An Army investigator has recommended that four soldiers accused of murder in a raid in Iraq should face the death penalty if convicted, according to a report obtained Saturday by The Associated Press.
slimrabbit writes “LinuxDevices is reporting on a truly silent home theater PC that comes with its own Fedora 5 based quick install Linux DVD capable of installing a fully-configured FC5 system with LIRC, KDETV, TV-Time and Kradio in about 15 minutes. The most notable features are its “church mouse quiet” 14dba power supply, TV-Out (SVideo and composite), component video, DVI and VGA out, and hardware MPEG support(XvMC). The company also supports and engages the Linux community through its sponsorship program. It is sponsoring knoppmyth and the Debian User Project and makes the mechanical drawings of its face plates available under the GPL.”
Diggnation at the TikiBar, Diggnation models / Diggnation shirt spotted in an IBM ad., Digg Trademark fun, Google to Allow Free Downloads of Books, iTunes 6 Cracked, 1.2 Million Flickr Photos Geotagged, Laptop Laser Engraving, Google Office Biz Suite Site Debuts
Filed under: PC, Driving, Simulations, Video, Machinima
Sorry, but there’s just no way we can’t post this one because this video certainly deserves all the attention it can get. Set to Moby’s Flower, 1K Project II is the result of 1,000 cars combined together in Trackmania. We’re sure you’ll end up watching this thing a few times just to soak it all in. Kudos to whoever put this together.
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This one is the Mike Gottfried/Paul Maguire/Gary Thorne hatred edition. And we’re wrapping this up for the day. Many many thanks. I think it’s been a success.
The announcer just said Akron QB…
The Houston Texans placed running back Domanick Davis on injured reserve Saturday, ending his 2006 season.
Larsonist writes to tell us that even though AMD’s new architecture wont be released until mid-2007 they are still letting people in on what some of the new features will be. From the article: “While clock speeds have not been revealed, each of the four cores will integrate 64 KB L1 Cache and 512 KB L2 cache. The native quad-core architecture will also include a 2 MB shared L3 cache, which may increase in capacity over time. The processor will have a total of four Hypertransport links - up from three today - that provide a total bandwidth to outside devices of 5.2 GB/s. AMD is also thinking about integrating support for FB-DIMMs “when appropriate.”
Veteran receiver Todd Pinkston became the latest former Eagle to come to Minnesota when he signed a contract with the Vikings on Saturday.
Visit ESPN.com for the complete story.
• Tennis. US Open, Men’s @ Women’s, Third Round. Or, whatever they decide to show in the event of a rain delay. 7:00, USA.
• College Football. BYU @ Arizona. Get ready for some hot…
BAGHDAD (Reuters) - A much-anticipated ceremony to transfer operational command from U.S-led forces to Iraq’s new army was postponed on Saturday at the last minute amid confusion, a U.S. military spokesman said, citing poor planning. [Reuters]
Filed under: Culture
Our readers amaze us. In responding to our post about the “perfect” game enemy, reader Brad Lee diagnosed the ailment that afflicts game designers who insist on using the same old slobbering, ugly Zombie-Alien-Nazi enemies. Here’s Brad’s post, edited for brevity:
The problem is that games are still stuck in the ‘Romantic’ era. Too many video game developers look to romanticism for inspiration. (Romanticism was an artistic movement that emphasized exaggeration, emotion, nature, tradition, etc.) In Romanticism, an artist who wants to convey an emotion such as sadness uses dark colors. If he wants to convey evil, he makes the subject ugly. And so on.
Games use this art style simply because it’s easier. There are a lot of costs to produce a video game — graphics and game engine being the most expensive — and I’m sure story and characters are probably a lower priority than other aspects of video games. Keep in mind that most games’ stories are not produced by professional writers (or good writers anyway), so it is simply easier to use romanticism than try and craft a realistic story with [realistic] characters.
It is much easier to make a story about demons rampaging through the world (and only one guy — you! — can stop them) than to create a story about real people just struggling to do the right thing. Many game developers just don’t know any better because they don’t bother to take creative writing classes or to learn how to craft a good story. Many think they shouldn’t have to [learn these things] simply because they are focused on the game and not the story or the characters.
Game developers are likely game developers because they love games, not because they love great stories. When those developers aren’t working they are likely spending their time playing other games. If developers took some time to read [and analyze] good literature and watch classic movies we would probably have better stories and characters in our games. Until that happens, I’ll be expecting to slaughter many more hordes of zombies, nazis, demons, and aliens in the years to come.
Any game designers out there care to post a rebuttal or confirmation? Are Brad’s charges accurate? From where we sit, it seems he’s nailed it.
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