3 Reasons To Check Out Condominiums For Sale In Colchester

Tuesday, August 24, 2010

Wikinews has obtained a list of middle management teaching staff allegedly made redundant, or laid off due to restructuring, by Sunshine Coast Grammar School (SCGS), in Queensland, Australia. Sources say that those staff have been told that they can apply for new positions that have opened up.

The list, published on the SCGS alumni Facebook page, contains the names of twenty-two staff members, eight of which taught this article’s primary contributor. Seventeen positions are reportedly being opened up by the private Christian school, eight of which seem to significantly overlap the old ones.

The changes are, apparently, designed to get teachers back into the classroom. “We are not cutting subject choices and extracurricular activities, but retaining a student-driven curriculum that integrates with the new Australian Curriculum, in keeping with our commitment to teaching and learning opportunities,” said headmaster Nigel Fairbairn.

Fairbairn could not guarantee that any of the staff would be given a position in 2011. “That will depend on how many people on that list apply for new positions of responsibility and are successful,” he said.

“The Head of the School cannot guarantee the 21 staff a job at the School in the future, with many of the positions being advertised to external applicants,” said Terry Burke, secretary for the Independent Education Union of Australia Queensland branch (Queensland Independent Education Union, QIEU).

“There has been little or no consultation with affected staff, who should not have to reapply for their jobs,” he said. “Most of the proposed restructuring is highly questionable and places at risk the high quality education at the School.”

Some former students responded angrily to the news.

Four of the affected teachers “were the backbone of the school when [controversy surrounded founding headmaster John Burgess] happened,” a former prefect (student leader) said. “They got it through that crisis and this is the thanks they get.”

“People are angry and shocked,” they continued. “I am aware of at least 10 families who have said they will pull their children out of the school – it’s that bad.”

The student body has not ruled out protesting the schools plans. “It’s getting to that stage,” the former prefect said. “People are trying to look at it in an intelligent way but there is so much anger out there.”

Wikinews understands that Fairbairn attracted criticism when he was a head teacher in Christchurch, New Zealand, where a former student claimed that Fairbairn “replaced the open and welcoming culture … with the tyrannical and oppressive one.”

Sunday, September 18, 2005

San Francisco police have recovered a laptop stolen on March 11 from the University of California, Berkeley. The laptop was left unattended in the Graduate Division and contained personal information on 98,369 graduate students and applicants going as far back as 1976. This information included names, birth dates, addresses, and Social Security numbers.

The Silicon Valley forensic lab which analyzed the laptop said it had been reformatted, making it very difficult to determine if the data had been accessed. “There’s nothing in the Police Department investigation that points to any type of identity theft or credit card theft” said university spokeswoman Janet Gilmore.

The laptop was stolen by an unknown woman, who sold it to Shuki Alburati, who sold the laptop to an unsuspecting South Carolina man. Shuki Alburati was arrested on June 8 for receiving stolen property; he has been charged with one misdemeanor count.

He claims he didn’t know the laptop, a new IBM X40 worth $2,429, was stolen. He purchased the laptop from the woman, who said it wasn’t stolen, for $300 or $340. A few days later, on April 19, he placed the laptop on eBay. The winning bidder was a man in South Carolina who bought the laptop for $1,195.50. Police have said this man is not a suspect. Police were alerted by IBM after the man called IBM for tech support.

Shuki Alburati has pleaded not guilty. He claimed “It’s unfair, I didn’t know it was stolen.” His trial is scheduled for Sept. 30 before Superior Court Judge Michael Gaffey in Oakland. The woman who stole the laptop has not yet been found.

Thursday, June 1, 2006

If you’ve always wanted to live in a world populated by elves, dwarves and wizards, you don’t need to pay for a World of Warcraft subscription or buy the Special Extended DVD Trilogy Edition of The Lord of the Rings just yet. You could instead give Battle for Wesnoth a try — an open source turn-based strategy game in a fantasy setting. For the practically minded, “open-source” means that the code which the game is made of is available to anyone who wishes to use, redistribute or change it. It was created by volunteers and can be freely shared. Even the multiplayer online part of the game is free (no ads or spyware either).

But Wesnoth, as it is often abbreviated, is notable not only because it is free. While its graphics are simple by modern standards, the sheer number of units and scenarios that are available for the game is staggering. This is where the “open source” philosophy comes truly into play: anyone can contribute art or new campaigns. As of May 2006, the forum where users can share and discuss their own art contained over 25,000 messages. Most of this art is made available under the same open source terms as the game itself.

Battle for Wesnoth lets you command armies of units such as archers, swordmen, mages and gryphons during the course of a campaign consisting of multiple missions. Typically, your mission is to defeat an enemy leader, but some scenarios let you liberate a prisoner, find a lost artifact, traverse dangerous territories, and so on. Your best units can be taken from one mission to the next, “levelling up” in the process. Even units of the same type vary in their abilities, making the tactical use of the right unit at the right time very important.

The game is reminiscent of turn-based strategy classics such as Heroes of Might and Magic or Warlords. Throughout each campaign, the player is informed of the progress of the story. For instance, in the “Heir to the Throne” campaign, the player follows the story of Prince Konrad, who must reclaim the throne of Wesnoth from an evil queen.

The game was originally designed by David White, who is still the project’s lead developer. We exchanged e-mails with David about the state of open source gaming, the future of Wesnoth, and the collaborative aspects of game development.

David, thanks for taking our questions. Open source games suffer from the problem that very few people have all the abilities needed to make a good game: programming, graphics, story development, sound effects, music, and so on. When you started Battle for Wesnoth, how did you deal with this?

Not very well.  🙂

Version 0.1 of Wesnoth was developed entirely by me, and it was ugly. It had awful graphics, and no sound or music at all.

I think the best way to deal with the problem is to make an early version of the game which showcases the desired gameplay. Then, people with the appropriate skills who like the game will contribute. This worked out well with Wesnoth, anyhow, as I soon attracted a fine artist, Francisco Munoz, and once the graphics were decent, more people started wanting to help.

I noticed that the forum allows anyone to submit art for the game. How important have contributions from ordinary players been for development?

Well, as with almost any free software project, contributions from users have been very important. In the area of art, this is definitely so, though making a substantial contribution of art generally requires a reasonable amount of skill, so the number of people who can contribute art is somewhat limited.

This has meant that the number of people who contribute art is much smaller than, say, the number of people who contribute bug reports or feature requests. Still, there are plenty of good pixel artists out there, and we have had many good contributions from our community.

Also, within the game itself, it’s possible to directly download new campaigns from the Internet, many of which have been created by players. Do you think that, in essence, we are seeing the beginnings of applying “wiki” principles to game development?

On one hand, I see the ability to directly download new campaigns as a mild convenience — it wouldn’t be much more difficult for the user to, for instance, go to a web page and download campaigns.

On the other hand, it does blur the line between ‘developer created content’ and ‘user created content’ and so, like a Wiki, makes it much easier for any user to contribute to the game.

I think that for an Open Source game, making it as easy as possible for users to contribute content is a key way to help make the game succeed. We have tried hard to do this in Wesnoth. I don’t think that with something dynamic like a game, it’s quite as easy to make absolutely anyone be able to edit it or contribute as easily as they can in a Wiki, but we have tried to make it as easy as possible.

How do you moderate user-submitted content? Are there scenarios or graphics you have rejected because they crossed a line — sexual content, excessive violence, etc.?

Well, there are basically three levels of content acceptance:

1. ‘Official’: content can be accepted into the game itself — the content will reside in our SVN repository, and will be in the tarballs released by developers.
2. ‘Campaign Server’: Content can be allowed on the campaign server (the server which users can connect to in-game to download more content).
3. ‘Disallowed’: Finally, content can be disallowed on the campaign server, which means that the creator could only distribute it using their own channels (for instance, having a web site people could download it from).

Content only makes it to (1) if the developers happen to like it very much. We don’t have any firm rules as to what is allowed and disallowed, and a campaign that has short-comings from the developer’s point of view might still be allowed if it is exceptional in other areas. As an example of this, the campaign ‘Under the Burning Suns’ contained explicit references to religion. To avoid controversy, we wanted to avoid references to religion in Wesnoth. However, recognizing the exceptional quality of the campaign, we decided to accept it into the official version of Wesnoth in spite of this one aspect we didn’t like.

Artwork containing nudity has also been a controversial point in the past, as has violence (particularly explicit depiction of blood). We generally take the point of view that we will review each item as it comes, rather than making blanket rules.

With regard to whether we allow things onto the campaign server, (2), our general policy is that to be allowed onto the campaign server, the content need only be licensed under the GPL. However, we reserve the right to remove content that we consider to be distasteful in any way. Fortunately, our content submitters are generally very reasonable, and we haven’t had to exercise this right.

Our aim is to keep Wesnoth appropriate for users of any age and background — of course, it contains some level of violence, but this is not depicted very explicitly, and only parents who do not want to expose their children to animated violence of any level need be concerned. For this reason, we also do not allow expletives on our forums or IRC channels.

How do you feel about games like “Second Life”, where players trade user-generated content for money?

I’ve never understood the appeal of games like that. I don’t enjoy cheating in games, and to me buying items with real money seems like cheating — except worse, since it actually costs money.

What changes to the game or gameplay do you anticipate in the coming months and years?

Well, we’ve avoided making many gameplay changes at all, since very early on in Wesnoth’s development. Wesnoth is meant to be a simple game, with simple gameplay, and ‘changing’ gameplay will probably lead to it being more complex. We want to keep it simple.

Changes will probably focus on improving existing features, and making the engine a little more customizable. Enhancing the multiplayer component is big on the list — we’ve progressively added more and more features on the server. We also want to add more graphical enhancement. For instance, a particle system to allow various combat effects.

If you had unlimited resources at your disposal to improve the game, what would you change about it?

Wesnoth was always designed to be a simple game, with simple goals. It has exceeded all the expectations I originally had for it. There is still some ‘polishing’ work going on, but really I don’t think there is too much I would dramatically change.

Probably the largest thing I can name is a much better AI than we currently have. I’m pretty happy with the AI developed for Wesnoth — I think it’s much better than AIs for most commercial games — but it could be better. That’s the only area of Wesnoth that I think could really be very dramatically improved.

I am pretty happy with our in-game graphics. Some people compare our graphics to modern commercial games, and think our graphics are laughably poor. We often get comments that our graphics are around the same quality as those seen in SNES or Genesis games, or PC games from a decade ago. (These people should try playing a strategy game on the SNES/Genesis/PC from this long ago; Wesnoth’s graphics are much better).

I am very happy with our graphics overall. I think our artists have done an excellent job of making the game look attractive without detracting from functionality. Adding 3D graphics, or changing the style of the 2D graphics would only be wasted effort in my mind — I think we’ve achieved a great balance of making the game easy and clear, while making it look good.

With unlimited resources, I would like some more storyline/cutscene images, and a nice new title screen, but these are relatively small concerns I think.

There are some enhancements to multiplayer I would like added — multiplayer campaigns is a long-time feature request. As are more options and features on the multiplayer server.

Overall though, if I had ‘unlimited resources’, I’d much rather develop an entirely new game. We don’t have enough good Open Source games — it’s a waste to pour all the resources we have into one. 🙂

Wesnoth has dwarves with guns, World of Warcraft has gnomes and goblins with explosives and flying machines — where do you, personally, define the limits of the fantasy genre? Are there scenarios playing in a steampunk world, or ones with modern technology? Would you allow those?

Actually we have Dwarves with ‘Thundersticks’ 🙂 — mysterious weapons that make a loud sound and do lots of damage, but are clumsy and unreliable. The developers do not comment on whether or not these ‘thundersticks’ are or are not like ‘guns’ on earth. We like to keep Wesnoth slightly mysterious, and leave some things up to the player’s interpretation, rather than spell it out.

We once used to have dragoons with pistols, and other weapons like that, but we made a very intentional decision to remove them.

I don’t like categorizing things into ‘genres’. Many people debate whether Wesnoth is an ‘RPG’, or ‘strategy game’, etc. I think the debate of what genre something is in is largely irrelevant.

We do have a vision for what the world of Wesnoth is like though — and Wesnoth is a world of ancient-era weaponry, with a little magic. Of Elves and Dwarves and Orcs. Very much inspired by Tolkien. I actually originally chose this setting because my focus was on technical excellence — writing a good, solid engine — not on creating a new fantasy world. I decided to stick with a very well-known, proven theme, figuring I couldn’t go wrong with it.

We probably wouldn’t allow anything that departs dramatically from the world we’ve made into the official version of the game, but we’d be happy to have it on our campaign server. The main attempt at a ‘total modification’ of Wesnoth is a project known as Spacenoth, which has a sci-fi/futuristic theme.

At this time though, there is no release of this project. I hope they do well though.

How do you feel about turn-based games like “Heroes of Might and Magic” with their massive army-building and resource management? Do you think there’s going to be an open source equivalent of this type of game soon?

I haven’t played Heroes of Might and Magic very much. The few times I have played it, I thought it was boring to be honest. I don’t like the type of game where one marches armies around a ‘large map’ and then must ‘zoom in’ to a different ‘battle field’ every time a battle takes place. I find games like that to take far too long, and tend to become tedious.

I would prefer a civilization or perhaps colonization type game. FreeCiv is nice, though it’s close to being a clone of Civilization II. I’d like an original game that had the same sort of theme as civilization, but with new and innovative rules.

Every online game and community is also a social space. Have you met interesting people through Wesnoth whom you would not have met otherwise? Are there other stories you can tell from the community — have there been real world meetups, chat rooms, etc.?

I’ve come into contact with lots of very interesting people through Wesnoth, and have learned a great deal from them. The Wesnoth developers — many of whom are from Europe — used the LSM conference in France in 2004 as an opportunity to meet each other. Nekeme, an organization dedicated to developing and promotion Free games was kind enough to sponsor two developers to go. Unfortunately, I was not able to attend, but the developers who did had a very nice time.

We have several IRC channels on irc.freenode.net, and the most popular ones — #wesnoth and #wesnoth-dev are usually fairly busy with both discussion about Wesnoth, and friendly discussion of other topics.

Also, the developers have tried to make a habit of playing “co-operative multiplayer” games against the AI. During these games, we use the in-game chat facility to get to know each other better, and discuss improvements to the game.

Are there other open source games that have personally impressed you, or that you enjoy playing?

I’m afraid I haven’t played many. I like RPGs, and I know lots of people love NetHack and similar games, but I much prefer party-based and generally more storyline-oriented RPGs.

FreeCiv is pretty well-done, though I am happy to play commercial games, and so I think Civilization 3 and Civilization 4 are both technically superior in virtually every regard. I think that’s an inevitable problem when you make an Open Source game a straight clone of a commercial game.

Probably the most promising Open Source game I’ve seen is GalaxyMage, but it still has a long way to go.

Honestly, I don’t play that many games. I like playing commercial RPGs, usually console-based, with my wife, and I occasionally like playing the commercial Civilization series. To play an Open Source game, it’d have to be very good, and appeal to my tastes, and I haven’t found any Open Source games like that, sadly.

Tuesday, April 13, 2010

Women who eat “high-glycemic” foods, which cause blood sugar levels to spike, are at risk for coronary disease, according to a large study of Italians published in the Archives of Internal Medicine, a publication of the American Medical Association. In this study men were not affected the same way, but the researchers said that more studies were needed to verify that there is really no association between a high dietary glycemic load and cardiovascular disease in men.

Sabina Sieri of the Fondazione IRCCS Istituto Nazionale dei Tumori in Milan, Italy, who led the study, said that “high consumption of carbohydrate from high-glycemic foods, rather than overall quantity of carbohydrate consumed, appears to influence the risk of developing heart disease in women.” Sieri added, “It’s a good idea for people to choose foods with a lower glycemic index over higher ones.”

Sieri and her colleagues studied 47,749 Italian adults (15,171 men and 32,578 women), who were asked to complete dietary questionnaires. Women whose diet had the highest glycemic load had 2.24 times the risk of heart disease.

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Wednesday, June 16, 2021

On June 3, the New Liberals were officially registered as a political party by the Australian Electoral Commission, enabling them to run candidates for federal elections in the country.

While the party has been in existence for over a year, with member Karen Porter having run in the 2020 Eden-Monaro by-election as an independent candidate, the party applied for registration on December 16.

The party has already faced legal barriers for registration. It shares the “liberal” moniker with Australia’s governing Liberal Party, who called the New Liberals a “cynical attempt to piggyback” on their own name, even presenting a survey from Crosby Textor of over 2000 voters that claimed over two-thirds of voters could percieve a connection between the parties, in an attempt to prevent the party’s registration. Ultimately, the Australian Electoral Commission decided that, on balance, the name of the New Liberals was “sufficiently visually and aurally distinct” from the Liberal Party’s name, and registered the party.

Wikinews spoke with the New Liberals’ party leader Victor Kline via email about the plans of the New Liberals and their policies and values.

Friday, January 25, 2008

A fire has been confirmed at The Monte Carlo Resort and Casino in Las Vegas, Nevada in the United States.

Reports say the fire, which was reported at about 11:00 a.m. (Pacific Time) began in the top center of the hotel and quickly spread to the top five floors, burning a large section of the roof and facade. Flames were seen shooting out of the top of the hotel. Also visible was a plume of black smoke which according to witnesses, was visible for many miles.

At least three fire companies responded to the scene and quickly began to extinguish the fire. As of 12:00 p.m., the fire was nearly contained. The Strip has been closed off in front of the hotel while firefighters continue to fight the blaze.

All guests have been evacuated from the hotel with no injuries reported. The hotel has 3,002 guest rooms, 211 suites and is 32 stories high.

The cause of the fire is not known and is being investigated.

Wednesday, April 4, 2018

On Monday, two US Republican Party legislators, Greg Walden and Frank Pallone Jr., respectively the chairman and the ranking member of the United States House Committee on Energy and Commerce, co-wrote a public letter to Jim Zemlin, executive director of The Linux Foundation, about open-source software (OSS) and improving its security. They requested Zemlin to answer their questions by no later than April 16.

The letter contained the following four questions; each of the first two has a further two follow-up questions.

1. Has the CII [Core Infrastructure Initiative] performed a comprehensive study of which pieces of OSS are most crucial to the “global information infrastructure”?
1. If not, does the CII plan to perform such a study?
2. What would the CII need in order to do so?
2. Has the CII, or any other organizations, compiled any statistics on OSS usage?
1. If not, does the CII plan to perform such a study?
2. What would the CII need in order to do so?
3. In your estimation, how sustainable and stable is the OSS ecosystem?
4. Based on your response to the previous question, how can the OSS ecosystem be made more sustainable and stable?

Walden and Pallone exemplified Heartbleed, a “critical cybersecurity vulnerability” that allowed the hacking of websites and passwords, and millions of medical records in 2014. They also wrote that, in response to that vulnerability, The Linux Foundation established a multi-million dollar project, the Core Infrastructure Initiative, intended to improve the global infrastucture of such software.

The politicians noted large tech companies like Microsoft, Apple Inc., and Adobe Systems respond more quickly to such critical vulnerabilities than distributors and developers of open-source software.

Open-source software is “publicly accessible” and usually freely-licensed for a wide range of use, such as modification and commercial uses. Walden and Pallone also expressed praise toward open-source software and cited a 2015 survey conducted by Black Duck Software saying 78% of companies used such software.