twitter: GT5 Prologue without a steering wheel is fai (updated 9 minutes ago)
A botched launch of MobileMe — the company’s new data-syncing service — has led Apple to make repeated offers of free services to frustrated customers. And there have been teething problems for its generally well-received 3G iPhone, including flaky reception and weak battery life.
Malaysia-Today IP: 202.75.62.114
Malaysia-Today alternate URL: http://mt.harapanmalaysia.com/2008/
Start using OpenDNS to avoid the pain.read more…
Mainstream media, always picking up things late. I’ve already suggested that they may soon be irrelevant as they’re only propaganda machinery, governed by the Minister of Propaganda (current ruling BN - go read George Orwell).
The Star is reporting that all ISPs ordered to cut access to the Malaysia Today site. Apparently, Malaysia has 21 ISPs - who knew, this? It goes on to say:
The notices were sent out on Tuesday in accordance with Section 263 of the Communications and Multimedia Act.“This means that MCMC is allowed to block any particular website which has committed acts that contravene the local laws of the country, for example, sedition,” the source said.
Read ACT 588 - COMMUNICATIONS AND MULTIMEDIA ACT 1998 if you’re so inclined. If bored, the MCMC has a list of Acts that come under their purview.
Raja Petra hosts the site in a MyLoca data centre… owned and operated by TMNet. What’s next, turning off his tubes?
I don’t particularly read RPK, but I do find it disturbing that they’ve chosen to censor the Internet. In his usual flamboyant self, RPK says:
“The Government has clearly broken its own promise,” said Raja Petra yesterday. Asked whether he was notified of the reasons of the blocking, he answered no.“I will turn this into a big issue, no doubt. When it is known that the Government has violated the charter, MSC will die. I will personally see to it,” he said.
Companies, thinking about coming to Malaysia, using the MSC status? Think twice… its starting to seem more and more like Beijing. I like how he says the “MSC will die” - the way I look at it, the MSC never took off as the then Prime Minister, Mahathir said it would. You don’t hear Cyberjaya being synonymous with Bangalore, do you? Topic for discussion, another day.
I urge more people to put up EFF badges supporting bloggers rights. Don’t let this wannabe-autocratic government take over.
N/B: Title says “mirror” as opposed to alternate URL… It makes it easier for indexing, afaik.
I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "NASA has received interesting results from the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, originally known as GLAST, which has allowed them to create new map of the gamma-ray sky. The secret to its ability to resolve gamma-rays is that they use layers of tungsten interleaved with silicon detectors. When a gamma-ray strikes tungsten, it produces an electron/positron pair due to the photoelectric effect, which cascades as it goes through further layers of tungsten. Meanwhile, they record which silicon detectors had electrons or positrons pass through them to determine the direction of the source and they also record the total energy of the electron/positron pairs to calculate the wavelength of the gamma-ray using Planck's Law. The data gathered in just its first few hours of operation is reportedly comparable to the data from the Energetic Gamma-Ray Experiment Telescope, which gathered data for nine years back in the 1990's and there are hopes that it could detect dark matter in the form of weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs)."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Layne Flack came to the 2008 World Poker Tour Legends of Poker riding high after the biggest win of his career. He won $577,725 and his sixth gold bracelet at the World Series of Poker and he looked to continue that success at the first major stop on the tournament trail. Flack has made a strong...
An anonymous reader writes "The Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS) has apparently discovered a new world-record prime number. A GIMPS client computer reported the number on August 23rd, and verification is currently under way. The verification could take up to two weeks to complete. The last Mersenne prime discovered was over 9.8 million digits long, strongly suggesting that the new value may break the 10 million digit barrier — qualifying for the EFF's $100000 prize!"
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Knowing several SDKs for mobile devices available in the market such as OpenMoko Freerunner, Nokia N810 and several other I decided to take a look at the new MOTODEV Studio for Linux by Motorola. They published the preview release 0.3 a short time ago. Its quite appealing to write applications for all the MOTOMAGX devies out there. But it turned out that it is not really easy and the fun seems to be limited even if the MOTODEV Studio itself looks and feels quite nice.
The MOTODEV Studio preview comes as a 381MB zip archive which contains install instructions (PDF) and an executable binary installer. Even if the website says that it requires RHEL4 it installed without trouble on my Ubunty 8.04 after switching from GCJ to a SUN JRE. It requires ~900MB of disk space (no 3GB like the website says). There is an installer for Windows as well, but trying this is a job for someone else ;-)
The Eclipse (they use 4.0.3) IDE’s developer perspective looks pretty good and is easy to use even for developers who are not used to Eclipse at all. Only the fact that it needs a big screen to become useful is a problem for the users of many laptop computers which do not offer a screen higher than ~800 pixels. Resolutions below 1280×1024 result in a very small editor window.
Developer Perspective
Note the documetation browser at the right side of the window. There is a lot of documentation included already and integrated into the Eclipse help mechanism.
The VMware set-up and creating a configuration for the device emulator is rather trivial with the step-by-step instructions. Make sure to have VMware player 2.0.4 installed - the website still has 2.0.3 as a requirement which did not work for me.
The device emulator starts a VMware instance booting into a Linux system. Once the emulator is running it opens a tab in the IDE with a virtual device. It somewhat reminds me to Xoo :-)
IDE with emulator
With a set of example applications included it is very easy to get an application started. Creating a new project you are offered five application skeletons to choose from which includes a GUI application that shows how to use the contact database API.
So far the whole SDK looks really promising and much more convenient for Linux developers than the Series60 SDKs. But currently there are some bad limitations:
All in all its a big step into the right direction, but there is atill a hell of a lot of work to do. I guess it would be a nice idea for some MOTODEV Studio developers to have a chat with us Maemo people at OSiM next month.
Have a nice time…
The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) said it received complaints from two local viewers who took issue with a claim in the 30-second spot which stated that "all the parts of the internet are on the iPhone." That assertion was misleading, they said, because the iPhone does not support Flash or Java, two proprietary technologies that sometimes
The Olympics is the world's stage for the ultimate display of athletic talent, and the PokerStars World Championship of Online Poker (WCOOP) could be considered the equivalent for online poker players. While the Chinese gymnasts flipped on the floor exercise to claim victory, poker players...
After lab results demonstrated that the iPhone 3G's antenna actually functions normally, critics complained that the tests didn't represent their own experiences. So the tests were performed again on two phones that had been experiencing severe problems for some users; the verdict was the same: no hardware problems found.
DesScorp writes "The Times reports on the problems of adding wind farms to the power grid. Because of the grid's old design, it can't handle the various spikes that wind farms sometimes have, and there's no efficient way to currently move massive amounts of that power from one section of the country to the other. Further complicating things is the fact that under current laws, power grid regulation is a state matter, and the Federal government has comparatively little authority over it right now. Critics are calling for federal authority over the grid, and massive new construction of "superhighways" to share the wind power wealth nationally. Quoting the article, 'The dirty secret of clean energy is that while generating it is getting easier, moving it to market is not.'"
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
AlHunt writes "I've been tasked with finding a way to bury digitally stored photographs in a small underground time capsule to be opened in 25 years. It looks like we'll be using a steel vessel, welded closed. I've thought of CDs, DVDs, a hard drive, or a thumb drive — but they all have drawbacks, not the least of which is outdated technology 25 years from now. Maybe I'll put a CD and a CD-ROM drive in the capsule and hope that the IDE interface is still around in 25 years? Ideas and feedback will be appreciated."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Despite a turbulent history between the Republican Party and online gambling supporters, the Poker Players Alliance (PPA) has reached out and partnered with the American Gaming Association (AGA) to host a charity poker tournament at the Republican National Convention next week in an effort to...
Please excuse the indexing-friendly title. I hate it as much as you do, but I know there are literally fives of people on the Internets who may want to know this vital information for the coming weekend.
I'll be at Penny Arcade Expo in Seattle this weekend. I'm not keynoting, but I am on a couple of panels, and I will have a booth, stocked with all of my books, plus my glasses and my shoes, so I have them. I don't have a ton of stuff, though, so you should probably drop everything you're doing and go get in line right now.
My schedule looks shockingly similar to this:
Friday
3-4PM: Signing in my booth
7-8PM: Signing in my booth
Saturday
3-4PM : Signing in my booth
6-7PM: Panel - "Is Casual Killing Core Games?" in the Raven Theater. This should be an interesting conversation. I don't think casual is killing core gaming at all, but I'm interested to hear from people who think it is, and tell them why they're so very very wrong.
7-8PM: Signing in my booth
Sunday
11:30-12:30: "The Wil Wheaton Panel!" in the Serpent Theater. I'm going to be honest: I don't think a lot of people are going to come to this. There are two absolutely awesome panels at the same time, including Family Feud with Gabe and Tycho, and if the panel didn't have my name in it, I would skip it, too. However, for those of you who will be in attendance, due to your sacred vow to never watch Family Feud, I'll be reading from Happiest Days and Sunken Treasure, wand I'll do a Q&A if there's enough interest. We'll have fun (oh yes, we'll have fun. We always have fun, and we float, Georgie! We all FLOAT DOWN HERE!) and it will be awesome.
12:15-2PM: Signing in my booth
I reserve the right to bail on signings early if nobody's there, and stay a little longer if that's necessary.
Please, please, please come introduce yourself if you read my blog, especially if you're a regular commenter. It's pretty awesome to have faces to go with the names.
The PokerStars European Poker Tour is giving you a chance to pick your favorite player poker on the EPT.
The first-ever EPT Awards are just a couple of weeks away in Barcelona. On September 9, the eve of the Season 5 opening event in Barcelona, some of the best players from around the world will show up and be recognized for all the work they put in during Season 4 of the European Poker Tour.
While several awards will be presented that night, one award stands out: The EPT People's Choice Award. This is your chance to recognize your favorite player's efforts. Use whatever criteria you like: the player's game, contribution to poker, entertainment value, or whatever you think is best.
If you need some help getting started, here are the Top 50 players from Season 4 of the EPT.
Ready to make your vote? Click HERE to make your choice.
For more information, visit the EPT Awards homepage.
blackbearnh writes "It may make you feel very, very old, but the Macintosh will be turning 25 in January. As we approach this momentous anniversary, O'Reilly News had a talk with Andy Hertzfeld, one of the original Macintosh designers, about the long and storied history of the Mac. Hertzfeld, who tells the story of the Mac in his book A Revolution in the Valley, shares his thoughts about how the Mac has aged over time, how life might have been different if Steve Jobs had stayed on at Apple, and the differences between working for Apple, and for Google (his current employer.)" Read on below for a bit of what Hertzfeld had to say.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Inspired by my previous post and its related conversation in the geek group, my friend Andrew and I have been talking, as we so often do, about our RPG experiences. He said I could share this one:
Our college group wasn't big on subtle roleplaying. The anecdote that best exemplifies our attitude comes from a random night encounter.
The mage was on guard, heard a rustle in the woods outside the camp, and immediately unleashed a fireball.
"You aren't going to wait to see who it is?" asked the DM (different guy; we rotated). "What if it's one of your friends?"
"They can take the damage," replied the mage's player.
End of encounter.
There are times to take RPGs seriously (or so I've heard) but it's time like these that I look forward to the most when I play a tabletop RPG. If you listened to the Penny Arcade D&D podcasts (JIM DARKMAGIC FOR THE WIN!) you heard something remarkably similar to my friends and me playing . . . well, just about everything, really. That's sort of the whole reason we play games, isn't it?
I'm going to PAX this weekend, where I'm sure I'll engage in quite a bit of the video gaming. I'm especially looking forward to playing Rock Band 2 with the Enforcers, but more than anything else, I'm excited to spend some time in the Original Wireless Gaming area, which I missed last year. It's nothing but classic RPGs and hobby games, all donated and run by volunteers. Last year, there were opportunities to do a one-shot dungeon crawl, and I can't wait to get on the list for one of those if they're doing it again.
Filed under: downloads hacks
The LWN.net Weekly Edition for August 28, 2008 is available.
Win a package to PokerRoom's televised Race Trophy Semi Final in Monza, Italy for a chance at the live televised Final Table in Vienna and a share in the $500,000 guaranteed prizepool…