The Making of a 1980s Dungeons & Dragons Module

An anonymous reader writes: Over at Medium, Jon Peterson (author of Playing at the World) has put up a new in-depth article covering the internal process at TSR that created Dungeons & Dragons modules in the 1980s. The adventures created at that time (by the likes of Tracy Hickman, then a staff designer) paved the way for many later computer role-playing games, and this piece shows how TSR work was pitched, storyboarded, proofed, edited and organized. With the positive reception of the new 5th edition of D&D and the attention paid to the fortieth anniversary of the game, the historical record behind modern gaming gets ever more important. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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The Making of a 1980s Dungeons & Dragons Module

Belize’s "Blue Hole" Reveals Clues To Maya’s Demise

An anonymous reader writes The collapse of the Mayan civilization has been a mystery for decades, but now new research suggests that the blue hole of Belize could provide an answer. Studying minerals from Belize’s famous underwater cave, researchers have discovered that an extreme drought occurred between AD 800 and AD 900, which is when the Mayan civilization collapsed. From the article: “Although the findings aren’t the first to tie a drought to the Mayan culture’s demise, the new results strengthen the case that dry periods were indeed the culprit. That’s because the data come from several spots in a region central to the Mayan heartland, said study co-author André Droxler, an Earth scientist at Rice University.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Belize’s "Blue Hole" Reveals Clues To Maya’s Demise

Know Your Type: Five Mechanical Keyboards Compared

MojoKid writes As a power user, you notice certain things that the average person might not. One of those is the difference between typing on a sweet mechanical keyboard with luxurious key action, versus pounding away on a run-of-the-mill squishy plank that relies on membrane switches to register your keystrokes. The difference may seem subtle to the uninitiated, though even casual typists can recognize that there’s something inherently superior about a mechanical keyboard. Of course, it’s the mechanical key switches that are responsible for elevating the typing experience. These are better than the rubber domes found in membrane keyboards in a number of ways, including feel, responsiveness, and durability. Mechanical keyboards are growing in popularity, as word is spreading about how good they are. In turn, keyboard manufacturers have responded by feeding more mechanical models into what was once a niche market. If you go out in search of a mechanical keyboard, you’ll now find a mountain of options. This roundup further reinforced something we’ve known for a long time, which is that mechanical keyboards are the superior choice for both gaming and daily typing chores. That doesn’t mean they’re all created equal — there are different key switches to choose from, and features vary from one plank to the next. The choice of key switch type is highly subjective but we can say that Cherry MX key switches are indeed of higher quality than knock-offs like the Kailh switch. That’s not to say Kailh switches are bad, just that you can discern a difference when going from one to the other. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Know Your Type: Five Mechanical Keyboards Compared

Proscutors Raid LG Offices Over Alleged Vandalism of Samsung Dishwashers

As reported by Reuters, Korean manufacturing giant LG’s Seoul headquarters have been raided over allegations that LG employees sabotaged dishwashers made by rival Samsung. The Samsung machines were “on display at two stores in September ahead of the IFA electronics show in Berlin.” From the article: On Friday, investigators searched the Seoul offices of LG Elec’s home appliance head, Jo Seong-jin, and others and secured documents and computer hard disks related to the IFA fair, Yonhap News Agency said. They also combed through LG Electronics’ home appliance factory in the southeastern city of Changwon, the report said. … Samsung sued LG Electronics employees after the incident in Germany, and LG said the company has counter-sued Samsung employees on Dec. 12. Media reports have earlier said prosecutors banned LG’s Seong-jin from leaving the country ahead of the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) to be held January 6-9. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Proscutors Raid LG Offices Over Alleged Vandalism of Samsung Dishwashers

Crowds (and Pirates) Flock To ‘The Interview’

Rambo Tribble writes: Many of the 300+ theaters showing The Interview on Christmas were rewarded with sell-out crowds. While reviews of the comedy have been mixed, many movie-goers expressed solidarity with the sentiment of professor Carlos Royal: “I wanted to support the U.S.” Despite sellout crowds, the movie’s limited release meant it only brought in about $1 million on opening day (compared to $10M+ for the highest-grossing films). Curiosity about the film seems high, since hundreds of thousands rushed to torrent the film, and others figured out an extremely easy way to bypass Sony’s DRM. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Crowds (and Pirates) Flock To ‘The Interview’

Rackspace Restored After DDOS Takes Out DNS

An anonymous reader sends word that Rackspace has recovered from a severe distributed denial of service attack. “Over on the company’s Google+ page Rackspace warned of ‘intermittent periods of latency, packet loss, or connectivity failures when attempting to reach rackspace.com or subdomains within rackspace.com.’ The company’s status report later confirmed it had ‘… identified a UDP DDoS attack targeting the DNS servers in our IAD, ORD, and LON data centers [North Virigina, Chicago and London]. As a result of this issue, authoritative DNS resolution for any new request to the DNS servers began to fail in the affected data centers. In order to stabilize the issue, our teams placed the impacted DNS infrastructure behind mitigation services. This service is designed to protect our infrastructure, however, due to the nature of the event, a portion of legitimate traffic to our DNS infrastructure may be inadvertently blocked. Our teams are actively working to mitigate the attack and provide service stability.'” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Rackspace Restored After DDOS Takes Out DNS

Linux 3.19 Kernel To Start 2015 With Many New Features

An anonymous reader writes Linux 3.18 was recently released, thus making Linux 3.19 the version under development as the year comes to a close. Linux 3.19 as the first big kernel update of 2015 is bringing in the new year with many new features: among them are AMDKFD HSA kernel driver, Intel “Skylake” graphics support, Radeon and NVIDIA driver improvements, RAID5/6 improvements for Btrfs, LZ4 compression for SquashFS, better multi-touch support, new input drivers, x86 laptop improvements, etc. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Linux 3.19 Kernel To Start 2015 With Many New Features

Human Eye’s Oscillation Rate Determines Smooth Frame Rate

jones_supa writes: It should be safe to conclude that humans can see frame rates greater than 24 fps. The next question is: why do movies at 48 fps look “video-y, ” and why do movies at 24 fps look “dreamy” and “cinematic.” Why are games more realistic at 60 fps than 30 fps? Simon Cooke from Microsoft (Xbox) Advanced Technology Group has an interesting theory to explain this all. Your eyes oscillate a tiny amount, ranging from 70 to 103 Hz (on average 83.68 Hz). So here’s the hypothesis: The ocular microtremors wiggle the retina, allowing it to sample at approximately 2x the resolution of the sensors. Showing someone pictures that vary at less than half the rate of the oscillation means we’re no longer receiving a signal that changes fast enough to allow the supersampling operation to happen. So we’re throwing away a lot of perceived-motion data, and a lot of detail as well. Some of the detail can be restored with temporal antialiasing and simulating real noise, but ideally Cooke suggests going with a high enough frame rate (over 43 fps) and if possible, a high resolution. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Human Eye’s Oscillation Rate Determines Smooth Frame Rate

Pirate Bay Domain Back Online

Zanadou writes On December 9 The Pirate Bay was raided but despite the rise of various TPB clones and rumors of reincarnations, thepiratebay.se domain remained inaccessible, until today. This morning the Pirate Bay’s nameservers were updated to ones controlled by their domain name registrar binero.se . A few minutes later came another big change when The Pirate Bay’s main domain started pointing to a new IP-address (178.175.135.122) that is connected to a server hosted in Moldova. So far there is not much to see, just a background video of a waving pirate flag (taken from Isohunt.to) and a counter displaying the time elapsed since the December 9 raid. However, the “AES string” looks promising. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Pirate Bay Domain Back Online

Watch This Double Amputee Control Two Robotic Arms At Once

 It’s rare to see the future unfold in front of our eyes this dramatically but here it is: the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Lab has helped a man who lost both his arms in a “freak electrical accident” connect to dual robotic arms by connecting to and reading from his nervous system. The results aren’t quite staggering as he still has limited control over the… Read More

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Watch This Double Amputee Control Two Robotic Arms At Once