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Filed under: Fun, Games, Kids, Time-Wasters, Web

Dynamic Systems - Time Waster

Dynamic SystemsDynamic Systems is a physics-based puzzle game. As is common for this type of game, your goal is to get the ball into the goal. In this case the ball is metal, and the goal is a cup. You move certain objects into place and rotate them into the correct orientation to allow the ball to roll, bounce, or otherwise be moved into the cup. Thankfully, unlike most puzzle games, Dynamic Systems offers solutions to each level's puzzle right in the game.

The feel of the game is somewhat like Collider, with floating metal bars and dirty industrial graphics everywhere. The background music in Dynamic Systems is relatively soothing, but as the game gets more challenging, the repetitive nature of the music becomes pretty frustrating. Thankfully, you can turn it off.

The difficulty in Dynamic Systems grows slowly but steadily, making it a fun game to come back to.

Filed under: Business, Design, Developer, Internet, Text, News, Open Source

Walmart.com beefs up, adds open-source

Walmart
Wal-Mart has generally had a good-enough web presence online, that is for the most part helpful in finding products and priming the pump for customers to visit the store knowing what they will find already since they saw it online. I have used their website for a long time. Now, Walmart.com has had a face-lift, a make-over, and even to some extent, a make-under. Using open-source software, Wal-Mart has pulled the trigger on their reloaded web experience. New features include: the use of Flash for promotional spots and new flashy-popdown-menus to quickly find what you are looking for, which saves a lot of time having to click on each tab previously and wait for it to load. Alphabetical menus, a "what's hot" area, and logical product groupings make everything easy to find. Walmart uses OpenLaszlo and Flash technologies to accomplish this newly christened voodoo, making open-source a big component of their operation. One more thing, hub, the failed social networking experience is not a part of the new site, thank goodness. If you ask me, Wal-Mart should think about adding social product voting and interactive user comments on products. Turn the thing into a giant blog that the customer can contribute to. That would be something.

Filed under: Developer, Text, News

Python 2.5 released!

Python 2.5The latest version of the Python programming language, version 2.5 final, is ready for download. The Python website states that Python 2.5 is ready for production use and should work great. Python 2.5 has had many changes to make it better, faster, and make programming easier for you. Some of the new things in Python are: It now uses the Buildbot tool; conditional expressions have been updated; absolute and relative package imports are now possible; generators got push, throw, and close methods; min and max now have a keyword parameter; and new modules added to the standard library are ctypes, ElementTree, hashlib, sqlite3 and wsgiref. There are many more new things about Python 2.5, so if you use the language, or have wondered about it, it is all about you right now.

Filed under: Developer, Microsoft, Open Source

Microsoft releases .NET version of Python

PythonLast week Microsoft released IronPython, a version of of the Python open source scripting language designed to interoperate with its .NET libraries on Windows or Mono, an open source .NET implementation for Linux. CNet News.com speculates that Microsoft will soon support IronPython in its Visual Studio development environment. IronPython's source code is available from Microsoft's under their shared source license.

Featured Time Waster

The World's Hardest Game 2.0 - Time Waster

So, just how good at time waster games are you? Think you've got the stuff? Well, The World's Hardest Game 2.0 doesn't think you do. Yes, amazingly, it's possible to have a sequel to a game called "The World's Hardest Game". It doesn't seem logically possible, since if the first one was actually the world's hardest, how could another one come along and share the moniker? It made me doubt the name in the first place. That is, until I tried the game. The mechanics of the game are very simple. You are a small red square, ...

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