Submission + - Slashdot Alum Samzenpus's Fractured Veil Hits Kickstarter

Submitted by CmdrTaco on Tuesday September 07, 2021 @11:46AM

CmdrTaco writes: Long time Slashdot readers remember Samzenpus,who posted over 17,000 stories here, sadly crushing my record in the process! What you might NOT know is that he was frequently the Dungeon Master for D&D campaigns played by the original Slashdot crew, and for the last few years he has been applying these skills with fellow Slashdot editorial alum Chris DiBona to a Survival game called Fractured Veil. It's set in a post apocalyptic Hawaii with a huge world based on real map data to explore, as well as careful balance between PVP & PVE. I figured a lot of our old friends would love to help them meet their kickstarter goal and then help us build bases and murder monsters! The game is turning into something pretty great and I'm excited to see it in the wild!

Comment Shit stained diapers (Score 4, Funny) 262

by squarefish on Sunday June 18, 2017 @05:31AM (#54641781) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: How Do You Prepare For The Theft Of Your PC?

Biological weapons work best.

Comment Debunk? (Score 5, Informative) 301

by JohnGrahamCumming on Tuesday January 14, 2014 @10:48AM (#45950739) Attached to: Programmer Debunks Source Code Shown In Movies and TV Shows

Hmm. I am the person who created that Tumblr. I'm not trying to "debunk" anything. Just showing what it really is: sometimes it's nonsense, sometimes it's there's an amusing juxtaposition, sometimes it's a fun Easter Egg.

Comment Re:Cockroach rights? (Score 1) 512

by squarefish on Monday October 07, 2013 @08:42PM (#45065339) Attached to: Cyborg Cockroach Sparks Ethics Debate

Not true- I've seen them on boats and those boats dock. It's the same way AK has giant Norwegian rats running the shipyards- they got there by boat. Much of AK has more pleasant weather than Chicago and they sure has hell don't freeze here, so I call bullshit! With the amount of air traffic, ships, and trucks, there is simply no way that AK doesn't have them.

Comment Re:Already underway (Score 4, Informative) 56

by JohnGrahamCumming on Wednesday October 24, 2012 @06:19AM (#41750057) Attached to: Building Babbage's Analytical Engine

Tim Robinson, the man behind the Meccano construction you link to, is a trustee of the Plan 28 charity mentioned above.

Comment Re:It's not hard to do, just moderately expensive (Score 5, Informative) 56

by JohnGrahamCumming on Wednesday October 24, 2012 @06:11AM (#41750033) Attached to: Building Babbage's Analytical Engine

You are quite correct that we have not built a single demo part. In the two years since I started talking about this project the following has happened:

1. Persuaded the Science Museum to digitize all of Babbage's plans and notebooks (this in itself was a non-trivial task involving a great deal of effort at all levels and they should be thanked for taking on the task).
2. Got the leading Babbage experts to join and work with me (Doron Swade who built the Difference Engine No. 2 and Tim Robinson)
3. Started a UK-based charity (again these things take time as there are legal requirements and the recruitment of a board of trustees)
4. Started research on the Babbage archive itself
5. Begun fund-raising.

No. 4 is non-trivial because there are literally thousands of pages of notes and > 230 large scale plans to decipher. Plus there's a hardware description language to work with. And the archive is not well documented. There are a number of different cross references that conflict with each other. I realize that all this stuff is boring and people would like to see an immediate result, but that's not going to happen. It's years of work to properly study this stuff and build a historically accurate machine.

Note that we have not proposed building the 1,000 memory location machine. That's far too much to demonstrate that it would work and would add to the cost and size. As for the number of parts, until we've deciphered all the plans and come up with a definitive plan that it's hard to answer but we believe there will be roughly 40,000 to 50,000 components to be made.

Comment Re:Great idea, probably not happening (Score 5, Informative) 132

by JohnGrahamCumming on Sunday April 29, 2012 @04:59PM (#39839421) Attached to: The Greatest Machine Never Built

You are correct that I care about the PR side of things. I need to because I need to raise a substantial amount of money.

But it's far from all PR. There's now a registered British charity with a board of trustees and the pre-eminent Babbage expert, Doron Swade, who built the Difference Engine No. 2 at the Science Museum is running the technical side of the project.

Study of the digitized plans has been underway since February and some first results will be announced this summer. We actively want to build a 3D working model in a tool like Autodesk.

Submission + - A hacked WiFi Router, an API and a toy bus: it's the ambient bus arrival monitor (jgc.org)

Submitted by

JohnGrahamCumming

on Tuesday March 20, 2012 @07:13AM

JohnGrahamCumming writes: "In this simple project a hacked Linksys WRT54GL talks to a public API to get real-time bus information and displays the times of the next buses on a model bus. Never miss the bus again!"

Comment Re:Succession plan? (Score 1) 1521

by frankie on Friday August 26, 2011 @11:02AM (#37219088) Attached to: Rob "CmdrTaco" Malda Resigns From Slashdot

Been a while since I posted on /.

I can understand Lord Steve's retirement, considering he's been running on secondhand parts for a while, but Taco?

No one else has abused this meme yet, so I may as well: not letting Taco keep his posting privileges is something that Hitler would do.

EOL.

Rob "CmdrTaco" Malda Resigns From Slashdot 1521

Posted by CmdrTaco on Thursday August 25, 2011 @09:00AM from the steve-got-front-cutsies dept.

After 14 years and over 15,000 stories posted, it's finally time for me to say Good-Bye to Slashdot. I created this place with my best friends in a run down house while still in college. Since then it has grown to be read by more than a million people, and has served Billions and Billions of Pages (yes, in my head I hear the voice). During my tenure I have done my best to keep Slashdot firmly grounded in its origins, but now it's time for someone else to come aboard and find the *future*. Personally I don't have any plans, but if you need to get ahold of me for any reason, you can find me as @cmdrtaco on twitter or Rob Malda on Google+. You could also update my mail address to be malda at cmdrtaco dot net. Hit the link below if you want to read some nostalgic saccharine crap that I need to get out of my system before I sign off for the last time.

NASA Discovers 7th Closest Star 137

Posted by CmdrTaco on Wednesday August 24, 2011 @12:48PM from the practically-in-my-back-yard dept.

Thorfinn.au says "Scientists using data from NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) have discovered the coldest class of star-like bodies, with temperatures as cool as the human body. Astronomers hunted these dark orbs, termed Y dwarfs, for more than a decade without success. When viewed with a visible-light telescope, they are nearly impossible to see. WISE's infrared vision allowed the telescope to finally spot the faint glow of six Y dwarfs relatively close to our sun, within a distance of about 40 light-years. 'WISE scanned the entire sky for these and other objects, and was able to spot their feeble light with its highly sensitive infrared vision,' said Jon Morse, Astrophysics Division director at NASA Headquarters in Washington. 'They are 5,000 times brighter at the longer infrared wavelengths WISE observed from space than those observable from the ground.'"

Sports Bars Changing Channels For Video Gamers 351

Posted by CmdrTaco on Wednesday August 24, 2011 @12:00PM from the we-watch-channel-zero dept.

dtmos wrote in to say that "This summer, StarCraft II has become the newest bar room spectator sport. Fans organize so-called Barcraft events, taking over pubs and bistros from Honolulu to Florida and switching big-screen TV sets to Internet broadcasts of professional game matches. As they root for their on-screen superstars, StarCraft enthusiasts can sow confusion among regular patrons... But for sports-bar owners, StarCraft viewers represent a key new source of revenue from a demographic—self-described geeks—they hadn't attracted before."

Researchers Report Spike In Boot Time Malware 132

Posted by CmdrTaco on Wednesday August 24, 2011 @11:18AM from the can't-fight-the-fever dept.

wiredmikey writes "In their most recent intelligence report, Symantec researchers pointed out a massive increase in the amount of boot time malware striking users, noting there have already been as many new boot time malware threats detected in the first seven months of 2011 as there were in the previous three years. Also known as MBR (master boot record) threats, the malware infect an area of the hard disk that makes them one of the first things to be read and executed when a computer is turned on. This enables the threats to effectively dodge many security defenses."

MakerBot Gets $10 Million Investment 160

Posted by CmdrTaco on Wednesday August 24, 2011 @10:24AM from the thats-a-lotta-money dept.

First time accepted submitter chrisl456 writes "MakerBot Industries, makers (hah!) of 3D printers / personal fabrication devices, just got a big boost in the form of $10 million from an 'all-star lineup.' Replicators, here we come!"

Submission + - Facebook Data Collection Under Fire Again (computerworld.com)

Submitted by

JohnBert

on Wednesday August 24, 2011 @10:20AM

JohnBert writes: "A German privacy protection authority is calling on organizations there to close their Facebook fan pages and remove the social networking site's "Like" button from their websites, arguing that Facebook harvests data in violation of German and European Union law.

The Independent Centre for Privacy Protection (ULD), the privacy protection agency for the German state of Schleswig-Holstein, issued a news release on Friday saying Facebook builds a broad, individualized profile for people who view Facebook content on third-party websites.

Data is sent back to Facebook's servers in the U.S., which the agency alleges violates the German Telemedia Act, the German Federal Data Protection Act and the Data Protection Act of Schleswig-Holstein. The agency alleges the data is held by Facebook for two years, and wants website owners in the state to remove links to Facebook by the end of next month or possibly face a fine."

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