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

Submitted by CmdrTaco
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 Re:Has no one heard of Handbrake? (Score 4, Informative) 167

The "big deal" is things beyond simple video content.

  • * Vector animations, that would lose quality if they were rasterized and compressed.
  • * Interactive presentations; where rendering to a normal video and compressing it would strip out the interactive aspects.
  • * Old games; it was easy for people who were learning how to create games to get started with flash, and there is a huge corpus of games out there which represent an interesting segment of indie game development history.

Hopefully things like Shumway will provide a path forward for viewing old content in the future.

Comment Windows is approaching usability (Score 5, Interesting) 376

by Pathwalker (#52657265) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: Share Your Experiences With Windows 10

I keep a Windows laptop around, to both keep up to date with how recent updates are coming along, as well as to play old games.

Windows is approaching the point where it might be workable for day to day use.

For work purposes, I don't need much, A bunch of terminal windows, a ssh client that can handle private keys stored on a Yubikey, and a web browser.
While the terminal emulation of the Bash prompt in the Ubuntu subsystem is still very poor, I could probably manage most of what I need for work from a windows box.

For my most common hobby, I need a few more things. Good NFS performance, a working automounter, an Xserver that supports hardware accelleration, and for the OS to not intercept any function keys for its own use.

The NFS performance of Windows 10 is decent, but alas if you install autofs into the Linux subsystem, it is unable to mount files. The few attempts I've made at mounting a NFS server from inside of the Linux subsystem have all failed. It appears that all mounts need to be done from Windows itself.

There are decent Xserver options for windows, but they (along with most other programs) suffer from Windows intercepting any press of F1 and using it to pop up a useless help screen, rather than passing it to the underlying application.

As far as I can tell, any program that doesn't make the right system call to indicate that it intends to use F1, will never see those keypresses as windows will intercept them.

If the automounter was working, and if there was a way to disable Window's interception of F1, I might actually be able to use it for hobby use as well.

Until then, I mainly use it for old games, and keep any productive work on Linux, BSD, and OSX.

Congress Gives Federal Agencies Two Weeks To Tally Backdoored Juniper Kit (csoonline.com) 77

Posted by samzenpus from the get-it-fixed dept.
itwbennett writes: In an effort to gauge the impact of the recent Juniper ScreenOS backdoors on government organizations, the House of Representatives is questioning around two dozen U.S. government departments and federal agencies. The U.S. House of Representatives' Committee on Oversight and Government Reform sent letters to the agencies on Jan. 21, asking them to identify whether they used devices running the affected ScreenOS versions, to explain how they learned about the issues and whether they took any corrective actions before Juniper released patches and to specify when they applied the company's patches. The questioned organizations have until Feb. 4 to respond and deliver the appropriate documents, a very tight time frame giving that 'the time period covered by this request is from January 1, 2009 to the present.'

University of Helsinki To Lay Off a Thousand People (yle.fi) 308

Posted by samzenpus from the getting-small dept.
jones_supa writes: University of Helsinki, the place where Linus Torvalds got his degree as well, will reduce staff by 980 people, with 570 being laid off by the end of 2017. In addition, the university will reorganize and incorporate certain divisions including continuing education. Professors, teachers and researchers are criticizing the cuts, which coincide with the university's administrative and educational overhaul. The staff cuts reflect the government's drastic funding cuts to education, which plays one part in the effort of trying to help the difficult economic situation of today's Finland. The university estimates that of the 980 positions, terminations during this coming spring will account for 570 positions. Of the employees to be made redundant, 75 are teaching and research staff and 495 other staff. The rest of the cuts will be spread over the coming years.
Classic Games (Games)

Computer Beats Go Champion 149

Posted by samzenpus from the man-versus-machine dept.
Koreantoast writes: Go (weiqi), the ancient Chinese board game, has long been held up as one of the more difficult, unconquered challenges facing AI scientists... until now. Google DeepMind researchers, led by David Silver and Demis Hassabis, developed a new algorithm called AlphaGo, enabling the computer to soundly defeat European Go champion Fan Hui in back-to-back games, five to zero. Played on a 19x19 board, Go players have more than 300 possible moves per turn to consider, creating a huge number of potential scenarios and a tremendous computational challenge. All is not lost for humanity yet: DeepMind is scheduled to face off in March with Lee Sedol, considered one of the best Go players in recent history, in a match compared to the Kasparov-Deep Blue duels of previous decades.
Technology

Creator of Minecraft Develops Experimental VR Project (roadtovr.com) 63

Posted by samzenpus from the more-real-than-real dept.
An anonymous reader writes: Despite his on-again off-again relationship with VR headset maker Oculus, the creator of Minecraft, Markus "Notch" Persson, has developed an experimental virtual reality project that leverages WebVR technology to run directly within a browser using a Rift DK2 headset. Notch contributed $10,000 to Oculus' 2012 Kickstarter, and even traveled from Europe to visit the company in its early days. After Facebook's $2 billion acquisition of Oculus in 2014, his enthusiasm dwindled, saying "I definitely want to be a part of VR, but I will not work with Facebook." One month before selling his own company to Microsoft for a similar sum, he said he was "officially over being upset about Facebook buying Oculus."

DeLoreans To Go Back To Production (cnn.com) 276

Posted by samzenpus from the mr.-fusion-not-included dept.
An anonymous reader writes: The last time a DeLorean was built was about 35 years ago, but that is all about to change. Next year, you'll be able to buy a new 2017 DeLorean to satisfy all your deepest Back to the Future dreams. CNN reports: "The new production plan is itself something of a time warp. The cars will be built from an inventory of a million spare parts that have been in storage ever since the Belfast plant closed. Only the engine will be a creature of the 21st century."

The Tragedy Of Apollo 1 And The Lessons That Brought Us To The Moon (forbes.com) 118

Posted by samzenpus from the lessons-learned dept.
An anonymous reader writes: On January 27, 1967, the Apollo 1 crew was performing a "plugs-out" test of the Command/Service Module, an essential simulation of how the three-person capsule would perform under in-space conditions under its own power. At 6:30 PM, a voltage spike occurred, leading to a disaster. In 26 seconds, everything changed. The Apollo 1 fire and the tragic death of all three astronauts wasn't due to just a single point-of-failure, but rather due to five independent confounding factors that if any one of them had been different, the astronauts Grissom, White and Chaffee might have survived. As it stands, all the crewed Apollo missions were scrapped for 20 months while NASA changed how they did business. The changes worked remarkably well, and 2.5 years later, humans walked on the Moon.

Submission + - DeLoreans to go back to production (cnn.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The last time a DeLorean was built was about 35 years ago, but that is all about to change. Next year, you'll be able to buy a new 2017 DeLorean to satisfy all your deepest Back to the Future dreams. CNN reports: "The new production plan is itself something of a time warp. The cars will be built from an inventory of a million spare parts that have been in storage ever since the Belfast plant closed. Only the engine will be a creature of the 21st century."
Facebook

Top Telcos Join Facebook Open Source Hardware Project (thestack.com) 18

Posted by samzenpus from the joining-the-club dept.
An anonymous reader sends word about the latest telcos to join Facebook's Open Compute Project. The Stack reports: "A new wave of communications companies has joined Facebook's non-profit Open Compute Project (OCP), including AT&T, Verizon, Deutsche Telekom and South Korea's SK Telecom, as the movement seeks to share innovative hardware designs and drive down costs in the telecom arena. An OCP sub-section focused entirely on telecom requirements has been set up to look into servers and networking efficiency in the field. As one of the largest hardware buyers, telcos will provide a significant new market for the project, alongside its successful data center efforts.
Android

Android Ransomware Threatens To Share Your Browsing History With Your Friends (symantec.com) 160

Posted by samzenpus from the some-things-are-better-left-private dept.
An anonymous reader writes: The newly discovered Lockdroid ransomware is unique in two ways. First it uses perfectly overlaid popups to trick users into giving it admin privileges. This trick works on devices running Android versions prior to 5.0 (Lollipop), which means 67% of all Android smartphones. Secondly, after it encrypts files and asks for a ransom, it also steals the user's browsing history and contacts list, and blackmails the user to pay the ransom, or his browsing history will be forwarded to his contacts.

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