trebonian writes "For great old hardware products like the MOS 6502 (used in the Apple II, the C64, the Nintendo NES), the details of the designs have been lost or forgotten. While there have been great efforts to reverse engineer the 6502 from the outside, there has not been the hardware equivalent of the source code — until now. As Russell Cox states: 'A team of three people accumulated a bunch of 6502 chips, applied sulfuric acid to them to strip the casing and expose the actual chips, used a high-resolution photomicroscope to scan the chips, applied computer graphics techniques to build a vector representation of the chip, and finally derived from the vector form what amounts to the circuit diagram of the chip: a list of all 3,510 transistors with inputs, outputs, and what they're connected to. Combining that with a fairly generic (and, as these things go, trivial) "transistor circuit" simulator written in JavaScript and some HTML5 goodness, they created an animated 6502 web page that lets you watch the voltages race around the chip as it executes. For more, see their web site visual6502.org.'"

eldavojohn writes "Republican Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli has requested receipts and research documents relating to nearly half a million dollars in state taxpayer money used to conduct climate change research at the University of Virginia while under direction of Michael Mann, originator of the famous 2001 IPCC Hockey Stick graph depicting rapid climate change. Mann appears to be a prime target for Cuccinelli — who has also requested hearings with the EPA to contest the grounds of their carbon dioxide studies. Mann's expenditures of taxpayer money may become problematic if Cuccinelli finds violations of Virginia's Fraud Against Taxpayers Act. Cuccinelli has been active in pushing conservative views in the past, including an effort to remove the titillating mammary from the beloved Great Seal of Virginia. No end in sight for the politicizing of the science and research surrounding climate change."

FleaPlus writes "On Saturday, SpaceX successfully conducted a launch dress rehearsal and on-pad test firing of their completed Falcon 9 rocket, with the 15-story tall rocket held down to prevent launch (videos). SpaceX is one of several likely competitors (ranging from the upstart Blue Origin to the more experienced Boeing) in NASA's new plans for commercial crew transportation to low-Earth orbit. SpaceX has been cleared by Cape Canaveral for the Falcon 9's first orbital launch next month, carrying a test model of the company's Dragon cargo/crew capsule, although CEO/CTO Elon Musk has cautioned that they're still in the equivalent of 'beta testing' for the first few flights."

SlappingOysters writes "IGN has taken a look at the most impressive middleware solutions for the next generation of gaming, giving a detailed analysis of which engines are performing the best and which have the most exciting futures. It runs through the technical strengths of each engine, as well as how that translates into actual gameplay. It also runs through which software has and will be using each engine."

$luggo writes "Curious about MS Fix It, I recently went hunting in the MS knowledge base for articles that provide the new EZ-button. After locating on few, I decided to click the button to download the Microsoft Installer package containing the executable and/or files that automatically enable the DVD Library feature in Windows Vista Home Premium and Ultimate — on my XP Media Center. 'Surely, MS will use some scripting, HTTP User-Agent sniffing, or even Genuine Windows validation to verify that I am running Vista,' I thought. It did not and I canceled the download when I received the prompt to save the file. So, I wonder: is there a Fix-it for Fix it? Because I can easily imagine someone doing what I did without scrolling to the bottom of the KB article and verifying that the article applies to their OS/version. This is a great example poor design. Why not simply use the download approach that other articles / fixes / service packs use, whereby the user must select the appropriate OS?"

GamerDNA is trying out what they call their Discovery Engine, a system that uses metadata from users to classify games and identify which have similar traits. Massively describes it thus: "Once the gamerDNA community continues to contribute to something like this, it builds up an enormous database of terminology based on actual player knowledge, not just shiny PR words thrown together to promote a game. These search terms can end up being unique to a specific genre, and ultimately lead gamers to exactly the types of games they're looking for." GamerDNA tested the system out on some of the popular MMOs, and they've posted the results. They look at how MMO players identify themselves within the game, how they describe the setting, and what basic descriptive phrases they use in reference to the games.

coondoggie writes "Despite the daily drumbeat of new and improved hardware or software, the tech industry isn't all bits and bytes. Some interesting things happen along the way too. Like floating data centers, space geekonauts, shape shifting robots and weird bedfellows (like Microsoft and Jerry Seinfeld). What we include here is an example of what we thought were the best, slightly off-center stories of 2008."

Edge Magazine is running a story about the development of the real-time strategy genre. They credit Dune II: the Building of a Dynasty with establishing the basic concepts that led to more popular titles like Command & Conquer and the original Warcraft. "[Westwood Studios co-founder Brett] Sperry describes Dune II's core challenge as 'combining combat, exploration and production at a particular pace and rhythm to make it all exciting and almost out of control. That was a key part of what made it so addictive.' Indeed, the experience was quite unlike more staid turnbased strategies, where success or failure rolled in slowly rather than rushing over sand dunes at the speed of an action game. 'You had to think and respond fairly quickly, and in realtime, or else your base and forces would all be overrun. And as we developed the game further, it became clearer how the pacing and battle scenario design were all a delicate balance.'"

theodp writes "Barack Obama supporters were left shaking their heads after a report surfaced that the president-elect was using a Zune at the gym instead of an iPod. So why would Mac-user Obama be Zune-ing out? Could be one of those special-edition preloaded Zunes that Microsoft bestowed on Democratic National Convention attendees, suggests TechFlash, nixing the idea that the soon-to-be Leader of the Free World would waste time loading Parallels or Boot Camp in OS X just to use a Zune."

jage2 writes "Researchers say they have located the world's oldest stash of marijuana in a tomb in a remote part of China. The cache of cannabis is about 2,700 years old and was clearly 'cultivated for psychoactive purposes,' rather than as fibre for clothing, or as food, says a research paper in the Journal of Experimental Botany. The 789 grams of dried cannabis was buried alongside a light-haired, blue-eyed Caucasian man, likely a shaman of the Gushi culture, near Turpan in northwestern China."