Weekend tech reading: Join us for a gaming get-together!

[Matthew DeCarlo]

Join us for a gaming get-together! On Saturday, May 8 around 5PM EST various TechSpot staff and community members will gather to play Team Fortress 2. If you are interested in participating, please join the TechSpot Steam group and post a message in this thread. Folks without TF2: We will randomly select two interested TechSpot members on Thursday, May 6 and purchase copies for those individuals. We look forward to meeting up with all of you next weekend!

Here's the first screenshot of the Linux Steam client Less than two weeks ago we reported on the Mac OS X Steam client confirming the existence of a Linux client and then found more Linux references too. We then found the unreleased Steam Linux binaries that were under active development. Some still didn't believe the existence of a Steam client for Linux with Source Engine support, but it's something we have said for nearly two years based upon our sources and then the emergence of these binaries. Phoronix

Man "beats" Bejeweled 2 after playing for 3 years A California steel contractor named Mike Leyde recently displayed one such type of persistence by playing a single round of his casual game of choice, Bejeweled 2, for 2,205 hours and 51 minutes over the course of three years. In that time, he collected 4,872,229 gems, earning the game's highest calculable score, 2,147,483,647, at which point the score display got really perplexed and went blank. Joystiq

Twitter suspends accounts of torrent sites Twitter has suspended the accounts of at least two torrent sites and removed all of their followers. No reason for the suspension has been given other than that the sites in question "abused" Twitter’s service. Both sites were updating their accounts with newly published torrents daily. TorrentFreak

Encryption can't stop the wiretapping boom As encryption technologies have outpaced the mathematical methods of breaking crypto schemes, law enforcement has feared for years that scrambled messages between evildoers (or law-breaking activists) would thwart their snooping. But it seems that either lawbreakers aren't using encryption, or those privacy tools simply don't work. Forbes

Lock, stock and Barcelona Locking your bicycle to benches, lampposts, railings, etc is not allowed in Barcelona. One chap who had his bicycle lock cut and his ride removed by the city couldn't be bothered to pay the €60 fee to get his bicycle back. Instead, he invested the money in a whole bunch of locks and promptly proceeded to lock all manner of objects to lampposts and railings all around town. Copenhagezine

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https://www.techspot.com/news/38801-weekend-tech-reading-join-us-for-a-gaming-get-together.html

 

[slh28]

Any reason why 2,147,483,647 is the highest Bejeweled 2 score? Or did he just keep playing until the game crashed?

 

[Matthew DeCarlo]

"We had to give the game some sort of maximum-displayable score, and figured that was high enough; no one would ever get that many points," Bejeweled co-creator Brian Fiete said in a statement. CNET

 

[tengeta]

Its a joke reference to the "Year 2038 problem" in which UNIX will reroll the clocks just like the Y2K issue. Also, its the 8th Mersenne prime... Most interesting Wikipedia article I've read in a while.

I also saw somewhere else that this is the max score in many games of the 32-bit era.

 

[matrix86]

About the Twitter article:

.....people still use Twitter? lol

To the guy in Barcelona...I applaud you. I bet they'll put up more bike racks now. Although, chances are, they are probably too stupid to even make the connection. Should have put a sign on all the stuff saying "you won't let me lock my bike here, but what about this item? P.S., we need more bike racks around here." Think maybe they'll get the point then, lol.

 

[ET3D]

2,147,483,647 is the maximum 31 bit number. Presumably the developers used a signed 32 bit integer, which means that after this number the value became negative.