Slashdot Mirror

eToyChest takes a look back at five gaming magazines worth subscribing to. Tellingly, four out of five are no longer published. From the article: "What can be said about Next Generation Magazine that would truly do it justice? In its seven-year run starting in 1995, Next Generation virtually defined what good game journalism should be in the U.S. Interviews with prominent industry figures, even those unrelated to game-making such as Henry Jenkins of M.I.T. and Senator Joseph Lieberman were erudite and informative. Imagine what fun they would have had with Jack Thompson." As I've said before, Futurenet's Edge is my personal favorite print magazine. What is yours?

mikesd81 writes "AOL may give away more services including its AOL.com accounts reserved for paying customers. They have a proposal under consideration which calls for Time Warner's online unit to stop charging subscription fees to users who have high-speed Internet access or even dial-up service from a rival provider. Under the plan the company would continue to charge the fees for those needing dial-up access through AOL. The AOL software also would allow subscribers to continue using instant messaging, Web journals and other services without having to download separate software or figure out Web-based options. That would ease the transition and encourage them to keep using AOL services, the person familiar with the matter said."

Rob writes to mention a CBR article on Judge Wells' assessment that SCO just hasn't made its case against IBM in the well-known and long-lasting legal battle. The magistrate called the lack of evidence inexcusable. She further likened their claims to a shoplifter being handed a catalog for a store after being stopped, and being told 'what you took is in there somewhere, figure it out.' From the article: "In the view of the court it is almost like SCO sought to hide its case until the ninth inning in hopes of gaining an unfair advantage despite being repeatedly told to put 'all the evidence... on the table' ... given SCO's own public statements... it would appear that SCO had more than enough evidence to comply with the court's orders." Groklaw has coverage of the decision, and the complete text from the judge. Update: 06/30 15:14 GMT by Z : This story bears more than a passing resemblance to this one from Wednesday. Sorry about that.

gbulmash asks: "Recently, I began working on a graphics project and wanted to use ImageMagick. As a PHP coder, I figured I'd use MagickWand for PHP. But after some investigation, I decided that an alpha at 0.1.8 with sparse documentation just wasn't going to be good enough for production use. I decided that PerlMagick would be a much better API, but I didn't want to code the whole project in Perl. In the end, I found a cool package for embedding Perl code in PHP scripts (with an article on its use) and it went to a 1.0.0 release, earlier this year. I think I've found my answer, but before I make a final decision and go ahead with it, I thought I'd ask the knowledgeable Slashdot crowd: Is there a better way of interfacing Perl with PHP so you can get the best of both worlds?" So you've got Perl in your PHP, is there a way to do PHP in your Perl?

happylucky writes "There are many obstacles to creating a space colony on the moon, primarily food, water, and oxygen. Since it is so expensive to bring supplies from the earth, some scientists have suggested that we mine the moon. In an article in the Toronto Star, Dale Boucher suggests the best way to do this would be to develop a mining colony. To that end, the Sudbury-based Northern Center for Advanced Technology has linked Canada's mining industry with some of the top minds on space.Mining the moon was considered earlier this month at the Planetary and Terrestrial Mining Sciences Symposium which attracted some 100 delegates, including experts from the Canadian Space Agency, NASA and the European Space Agency. There are other hurdles of course that need to be figured out. The moon's gravity is one sixth that on Earth. New research, however, may lead to a solution to this problem as well. It may be possible to develop a sticky compound that can be adjusted by UV light to help adhere boots and objects to the floor."

GhettoPeanut asks: "Trends are constantly changing, upgrading, or become popular due to high end user demand or just basic usefulness. I do my best to keep up with the trends, believing that for the most part they will be better then the current methods in place, or just comfort in knowing that if enough people use it, that there will be allot of help out there. Ultimately though, its keeping up with these trends and trying to figure out what's a fad versus what's actually useful that's the difficult part. What do some of you do to keep up with the trends? Websites? Magazines such as Dr. Dobbs? Forums? I know there's not one solve all, but for the sake of argument, suppose you wanted to stay on the forefront of Java based web development, what would you do?"

Ars Technica has an interview up with Matt Lee, a software developer in Microsoft's Xbox division. He's got a lot to say on the subject of the future of MGS gaming. He touches briefly on Xbox Live, Games for Windows, and the powerhouse that is the 360. From the article: "The tessellator in the Xbox 360 GPU is indeed a very powerful piece of hardware, and you're right--most games have yet to take advantage of this. I think you'll see more titles use it in the future. As for procedurally generated worlds, I believe the biggest obstacle to overcome is how to design and build the content for such a system--it can be quite a departure from today's art pipelines. Game studios will figure it out though--it's crucial to generating and delivering ever larger worlds without having to exponentially grow the size of the art team."

SJasperson writes "A few weeks ago Mini-Microsoft decided to stop tweaking his corporate masters, having won the astounding victory of getting free towels returned to the locker rooms in Redmond. Now uber-blogger Scoble is moving on to work with a podcasting startup, having apparently tired of his supposed role as Vista evangelist and self-appointed corporate revolutionary. The company still has 3,000 bloggers left, but Microsoft has apparently figured out how to keep them safely within the rules, blogging about the wonders of product renaming and coming features instead of anything that might challenge the party line. There's a lesson here for those starry-eyed adolescents who think the power of the blog is going to triumph over the power of the boardroom."

capt turnpike writes "The One Laptop per Child association and its chairman, MIT Media Labs's Nicholas Negroponte, unvelied a working model of their $100 laptop at the Massachusetts Innovation and Technology Exchange (MITX) show, and the little laptop that might was a hit. It's got a version of Fedora Linux, is rugged, and each unit will work as part of a wireless mesh automatically. From the article: "However, as Negroponte put it in his address, One Laptop per Child isn't all about the laptops. The main goal is to tap into the ability of every child to toss away a manual and figure out how to make gadgets work on their own, thus helping children help themselves to learn." eWEEK.com also has photos."

hdtv writes "The New York Times is reporting that Palo Alto-based Illumio will soon try to figure out the experts among your social network with a new online service." From the article: "Illumio is not a search engine, like Google or Yahoo. The system works by transparently distributing a request for information on questions like "Who knows John Smith?" and "Are Nikon digital cameras better than Olympus?" to the computers in a network of users. The questions can then be answered locally based on a novel reverse auction system that Illumio uses to determine who the experts are."

Arcidius asks: "It's been a year and still nobody seems to have a real solution for getting USB devices to work under Windows XP in an Novell environment. If you're running Windows XP and Novell servers (NetWare 6 for us), Windows XP will show all drives available, even though usually many are have been drive mapped. When you plug in an external hard drive or USB device, Windows maps it to the first free drive letter, usually F:, but since Novell has mapped it already, you can't access the drive. The fix so far has been to manually remap the memory key to a free letter, such as B:, and this has to be done on every machine. Either that, or switch your first mapped drive, which is more of a problem in most environments. Since Novell can't figure out a solution, (and Microsoft obviously doesn't care), I throw it to Slashdot. Does anyone have a real, network wide solution?"

Thanks to the 'E3 at Home' initiative, Xbox Live has served up 24 million pieces of content, and connected 1.5 million gamers. From the article: "Over 600 terabytes of data were transferred over the network during the week, a figure which represents 30 times more data than is found in all the printed material in the US Library of Congress, according to Microsoft games boss Peter Moore, who thankfully did not go on to provide the standard British comparison of telling us how many double decker buses it equates to."

Carl Bialik from WSJ writes "Many companies are teaching programmers to write safer code and test their security as software is built, not afterward, the Wall Street Journal reports. This stands in contrast to an earlier ethos to rush to beat rivals with new software, and, of course, brings tradeoffs: 'Revamping the software-development process creates a Catch 22: being more careful can mean missing deadlines.' The WSJ focuses on RIM and Herb Little, its security director, who 'uses Coverity every night to scan the code turned in by engineers. The tool sends Mr. Little an email listing potential red flags. He figures out which problems are real and tracks down each offending programmer, who has to fix the flaw before moving on. Mr. Little has also ramped up security training and requires programmers to double-check each others' code more regularly.'"

Next Generation is running two pieces today about Sony's upcoming console. In 'Console War a Side Quest for Sony?', they examine an analyst report suggesting that the company is more interested in winning the movie format war than in taking the lead on this generation of consoles. They also have a piece wherein some industry figures weigh in on the PS3. From that article: "The impact will be enormous. Digital distribution will allow for new ways to generate excitement for these games - from being able to purchase new game packs that extend the life of gameplay and purchasing cool new items that make your character and experience unique, to the emphasis the consoles will showcase linear programming much like an iPod or OnDemand service does. With something like Steam, the entire console channel is avoided, and suddenly the game developer is selling directly to a consumer. "

Vitaly Friedman writes "Entrepreneur Mark Cuban doesn't believe that traditional television advertising is dead, it simply needs to be more interesting. And what's more interesting than being live? From the article: 'It's no secret that the traditional 30-second spot has been losing much of its luster with advertisers. With the rise of other media options (videogames, home theater systems, Web surfing) on the one hand and the recent growth of DVRs like TiVo on the other, traditional television advertising has been feeling the squeeze. Broadcasting executives are struggling to figure out the economics of the new digital landscape, and have been willing to try just about any creative idea, such as TiVo's plan to replace old commercials with new ones when watching recorded shows.'"

Clive Thompson, over at Wired, takes a look at the appeal of playing as Lara Croft ... and doesn't focus on her physical assets. From the article: "The Final Girl theory emerged in 1985, when Carol Clover -- a medievalist and feminist film critic -- was dared by a friend to see The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Back then, most feminist theorists loathed slasher films, and regarded them as classic examples of male misogyny. It wasn't hard to figure out why: Thousands of young men were trooping into theaters to cheer wildly as masked psychos hacked apart screaming young women. That really didn't look good. But as Clover sat in the theaters, she noticed something curious. Sure, the young men would laugh and cheer as the villain hunted down his female prey. But eventually the movie would whittle down the victims to one last terrified woman -- the Final Girl, as Clover called her. Suddenly, the young men in the audience would switch their allegiance -- and begin cheering just as madly for the Final Girl as she attacked and killed the psycho."

An anonymous reader writes "Thanks to an odd glitch in the game that prevents him from completing the Knights of the White Stallion quest, Shawn has figured out how to keep himself a mighty fine Orc wife, Mazoga. Once she went on adventures with him. Now she lives in his house in Tamriel, and he can't get her to leave. He visits her when he's in the city, tired after his days of adventuring. He's thinking about buying her a kitchen set. Maybe a living room. Hands down, it's the best Oblivion glitch to date."

holy_calamity writes "Dutch researchers have figured out a way to measure the mood swings of the blogosphere. It can pick up peaks of flirtiness from bloggers around Valentine's Day and drunkenness at weekends, the plan is to create a search engine that returns the prevailing mood in the blogosphere about a topic. Companies are already interested in using it to track consumer confidence. What's the mood of Slashdot on this one?"

Variety has a piece detailing some new hires at G4, all designed to further move the channel away from its technology roots. From the article: "One of Finn's priorities will be to scout people to profile when 'Icons' relaunches this summer. The 'Biography'-style skeinskein has been revamped to focus on figures that appeal to young men, including J.J. Abrams and Bryan SingerBryan Singer. She'll also continue to strengthen the lineup of guests visiting G4's live, studio-based series. In addition, both 'Filter' and 'Attack of the Show' will be relaunched in June with a scaled-back focus on technology. Heavier emphasis will be on attitude, humor and a broader range of male-oriented topics."

kukyfrope writes to mention a GameDailyBiz article speculating on the edge HD-DVD will have on Blu-ray in the near future. From the article: "Although Toshiba may take round one, in the long run 'complicating factors may shift the balance.' ABI predicts that by the end of 2006, only about 30 percent of the global hi-def movie player market will be controlled by Blu-ray, but that could quickly change as Sony launches its PlayStation 3 (which has a Blu-ray drive) worldwide this November. '...its large expected sales figures could change the market dominance picture dramatically,' notes ABI."