Sun, 13 May 2012 21:42:02 -0500 http://www.glideunderground.com/ Glide Underground Backend en-us http://www.glideunderground.com/images/logo.gif http://www.glideunderground.com/ http://www.glideunderground.com/index.php?name=News&file=article&sid=4173 Scott Hanselman offers up some icons that don't mean what they used to mean - recognizable only to old school computer users. Bookmarks We used to use smaller flat dead trees to keep our place in between the dead trees we would read from so that we didn't lose our page. No, books didn't "keep our place when we turned them off." Address Books and Calendars We would write down all our addresses and phone numbers in a dead tree and carry it around with us. Sometimes we'd manage our calendar that way also. Everything was bound together with metal spiral loops. Let me check my Filofax. Sun, 13 May 2012 21:42:02 -0500 http://www.glideunderground.com/index.php?name=News&file=article&sid=4172 The passing of Donald "Duck" Dunn, legendary blues and jazz performer. Time to break out the old Blues Brothers dvd and raise a glass. Sun, 13 May 2012 21:12:29 -0500 http://www.glideunderground.com/index.php?name=News&file=article&sid=4171 Wolfenstein 3D is 20 years old; Bethesda has kicked up a browser-based version for your enjoyment. Have fun! Thu, 10 May 2012 22:43:08 -0500 http://www.glideunderground.com/index.php?name=News&file=article&sid=4170 Just... Go Right. This is seriously cool. Mon, 30 Apr 2012 21:12:04 -0500 http://www.glideunderground.com/index.php?name=News&file=article&sid=4169 Hothardware has a great point: four gaming cliches really need to die. Especially the suicidal NPCs. If you answered anything but A, we're sorry -- you're just too smart to be a Skyrim NPC. Skyrim, to be fair, is far from the only game that uses this sort of mechanic, but the behavior of its NPCs stands out in what's otherwise an excellent title. Bandits and other low-level NPCs will continue to attack you on sight, despite the obvious disparity in your equipment and capabilities. Attacking the player is suicidal, but worse is the suicidal teammates. Those REALLy need to die. Especially the "escort the suicidal idiot to point A" quests. Fri, 27 Apr 2012 15:28:12 -0500 http://www.glideunderground.com/index.php?name=News&file=article&sid=4168 How statutory minimums made a mockery of the saga of the open Maple story server UMaple: After a paltry copyright infringement damages award, the opinion turns to anti-circumvention damages. Dun dun DUN. 17 USC 1203 sets a statutory damages minimum of $200 per act of circumvention. UMaples' client, the "UMaple Launcher," allegedly bypassed the access controls in MapleStory's client software. UMaple had 17,938 users. At $200/user (assuming 1 act of circumvention per user), the tally reaches a total of $3.5M+ in statutory damages, but the judge doesn't think this is right: even the minimum statutory amount awardable under the DMCA in this case [is] a significant windfall to Plaintiff far in excess of any amount necessary to deter future infringing conduct. Further, the minimum award here likely bears little plausible relationship to Plaintiff's actual damages. Nevertheless, the judge had no choice based on the formula it felt was binding, so this produces a massive anti-circumvention award. If it were collectible, it would be quite noteworthy as one of the biggest anti-circumvention awards of all time. But, it's not collectible.Emphasis added. Thu, 19 Apr 2012 10:16:10 -0500 http://www.glideunderground.com/index.php?name=News&file=article&sid=4167 About Damn Time. When they announced the cancellation of the series previously, I was roundly disappointed. Fri, 06 Apr 2012 07:08:14 -0500 http://www.glideunderground.com/index.php?name=News&file=article&sid=4166 Here's something cool for the day. The first ever home computer video game, emulated in a browser setting. Time to get your Spacewar on. Thu, 05 Apr 2012 13:08:32 -0500 http://www.glideunderground.com/index.php?name=News&file=article&sid=4165 A major supercomputing rig and a lot of time equals... the solution for one of Chess's famous openings. Assuming perfect play, the King's Gambit is a draw... but easily can be lost if one move is missed early on. 1.e4 e5 2.f4 exf4. We now know the exact outcome of this position, assuming perfect play, of course. I know your next question, so I am going to pre-empt it: there is only one move that draws for White, and that is, somewhat surprisingly, 3.Be2. Every other move loses by force.I imagine that within the next 5 years, most other gambits will also be solved. After all, solving KG only took 4 months of computer time. Mon, 02 Apr 2012 16:12:43 -0500 http://www.glideunderground.com/index.php?name=News&file=article&sid=4164 In the news on MegaUpload, signs that things aren't what they seem: In 2009, Fox e-mailed seeking "third party partners" for Fox's recently launched ad network. "Please let me know if you have some time to chat this week about how we can work together to better monetize your inventory," the Fox employee wrote. In 2010, a Warner Brothers executive e-mailed Megaupload seeking to expedite the process of uploading Warner content to Megaupload. "I would like to know if your site can take a Media RSS feed for our syndications," he wrote. "We would like to upload our content all at once instead of one video at a time." TorrentFreak's got an entire interview with Kim Dotcom over here as well. This is getting stranger and stranger. Tue, 27 Mar 2012 08:19:01 -0500 http://www.glideunderground.com/index.php?name=News&file=article&sid=4163 So... Anybody want to go build some Mechs? 4 years ago the Mech Warfare Competition was founded. Since then, the event has grown massively with more and more competitors from around the globe. As the competitor pool and the event itself grow, so must the arena in which these robots battle. The PVC pipe and canvas tent just isn't cutting it anymore. This year the Mech Warfare organizers want to build a lexan & aluminum armored arena to house the robot competitors. That's where you come in. $6000 is needed to make this new arena a reality and the organizers of Mech Warfare have set up a Kickstarter Project to fund it. The project is on its way, but it still has a ways to go. Your donation will help build an arena that will house Mech Warfare competitions for years to come, inspiring competitors and spectators alike. Now we know that just the knowledge that you're promoting the robotics cause is enough to get you to donate, but there are also some great thank you gifts for backers. These gifts include listing on the sponsors page, Mech Warfare and MORAV posters, and even having your name/company/website integrated into the arena itself. Just imagine your face looking down from a billboard onto the Mech Warfare Arena! So checkout the Kickstarter Page and sign up to donate. Every little bit helps towards getting an awesome new arena for these awesome robots.Seems like a good and worthy cause to me. Tue, 20 Mar 2012 18:58:56 -0500 http://www.glideunderground.com/index.php?name=News&file=article&sid=4162 In uglier tech news, Kyle Wiens of iFixit has some negative views of the iPad 3 - it's nigh impossible to open up to perform even the most basic repairs. This is par for the course for Apple, though; in recent years, even replacing a battery in their machines has become a "ship it back to the factory" level repair. Mon, 19 Mar 2012 22:14:19 -0500 http://www.glideunderground.com/index.php?name=News&file=article&sid=4161 Time for some hardware. I grabbed a Kinect shortly before Christmas, and I've tried it out off and on since. A few games - sports titles, dance titles, Gunstringer, things like that. Suffice to say, there's a lot of hype about this $150 motorized camera. It gets some really cool hype, too. Things like hackers making lightsaber fights in expectation of an upcoming lightsaber-based game for instance. That being said... I'm just not feeling it. For one thing, the Kinect requires a TON of space. You think your gaming room is big? Got a nice 12x12 room with a couch in it, big TV? Get ready to haul that couch out of the room if you want any hope of playing this thing in 2-player mode. But does it play well? Uhm... sorta. It wants a LOT of ambient light to do its thing; the infrared camera mode doesn't really cut it. Kinect is a light-hog, and if your game room is the standard gamer-darkness, you're going to need to drag in a few floor lamps to the corners by the TV, too. And the games? Well, they're nice, but they get old fast, in a "Hey, Wii Sports was cool... before it got boring..." sort of way. If you're only playing once in a while when you can get friends over, or playing with your kids (hey, it's the 2010s, gamers can have kids now, hopefully growing up to be little gamers themselves) then it may not get old as fast, but it's still gimmicky, especially the "party" type games. The final insult is the "motion sensitive interface." Really, it looks cool for about 5 minutes, then comes the realization: I'm standing here, holding my arm in the air and waving like a weirdo, when I could just use the controller and get my game started a lot quicker. Even funnier is holding your hand on your hip for the exit command... and holding it... and holding it... now STOP holding it because you're in the exit screen... oops held it too long! I was looking forward to reviewing the Kinect more positively but - well, I'll be honest, it's a gimmick. Microsoft needed motion sensing, and this was their solution. May there be software to correct the flaws... soon. Mon, 19 Mar 2012 18:31:27 -0500 http://www.glideunderground.com/index.php?name=News&file=article&sid=4160 If true, it could be a marvel - an airplane with a second set of wings, to cancel out sonic booms. Just the thing to enable supersonic passenger flights! What's the catch? At sub-supersonic speeds, a Busemann Biplane doesn't produce sufficient lift under acceleration, undergoing considerable drag. The design is said to work perfectly at supersonic speeds - it's getting to them that is the trouble. So though there may be no sonic boom, there's no flight either. ... Better yet, the MIT/Stanford team think they might have cracked the problem of lift at sub-supersonic speeds. Through an iterative processes, modeling differing design variations, the team has discovered that smoothing the wing's inner surface eases the passage of air between the wings. By additionally "bumping out" the outer edges of the two wings, the team has come up with a design it claims will fly below the speed of sound, and with half the drag of Concorde.Ok, so maybe they're not quite there yet... Mon, 19 Mar 2012 18:16:44 -0500 http://www.glideunderground.com/index.php?name=News&file=article&sid=4159 The next level of Malware: Java drive-bys that only live in RAM. The Java exploit's payload consisted of a rogue DLL (dynamic-link library) that was loaded and attached on the fly to the legitimate Java process. This type of malware is rare, because it dies when the system is rebooted and the memory is cleared. However, this wasn't a problem for the cybercriminals behind this particular attack, because of the very high probability that most victims would revisit the infected news websites, Golovanov said. The malicious DLL loaded into memory acted as a bot, sending data to and receiving instructions from a command and control server over HTTP. In some cases, the instructions given out by attackers were to install an online banking Trojan horse on the compromised computers.And since many people hate to reboot their computers, this could live for days on one machine alone. Truly insidious. Mon, 19 Mar 2012 18:03:42 -0500 http://www.glideunderground.com/index.php?name=News&file=article&sid=4158 Seriously, just get ready to watch this. Tabletop games need to come back in a big way. My ulterior motive with Tabletop is to show by example how much fun it is to play boardgames. I want to show that Gamers aren't all a bunch of weirdoes who can't make eye contact when they talk to you, and that getting together for a game night is just as social and awesome as getting together to watch Sportsball, or to play poker, or for a LAN party, or whatever non-gamers do with their friends. I want to inspire people to try hobby games, and I want to remove the stigma associated with gaming and gamers.Thank you, Wil, thank you. I've toyed with the idea of opening up reviews of tabletop games here; maybe sometime soon, say over summer, it can become a reality. Mon, 19 Mar 2012 17:55:21 -0500 http://www.glideunderground.com/index.php?name=News&file=article&sid=4157 The academic boycott of Elsevier, 900-lb gorilla of the academic journal world, is growing: Seem dramatic? Well, here?s a little test. Go to any of the top academic journals in the world and try to read an article. The full article, mind you?not just the abstract or the first few paragraphs. Hit a paywall? Try an article written 20 or 30 years ago in an obscure journal. Just look up something on PubMed then head to JSTOR where a vast archive of journals have been digitized for reference. Denied? Not interested in paying $40 to the publisher to rent the article for a few days or purchase it for hundreds of dollars either? You?ve just logged one of the over 150 million failed attempts per year to access an article on JSTOR. Now consider the fact that the majority of scientific articles in the U.S., for example, has been funded by government-funded agencies, such as the National Science Foundation, NIH, Department of Defense, Department of Energy, NASA, and so on. So while taxpayer money has fueled this research, publishers charge anyone who wants to actually see the results for themselves, including the authors of the articles.Shockingly, this is common even if you're a student or staff at a university and your university library's paid for journal access. It'd be nice to see the tide turn a bit, and more journals reach open access for the world. Mon, 19 Mar 2012 17:53:19 -0500 http://www.glideunderground.com/index.php?name=News&file=article&sid=4156 Behold, what one erroneous DMCA complaint can cause. But I can only tell you the number of views/favourites/comments etc. up to October 11th 2007 because that's the last record of it at its original url in the internet archive. Unfortunately, on February 17th this year, Flickr - who are owned by Yahoo! - deleted the image from their servers. The page it was on disappeared... and with it, all the comments, favourites, and the record of its views disappeared too. That stuff matters only because I'm vain... but every blog that linked to it now has a broken link that goes nowhere and that matters because links are what make the internet the internet. With all those links broken, 6 years worth of photo-sharing has been undone. Mon, 05 Mar 2012 16:37:33 -0600 http://www.glideunderground.com/index.php?name=News&file=article&sid=4155 No, it's not George Lucas. The man behind most of the Star Wars concept art, Ralph McQuarrie, has passed on. A list of more of his achievements is available at his IMDB page. Sun, 04 Mar 2012 10:40:32 -0600 http://www.glideunderground.com/index.php?name=News&file=article&sid=4154 ... and time cannot come fast enough to get this game into my grubby hands. All of a sudden, an explosion of 'Mech games, after a dearth for years? Pinch me, I must be dreaming. Fri, 02 Mar 2012 07:38:06 -0600 http://www.glideunderground.com/index.php?name=News&file=article&sid=4153 Let us bow our heads in a moment of silence - the inventor of the modern pinball machine, Mr. Steve Kordek, has passed on. A generation of pinball wizards mourn his loss... myself included. Fri, 24 Feb 2012 22:00:58 -0600 http://www.glideunderground.com/index.php?name=News&file=article&sid=4152 If you've been following Mechwarrior Online and Mektek at all lately, you've doubtless heard of the 'Mech pods and the rumors of "Solaris Assault Tech." No Guts No Galaxy, a Mechwarrior/Battletech-centric podcast, have scored a great interview with Nick "Propwash" Smith, owner of Virtual World Entertainment, the outfit that hires Mektek to port their software into the pods. It's a great listen: check it out. Wed, 08 Feb 2012 09:00:00 -0600 http://www.glideunderground.com/index.php?name=News&file=article&sid=4151 A judge today has refused to shut down used MP3 marketplace ReDigi. It's an interesting place. Works like this: if you have music you don't listen to any more, legally purchased, you can put it up on ReDigi. When someone buys it, the music's transferred to their computer and deleted from yours. More over at Recording Industry vs The People, or you can read the court transcript. Wed, 08 Feb 2012 07:46:28 -0600 http://www.glideunderground.com/index.php?name=News&file=article&sid=4150 HotHardware looks at the brouhaha over Kingdoms of Amalur's content lock. Essentially, if you bought a new copy, you get some "free stuff" that may or may not already be on the disc. If you buy used, you have to pay EXTRA money to unlock a part of the single-player game. A number of people have declared this to be simple greed, but the situation isn't that simple. Consider this: When you buy a game from Gamestop, the studio gets nothing. Buying a used game and pirating the game outright are identical as far as their impact on the studio's revenue. That's inherently frustrating for developers, and the problem is made substantially worse by Gamestop itself. The problem, after all, isn't the fact that a used games market exists, but that the used games market is dominated by a single enormous company. Gamestop's monopoly on the used game market gives it the ability to set prices on what a used game should sell for, and the resulting sale is 100% profit for the company. Unlike the MPAA, which prohibits selling new and used games side-by-side, there's no such restriction at GS.I'm not the world's biggest Gamestop fan, but really, the used games market exists like a used market exists for just about every other product in the world. PC gamers don't get much of a used games market these days thanks to the Steam DRM lock, and it really annoys people and hurts the industry by making people less willing to buy a game that they may finish and want to give away to a friend. And the move to items you can't sell without breaking them hasn't come with decreasing prices, so consumers are even more leery of purchasing. I don't like the idea of the death of the used games market, which is definitely what the game publishers want to see happen. It's bad enough knowing that there are a set of games from my Xbox Live Marketplace downloads that, once the Xbox dies or Xbox360 is deprecated from Live (just like they did to the original Xbox and its DLC packs), the content is almost impossible to see again. Mon, 30 Jan 2012 08:14:18 -0600 http://www.glideunderground.com/index.php?name=News&file=article&sid=4149 Say hello to a scientific analysis of how mathematically hard some classic games are. Location traversal and single-use paths, ala Pac-Man, is NP-hard. Pressure plates, ala Prince of Persia or Portal, is PSPACE-hard if there are two pressure plates, and NP-hard if only one is required to open a door. In the case of switches, one switch is P-hard, two is NP-hard, and three or more is PSPACE-hard. Viglietta then uses these characteristics to classify each of the 13 games. Boulder Dash, which involves traversing a map strewn with boulders, is NP-hard. Prince of Persia, thanks to its pressure plates, is PSPACE-complete. Doom, with its multiple switches, is PSPACE-hard (and Viglietta claims that most other FPSes and adventure games are the same).Regrettably, they don't have categories for games like Ninja Gaiden 3 or the original Castlevania, which qualify simply as "throw your controller at the wall repeatedly in frustration, Nintendo Hard." Fri, 27 Jan 2012 11:00:00 -0600