Behind Menuet, an OS Written Entirely In Assembly 419

Posted by Soulskill on Wednesday August 19, 2009 @09:34AM from the keep-it-simple dept.

angry tapir writes "MenuetOS is an operating system written entirely in assembly language. As a result it's extremely quick and compact (it can even fit on a floppy disk, despite having a GUI). It can run Quake. Two of the developers behind MenuetOS took time out to talk about what inspired them to undertake the daunting task of writing the operating system, the current state of Menuet and future plans for it."

Games That Design Themselves 162

Posted by Soulskill on Thursday July 30, 2009 @12:20PM from the real-time-savers dept.

destinyland writes "MIT's Media Lab is building 'a game that designs its own AI agents by observing the behavior of humans.' Their ultimate goal? 'Collective AI-driven agents that can interact and converse with humans without requiring programming or specialists to hand-craft behavior and dialogue.' With a similar project underway by a University of California professor, we may soon see radically different games that can 'react with human-like adaptability to whatever situation they're thrust into.'"

Do Video Games Cost Too Much? 763

Posted by Soulskill on Friday February 20, 2009 @07:02AM from the depends-how-the-pirate-bay-trial-goes-right dept.

Valve's Gabe Newell gave the keynote address at this year's Design, Innovate, Communicate, Entertain (DICE) Summit about the cost of games, the effect of piracy, and how to reach new players. Valve undertook an experiment recently to test how price affected the sales of their popular survival-horror FPS, Left 4 Dead. They Reduced the price by 50% on Steam, which "resulted in a 3000% increase in sales of the game, posting overall sales that beat the title's original launch performance." They also tested various other price drops over the holidays, seeing spikes in sales that corresponded well to the size of the discount. This will undoubtedly add to the speculation that game prices have risen too high for the current economic climate. G4TV ran a live blog of Newell's presentation, providing a few more details.

Cambridge, Mass. Moves To Nix Security Cameras 366

Posted by timothy on Thursday February 12, 2009 @02:14PM from the buncha-lefties dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Citing privacy concerns, the Cambridge, Mass. City Council has voted 9-0 to remove security cameras scattered throughout the city. 'Because of the slow erosion of our civil liberties since 9/11, it is important to raise questions regarding these cameras,' said Marjorie Decker, a Cambridge city councilor. Rather than citing privacy, WCBVTV is running the story under the headline 'City's Move To Nix Security Cams May Cost Thousands.'"

DIY LED Array Marquee For Your PC 128

Posted by kdawson on Friday January 23, 2009 @02:21PM from the geeking-out-on-the-weekend dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Ever wish you had one of those big LED displays to keep you up to date on e-mails, stock quotes, server uptimes, or weather? Here's a new video tutorial showing how to build your own computer-controlled LED array. You can code your own data feed, and just send it over a TCP socket. This looks like a fun weekend project for someone looking to get started with electronics by building something useful."

A Cheap, Distributed Zero-Day Defense? 116

Posted by CmdrTaco on Wednesday January 14, 2009 @02:14PM from the yeah-that-won't-get-gamed dept.

coondoggie writes "Shutting down zero-day computer attacks could be carried out inexpensively by peer-to-peer software that shares information about anomalous behavior, say researchers at the University of California at Davis.The software would interact with existing personal firewalls and intrusion detection systems to gather data about anomalous behavior, says Senthil Cheetancheri, the lead researcher on the project he undertook as a grad student at UC Davis from 2004 to 2007. He now works for SonicWall."

Comment Re:oh goodie (Score 1, Insightful) 199

by Aerynlore on Wednesday January 14, 2009 @01:32PM (#26451603) Attached to: US Senate & House Create YouTube Channels

I think the biggest problem is more with a lack of time then a lack of caring. While apathy is a huge problem, who has time to sit at work and watch YouTube (or CSPAN) video all day? Hell, most of the Congress speeches are already written, rehearsed and recorded before they even step on the floor. They even have the press releases out the day before. How many times have you seen "Senior Senate from a state to deliver speech on [topic de jeur] tomorrow."
So little is actually a surprise inside the chambers that there is no actual reason to watch this crap, on TV or online.

AVG Virus Scanner Removes Critical Windows File 440

Posted by kdawson on Monday November 10, 2008 @08:42PM from the it-just-acts-like-one dept.

secmartin writes "The popular virus scanner AVG released an update yesterday that caused their software to mark user32.dll as a virus. Since this is a rather critical file, AVG's suggestion to remove it caused problems for users around the world who are now advised to restore the file through the Windows Recovery Console. AVG just posted an update about this (FAQ item 1574) in the support section of their site. Their forums are full of complaints."

EA Forum Ban Will Now Mean EA Game Ban 549

Posted by timothy on Thursday October 30, 2008 @09:55PM from the being-nice-is-actually-an-option dept.

An anonymous reader writes "A post on the EA Support Forums from APOC, online community manager for Electronic Arts, outlines a new policy for their new forums, saying users who earn a ban based on their behavior in the forums will be locked out of all of the EA games tied to that account: 'Well, its actually going to be a bit nastier for those who get banned. Your forum account will be directly tied to your Master EA Account, so if we ban you on the forums, you would be banned from the game as well since the login process is the same. And you'd actually be banned from your other EA games as well since it's all tied to your account. So if you have SPORE and Red Alert 3 and you get yourself banned on our forums or in-game, well, your SPORE account would be banned to. It's all one in the same, so I strongly recommend people play nice and act mature. All in all, we expect people to come on here and abide by our ToS. We hate banning people, it makes our lives a lot tougher, but it's what we have to do.'" Update: 10/31 12:36 GMT by T : Not so! Pandanapper writes "After a flood of complaints the EA community moderator APOC corrects his statement about how banning you from the forums bans you from your game access as well:"That said, the previous statement I made recently (that's being quoted on the blogs) was inaccurate and a mistake on my part. I had a misunderstanding with regards to our new upcoming forums and website and never meant to infer that if we ban or suspend you on the forums, you would be banned in-game as well. This is not correct, my mistake, my bad."

Comment Re:So... (Score 1) 387

by Aerynlore on Wednesday June 25, 2008 @04:18PM (#23940195) Attached to: Google Begat the End of the Scientific Method?

It sounds like this, yes.
In fact, his entire concept sounds very much like David Brin's Uplift universe and the Galactic Library Institute, where everything there is to know has already been found, cataloged and retained. All you have to do is find it in the fast cloud of interstellar information.

FCC Revises Broadband Penetration Metrics 149

Posted by kdawson on Tuesday June 17, 2008 @03:22PM from the end-of-a-long-running-joke dept.

joelt49 writes "Ars Technica reports that the FCC has revised its broadband penetration metric. Previously, if only one subscriber in a zip code received connectivity at 200 Kbps, then the entire zip code was considered to have broadband access. Now, the FCC will count the number of subscribers in census tracts. The FCC has also revised its definition of broadband; previously, it was anything over 200 Kbps. Now, speeds between 200 and 768 Kbps are considered 'First-Generation' broadband, and speeds up to 1.5 Mbps are considered 'Basic' broadband." Unfortunately, the FCC has decided to keep all this new data to themselves.

Submission + - Reznor releases new NIN album via 'net experiment (blorge.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 03, 2008 @09:52AM

An anonymous reader writes: Convinced the current music business infrastructure (requiring artists to rely on labels) is broken, Nine Inch Nails front man, Trent Reznor, released his band's new album, Ghosts I — IV (Ghosts Volumes One though Four), on Sunday at 6 PM via his official site, marking yet another business experiment for this artist in the changing music market.