“Of course, least positively of all, another angle for many publishers is in-app purchasing – why provide a feature as a hidden cheat when you can get people to pay money to unlock it?” Seavor has also noticed this trend. “Bigger publishers have now realised you can actually sell these things to players as DLC. Want that special gun? Think you can unlock it with a cheat code? Nope! You’ve got to give us some money first!”
Tag Archives: history
The Hackers Who Recovered NASA’s Lost Lunar Photos
When they learned through a Usenet group that former NASA employee Nancy Evans might have both the tapes and the super-rare Ampex FR-900 drives needed to read them, they jumped into action. They drove to Los Angeles, where the refrigerator-sized drives were being stored in a backyard shed surrounded by chickens. At the same time, they retrieved the tapes from a storage unit in nearby Moorpark, and things gradually began to take shape. Funding the project out of pocket at first, they were consumed with figuring out how to release the images trapped in the tapes.
via The Hackers Who Recovered NASA’s Lost Lunar Photos | Raw File | WIRED.
The resulting framelets had to be individually reassembled in Photoshop. After kluging through countless engineering problems (try finding a chemical substitute for whale oil to lubricate tape heads), the LOIRP team was able to single out and reproduce the famous earthrise image. This proof of concept brought the first NASA funding in 2008, and the team recently completed processing the entire tape collection.
The IRS uses computers?! The horror!
It’s impossible to imagine the Internal Revenue Service or most other number-crunching agencies or companies working without computers. But when the IRS went to computers — the Automatic Data Processing system –there was an uproar. The agency went so far as to produce a short film on the topic called Right On The Button, to convince the public computers were a good thing.
BASIC at 50
At 4 a.m. on May 1, 1964, in the basement of College Hall, Professor John Kemeny and a student programmer simultaneously typed RUN on neighboring terminals. When they both got back correct answers to their simple programs, time-sharing and BASIC were born.
via BASIC at 50.
Virtual AGC Home Page
The Apollo spacecraft used for lunar missions in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s was really two different spacecraft, the Command Module (CM) and the Lunar Module (LM). The CM was used to get the three astronauts to the moon, and back again. The LM was used to land two of the astronauts on the moon while the third astronaut remained in the CM, in orbit around the moon.
The Virtual AGC project provides a virtual machine which simulates the AGC, the DSKY, and some other portions of the guidance system. In other words, if the virtual machine—which we call yaAGC—is given the same software which was originally run by the real AGCs, and is fed the same input signals encountered by the real AGCs during Apollo missions, then it will responds in the same way as the real AGCs did. The Virtual AGC software is free of charge, can be obtained for Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, or as open source software source code so that it can be studied or modified.
Apple rejects Tank Battle 1942 for depicting Germans & Russians as “enemies”
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.
Wake up, Rosetta!
Rosetta was launched in 2004 and has since travelled around the Sun five times, picking up energy from Earth and Mars to line it up with its final destination: comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko. For the coldest, loneliest leg of the mission, as Rosetta travelled out towards the orbit of Jupiter, the spacecraft was put into deep-space hibernation.
In 2014, Rosetta will complete its cruise towards the comet, rendezvousing with it in August, before putting its Philae lander onto the comet’s surface in November, as it begins its journey closer to the Sun.
via Wake up, Rosetta! / Rosetta / Space Science / Our Activities / ESA.
Rosetta will arrive at 67P in August 2014, where it will become the first spacecraft to orbit the nucleus of a comet and, later in the year, the first to land a probe – Philae – on a comet’s surface. It will also be the first mission to escort a comet as it journeys around the Sun.
China lands Jade Rabbit robot rover on Moon
China says it has successfully landed a craft carrying a robotic rover on the surface of the Moon, the first soft landing there for 37 years.
On Saturday afternoon (GMT), a landing module used thrusters to touch down, marking the latest step in China’s ambitious space exploration programme.
Magnetic tape to the rescue
Tape will never be the whole answer to storing data, according to Dr Eleftheriou. But it forms a crucial part of a “storage hierarchy”. At the top of this are so-called hot data, those that need to be available for immediate access. These are best held in flash memory. Lukewarm data—those that people need to access frequently, but not instantaneously—are best stored on disks. Cold data, the stuff in long-term storage, can be recorded on tape. This cold store is by far the biggest repository. A report published in 2008 by Andrew Leung of the University of California, Santa Cruz, found that in general, 90% of an organisation’s data becomes cold after a couple of months.
Should arrays start with 0 or 1?
“Should array indices start at 0 or 1? My compromise of 0.5 was rejected without, I thought, proper consideration.” — Stan Kelly-Bootle