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Roborace engineer explains why a driverless racecar drove into a wall
The SIT Acronis Autonomous car was doomed before the start of its fateful lap.
Watch a self-driving Roborace car drive directly into a wall
It's clear robotic racing has some bugs to sort out as a Roborace participant's AI car drove directly into a wall.
Decompress with The Unarchiver
When I was asked to review The Unarchiver 2.7, a free decompression utility from Dag Ågren/WAHa, I thought "Who needs this program, when Mac OS X opens most common archive formats?" I quickly found out that thousands of people rely on The Unarchiver to do tasks that lie beyond the scope of built-in Archive Utility.app found in OS X. First I spoke to a loyal user, Barry Porter, an Apple Consultants Network member from Delray Beach, Fla. He said, "I use it everyday. It's great. I haven't found an archive it can't open. I use it because the built-in program is very limited in what it can create and open. You never need to open the program, it just works in the background unarchiving stuff." That's a glowing recommendation, so I put The Unarchiver to my own test. Back in the old days, it was common practice to archive files by compressing them so that they fit on a floppy disk or CD. If you happen to have saved those files onto a hard drive socked away for safekeeping, today you are hard-pressed to open those files. The Unarchiver can decompress many file types, so rejoice, because you can actually open DiskDoubler, Compact Pro and PackIt files now. I dug up some seriously old files to test The Unarchiver. I found some .sit files from 1994 and The Unarchiver opened them. Oh joy! Anyone need an Macintosh FTP list from 1995? (Curiously though, my search for files created before 1999 found over 1000 files created in 1969. I'm pretty sure that's not right! Must be a backup from a crashed drive... but I digress...) If you use more current formats and various download sites, you may encounter RAR or Tar files. No problem for The Unarchiver there either. If you find bugs or have a problem, Dag Ågren maintains an old-school support board on which you can ask questions. Also included is support for over 29 languages and DOS and Windows formats. To install, you only need to download it from the App Store. The program runs in the background. When you double-click on the application, all you see is the Preferences window. The only time you have to interact with the program is to give it permission to write to a folder, if you want to extract an archive into the same folder in which it lives. If you're curious and want to know exactly how many different archive formats exist, first look at The Unarchiver Supported formats page. Second, take a gander at Wikipedia's "List of archive formats." This handy page explains all of the file extensions used on various platforms for archived and compressed formats. In short, if you need to open archives of any flavor, you can't go wrong installing The Unarchiver. If you like it, you can donate to help Dag Ågren's development efforts for other programs too. Requirements: OS X 10.6.0 or later
Scientists build WiFi hunter-killer drone and call it SkyNET... Viene Tormenta!
You'd think scientists would proscribe certain names for their inventions -- you wouldn't be taken seriously if your supercomputer was called HAL 9000, WOPR or Proteus IV would you? Well, a team from the Stevens Institute of Technology isn't listening, because it's developing an aerial drone and calling it SkyNET. A Linux box, strapped to a Parrot A.R. Drone, can fly within range of your home wireless network and electronically attack it from the air. Whilst internet-only attacks are traceable to some extent, drone attacks are difficult to detect until it's too late -- you'd have to catch it in the act and chase it off with a long-handled pitchfork, or something. The team is working on refining the technology to make it cheaper than the $600 it currently costs and advise that people toughen up their domestic wireless security. We advise they stop pushing us ever closer towards the Robopocalypse.
Microsoft Kinect will work just fine for seated gameplay
One of the major points of confusion related to Microsoft's new controller-less Xbox 360 Kinect gaming system is the perceived lack of seated gameplay, largely driven by those early demos that required a standing player. At the time, Kinect's sensor was keying off the base node located at the bottom of the spine to create its skeletal models. As of a few months ago, Microsoft updated its software libraries to key off the base of the neck, thus avoiding any ambiguity caused by the player's motionless knees or feet obscuring a spine stuffed into the opaque comfort of the living room sofa. At least that's what Blitz Games Studios co-founder and CTO Andrew Oliver told Eurogamer. Unfortunately, the motion-sensing changes for lazy-bone play come too late for Kinect's early November launch titles (burdened with writing their own software for seated play) but "games going forward won't have a problem," says Oliver.
All the World's a Stage: Player housing, interactivity, and other possible features
All the World's a Stage, and all the orcs and humans merely players. They have their stories and their characters; and one player in his time plays many roles. Playing Warhammer recently has made me think of more features that WoW could add in order to create a better roleplaying experience. Far and away the most important one, to my mind, was the Tome of Knowledge. WoW players really need an in-game resource they can refer to as a standard for information about the Warcraft universe, and having this at hand, roleplayers could do a lot better than they can today. Knowledge is the most important thing, of course, but there are other features Blizzard could add to the game that would help roleplayers too. I'd like to address a few of these things, and see how much they could really do for us. Player housing is a possible feature that gets talked about a lot, but I have my doubts as to whether or not it would really help roleplayers all that much. Another issue is one that is more important to me personally, and is another feature inspired by my trial with Warhammer Online: looking at interactivity between characters.
All the World's a Stage: How to roleplay your way to level 70
When you decide to roleplay, a whole new world of imagination opens up to you -- soon you realize that all the World of Warcraft is a stage, and all the orcs and humans merely players.A friend of mine recently complained that lately leveling has been extremely tedious. Even with characters he might feel excited about at first, he eventually gets bored after just a few quests. We talked about this for a little while, and he brought up the fact that if he was going to play WoW by himself he might as well play a single-player game instead. It got me thinking that, in spite of all the demand people have for more solo and casual content, this is significantly better when we play it together. Even when I play by myself, my eye is always on my friends list to see if someone I know is going to show up and chat with me. Thinking about my friend's problem, I thought maybe it would really help if he and I were to go questing together -- so we found the two characters we had with the smallest level gap between them and we decided to go at it. Rather than just just going through the motions of killing the various enemies listed on our little quest sheets as if we were buying groceries or something, we made it into a neat little roleplay experience.In fact, there are lots of quests in the game that are very appropriate for roleplaying. When you get together with your friends to level up and quest together, you can focus on the quest that has the deepest possible connection to your own character, or the one with the most intrinsic storyline. Of course there are many other throwaway quests you can do along the way, like "kill 10 Generic Humanoids" or whatever, but it works best to pick one that seems to have some meaning to you or your character and start there.
BetterZip is a better zip
With zip support built into OS X a third-party compression utility has to bring something special to the table, and BetterZip does. Basically it allows you to open and inspect archives without expanding the whole thing first. This can be useful if you only want a few of the files that are compressed within an archive. It also does compression naturally, including encryption, splitting large archives, and stripping out Mac specific hidden files to make archives more cross-platform..BetterZip supports a bunch of formats which should cover just about anything you'll run into on the net: ZIP, SIT, TAR, GZip, BZip2, RAR, 7-Zip, CPIO, ARJ, LZH/LHA, JAR, WAR, CAB, ISO, CHM, RPM, DEB, NSIS, BIN, HQX, DD. Finally, the developer has also put together a great Quick Look plugin that supports most of the same formats. BetterZip is normally $19.95 and a demo is available but as it happens it's on sale at MacUpdate Promo until Monday evening for half-off ($9.95)
Wii Fanboy poll: How do you get your Wii on?
Seeing this post over at Joystiq got us thinking. We wanted to know how most people played Wii. Would they choose to get up and be active in the game, or do they instead play more traditionally in a sitting position. We then thought we'd ask you all to vote in a poll so we, and you, could see what the majority of Wii Fanboy readers think. How do you get your Wii on? I prefer to keep it OG and sit I stand tall when I get my game on I play riding on the back of the family horse Pepe I don't have a Wii and am contemplating jumping off a bridge Free polls from Pollhost.com
