Notable software releases this week include Microsoft Office 2011 14.3.7, SpamSieve 2.9.8, Security Update 2013-004 for Lion and Snow Leopard, Safari 5.1.10 for Snow Leopard, and Nisus Writer Pro 2.0.5 and Express 3.4.4.

 

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The TidBITS staff joined Chuck Joiner on his MacJury podcast to render judgment on the new iPhones. What new iPhones? If you missed Apple’s announcement, you can now watch the video on the company’s Web site. Will the Touch ID fingerprint scanner on the iPhone 5s make security more available to the disabled? Accessibility expert Steven Aquino thinks so. While Apple was announcing new products, it quietly shuttered the Cards app and service for sending custom greeting cards from an iPhone or iPad. Finally, find out how Facebook can make you depressed (or not), 1Password’s developers respond to the NSA revelations, and a wistful John Sculley laments the firing of Steve Jobs.

 

Read the full article at TidBITS, the oldest continuously published technology publication on the Internet. To get a full-text RSS feed, help support our work and become a TidBITS member! Members also enjoy an ad-free version of our Web site, email delivery of individual articles, the ability to make long comments with live links, and discounts on Take Control orders and other Apple-related products.

Landslide kills 12 people in Veracruz, bringing total number of dead from storms Ingrid and Manuel to 34.

Slashdot's Timothy Lord is attending LinuxCon in New Orleans this week and writes in with the following. "Valve co-founder and managing director Gabe Newell says in no uncertain terms what the brain trust at Valve thinks: When it comes to actual users, 'Linux is currently insignificant by any metric' (by any metric that matters to game companies, at least, like number of players, minutes played, and — all important — revenue). On these fronts, Linux players are 'typically under 1 percent' of what game companies see. But that's not the upshot. The takeaway is just about the opposite, says Newell: 'The future of gaming is on Linux.' Newell expounded on the present and future of games on Linux in a keynote address at LinuxCon North America, which kicked off today in New Orleans. He described ways Valve is working to improve the landscape for games on Linux, and hinted at new hardware developments from the company in the near future." Keep reading for the rest of Tim's report.

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President Kagame's coalition expected to win by large margin, after voting passes off peacefully.

With three letters, you can get most gamers' attention: MMO. With three more, you can just as quickly inspire skepticism and doubt: FPS. Ever since the MMORPG craze got underway, players and developers have been looking for ways to meld it with the FPS craze that's been going on since the days of Doom. Unfortunately, it's proven much more difficult than expected. The spectrum ranges only from high profile failures, like Richard Garriott's Tabula Rasa, to minor successes, like the Planetside games. That's why Red 5 Studios, a company built upon industry veterans from studios like Blizzard, has been hesitant to throw around the term 'MMOFPS' to describe its first game: Firefall. They say emphatically that it's 'a shooter first and foremost,' and that it also has MMORPG elements. It's more than an academic distinction; they feel that you can't simply cobble together two different genres. In order for the game to work, it has to do the shooter part well, with the relevant RPG parts (character advancement, a persistent world, crafting, etc.) added only in service to the shooter aspect. As Firefall takes shape in an open beta period, it's clear that this is the proper approach. Red 5's unfinished experiment is promising.

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minty3 writes "The new snail species, Zospeum tholussum, has no eyes or pigmentation on its shell and is considered to be a true eutroglobiont or cave-dweller. It was found by a team of cavers and biologists from the Croatian Biospeleological Society. While on an expedition to determine the cave’s depth, they collected animal specimens including one of the previously unidentified snails along with eight of its empty shells."

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Interface to Transmission

Create an LWP UserAgent that records and plays back sessions

Search recursively dependencies used in a module's directory