ZeniMax, the owner of game studios Bethestha Softworks and id Software has been awarded $500 million by a jury in its lawsuit against Oculus Virtual Reality and its parent company, Facebook. Read more…
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ZeniMax Awarded a Half Billion in Lawsuit Against Facebook
Ubiquitous in many classrooms since the 19th century, chalk and chalkboards are familiar to most of us. White, powdery and prone to sticking to those surfaces where it is put (and just as easy to wipe away), chalk and its accompanying board are excellent instructional aids. Notably, however, most chalk today isn’t technically chalk at all, but gypsum. Read more…
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Blackboard Chalk Isn’t Really Chalk at All
This is the Fourier Transform. You can thank it for providing the music you stream every day, squeezing down the images you see on the Internet into tiny little JPG files, and even powering your noise-canceling headphones. Here’s how it works. Read more…
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Digital Music Couldn’t Exist Without the Fourier Transform
In the wake of Sony Pictures canceling its release of The Interview , some theaters with actual balls opted to show Team America: World Police as a protest. No such luck, as theaters are now reporting they’ve been told not to show the film by Paramount. It’s a staggering act of cowardice. Read more…
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Paramount Cancels Team America Screenings Because Everyone’s a Coward
darthcamaro writes “Oracle today officially released Java 8, nearly two years after Java 7, and after much delay. The new release includes a number of critical new features, including Lambda expressions and the new Nashorn JavaScript engine. Java 8, however, is still missing at least one critical piece that Java developers have been asking for, for years. ‘It’s a pity that some of the features like Jigsaw were dropped as modularity, runtime dependencies and interoperability are still a huge problem in Java, ‘ James Donelan, vice president of engineering at MuleSoft said. ‘In fact this is the one area where I still think Java has a long way to go.'” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Java 8 Officially Released
Bennett Haselton writes with a bit of online detective work done with a little help from some (internet-distributed) friends: “A website that was temporarily inaccessible on my Comcast Internet connection (but accessible to my friends on other providers) led me to investigate further. Using a perl script, I found a sampling of websites that were inaccessible on Comcast (hostnames not resolving on DNS) but were working on other networks. Then I used Amazon Mechanical Turk to pay volunteers 25 cents apiece to check if they could access the website, and confirmed that (most) Comcast users were blocked from accessing it while users on other providers were not. The number of individual websites similarly inaccessible on Comcast could potentially be in the millions.” Read on for the details. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Crowdsourcing Confirms: Websites Inaccessible on Comcast
angry tapir writes “As the number of top-level domains undergoes explosive growth, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) is studying ways to reduce the risk of traffic intended for internal network destinations ending up on the Internet via the Domain Name System. Proposals in a report produced on behalf of ICANN include preventing .mail, .home and .corp ever being Internet TLDs; allowing the forcible de-delegation of some second-level domains in emergencies; and returning 127.0.53.53 as an IP address in the hopes that sysadmins will flag and Google it.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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ICANN Considers Using ‘127.0.53.53’ To Tackle DNS Namespace Collisions
KingofGnG writes “DICE is a small emulator dedicated to recreating on a modern computer the arcade games based on discrete circuits: ancient and bizarre entertainment machines where the electronic components required for the game experience were soldered individually on the circuit board and where there was no trace of integrated circuit or CPU. It’s an obscure and fascinating kind of emulation, and the offering of emulated games grows richer with each release.” Released a few days ago, DICE 0.8 adds support for four new games: Atari’s Crossfire and Pin Pong, and Ramtek’s Clean Sweep and Wipe Out. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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New Release of DICE, the CPU-Less Arcade Game Emulator, Adds Four Games
New submitter optimus_phil writes “New Scientist magazine reports on findings that suggest that delaying fatherhood may increase the risk of fathering children with disorders such as Apert syndrome, autism and schizophrenia. The article reports that ‘although there is a big increase in risk for many disorders, it’s a big increase in a very small risk. A 40-year-old is about 50 per cent more likely to father an autistic child than a 20-year-old is, for instance, but the overall risk is only about 1 per cent to start with.'” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Delayed Fatherhood May Be Linked To Certain Congenital and Mental Disorders