mugs_oh - Slashdot User

Child Receives Trachea Grown From Own Stem Cells 103

Posted by samzenpus on Wednesday March 24, 2010 @07:29PM from the just-add-oxygen dept.

kkleiner writes "Doctors at the Great Ormond Street Hospital (GOSH) along with colleagues at the University College London, the Royal Free Hospital, and Careggi University Hospital in Florence have successfully transplanted a trachea into a 10 year old boy using his own stem cells. A donor trachea was taken, stripped of its cells into a collagen-like scaffold, and then infused with the boy's stem cells. The trachea was surgically placed into the boy and allowed to develop in place. Because his own cells were used, there was little to no risk of rejection. This was the first time a child had received such a stem cell augmented transplant and the first time that a complete trachea had been used."

Comment Re:Classes? Who needs em! (Score 1) 209

by mugs_oh on Tuesday August 18, 2009 @02:12PM (#29108883) Attached to: The Challenges of Class Balance In MMOGs

The problem is you are assuming Builds A, B, and C all have the same skill point cost AND what the defensive strengths and weaknesses there are with those builds. Build B is clearly the choice, unless they take damage at 3x the rate of build A or cost 3x the skill points. If you devote so much skill to a high damage skill, you rob your defensive ability. Balance then becomes a system of balancing the costs of different advantages. That makes balancing easier overall than trying to balance entire sets of skills over the course of an entire range of levels.

Jumpgate Evolution Dev Talks Class Balance 86

Posted by Soulskill on Friday July 31, 2009 @06:39AM from the check-out-my-+1-laser dept.

Hermann Peterscheck recently made a post on the Jumpgate Evolution developer blog about NetDevil's strategy for balancing the various classes of ships in the game. They seem to be taking a different approach from most MMOs in letting the PvP side of the gameplay set the baseline, rather than allowing PvE concerns to override that. From the section titled Combating Combat: "Early on our lead systems designer, Jay Ambrosini, came to the correct conclusion that all of the preliminary balancing was best done in a PvP context. The reasoning is that in PvE, the player needs to feel powerful, but in PvP the fight needs to feel balanced. Once ship classes are balanced in PvP, its not as hard to make the player feel powerful in PvE, but the opposite is not true. We spent many weeks playing just the first class of ship, the light fighter, in teams of 5 or 6 in order to evaluate what it was that made those ships fun to fly and fight. After daily battles, you begin to see what makes those ships work. We also started with the mid level ships as opposed to the low or high level ships. This is primarily because you can find the center point and then work upwards and downwards from there. ... It's very tempting to just throw a bunch of classes of ships together in order to say things like "our game has 15 classes of ships!" but this, we believe, is the wrong direction. People want meaningful and strong choices and not lots of meaningless, empty choices. Currently we plan to have 4-6 classes, but they will each have nearly endless possible configurations within those groups."

Comment No way this is true (Score 1) 257

by mugs_oh on Wednesday January 16, 2008 @07:17PM (#22073142) Attached to: 10-year-old Microsoft Ticket Resurfaces?

First off, Windows 95 support ceased on Dec 31, 2001. I'm sure they cleared all open issues at that time. Support could still be obtained through third parties that had done the support for MS, but it was fee based and not affiliated with MS any longer. Secondly, the software MS was using at that time (CITS and Compass) had no scheduling feature. I worked for MS support in 1998, so I know the procedure and practices of the time. This was likely either a wrong number, a satisfaction survey on his most recent call, or a complete fabrication.

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