37554031
submission
ProbablyJoe writes:
The long awaited Source engine remake of the Valve's original Half Life has finally been released. The initial release only includes the story up until Xen, but the developers say they'll be adding the rest of the story, along with an online multiplayer Deathmatch mode, soon. The game is available to download for free, and only requires players to install the Source SDK (included with all Source games, or a free download.
The highly anticipated release has also caused a huge amount of traffic for any servers hosting the files, with GameFront, GameUpdates, and Black Mesa's own CDN brought down within minutes of the release. The project has also been approved by Steam's Greenlight program, and will hopefully be available through Steam soon, though no timeframe has been given.
26295388
submission
ProbablyJoe writes:
A poll for the BBC shows that worldwide support for nuclear power has dropped significantly in the past 6 years.
However, while support has dropped in most countries, the UK has defied the trend, where 37% of the public support building new reactors. Unsurprisingly, support in Japan has dropped significantly, with only 6% supporting new reactors. The USA remains the country with the highest public opinion of nuclear power, though support has dropped slightly.
Much of the decline in opinion has been attributed to the events in Fukushima earlier in the year, although a recent Slashdot poll indicated that many readers opinions had not been affected by the events, and an even split between those who found the technology more or less safe since the events.
With reports on the long lasting effects in Fukushima still conflicted, is nuclear power still a viable solution to the world's energy problems?
26166414
submission
ProbablyJoe writes:
AllThingsD is running a series of stories this week about a possible new Facebook phone, codenamed 'Buffy'.
The phone is said to be in development by HTC, who collaborated with Facebook earlier this year for the Salsa and ChaCha/Status phones, which both had physical Facebook buttons, and a degree of integration with the social network.
While these rumours have been going around for quite a while, the article contains some new information, and neither Facebook or HTC are denying the rumours.
The phone will be based on Android, but like Amazon's Kindle Fire, will be heavily modified to integrate with Facebook, potentially using Facebook's HTML5 platform.
While we're unlikely to see any official announcements or releases any time soon, Facebook are eager to compete with Google and Apple, and are likely to want a phone of their own on shelves as soon as possible.
25865838
submission
ProbablyJoe writes:
InfoQ reports that Adobe is to donate it's web application SDK, Flex, to an "an established open source foundation" — suspected to either be the Open Spoon Foundation (who have been working on an open source fork of Flex), or the more established Apache Foundation
Adobe has stated on it's blog that they consider HTML5 to be a better technology for the future than it's own Flex platform, causing frustration among developers who have used the platform for enterprise applications
Is this a generous contribution to the open source community, or just Adobe offloading another failing technology?
