Not-a-Neg - Slashdot User

AbleGamers Reviews Games From a Disability Standpoint 125

Posted by Soulskill on Wednesday December 02, 2009 @04:59AM from the gaming-for-all dept.

eldavojohn writes "Early last month a visually impaired gamer sued Sony under the Americans with Disabilities Act (and if you think that people with disabilities don't play games, think again). The AbleGamers Foundation has decided to step forward and provide a rating system for games that blends together a number of factors to determine a score with regard to accessibility. Visual, hearing, motion, closed captioning, speed settings, difficulty settings and even colorblindness options are all taken into account when compiling these scores and reviewing these games."

MacBook Mod Gives Base Station Chassis New Purpose 129

Posted by timothy on Tuesday December 01, 2009 @11:30AM from the hyper-extension dept.

odysseus31173 writes "A little over a year ago, I began developing for the iPhone and needed a working mac (not a Hackintosh), so I decided to purchase a MacBook logic board to save on cost. I modded a Linksys case to accept the logic board (along with all of the other hardware) and made it function again. The Mac currently runs Leopard and has a working iSight and mic along with fully functional WiFi and bluetooth. The RAM is the standard 1 gig, but the hard drive has been upgraded to 160 gigs. The iSight/mic holes in the front panel are hard to see and this could be used as a nanny cam of sorts."

Nintendo Upset Over Nokia Game Emulation Video 189

Posted by Soulskill on Tuesday December 01, 2009 @02:45AM from the super-mario-takedown dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Nintendo is investigating potential copyright infringement by Nokia during some video demos of their N900 phone, which can be seen emulating Nintendo games. Nintendo spokesman Robert Saunders says: 'We take rigorous steps to protect our IP and our legal team will examine this to determine if any infringement has taken place.' In the video, Nokia says, 'Most publishers allow individual title usage, provided that the user is in possession of the original title.'"

Lifecycle Energy Costs of LED, CFL Bulbs Calculated 400

Posted by kdawson on Tuesday December 01, 2009 @12:34AM from the pla-hol dept.

necro81 writes "The NY Times is reporting on a new study from Osram, a German lighting manufacturer, which has calculated the total lifecycle energy costs of three lightbulb technologies and found that both LEDs and CFLs use approximately 20% of the energy of incandescents over their lifetimes. While it is well known that the newer lighting technologies use a fraction of the energy of incandescents to produce the same amount of light, it has not been proven whether higher manufacturing energy costs kept the new lighting from offering a net gain. The study found that the manufacturing and distribution energy costs of all lightbulb technologies are only about 2% of their total lifetime energy cost — a tiny fraction of the energy used to produce light." The study uses the assumption that LEDs last 2.5 times longer than CFLs, and 25 times longer than incandescents.

Jetman Attempts Intercontinental Flight 140

Posted by samzenpus on Wednesday November 25, 2009 @01:32PM from the a-jetwing-and-a-prayer dept.

Last year we ran the story of Yves Rossy and his DIY jetwings. Yves spent $190,000 and countless hours building a set of jet-powered wings which he used to cross the English Channel. Rossy's next goal is to cross the Strait of Gibraltar, from Tangier in Morocco and Tarifa on the southwestern tip of Spain. From the article: "Using a four-cylinder jet pack and carbon fibre wings spanning over 8ft, he will jump out of a plane at 6,500 ft and cruise at 130 mph until he reaches the Spanish coast, when he will parachute to earth." Update 18:57 GMT: mytrip writes: "Yves Rossy took off from Tangiers but five minutes into an expected 15-minute flight he was obliged to ditch into the wind-swept waters."

GIMP Dropped From Ubuntu 10.04 900

Posted by Soulskill on Thursday November 19, 2009 @10:22AM from the should-have-used-the-fireman's-carry dept.

kai_hiwatari writes "It looks like the Ubuntu developers consider GIMP to be too powerful for a normal desktop user. They are removing it from the upcoming Ubuntu 10.04. Among the reasons cited are that the UI is too complex, it takes up room on the disc, and 'desktop users just want to edit photos and they can do that in F-Spot.''"

NIF Aims For the Ultimate Green Energy Source 234

Posted by Soulskill on Sunday November 15, 2009 @11:16AM from the crazy-eddie's-discount-power dept.

theodp writes "Edward Moses and his team of 500 scientists and engineers at Lawrence Livermore's National Ignition Facility are betting $3.5B in taxpayer money on a tiny pellet they hope could produce an endless supply of safe, clean energy. By the fall of 2010, the team aims to start blasting capsules containing deuterium-tritium fuel with 1.4 megajoules of laser power, a first step towards the holy grail of controlled nuclear fusion. Not all are convinced that Moses will lead us to the promised land. 'They're snake-oil salesmen,' says Thomas Cochran, a scientist with the Natural Resources Defense Council. Moses, for his part, seems unfazed by the skepticism, saying he's confident that his team will succeed."

LHC Shut Down Again — By Baguette-Dropping Bird 478

Posted by timothy on Friday November 06, 2009 @04:50AM from the first-causes dept.

Philip K Dickhead writes "Is Douglas Adams scripting the saga of sorrows facing the LHC? These time-traveling Higgs-Boson particles certainly exhibit the sign of his absurd sense of humor! Perhaps it is the Universe itself, conspiring against the revelations intimated by the operation of CERN's Large Hadron Collider? This time, it is not falling cranes, cracked magnets, liquid helium leaks or even links to Al Qaeda, that have halted man's efforts to understand the meaning of life, the universe and everything. It now appears that the collider is hindered from an initial firing by a baguette, dropped by a passing bird: 'The bird dropped some bread on a section of outdoor machinery, eventually leading to significant overheating in parts of the accelerator. The LHC was not operational at the time of the incident, but the spike produced so much heat that had the beam been on, automatic failsafes would have shut down the machine.'"

Comment Re:Blank (Score 2, Interesting) 496

by Not-a-Neg on Tuesday November 03, 2009 @10:58AM (#29963466) Attached to: Your browser's home page is...

I have mine set to Google for 3 simple reason's:

1.) It loads fast
2.) It verifies my internet connection is working without having to go to some other site
3.) More often than not the first thing I need to do after opening Firefox is do a search on Google; once the site is open I can simply start typing because the cursor defaults to the Google search box on the webpage

Asimov Estate Authorizes New I, Robot Books 426

Posted by timothy on Sunday November 01, 2009 @09:20PM from the automatic-writing dept.

daria42 writes "In a move guaranteed to annoy long-term science fiction fans, the estate of legendary science fiction author Isaac Asimov, who passed away in 1992, has authorized a trilogy of sequels to his beloved I, Robot short story series, to be written by relatively unknown fantasy author Mickey Zucker Reichert. The move is already garnering opposition online. 'Isaac Asimov died forty years after they were first written. If he had wanted to follow them up, he would have. The author's intentions need to be respected here,' writes sci-fi/fantasy book site Keeping the Door."

Comment Blame the economy (Score 1) 709

by Not-a-Neg on Monday October 26, 2009 @12:12PM (#29873499) Attached to: This Hallowe'en ...

I blame the economy for my lack of desire to buy/create a costume this year. Thankfully the candy has been on sale so I can still make baseball sized wads of Tootsie Rolls.

Amazon Hobbles Features For International Kindle 166

Posted by timothy on Thursday October 22, 2009 @02:01PM from the someone-call-me-when-the-sinister-starts dept.

Barence writes "Amazon has stripped several key features out of the international edition of the Kindle, PC Pro has discovered. Newspapers and magazines are delivered without any photos, and the web browser has been disabled, presumably because Amazon doesn't want to foot the data bill. There's also a 40% premium on books bought via the Amazon store. 'International customers do pay a higher price for their books than US customers due to higher operating costs outside of the US,' an Amazon spokesperson confessed."

Yahoo Offered Lap Dances At Hack Event 572

Posted by samzenpus on Thursday October 22, 2009 @10:50AM from the whos'-next-it's-you dept.

Fotograf writes "Yahoo's latest embarrassment seems like a sign that the company is just trying too hard to be cool. The latest debacle is earning the company some additional publicity. After Yahoo hosted Taiwan Open Hack Day, a special event for engineers and developers that was held last weekend, a series of photos found their way onto the internet — as ill-thought out decisions often do. Yahoo offered lap dances to the attendees of the hack event. Since the pictures have come out the company has decided to apologize."

Comment Losing my soul (Score 1) 606

by Not-a-Neg on Wednesday October 14, 2009 @12:51PM (#29746545) Attached to: Do You Provide Tech Support To Friends and Family?

Once I had my own car (which my parents were against me getting one) my parents started telling everyone they knew to call me if they needed computer help. I charged those people. For friends and family though, I don't charge anything other than the cost of parts. Sadly, the longer my day gets at work the less "glad" I am to help. It seems like the better I get at doing what I do, the more annoying it becomes to do in my free time. On the other hand, I enjoy any excuse to swing by Fry's.

P.S. My signature fits my response to this poll, and is what I tell anyone that asks me what they should buy.

Ted Dziuba Says, "I Don't Code In My Free Time" 619

Posted by timothy on Sunday October 11, 2009 @04:31PM from the your-allotment-of-seconds-on-earth dept.

theodp writes "When he gets some free time away from his gigs at startup Milo and The Register, you won't catch Ted Dziuba doing any recreational programming. And he wouldn't want to work for a company that doesn't hire those who don't code in their spare time. 'You know what's more awesome than spending my Saturday afternoon learning Haskell by hacking away at a few Project Euler problems?' asks Dziuba. 'F***, ANYTHING.'"

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