OpenXcom 1.0 Released
Posted by News Fetcher on June 14 '14 at 09:30 AM
By timothy from
Slashdot's dropped-the-hyphen department:
It's a small class of video games that still draw interest or inspire an active community 20 years after their first release — even if we're now
40 years into the era of commercial video games. Games like
Doom, the several iterations of
Civilization, and the
Mario Brothers franchise will probably be around and played in some form many decades hence. The
X-COM family of games fits, too, having inspired
various spiritual successors since its release in 1994. Now, an anonymous reader writes that the open source (GPL) "
OpenXcom 1.0 is finally released, after 5224 commits, 1843 days, and 606 resolved issues since v0.9. 20 years of
X-COM —
XCOM oldschool lovers enjoy!"
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By timothy from
Slashdot's so-really-it's-both-plus-and-minus department:
New submitter
jackjeff (955699) writes with an excerpt from developer Aymeric Barthe about data loss suffered under Apple's
venerable HFS+ filesystem.
HFS+ lost a total of 28 files over the course of 6 years. Most of the corrupted files are completely unreadable. The JPEGs typically decode partially, up to the point of failure. The raw .CR2 files usually turn out to be totally unreadable: either completely black or having a large color overlay on significant portions of the photo. Most of these shots are not so important, but a handful of them are. One of the CR2 files in particular, is a very good picture of my son when he was a baby. I printed and framed that photo, so I am glad that I did not lose the original.(Barthe acknowledges that data loss and corruption certainly aren't limited to HFS+; "bitrot is actually a
problem shared by most popular filesystems. Including NTFS and ext4." I wish I'd lost only 28 files over the years.)
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By timothy from
Slashdot's clearing-the-table department:
Dave Knott (2917251) writes
Montreal-based gaming company Amaya Gaming Group Inc. has agreed to purchase privately held Oldford Group, the owner of online poker websites PokerStars and Full Tilt Poker, for $4.9 billion. The deal marks the end of a remarkable story that began when Isai Scheinberg, an Israeli-Canadian former IBM computer programmer, founded PYR Software in Toronto and started building PokerStars, which eventually became the largest online poker site in the world. But in 2011, federal prosecutors in Manhattan launched a massive crackdown against online poker in the U.S., indicting Scheinbeg, suing PokerStars and shutting down the U.S. operations of the company for operating an illegal gambling business. In 2012, PokerStars struck a $731 million settlement with federal prosecutors that also saw the company acquire the assets of Full Tilt Poker. However, reentering the vital U.S. market has proved difficult, and in the end, it started to make sense for the Scheinbergs to sell. The Scheinbergs will not remain with PokerStars in any capacity after the current deal closes. In a statement announcing the deal, Amaya said it believes the "transaction will expedite the entry of PokerStars and Full Tilt Poker into regulated markets in which Amaya already holds a footprint, particularly the U.S.A."Read Replies (0)
By timothy from
Slashdot's only-reading-it-for-the-articles department:
NewYorkCountryLawyer (912032) writes
In Authors Guild v Hathitrust, the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit has found that scanning whole books and making them searchable for research use is a fair use. In reaching its conclusion, the 3-judge panel reasoned, in its 34-page opinion (PDF), that the creation of a searchable, full text database is a "quintessentially transformative use", that it was "reasonably necessary" to make use of the entire works, that maintaining four copies of the database was reasonably necessary as well, and that the research library did not impair the market for the originals. Needless to say, this ruling augurs well for Google in Authors Guild v. Google, which likewise involves full text scanning of whole books for research.Read Replies (0)
By Roblimo from
Slashdot's round-and-round-the-little-cube-goes department:
Here's another one Tim spotted at
Maker Faire Bay Area 2014: A Rubik's Cube solver made by 12-year-old Saurabh Narain. He's in 7th grade -- and started soldering in 2nd grade and messing with Linux in 3rd grade. "What do you want to be when you grow up?" Tim asked. "An engineer..." (not that you couldn't have guessed). There may be
faster Rubik's Cube solvers, and there may be
slicker-looking ones, but Saurabh's is a lot more elegant, if you define engineering elegance as getting the most accomplished with the fewest possible parts, using the simplest possible design. And both of the fancier Rubik's Cuber solvers linked to in this paragraph were made by adult engineers, while Saurabh is 12. Can you imagine what he'll be like at 18? Or 28? Not that he's alone; there are lots of other engineering prodigies out there. The next 10 or 20 years are going to be amazing if we encourage young people to go into
STEM, and even 5% of them are as smart as Saurabh. (
Alternate Video Link)
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