milath - Slashdot User

Comment: Cute. (Score 2) 589

by milath on Saturday May 12, 2012 @03:37PM (#39980871) Attached to: Engineer Thinks We Could Build a Real Starship Enterprise In 20 Years

I say, as someone who didn't grow up masturbating to Uhura or that green alien chick in my formative years that if we somehow ever came up with 1 trillion dollars to do anything in this country that didn't involve bankrolling financial meltdowns or bailing out some industry, we throw half of it at NASA (which is nearly more than they got in the entirety of the program) and give them a goal of getting astronauts on Mars in 10 years, with the promise of the other half once the astronauts return safely.

Then they can start building whatever pie in the sky BS this guy cooked up. Or hopefully come up with something more realistic and less based on watching too many episodes of some 40 year old sci-fi show.

Seeing as how none of this is going to happen, and the above also seems much more realistic to me, this article and idea just seems like mental masturbation.

Buy Your Own Tron Lightcycle For $35,000 170

Posted by CmdrTaco on Thursday July 01, 2010 @10:53AM
from the now-there's-a-bargain dept.

ElectricSteve writes "The lightcycle scene was probably the most memorable part of an absolutely jaw-dropping movie when Tron was released in 1982. One of the first films to use the kinds of computer-generated special effects that later become commonplace, it was a glimpse into a whole new world that left an indelible impression on most who saw it. Now, as Disney prepares to release Tron Legacy, a sequel some 28 years after the original, the lightcycles are back and looking meaner than ever. Built by the same guys who did the memorable Batpod replica, the new lightcycles feature massive dual hubless wheels, carbon fiber/fiberglass bodies, and all the lashings of neon that you'd expect. And there will be five running models built — all of which are now up for sale on eBay for a cool $35,000."

Mozilla Plans Fix For Critical Firefox Vulnerability In Next Release 140

Posted by Soulskill on Saturday March 20, 2010 @12:05PM
from the sooner-than-later dept.

Trailrunner7 writes "A month after an advisory was published detailing a new vulnerability in Firefox, Mozilla said it has received exploit code for the flaw and is planning to patch the weakness on March 30 in the next release of Firefox. Mozilla officials said Thursday that the vulnerability, which was disclosed February 18 by Secunia, is a critical flaw that could result in remote code execution on a vulnerable machine. The vulnerability is in version 3.6 of Firefox."

Setting a Learning Curve In MMOs 156

Posted by Soulskill on Tuesday January 06, 2009 @05:01AM
from the approach-rat-kill-rat-loot-rat dept.

Ten Ton Hammer has an article looking at the learning curves of modern MMOs. Many of the more popular games, such as World of Warcraft, go to great lengths to make learning the game easy for new players. Others, such as EVE Online, have had success with a less forgiving introduction. But to what extent do the most fundamental game mechanics limit the more complex end-game play? "The current trend in MMOG's appears to be make the game so easy and interest-grabbing right out of the gate that even a person with the attention span of a monkey chewing on a flyswatter will be able to keep up and get into the swing of things. Depth of game mechanics is still possible with a system like this, but it needs to be introduced not only clearly, but later in the game, after a player has played enough to be hooked and is willing to put in some extra time to learn about the more intricate game mechanics available to them."

Are C and C++ Losing Ground? 961

Posted by Soulskill on Thursday April 24, 2008 @04:33PM
from the lots-of-ground-to-lose dept.

Pickens writes "Dr. Dobbs has an interesting interview with Paul Jansen, the managing director of TIOBE Software, about the Programming Community Index, which measures the popularity of programming languages by monitoring their web presence. Since the TIOBE index has been published now for more than 6 years, it gives an interesting picture about trends in the usage of programming languages. Jansen says not much has affected the top ten programming languages in the last five years, with only Python entering the top 10 (replacing COBOL), but C and C++ are definitely losing ground. 'Languages without automated garbage collection are getting out of fashion,' says Jansen. 'The chance of running into all kinds of memory problems is gradually outweighing the performance penalty you have to pay for garbage collection.'"