Review:
The games career mode starts out with a hilarious bang. You take on the role of a nameless, faceless new racer attempting to hit the scene in the city of Rockport. An underground ranking known as the Blacklist governs who can race who, and when. You almost immediately run into a punk named Razor, whos definitely the sort of dude that lives his life a quarter-mile at a time. Hes at the bottom of the list, but a few races later, hes sabotaged your ride and has won it from you in a race. Meanwhile, youre carted off to jail. Left with nothing but some mysterious help from a stranger named Mia, your task is to get back in the race game to work your way to the top of the Blacklist, which is now topped by Razor, whos using your old car to wipe out the competition.

The game actually has a great story hook at the beginning that makes you want to see the career mode through to completion. The early story segments are told through some sort of unholy mixture of computer-generated cars and full-motion video actors. The acting in these early segments is awful...awful good, that is. Youll scratch your head and wonder if these segments are intentionally bad and meant to be played for laughs or if theyre just unintentionally funny. Either way, theyre great. Unfortunately, after a brief prologue, you stop seeing video sequences, and the story is conveyed via voicemails from various characters. Are you a cop? Will you get to utter the magic street racing words, "Mia, I am a cop"? Or is the plot twist even more painfully obvious than that? Youll have to see the story through to find out where everyones allegiances lie.

Working your way up the Blacklist is a multistep progress. Before you can challenge the next Blacklist racer, you have to satisfy a list of requirements. Youll have to win a set number of race events. And youll have to reach a set number of pursuit milestones and earn enough bounty by riling up the police. The cops hate street racers and will give chase when they see you rolling around the open city. You can also just jump right into a pursuit from a menu, too.


Running from the cops is the best action the game has to offer. Chases usually start with just one car on your tail. But as you resist, you might find 20 cars giving chase, in addition to a chopper flying overhead. Losing the cops gets tougher as your heat level rises. Level one heat results in the appearance of just your standard squad cars. But by the time you get up to level five, youll be dealing with roadblocks, spike strips, helicopters, and federal-driven Corvettes. A meter at the bottom of the screen indicates how close you are to losing the cops or getting busted. Stopping your car--or having it stopped for you by spike strips or getting completely boxed in by cops--is how youll get busted. To actually get away, youll need to get out of visual range...and stay there. The initial evasion changes the meter over to a cooldown meter. Youll have to lie low and wait for that meter to fill up to end the chase. This is probably the tensest part of the entire chase, since you never know when two cops might blow around the corner and spot you, starting the whole process over again. It all sort of works like some sort of strange, wonderful cross between Grand Theft Autos open city and Metal Gear Solids stealth mechanic. All the while, youll be acquiring heat on your car. This means that youll have to keep a couple of cars around, because acquiring heat on one car lowers the heat on your other ones. Also, getting busted too many times can result in your car getting impounded, though you can avoid that by resetting the system whenever you get caught (if thats more your speed).
Theres also a lot of racing in Most Wanteds career mode--almost too much, in fact. Youll engage in multilap circuit races, point-A-to-point-B sprint races, drag racing, checkpoint-driven tollbooth races, and speed trap, where the winner is the player that accumulates the most speed while passing by a handful of radar cameras spread throughout the track. The races are solid but not spectacular. The artificial intelligence doesnt really help things along, because most of the game is rubber-banded like crazy. We actually set our controller down for 20 seconds--then picked it back up and caught our opponents on the final lap. And though the AI will occasionally crash and come to a complete halt, itll catch up very, very quickly. Later on in the game, you get a voicemail message informing you that things are going to get tougher. At this point, the computer drivers magically start taking every single shortcut, and the rubber banding only seems to work against you. As a result, catching up after a mistake is much tougher. If this difficulty had gradually sloped up, it wouldnt be a big deal. But flipping the switch from "drive like crap" to "drive like a genius" is really annoying. Fortunately, the racing action itself is entertaining enough to keep you going, and of course, youll be dying to find out what happens next in the story. Read more

System requirements:
Windows 2000/XP
1.4GHz Processor
256MB RAM
8X CD-ROM Drive
3GB Hard Disk Space
32MB ATi Radeon 7500 or nVidia GeForce2 MX Class Video Card
DirectX compatible Sound Card
DirectX 9.0c
Keyboard
Mouse

Screen Shots: Click on the image to view large screen

Microsoft PowerPoint software is rich enough in features and functionally and fulfill almost all needs of PowerPoint users. However, there are few  use cases  which Microsoft has missed. Thankfully, there are few free or moderately priced Add-ins or Plug-ins available from Microsoft MVPs or independent software venders which will make your PowerPoint creation experience more enjoyable and hassle free.

Narration Timing Tweaker
PowerPoints narration tool offers an easy feature to record audio narration to go along with the slide show. However, if you need to fine tune any of the event times in the recorded show, you have to redo the whole slide again. Narration Timing Tweaker is a free add-in which eliminates that need altogether.

Fotolia Ribbon
With Fotolia PowerPoint add-in you can instantly add high-resolution photos, vectors, and illustrations using your free Fotolia account without leaving PowerPoint. You can Insert royalty free images in PowerPoint slides using Fotolias PowerPoint add-in.

Insert web pages in PowerPoint slides with PowerPoint Web Browser Assistant
PowerPoint Web Browser Assistant addin assists you in inserting live web pages on slides on your presentation. It uses Microsoft Internet Explorer to display the web pages.

PptPlex
Microsofts lab product pptPlex is the coolest PowerPoint add-in which lets you give presentations in a quite astonishing way.

Embed media
Microsoft Office PowerPoint does not provide a way to embed video and audio files (with a small exception that you can embed small .wav files). OfficeOne ProTools Embed Media works around that limitation and allows you to embed media files into the presentation. Since the media files are within the presentation, you no longer have to worry about breaking links to the external video files when you move or copy the presentation. PowerPoint will play your files as it would normally do. OfficeOne ProTools Embed Media is not required for playing the video and audio files.

Microsoft Producer
Microsoft Producer allows you to get an existing presentation file, capture and synchronize video and audio narration, add additional media content, and produce a unified set of content ready for viewing in a browser on your intranet , on the web or on a DVD.

Add progress bar with Thermometer
Adding a progress bar to your PowerPoint will let  your audience know at any given point that how much has been covered and how much still left. Thermometer for PowerPoint is a free add-in from Indezine that creates a thermometer style bar in the bottom area of the slide that shows how much of a presentation has progressed and how much more is remaining.

YouTube Video Wizard (YTV)
YTZ wizard lets you easily  insert YouTube videos into a PowerPoint slide. All you need to do is to provide the YouTube video URL that appears in the browser address bar, the rest is taken care of by the YTV Wizard.

Mouse Mischief
Mouse Mischief integrates into Microsoft PowerPoint 2010 and Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2007, letting you insert questions, polls, and drawing activity slides into your lessons.

Students can actively participate in these lessons by using their own mice to click, circle, cross out, or draw answers on the screen.

Flashback PowerPoint Add-in to rewind Flash movies in PowerPoint automatically
FlashBack will rewind the Flash movies inserted using the Shockwave Flash control automatically. Click here to read more and download.

authorSTREAM Desktop
authorSTREAM desktop lets you search and insert YouTube videos and images in your PowerPoint file from within PowerPoint.

authorPOINT Lite
authorPOINTTM Lite is a free PowerPoint to Flash Converter for converting PowerPoint files in Flash. authorPOINT Lite also lets you share your presentations online on the web through authorSTREAM.

iSpring
Similar to authorPOINT Lite, iSpring is a free PowerPoint to Flash converter which can handle animation effects, slide transitions, audio narrations, video and Flash objects in output.

Slide Finder
SlideFinder Add-in for PowerPoint 2007  lets you search the web for presentations and slides from within PowerPoint.

This is not the comprehensive list of free add-ins for PowerPoint. You can find more information about add-in and other PowerPoint resources at links below:


http://officeone.mvps.org/products.html
http://www.indezine.com/products/powerpoint/links.html#addin

At LinkedIn, weve started to use the Play Framework, which supports not only Java, but also Scala. Many teams have opted to write their apps in Scala, so Ive spent a fair amount of time helping team members learn the language.


Most LinkedIn engineers are proficient in Java, so their early Scala code looks like a literal translation from Java to Scala: lots of for-loops, mutable variables, mutable collection classes, null values, and so on. While this code works, its not taking advantage of one of Scalas biggest strengths: strong support for functional programming.

In this post, I want to share 10 recipes for how to translate a few of the most common imperative Java patterns into functional Scala code.

Why functional programming?

Why would you want to make your code "functional"? This question has been asked and answered many times, so rather than recreating the answers myself, Ill point you to a couple good starting points:

1. Why Functional Programming Matters by John Hughes
2. Functional Programs Rarely Rot by Michael O. Church

Its worth mentioning that Scala is not a pure functional language, but it is still worth trying to make as much of your code as possible out of (a) small functions that (b) use only immutable state and (c) are side effect free. If you do that, I believe your code will generally be easier to read, reason about, and test.

Now, on to the cookbook!

Recipe 1: building a list

Lets start easy: we want to loop over a List of data, process each item in some way, and store the results in a new List. Here is the standard way to do this in Java:

Its possible to translate this verbatim into Scala by using a mutable.List and a for-loop, but there is no need to use mutable data here. In fact, there is very rarely a reason to use mutable variables in Scala; think of it as a code smell.

Instead, we can use the map method, which creates a new List by taking a function as a parameter and calling that function once for each item in the original List (see: map and flatMap in Scala for more info):


Recipe 2: aggregating a list

Lets make things a little more interesting: we again have a List of data to process, but now we need to calculate some stats on each item in the list and add them all up. Here is the normal Java approach:

Can this be done without a mutable variable? Yup. All you need to do is use  the foldLeft method (read more about it here). This method has two parameter lists (Scalas version of currying): the first takes an initial value and the second takes a function. foldLeft will iterate over the contents of your List and call the passed in function with two parameters: the accumulated value so far (which will be set to initial value on the first iteration) and the current item in the List.

Here is the exact same calculateTotalStats written as a pure Scala function with only immutable variables:


Recipe 3: aggregating multiple items

Ok, perhaps you can do some simple aggregation with only immutable variables, but what if you need to calculate multiple items from the List? And what if the calculations were conditional? Here is a typical Java solution:

Can this be done in an immutable way? Absolutely. We can use foldLeft again, combined with pattern matching and a case class (case classes give you lots of nice freebies) to create an elegant, safe, and easy to read solution:


Recipe 4: lazy search

Imagine you have a List of values and you need to transform each value and find the first one that matches some condition. The catch is that transforming the data is expensive, so you dont want to transform any more values than you have to. Here is the Java way of doing this:

The normal Scala pattern for doing this would be to use the map method to transform the elements of the list and then call the find method to find the first one that matches the condition. However, the map method would transform all the elements, which would be wasteful if one of the earlier ones is a match.

Fortunately, Scala supports Views, which are collections that lazily evaluate their contents. That is, none of the values or transformations you apply to a View actually take place until you try to access one of the values within the View. Therefore, we can convert our List to a View, call map on it with the transformation, and then call find. Only as the find method accesses each item of the View will the transformation actually occur, so this is exactly the kind of lazy search we want:


Note that we return an Option[SomeOtherObject] instead of null. Take a look at Recipe 7 for more info.

Recipe 5: lazy values

What do you do if you want a value to be initialized only when it is first accessed? For example, what if you have a singleton that is expensive to instantiate, so you only want to do it if someone actually uses it? One way to do this in Java is to use volatile and synchronized:

Scala has support for the lazy keyword, which will initialize the variable only when it is first accessed. Under the hood, it does something similar to synchronized and volatile, but the code written by the developer is easier to read:


Recipe 6: lazy parameters

If youve ever worked with a logging library like log4j, youve probably seen Java code like this:

The logging statement is wrapped with an isDebugEnabled check to ensure that we dont calculate the expensive diagnostics info if the debug logging is actually disabled.

In Scala, you can define lazy function parameters that are only evaluated when accessed. For example, the logger debug method could be defined as follows in Scala (note the => in the type signature of the message parameter):

This means the logging statements in my code no longer need to be wrapped in if-checks even if the data being logged is costly to calculate, since itll only be calculated if that logging level is actually enabled:


Recipe 7: null checks

A common pattern in Java is to check that a variable is not null before using it:

If youre working purely in Scala, and have a variable that might not have a value, you should not set it to null. In fact, think of nulls in Scala as a code smell.

The better way to handle this situation is to specify the type of the object as an Option. Option has two subclasses: Some, which contains a value, and None, which does not. This forces the programmer to explicitly acknowledge that the value could be None, instead of sometimes forgetting to check and stumbling on a NullPointerException.

You could use the isDefined or isEmpty methods with an Option class, but pattern matching is usually cleaner:


The Option class also supports methods like map, flatMap, and filter, so you can safely transform the value that may or may not be inside of an Option. Finally, there is a getOrElse method which returns the value inside the Option if the Option is a Some and returns the specified fallback value if the Option is a None:


Of course, you rarely live in a nice, walled off, pure-Scala garden - especially when working with Java libraries - so sometimes youll get a variable passed to you that isnt an Option but could still be null. Fortunately, its easy to wrap it in an Option and re-use the code above:


Recipe 8: multiple null checks

What if you have to walk an object tree and check for null or empty at each stage? In Java, this can get pretty messy:

With Scala, you can take advantage of a sequence comprehension and Option to accomplish the exact same checks with far less nesting:


Recipe 9: instanceof and casting

In Java, you sometimes need to figure out what kind of class youre dealing with. This involves some instanceof checks and casting:

We can use pattern matching and case classes in Scala to make this code more readable, even though it does the same instanceof checks and casting under the hood:


Recipe 10: regular expressions

Lets say we want to match a String and extract some data from it using one of a few regular expressions. Here is the Java code for it:

In Scala, we can take advantage of extractors, which are automatically created for regular expressions, and pattern matching using partial functions, to create a much more readable solution:

Got some recipes of your own?

I hope this post has been helpful. Its worth noting that the recipes above are only one of many ways to translate the code; for example, many of the List examples could have also been done with recursion.

If youve got suggestions on how to make the examples above even better or have some handy recipes of your own, leave a comment!

3ds Max 2011 is a powerful, integrated 3D modeling, animation, rendering, and compositing tool. Its widely used in diverse industries such as architecture, industrial design, motion pictures, gaming, and virtual reality. If youre interested in learning how to use this powerful application, here are some 3ds Max 2011 video tutorials for beginners from 3ds Max 2011 Essential Training from Lynda.com. Topics covered in this course include creating motion graphics, shading objects with materials and maps, setting up camera and scene layout, lighting basic scenes, animating particle systems, and more.









To watch the complete set of these 3ds Max 2011 video tutorials for beginners, become a lynda.com member today. Your membership gives you access to this entire course as well as their entire library of over 1000 courses.

Adobe has just recently released Creative Suite 6, and with it comes a new version of the highly popular Adobe Photoshop photo editing software. Adobe Photoshop CS6 comes with new improvements to Camera RAW, the layers panel, adjustment techniques, content-aware retouching, and more. If youre new to Photoshop, I recommend that you watch the free videos below. These are Adobe Photoshop CS6 video tutorials for beginners, and will most definitely help you get started on learning how to use this amazing application.

What is Adobe Bridge? - Adobe Photoshop CS6 Video Tutorials for Beginners


Viewing images in Full Screen Preview mode - Adobe Photoshop CS6 Video Tutorials for Beginners


Saving images in collections - Adobe Photoshop CS6 Video Tutorials for Beginners


Using smart collections - Adobe Photoshop CS6 Video Tutorials for Beginners


Comparing RAW and JPEG files - Adobe Photoshop CS6 Video Tutorials for Beginners


Fixing color casts with the White Balance tool - Adobe Photoshop CS6 Video Tutorials for Beginners


Retouching blemishes with the Spot Removal tool - Adobe Photoshop CS6 Video Tutorials for Beginners


Saving variations within a single file with the Snapshot command - Adobe Photoshop CS6 Video Tutorials for Beginners


Understanding Resize vs. Resample - Adobe Photoshop CS6 Video Tutorials for Beginners


Preserving important elements with Content-Aware Scale - Adobe Photoshop CS6 Video Tutorials for Beginners


Introducing adjustment layers - Adobe Photoshop CS6 Video Tutorials for Beginners


Body sculpting with Liquify - Adobe Photoshop CS6 Video Tutorials for Beginners



These videos are from a 10-hour video training series called Photoshop CS6 Essential Training, and is produced by lynda.com, one of the best software training providers on the web today. Photoshop CS6 Essential Training has 22 informative chapters that will help you get the most out of Photoshop as a beginner. You can learn more about the course by visiting the course details page. As a visitor of this site, you can also sign-up for a free 7-day trial pass to gain full access to the course, along with the ENTIRE lynda.com training library of over 1000 courses. If you want to keep learning after the trial, lynda.com offers an affordable subscription for $25/month. A subscription gives you access to the entire training library at any time so you can learn at your own pace. So sign-up for a lynda.com membership today to start watching this complete set of Adobe Photoshop CS6 video tutorials for beginners.