Archive for July, 2010

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »

It’s the World’s Strongest, Most Expensive Beer.. Inside a Squirrel!

Friday, July 23rd, 2010

Our old buddies BrewDog have done it again. Not content with winning back the “strongest beer in the world” title last February with its Sink the Bismarck!, they’ve now upped their game with a new brew that is 55 percent alcohol by volume and carries a $765 price tag. It’s called The End of History.

Oh, and did we mention that the bottles come in stuffed animals-like stuffed animals that were once alive? The 12 bottles have been made featuring seven dead stoats (a kind of weasel), four squirrels and one rabbit. James Watt, one of the two guys behind BrewDog, put it better than we ever could: “The impact of The End of History is a perfect conceptual marriage between taxidermy, art and craft brewing.” Just like we’ve all been waiting for!

For those interested in the actual beer, it’s a blond Belgian ale with touches of nettles and juniper berries — and in order to achieve the brain-blasting alcohol content, it had to be created using extreme freezing techniques.

source: http://asylum.com/

Posted in Cool stuff, General | No Comments »

NASA Launches Moonbase Alpha

Wednesday, July 7th, 2010

NASA has given gamers a taste of lunar adventure with release of Moonbase Alpha, an exciting new, free online video game.

The game has single and multiplayer options that allow participants to step into the role of an exploration team member in a futuristic 3-D lunar settlement. Players must work to restore critical systems and oxygen flow after a meteor strike cripples a solar array and life support equipment. Available resources include an interactive command center, lunar rover, mobile robotic repair units and a fully-stocked equipment shed.

The game is a proof of concept to show how NASA content can be combined with a cutting-edge game engine to inspire, engage and educate students about agency technologies, job opportunities and the future of space exploration. Moonbase Alpha is rated “E” for everyone.

It is the first game in NASA’s Learning Technologies project. The project supports the delivery of NASA content through interactive technologies such as virtual worlds, games and software applications to enhance science, technology, engineering and mathematics, or STEM, education.

Moonbase Alpha is a precursor to a planned NASA-based massively, multiplayer online game project. The project is being designed to have content and missions that require players to gain and demonstrate STEM knowledge to succeed.

NASA released the game on Valve’s Steam network. The agency will use the Steamworks suite of services for server browsing, leaderboards, statistics and more. Steam has more than 25 million accounts and has released more than 1,100 games. It was built on Epic Games’ Unreal Engine 3.The Army Game Studio developed the game with support from Virtual Heroes, a division of Applied Research Associates in Research Triangle Park, N.C. This collaboration between NASA and the Army’s Aviation Missile Research Development and Engineering Center is an example of government agencies working together to improve education in the STEM fields.

For more information about Moonbase Alpha, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/moonbasealpha

To download the game for FREE from Steam click here

Posted in Cool stuff, Games, Software | No Comments »

Firefox 4 Beta 1 is out

Wednesday, July 7th, 2010

From the Mozilla Blog:

Today we’re releasing the first beta-quality version of Firefox 4, which starts us down the path to a final release of Firefox 4. We’re handling this beta differently than we’ve done other releases. In previous betas we’ve made milestone-like releases. For this beta we’ll be making more frequent updates during the beta program. So if you download the beta build and run it you’ll likely get updates every two to three weeks, instead of a couple of months apart. We believe that this will give us the ability to reply to people’s feedback quickly and get fixes and changes tested earlier. This, in turn, will mean we’ll be able to release a much higher quality browser as a result.

Performance

Firefox 4 contains a large number of performance improvements over Firefox 3.6. As a web developer you’re likely to notice big improvements in overall performance.

DOM and Style Performance – We’ve made huge improvements in our DOM and style resolution engine, meaning that pages that have complex CSS rules and selector matching will generally work faster and better. (On some tests in the Zimbra performance test suite we’ve seen a solid 2x improvement.)

Reduced IO in the page load path – One big area where we’ve made huge improvements in Firefox 4 vs. 3.6 is the removal of tons of I/O from the main UI thread. This means making sure that when we do history look-ups for coloring links based on browser history, that those look-ups are done off the main thread, to making sure that we’re not synchronously writing data to the HTTP cache on the main thread. This alone has improved the overall feel of the browser more than anything else.

JavaScript – The JavaScript engine is much faster as well, although beta 1 does not include the new JägerMonkey work. That work is well underway and will be landing through the beta process, and is already showing positive results.

The full article can be found here

Download Now

Posted in General, Web development | No Comments »

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »