Submission + - Why Does Time Fly By As You Get Older? (wbur.org)

Submitted by Ant on Tuesday February 02, 2010 @10:43AM

Ant writes: A WBUR Boston article asks "why does time fly by as you get older? ... show the psychological changes, and one of the most universal changes is that as humans age, they change the way they feel about time..."

Seen on Boing Boing.

7 of the Best Free Linux Calculators 289

Posted by timothy on Saturday January 30, 2010 @08:36PM from the open-in-tabs dept.

An anonymous reader writes "One of the basic utilities supplied with any operating system is a desktop calculator. These are often simple utilities that are perfectly adequate for basic use. They typically include trigonometric functions, logarithms, factorials, parentheses and a memory function. However, the calculators featured in this article are significantly more sophisticated with the ability to process difficult mathematical functions, to plot graphs in 2D and 3D, and much more. Occasionally, the calculator tool provided with an operating system did not engender any confidence. The classic example being the calculator shipped with Windows 3.1 which could not even reliably subtract two numbers. Rest assured, the calculators listed below are of precision quality."

Replacements For Adobe Creative Suite 3 Apps? 270

Posted by timothy on Wednesday August 26, 2009 @06:05PM from the best-of-luck-to-ye dept.

Gilmoure writes "With rumors of Adobe not supporting Creative Suite 3 applications on Mac OS X 10.6, I was wondering what Open Source apps folks would recommend to replace Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, and Dreamweaver? If the apps can work with the native file formats, all the better but if they provide the same functionality, that's still good. I have several designer friends that are looking forward to the speed boost of OS X 10.6 but don't want to go through the Adobe upgrades so soon after the CS2 to CS3 upgrades. Especially when Adobe's already working on CS5."

Ultima Online Expansion Sept. 8, WAR Expansion In Near Future 40

Posted by Soulskill on Friday August 14, 2009 @11:08PM from the bigger-and-better dept.

IndustryGamers recently spoke with Mythic Entertainment execs about the futures of Ultima Online and Warhammer Online. UO's newest expansion, Stygian Abyss, was recently given a September 8th release date. As for WAR, they say, "... we just finished up a major patch for Warhammer Online and there's a lot of stuff we're thinking about for improving and enhancing the gameplay experience and guaranteeing that the product lives up to the legacy of the Warhammer franchise. You should expect an expansion in the near future." The Overly Positive blog suggests that recent developer interviews have undergone a change in tone, demonstrating a greater willingness to acknowledge the game's flaws and work out ways to correct them.

Music Streaming to Overtake Downloads 254

Posted by samzenpus on Thursday June 04, 2009 @02:41AM from the how-do-you-steal-a-stream dept.

Barence writes "Streaming will overtake download services to become the dominant force in the online music industry, according to industry insiders. The claim comes in the wake of the PRS cutting the amount of royalties streaming services have to pay songwriters to about a third. Sites will now pay the PRS 0.085p per track, compared to the 0.22p they paid previously. On-demand streaming services still have to pay the record labels about 1p for every track streamed, however. Steve Purdham, CEO of music service We7, says the move will accelerate the growing trend towards online streaming which has seen newcomers such as his site and Spotify attract millions of users in less than a year. 'Over the next 12-24 months you'll see a move towards listening [online],' Purdham told PC Pro. 'Why do you actually need to have something downloaded on your PC? The streaming idea is really the future.'"

Tyler Bell On Yahoo's Open Location API 76

Posted by Soulskill on Tuesday April 14, 2009 @09:05PM from the where-two-point-oh dept.

blackbearnh writes "Yahoo! has been working for a while to promote a unified system for referring to places, through their Where On Earth IDs. Using a WOEID, you can query Yahoo's publicly available APIs to find out things like what cities are in a county, or what counties border each other. In an interview for O'Reilly Radar, Tyler Bell, the product lead for the Yahoo Geo Technology Group, talks about their Open Location program (not to be confused with openlocation.org, a different group altogether). He also talks about how privacy concerns interact with the increasing use of personal geotracking, and the troublesome problem of what to call places. 'I'm not even going to tell you about the problems we had when we accidentally called Constantinople Byzantium, just slipping back about 800 years there accidentally. That's a very sensitive issue. Any company dealing with geography is going to have to address it somehow. So I'll be very candid in how Yahoo addresses this. I mean first, our stated goal is to capture the world's geography as it is used by the world's people. We don't see ourselves as the definitive authority on how a place should be called.'"

STEREO Spacecraft To Explore Earth's L4 and L5 66

Posted by kdawson on Friday April 10, 2009 @08:28AM from the home-home-on-lagrange dept.

Hugh Pickens writes "Launched on October 25, 2006, NASA's twin Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory (STEREO) spacecraft are about to enter the L4 and L5 Lagrangian points, special points in our orbit around which spacecraft and other objects can loiter because the gravitational pull of earth and the sun balances the forces from the object's orbital motion. (The spacecraft won't linger at the Lagrangian points; they are just passing through.) 'These places may hold small asteroids, which could be leftovers from a Mars-sized planet that formed billions of years ago,' said NASA Project Scientist Michael Kaiser. STEREO will look for asteroids with a wide-field-of-view telescope. 'If we discover the asteroids have the same composition as the Earth and moon, it will support Belbruno and Gott's version of the giant impact theory. The asteroids themselves could well be left-over from the formation of the solar system.' L4 and L5 are also good places to observe space weather. 'With both the sun and Earth in view, we could track solar storms and watch them evolve as they move toward Earth. Also, since we could see sides of the sun not visible from Earth, we would have a few days warning before stormy regions on the solar surface rotate to become directed at Earth,' says Kaiser."

Apple's iPhone Developer Crisis 315

Posted by Soulskill on Sunday March 08, 2009 @09:36AM from the mo'-apps-mo'-problems dept.

David Gerard writes "iPhone development sounds closed-shop but simple — apply to be a developer, put application on the App Store, you and Apple make money. Except Apple can't keep up with the request load — whereas getting a developer contract used to take a couple of days, it's now taking months. Some early developers' contracts are expiring with no notice of renewal options. And Apple has no idea what's going on or the state of things. If you want to maintain a completely closed system, it helps if you can actually keep up with it." Reader h11:6 points out news of a recent study which suggests that "Android's open source nature will give it a boost over Apple's iPhone," and thus take the lead in sales as soon as three years from now. It will be interesting to see how they deal with the flood of proposed apps as their popularity rises.

Google Researchers Warn of Automated Social Info Sharing 124

Posted by Soulskill on Friday January 09, 2009 @09:10PM from the don't-post-what-you-want-kept-private dept.

holy_calamity writes "Researchers from Google have written a paper about how social networks can undermine privacy. The most interesting scenario they discuss is 'merging social graphs' — when correlating multiple social networks makes it possible to reveal connections that a person has intentionally kept secret (PDF). For example, it may be possible to work out that a certain LinkedIn user is the same person as a MySpace user, despite their attempting to keep their profiles separate. The Google solution is to develop software that screens new data added to a social network, attempting to find out if it could be fodder to such data mining."

NFL's First Broadcast In 3-D, Still Has Work To Do 178

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Friday December 05, 2008 @06:40PM from the more-cheerleaders-for-sure dept.

darkwing_bmf writes "The NFL broadcast a live game to theaters in 3-D for the first time on Thursday night. The technology demonstration was mostly successful but they still have some issues to work out. 'Some scenes clearly captured the benefits of 3-D broadcasts, however, such as an interception by Chargers linebacker Stephen Cooper as players crisscrossed the field, and a long touchdown catch by San Diego's Vincent Jackson with the arc of the ball caught on camera all the way. Viewers were encouraged to text in their reaction to the viewing. One of the first comments, according to the commentators: "More cheerleaders."'"

Comment Rational Rating Systems Needed (Score 2, Interesting) 804

by jason_j_hinze on Monday February 09, 2004 @07:12PM (#8231807) Attached to: Good Online FPS Games/Servers For Beginners?

I've often thought that the online gaming experience could be greatly improved by the incorporation of consistent rating system, such as the one used by the U.S. Chess Federation. It would be hopeless to walk into a room full of mixed-skill chess players and just play some pick up games. In order to have an enjoyable game, it's vital that you play someone in the same skill range as you. If the difference is too great one way or the other, one person will win with such regularity as to make the game boring. Sound familiar?

This is exactly the situation with online gaming. I am very good at some games, to the point at which I am accused of cheating. At others, I'm fair to middling. And I'm hopeless at some. All of these games would be more enjoyable for me if there were an online rating system that matched me up with players of similar skill. I've seen the fledgling effort in Warcraft III, but it doesn't seem to work very well. Why not just have a USCF-like rating system, where, if my UT2k3 rating is, say, 1643, I could get on a server for people rated 1600-1800? And for Q3, I'd be unrated, so I could get on a 0-1000 server until my performance had been logged for a while, so that the rating bot could assign me a provisional rating.

This would certainly require some effort on the part of online game developers, but the general problem of rating systems is well understood. The developers could choose to "stand on the shoulders of giants", rather than on their toes, by adopting these proven solutions into their online games, making more fun for all of us, and more sales for all of them.