Rising out of the rich soil sprouts Gardening Mama, a new Nintendo DS(TM) gardening simulation that was announced today by Majesco Entertainment Company (Nasdaq: COOL), an innovative provider of video games for the mass market. Developed by Cooking Mama Limited, the team that created the award-winning Cooking Mama franchise that has sold 2.5 million units domestically, Gardening Mama brings back the beloved matron to cultivate a cornucopia of fruits, flowers and vegetables in her backyard.

"Mama has become a certifiable iconsince her original introduction in Cooking Mama DS," said Jesse Sutton, Chief Executive Officer, Majesco. "Her first brand offshoot captures those features that made the Cooking Mama series a best seller -- an innovative concept, full Touch Screen control, approachable gameplay for everyone and, of course, a charismatic mentor who pushes you in her own endearing way to give a gold medal performance every time."

Gardening Mama transforms the DS stylus into a universal gardening tool that players will use to plant, nurture and harvest flowers, fruits and vegetables. Gamers can manage their garden through the seeding, blooming and maturation phases, and then produce items from the plants they've grown (i.e. grow strawberries to make jam or raise pumpkins and then carve a jack-'o-lantern). A robust multiplayer mode lets up to four friends compete to grow the biggest harvest and Treasure Box mode lets players share items they've grown with online friends. Gamers can also decorate various gardens while creating goods like pergolas and hanging baskets. In addition, players can change Mama's outfit to their liking while customizing the screen design to their preference.

Just as millions of players enjoyed slicing and dicing with Mama in the kitchen, they can now move to the great outdoors -- planting, pruning, picking, and creating -- in Gardening Mama!

Gardening Mama for DS is expected to release in Spring 2009. For additional information about Majesco's exciting line of products, please visit www.majescoentertainment.com.

centerobject width="425" height="344"param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/4qxWGr8VhzQcolor1=0xb1b1b1color2=0xcfcfcfhl=enfeature=player_embeddedfs=1"/paramparam name="allowFullScreen" value="true"/paramembed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/4qxWGr8VhzQcolor1=0xb1b1b1color2=0xcfcfcfhl=enfeature=player_embeddedfs=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="344"/embed/object/center centeriVideo: Yip Yip aliens discover a radio (via a href="http://blog.free103point9.org/newsroom.html"free103point9's blog/a)/i/centerbr / pLots of radio-related activity this week. Art collective a href="http://www.finishing-school.net/"Finishing School/a will, um, finish their three-month residency at MOCA on Thursday with their project a href="http://www.moca.org/party/"iFinding Joy/i/a. The title "finding joy" is a military term for establishing radio contact in battle. In preparation for this one night event, Finishing School conducted and prerecorded a series of interviews in which interviewees discuss what brings them joy. Part workshop and part treasure hunt, participants will be asked to build small DIY radios in order to pick up transmissions of these interviews, which are dispersed throughout the museum. The public is also invited to call in and share their thoughts about joy, and Finishing School have set up a a href="http://www.moca.org/party/?p=301""Finding Joy Hotline"/a for this purpose. /p pNew York-area freeform radio station a href="http://wfmu.org/"WFMU/a is what brings me joy, and beginning this weekend WFMU will hold a a href="http://printedmatter.org/news/news.cfm?article_id=389email=cookie1=F88B5307-1C42-ECEB-78664196F01692A6"benefit art sale/a at a href="http://printedmatter.org/"Printed Matter/a, accompanied by an a href="http://art.wfmu.org/"online auction/a as well. This is their 50th year in operation, and most listeners will agree, WFMU have long standing commitment to supporting and covering the arts. Tauba Auerbach, Olaf Breuning, Mike Kelley, Christian Marclay, Richard Prince, Gelitin, Swoon are only a few of the artists auctioning work, which is "priced to sell."/pimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/rhizome-fp/~4/472700300" height="1" width="1"/

Here’s some rough notes on Chris Klaus’ keynote this morning. Seems to me like he’s almost pitching Metaplace. It’s nice to see industry leaders all pushing in the same direction.

Chris Klaus, Kaneva

Virtual worlds have been one of the more exciting segments for everyone here. I tried to write a videogame when I was a kid, ended up in security instead. Now I want to help change the world by enabling kids with the tools that we are seeing, and with games and vws we can do that.

Wanted to talk at a high level about main themes we are seeing in the industry. We are seeing patterns, divergence emerging. Some are entertainment, some are more serious and business oriented. Also will talk a bit about Kaneva.

Opportunity: 80% of Internet will engage in a VW by 2011 — Gartner. Consumer need: entertainment, connect me, enable me to express creativity and individuality, in an immersive 3d environment that is easy. Business need: engage with customers where they spend time, in our own space, without needing to develop tech from scratch.

8bn market for VW goods by 2018
addressable market 50-60m
Convergence with social networks.

#1. watch 3d TV with friends and other stuff around rich media within a virtual world.

#2. Target community. Very different from world to world. Long term we will see VWs move to niche communities.

#3. Brand safe environments. A success criterion is whether there are self-policing mechanisms.

#4. Does your brand fit the world? It doesn’t make sense to have a MCD’s logo tattooed to a dragon. To fit in brands, the easiest world to build is a modern day one.

#5. Real time engagement — webcasts into the world, like interviews with TV cast members, stuff where you can see an engagement. Not just in world — Twitter, videocams, etc.

#6. Rewards and incentives, something lacking in most of the worlds to date. The games do it well, but it is a missed opportunity in virtual worlds — builders are rewarded but what about everyone else? Look to games for models: level progression, badges, leaderboards and ranking, etc more.

#7. Fun & casual games. Dancing, treasure hunts, trivia, card games, etc — icebreakers. and allow the community to make them! And tie them into the reward system.

#8. Hollywood at home. Augment reality, mirror events in real time. there was the Screen Actors Guild awards show, and we did a simulation of the red carpet, etc. Represent patterns people are familiar with, people want to be in them. Mirror worlds, traveling to LA, NYC, Shanghai…

#9. encourage creativity. The tools right now are too complex for this. But new paradigms are coming — and around all kinds of digital content, not just 3d assets. Music festivals, etc.

#10. Package the experience. Starbucks provides a reliable experience everywhere in the world. VWs don’t do this yet.

About Kaneva: Latin for “canvas.” Want to be a hub to lots of creative experiences. STAR System: Synthetic Theme-based Augmented Reality. Allowing partners to have their own STARs.

The British Academy of Film and Television Arts has started videotaping its events and a href="http://bafta.org/learning/webcasts/"making them available online/a. Highlights include in-depth video interviews with a href="http://bafta.org/learning/webcasts/a-life-in-pictures-guillermo-del-toro,466,BA.html"Guillermo Del Toro/a, a href="http://bafta.org/learning/webcasts/a-life-in-pictures-mike-leigh,433,BA.html"Mike Leigh/a, a href="http://bafta.org/learning/webcasts/a-life-in-pictures-anthony-minghella,291,BA.html"Anthony Minghella/a, and a href="http://bafta.org/learning/webcasts/a-life-in-pictures-the-coen-brothers,212,BA.html"the Coen brothers/a, as well as a lecture by a href="http://bafta.org/awards/video-games/will-wright-video-games-lecture-in-2007,254,BA.html"Will Wright/a. If that's not enough, BAFTA's a href="http://bafta.org/archive/"online archives/a include treasures like a href="http://bafta.org/archive/david-lean/lawrence-of-arabia-journal,8,BAA.html"this 1962 Academy publication/a on the making of Lawrence of Arabia. br /

Many game downloads are 100% safe and free of viruses. We can quickly download games to play now or later, even if we are offline. With downloadable games ranging from Little Shop of Treasures to Poker Pop to Sally's Spa GameHouse has games for everyone in the family.
----------

Adam

Internet marketing

What we know about Joakim's new game (pictured above):
- it is called "Solar Plexus"
- not about punching people in the stomach
- a 2D platformer with puzzle elements involving blocks
- uses the mouse as one of the control inputs
- small stages
- has a world map
- the main character is a woman in a suit
- 640x480 resolution (Noitu Love 2 is 320x240)
- most of the graphics in the game are drawn by hand
- expect awesome boss fights
Konjak's new site
IGF information page



Barely two months after releasing Treasure Hunter Man, Bernie is now hard at work on a new RPG.



Screenshots from messhof's Ghost Forest and Terror Bikes posted. Also announced: two separate games from cactus and messhof to be released this Friday (December 5th) - developed individually, but originally based on the same design concept.


A new game from Andreas Zecher, developer of the Understanding Games series.


More...

!-- pageType= magazinewide slug= ff_diamonds section= science subsection= planetearth headline= How a Rogue Geologist Discovered a Diamond Trove in the Canadian Arctic authorName= Carl Hoffman creditType= photo credit= Andrew Hetherington caption= Diamond hunter Chuck Fipke with maps of potential new discoveries. -- pBehind an unmarked door in a faded business park outside Kelowna, British Columbia, in a maze of rooms crowded with desks, computers, and floor-to-ceiling shelves, Chuck Fipke sifts through 20-pound bags of dirt./p p"We take samples, hey, from gravel and streambeds all over the world," Fipke says. He sieves the earth, runs it through magnetic drums and centrifuges and electromagnetic separators. Then his technicians, working with scanning electron microscopes, separate out grains and mount them on postage-stamp-sized squares of epoxy. It's painstaking work but worth the trouble. Fipke has learned to understand those grains of dirt, and that understanding has led him to diamonds./p pEighteen years ago, there was no such thing as a Canadian diamond mdash; as far as anyone knew. Diamonds came mostly from Australia, Botswana, South Africa, Namibia, and Russia. De Beers mined 75 percent of the world's output, much of it tainted by controversial "a href="http://www.un.org/peace/africa/Diamond.html"blood diamonds/a," sold to fund African wars./p div id="embed" div id="pic"img src="http://www.wired.com/images/article/magazine/1612/ff_ice2_f.jpg" alt="" / div id="caption"Stones from the Ekati Mine.br / emPhoto: Andrew Hetherington/em/div /div /div pToday, Canada is the world's third-largest producer, by value, of rough stones. In the Northwest Territories, a href="http://www.bhpbilliton.com/"BHP Billiton/a's Ekati a href="http://www.bhpbilliton.com/bb/ourBusinesses/diamondsSpecialtyProducts/ekatiDiamondMine.jsp"mine/a has been producing since 1998 and Rio Tinto's a href="http://www.diavik.ca/"Diavik mine/a since 2003. De Beers opened its first Canadian mine, at Snap Lake, in July mdash; a confirmation that Canada is the new center of the world./p pThe story behind the addition of Canada to the ranks of diamond-producing nations leads back to one man: a short, absentminded Canadian geologist named Chuck Fipke. When he discovered diamonds in a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lac_de_Gras"Lac de Gras/a, Northwest Territories, in 1991, he started the largest staking rush in North America since a href="http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history.do?action=Articleid=4614"George Carmack/a found gold in the Klondike a century earlier. And he's not finished: He's prospecting around the world, toting gravel samples back to his lab in British Columbia to figure out where to look for his next big strike./p pstrongIn 1970, fresh out of/strong the University of British Columbia with a degree in geology, Chuck Fipke signed on with mining company a href="http://www.kennecott.com/"Kennecott Copper/a to look for gold and copper in Papua New Guinea. A helicopter would drop him off alone in the middle of a jungle, and pick him up at the end of the day. The terrain was so rough that the chopper often couldn't land mdash; Fipke would just leap out as it hovered close to the ground. One day he turned around to face 20 locals, arrows strung. He raised his arms, slowly removed his vest, and offered it to "the one who looked like the chief." By the time the helo returned for him, Fipke was in his underpants clutching a fine array of tribal shields, bows and arrows, and fetishes. "I've got an amazing collection of stuff!" he says./p pFipke is a small man with a shaved head, a burnished tan, piercing blue eyes, and forearms like Popeye's. As a kid, his frantic start-stop mind made people think he was stupid. After getting his high school girlfriend pregnant, he agreed to marry her ... and then failed to show up for the wedding. (The couple eventually married after the baby was born.) He stutters and says "hey" in almost every sentence. He frequently loses his glasses and his keys, shows up late to appointments, and has a history of spending prodigious amounts of money in strip joints. His nicknames have included Captain Chaos and Stumpy./p pAfter stints in the Amazon, Australia, and South Africa, Fipke opened a mineral separation laboratory in British Columbia in 1977. A year later, a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superior_Oil_Company"Superior Oil/a hired him to go back into the field mdash; to look not for metals but gems./p !-- pagebreak -- div class="wide_img"img src="http://www.wired.com/images/article/magazine/1612/ff_ice3_f.jpg" alt="" div class="wide_caption"div class="wide_caption_txt"The wilderness around Snap Lake, in Canada's Northwest Territories, conceals a trove of diamonds.br / emPhoto: Andrew Hetherington/em/div/div/div br/br/ pThe company already had a search method. A couple of years prior, a geologist named a href="http://web.uct.ac.za/depts/geolsci/people/staff/johng.htm"John Gurney/a, working with Superior's money at the University of Cape Town, hypothesized that certain common minerals might reliably form alongside diamonds. He used an electron microprobe to analyze geological structures called a href="http://www.amnh.org/exhibitions/diamonds/kimberlite.html"kimberlite pipes/a mdash; the places you occasionally (but not often) find diamonds mdash; and discovered that the presence of chromite, ilmenite, and high-chrome, low-calcium garnet did indeed predict a rich strike. He examined a host of pipes in South Africa that had these so-called indicator minerals and published a paper explaining his results./p div id="embed" div id="pic"img src="http://www.wired.com/images/article/magazine/1612/ff_diamonds_map_250.jpg" alt="" / div id="caption"The Snap Lake site is one of four diamond mines established in Canada in recent years.br / emIllustration: Bryan Christie/em/div /div /div pFipke heard about Gurney's work on a tour of De Beers' a href="http://www.mining-technology.com/projects/finsch/"Finsch Mine/a in South Africa and quickly turned himself into an expert on indicator minerals mdash; combining what he understood of Gurney's work with results coming out of Russian labs and his own skills with field sampling. Superior had worked with Fipke before, back in his gold mining days, so by the time the company wanted someone to go look for kimberlite pipes northwest of Fort Collins, Colorado, Fipke was the best choice. He found half a dozen, but like 98 percent of the kimberlite formations in the world, they didn't contain diamonds in commercially viable quantities./p pBut Fipke knew that, 100 miles under those pipes, was a craton, a thick, old chunk of continental plate where diamonds form. Kimberlite pipes are created when magma bubbles up through a craton, expanding and cooling on its way up. If the craton has diamonds in it, the result is either a carrot-shaped, diamond-studded pipe reaching up to the surface or a wide, flat underground structure called a dike./p pFipke also knew that the craton underneath the pipes he had found ran all the way up the Rockies. With Superior's backing, he teamed up with a geologist and pilot named Stewart Blusson, formed a href="http://www.diamet.com/"Dia Met Minerals/a, and headed north./p pBy 1981, the two men were sampling the ground in Canada; they would eventually secure mining concessions on 80,000 square miles. "It was just me and Sewart and a floatplane," Fipke says. "We took all the supplies and all the samples in ourselves."/p pDe Beers geologists, it turned out, were already there, relying on their own indicator mineral formulas. But Fipke and Blusson surmised that the indicators De Beers found had in fact been dragged far from the kimberlite pipe eons ago by a passing glacier. What they needed to do was look "upstream" for the point of origin. Fipke got a helicopter and flew back and forth over the Arctic Circle, using a magnetometer to track variations in magnetic field that would suggest kimberlite. After thousands of miles and hundreds of hours in the air, he found a promising site near Lac de Gras, a barren world of lakes and rock and muskeg a few hundred miles outside the Arctic Circle./p pHe'd been surveying for eight years. He hadn't found a single diamond. Superior had abandoned the diamond business. Dia Met's stock was trading at pennies a share. But based upon a few samples, Fipke estimated a diamond concentration at Lac de Gras of more than 60 carats per 100 tons mdash; with about a quarter of the stones of good quality or better. (In kimberlite pipes that have gem-quality stones in commercial quantities, a concentration of 1 carat mdash; 0.2 grams mdash; per 100 tons can be profitable.) After six months of sampling, Fipke went public. It was 1991, and he had found a kimberlite pipe (buried under 30 feet of glaciated sediment) with a concentration of 68 carats per 100 tons mdash; the first Canadian diamonds ever found. Shares of Dia Met rocketed to $70. Fipke had partnered with mining giant Broken Hill Proprietary Company (now BHP Billiton) to get the diamonds out; BHP opened the Ekati mine at Lac de Gras in 1998. Soon Dia Met's 29 percent share of the mine was worth billions. Fipke would go on to sell his chunk to BHP for $687 million, retaining 10 percent ownership in the mine, worth another $1 billion./p pToday Canada's diamond business is soaring. The country's four working mines produced 17 million carats in 2007, up 23 percent from 2006. Diamonds from Canada now account for 10 percent of all diamonds by carat sold in the world. And the addition of more diamonds to the global market hasn't driven prices down. Average carat value has actually risen 15 percent, and the gems from the far north are untainted by the bad publicity that comes from an association with African wars./p pShortly before Fipke sold most of his Ekati claim to BHP Billiton, his marriage, faltering for years after so much time in the field, fell apart. At the time it was the a href="http://www.nnsl.com/frames/newspapers/2000-02/feb28_00dia.html"largest divorce settlement/a in Canadian history. "Cost me $200 million, hey," Fipke says. "Best money I ever spent!"/p pstrongFipke now has mining/strong projects in Morocco, Greenland, Canada, Angola, and Brazil. His laboratory bookshelves are heavy with mineral guides mdash; and the family histories of thoroughbreds. Besides diamonds, he's now obsessed with horse racing. "It's a huge challenge, hey, and I like challenges even if they're risky," he says. "And I think I'm really going to do spectacularly well with horses." So far, so good: He has more than 50 brood mares in Ireland and Kentucky and 20 racehorses all over the world. His horse a href="http://www.kentuckyderby.com/2008/contenders/tale-ekati"Tale of Ekati/a placed fifth in this year's Kentucky Derby. "I always go to the Derby with Bo Derek," he says, unlocking the door to a windowless room piled with maps and electron microscopes and computers. "She's a good rider, and she knows horses. And she's a lot of fun, hey! I'm gonna do for horse racing what I did for diamonds!"/p !-- pagebreak -- div class="wide_img"img src="http://www.wired.com/images/article/magazine/1612/ff_diamonds_debeers_630.jpg" alt="" div class="wide_caption"div class="wide_caption_txt"The De Beers mine at Snap Lake is a labyrinth of crushers and separators. br/ emPhoto: Andrew Hetherington/em/div/div/divbr/br/ pWhether or not Fipke actually turns out to have an eye for horseflesh, his eye for the characteristics of crystals is unparalleled. He shows me rooms of glass flasks and tubes, the equipment for analyzing all those gravel samples. I peek through a microscope and see a rainbow treasure of sparkling gems: green chrome diopsides and red garnets mdash; the low-calcium, high-chrome G-10s that mean diamonds are nearby./p pOver many years in the field and the lab, Fipke has refined his understanding of this unique stew of minerals. "Everyone now knows that G-10 garnets with low calcium might lead you to diamonds, hey," Fipke says. "But how do you distinguish between a Group 1 eclogitic garnet that grew with a diamond and a Group 2 eclogitic garnet that didn't? They look the same." Custom software compares the grains' shapes and chemical compositions, analyzes them against 1,000 minerals that are intergrown with diamonds, and compares them against 10 fields of mineral groupings. If seven to 10 of the fields from one pipe overlap, Fipke says, "there's no doubt; it's full of diamonds. No one else out there can distinguish between these similar tiny particles of minerals that grow with a diamond and ones that don't."/p div id="embed" div id="pic"img src="http://www.wired.com/images/article/magazine/1612/ff_ice5_f.jpg" alt="" / div id="caption"Miners prepare to blow up a rock face.br / emPhoto: Andrew Hetherington/em /div /div /div p"Look," he says, opening a folder on a table. He has thousands of photos of mineral grains magnified to the size of golf balls. Some are all sharp corners and jagged edges, some rounded. Since erosion and age wear the minerals down, "we can tell when we're getting closer to the source. If the edges are sharp, hey, we know they haven't traveled far from the pipe."/p pThat level of geographic precision has allowed Fipke to stake more claims. He's even working in areas of Brazil where De Beers hasn't been able to turn a profit. "And Angola. Angola has the richest alluvial diamond river in the world," he says, "and there are thousands of diamond works there. But we're looking for the source pipes." Five years ago Fipke started making magnetometer survey flights over the a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kwango_River"Kwango River/a. Having identified 100 possible targets, he now has 40 men taking core samples 900 to 1,200 feet under the riverbed. "I'm there at the camp at least three times a year, hey, and it's much harder than in the Arctic. Your drilling equipment just gets buried in enormous piles at customs in Luanda and you can't get it. In the Northwest Territories it was cold, hey, and full of snow, but you get a good parka and you're a bug in a rug. Angola is the most inefficient place on earth!"/p pI start to ask another question, but Fipke has something else in mind. "I'm hungry, hey," he barks, as the door to the map room slams shut behind us. "Do you like oysters?" But we're not going anywhere: He has locked his keys in the room and has to call someone to drive in and open up his office./p pWe finally head into town. "Hi, Chuck!" says the hostess, leading us to the back room of a hip Asian fusion place. Around a long table sit 23 young women, all sporting stilettos and big hair. "Chuck!" they shout. We have, it seems, shown up at the bachelorette party for Fipke's granddaughter. The hostess seats us at the next table. Fipke orders four dozen oysters and a bottle of wine that has to be driven to the restaurant from some special cellar, and a young women shimmies into the booth next to Fipke. "Chuck," she says, kissing him on the cheek, "do you think you can pay for us all tonight?"/p p"Sure," Fipke says, beaming./p p"Do you remember this?" says another woman mdash; his daughter, it turns out, who slides in next to him, holding up a purse. "You bought it for me!"/p pWith Fipke suddenly bankrolling the night, the girls break loose, and the restaurant staff starts hauling out the bottles of champagne. Pretty soon a couple of lasses are dancing on the tables, the oysters are slipping down, a second bottle of rare wine is being decanted, and Fipke is remixing the menu like Danny DeVito in ema href="http://www.imdb.com/Title?0113161"citeGet Shorty/cite/a/em./p pAnd the tales spill forth: three week forays into the Peruvian Amazon, travels with the Kalahari Bushmen of Southern Africa, visits to the pygmies of the Ituri forest in the Congo. "I'd just leave my family and go, hey," he says. "I was really into native culture."/p pSomebody asks him about Brazil, and it reminds him of something important. "Caipirinhas!" he shouts out of the blue. "I want 25 caipirinhas!"/p pWhen the bill arrives, it's 3 feet long and $4,000. Fipke pays up, and we spill into the night mdash; his daughter and granddaughter and their friends and now boyfriends, who joined us in the restaurant. On the street, Fipke suddenly leaps into the air and delivers a solid, suede loafer-clad foot to the head of a parking meter. "I fucking hate parking meters, hey!" he shouts. He jumps and kicks another one, and then erupts into a fit of giggles./p pWe are ushered past the velvet rope at the Cheetah Lounge, Kelowna's classiest strip joint, and Captain Chaos orders another round of caipirinhas for everyone. Three generations of Fipkes pound drinks as naked women dangle upside down from poles onstage./p pThe room is spinning by the time Fipke takes me aside and lays a big warm hand on my arm. "Hey," he says, "here's the thing. I learned that I did my best. I mean, I really tried my best. How many people can say that? I worked hard, and I mean really hard. I worked seven days a week from 8 am until 3 am. Every day. We drilled and drilled all winter when it was dark and the windchill was 80 below. Everyone thought I was crazy. But most people just never do their best, hey. And I did."/p pemContributing editor Carl Hoffman /em(a href="mailto:carlhoffmn@earthlink.net"carlhoffmn@earthlink.net/a) emwrote about the private space company SpaceX in issue 15.06./em/pbr style="clear: both;"/ a style='font-size: 10px; color: maroon;' href='http://www.pheedo.com/hostedMorselClick.php?hfmm=v3:0627ce3c3b6ae327e5f06dd2f229cc5e:%2FfMZEsh%2BwKLICU5UU6f2XvNPdawcsXbrPL0IgcNmb1HkbkovTIq34grsdoe%2FarsA5BIV0olmUO5vOg%3D%3D'img border='0' title='Add to Facebook' alt='Add to Facebook' src='http://www.pheedo.com/images/mm/facebook.gif'//a a style='font-size: 10px; color: maroon;' href='http://www.pheedo.com/hostedMorselClick.php?hfmm=v3:f6c60dd504b07078bdbc6b09258399fa:z9re7O%2Fr9g7IWr4dUnV7qrGpZcrb8Jda0z5wA4Ind8sbvwvuCjEcWeHZ3OMoIQ2%2FlAqrQu%2BxQ%2Fwj'img border='0' title='Add to Reddit' alt='Add to Reddit' src='http://www.pheedo.com/images/mm/reddit.png'//a a style='font-size: 10px; color: maroon;' href='http://www.pheedo.com/hostedMorselClick.php?hfmm=v3:eabae8e0f643b5c7f7a103cea954fefd:B7poPN8AgcPsLABfHqfLdvTArLYNDoIDfq7hJXfovsGgeK1C%2FXxzP9gLrcWMNRJZSzyblLz%2BiS6g'img border='0' title='Add to digg' alt='Add to digg' src='http://www.pheedo.com/images/mm/digg.gif'//a a style='font-size: 10px; color: maroon;' href='http://www.pheedo.com/hostedMorselClick.php?hfmm=v3:3669b8286376e46e06956252ef17c5b1:cfCGfTXzx74lBKekrETCStAWLWyBnGkD8fTmyGqiNQWrC6%2FmqUtSmWQQxfC2zORnD6oE0JLZc9DD'img border='0' title='Add to Google' alt='Add to Google' src='http://www.pheedo.com/images/mm/google.png'//a br style="clear: both;"/ a href="http://www.pheedo.com/click.phdo?s=aee47be5de030b69470388cf099ed063p=1"img alt="" style="border: 0;" border="0" src="http://www.pheedo.com/img.phdo?s=aee47be5de030b69470388cf099ed063p=1"//a img src="http://www.pheedo.com/feeds/tracker.php?i=aee47be5de030b69470388cf099ed063" style="display: none;" border="0" height="1" width="1" alt=""/ pa href="http://feeds.wired.com/~a/wired/index?a=IAu4eH"img src="http://feeds.wired.com/~a/wired/index?i=IAu4eH" border="0"/img/a/pimg src="http://feeds.wired.com/~r/wired/index/~4/472101281" height="1" width="1"/

img class=face src=http://planet.ubuntu.com/heads/sridhar.png alt= pJust for a second, put yourself in the shoes of an average PC user. You use the software that came with your computer, plus perhaps some others that you downloaded, bought in a box or #8216;borrowed#8217; from a friend. You#8217;ve heard some good things about something called #8220;open source#8221;, but you haven#8217;t the foggiest clue of where to get it or what applications to try. You aren#8217;t a technical person, have limited time and even less patience. Ultimately, you#8217;re looking for something that #8216;just works#8217; and is either free (of cost) or clearly better than what you#8217;re using now. Why make the effort otherwise? Honestly, you#8217;d rather be down at the pub watching the cricket with yournbsp;mates./p pHow would free software advocates best woo such a person into their camp? They aren#8217;t going to immediately repartition their hard drive and use GNU/Linux exclusively. They would more likely be willing to try some free software on their existing OS, provided that the barrier was sufficiently low. If you#8217;re lucky, that toe-dip will lead to deeper immersion in the world of FOSS, and hopefully also into some appreciation of the philosophy beyond thenbsp;practical./p pIf this person has a knowledgeable friend or pays attention to certain information sources, they might get some ideas on what software to use. Applications like Firefox and OpenOffice.org are fairly popular choices these days, but what about less publicised treasures like the GIMP or ClamWin? Sure, there are a title=Introduction to Linux, Free Software and Open Source href=http://www.linux.org.au/linux#FindAppsWeb sites/a that let you search for FOSS equivalents to proprietary applications, but these still require somenbsp;effort:/p ol liSearch for the application younbsp;want./li liGo to the Web site for thatnbsp;application./li liFind the download page and pull itnbsp;down./li liRun thenbsp;installer./li liTo uninstall, use Windows#8217; emAdd/Removenbsp;Programs/em./li /ol pThese steps need to be performed for emeach/em application you wish to install, so can become tiresome verynbsp;quickly./p pHow could we simplify this process? What I propose is a software management application. Let#8217;s for the sake of brevity call it emFOSS Pack/em, named after the closest analogue I can think of, a href=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_PackGoogle Pack/a. The process is intended to be as simple as possible for the endnbsp;user:/p ol liThe user downloads a single application (emFOSS Pack/em) and installsnbsp;it./li liWhen they launch FOSS Pack, they can select from a menu of categorised FOSS applications to install, similar to how a GUI package manager front-end works onnbsp;(GNU/)Linux./li liThe user selects the applications they want, and then they are downloaded and installed innbsp;batch./li liUninstallation should be as simple as installation, all within FOSSnbsp;Pack./li /ol pHere#8217;s the killer feature: FOSS Pack should be able to scan the user#8217;s system for proprietary applications. These are identified based on an internal list, which also contains information on FOSS alternatives to those applications. Those alternatives are presented for easy download andnbsp;install./p pFOSS Pack contains descriptions of each application, so the user doesn#8217;t have to visit another Web site to understand what they do (although a hyperlink should be provided as well). The option should exist to be able to select only from applications that have Linux versions, as a means of facilitating an OS transition. FOSS pack should also be able to automatically check for updates at regular intervals, and offer to install them whennbsp;available./p pI#8217;m not expecting any of this to be as clean as a real package management system. FOSS Pack will likely have to execute the external installers. Perhaps in the future the applications authors could co-operate with FOSS Pack maintainers to deliver a more seamlessnbsp;experience./p pIt looks to me that a lot of the pieces to create FOSS Pack are already there, and as is often the case in the FOSS world all that#8217;s required is to tie them together in an appropriatenbsp;way./p pstrongLotD:/strong a title=K12 Open Technologies href=http://www.k12opentech.org/solveig-haugland/2008/05/16/30-things-are-same-microsoft-word-and-openofficeorg-writer30 Things That Are the Same In Microsoft Word and in OpenOffice.orgnbsp;Writer/a/p br /pcopy;2008 a href=http://www.dhanapalan.com/blogSridhar Dhanapalan/a.br / This work is licensed under a a rel=license href=http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5/au/Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 Australia Licence/a.br / a rel=license href=http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5/au/img src=http://i.creativecommons.org/l/by-sa/2.5/au/88x31.png alt=Creative Commons BY-SA Licence //a /p.

Welcome back to another episode of Words from the Streetz: Uncommon and Common Magical Treasures. In this, part six of the series, I will be talking about the Mirrodin Block, revisiting the Shadowmoor Block (including Shadowmoor and Eventide) and possibly dipping into a bit of Shards of Alara. Interested? Excited? Curious? Whatever your emotion is at the present time, click on the article link. You may find out that your collection of commons and uncommons are worth more than your rares!

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5 used & new from $19.9620 award-winning and classic children s stories are faithfully adapted and brought to live in this 4-DVD collection. From Karma Wilson's best-sellers Bear Snores On and Bear Wants More, to the Beverly Clearly Classic The Mouse and the Motor Cycle, parents and children alike are sure to enjoy these storybook treasures, featuring celebrity narration by by Sean Hayes, James Naughton, B.D. Wong and... (read more)

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Our pals at Watchismo have launched a new store to highlight their kick-ass line of reproductions of LIP diode watches -- replicas of Roger Tallon's 1973 timepieces that were among the first (and coolest) digital watches made. I bought my LIP back in September and I've been wearing it ever since. Watchismo has offered to give away a LIP watch to one Boing Boing reader (and to offer a 20 percent discount to BB readers on the entire store, which includes dozens of superb vintage and new watches -- just use the discount code BBWATCHISMO) in a giveaway drawing that's scheduled for the 22nd of December. I love watches -- my grandfather was a watchmaker and I grew up surrounded by them -- and I discovered Watchismo through a friend's recommendation. Since then, I've bought two watches from the site, and been given two more as gifts, and each one is an absolute treasure: beautiful, functional, and distinctive. There's an early digital that you adjust by rubbing a magnet (hidden in the bracelet) against the back of the case. There's another early digital whose numbers are actually printed in bright orange LED font on hidden cardboard wheels and then reflected on a disguised curved mirror that makes it appear that they are lit from within. The craftsmanship and aesthetics of Watchismo's stocks really hit the sweet-spot for me: they're gizmos that are meant to last for the ages and be used every day. Welcome to the BoingBoing LIP Diode Giveaway!...br style="clear: both;"/ a href="http://www.pheedo.com/click.phdo?s=a3576dc1ffeccf9eca80fd3caf788cbap=1"img alt="" style="border: 0;" border="0" src="http://www.pheedo.com/img.phdo?s=a3576dc1ffeccf9eca80fd3caf788cbap=1"//a img src="http://www.pheedo.com/feeds/tracker.php?i=a3576dc1ffeccf9eca80fd3caf788cba" style="display: none;" border="0" height="1" width="1" alt=""/

A few Fiji bloggers have sharply criticized the country’s military government for allowing the armed forces to overspend its allocated funds in the past fiscal year by more than 50 percent.

The hubbub came after self-appointed Prime Minister Commodore Voreqe (Frank) Bainimarama introduced a new $1.75 billion budget Friday, November 21 that included an increase for military spending for 2007 to more than $68.7 million, up from the $43 million the armed forces has been allocated. Bainimarama, who came to power in a military-lead December 2006 coup, did not directly address military finances, instead concentrated on business incentives he hopes will jump start the country’s stagnating economy, like offering 13 years of tax free status for companies opening businesses on eight different islands and cutting corporate taxes from 32 to 28 percent over the next two years.

Soon after the budget became public, however, local media began reporting that during the previous five years, the Republic of Fiji Military Forces overspent its earmarks by $118 million. A military spokesman explained the country’s armed forces overshot its 2007 finances because they learned “members of the ousted government had requested for military intervention” from an outside power.

“The budget allocation Frank has presented has proven to us all where his real concerns lie, argues Rajnalu, writing at Raw Fiji News:

The Good book says, “Where your treasure is,there your heart will be also”.

If you therefore follow the money, you will see that his heart is closely tied to his own security and not yours, Fiji.

He has piled the treasures up at Nabua so Nabua can keep him safe.

How sad!!

.......................................................

As long as there is true wisdom, honesty and the sense of stability displayed by leaders, the people will naturally rise to the occasion and change their own situations, for the better.

Until you do that, Frank, you will not live to see such a wonder of a sight when people rally behind a true leader and change the course of their lives and their nation.

All that Frank sees now is a revolt in the horizon.

................................................

Until Fiji breaks it’s silence over the this political, economic and social fracas, everything that is coming out of Nabua and out of the interim government, Fiji deserves!

There is a place and time for ’silence’, but now is not the time.

Soli Vakasama wonders where the money is going to come from:

It comes as no surprise the Military are the biggest benefactors of the budget because the illegal regime cannot remain in power without their support. [Former Finance Minister Mahendra Chaudhry] Chand and [Current architect of Building a Better Fiji plan John] Samy are caught in a vicious cycle because they need to keep the military happy or it will turn against them. The main question is how are they going to pay for this budget? More and more people are going to be lose their jobs by the 1st quarter next year and it will become more bleaker during the 2nd quarter then progressively worse going into the 3rd and 4th quarter.

…

Whilst we want this illegal regime to collapse and a lawful government restored, we need to be conscious of the international influences involved at the same time who will exploit our situation and who these illegal bastards will veiw as saviours.

From a commenter called EnufDictatorship:

So the Efen Military gets the increase for capital projects while they think of reducing the civil service by 10%?...what kind of capital projects? filling their armoury with more guns and ammunitions to destruct the UNARMED citizens of Fiji?

Will they reduce the military by 10% as well? By the looks of it NOT!

Poor children of Fiji and their education, which will just coast on the average bcos the funds are diverted to adults who can and will use their guns to kill them!

And u’re so right SV...where are the monies coming from?

Finally, gdevreal, writing at Fiji Board Exiles points out that the budget allocations are illegal because they weren't approved by tax payers.

Military blood money blew budget by $50 million of taxpayer money without approval by any legitimate decisionmaking body.

So it is not just the increase in military budget, but also the amount by which they illegally exceed that budget. This is the BLOOD MONEY the regime uses to rape the People of their democracy. So isn't it wonderful that the police and army facilities are neat and clean. It covers up the FILTH of their mentality as they run paradise, industry, and the hopes and dreams of the People into the ground.

img src='http://www.wired.com/images/article/magazine/1612/pl_games_stack_t.jpg'/img: p Since the arcade heyday of citeSpace Invaders/cite and citePac-Man/cite, coin-op machines have coaxed kids into forking over their pocket change. But once it's GAME OVER, what are you left with? Empty pockets and your initials on the high-score table? That won't buy those Warhammer figurines. /ppWell, now one of the hottest toy trends out of thrifty Japan is piggy banks that turn stockpiling yen into a game. In 2006, the Tomy company launched its Jinsei Ginko ("Life Bank"), a coin repository with an electronic version of the board game Life. It was such a hit that today there's a range of increasingly sophisticated banks, tailored for both genders and encompassing several genres. /ppHere's a look at a few piggys that are gobbling up the nation's yen, and the gameplay you get when you drop some dough. /p img src='http://www.wired.com/images/article/magazine/1612/white_bank1_t.jpg'/img: p This high-tech piggy bank started it all. The LCD screen is inhabited by a stick-figure avatar who can have various jobs like businessman or musician or president. He is your pet, sort of like a Tamagotchi that you have to feed with yen. /p p Let's play it safe, join the work force as a corporate warrior. Our young salaryman starts out in a one-room dilapidated apartment, eating bowls of cheap noodles. Five days in, he has only saved a mere 500 yen. Pathetic. /pimg src='http://www.wired.com/images/article/magazine/1612/white_bank2_f.jpg'/img: p Work, work, work. Endless! Our businessman races back into his office, briefcase in tow, only to end up hunched over a desk late into the night. /p img src='http://www.wired.com/images/article/magazine/1612/white_bank3_f.jpg'/img: p Here comes the bride, the stick figure bride! (Isn't she a knock out?) We've dumped thousands of yen into the Jinsei Ginko, and our avatar is moving up in the virtual world. With enough money in the bank and ample stick-figure charm, the salaryman is able to convince a fetching young lady to accept his hand in marriage. /p img src='http://www.wired.com/images/article/magazine/1612/white_bank4_f.jpg'/img: p As you move closer to maxing out the bank at 100,000 yen, your avatar moves out of his urban shoebox into a penthouse apartment with a beautiful view of the city. Raise your glass, salaryman-san. You've hit the 2-bit LCD big time! /p img src='http://www.wired.com/images/article/magazine/1612/tower_bank1_t.jpg'/img: p The worst part of Japanese RGPs is grinding through the damn game, looking for money. Here's a thought: Look in your wallet! Instead of using in-game currency, BankQuest uses emyour/em coins. /p p Still wet behind the ears, our hero enters the Tower, but he's brought an ax to a sword fight mdash; not to mention a stupid-looking hat. Let's plunk some cold hard cashola into the bank so we can level up. Whenever players put change into this role-playing lock box, the gargoyle's mouth glows red and the in-game hero gets credit. /p img src='http://www.wired.com/images/article/magazine/1612/tower_bank2_f.jpg'/img: p Once you've converted real money into virtual money, your avatar can buy weapons, armor and even health mdash; regeneration potions in the village shops outside the castle walls. "Welcome!" says the shopkeeper. /pimg src='http://www.wired.com/images/article/magazine/1612/tower_bank3_f.jpg'/img: p As you toggle through the goods in the shop, you'll spot cool merch like this blade that looks like it could cut a swath through hundreds of tiny LCD monsters. Must-have. /pimg src='http://www.wired.com/images/article/magazine/1612/tower_bank4_f.jpg'/img: p Back in the Tower, our hero's brandishing his new gleaming sword and fancy hairdo. Just like in a standard RPG, leveling up changes the characters' appearance, and right now you look pretty darn good. /pimg src='http://www.wired.com/images/article/magazine/1612/tower_bank5_f.jpg'/img: p Just like in any standard RPG, enemies pop up asking for a butt-whoppin'. Ack! There's a globby one. But with a badass sword in hand, that monster is so toast. The hero roams dungeons killing monsters and amassing treasure before he faces down the final boss, the dastardly spendthrift Devil Warudollar (emwaru/em means "bad"). /p img src='http://www.wired.com/images/article/magazine/1612/heart_bank_hunk_t.jpg'/img: p Why drain your purse on dates with real men? Following schmaltzy romance novel plot lines, Ikemen Bank is a vault you can fall in love with. Literally. This heart-shaped vault is a emrenai/em (dating game) that lets frugal gals find romance while saving money. emIkemen/em is Japanese slang for "handsome guy," and there are five hunky suitors to select from: the cool dude, the TV star, the rich kid, the buff athlete and the sugar daddy. Just look at that dreamboat. He's so, well, dreamy. /pimg src='http://www.wired.com/images/article/magazine/1612/heart_bank_rice_t.jpg'/img: p Cool guy is hungry, and when cool guy is hungry, you damn well better feed him. Tonight's din-din is a traditional meal. "Delicious!" he says, emptying another bowl of rice. /pimg src='http://www.wired.com/images/article/magazine/1612/heart_bank_holdclose_t.jpg'/img: p What. An. Evening. Tonight was truly a date to remember forever and ever. That is, until the next one. But before parting, cool guy pulls you close, whispering sweet nothings. Each time a coin is inserted, he'll say things like "I want to smooch," or "You really look great today," or "Let me give you a shoulder rub." Swoon! /pimg src='http://www.wired.com/images/article/magazine/1612/heart_bank_sayonara_t.jpg'/img: p Great date aside, you're totally busy with real world stuff! And you totally forget to insert money into your Ikemen Bank for a whole working week. Your greedy hunk writes you a letter that simply says, "emSayonara/em." No translation needed. /pbr style="clear: both;"/ a style='font-size: 10px; color: maroon;' href='http://www.pheedo.com/hostedMorselClick.php?hfmm=v3:2c57fdaa67026c727731d01fed441262:613lc78hik1NULFov2dZuXax%2BoS6oFREi6qD2oI8H5OKGVDe7BrwH0Me2v8Q9goojR%2FROf38DJ%2Fc6A%3D%3D'img border='0' title='Add to Facebook' alt='Add to Facebook' src='http://www.pheedo.com/images/mm/facebook.gif'//a a style='font-size: 10px; color: maroon;' href='http://www.pheedo.com/hostedMorselClick.php?hfmm=v3:c4e1cf2b0866451d525fa29e1e9195ed:1o%2Bsgx5ysTxyLikMBLGnFrsl7lb%2F%2Fu0xzWk8oKBwFMUu1zsBAMuBYTPRdIznqvMT4b%2FwxlLNOzH3'img border='0' title='Add to Reddit' alt='Add to Reddit' src='http://www.pheedo.com/images/mm/reddit.png'//a a style='font-size: 10px; color: maroon;' href='http://www.pheedo.com/hostedMorselClick.php?hfmm=v3:a529d7f28be5ec78d6874abf084feae3:08gOUcR%2BvkNVEf9kXhBNZo%2BgwGBxbvwb0P6QQvHQbYx6cYp0td76C11zIpCt1bhgYO6umlVPhN0U'img border='0' title='Add to digg' alt='Add to digg' src='http://www.pheedo.com/images/mm/digg.gif'//a a style='font-size: 10px; color: maroon;' href='http://www.pheedo.com/hostedMorselClick.php?hfmm=v3:0b6590178278dc967e63e66c49346ee7:syqbZ4wvguFbFd8ShgU5cVFwcy2v%2FJEzCgkPKo%2BnRZ5PsDk5%2B2mDLsPtifrxcLTsFPYvPa7Ke2yI'img border='0' title='Add to Google' alt='Add to Google' src='http://www.pheedo.com/images/mm/google.png'//a br style="clear: both;"/ a href="http://www.pheedo.com/click.phdo?s=b4b35ae1016f5298984a0ee52bcdec06p=1"img alt="" style="border: 0;" border="0" src="http://www.pheedo.com/img.phdo?s=b4b35ae1016f5298984a0ee52bcdec06p=1"//a img src="http://www.pheedo.com/feeds/tracker.php?i=b4b35ae1016f5298984a0ee52bcdec06" style="display: none;" border="0" height="1" width="1" alt=""/ pa href="http://feeds.wired.com/~a/wired/index?a=geW5eI"img src="http://feeds.wired.com/~a/wired/index?i=geW5eI" border="0"/img/a/pimg src="http://feeds.wired.com/~r/wired/index/~4/471672380" height="1" width="1"/