news 5-11-06

FOR YARIV:
book review: The Game Design Reader Katie Salen from the New School
and Eric Zimmerman of GameLab have put together the "Game Design
Reader" (MIT Press 2006), the first reader specifically about the
design of games.
The editors have gathered an impressive collection of seminal essays
on games and their design. This diverse set of readings include early
academic studies of games and play from the 70s, when very little
research was being done in the area. Writings on video game design
and game play cover early Atari games to Massively Multi-player
Online Role Playing Games (MMORPGs) and everything in between. The
reader itself opens with a series of short essays written by Salen
and Zimmerman, with titles like "Gaming the Game" and "Game Design
Models," each referencing relevant content included in the reader, as
well as a "further reading" list.

http://tinyurl.com/mrpgw

Debugging Essential technological literacy These days debugging is an
necessary life skill. Anything high tech has more ways of failing
than ever before. In this complexity breakage is commonly buried. You
need to be systematic to find a failure point in a system, and to be
certain about it. But debugging skills are not taught anywhere. This
book teaches you how to troubleshoot. It is meant for engineers
debugging computer programs, but the principles of debugging can
easily be applied to any engineered system -- your car, home
plumbing, a new gizmo, old laptop, hi-fi system, or anything with
many moving parts. The book is easy, with lots of war stories. I
learned a lot. Lately I've become the defacto system administrator
for the network of seven computers in our household, and these
principles have upped my success rate in clearing up the inevitable
problems.
What you get: essential technological literacy. -- KK

http://tinyurl.com/qds5z

AND HERE ARE THE RULES IT MENTIONS:

http://www.debuggingrules.com/

THIS KID CAN GO TO ANY COLLEGE HE WANTS:

The daily news so often brings us such doom and gloom about the fate
of people and the planet that it can become overwhelming. We may
think to ourselves, “How can little ole me contribute anything of
worth to improving this morass?” This was the question Ryan Hreljac
asked, when informed of the plight of African families struggling
without access to clean water. Ryan, undaunted by the challenge
before him as a 6 year old school kid, set out to right this wrong.
He persuaded his parents to pay him to do extra chores and finally
came up with the $75 he thought was needed to drill a well. Turns out
that was for a hand pump, a well was more like $2,000. He redoubled
his efforts and some months later presented this money to WaterCan.
They dug a well on his behalf next to a school in Uganda. Impressive,
huh? Not for Ryan it wasn't.

http://tinyurl.com/o52qy

A 4.1 GHz Dual Core at $130?
Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Wednesday May 10, @06:46PM from the power-
on-a-budget dept. joshmo97 writes "Tom's Hardware has found that the
Pentium D 805 runs stable at 4.1 GHz and outperforms Intel and AMD's
flagship offerings in many benchmarks. From the article: 'The Pentium
D 805 is a budget CPU, but it puts lots of processors from AMD and
Intel to shame. Although it is not based on the latest 65 nm core,
this CPU remains stable even when operating at amazing 4.1 GHz. The
Pentium D 805 ascends to the throne as the new King of overclocking,
knocking out the AMD Opteron 144.'"
http://tinyurl.com/p4uxv

A 4.1 GHz Dual Core at $130 - Can it be True?
http://tinyurl.com/ewqrn

Huge GTD Series at Brandon 3.0 There’s a huge wealth of posts at
Brandon 3.0 about Getting Things Done. I like them because it’s a
personal skinning of the popular book by David Allen (we don’t have
to tell you that any more, do we?). Brandon starts us out with a
great question to ask yourself: WHY do GTD? How’s it better than
what you’re doing now?
After that, Brandon covers part 1 of a series in a post entitled
“Collection.” It’s great because it recaps the book, but it adds
Brandon’s voice and thoughts on the matter. I urge you to check it
out.

http://tinyurl.com/m4h78

Rare Mirage Lasts for 4 Hours off East China Shorehttp://
tinyurl.com/kymlq

(JACK WILL YELL AT ME FOR THIS BUT....) I KNEW IT!!!! I said this
was a good idea, i said it was possible and that it SHOULD be done,
and I was told no, it could not be done, not by me and not soon......
and yet here it is at almost the price point I wanted:

iSee 360 Hands On Scenario: A bartender feeds drink after drink to an
ATO employee in order to pry the iSee 360 from his plastered hands.
The result? It’s about as heavy as it looks, but let me tell you the
screen is great. Being a typical geek I asked if it had DivX support
and he said it’s coming soon (firmware upgrade?). The thing is
sweet. The only downside is a 4hr battery life
(according to the rep). Real easy to use. Available now for $249.

http://tinyurl.com/qpnb5

$10M Prize for Hydrogen Fuel Technology WASHINGTON - Scientists,
inventors and entrepreneurs will be able to vie for a grand prize of
$10 million, and smaller prizes reaching millions of dollars, under
House-passed legislation to encourage research into hydrogen as an
alternative fuel. Legislation creating the "H-Prize," modeled after
the privately funded Ansari X Prize that resulted last year in the
first privately developed manned rocket to reach space twice, passed
the House Wednesday on a 416-6 vote. A companion bill is to be
introduced in the Senate this week.

http://tinyurl.com/zz47b

AS I HAVE OFTEN BEEN TOLD... THE MASSES ARE ASSES!

Bird Flu Movie Sparks Panic Calls And Enquiries After watching the
ABC movie ‘Fatal Contact: Bird Flu in America' last night, telephone
helplines from all over the USA have been receiving calls from
anxious viewers. At Medical News Today we have received 112 emails
from people in the USA with questions ranging from ‘How could other
countries be so selfish as to withhold vaccines?' to ‘I woke up with
a temperature and a cough this morning, do you think I may have
caught the bird flu?' As the movie was pure fiction, not a
documentary, and bird flu has not yet arrived in the USA, it baffles
me how people can be angry at other countries or wonder whether they
are infected. Possibly, the movie may have awoken public awareness.
The trouble is, ‘Fatal Contact' depicts such an unlikely scenario
that one wonders what kind of preparations people will now be making
as a result of watching the film. If a group of people next door
start coughing, will people who live in that street rush to the local
supermarket and stock up on vital supplies and medicines? The world
is facing a probable flu pandemic. The H5N1 bird flu virus strain
will probably mutate. However, it will not spread like wildfire the
minute one man flies in from Hong Kong to America and coughs. It is
important that everyone who saw the film realises it was a
dramatization, a piece of fiction - not a documentary. THERE IS NO
BIRD FLU IN THE USA AT PRESENT. THERE IS NO HUMAN FLU PANDEMIC
ANYWHERE IN THE WORLD AT PRESENT.

http://tinyurl.com/rxf3d

Sony, Microsoft about to be bottlenecked by Nintendo WE HAVE TALKED
to a lot of developers here at E3 Halls, mostly over informal drinks.
Several expressed extreme dissatisfaction over the performance shown
by both Sony and Microsoft consoles. The main problem for the
PlayStation 3 console is that it is still in a heavy prototype stage.
And the performance in many cases just isn't there. One of the
reasons offered to us is the actual hardware installed in the
console. Since this generation was all about pricing instead of
technology, those savings are the reason why Crysis and many more
titles will remain PC exclusives, since consoles don't have the
horsepower. Developers have voiced out their disappointment in not
being able to do what they've planned to do.

http://tinyurl.com/ljt5g