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Domain: blueyonder.co.uk
Stories and comments across the archive that link to blueyonder.co.uk.
Stories · 18
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Gizmondo Europe To Be Liquidated
20Pfhor7 writes "The English High Court has ordered Gizmondo Europe to be liquidated, according to The Register. Looks like parent company Tiger Telematics' funding plans haven't gone according as they'd hoped, and it may have to sell off its Gizmondo USA operation." From the article: "Tiger said it was considering its own future in the light of the High Court verdict, and of the liquidation of its game studios in Sweden and Manchester, England. For starters, it's now able to eliminate $72m of the $90m liabilities recorded on its balance sheet as of 30 September 2005. It said it was pondering the sale of the whole company, parts of it, or elements of the intellectual property it owns, 'including patents and game rights, and continuing operations in the USA'." -
Spam Blacklist Targets Hijacked Telewest Customers
davidmcg writes "BBC.co.uk reports that UK cable firm Telewest has had almost one million email address blacklisted by an anti-spam firm. The Spam Prevention Early Warning System blacklisted the email addresses because a large number of the machines using them have been hijacked by spammers. Telewest have stated that they knew about the problem and have been working with customers to regain control of their machines." -
Grokking Knoppix
chronicon writes "Knowing Knoppix is a beginner-friendly, 134 page freely downloadable book (released under the GNU Free Documentation License in PDF format) designed to familiarize new users with the Knoppix LiveCD distribution, GNU/Linux in general, and (as listed first on the description) Windows disaster recovery using Knoppix." -
The Wireless Backpack Repeater
Andy Laurence writes "So, you've decided to do a webcast around the streets of Bristol, but your puny wireless NIC isn't up to it? You need the ultimate wireless repeater! Built from an old backpack, a lead acid battery, a Linksys wireless device, and a rather scary antenna, this wireless repeater will get you webcasting from over a mile away." You'd definitely burn extra calories hiking with that thing. -
Simple Database Interfaces for Unix?
Siddly asks: "OK, I've used databases in DOS, like dBase2, dBase3 and others. None of those mentioned needing a knowledge of database theory, they allowed you to layout and manipulate data quite easily. In Linux, we have MySQL, Postgres, SQLite, and more. None of these are intuitive, even the GUI's aren't very helpful to any casual or very occasional user, who just wants to create a simple database and forget it until something significant needs to be added, deleted or amended. I obviously don't posses the skills or time to undertake writing such an animal. Does anyone else suffer this frustration? Has anyone managed to get something like dBase3 working under dosemu?" The problem isn't necessarily the underlying RBDMS, but the interface presented to the user. Are there front-ends for the various Unix database offerings that simplify database concepts to the level of what a dBase3 user would feel comfortable with? -
Half-Life 2 Mod Creation FAQ Released
blue2k writes "The VERC website has released a new official FAQ containing plenty of new information pertaining to the forthcoming, eagerly awaited Half-Life 2 SDK, and development with the Source engine." The FAQ answers such questions as how to get lip-syncing working in your mod ("To start with, you'll need to author keyshapes, or morph targets for each of your characters. Our facial animation system uses 34 keyshapes, 14 of which are required for proper lip-sync animation."), and co-operative gameplay in Half-Life 2 ("..we aren't doing a co-operative mode, but the mod community.. [particularly] Sven Co-op has expressed great interest in this.") -
Minimum Seek Hard Disk Drivers for Unix?
Jonathan Andrews asks: "I remember back in the old days reading about a filesystem/device driver that had alomost no seeks of the physical disk. It worked by scanning the heads of the disk from track 0 to the end then back again in a constant motion. Disk reads and writes where cached so that they got written to disk only when the heads where on that part of the platter. My question is simple, now that disks are IDE, have lots of heads and even worse differing Heads/Cylander/Sector translation scemes is this type of system even possible? Would you have to fight the disk cache on the drive? I seem to recall it giving real throughput advantages, if the cache was large enough to hold 'one sweep times worth of data' then the cache almost never blocked and disk writes/reads sustained at the max throughput all the time. Best of all it gets rid of that blased seeking, chewing, seeking noise!" -
LOTR: The Two Towers
Let's try to mash all the LOTR submissions into one. Reviews: comingsoon.net, Empire Online (UK), CNN, Slate, Salon. The LA Times has a story about animating Gollum which we can't link to because it requires registration. Lord Satri writes "Ents, elves and mages being on every orc's lips, new versions of Tales Of Middle-Earth are available. It is an open source, one player and online multiplayer game. It is ported to many OS's. Yeah, no terrific graphics, but the game is really worthwhile. It is based on the famous roguelike Angband (variants here). Faithful to Tolkien's writings." -
Escher Paintings with Lego Bricks
sciuro writes "a couple of guys (A Lipton & D Shiu) have built three of M C Escher's 3D-distorting paintings using Lego bricks (and some carefully chosen camera angles). Balcony, Belvedere & Ascending and Descending are all down at the bottom of the page. Nice!" Some other pretty pieces as well. -
Mathematical Lego Sculptures
Daedalus_ writes "Some guy has created mathematical surfaces (mobius strips, klein bottles, etc) out of Legos. He also has some other interesting creations (such as Dilbert figurines and a Hoberman Sphere)." -
Mathematical Lego Sculptures
Daedalus_ writes "Some guy has created mathematical surfaces (mobius strips, klein bottles, etc) out of Legos. He also has some other interesting creations (such as Dilbert figurines and a Hoberman Sphere)." -
Transmeta Meets Blades
The Griller writes "Gordon Bell, one of the creators of VAX, and Linus Torvalds were at the launch of a new supercomputing platform at the Los Alamos National Laboratory. Based on Crusoe processors from Transmeta and running a version of linux, it is aimed at being cheaper than conventional supercomputers by requiring no cooling and lower maintenance. " Basically, it's blade clustering, using Beowulf. -
Apache 2.0 vs. IIS
TonyG writes: "According to an item on InternetNews, the impending release of Apache 2.0 could very well mean the demise of IIS. Interestingly, the article asserts that Microsoft have already given up on IIS, the proof being its absence in XP Home and its non-standard presence in XP Pro. Apache.Net? Sounds catchy..." That's a silly argument by the internetnews.com writer - IIS isn't in the Home edition because Microsoft wants to charge more for "server" operating systems, not because they're "admitting defeat". But it's a decent look at the upcoming Apache 2.0. -
OroborOSX: XDarwin Aqua-Like Window Manager
UnanimousCoward writes: "I've just downloaded OroborOSX, "A modified Oroborus-based X11 window manager for use with XFree86 and XDarwin on Mac OS X." It's truly a wm worthy of standing side-by-side with Aqua in rootless mode. Here are some screenshots from Jonathan Tyzack (I'm too lazy to create my own, but my experience is the same). Using MacGimp under OroborOSX is awesome ..." The original Oroborus looks interesting as well; the original author has discontinued work on Oroborus, but it looks like the code has found a nice new application. -
OroborOSX: XDarwin Aqua-Like Window Manager
UnanimousCoward writes: "I've just downloaded OroborOSX, "A modified Oroborus-based X11 window manager for use with XFree86 and XDarwin on Mac OS X." It's truly a wm worthy of standing side-by-side with Aqua in rootless mode. Here are some screenshots from Jonathan Tyzack (I'm too lazy to create my own, but my experience is the same). Using MacGimp under OroborOSX is awesome ..." The original Oroborus looks interesting as well; the original author has discontinued work on Oroborus, but it looks like the code has found a nice new application. -
Oracle JDeveloper Beta Available for Linux
smugskii writes: "Oracle is releasing JDeveloper 9i on Linux - its Java/XML/JSP authoring tool. The Oracle database is nothing new on Linux, but this is the first time (to my knowledge) that Oracle is supporting development tools running on a non-Windows OS. Oracle are well known for the RDBMS, but somehow get overlooked for their other tools and technologies. If only they'd port Oracle Designer (good modelling tool) I'd be able finally remove the dual boot from my workstation.
Check out the Beta release at Oracle Technet , though may need to register for a free account before downloading." -
Optical Fiber Capacity Growth
kastaverious writes: "I found this on Scientific American. It talks about developments in all optical switching and the growth in capacity of optical fiber. The article has some interesting graphs of bandwidth demand and the growth in bandwidth availabilty. There is also a good explanation of some of the technical issues involved in increasing switching capacity, and efforts underway to overcome these problems." The article also has lots of good SciAm-style graphics. This short article at Janes also sheds some light on the world on undersea cable laying, which also recalls the article Neal Stephenson wrote for Wired a few years ago. -
The Continuing Rise Of Amiga
Mike Bouma writes: "Already well over 15,000 developers have bought the Amiga SDK 1.0 and soon there will be an update available (3D, Sound, GUI and performance improvements). It will be downloadable freely for 1.0 buyers and a Windows equivalent will be available. There is an enormous amount of activity going on within the Amiga community, for example only yesterday Hyperion Software acquired the rights for a Europa Universalis port. While Hyperion Software already had an incredible lineup of games licenses for the Amiga (Majesty, Soldier of Fortune, Sin, Heretic II, Shogo: Mobile Armor Division, Freespace: The Great War, Worms: Armageddon), Linux (Majesty, Sin, Shogo) and Mac (Shogo, Soldier of Fortune). Read this interesting interview with Thomas Frieden to know more about them. They are also working together with Titan Software to port various titles like Alien Nations as Titan has the Amiga and Mac porting rights.(Also their Exodus: the Last War *finally a Napalm beater?* and Evils Doom are great new games) Meanwhile many other companies are investing a lot of effort to support alternative OSes and especially the Next Generation Amiga Digital Environment. Some examples are Epic Interactive and PaganGames (Earth 2140, Scavengers, Magick, Simon The Sorcerer 2, Dafel: Bloodline, etc., for both Amiga/Mac and Foundations series), Crystal Interactive (Gilbert Goodmate, Bubble Heroes, Dark Millennia, Dweebs, Gorky17), Digital Dreams Entertainment (Hell Squad, Wasted Dreams series, Diablo's Land), Blittersoft (Wipeout 2097 for Amiga/Mac, Payback, Homeland, etc.) and many many other small and unannounced companies developing for the new Amiga. Some interesting Amiga SDK information and some open sourced games and utilities for the Amiga SDK can be downloaded here."