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Classic Games (Games)

M.U.L.E. Is Back 110

jmp_nyc writes "The developers at Turborilla have remade the 1983 classic game M.U.L.E. The game is free, and has slightly updated graphics, but more or less the same gameplay as the original version. As with the original game, up to four players can play against each other (or fewer than four with AI players taking the other spots). Unlike the original version, the four players can play against each other online. For those of you not familiar with M.U.L.E., it was one of the earliest economic simulation games, revolving around the colonization of the fictitious planet Irata (Atari spelled backwards). I have fond memories of spending what seemed like days at a time playing the game, as it's quite addictive, with the gameplay seeming simpler than it turns out to be. I'm sure I'm not the only Slashdotter who had a nasty M.U.L.E. addiction back in the day and would like a dose of nostalgia every now and then."
Robotics

Ants Used For Mind-Controlled Robotic Limbs 82

mr sanjeev writes "Australian researchers are reducing the divide between science fiction and science reality by bringing the development of mind-controlled robotic limbs a few steps closer. Even the most fertile science fiction imagination might not see a link between the behavior of ant colonies and the development of lifelike robotic limbs, but that is the straightforward mathematical reality of research underway at the University of Technology, Sydney. The technology mimics the myoelectric signals used by the central nervous system (CNS) to control muscle activity. Artificial intelligence researchers have long used the complex interactions between ants to construct a pattern recognition formula to identify bioelectric signals. PhD student Rami Khushaba said 'swarm-intelligence' allows scientists to understand the body's electrical signals and use the knowledge to create a robotic prosthetic device that can be operated by human thought."
Privacy

Real Name For Open Source Development? 262

An anonymous reader writes "Do you contribute to open source projects under your real name or a nickname? The openness of open source can be encouraging, but software patents you have never heard of can become a nightmare if a patent troll sues for implementing 'their' scroll bar. A real name also means you end up in the big index we call search engines. An assumed name could be an additional layer of protection, but what are its pros and cons and is it worth the hassle when asked to participate in a meatspace meeting?"

Comment Re:My advice (Score 0) 176

Don't use FLAK or some other monkey sound formats. Go with a real standard, like Windows Lossless, or Apple Lossless, they just sound sooo much better.
eh? You do understand what lossless means, right? What nonsense.

One other thing to bear in mind, is that CDs often contain more audio data than just what is marked as a track in the table of contents. Some of which can turn out to be hidden tracks:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hidden_track

You will miss these, if you just rip the individual tracks. For a complete archive of everything that a CD contains, you probably want to use something like abcde (command-line front-end CD archiving tool) to get cdparanoia to rip the entire audio stream off the CD, then store it as FLAC with an embedded cue sheet containing the original table of contents and CDDB disc-id ... You can also embed cover graphics as well.

This process is the only sensible way to ensure you've archived absolutely everything off the CD. That said, support for playing direct from FLACs with embedded cue sheets isn't as widespread as general FLAC support, so it's best to transcode to a more portable format for actually playing ...

As someone else already mentioned, the hydrogenaudio forums are the best place for this sort of discussion.

Sam.

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