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Graphics

What's the Importance of Graphics In Video Games? 506

An anonymous reader writes "I develop games as a hobby. I've experimented with games on almost every platform available. For me, the gameplay is the most influential factor of a game, with history and graphics dividing second place. But, for some reason, it's not the technical beauty of the graphics that appeal to me. I have played Crysis, and I've played Pokémon games. The graphics of the Pokémon games entertain me as much as the graphics of Crysis. I think both are beautiful. So, why is the current generation of games giving so much importance to the realism in graphic games? I think it is sufficient for a game to have objects that are recognizable. For example, while the water in some games may not look as good as in Crysis, I can still tell it's water. What are your opinions on the current direction of game graphics? Do you prefer easy-to-render 3D scenes that leave space for beautiful effects, like with Radiosity, or more complex 3D scenes that try to be realistic?"
Nintendo

New Super Mario Bros. Wii To Include Official "Cheat" 275

phlack writes "Yahoo Games has an article describing a new mode in Nintendo's upcoming New Super Mario Bros. Wii that will allow the player to activate a 'demo' mode to get out of a hard situation. Nintendo plans on incorporating this into future games. Is this a good idea (to help relieve frustrations) or just sanctioned cheating?" They actually patented this system as well.

Comment Re:NTFS burns up drives more quickly! (Score 1) 198

Accesses don't wear flash significantly compared to writes. Heavily read pages of NAND flash do need to be rewritten occasionally, but I can't imagine this alone would ever cause a device to reach its wear limit in normal use. NTFS does write more than FAT32, so you're still correct that FAT is better for reducing wear. FAT's fault tolerance is notoriously bad though.... would you rather lose your data or have to replace a $20 usb stick (which will probably be $2 by the time you wear it out)

Comment Re:Choose NTFS for the life of your drive (Score 3, Informative) 198

Flash drives have a flash translation layer that makes the flash look like a regular disk despite having special properties. This layer handles the wear-leveling, garbage collection, and bad block detection so the standard filesystem (that was designed for magnetic disks, probably) doesn't have to consider them. Regardless of the filesystem used, the wear of the device should be related to the total amount of data written, not the location of the data.

The Internet

Facebook Exposes Advertisers To Hate Speech 806

NewsCloud writes "Does Facebook believe that no publicity is bad publicity? Why else would they leave a group called, "F**k Islam" open since July 21, 2007 despite more than 53,482 members joining an opposing group called petition: if "f**k Islam" is not shut down..we r quitting facebook group? Furthermore, advertisers such as Sprint, Verizon, T Mobile, Target, and Qwest wouldn't be too happy to learn that they are paying for ads on the 'F**k Islam' group pages. Shouldn't a startup like Facebook, reportedly worth more than a billion dollars and with over a hundred employees, be expected to enforce its own Terms of Use in less than six weeks?"

US Government Checking Up On Vista Users? 291

Paris The Pirate writes "This article at Whitedust displays some very interesting logs from Vista showing connections to the DoD Information Networking Center, United Nations Development program and the Halliburton Company; for no reason other than the machine was running Vista. From the article 'After running Vista for only a few days — with a complete love for the new platform the first sign of trouble erupted. I began noticing latency on my home network connection — so I booted my port sniffing software and networking tools to see what was happening. What I found was foundation shaking. The two images below show graphical depictions of what has and IS trying to connect to my computer even in an idle state'."

Feed HP to sell low-cost ink (theregister.com)

Change of attitude

Michael Hoffmann, the head of the European operations of HP's printer division, has told German daily Süddeutsche Zeitung that his company is going to sell low-cost ink alongside better quality cartridges.


Republicans

Submission + - 2004 vote count manipulated on GOP servers

hugecabbage writes: "The Free Press published an interesting article stating that not only did the Republicans alter the actual Ohio vote count during the 2004 presidential election, they also controlled how the tallies of those manipulated votes were disseminated over the web, affecting media and public perception of the returns as they occurred. FTA: 'There is more than ample documentation to show that on Election Night 2004, Ohio's "official" Secretary of State website — which gave the world the presidential election results — was redirected from an Ohio government server to a group of servers that contain scores of Republican web sites, including the secret White House e-mail accounts that have emerged in the scandal surrounding Attorney General Alberto Gonzales's firing of eight federal prosecutors.'"
PC Games (Games)

More Bioware For Linux? 287

GNious writes "Bioware has a thread about porting the upcoming game Dragon Age to Apple Mac OS X and/or Linux. Debate include such topics as porting houses, physics engines and the value of the market, with an enormous amount of requests for such games as Neverwinter Nights 2. With the potential for selling upwards of 1000 copies (counting individual requests) of a game at possibly $50 each, is the decision to exclude a platform and the associated revenue the correct one, or are the petitioners the ones that have gotten it wrong to think that their ca 1-5% marketshare matters?" I think the unfortunante reality is that in today's gaming market, you find that fewer people are willing to take a chance on the sales for these smaller markets -- too hard to predict revenue, and too hard to (some would say) to do the porting.

Plastic Batteries Coming Soon? 200

Roland Piquepaille writes "Engineers at Brown University have built a prototype of a hybrid plastic battery that uses a conductive polymer. The system, which marries the power of a capacitor with the storage capacity of a battery, can store and deliver power efficiently. For example, during performance testing, 'it delivered more than 100 times the power of a standard alkaline battery.' Still, it's unlikely that such a device can appear on the market before several years."

Madden 07 Earns $100 Million in First Week Sales 89

192939495969798999 writes "CNN reports that Madden 07 grossed over $100 million in the first week, helping to resurrect a sales slump for Electronic Arts. The article states that most people are waiting for the release of PS3 and/or Wii to make game purchases." From the article: "An industry turnaround isn't expected until next year, and EA officials predicted during its quarterly earnings report on August 1 that videogame sales for 2006 across the industry would be flat to down 5 percent."

UBC Engineers Reach Mileage Of Over 3000 MPG 625

The New Revelation writes "Physorg reports that engineers at UBC have developed a single occupancy vehicle that achieves a ridiculous 3145 MPG! From the article: 'The Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) Supermileage Competition took place June 9 in Marshall, Michigan. Forty teams from Canada, the U.S. and India competed in designing and building the most fuel-efficient vehicle... The UBC design, which required the driver to lie down while navigating it, achieved 3,145 miles per US gallon (0.074 liters/100 km) -- equivalent of Vancouver to Halifax on a gallon (3.79 liters) of gas -- costing less than $5 at the pump.'"

Manual Writing Tools? 139

Saulo Achkar writes "I've been recently assigned the task to rewrite the user's manual to a piece of relative complex software. Today, the existent manual used was developed with reStructuredText, a very nice piece of software; unfortunately, we're not able to create classes or templates for things like similar interfaces (that share the same functions), which means we need to write more code and that means more editing. XML formats aren't very friendly to code or edit in, either. What kind of techniques or tools are there to make writing manuals a bit friendlier and faster?"

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