Carolina Beach Hotel | "Game meant to be played in 2,000 years gets buried in desert"

Source     :  http://news.cnet.com
Category   : Carolina Beach Hotels
By             :  Beach Hotel
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The cathedrals of Europe took centuries to build, surviving political upheavals for the benefit of future generations. Can a board game created today also last that long?

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That's what game designer Jason Rohrer was shooting for when he unveiled A Game for Someone, winner of the Game Design Challenge at the recent Game Developers Conference (GDC) in San Francisco.
Rohrer, who has created titles such as The Castle Doctrine, designed A Game for Someone for a challenge titled "Humanity's Last Game," which it won.

Rohrer's new board game is meant to be played not by anyone alive today, but by people some 2,000 years in the future, assuming our species survives that long. To that end it has been buried somewhere in the Nevada desert, Polygon tells us.

"I wanted to make a game that is not for right now, that I will never play," the website quoted Rohrer as saying, "and nobody now living would ever play."
Inspired by the Mancala group of board games, A Game for Someone was tested in video game form by AI algorithms, and apparently Rohrer did not even play it himself.

It was designed to last through the ages, with the 18x18-inch board and silver cylindrical pieces machined from about 30 pounds of titanium.
The rules, which Rohrer has kept secret, were printed as diagrams on acid-free paper, sealed in a Pyrex tube, and housed in more titanium.

Rohrer then buried the game at a secret location in the Nevada desert, but kept the GPS location.
With dramatic panache, after describing the game he had GDC attendees open envelopes he had distributed. They contained a total of 1 million GPS coordinates.
"He estimates that if one person visits a GPS location each day with a metal detector, the game will be unearthed sometime within the next million days--a little over 2,700 years," Polygon noted.

Carolina Beach Hotel | "Apple Sells 2m iPhone 5s In China"

Source         :  http://www.guardian.co.uk
Category      : Carolina Beach Hotel
By                : Beach Hotel
Posted By    : Hotels Carolina Beach NC


Apple has confounded Wall Street's expectations by announcing it sold more than 2m iPhone 5s in China, a record for the company, after a launch on Friday that observers had thought low-key.

Chief executive Tim Cook said the sales – which were allotted by online lottery to defeat gangs who buy and resell the handsets – had been "the best first weekend sales ever in China" in a statement.

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Sources including Shanghai Daily said that even if Apple's stores were comparatively quiet, its carrier partners selling the iPhone 5 had a busy weekend, with people signing up to buy the handsets with contracts through China Unicom and China Telecom. Before the launch, China Unicom had had 300,000 preorders for the device, compared with the 200,000 it had for the iPhone 4S in January.

Even so, Apple's stock was downgraded by at least one analyst, as Citi Research cut its recommendation from "buy" to "neutral", suggesting people shouldn't buy or sell it. Citi Research also lowered its target for the stock to $575 (£355) from $675, saying there was growing competition in smartphones and lower excitement around the iPhone 5.

The announcement by Apple seemed calculated to respond to reports on Friday suggesting the lack of queues at its stores meant a lack of interest. In fact the online lottery – instituted by the company after near-riots around the launch in January of the iPhone 4S – meant customers could come into stores at any time to pick up a handset if they were allocated one in the scheme.

China is the world's largest smartphone market, and growing fast, dominated by cheap devices built on Google's Android software. Apple's key problem is seen as the lack of a contract with China Mobile, the country's largest mobile operator, which has more than 700 million customers.

The iPhone 5 was launched in the US and 30 other countries in September, and will be on sale in more than 100 countries worldwide by the end of December – the company's fastest rollout ever.

That makes direct sales comparisons with previous years hard, but also means greater volumes for Apple overall in the increasingly competitive smartphone market, where smartphones using Android have a dominant – and growing – share, and new competitors using Microsoft's Windows Phone software have begun rolling out.

Carolina Beach Hotel | "Losing Norms and Values"

Source     : http://blogs.thenews.com.pk
Category   : Affortable Hotels In Carolina Beach
By         :Beach Hotel
Posted By  : Hotels Carolina Beach NC


Weekend always come as a relief from hectic routine of 5 working days. I always make sure to make these 2 days ideal for me and for my family. Thus this time we planned to watch a movie and went to posh movie area in Bahria Town. The place is beautifully decorated with full emphasis given on the comfort of audience. Mainly young lot is the target audience who are more tuned to visit and watch movies mostly with friends. In a nutshell the place is well maintained and organized.

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Finally the curtain rose (just a phrase as there are no such curtains their), and as per normal custom, it directed to stand for the National Anthem. National Anthem started, as a norm me and my husband stood up in the respect and honor of national anthem. To my surprise, only 4 to 5 youngsters manage to stood up, while remaining remained busy texting, gossiping, eating pop corns etc. I looked around and said to my husband, it was just US Standing, weren’t we all supposed
to stand? He replied, these are today’s kids (as if we were decade older ones) I can still recall this practice back to our school days some 7 8 years back, when at the end of morning session, National Anthem would play and we all would sing it along and pay homage and tribute to our Country.

I am not here to give sermon to our youngsters or complaint as it is not their fault. It is the fault of our system, maybe our media. When we have started celebrating “valentine’s day” with more vigor, enthusiasm and charm as compared to Independence Day or Pakistan day, then such things are bound to happen. It has become normal practice that people spend Eid holidays sleeping all day (mostly think it is the Holiday they get disguised in the form of Eid) and rather enjoying and spending time with family, they sleep/ rest all day.