The Daily Nerd (February 10th, 2014)

The Daily Nerd (February 10th, 2014) #

Flappy Bird is dead — but brilliant mechanics made it fly

Flappy Bird has flapped its last. It is an ex-bird. The minimalist pipe-avoidance sim that scorched to the top of the iPhone free game rankings earlier this year has been removed by its creator, Dong Nguyen. “I am sorry ‘Flappy Bird’ users, 22 hours from now, I will take ‘Flappy Bird’ down,” he tweeted. “I cannot take this anymore.” Some have seen in this a sort of victory for honest game design. Others have lambasted Nguyen for whining about earning a reported $50,000 a day from the game. Both responses are reductive and unfair. Flappy Bird was despised, at least in part, because of misunderstandings about how the games industry and game creators work.

GCC & LLVM Developers May Begin Collaborating

Renato Golin of Linaro volleyed an interesting message to the GCC mailing list on Friday about “LLVM collaboration?” While controversial, he suggested LLVM and GCC developers begin collaborating due to an “unnecessary fence” between the competing compilers and decisions that need to be shared. He acknowledges while there’s licensing differences (GPL vs. UIUC / BSD) there’s differences between the compilers and their stacks that really shouldn’t exist as it hinders the users and developers.

Behind the scenes of Star Wars — in pictures

It’s more than 30 years since the first Star Wars film was released. Peter Mayhew, who played Chewbacca in the original trilogy, has shared via Twitter images of the cast letting their hair down behind the scenes