GameGod0 - Slashdot User

Walter Bright Ports D To the Mac 404

Posted by Soulskill on Sunday February 22, 2009 @10:52AM from the sieze-the-d dept.

jonniee writes "D is a programming language created by Walter Bright of C++ fame. D's focus is on combining the power and high performance of C/C++ with the programmer productivity of modern languages like Ruby and Python. And now he's ported it to the Macintosh. Quoting: '[Building a runtime library] exposed a lot of conditional compilation issues that had no case for OS X. I found that Linux has a bunch of API functions that are missing in OS X, like getline and getdelim, so some of the library functionality had to revert to more generic code for OS X. I had to be careful, because although many system macros had the same functionality and spelling, they had different expansions. Getting these wrong would cause some mysterious behavior, indeed.'"

Submission + - Hercules releases GPL MIDI drivers for Linux (blogspot.com)

Submitted by

Anonymous Coward

on Wednesday February 18, 2009 @10:33PM

Anonymous Coward writes: "On Monday Feb 16th, Hercules released GPL Linux MIDI drivers for their DJ Controller series of MIDI input devices (Mk2, RMX, MP3 Control, DJ Control Steel).
Today, cross-platform GPL DJ software Mixxx released "Mixxx 1.6.1+Herc" to enable use of those drivers with Mixxx. Details are available on the Mixxx Development Blog.
Big props to Hercules and to Mixxx for supporting Free DJs everywhere!"

Comment Re:Re-discovering magnetic bubble memory (Score 1) 109

by GameGod0 on Monday February 02, 2009 @05:51PM (#26700269) Attached to: "Magnetic Tornadoes" Could Offer New Data Storage Tech

The lowest order state of the vortex has 4 modes because:
A) The demagnetizing field wants to minimize free magnetic poles at the surface of the element. This might be the largest contribution to the vorticity (ie. having all the spins aligned in a vortex minimizes the free poles at the surface).
B) There is a discontinuity at the center of the vortex when you look at in-plane magnetization. The spins at the center are frustrated and are forced out-of-plane.

What do you mean by "folds" on the vortex? Are you talking about impurities that would pin the field?

Don't confuse out-of-plane magnetization ("perpendicular storage") with bubble memory, they are not the same thing. (There's a reason one came much later than the other. I'd like to give you a better explanation than this, but I don't have a good reference handy. Can anyone dig something up?)

The sizes involved are indeed different, see [1] where the diameter of their elements is 700 nm, and contrast with [2] (bubble memory) where a 2x2um cell was used. Perhaps with larger circular elements you won't have a single-domain state (ie. no vortex).

... and please don't misunderstand me, I don't mean to start a flamewar. I wouldn't mind having a definitive answer to these questions too. If you can dig up any relevant papers or sources, I'd be interested to take a look at them. Thanks!

[1] http://scitation.aip.org/getabs/servlet/GetabsServlet?prog=normal&id=APPLAB000079000019003113000001&idtype=cvips&gifs=yes
[2] http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/246/4936/1400

Comment Re:Re-discovering magnetic bubble memory (Score 3, Informative) 109

by GameGod0 on Monday February 02, 2009 @04:55PM (#26699389) Attached to: "Magnetic Tornadoes" Could Offer New Data Storage Tech

This sounds a lot like magnetic bubble memory that intel, fujitsu, IMB and TI made in the 1980s.

That too had multiple states per "bubble". However the higher-order bubbles were generally not used. The reason was, it was hard enough keeping the single bit (zeroth order mode) bubbles stable at high circulation and high density.

Since here the domains are fixed and the disk moves it might be easier to use higher order magnetic domain modes.

Magnetic vortices are significantly smaller than the bubbles in bubble memory. Because of this, there are no "higher order" states - you have 4 distinct magnetization states (CW/CCW, in/out), and there are no in-between states. The trick is figuring out how to get the switching speed down using exchange bias coupling and crazy anisotropy effects.

January 2009 Indie Game Round-Up 22

Posted by Soulskill on Wednesday January 28, 2009 @02:34AM from the new-year-new-games dept.

cyrus_zuo writes with this month's round-up of independent game reviews by the folks at Game Tunnel. The top rated game this month is Defense Grid: the Awakening, a tower defense game which "does not revolutionize the tower defense genre, but is solid in every aspect with a few interesting twists." Also scoring highly were cloudphobia and The Tales of Bingwood: Chapter I. "Bingwood is a very clear and unabashed homage to The Secret of Monkey Island. It succeeds because it manages to reference and mimic the style of the original with a fresh and engaging story and a consistent, clean presentation."

Smash Bros. Creators Behind New TMNT Game 29

Posted by Soulskill on Tuesday January 27, 2009 @05:14AM from the totally-tubular-dude dept.

The Opposable Thumbs blog reports that work is underway on a new Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles game for the Wii. They note that "Game Arts, the developer for Super Smash Bros. Brawl, will be creating the four-player action title for Ubisoft." According to the press release, the game is set to launch in late 2009 to celebrate 25 years of the TMNT franchise. The game won't be tied to any particular movie or TV series.

What, Me Worry? MAD Magazine Going Quarterly 132

Posted by timothy on Sunday January 25, 2009 @05:40AM from the needs-more-website dept.

theodp writes "MAD Magazine is about to put out its 500th issue, but starting with its April publication, the mag is cutting down to only four issues per year. The feedback we've gotten from readers,' quipped Editor John Ficarra, 'is that only every third issue of MAD is funny, so we've decided to just publish those.' MAD Kids and MAD Classics are ceasing publication entirely. Keep up the what-me-worry game face, Alfred!"

Comment Re:A reasoned analysis? That's good. (Score 1) 869

by GameGod0 on Saturday January 24, 2009 @04:31PM (#26591823) Attached to: Linus Switches From KDE To Gnome

My mouse didn't work. Why? Because they included an update to the Bluez stack, to support a change to the kernel, but the KDE4 Bluetooth support hadn't been updated to support that new Bluez stack. Their solution? Drop bluetooth support in Kubuntu Intrepid. WTF?

Sometimes projects have to make tough decisions in order to meet deadlines or to otherwise keep development going in the right direction. They probably weren't happy with this either, but don't think that you could have done any better if you were in their shoes.

Fedora 11 To Default To the Ext4 File System 161

Posted by kdawson on Friday January 23, 2009 @10:33AM from the better-in-many-dimensions dept.

ffs writes "The next release of Fedora, 11, will default to the ext4 file system unless serious regressions are seen, as reported by heise online. The LWN story has a few comments extolling the virtues of the file system. Some benchmarks have shown ext4 to be much faster than the current default ext3. Some of the new features that matter for desktop users are a faster file system check, extents support (for efficiently storing large files and reducing fragmentation), multiblock allocation (faster writes), delayed block allocation, journal checksumming (saving against power / hardware failures), and others. The KernelNewbies page has more information on each feature. As is the extfs tradition, mounting a current ext3 filesystem as ext4 will work seamlessly; however, most new features will not be available with the same on-disk format, meaning a fresh format with ext4 or converting the disk layout to ext4 will offer the best experience."

Microsoft Brings Back DRM 414

Posted by timothy on Thursday January 22, 2009 @03:39PM from the perhaps-skydiving-is-not-for-you dept.

Barence writes "Microsoft yesterday unveiled its MSN Mobile Music service — and a surprise return to digital rights management (DRM). While companies such as Apple and Amazon have finally moved to music download services free of copy protection, MSN Mobile locks tracks to the mobile handset they are downloaded to. It also charges more than the other services per track, and offers no way to transfer your tracks to your new phone when you upgrade. The company's Head of Mobile UK spoke to PC Pro about the launch, but his answers are almost as baffling as the service itself. Best quote: Q: 'If I buy these songs on your service — and they're locked to my phone — what happens when I upgrade my phone in six months' time?' A: 'Well, I think you know the answer to that.'"

Valve Takes Optimistic View of Piracy 509

Posted by Soulskill on Sunday January 18, 2009 @02:12PM from the non-customer-is-always-right dept.

GameDaily recently spoke with Jason Holtman, director of business development and legal affairs for Valve, about online sales and piracy. Holtman took a surprising stance on the latter, effectively taking responsibility for at least a portion of pirated games. Quoting: "'There's a big business feeling that there's piracy,' he says. But the truth is: 'Pirates are underserved customers. When you think about it that way, you think, "Oh my gosh, I can do some interesting things and make some interesting money off of it." We take all of our games day-and-date to Russia,' Holtman says of Valve. 'The reason people pirated things in Russia,' he explains, 'is because Russians are reading magazines and watching television — they say "Man, I want to play that game so bad," but the publishers respond "you can play that game in six months...maybe." We found that our piracy rates dropped off significantly,' Holtman says." Attitudes like this seem to be prevalent at Valve; last month we talked about founder Gabe Newell's comments that "most DRM strategies are just dumb."

Submission + - Internet communications while at sea?

Submitted by

ubergamer1337

on Tuesday January 13, 2009 @01:30AM

ubergamer1337 writes: "Next semester I will be participating in a college study abroad program known as Semester at Sea. The gist of it is that over four months 600ish students sail around the world on a converted cruise ship, visiting diverse port cities while taking classes when we are between ports. Debates about its educational merit aside, my internet options while I will be at sea will be severely limited. We get just 100 minutes of internet access for the entire voyage, and once thats gone the only internet access we have is a university email address, which is limited to messages under a megabyte with no attachments. I have been pondering different ways to staying in contact with friends and family back at home without running to an internet cafe in every port, and I have already decided that I want to set up a blog that can be updated by email, but I wanted to ask the collective wisdom of Slashdot if anyone knows of any other ways to transmit more then just your standard message through email. Some things I would be particularity interested in being able to figure out would be a way to send photos (encode them as text?), and a way to get wikipedia pages etc. emailed to me."

Apple Introduces "MacBook Wheel" 268

Posted by CmdrTaco on Tuesday January 06, 2009 @10:27AM from the future-is-now dept.

CommonCents noted an Apple announcement a few hours before the anticipated keynote. He says "Apples' latest must have gadget does away with the keyboard. With the new MacBook Wheel, Apple has replaced the traditional keyboard with a giant wheel."

CCC Create a Rogue CA Certificate 300

Posted by CmdrTaco on Tuesday December 30, 2008 @01:14PM from the they-even-faked-this-dept dept.

t3rmin4t0r writes "Just when you were breathing easy about Kaminsky, DNS and the word hijacking, by repeating the word SSL in your head, the hackers at CCC were busy at work making a hash of SSL certificate security. Here's the scoop on how they set up their own rogue CA, by (from what I can figure) reversing the hash and engineering a collision up in MD5 space. Until now, MD5 collisions have been ignored because nobody would put in that much effort to create a useful dummy file, but a CA certificate for phishing seems juicy enough to be fodder for the botnets now."

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