VMware (http://www.vmware.com) is a company specialized in virtualization technology, providing software to run an operating system (guest) inside another (host). A few months ago VMware released VMware Player, a free virtual machine player which you can use to run prebuilt virtual OSs.
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A funny article about gadgets from the 70's & 80's compared to gadgets of today. Amazing that you can fit 25 000 5 1/4 diskettes on one 8GB compact flash...! And the phone then...11.5 pounds...! Hehe
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The article is about the true history of the fisher space pen. The article disposes the old myth that NASA spent one billion on the space pen, while the Russians just took a pencil to space.
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This site details ways to achieve native NTFS write support on your Linux box using the ntfsmount tool and the ntfs-fuse user-space filesystem driver. These tools have yielded very promising success rates in writing to NTFS volumes with 0% corruption. Packages are available for most distros including Ubuntu, Debian, Red Hat and Arch.
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Read MoreTold ya (see my previous post). Everyone starts piling on now.
Here's today's press release from Leland Yee's office, without further comment from me (for now):
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Yee Calls on Video Game Maker, Ratings Board to Stop Deceiving Parents
Another Take Two Interactive Game Found to Have Graphic Hidden Content
SACRAMENTO -- Assembly Speaker pro Tem Leland Yee (D-San Francisco/Daly City), child psychologist and legislator who authored California’s law to prohibit the sale of extremely violent video games to minors, today blasted the video game ratings board and publishers of the best-selling video game Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, for once again deceiving the public about a game's content.....
Aston Martin has unveiled the new DBS which will be driven by James Bond, the legendary British secret agent, in the next 007 film, "CASINO ROYALE", to be produced by Michael G Wilson and Barbara Broccoli for EON Productions.
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Earlier today, the Entertainment Software Ratings Board announced that it had re-rated The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion for the PC and Xbox 360 as M for Mature.
Bethesda has now responded to the situation...
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Vivendi Games to bring the brilliant PC FPS to the Xbox 360 in autumn 2006. F.E.A.R. hit the PC late in 2005 and received acclaim for its incredible combat and lifelike AI. Now Xbox 360 owners can see what made the game so impressive, as Day 1 Studios and Monolith are brining the game to the Microsoft console.
Microsoft Corp. has released in beta this week its Windows Live Shopping site, but Firefox users will have to switch to Internet Explorer if they want to look for bargains.
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Many have questioned why the RIAA gets to request $750 to $30,000 per song fines against those they've charged with offering up unauthorized songs on file sharing networks.
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Devicescape Software, a company with a history of developing Wi-Fi software for embedded devices, has released its Linux wireless LAN driver software to open-source developers. The move may ultimately see native Wi-Fi capabilities integrated into the Linux kernel for the first time.
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The new federal study found that "there is no longer a discrepancy in the rate of global average temperature increase for the surface compared with higher levels in the atmosphere," in the words of a news release issued by the Commerce Department and approved by the White House.
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Broadband providers and Internet phone companies will have to pick up the tab for the cost of building in mandatory wiretap access for police surveillance. Guess who's going to foot the bill in the end.
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Dell charges $49 to remove their OWN spyware
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There is virtually nothing exciting that is coming out of Microsoft. Sure, they will keep making money, but all of its attempts to enter other markets have failed. Vista and the new Office keep getting delayed and scaled back. Now the company is focusing all its energy on trying to attack Google.
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Xbox.com is back and now you can send msgs to people on your Xbox Live friends list directly from the Xbox.com website!
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Software companies and their shill groups have been spreading around reports on the "cost" of piracy, which are made bogus by their assumption that every pirated copy of software equates to a lost sale, which simply isn't the case. Now, the MPAA has joined the fun
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ESRB uses the pimp hand and smacks Oblivion with an M rating. Games being pulled from shelves, and GameDaily just received word from the IEMA... another Hot Coffee?
ESRB quote from the article: "Since players create [mods], it is impossible for ESRB or any rating service to consider them in assigning a rating."
Funny how that's EXACTLY WHAT THEY JUST DID.
And in other news, The Sims rating was upgraded to M due to a "mod" that removes the blur over characters when they use the facilities or the shower....
Honestly, it is stuff like this that undermines the entire ratings system for games... You can't rate a game based on how users might be able to modify it... If so, pretty much any game would have to get a rating of M or AO.
"'Parents across the country depend on ESRB ratings every day to make sensible choices about the games they bring home for their families,' said ESRB president Patricia Vance"
That's why Oblivion, with many times over multiple murder and assassination scenes, was perfectly OK, but with the vague chance of OMG OMG OMG female... wait for it... breasts... OMG *if* the game is hacked OMG OMG is now something the ESRB must notify parents of so they can make (cough) "sensible" choices...
Patricia Vance, and everything her ESRB organization stands for, is moronic. On a good day.
But you know what? My America deserves this. My country is so sick and lost with regard to sexuality that only the Muslims really manage to make us look progressive.
....i mean I'm a Jehovah's witness, but nothing like this bothers me at all.. a bit of virtual boobies does no harm... and i loved the dark brotherhood bit of oblivion, (the bit near the end under the light house was kinda sick with guts n flesh n flies everywhere) the bit where you get locked in the house with them 7 or so people and have to kill them all off individually without the others knowing.. that was awesomely fun lol.. iv also put in over a thousand hours on GTA 3, VC, SA and LCS... and I'm a firm believer in god and read the bible so... were not all like that at all... just the priests who touch little boys and America's higher ups in the government, thems the nutheads
Thank god this was caught in time before any impressionable teenagers were able to see *gasp* boobies.
I'm pretty sure virtually any teen can see pictures of REAL boobs anytime they want, nowadays. In my day, we had to bury stolen Playboys by the stump in the field.
*sigh* Anyway, when is this kinda overreaction gonna stop?
nudity != pr0n
What gets me most is that they're quite happy to rate games with lots of killing and maiming for younger audiences, but as soon as you include a sideboob and the outline of a cock it's rated adults only
"When did sex become a bad thing? I'd rather my children watched two people making love than killing each other" (or something to that effect)
Bill Hicks
What is different is that in the Hot Coffee mod there was an *entire mini game included* including button sequences for position changes and such. In the case of Oblivion there is a texture that represents boobies..... in other words the same texture as the men except some dark pixels in one place for shading and a cluster of dark pixels in another for a nipple. That texture is used for nothing in the game except to provide shape to what lays over it, just like they do when real people are fully clothed. No where in the actual game is the texture ever used alone. The change for gore is asinine and the change for the booby mod is asinine, plain and simple.
Think of it this way: REAL PEOPLE have boobies under their clothes, just like the characters in the game. The game only provides a way to see it if you modify it, JUST LIKE REAL PEOPLE. The ESRB is essentially saying that in a game it isn't ok for characters *IN A FREAKING GAME* to have non visible boobs under their clothes... I mean *come one*! This whole thing just drives me nuts.
I still don't get why seeing the human body is wrong...
Why do they hide the content? Because the devs, naughty monkeys that they are, put junk in the game late on the 49th straight day of midnight coding, purely for their own personal amusement, and they disable it just before mastering because it's easier than removing it entirely. In this case, having a "nude" skin texture can actually help the artists in developing clothed textures, getting the shading done right, folds and such.
Remember, kids, you can shank that dark elf whore until she bleeds on the pavement, but just don't ogle her titties.
Massachusetts Tuesday called on popular teen social networking Web site MySpace.com to strengthen protection of children against sexual predators, including raising the minimum age for users to 18 from 14.
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First booth babes now this! Naughty America: The Game an MMO will not be allowed to participate in the gaming industry's largest tradeshow, the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3), due to what was described as "adult content".
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Linux Kernel 2.6.16.13 has been released. This release contains a single fix which might be important to some of you for an infinite loop in "NETFILTER: SCTP conntrack".
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The list of serious unpatched vulnerabilities in Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser keeps getting longer and longer.
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Since the day after Microsoft terminated the Ultimate TV box, in February 2002, Baker has been working on the Xbox 360 silicon architecture team at Microsoft's campus in Mountain View, Calif. He is one of the 3DO survivors who now gets a shot at revenge against the Japanese companies that vanquished his old firm
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The huge growth of MySpace.com has spurred top marketers to try to create their own versions of the teen-oriented social network site that has more than 66 million registered users.
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Microsoft may delay Windows Vista again -- Gartner
SEATTLE (Reuters) - Microsoft Corp.'s long- awaited release of the upgrade to its flagship Windows operating system will likely be delayed again by at least three months, research group Gartner Inc. said on Tuesday.
The research note, released to clients on Monday, said the new Windows Vista operating system is too complex to be able to meet Microsoft's targeted November release for volume licence customers and January launch for retail consumers.
A Microsoft spokeswoman said the company disagreed with the Gartner report and it was still on track to meet its launch dates.
Lego will release the source code for its forthcoming Mindstorms NXT toys, giving children a way to grasp the concept op open source in a way that they can relate to: by playing.
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Recently in an interview with IGN, EA Canada's senior vide president, John Schappert, slipped some details on features built-in for Wii that weren't previously confirmed. One such feature was the rumor that accelerometers were built into the nunchuck unit of the controller setup.
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"DARPA will award prizes for the top three autonomous ground vehicles that compete in a final event where they must safely complete a 60-mile urban area course in fewer than six hours. First prize is $2 million, second prize is $500,000 and third prize is $250,000.Additional information can be found on the main page, as well as the discussion board about DARPA Urban Grand Challenge.
Gates, described Google in an interview late last year as a worthy adversary, a company to test MS's mettle."This is hypercompetition, make no mistake,".The rivalry between the companies is growing more combative, and with good reason: the outcome is likely to shape the future of competition in computing and the way people use information
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Belkin today announced its draft 802.11n product line. According to the company, the N1 Wireless line will use Atheros XSPAN MIMO technology with "physical data rates" of up to 300 Mbps in "40 MHz Channel Mode" and up to 150 Mbps in "20 MHz Channel Mode."
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Honey Bees surround a Scout Hornet and raise its temperature by vibrating their bodies...which slowly roasts the hornet alive. Amazing photography.
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Great article from 1up about how the Wii's name, no matter how ridiculous, will not matter in the long run. Changed perspectives ahead.
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A throw back to the games of yesteyear. Here you can find and play some of the best games from the world of DOS. Enjoy.
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The crew at [H]ardOCP sits down with ATi, and talks about what DirectX 10 will mean for games.
Bottom line: save your money for a DirectX 10 GPU and Windows Vista!
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Episode One may be pre-purchased at retail outlets now and via Steam beginning May 1, 2006. If you pre-purchase your copy via Steam, you'll save 10% off the $19.95 price.
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After getting some postive feedback about the blog, I noticed that there was no way for peole to comment about my blog, and give suggestions, I now have an email address availible for any feedback and suggestions at compuguynews@gmail.com.
We've got six new screenshots from this booster pack for Battlefield 2. Armored Fury allows for the first time mechanized battles on U.S. soil in the Battlefield universe. Not 56K safe.
Vista and .NET. Type safety anyone?
Gary McGraw is CTO of Cigital Inc and author of : Software Security: Building Security In www.awprofessional.com/title/0321356705
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gamedevmap is a cool, living map and catalog of game development organizations. it shows where game companies are located around the globe. Click on the little red dots to pull up a list of companies and their webpages.
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Okay, let me explain something about USI right off the bat: you're either going to love it, or you're going to hate it with every fiber of your soul. And I've got a feeling even the people that hate it are going to play it with a masochistic, and just downright frightening, intensity.
As soon as I spawned, it was mayhem. I figured the other people on my team who had previous contact with the mod knew something that I didn't so I joined in on the mad rush for vehicles and cover. Now, this wasn't your standard “I'm gonna get the jet first” kind of struggle. And I quickly figured out why after my first time in the air. The balance in this mod is... complicated. But more on that later.
They know their ink cartridges are over priced so instead of putting the price where it should be they try and kill off the competition. Reminds me of the RIAA and music!
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You probably heard about Quake Wars' MegaTexture technology by now. Is it just typical game industry marketing hype, or is Carmack once again set to revolutionize 3D engine design? Read this interview and find out!
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The linked article talks about 3 upcoming games for the Wii, all very different then the normal Nintendo game. Lets home that Nintendo finally kicks the "Kiddy" stigma that they've had up to now. I hope the Wii is as revolutionary as it's codename leads us to believe.
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Legends is a freely available, online multiplayer first/third person shooter which features ski-style movement and jetpack propulsion across vast terrains as you fight other online players for their flag, or their death. Featuring great OpenGL graphics and textures, objects and particles look very life-like. Legends runs under Windows and Linux.
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Imagine actually having enough money to buy a $25k fighter jet, from ebay no less and he's not even going to take it for a fly! Paypal must have made a killing through this guy.
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Simply enter you Live gamertag and 360voice.com will automatically, based upon what you did that day, create a blog entry for your 360.
The blog is updated once a day and even offers RSS feeds to your own, and others 360's blogs.
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Story on Wired about Pete Ashdown running for US Senate against Orrin Hatch.
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OpenBSD 3.9 has been released today. The upcoming version of OpenBSD has better buffer-overflow protection, and can ease the burden of systems monitoring through a new sensor interface framework.
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All is not roses at [H] Consumer as they evaluate what turns out to be a bad investment when it comes to your money. "This is not a good computer with a terrible flaw -- this is a below average computer across the board." Might want to steer clear of these guys for a while in hopes that they get their business model together.
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Linux's wireless capabilities are poised to take a big step forward, with the release of an 'advanced' 802.11 driver stack to the open source community under the GPL.
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Describes a way to view ABC tv streams from outside the USA. All you need is a proxy that is hosted in the USA and does not spill your IP. The article helps you find those proxies.
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A little video of a small guass gun and how it works. Easy enough to make one yourself
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By filling 15 percent of your car's gas tank with ethanol, you can bring down the price-per-gallon from $3 to about $2.40... Of course, if you don't add the ingredient that makes ethanol unfit for human consumption, you would find yourself with something else: 190 proof moonshine.
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Physicists have made water run uphill quite literally under its own steam. The droplets propel themselves over metal sheets scored with a carefully designed array of grooves.
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According to the zfs-discuss mailing list, Apple is interesting in porting Solaris' new (and rather advanced) filesystem, ZFS, to Mac OS X. ZFS features include a pooled storage model, protection from data corruption, fast backup/restore/snapshots/clones, built in compression, and is highly scalable.
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Sabianq used the 5.25 inch drive bay to house 4 hard drives expanding the capacity of a computer to 1200 gigabytes.
Joystiq recently called people up asking for their blind opinion about the Nintendo Wii, without knowing what the product was beforehand. Not one of the respondants guessed that it was a gaming product
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The Valve store has 1/4 scale headcrab plushies with posable hooking legs for $24.95.
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Valve's first foray into episodic gaming will be available to download through Steam starting next week, even though it's a month away from being released. Soon you too can have all the satisfaction of having the game on your hard drive as well as all of the frustration of being unable to play it.
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Ever noticed how we've never seen what the people in the Revolution previews are swinging at?
Imagine.
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The MPAA has been offering people to settle for a few grand (and many took the bait) but they now chose the wrong guy to mess with; one who sticks to his principles and who has a lot of money to cover the legal fees to fight these lying morons. Interesting case to follow!
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A group of local scientists has uncovered some clues to the source of a mysterious disturbance that rattled San Diego County on the morning of April 4, shaking windows, doors and bookcases from the coast to the mountains.
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A simple hack to disable all access to USB drives on XP, without disabling USB mice, or keyboards.
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The code inserted by the trial judge into the legal judgement on the recent Da Vinci Code court case has been decrypted.
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People wearing the robotic shoe would be able to step directly onto an anti-personnel mine, without getting their legs blown off. It can be used by mine clearers or special forces troops.
The six-legged shoes protect the wearer by lifting up a leg if it is over a mine. The other five legs continue to support the wearer's weight.
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I was inspired by the DiggUpdate software that appeared on Digg earlier - and wrote this quick Firefox extension for Digg that checks the front page every so often for new stories. Very useful if you have a desk job and Firefox open all day!
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the 3 executives remained typically tight-lipped about Apple's future product plans. When pressed about what product to expect in the future, Jobs said, "I can't tell you." However, Apple's CEO didn't let secrecy stop his enthusiasm for those secret products. "The new products in the pipeline are the best I've ever seen in my life," Jobs said
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Sony Corp. said on Thursday that it expected its game division to post a loss of about 100 billion yen, hit by start-up costs for its PlayStation 3 game machine. That's almost a billion dollars Sony is looking to lose to launch the PS3. And to think that many of us thought Sony would actually learn from the mistakes of Microsoft
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Did you know you can play Doom on your iPod? You can also load it with unusual stuff like Wikipedia and subway maps -- even dating videos! Here's a good rundown of some unconventional ways to use your iPod that go way beyond just listening to music.
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Pirates in China didn't just copy NEC's products, they faked the entire company. "Evidence seized in raids on 18 factories and warehouses in China and Taiwan over the past year showed that counterfeiters had set up what amounted to a parallel NEC brand."
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Electronic Arts, in announcing Madden for Revolution, have set up a specific game studio just for Revolution games, commenting: 'I don't think a winning approach on the Revolution is to port games to it', adding that EA 'didn't do that on the DS, and I think that was part of our learning process'.
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Awesome NY Times article about MySpace accounts serving as online memorials for people who've died. Also mentions MyDeathSpace.com, a site that tallies people with MySpace accounts that have died.
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Leave it to the pizza delivery guy to have Madison thinking green. Glass Nickel Pizza is running 4 of their delivery vehicles on Fryer Oil Bio Diesel.
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While the majority of illegal copying and distribution of music and movies occurs over the public Internet on peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing systems, students at colleges and universities have been increasingly using programs to engage in such activity on campus LANs without using the broader public Internet.
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At Apple's sharholder meeting, when asked about a Media Center, Jobs replied with "we hear you loud and clear". Interesting notes of what went down at the meeting.
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Iran has just obtained missiles (Russian-made BM-25's) that have a range capable of hitting Europe. These missiles are known to be capable of carrying a nuclear weapon, and were obtained through North Korea.
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For those of you who doubted the previous article, the NYC Department of Education has been reported to actually go through with the confiscation of iPods and Cell Phones. "A new program to search school students didn't turn up many weapons Wednesday, but a lot of kids had to do without their cell phones and music."
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Researchers at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada, are exploring the possibility of a biometric security device that will use a person's thoughts to authenticate her or his identity.
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An amateur exposed security flaws in US governmental computers to unlock the truth about UFO's and aliens. Sure sounds like they exist. Know he's going to jail or worse.
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Light is the solution. It's also the problem. That's the paradox HP Labs' Quantum Information Processing Group is beginning to unravel with its research into optical quantum computing.
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This copy of Microsoft Windows XP is not genuine. Windows XP Pirates have again found workaround methods to bypass the latest Microsoft Anti-Piracy effort - Windows Genuine Advantage Notifications that notifies you through annonying pop-up messages if your copy of Windows is not genuine.
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We still scratched our head, so we spoke with Nintendo of America's Public Relations Manager Matt Atwood to get Nintendo's explanation of what the name was really about.
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It seems Mr Moore has today revealed that the legendary Master Chief will be appearing at E3 to show off the latest game in the Halo series. Of course nothing is known about what will be shown; whether it will be CGI or in game footage, but rest assured it will be one of the biggest highlights of this years E3.
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Software engineers have won a $14.9 million settlement from Electronic Arts, in a settlement of a California class-action lawsuit over unpaid overtime, following a similar $15.6 million settlement reached in October with graphic artists.
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For those who are overly emotional, you might want to sit down while reading:
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This guy makes a good case why Linux will never over take Windows.
This short tutorial shows how to create nearly photo-realistic grass in Photoshop. Useful for creating a relaxing website design :)
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Nintendo of Canada's Marketing Director Director of Marketing, Pierre-Paul Trepanier, confirms in an interview with Canadian internet radio station Radio-Talbot that the Revmote will indeed have force feedback. Also discussed was that the market in Japan is actually the factor behind when the DS Lite will be released in North America.
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The first thing that you'll notice in Neverwinter Nights 2 is the graphics, which aren't just an overhaul of the old engine but a complete, ground-up re-write.
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A fast moving project working on porting Starcraft onto the PSP. Other sites for this story are: http://psp3d.com/showthread.php?t=6952 and http://pspupdates.qj.net/index.php?pg=49&aid=27924 When this is finished expect this to be a great homebrew game for the PSP.
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See what the new Battlefield 2142 will look like. HardOCP has posted the new screenshots (released today) of the game in their full resolution. Not 56K friendly.
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This is a video showing how UNO for the Xbox 360 has built-in support for the upcoming Xbox 360 camera. It shows off the menu's where you set up your camera's settings.
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Birds and rainwater are inside the steel-concrete shelter hastily built over the reactor that blew up in 1986, and officials worry about what is getting out.
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The latest issue of Nintendo Power had the dirt on the new Revolution Console, check it out.
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A list of free programs that do not require an installation and can be used directly from your USB stick or any other removable drive
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Panasonic's new ToughBook Letsnote CF-Y5 notebook features a Duo-Core processor and is designed to withstand an impact of up to 220 pounds plus a special waterproof sheet and drainage system.
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