Obsidian's taking Fallout to the wild, untamed (or “tamed but then subsequently re-untamed thanks to a nuclear holocaust,” if we're being technical about it) west, so we're doing the same with our preview. Well, kind of. In the spirit of classic Sergio Leone spaghetti western  “The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly,” we're breaking down Fallout: New Vegas' opening hour – which we had the privilege of taking for a test run during QuakeCon – into thematically appropriate, self-explanatory categories.

Before we dive into the meat of things, though, let's set the scene. You're... a person. We can say that with a fair deal of certainty. You come to in a doctor's office, which – thanks to wasteland sanitation standards – is about as sterile as your average convenience store toilet, but you've got bigger things to worry about. Apparently, you  nearly bit the big one at the hands of some pretty shady customers, but you don't know why. The doc, thankfully, patched up that pesky organ leak that tends to come as the result of bullet wounds, but unfortunately, he can't fill the gaping hole in your memory. He does know this, however: the bastards who did their darnedest to turn you into Swiss cheese were headed toward New Vegas. Well, there are certainly worse places to go for a vengeance-fueled vacation, eh?

Read the rest after the break!

Read More

I’ll say it again.  There is genuine magic in a vinyl record.  

The grooves pressed into the vinyl are direct analogs of the sound waves that struck the microphone.  Because they’r analogs, the physical medium becomes part of the process of sonic reconstruction.  Every single factor in the signal chain—the physical characteristics of the stylus, the cantilever, the coils, the magnets, the tonearm, the turntable motor, the connecting wires, the preamplifier components, the equalization curve—everything affects the signal quality.  Every single component votes on the overall sound.  

That decades of engineering brilliance have made it possible for such stunning sound to come out of such an obstinate signal path is the triumph of passionate will power over the inordinate obstinacy of the physical universe.  During the seventies and eighties, I invested a small fortune into high-end stereo gear and a much larger fortune into an admirable collection of rock and classical and electronic music.  

Playing a vinyl record is an act of devotion for an audiophile.  You handle it lovingly, you use a special blower to bow excess dust off it, you give it a wipe with a clean micro-fiber cloth or maybe you run it through an expensive record-cleaning machine, you install a special brush on the end of the tonearm to remove errant dust from the grooves before the stylus gets there, you lower a dust cover over the whole affair so that dust doesn’t land on the record while it’s playing.  And you make sure you have the whole thing sonically isolated on so that even an errant foostep won’t be felt by the stylus and produce an audible thump in the music.  

Read More

A recent survey hit my radar this weekend and, I must say, I’m not that surprised by the results. Contrary to my usual columns, I won’t bury the lede: Accenture polled 300 large organizations in both the public and private sectors and—surprise!—found that half of them are “fully committed” to using open-source software in their businesses.

To be honest, I expected results more in line from the Zenoss survey I ran across this weekend, which notes that 98 percent of all enterprise companies use open-source software in some capacity. But I’ll leave that difference up to nomenclature / polling differences. The real juice of Accenture’s story is buried in a single, meager sentence somewhere toward the bottom of the press release: less that 29 percent of surveyed companies intend to shovel their open-source contributions/modifications/development back into the community.

Wait a second.

What?

Read More

My father was a professional photographer.  He worked hard to master his craft and he built his own cameras to his own precise specifications.  I watched him build them in his workshop, fascinated by the process.  In those days, a camera was a large and bulky box with a frosted glass plate in the back for focusing—you stuck your head under a black velvet hood to line up the shot.  The image was upside down on the glass, so you had to mentally invert it.  (Talk about your single-lens reflex system!)

Every exposure required an 8x10 sheet of film.  You loaded each sheet into one side of a large two-sided plate — kind of like a cartridge-thing, only huge.  You put a sheet of film on each side and you slid a covering slide over each piece of film to protect it from the light.  Did I mention that you had to do this in the darkroom, so called because you were literally working in the dark?  You loaded the film into the plates in total darkness, by feel alone.  You couldn’t risk even the slightest smidge of light.  You couldn’t even risk a spark of static electricity.  (I loaded film for my dad a few times.  It was time consuming and tedious.  It was not my idea of fun.  I’ve had fun, this wasn’t it.)  You loaded up as many plates as you expected to use and lugged them around in a heavy case.   

When you were ready to take a picture, you slid the cartridge-thing into the back of the camera, just in front of the glass panel, pulled out the slide that protected the film from light, squeezed the air-pressure bulb that clicked the shutter, slid the covering slide back over the film, pulled out the cartridge-thing, flipped it over, reinserted it into the camera so you could expose the film on the flip side.

Read More