Doing time in &quot;Lockup&quot; a dangerous proposition
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Chances are, field crews  working on most reality shows don&#39;t continually put their lives  -- or their subjects&#39; -- in as much danger as the people behind  MSNBC&#39;s documentary series &quot;Lockup.&quot;
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System latency can mean losses for stock traders and virtual death for online gamers. The developer of the EVE Online game hopes high-performance computing tools can save the day for its players.
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Blog: Some developers must have too much time on their hands
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I love overclockers - I don&#39;t know if it&#39;s the nerves of steel needed to run components so far beyond their factory specifications that they need to be refrigerated, or the glowing water cooling pipes they use, or it might even be the UV lamps and dodgy
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By Tom Angleberger   tomangleberger@yahoo.com
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Run rate is a fine but dangerous tool.
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Tycho:  We never sit down with the firm intention of making another Bioshock comic - indeed, we intend the opposite - but somehow Bioshock comics continue to be written.  One day, science will pierce these mysteries.  Until then, you'll simply have to endure more strips regarding interactive storytelling's electronic opus.  My recovery from this weekend's rigors would be quite accelerated if I were not up until two or more every night, which is to say morning, hacking and slashing my way through the new releases like some malarial jungle guide.  I put Bioshock to bed last night, and theoretically this should be cause for joy, but I suppose it's like finishing a pie.  There is a whiff of accomplishment, semisweet - but the pie is gone.  Without pause, I slapped the input stud on the video switcher before the final cinema faded to black.  Hurling the gamepad into a knitting basket, I dug deep into the faultlines of the couch, producing a wiimote/nunchuk pair.  I've now played enough of Metroid Prime 3 to know that they've washed the filth of Red Steel completely from the system.  For awhile, I was doing that thing we sometimes do, playing until "the next savepoint," which so frequently becomes "until the savepoint after that," only to meld seamlessly into "until I can no longer see."  They've been spinning the tumbler at Retro for awhile on this one, trying to define first person on Nintendo's weird little chimera, and they've drilled down with enough diligence to find it.  No doubt some measure of the enthusiasm directed toward the game is due to the fact that people are actually using their Wii again, but that shouldn't diminish what they've done.    People have seen Corruption for a couple years, now, builds that bubbled up at different press events, and it's been slightly different each time.  I think they've moved some of the interactions since I last played it - things that were mapped to the nunchuck's gyro before are now handled by the wiimote's pointing device, and I understand why.  Gestures are a very immersive, intuitive means of interaction, but when they fail (or when they fail to express us correctly) they are Goddamned infuriating.  In a case when your hand is actually "present" in the simulation - such as when your left hand is pulling, then twisting, then pushing forward - those motions need to be as authentic as possible.  They must have chosen the perfect translation of the pointing device over the more "correct" left hand interaction.  It creates situations where you are using a different hand than your character, but because the motion is really one to one it still feels pretty good.    That's the long way of saying what you could learn in five minutes, sitting in front of it.  This entire exercise has only stoked my ardor.  It is my intention to begin playing this game at ten, and continue doing so until light begins to creep under the curtains.
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Tycho:  After seeing Chore Wars mentioned yesterday, the opportunities for manipulating people seemed...  rich.  The possibilities for mashups based on this data are also rich - I wonder if it could be exposed, somehow.  When my charge is old enough to manipulate in this way, my crib is going to fucking sparkle.
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Make the most of 15 minutes and avoid ugly sock piles.
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You may have heard by now that the Michigan Republican Party has called for my arrest. That&#39;s right. They literally want me brought up on charges -- and hope that I&#39;m locked up.
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Tycho:  There's a new Alternate Reality Game spinning up for Halo 3, God Damn them - God Damn them to hell.  I know perfectly well that I am being subjugated by a sophisticated marketing effort, that the best one can accomplish in these games is to get a real good look at the teeth before the mouth closes around you.  I type this even as the rabbit holes stand open in two other windows.  I don't presume to speak for the entire species, but there is something about secrets that does bit the mind.
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Get exploited on time The world of multi-core cpus we have just entered is facing a serious threat.â¦
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The European Union head office this week proposed redefining how working hours are counted under the bloc&#39;s maximum 48-hour workweek law and stopping companies in Britain from abusing an &quot;opt-out&quot; to the law.
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Dating, negotiating, fragging and making money.  Play and its consequences.
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Forget safeguarding hazardous waste -- can nuclear plant guards even stay awake?
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Tycho:  In case you are wondering, cats apparently need regular maintenance, like cars.  And, like an oil change, this juicing process can be done (I'm told) at home, preferably with the curtains drawn and a couple inches of sawdust laid down.  That's right: you can wring out your own cat's asshole.  This is the kind of helpful information you can expect when you visit Penny Arcade.  Don't everybody run home at once.    I've been playing a lot of Prism on the DS, even though the Zelda cartridge seems to squeal as I remove it.  I understand there's some kind of Ghost Ship?  I forget all of my cares, and also the cares of Princess Zelda, once those beams begin to refract.    They've ginned up some ridonculous crap about light eating space monsters to support their gameplay, which is very solid, and requires no extraterrestrial photophiles.  It's a puzzle game.  When I put pieces of a puzzle together, I never think about how alone each piece must feel, longing only to congregate with similarly knobbed partial images.  So, discard that.  Discard also the truly nasty presentation, no doubt a result of hard time done in already the Mobile and PC Casual markets.  Part these imperfections like tall savannah grass, and gaze into the game's rich core:  the creation of sometimes very complex circuits.     Inside each puzzle grid, the player is given some combination of Light Emitting Entities, Reflective Mirrors, Splitters, or Prisms.  You must jigger the aforementioned until light of the correct colors is distributed to targets around the edge of the field.  That's it, and the fun comes from how complicated this process can become.  There are quite a few cooperative puzzles as well - where each player has access to half the grid, and they must work together to route everything.  If you try this mode - and I request that you do so, as you only need one (1) cartridge and a willing accomplice - I recommend that you each turn your DS sideways, so that the UI is along the bottom.  That will make it so that "left" and "right" and "up" and "down" all mean the same thing to each of you.  Trust me, you want this.  The game is hard enough without the horror of fully relative terms.    Prism actually taught me something fairly significant about why I play games, and I think it's because the gameplay is so clean and the presentation so spartan that I could pick up on it.  I like games that generate communication.  This is why team-based shooters, roleplaying games, and tactical games are my delight - every one of these entails a suite of custom language to describe it, they require constant dialogue, and, most importantly, all other things being equal these games can be won by the efficient use of language.  Working out puzzles together in Prism has a strong logic component, but in large part the challenge was communicating ethereal notions succinctly.    I suppose this is also why I torment you here, thrice weekly: even when playing a game by myself, I am harvesting the experience so that it may be reconstituted here.  So, thank you for reading.  You dignify my leisure hours.          The Playstation 3 in the office has been more than acceptable for playing the sometimes short, often bad games that have arrived on it - but this holiday, with the titles to prove out the claim, I had to "get mine" in the bawdy parlance of the young.  What tipped my hand wasn't the four hundred dollar system on offer, rather, it was the three hundred and seventy nine dollar model.  These are probably mostly a mail order proposition, but any of those rare twenty gig models the platform launched with got bumped down by the new price.  It's inexpensive by PS3 standards, but it's positively cheap for a Blu-Ray device.  Now fully franchised, flexing all the rich benefits of Sony citizenship, you may expect me to be even more brutal in my critique.
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The complicated etiquette of saying "Get lost" online.