IT Masala

Gaming is not a crime, people make different maps for their play. But here its more than that. The student was suspended for playing a game..isn't it ridiculous??

Things went seriously wrong for Texas teenager when he got suspended from Clements High School for playing Counter Strike in his home computer, on a level which closely resembled his high school.

The whole story came into light a day after Virginia Tech Shooting when a parent called the Clements High School to inform that their child was playing a video game which involved killing and took place inside an animated map of Clements High School. School authorities then found a website which had that map for download, but unfortunately the creator of the map was a student at their school.

Law enforcement authorities were informed and they questioned the teenager. According to the police, the teenager never intended to cause any violence or to kill someone. His locker and computer were searched, but they found nothing illegal.

Carnegie Mellon University researchers have developed a new series of robots that are simple enough for almost anyone to build with off-the-shelf parts, but are sophisticated machines that wirelessly connect to the Internet.

Illah Nourbakhsh is a professor of robotics at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, which has one of the world's most prestigious robotics programs, and his research is funded by the likes of Google, Intel and Microsoft. But in the end, he says, he does it for the kids. 

Qwerkbot, a three-wheeled robot that can send images over the Internet, is one of several robots that can be built with the Telepresence Robot Kit (TeRK), a combination of a robot controller, commonly available parts and assembly instructions (recipes) developed by the CREATE Lab in Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Institute. Photo credit: Ken Andreyo/CMU

"[TeRK] is not only open from a software perspective, but also from a hardware perspective," Legrand says. "That's something this industry has never seen." 

via [ scientific american ] 

Who's the best Pac-Man player of all times? Certainly Billy Mitchell, who in 1999 played the world's first perfect game of Pac-Man, eating every fruit, all four ghosts with every power pellet and beating all 256 levels of the game without losing a life.

Microsoft and Namco Bandai have announced the Xbox 360 Pac-Man World Championship (presented by Quiznos). The best-scoring players from seven regions around the world (as well as one particularly rabid Pac-fan) will be flown to New York City for a final showdown, with the eventual champion to be crowned by Pac-Man creator Toru Iwatani.

If you haven't been paying attention so far, here's a complete timeline, as provided by Microsoft:

Gamers who want to start practicing can download Pac-Man"(400 Microsoft Points) now from Xbox Live Arcade on the Xbox 360.

Starting April 25, 2007, at 12:01 a.m. GMT (April 24, 2007, at 5:01 p.m. PDT), gamers can visit http://www.xboxlivetournament.com to register and review full eligibility criteria, regulations and rules.

Also on April 25, 2007, at 12:01 a.m. GMT (April 24, 2007, at 5:01 p.m. PDT), the worldwide competition will officially kick off on Xbox Live Arcade.

Previous leaderboard scores for Pac-Man will be deleted to provide a clean and fair slate for all gamers participating in the Xbox 360 "Pac-Man" World Championship.

Concurrently, Pac-Man fans in the United States and Canada can also enter the Pac-Man FANatic contest and receive an invitation to compete in the finals in New York City. Starting April 25, 2007, they can visit http://www.xboxlivetournament.com for more information on how to submit a creative video that best illustrates their love for Pac-Man.

On May 9, 2007, at 11:59 p.m. GMT (4:59 p.m. PDT), the competition will officially cease and nine finalists from the identified regions, based on the top leaderboard scores,* will advance to the Xbox 360 Pac-Man World Championship.

Before June 1, 2007, the top nine finalists will be announced.

The nine finalists will also be joined in New York City by the winner of the Pac-Man FANatic contest, and compete for the Xbox 360 Pac-Man World Championship title on June 5, 2007, in New York City.

  All the Best !

[ Xbox Live ]

On March 13, Dell announced that all Dell and Alienware customers who purchase select gaming desktops will now be able to increase their storage space by adding the world’s first one terabyte hard drive from Hitachi Global Storage Technologies.

Dell is the first computer system supplier to ship 1 terabyte (1,000 gigabytes) hard drives targeted at users needing to store large amounts of digital media.

The first Dell PCs to use the drives will be its own Alienware-branded gaming PCs. 

According to Neil Hand, vice president, worldwide consumer marketing consumer product group, “Digital content use is exploding in the consumer market – with this 1TB hard drive, a lifetime of memories, music and other information can be made, stored and shared with others. This type of capability used to be available only to the largest corporations. With the spectacular advancement in hard drives and the engineering in our systems, we’re now able to bring it to consumers.”

How different is it ?

Dell will use Hitachi GST's 1TB Deskstar 7K1000 drive spinning at 7,200rpm with a 3GBit/s serial ATA interface. The drive uses perpendicular recording, has five platters, a read access time of 8.5msecs and a write time of 9.2msecs. It has a cache of 32MB and an 8.7ms average seek time.

Pricing : Dell's 1TB drive is priced at $540.

Extras : 

Users can upload videos to Video Time Capsule Service  (www.studiodell.com) where Dell will store them, initially on the 1TB drives, for a claimed 50 years.

via [ StudioDell Website ]