In case you think you’ve read that wrong, I’ll summarise: a World War II-themed game that depicts fighting between two countries that actually fought in WWII breaks the rules. And apparently Drive on Moscow, Panzer Corps, and every single one of Hunted Cow’s other Tank Battle games don’t.
via Apple rejects Tank Battle 1942 for depicting Germans & Russians as “enemies” UPDATED.
Yes, there are definite reasons why the vi/vim editing model is just superior to any other out there. And you don’t need to be a Unix whiz to use it, either: vim is available for free for almost any platform out there, and there are plug-ins to get the functionality inside all major IDEs.
via Why, oh WHY, do those #?@! nutheads use vi?.
If you want to research vi/vim editing some more, here are some useful references:
- Learn why I got started
- Use my graphical cheat sheet and tutorial to learn vi/vim editing
- The awesome “vi lovers” home page
- Learn Jonathan McPherson’s hints for effective editing with vim
And of course:
In a four-launch scenario, the lander would precede the crew to the moon. The first two launches would be a moon injection stage followed by a lunar lander. These two vehicles would rendezvous in Earth’s orbit before the moon injection stage would send the lander ahead to the moon. The next two Falcon launches would carry a second moon injection stage and then the crew in their capsule/service module. After a similar boost in a moon-injection stage, they would meet up with the lander in lunar orbit.
The rest of the mission would be like the Apollo mission — Americans on the moon, once again taking giant leaps for mankind.
via How to return to the moon in just four years | Fox News.
The video below will walk through the process of setting up and installing Prosody, a lightweight Lua-based instant messaging server application. We’ll be using Ubuntu 12.04 for our server, though Prosody is a cross-platform application and will run on Windows, OS X, and a number of different Linuxes. Strap in, grab your server, and let’s roll!
via How to set up your own private instant messaging server | Ars Technica.
BGP traffic hijacking is on the rise, according to internet performance metrics analyst firm Renesys, which last year noted that over a period of two months, around 1500 IP address blocks were rerouted. Several were in Australia.
via Google DNS servers suffer brief traffic hijack – Telco/ISP – Technology – News – iTnews.com.au.
At one point Viacom, the cable powerhouse that owns networks such as MTV and Comedy Central, had been seeking $1 billion in damages from Google. But no money traded hands in the settlement, according to people familiar with the transaction.
via It’s Over! Viacom and Google Settle YouTube Lawsuit. | Re/code.
I’ve collected 50 UNIX / Linux sysadmin related tutorials that we’ve posted so far. This is lot of reading. Bookmark this article for your future reference and read it whenever you get free time.
Graphics give games a visual appeal, but it’s the internal physics engine that gives the game’s world life. A physics engine is a software component that provides a simulation of a physical system. This simulation can include soft- and rigid-body dynamics, fluid dynamics, and collision detection. The open source community has a number of useful physics engines operating in the 2D and 3D domains targeted to games and simulations. This article introduces the use and basics of a physics engine and explores two options that exist: Box2D and Bullet.
via Open source physics engines.
In terms of why Firefox was the most exploited browser at the 2014 Pw2Own event, money likely plays a key role.
“Pwn2Own offers very large financial incentives to researchers to expose vulnerabilities, and that may have contributed in part to the researchers’ decision to wait until now to share their work and help protect Firefox users,” Stamm said. “Mozilla also offers financial rewards in our bug bounty program, and this program’s success has inspired other companies to follow suit.” –
via Pwn2Own 2014 Claims IE, Chrome, Safari and More Firefox Zero-Days.
The ultrafast switch is made out of an artificial material engineered to have properties that are not found in nature. In this case, the “metamaterial” consists of nanoscale particles of vanadium dioxide (VO2) – a crystalline solid that can rapidly switch back and forth between an opaque, metallic phase and a transparent, semiconducting phase – which are deposited on a glass substrate and coated with a “nanomesh” of tiny gold nanoparticles.
The scientists report that bathing these gilded nanoparticles with brief pulses from an ultrafast laser generates hot electrons in the gold nanomesh that jump into the vanadium dioxide and cause it to undergo its phase change in a few trillionths of a second.