gonar - Slashdot User

Hank Chien Reclaims Donkey Kong High Score 122

Posted by Soulskill on Tuesday January 11 2011, @06:36AM
from the barrels-of-fun dept.

An anonymous reader writes "If you can say anything about Hank Chien, it's that he evidently doesn't take defeat very well. Sure, he knew not so deep down that his Donkey Kong World Record score wouldn't last forever, but he couldn't have foreseen that it would have been toppled so quickly. Twice, even. But he also knew that more Kong competition would be coming his way; namely Richie Knucklez Kong-Off in March. So Hank had something to prove, and prove he did. Scoring a massive 1,068,000 points in less than three hours, Hank has officially reclaimed the high score in Nintendo’s 1981 arcade classic."

Comment: Re:I have a much more ambitious vision (Score 1) 1073

by gonar on Thursday January 06 2011, @02:41PM (#34781302) Attached to: The Continued Censorship of Huckleberry Finn

actually, nearly a straight ripoff of Animal farm

Comment: coverity is a great tool. (Score 4, Interesting) 230

by gonar on Tuesday November 02 2010, @06:19PM (#34106990) Attached to: Serious Security Bugs Found In Android Kernel

we use it at .

Coverity is the commercial offshoot of the old Stanford Checker that found something like 2500 critical bugs in the linux kernel back when it (the checker) was just a grad school project. the bugs got fixed very quickly and linux was better for it.

that said, Coverity's definition of serious or critical is not necessarily what most developers could call critical (haven't read the bug list, but from personal experience.....)

in any case, this is a win. these bugs are now known, and google/community will fix them within days if they haven't already been fixed (I hope Coverity had the decency to inform google prior to their press release)

Comment: where have the high res laptop screens gone (Score 5, Insightful) 1140

by gonar on Wednesday October 06 2010, @11:57AM (#33811362) Attached to: Why Are We Losing Vertical Pixels?

why is it suddenly so hard to find a laptop with a good screen?

it is nearly impossible to find a laptop with anything other than 1366x768.

my 4 year old 14" dell has a 1440x900 screen and at the time a fairly high end cpu/memory combo (core duo/1gb). I paid $650 for it.

today I can't get a laptop with an equivalent screen for under 850. nearly all laptops don't even offer high res screen options anymore.

just because you can market a 1366x768 screen as HD does not make it good enough. especially if we are talking 17" laptops.

Radeon HD 5870 Eyefinity 6 — Gaming On Six Panels 111

Posted by Soulskill on Wednesday March 31 2010, @05:29AM
from the for-the-truly-dedicated dept.

MojoKid writes "AMD's 6-output Radeon has been seen in action at a number of events, but today the ATI Radeon HD 5870 Eyefinity 6 Edition is being officially launched. HotHardware paired the card up with six 22" Dell LCD panels in a 3x2 configuration — with a max resolution of 5760x2160 — and ran it through a number of popular titles including Dirt 2, Battlefield: Bad Company 2, Left 4 Dead 2 and Crysis. For specialized, high-end graphics cards like this, the market potential may be relatively small. If, however, the idea of multi-monitor gaming is appealing to you and you've got the means to score one of these cards (along with multiple displays), you won't be disappointed." Reader Vigile adds a different analysis of the card's six-monitor gaming: "PC Perspective found FPS games were basically unplayable because of the bezel through the middle of their vision while RTS and racing games like StarCraft 2 and DiRT 2 were spectacular."

TI-Nspire Hack Enables User Programming 88

Posted by Soulskill on Sunday February 28 2010, @12:59PM
from the done-and-done dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Texas Instruments' most recent, ARM-based series of graphing calculators, the TI-Nspire line, has long resisted users' efforts to run their own software. (Unlike other TI calculator models, which can be programmed either in BASIC, C, or assembly language, the Nspire only supports an extremely limited form of BASIC.) A bug in the Nspire's OS was recently discovered, however, which can be exploited to execute arbitrary machine code. Now the first version of a tool called Ndless has been released, enabling users, for the first time, to write and run their own C and assembly programs on the device. This opens up exciting new possibilities for these devices, which are extremely powerful compared to TI's other calculator offerings, but (thanks to the built-in software's limitations) have hitherto been largely ignored by the calculator programming community."

A Hyper-Velocity Impact In the Asteroid Belt? 114

Posted by Soulskill on Tuesday January 19 2010, @10:38AM
from the i-played-that-game dept.

astroengine writes "Astronomers have spotted something rather odd in the asteroid belt. It looks like a comet, but it's got a circular orbit, similar to an asteroid. Whether it's an asteroid or a comet, it has a long, comet-like tail, suggesting something is being vented into space. Some experts think it could be a very rare comet/asteroid hybrid being heated by the sun, but there's an even more exciting possibility: It could be the first ever observation of two asteroids colliding in the asteroid belt."

M.U.L.E. Is Back 110

Posted by Soulskill on Friday January 08 2010, @03:04AM
from the not-for-the-red-wings dept.

jmp_nyc writes "The developers at Turborilla have remade the 1983 classic game M.U.L.E. The game is free, and has slightly updated graphics, but more or less the same gameplay as the original version. As with the original game, up to four players can play against each other (or fewer than four with AI players taking the other spots). Unlike the original version, the four players can play against each other online. For those of you not familiar with M.U.L.E., it was one of the earliest economic simulation games, revolving around the colonization of the fictitious planet Irata (Atari spelled backwards). I have fond memories of spending what seemed like days at a time playing the game, as it's quite addictive, with the gameplay seeming simpler than it turns out to be. I'm sure I'm not the only Slashdotter who had a nasty M.U.L.E. addiction back in the day and would like a dose of nostalgia every now and then."

Palm Pre and WebOS Get Native Gaming 49

Posted by Soulskill on Monday January 04 2010, @02:48PM
from the break-out-your-rocket-launcher dept.

rboatright writes "WebOS developers have been waiting, and with the 1.3.5 release, Palm's open source page suddenly listed SDL. Members of the WebOS internals team took that as a challenge and within 24 hours had a working port of Doom running in SDL on the Pre, in a webOS card. 48 hours later, they not only had Quake running, but had found in the latest LunaSysMgr the requirements to launch a native app from the webOS app launcher from an icon just like any other app. At the same time, the team demonstrated openGL apps running. With full native code support, with I/O available via SDL, developers now have a preview into Palm's future intent with regard to native code SDK's, and a hint of what's coming."

Apple Orders 10 Million Tablets? 221

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Monday January 04 2010, @02:11PM
from the pricepoint-better-be-right dept.

Arvisp writes "According to a blog post by former Google China president Kai-Fu Lee, Apple plans to produce nearly 10 million tablets in the still-unannounced product's first year. If Lee's blog post is to be believed, Apple plans to sell nearly twice as many tablets as it did iPhones in the product's first year."