed Tiberian Dawn. This real-time strategy game pitted the Brotherhood of Nod against the GDI in all-out war. Now you can play this classic PC title entirely in your browser . What an age we live in.

An enterprising coder, Aditya Ravi Shankar, actually recreated the strategy game using nothing but HTML5, where it runs on 69k of Javascript. Why did he set out on such an adventure? For starters, Shankar’s attempt was a self-mandated undertaking in order to improve his coding skills, where he gave himself a one month window to rebuild the game in the browser, and had to comb through the original game’s files in order to obtain all the right sprites, sounds and specs.

According to Shankar, “In hindsight, I might have wanted to take smaller steps and make a tower defense game instead of jumping directly into an RTS. Trying to do the whole thing in under a month all by myself wasn’t the smartest idea.”

This implementation of Command and Conquer has been developed entirely in HTML5, so any modern web browser should be compatible. In its current incarnation you can’t play the entire game. You can run through the first few levels of both campaigns, but there is online multiplayer support through node.js.

All the assets and audio are lifted directly from the original game, circa 1995. The developer stresses that the port was not created for financial gains, but only as a proof of concept. The game itself is available as a free download from EA , and has been for a few years. Considering this, you might be able to get away with calling the HTML5 port fair use.

The game itself plays well in most places. Unit movement seems a little clumsy, but this might be a fair representation of the original game. The multiplayer skirmishes are good for a few rounds of fun, but many of the structures and units from the full game are missing at this point. Assuming the developer does not get a cease and desist, more content could be added later."
Link to Original Source
Twitter

+ - Twitter based Ted Beats Seismometers, Detects Philippines Earthquake Earlier-> 2

Submitted by hypnosec
hypnosec writes "Twitter based system has managed to detect the earthquake off the Philippines before any other advanced spotting systems being used by Seismologists. US Geological Survey uses the micro-blogging site to quickly gather information about earthquakes around the globe through the use of a system – Twitter Earthquake Detection (Ted) which put behind USGS’ own sensors on Friday when it came to detecting 7.6 magnitude earthquake off the Philippine coast. The Ted system gathers earth-quake related messages (Tweets) in real-time from Twitter. The system takes into consideration various parameters like place, time, keywords, photographs of affected places where tremors have been detected. Online information posted by people, Tweets in this case, can be picked up faster by researchers as compared to scientific alerts that may take up to 20 minutes."
Link to Original Source

If two people love each other, there can be no happy end to it. -- Ernest Hemingway

Close