Posts Tagged ‘Feature’

Feature: Game over—how sanctions and violence doomed Syria’s gaming industry

Posted on May 6th, 2012 • Filed under Learn • No Comments

“Life for Syrian game developers has never been better,” joked Falafel Games founder Radwan Kasmiya in an e-mail to Ars Technica. “You can test the action on the streets and get back to your desktop to script it on your keyboard.”

Kasmiya’s icy humor hides a sobering truth about the troubles faced by Syria’s once-promising game development industry. The country once looked like a future technology hub, with its centralized location among the Middle East and North African (MENA) countries allowing it to easily draw programming and engineering talent from Turkey, Iraq, Iran, Jordan, Lebanon and Egypt. But that promise has been effectively squashed, first by global economic sanctions and then by more than a year of bloody civil conflict.

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Feature: 1859′s “Great Auroral Storm”—the week the Sun touched the earth

Posted on May 2nd, 2012 • Filed under Learn • No Comments

Noon approached on September 1, 1859, and British astronomer Richard Christopher Carrington was busy with his favorite pastime: tracking sunspots, those huge regions of the star darkened by shifts in its magnetic field. He projected the Sun’s image from his viewing device onto a plate of glass stained a “pale straw colour,” which gave him a picture of the fiery globe one inch shy of a foot in diameter.

The morning’s work went as normal. Carrington patiently counted and charted spots, time-lining changes in their positions with a chronometer. Then he saw something unusual.

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Feature: Windows 8 on the desktop—an awkward hybrid

Posted on April 24th, 2012 • Filed under Learn • No Comments

Windows 8′s new user interface has proven nothing short of polarizing. The hybrid operating system pairs a new GUI concept, the touch-friendly Metro interface, to the traditional windows, icons, menus, and pointer concept that Windows users have depended on for decades. In so doing, it removes Windows mainstays such as the Start button and Start menu.

While few are concerned about Windows 8′s usability as a tablet operating system, desktop users remain wary. Will the new operating system take a huge step back in terms of both productivity and usability? Specific concerns voiced in our forums have included the mandated fullscreen view and a lack of resizable windows, the tight restrictions on what applications are permitted to do, and the automatic termination of background applications.

The good news is that these specific criticisms are largely off-base. Windows 8 includes a full desktop with all the applications and behavior that you expect a Windows desktop to include. This means full multitasking (no background suspension or termination), full system access (to the extent that your user permissions allow), resizable non-maximized windows, Aero snap, pinned taskbar icons, alt-tab—it’s all still there and it all still works. 

The bad news is that the various pieces of the operating system do not in fact mesh together smoothly; the seams, especially between the Metro and legacy interfaces, remain obvious and jarring. For desktop users, the experience remains decidedly mixed.

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Feature: Vote Pirate! Notes from a Pirate Party conference

Posted on April 8th, 2012 • Filed under Learn • No Comments

“If robots had a religion, I think this would be it,” said Lauren
Pespisa, an official member of both the Pirate Party and the “church” of
Kopimism.

Using a projector propped up on top of a box of plastic cutlery, the
24-year-old Web developer described the one true faith of those who take file sharing seriously—very seriously. A crowd of several dozen had gathered on March 10 in Cambridge, Massachusetts for the first ever state-level Pirate Party conference in the US, and Pespisa was one of the speakers.

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