solferino - Slashdot User

How Do I Create a Spiritual Game Successor? 125

Posted by Soulskill on Friday April 09, 2010 @07:08PM from the pray-on-it dept.

An anonymous reader writes "I've recently been on a legacy video game binge, reliving the nostalgic days, when I realized that one of my favorite old games can be vastly improved with a few tweaks. This game is pretty much made for a controller, so I would love to get it done on Xbox Live, but doing it on the PC is just as viable. Unfortunately, I am pretty sure the game is not in the public domain yet. Based on previous stories covered here, some companies are all for community made successors while others choose to give them the crushing blow from the start. My question is: how far is too far when one is trying to make a spiritual successor? I do not intend to copy any materials, but it would be lovely if I could incorporate some game design ideas (very general level design, movement, and just one or two game features)."

Submission + - Ubuntu Claims 12 Million Users - Before Lucid (linuxplanet.com)

Submitted by darthcamaro on Wednesday April 07, 2010 @05:21PM

darthcamaro writes: It's always a challenge to try and figure out how many users a particular Linux distro has — but Canonical is now providing a new figure for Ubuntu that is 50 percent more than what they were claiming just 18 months ago.
"We have no phone home or registration process, so it's always a guesstimate. But based on the same methodology that we came up with for the 2008 number, our present belief is that it's somewhere north of 12 million users at the moment," Chris Kenyon, vice president for OEM at Canonical, told InternetNews.com

Just in case you were wondering, Fedora still claims more — actually almost double at 24 million.

Submission + - Say what? High School Linguists Break the Code (cmu.edu)

Submitted by lslcmu on Wednesday April 07, 2010 @05:09PM

lslcmu writes: Winners of the fourth annual North American Computational Linguistics Olympiad just announced.

More than a thousand high school students from across the USA and Canada recently competed in the fourth annual North American Computational Linguistics Olympiad. The top students are eligible to represent their country at the Eighth International Linguistics Olympiad to be held in Sweden in late July. According to first place winner Ben Sklaroff, "Translating a language you've never heard of before just by using logic is extremely gratifying. It's like breaking a code, except languages generally make sense so all the rules are less arbitrary. Trying to figure out how another person would express common concepts in their own language, with just a few examples to work with is a fun challenge."

Submission + - Open Source, Open Standards under Attack in EU (computerworlduk.com) 1

Submitted by Glyn Moody on Monday March 29, 2010 @05:25AM

Glyn Moody writes: A battle for the soul of European IT is taking place behind closed doors in Brussels. At stake is the key Digital Agenda for Europe, due to be unveiled in a month's time. David Hammerstein, ex-Member of European Parliament for the Greens, tweeted last week: "SOS to everyone as sources confirm that Kroes is about to eliminate "open standards" policy from EU digital agenda; Kroes has been under intense lobbying pressure from Microsoft to get rid of interoperability and open source goals of EU." This is confirmed by the French magazine PC Inpact, which also managed to obtain a copy of the draft Digital Agenda. It's currently supportive of both open source and open standards — but for how much longer?

Comment They should value my attention (Score 2, Insightful) 344

by solferino on Saturday March 27, 2010 @07:04AM (#31638300) Attached to: The Times Erects a Paywall, Plays Double Or Quits

What Murdoch and the rest of the 'Content Kings' don't get is that content is no longer king.

These guys should be happy that they are getting my attention - that I'm literally paying them attention. You want me to pay money on top of me paying attention? Forget it. The whole world has a press now and there are millions of people out there - with interesting or intelligent or entertaining or titillating or whatever content - that would be just happy for me to paying them attention.

Murdoch seems to be attempting to hypnotise the public into thinking we need his stuff so badly we'll be prepared to pay for it. We don't.

Comment Re:Ping Pong (Score 1) 432

by solferino on Tuesday March 23, 2010 @08:14PM (#31591804) Attached to: China Hits Back At Google

China will never budge on these issues (at least not in my lifetime)

I think you're being overly pessimistic. The Soviet Union only lasted from 1922 to 1991. Everyone born during that period who's still alive today outlived it, including some people who were born before its inception. The People's Republic of China was only founded in 1949. Again, I think it's quite likely that a large proportion of people alive today will outlive it.

Comment Re:Works in Chrome (Score 1) 162

by jittles on Tuesday March 23, 2010 @07:34PM (#31591316) Attached to: How To Evade URL Filters With (Not-So) Fancy Math

This is not a new problem. I worked for an ISP in 1999 and we saw attackers using this back then.

Comment Re:Is anyone surprised? (Score 1) 171

by solferino on Wednesday March 17, 2010 @03:43AM (#31505558) Attached to: Federal Agents Quietly Using Social Media

If you need a leaked document to know that spies are spying, you fail at life.

"you fail at life" -- What's with the juvenile hyperbole? The basis of empiricism is confirmation of hypotheses. It's good to get detailed confirmation of (an almost certain) suspicion. And the detail is what is interesting here.

p.s. It wasn't a leaked document. It was two documents released under a FOI request.

Comment Re:New acronym in order? (Score 1) 271

by solferino on Saturday March 13, 2010 @12:58AM (#31461596) Attached to: Digg Says Yes To NoSQL Cassandra DB, Bye To MySQL

This reminds me of the original name for the Daihatsu Applause, before they did their complete model name reaction testing.

Sweet, Sour, Salty, Bitter, Protein ... and Now Fat 210

Posted by timothy on Wednesday March 10, 2010 @05:21PM from the visit-the-chiba-clinic-for-an-upgrade dept.

ral writes "The human tongue can taste more than sweet, sour, salty, bitter and protein. Researchers have added fat to that list. Dr. Russell Keast, an exercise and nutrition sciences professor at Deakin University in Melbourne, told Slashfood, 'This makes logical sense. We have sweet to identify carbohydrate/sugars, and umami to identify protein/amino acids, so we could expect a taste to identify the other macronutrient: fat.' In the Deakin study, which appears in the latest issue of the British Journal of Nutrition, Dr. Keast and his team gave a group of 33 people fatty acids found in common foods, mixed in with nonfat milk to disguise the telltale fat texture. All 33 could detect the fatty acids to at least a small degree."

Comment Re:Microsoft the tar-baby (Score 1) 215

by solferino on Wednesday March 10, 2010 @05:45AM (#31424288) Attached to: Why Microsoft Can't Afford To Let Novell Die

Thanks for your replies, and yes maybe it is a bug. I've checked my profile settings and confirmed that I still have sigs turned off. Here is how your comment appeared when viewing from my account. Your name at the end is plain text and not clickable.

Comment Re:Microsoft the tar-baby (Score 1) 215

by solferino on Tuesday March 09, 2010 @04:57PM (#31418970) Attached to: Why Microsoft Can't Afford To Let Novell Die

Unless I'm mistaken, in the comment I replied to, your name appears as plain text at the end of your comment. I have had signatures turned off since when I created my account (for so long actually that I'd forgotten that I'd even turned them off). But I still see a plain text signing off.

The reason I find your name (or anyone else's name) distracting at the end of a comment is it takes away from the pure content of the comment. I read it, process it, and then [thunk] your name momentarily derails my chain of thought as I move on to the replies. I want to just focus on the debate, or conversation. If I want to, I can see who wrote the comment in the comment title. Where there is also a place to link to your website or personal page.

Comment Re:Microsoft the tar-baby (Score 1) 215

by solferino on Tuesday March 09, 2010 @09:46AM (#31412678) Attached to: Why Microsoft Can't Afford To Let Novell Die

Bruce, I've been reading your comments on Slashdot for the last ten years. Appreciate your input.

Now a small request. Can you leave off signing your name at the end of your comment? Your name is clearly spelt out at the top of your comment (as your user name). You and a few other people have this habit and it's quite annoying.

Comment Re:More images (Score 1) 214

by solferino on Friday March 05, 2010 @12:12AM (#31367082) Attached to: Earliest "Writing" On 60,000-Year-Old Eggshells

The two included quotes and your own comment are linguistic rubbish. Sorry to be so blunt. You have been upvoted because people love hearing these kind of stories about the 'mysterious' Chinese script.

Please have a read of The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy by John DeFrancis before you go spouting any more such stories.

Dead Pigs Used To Investigate Ocean's "Dead Zones" 106

Posted by samzenpus on Thursday March 04, 2010 @03:55PM from the big-ocean-long-pig dept.

timothy writes "As places to study what happens to corpses, the Atlantic Ocean is both much larger and much more specialized than the famous 'body farm' in Knoxville, TN. But for all kinds of good reasons, sending human bodies into Davy Jones' locker just to see where they float and how they bloat is unpopular. Pigs don't pay taxes, and more importantly, they don't vote. So Canadian scientists have taken to using them as human-body proxies, to study what happens when creatures of similar size and hairlessness (aka, us) end up 86ed and in the drink."

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