fractic - Slashdot User

Comment Re:Programming games for kids (Score 1) 527

by fractic on Friday June 24, 2011 @05:55AM (#36552778) Attached to: Why Johnny Can't Code and How That Can Change

Check out http://www.zachtronicsindustries.com/. Those games take the essence of what makes programming fun and turn it into a game. Spacechem is not free but the other games are. They do get fiendishly difficult though.

Comment Full, abbreviated, hidden slider (Score 1) 2254

by fractic on Wednesday January 26, 2011 @05:15AM (#35006114) Attached to: Slashdot Launches Re-Design

The slider where you can select what scores should be shown as full, abbreviated or hidden has a little bug/typo. The score track goes 5 4 3 2 2 0 -1 making me wonder what happens with comments with a score of 1.

Sweet, Sour, Salty, Bitter, Protein ... and Now Fat 210

Posted by timothy on Wednesday March 10, 2010 @05:21PM from the visit-the-chiba-clinic-for-an-upgrade dept.

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:Open source (Score 1) 1747

by fractic on Thursday December 10, 2009 @12:23PM (#30389274) Attached to: The Science Credibility Bubble

There are two good examples of this. A lot of people don't believe that 0.999999... (infinite repetition) is equal to
1. Even if you prove it to them they remain convinced that there is a similar argument showing that they are unequal. Another example is the monty hall problem which is famous for even tricking many mathematicians.

Pirates as a Marketplace 214

Posted by Soulskill on Wednesday December 09, 2009 @07:31AM from the marrrrrrrket-share dept.

John Riccitiello, the CEO of Electronic Arts, made some revealing comments in an interview with Kotaku about how the company's attitudes are shifting with regard to software piracy. Quoting: "Some of the people buying this DLC are not people who bought the game in a new shrink-wrapped box. That could be seen as a dark cloud, a mass of gamers who play a game without contributing a penny to EA. But around that cloud Riccitiello identified a silver lining: 'There's a sizable pirate market and a sizable second sale market and we want to try to generate revenue in that marketplace,' he said, pointing to DLC as a way to do it. The EA boss would prefer people bought their games, of course. 'I don't think anybody should pirate anything,' he said. 'I believe in the artistry of the people who build [the games industry.] I profoundly believe that. And when you steal from us, you steal from them. Having said that, there's a lot of people who do.' So encourage those pirates to pay for something, he figures. Riccitiello explained that EA's download services aren't perfect at distinguishing between used copies of games and pirated copies. As a result, he suggested, EA sells DLC to both communities of gamers. And that's how a pirate can turn into a paying customer."

Comment Re:Periods and commas. (Score 1) 420

by fractic on Wednesday November 25, 2009 @12:03PM (#30226754) Attached to: Moving Decimal Bug Loses Money

I'm British - I use "," to separate thousands and "." to separate decimals, but that doesn't make me 'right' - it really is just usage and custom, there isn't anything to really recommend one way over the other.

Actually there is. The reason why a comma is used as a decimal separator in some places is the following. The decimal separator is more important
that the thousands separator, a misplaced thousands separator doesn't matter since it has no effect on the value. Now a speck of ink is more easily mistaken for a dot than a comma. It would be bad to mistake a speck of ink for a decimal separator.

Some people have argued that because the dot is more important for sentence structure it should also be used for the more important decimal separator. However this isn't a very strong argument since there is no reason to use grammar rules for the notation of numbers.

That said, personally I use a dot since I need the comma to separate lists of numbers (e.g. 1.2, 1.3, 1.4 ) and the comma notation for lists is almost
universal.

Comment Re:flat (Score 4, Informative) 670

by fractic on Saturday July 11, 2009 @09:40AM (#28659481) Attached to: Study Highlights Gap Between Views of Scientists and the Public

This is just plain wrong. Even the ancient greeks knew that the earth was spherical. This has been the dominant scientific position for a long time. The wikipedia article on it is quite good flat earth.

Silverlight 2.0 Released 164

Posted by kdawson on Sunday October 19, 2008 @03:58PM from the opposite-of-sun dept.

rfernand79 writes "Via Scott Guthrie's Blog for Microsoft, we find out that Silverlight 2.0 has been released. The blog post notes some interesting statistics, including the magnitude of video streamed during the Olympics and the Democratic National Convention (both using Silverlight). 'Hello Worlds' and educational links are included in the post."

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