Comment Of course a parabola also describes... (Score 1) 234
...the sales numbers for flash-in-the-pan games. Not saying this is one, but we've seen it with just about every game on Facebook. Mobile games may not be much different.
Preserving Virtual Worlds 122
The Opposable Thumbs blog has an interview with Jerome McDonough of the University of Illinois, who is involved with the Preserving Virtual Worlds project. The goal of the project is to recognize video games as cultural artifacts and to make sure they're accessible by future generations. Here McDonough talks about some of the technical difficulties in doing so:
"Take, for example, Star Raiders on the Atari 2600. If you're going to preserve this, you've got a couple of problems. The first is that it is on a cartridge that is designed to work on a particular system that is no longer manufactured. And as long as you've got a hardware dependency there, you're really not going to be able to preserve this material very long. What we have been looking at is how feasible is it for things that fundamentally all have some level of hardware dependency there — even Doom has dependencies on DLLs with an operating system, and on particular chipsets and architectures for playing. How do you take that and turn it into something that isn't as dependent on a particular physical piece of hardware. And to do that, you need information about that platform. You need technical specifications that allow you to basically reproduce a virtualization that may enable you to run the software in its original form in the future. So what we're trying to do is preserve not only the games, but preserve the knowledge that you would need to create a virtualization platform to play the game."
Comment Re:Not really seeing the market... (Score 2, Insightful) 139
Because Grandpa has no idea what VLC is.
Comment Re:.NET and biochemist (Score 1) 98
Having worked with Mike before, I'm going to guess this isn't the case. He's an incredibly talented software engineer and has a good head for business as well. More likely, he saw that the ship was sinking and decided to get off.
Sweet, Sour, Salty, Bitter, Protein ... and Now Fat
210
ral writes "The human tongue can taste more than sweet, sour, salty, bitter and protein. Researchers have added fat to that list. Dr. Russell Keast, an exercise and nutrition sciences professor at Deakin University in Melbourne, told Slashfood, 'This makes logical sense. We have sweet to identify carbohydrate/sugars, and umami to identify protein/amino acids, so we could expect a taste to identify the other macronutrient: fat.' In the Deakin study, which appears in the latest issue of the British Journal of Nutrition, Dr. Keast and his team gave a group of 33 people fatty acids found in common foods, mixed in with nonfat milk to disguise the telltale fat texture. All 33 could detect the fatty acids to at least a small degree."
Comment Re:Amazon S3 (Score 1) 411
One major caveat to this: storing data on S3 is not compatible with many types of compliance standards (PCI, SOX, HIPAA, etc.) If your business is required to have any particular types of compliance, either because the government requires it of you or your partners do, make sure you are storing the data offline. That's about the only way to do it and still meet compliance measures.
I also love the idea of using S3 for storage; just keep in mind that depending on the type of data you are storing it may not be the appropriate choice.
Comment Re:Won't work in some areas (Score 1) 184
And please no stupid "change ISP" comments, a lot of people aren't lucky enough to even have a choice of high-speed providers. It's either high-speed cable/DSL, or dial-up. Sometimes from the same ISP, even.
You should just change ISPs.
Comment Re:I hate Vista but for $50.... (Score 1) 389
Keep in mind that the they aren't basing this off of your retail price for Vista; the $50 probably represents their wholesale price for the OS. They're simply passing the difference on to you.
