doof.com - Meet and Beat at The Online Playground!

Neat new social networking gaming site.

Invasion Tactical Defense - defeat the UFOs that are attacking the Earth

"Your mission in this turret defense game is to defend the Earth from invading UFOs. Aliens are invading our earth and it is up to you to defend an important nuclear factory. Do this by buying cannons, training new defenders and telling them what to do. You also need to make strategic decision about what cannons you buy and what upgrades you make. Use YOUR MOUSE to control all aspects of the game. "

Gamasutra - Game Design Cognition: The Bottom-Up And Top-Down Approaches

"It is often said that there is one single word that ties both ends of the process of designing a game, being its cause and consequence. That word is 'fun'. But just how is it possible to create fun? What drives the creative force inside game designers and developers to define, specify and ultimately implement concepts that are entertaining by nature?"

Indy's 'Crystal Skull': What's The Title Mean? - Movie News Story | MTV Movie News

"He rediscovered love by finding the Ark of the Covenant, redeemed himself by rescuing the Sankara Stones and tasted illumination the second he sipped from the Holy Grail, but what sort of fortune and glory await Indiana Jones in his next adventure, 'Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull'?"

SPOILERS! New Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull Cameo Rumor!

"The one thing everybody knows about the new Indiana Jones adventure is that it deals with aliens. "

ASCII Art's grandfather: Paul Smith - Boing Boing

"Grey sez, 'Paul Smith, born in 1921, with cerebral palsy is probably is one of the first to use ASCII characters to make art. Through the years, he developed techniques to create shadings, colors, and textures that made his work resemble pencil or charcoal drawings."

Slashdot | Discovery Channel's Games Documentary Impresses

"Rock, Paper, Shotgun notes the kickoff of a new Discovery channel series called Rise of the Videogame. Blogger John Walker discusses the show, which just began last week, with an eye towards its research rigor and friendliness to the subject matter."

planet rome.ro: Doom Archaeology

"The Doom source that was released years ago wasn't the nice raw development directory otherwise you would have all seen the NeXTSTEP DoomEd source, Doom map source files, and what I have here: unreleased Doom MIDI files."

Fullbright: Length

"From what I've been told, according to market research, fewer than half the players of any given commercial game make it past the 50% point of the campaign, and the dropoff increases rapidly the further you go. "

Nov. 19: Carnegie Mellon Algorithm Identifies Top 100 Blogs for News - Carnegie Mellon University

"Using a problem-solving method called the Cascades algorithm, Carlos Guestrin, assistant professor of computer science and machine learning, and his students compiled a list of the best 100 blogs to read to find the biggest news on the Web as early as possible, http://www.blogcascades.org/. It includes well-known blogs, such as Instapundit and Boing Boing, but also some more obscure ones like Watcher of Weasels and Don Surber."

Microsoft’s new multicore-computing guru speaks out - Network World

"Supercomputing expert Dan Reed, who saw the birth of the Web browser at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, is joining Microsoft Research as director of scalable and multicore computing."

SocioTown - Massive Multiplayer Online Social Game - - http://www.sociotown.com

"This is the first official trailer of SocioTown. It contains some footage from the previous video clips as well as all new footage. The trailer shows several aspects of the social system such as the Social Network interface and Inner Circle. The trailer also shows the music mode in action."

Steven Poole: Trigger Happier

"As a follow-up to my post on Amazon’s crippled and hideous Kindle, and the discussion at Mark Pilgrim’s place, I thought I’d try an experiment, and give away for free an “ebook” version of my first book, Trigger Happy, with no “digital rights management” whatsoever. It’ll work on anything that can read a PDF."

Gamasutra - Feature: 'Game Feel - The Secret Ingredient'

"However you describe it, it’s hard to deny that the sensation of controlling a digital object is one of the most powerful -- and overlooked -- phenomena ever to emerge from the intersection of people and computers, says Flashbang Studios' Steve Swink. "

Gamasutra - Feature: 'Designing A Next-Gen Game For Sound'

"In this game audio article, sound designer Rob Bridgett (Scarface: The World Is Yours) discusses the key elements of next-gen audio - and just what sounding 'as good as film' means in today's increasingly sophisticated market."

Hammerfall

"Hammerfall is a gorgeous work-in-progress 2D game out of Russia."

Gamasutra - Critical Reception: Nintendo's Super Mario Galaxy

"This week's edition of the regular Critical Reception column examines online reaction to Super Mario Galaxy, the long-awaited Wii entry in Nintendo's flagship franchise that some critics are calling 'an exceptional game by any standard.'"

Gamasutra - Report: Re-Designed Nintendo DS Readied

"Pacific Crest Securities analyst Evan Wilson recently gave his perspective on the state of the industry in preview notes ahead of the holiday season, and said he believes that Nintendo will soon release another redesign of its DS handheld. "

Gamasutra - The History of Atari: 1971-1977

"It’s no small wonder that the simple beauty of a game like Go appealed to the college campus computer hackers of the 1960s. While chess was still very popular, its regimented opening moves and seemingly finite strategies were more in-tune with the “powers that be” than with new movements based on social change. Computer hackers were opening new doors to information that were only dreamed about a decade prior."

Facebook Analytics and Advertising | Adonomics

"Adonomics™, formerly Appaholic, is your source for Facebook analytics. By providing a stock-market-style analysis of the Facebook platform we enable developers and investors to track application growth, activity, and valuation."

Digg - Facebook Applications Trends Report: Analysis of Top 100 Apps

"Looking at these 100 most popular applications a very interesting picture revealed. There are overall 3 categories that these applications can be organised into: Identity formation, Phatic communication and other."

AlterNet: Rights and Liberties: The End of America? Naomi Wolf Thinks It Could Happen

"If you think we are living in scary times, your worst fears may be confirmed by reading Naomi Wolf's newest book, The End of America: Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot. In it, Wolf proves the old axiom that history does repeat itself. Or more accurately, history occurs in patterns, and in order to understand where our country is today and where it is headed, we need to read the history books."

POW editions of Monopoly from WWII included escape kits - Boing Boing

"A Wall Street Journal blogger describes how the UK manufacturer of Monopoly produced special 'loaded' editions of the game for distribution to Allied POWs during WWII, complete with files, escape maps, and real money."

AT&T Invents Programming Language for Mass Surveillance | Threat Level from Wired.com

"From the company that brought you the C programming language comes Hancock, a C variant developed by AT&T researchers to mine gigabytes of the company's telephone and internet records for surveillance purposes."

Technology Review: Terabyte Storage for Cell Phones

"A new type of memory technology could lead to thumb drives or digital-camera memory cards that store a terabyte of information--more than most hard drives hold today. The first examples of the new technology, which could also slash energy consumption by more than 99 percent, could be on the market within 18 months."

Ning - Create your own Social Networks!

"Ning is the only online service where you can create, customize, and share your own Social Network for free in seconds."

MySpace Joins Google Alliance to Counter Facebook - New York Times

"MySpace and Bebo, two of the world’s largest social networking sites, on Thursday joined a Google-led alliance that is promoting a common set of standards for software developers to write programs for social networks."

Technology Review: How to Organize the Web

"Listas is, put simply, about making lists. Users can make their own lists, by either typing in original content or taking clippings from Web pages, or they can read or edit public lists. The lists can include almost any type of content, including images and videos. They can be designated either public or private, and they can be tagged to make them easier to search."

U of M || University News Service || News Releases

"An ongoing study by University of Minnesota researchers has revealed that only one-tenth of 1 percent of Wikipedia editors account for nearly half the content value of the free online encyclopedia, as measured by readership. In addition, the computer science and engineering faculty and students have discovered that few edits inflict damage on the content and damage is typically fixed quickly."

'Suicide nodes' defend networks from within - tech - 01 November 2007 - New Scientist Tech

"A selfless act of destruction – exemplified by the way honeybees die to defend their hive – has inspired a novel way of securing computer networks against malicious hackers. The approach works by giving all the devices on a network – or 'nodes' – the ability to destroy themselves, taking any nearby malevolent device with them. 'Bee stingers are a relatively strong defence mechanism for protecting a hive, but whenever the bee stings, it dies,' says Tyler Moore, a security engineer at the University of Cambridge in the UK."

Computer scientist fights threat of ‘botnets’ (Oct. 31, 2007)

"In a test comparing Nemean against a current technology on the market, both had a high detection rate of malicious signatures — 99.9 percent for Nemean and 99.7 for the comparison technology. However, Nemean had zero false positives, compared to 88,000 generated by the other technology."

Microsoft Puts the 'F' in Functional

"'F# stems from the functional programming tradition [hence the 'f'] and has strong roots in the ML family of languages, though also draws from C#, LINQ and Haskell. F# is designed from the outset to be a first-class citizen on .Net,' Somasegar said. 'This means that F# runs on the CLR, embraces object-oriented programming, and has features to ensure a smooth integration with the .Net Framework.'"

Google scientist to demo quantum computer - ZDNet UK

"During a session at the SC07 supercomputing conference in Reno, Dr Hartmut Neven, a Google specialist in image recognition, will show an image-recognition algorithm running on a device, made by start-up D-Wave Systems, which is claimed to be the first practical quantum computer."

The state of the art in machine conversation: HAL's still pure Hollywood

"Anyone who has followed science fiction will remember the soothing voice of HAL, the computer that methodically killed all but one of the crew of the space ship it controlled. Perhaps the most compelling scene in the movie is the conversation that HAL had with the lone survivor as he inactivated the computer. The scene was notable largely because the conversation seemed so normal; HAL's end of it seemed positively human. A perspective in today's issue of Science takes a look at the prospects of creating computers that can mange this feat, and engage in natural-sounding conversations."

SD Times - Sun's Lively Kernel Comes to Life

"A research project unveiled by Sun Microsystems yesterday has brought back memories of Xerox PARC for one industry veteran. Known as the Lively Kernel, the JavaScript-based operating environment that allows for user interactions resembles those outlined by Alan Kay and others in the 1970s. With heavy Smalltalk influences and a hearty helping of the GPL, this open source project is now available for experimentation."

Jaq Loses Control: Taking the Joy Out of Joy Division � FirstShowing.net

"Once upon a time, in a horribly depressing place called Manchester, England, there was a boy named Ian Curtis. He had a few problems but decided to channel them into his music by singing in a band he dubbed Joy Division. That wasn't enough to keep away his demons, though, and in the end, he hung himself. The end."

Scathing review of the new Control movie, but I thought it wasn't bad.

Mozilla Rolls Out Firefox 3.0 Beta - New York Times

"Mozilla also claimed that it has fixed more than 300 individual memory leaks and added a new cycle collector to eliminate other memory issues. Firefox has a reputation for leaking memory consuming large quantities the longer it's left running, and ultimate slowing down its host computer although some of its developers have contested the claims, and even pegged the problem as one of perception."