Ghostzapper Has Speed to Burn
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The most brilliant American racehorse in years has labored in relative obscurity until now. But when he runs Saturday in the Breeders&#39; Cup Classic at Lone Star Park, Ghostzapper can demonstrate
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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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In a new blog post Richard Thomas takes a deeper look (well continues his ) at the performance of the Zend_Loader component of the Zend Framework.   When you use Zend_Loader your files are wrapped in conditional statements. These statements prevent APC and all other cache/accelerator programs to have problems properly caching your file. [...] Now here is the catch-22. Depending on the size of your application and how often different classes are used you can run into problems.   His result doesn't have much to do with the component, though - he points out that conditionals of any type can slow things down in an application and that "benchmarking is your friend".
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'Lets av sum fun!!' Gloucestershire Police are investigating a YouTube video which appears to show a Kawasaki ZX10R clocking up an impressive 189mph:â¦
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A flare-up from SunRocket It's a bit like fending off a house fly while you're locked in mortal combat with Godzilla.â¦
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Underpromising in order to overdeliver can't make up for sluggish operating results.
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Jail for thermite attack welder A man snapped speeding by a Gatso in Hyde, Greater Manchester, decided he'd attempt to destroy the evidence by blowing up the offending device with thermite, the BBC reports.â¦
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The popular skinning feature in Nullsoft&#39;s WinAmp media player has left the door wide open for malicious attackers to hijack PCs.
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Tycho:  We grabbed a couple demos yesterday afternoon to see if we were missing anything, specifically Tenchu Z and Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End, and came away with the expected comic materials.  I think Tenchu Z may get explored in a more robust fashion in Monday's strip, but after the loading is complete the demo flashes up one of those screens that is completely grown over with control instructions.  It wasn't even an especially bad one, and there are very, very bad ones, like the one in the demo for StarFire Saga V: Laserion.  It was merely an assault on the mind, paralyzing in its way.
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Microsoft is applying for a patent for an operating system that starts out crippled.  You must pay to do things like take the throttle off network speed, disk access, install drivers, install software, and more.  Trust me, I rarely even visit Groklaw, even if this is my second consecutive blog entry with a link to a Groklaw article. My VarLinux.org readers posted the article, A Brave New Modular World, and I had to share it.
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Tycho: The whole reason I wrote that other post was to link the new article about it at 1up, and I didn't even manage to do that - here you go. In a way, I'm glad I didn't link it before - in the intervening period, a new episode of the 1up show has dropped that has a ton of interview and video material for every part of Episode 2 - including TF2 and Portal. It's the top video on this page. Unbelievably delicious.(CW)TB
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The DRX-710UL-T external DVD burner supports both FireWire 400 and USB 2.0. It ships with Roxio Toast 6 Lite. Double-layer support means users can burn up to 8.5GB of data on a single DVD+R DL disc.
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Simple tool for mass-renaming of files, download of episode lists from TV.com, TVRage or AniDB, analyzing a folder (number of files and total size for each file type), creating and checking of SFV files all in a single executable jar.   What's new in FileBot 1.6: * Episode list searches work much better now (AniDB works again) * Much better handling of lots of files when creating/check sfv files * DnD improvements * Lots of bugfixes
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By Anonymous  ANCIENT TEMPERATURE DROP M
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Ghostzapper stormed to a three length victory in the $4 million Breeders&#39; Cup Classic at Lone Star Park on Saturday to hand owner Frank Stronach a Halloween treat.
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NEW YORK -- Ghostzapper, by a neck. In a thrilling stretchlong duel down the middle of the track, a gallant Ghostzapper held off Saint Liam and won yesterday's $500,000 Woodward Stakes, one of three Grade I races at Belmont Park leading up to the Breeders' Cup Oct. 30.
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Gabe: I had planned on making a couple posts last week but I ended up getting some kind of devil virus. It was the sort of sick where you don't really sleep. You just curl up in the bathroom and hallucinate that wolves are encircling you. I'm feeling better now though.I had wanted to talk about some stuff but I forgot almost all of it during my spirit quest. Let me see if I can remember anything. Sorry if this is sort of scattershot.I did go to the Pokemon Tournament and I ended up taking fourth. It was my first tourney and I was using a pretty crazy deck I'd built just a few days prior. Kiko also went and he took fifth even though we had the same win loss record during the day. They used some special Pokemon math to push me in to the final four and give him fifth. I pretty proud of both of us. It was a new level of competition that we'd never seen before and I think we played really well.If you're a fan of Transformers I highly recommend the new animated series on Cartoon Network. Some people might be turned off by the look but I think it's incredible. It's got a very Teen Titans look which makes sense seeing as it's by the same people. Even in vehicle mode these transformers are expressive and full of character. I read Amulet over the weekend (don't believe the date on his site, it is already in stores) and if you are a fan of comics I suggest you do the same. I don't want to say too much about it. I think that Kazu is one of the most talented individuals working in comics today. With Amulet he has created something timeless. I've collected all your Dickerdoodle pictures and there's some pretty great stuff in there. Give me some time to sort through them and I'll start posting my favorites soon. I'll get Tycho to help me pick a winner and we'll find something cool here in the office as a prize.-Gabe out