I’d be very happy if at least the core functionality from the party and matchmaking system from Modern Warfare 2 would be preserved in Call of Duty: Black Ops.

Seeing as how Call of Duty: Black Ops has a confirmed release date for 9 November 2010 (less than 6 months away) there may not be a lot of time left to integrate this feature if it has not already been taken into account but one can certainly hope :-)

Thanks!

This entertaining illustration accompanied the 1998 San Francisco Chronicle article The Penguin That Roared by David Einstein. This was the same year the term “open source” was introduced by Bruce Perens et al (Eric Raymond). Note the incorrect usage of the term “freeware”.

I’ve experimented with real-time collaborative text editors going back to at least 2006 (starting with MoonEdit). This was precisely the reason I was not impressed by Google Doc’s initial concurrent editing functionality, even though it seemed the world was going nuts about it (not sure what the current state of it is).

I’ve used Gobby for collaborating on plain text documents (content without design). Gobby is an open source desktop collaborative editor and runs on Linux, Mac OS X and Windows, If you want to try it out simply install it then click “Join session” in the toolbar and as a Host fill in “gobby.0×539.de” (without quotes).

There’s also EtherPad, launched in November of 2008, which seems to be the best (both in terms of user experience and depth of functionality) online real-time collaborative text editor currently out there. The biggest difference between EtherPad and Gobby is that the former is a web application, so you don’t have to install anything to try it out (you don’t even have to sign-up).

The company behind EtherPad (AppJet) has recently been acquired by Google, which led to open sourcing of EtherPad itself.

I’ve created a pad that you can use the try out EtherPad (and so I can check up on if anybody tried it out ;-).

If you want to collaborate on more formal documents you might be interested in Abiword’s real-time collaborative editing functionality (video).

For me the biggest disappointment in this area so far has been Google’s Wave implementation. I originally had high hopes, but, and I’m sorry to have to say it, for me right now it’s completely unusable for both communication (chat) and any form of collaboration. I’m keeping my fingers crossed that the situation will improve and wish them the best. Also see the comments from the EtherPad team on Google Wave.

On a side note. Wouldn’t it be totally awesome if you could simply plug-and-play real-time collaboration functionality in for example Geany, the basis is certainly there in the form of libifinity from Gobby though still a lot of work still needs to be done (undo/redo functionality being the major lacking feature).

However, before I’d go off and buy a particular drum kit I’d be sure to do my research (a quick Google search already turns up some complaints at the unofficial Roland V-Drums forum, such as this one).

Why an electronic drum kit? The first article on Google for the search query “advantages of an electronic drum” sums it up perfectly:

In the acoustic drum world, there is no such thing as a quiet drum set. Drums are meant to be loud, and if they are played quietly the sound just isn’t right. [...] But electronic drums can be played as quietly as you like. Just turn down the volume control.

Basically the only sound that is made is from the sticks hitting the pads.

Awesome.

Up until that day I had been a bit reluctant to actually pick up the guitar and play the game out of fear for “looking silly” but I thought to myself “Why the heck not?” and I must say I truly had a blast.

It also reminded me that I actually had already played another rhythm game a while back, to be precise the open source Frets on Fire, but actually using a guitar as a controller is half the fun.

The creators of the documentary travel to Iceland to try and answer the question: What happened? An economist, a philosopher, a comedian, a young activist, a fisherman and a coffehouse owner answer the question in their own way.

They also interview Eva Joly who, at the time, was employed as a special adviser by the Icelandic government to investigate the possibility that white-collar crime may have played a part in the Icelandic financial crisis.

You can watch the complete documentary online at the Tegenlicht website (most of the interviews are in English with Dutch subtitles).

Yes, this is actually possible and quite easy because all one has to do is register an event handler for the onCopy event. The sites I’ve stumbled upon so far are using it to add some text like “Read more at …”.

This is extremely annoying because it breaks my workflow in several situations, not limited to:

• When I want to search the web using the copied text: I will first copy the text (Ctrl + C) and then paste it into the search box using (Ctrl + K and Ctrl + P) (possibly adding more search terms).
• When I want to copy the text for use in a blog post (like this one).

If you don’t understand why this is annoying, you just don’t get it.

So for now I’ve enabled NoScript again, but as NoScript whitelists domains it means some websites might still slip through the cracks. If I get annoyed enough I might look into the possibility of removing attached event handlers using JavaScript injection (e.g. through GreaseMonkey).

If you’ll look closely you’ll notice that Carly Pain from BYU elbows Elizabeth Lambert in the chest, though from the video it isn’t quite clear whether Lambert herself instigated this, after which Lambert punches Pain in the back. Later, Lambert pulls Kassidy Shumway down hard by her ponytail, but again, if you look closely you’ll notice that Shumway starts by pulling Lambert’s shorts up.

Also, to really make a fair and balanced judgement you’d at the very least have to analyse the entire match and not just these segments.