emj writes "Craiglist offers an interesting approach to finding a life partner , summmary: "There is a sad truth to the world today. I am part of a dying breed of people known as "shell users." ... Because there are fewer and fewer of us, I must help keep our lineage alive. I am looking for someone to help me do this. I need a woman (obviously) who is willing to raise a child with me in the method of Unix."."

Craig Maloney writes "Throughout the years, there have been many clones and re-implementations of the venerable vi editor. One variant of vi that emerged and stayed with us is VIM. Since its introduction, VIM has proven itself a worthy successor to the traditional vi editor. VIM has rightfully taken the place of standard vi implementations as the spiritual successor to vi, completely replacing the vi editor on many, if not all of the current Linux distributions. Many improvements have been made to VIM such as tabs, spell checking, folding, and many, many more. However many of these new enhancements may still remain hidden to anyone who isn't keeping up on the cutting edge of VIM development. Hacking VIM is a good resource for becoming more familiar with the new features of VIM and how to make them work best for you." Read below for the rest of Craig's review.

Chris Kohler, editor over at Game|Life, has up a great interview with Super Mario Galaxy director Yoshiaki Koizumi. They discuss the development of the Mario and Zelda games, clarifying Shigeru Miyamoto's tense relationship with stories (and sentences), and discussing the lineage of the Mario titles: "In terms of spiritual successors, I've never found that to be the case. Whereas with the Zelda series, each game seems to follow pretty closely from the last with a few stylistic deviations. But Galaxy really feels like it went back to earlier roots with Super Mario Bros., in terms of trying to find that same tempo, that same feel. But for me, it's a matter of thinking what to do with each next step. There's nothing you really throw away. You think about these ideas and refine them constantly with every iteration of a game series. So for all the camera problems that you may have found in Mario 64 and Sunshine, even though we didn't realize how to fix those problems then, those solutions presented themselves over time and found their way into this game. I feel like you really can't have Galaxy without all of the things we learned from Sunshine."

MojoKid writes "Today NVIDIA unveiled the much-anticipated GeForce 8800M series of mobile graphics processors. The GeForce 8800M is powered by the new G92M GPU which is built on a 65nm manufacturing process and shares a lineage with the desktop-bound G92 GPU on which NVIDIA built their GeForce 8800 GT. The 8800M series will come in two flavors, a GTX and a GTS, with different configurations of stream processors, 64 for the GTS model and 96 for the high-end GTX."

Shack News and the Korean newspaper Chosun Ilbo are reporting that sourcecode for the MMOG Lineage III may have been stolen. As the third Massively Multiplayer game in a huge-selling South Korean series released by publisher NCSoft, over a billion dollars may be lost as a result of this theft. "The Seoul Metropolitan Police said Wednesday that seven former NCsoft employees are suspected of having sold the technology to a major Japanese game company. The seven left the Korean firm in February and allowed the Japanese company to review the software during a job interview. Police believe that the technology might have been copied during the demonstration."

Gamasutra reports on efforts by NCSoft and the FBI to shut down independently-run Lineage 2 servers. The servers, run by an outfit called 'L2Extreme' were making a profit off of the unauthorized MMOG operation. Gamasutra had the chance to talk with FBI agent Thompson from Austin office. From the article: "Regarding the Lineage II server code, Thompson explained that it was 'really not determined' who had originally made it available, but the L2Extreme creators were 'certainly someone who was using [NCSoft's proprietary code] — that is at least part of the investigation.'"

MCTFB writes, "According to CNN, human beings may have acquired a gene for developing bigger brains from Neanderthal man. Apparently, 70% of the world's population has a variant of a gene regulating brain size, with this variant being most common in people of European descent (where Neanderthal man lived alongside ancient humans), and least common in people of African descent (where Neanderthal man was non-existent). While modern day eugenicists might all too eagerly read into these findings to draw their own politically biased conclusions, people such as myself, who happen to be of northern European ancestry, may find it fascinating that somewhere in our lineage ancient humans and Neanderthals decided to make love and not war on the ancient plains of Eurasia."

An anonymous reader writes: "A new paper reports on the sequencing and analysis of the genome of a single-celled species known as Tetrahymena thermophila. This ciliate (like the Paramecium people look at in school) has some 27,000 genes, or nearly as many as humans. And despite existing as a single cell, this spcies encodes fantastic complexity and unusual features. For example, it has a primitive immune system that prevents the invasion of foreign DNA. Also, it is able to cordon off its germ cell lineage much as humans do with sperm and eggs. But Tetrahymena does this by having two nuclei within each cell, with one of the nuclei being held in reserve for sex. Basically, this species uses its genome complexity to function like a single celled chameleon, changing its shape and its properties in response to the changing environment. For example, when a new nutrient shows up in its neighborhood this species can build a kit to suck the nutrient in, degrade it, and turn it into cellular biomass quickly. Thus whereas humans use their genomic complexity in part to create a stable environment for the body, this species simply uses a genomic swiss army kit to make do with whatever environment it encounters."

Yale researchers claim to have found the very first neurons in what eventually becomes the human brain. Developed before most anything else, these neurons are in place just 31 days after fertilization. From the article: "We hypothesize that these predecessor neurons may be a transient population involved in determining the number of functional radial units including the human specific regions of the cerebral cortex mediating higher cognitive functions," Rakic said. "As a next step it is essential to determine their neural stem cell lineage, pattern of gene expression, developmental role and eventual fate."

the terminal of geoff goodfellow writes "The New York Times has an article on the Bagus Gran Cyber Café in Tokyo, where customers rent so-called media immersion pods. From the article: 'At first glance the spread looks officelike, but be warned: these places are drug dens for Internet addicts outfitted with VHS and DVD players, satellite and regular television on a Toshiba set, PlayStation 2, Lineage II and a Compaq computer loaded with software, all the relevant downloads and hyperspeedy Internet. In the nearby library were thousands of comic books, magazines and novels.'"

I don't know how I missed it but last week Bruce Woodcock updated his highly informative site, MMOGChart.com, for the first time in months. His data only goes out to late last year, but he promises another update soon. From the Edge Online blurb: "The charts, neatly broken into separate genre-giants, mid-size, and more-modest categories (largely due to World of Warcraft's unprecedented population squelching its competitors below), show at first glance few surprising results. As expected, World of Warcraft dominates the charts, with the Lineage pair coming in beneath, Final Fantasy XI continuing to gain ground, and UK indie-developed RuneScape coming in at a very respectable 5th, well above several blockbusters below."

Richard Garriot has been lauded over his long career for his work with the Ultima series. Last night he received a Lifetime Achievement award for that work, a testament to his perseverance. This morning he talked about the "Trials and Tribulations" of creating a MMOG, specifically his ongoing project, Tabula Rasa. Read on for notes on his discussion of the long road his project has taken.

Ever willing to explore the hidey-holes of thought, the Terra Nova blog has a discussion up this week talking about play as production. IE: What makes people willing to engage in 'productive play', like the crafting mini-games of Star Wars Galaxies or A Tale in the Desert? They also touch on the more pragmatic 'productive play', gold farming. From the article: "The outsourcing of labor is another interesting trajectory. We know that people outsource, for instance, 'Adena farmers' in Lineage, low-wage workers who farm for game currency to sell on the 'black market.' This creates interesting class and even race tensions, such as the Lineage 2 scenario described at State of Play 2004 by Constance Steinkhueler. Here, Adena farmers typically took the roles of female elf warriors (primarily for farming efficiency reasons); as a result, this race/class in the game began experiencing racial slurs and attacks by players who associated it with Adena farming."

greyfeld writes "South Korean lawyers have filed a class action lawsuit against NCSoft related to the identity theft of 230,000 people whose information was then used to register accounts on Lineage and Lineage2. From the Vnunet article: 'Most of the identify thefts took place over the past six months as underground gaming syndicates stole victims' official Korean ID numbers in hacking attacks and used them to register hundreds of thousands of Lineage accounts...the new accounts were then 'farmed' by low paid workers in Chinese gaming sweatshops to generate 'gold' and other game-world items that could be sold for real world cash.'"

gollum123 writes "The BBC reports that a small dinosaur with a long, slender snout and wing-like limbs is forcing a rethink on bird evolution." From the article: "The 90 million-year-old reptile, called Buitreraptor gonzalezorum, belongs to the same sickle-clawed group of dinosaurs as Velociraptor and feathered dinosaurs from China. It may provide tantalising evidence that powered flight evolved twice. One theory suggests the lineage of dinosaurs the new animal belonged to, the dromaeosaurs, originated in the Cretaceous Period (144 to 65 million years ago). But this discovery suggests their lineage can be traced further back in time, to the Jurassic (206 to 144 million years ago), experts say."

electro-donkey writes "A man has been arrested in Japan after on suspicion using a bot to beat up and rob characters in the online computer game Lineage II. The stolen virtual possessions were then exchanged for real cash, according to this report from NewScienist.com. "I regularly say that every form of theft and fraud in the real world will eventually be duplicated in cyberspace," says Bruce Schneier."

The ever interesting Grimwell.com has commentary available forecasting doom in the near future for World of Warcraft. Commentator Geldonyetich argues that, by the very nature of the Warcraft game design, the impressive subscription numbers they currently boast are fleeting. From the article: "World of Warcraft is a tremendously successful game. Its subscriber numbers are reaching peaks that threaten even the lofty Korean Internet Café centered Lineage series. Those of you who are stuck behind overloaded servers, don't despair: I can see WoW's success as being a very temporary thing."

Alarash writes "Blizzard just announced that its latest video game (and first MMO), World of Warcraft reached 1.5 millions of subscribers world-wide. Blizzard is now second only to NCSoft (over 5 millions users spread on Lineage, Lineage II and City of Heroes) according to the MMOG Chart."

Aviancer asks: "French computer historian Éric Lévénez has compiled a family tree of programming languages that I found quite interesting. This prompted me to wonder if there was any controversy on the issue of language lineage and my searches found another page on the same topic. I thought I'd pull an 'ask the audience' to see if there were any corrections on either (both?) pages to be made." What other computing language origins are you aware of that may not be mentioned in either page?

Ant writes "Voodoo Extreme reports on the story of a jilted Japanese girlfriend who logged onto her ex-lover's Lineage account with his username and password. Once there, she deleted his game data including all the items, weapons and clothes he had collected. Although the boyfriend did not suffer financially he reported the misuse of his account to the police. Police then reported the woman of Toyama Prefecture, to the Fukushima District Public Prosecutors Office accusing her of violating a law banning illegal access to someone else's online accounts." Considering the big business that Lineage represents, it doesn't surprise me that the police took it seriously.