Slashdot is powered by your submissions, so send in your scoop

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×
Microsoft

Activision CEO Kotick Says Sony 'Won't Return Our Phone Calls' (thegamer.com) 15

An anonymous reader shares a report: Things aren't looking great for the Microsoft-Activision merger. The EU has issued a statement of objections, the UK's CMA issued a provisional report finding the merger would stifle competition, and the FTC has outright sued to make sure the merger never happens in the US. It seems every major world regulator has a problem with Microsoft and Activision shacking up. It's at this point that most C-suite executives of a major corporation would start hedging their bets, but Sony has started screening Bobby's calls.

"It's funny, Sony's not on the phone to us," said Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick. "In fact, they're not returning our phone calls." In an interview with Fox Business, Kotick talked about the embattled merger and how normally he'd be on the phone with Sony executives talking about new business ventures. That's all changed because of the Microsoft merger.

Comment Re:Big question (Score 1) 53

>The way data is exposed is almost ALWAYS via a compromised "client" machine talking to a database server
Are there published stats on that or is that a hunch? I don't actually know.
>(other than unencrypted database dumps I supposed).
Yes, that's one of the reasons of having encrypted data at rest. Another is hardware theft, another is being able to store data with a host you don't completely trust.
  All the cloud data and backup providers aren't just going to stop encrypting data at rest just because lsllll says compromises "almost ALWAYS" happen at the client side. Even if that were true, encrypting data at rest is still a good thing for the times when it isn't true.

Comment Re:Um... everybody at the top is doing fine (Score 2) 49

the stock market barely moved

Were you watching? It's easy to say now after the carnage is over.
S&P did move, about 30% top to bottom in a few weeks, with the highest single-day volatility index except for a day in 2008. Crude light futures tanked went below 0 for the last trading day of that contract around that time.

Submission + - Scientists Observe Live Cells Responding To Magnetic Fields For First Time (newatlas.com)

An anonymous reader writes: One of the most remarkable “sixth” senses in the animal kingdom is magnetoreception – the ability to detect magnetic fields – but exactly how it works remains a mystery. Now, researchers in Japan may have found a crucial piece of the puzzle, making the first observations of live, unaltered cells responding to magnetic fields. Many animals are known to navigate by sensing the Earth’s magnetic field, including birds, bats, eels, whales and, according to some studies, perhaps even humans. However, the exact mechanism at play in vertebrates isn’t well understood. One hypothesis suggests it’s the result of a symbiotic relationship between the animals and magnetic field-sensing bacteria. But the leading hypothesis involves chemical reactions induced in cells through what’s called the radical pair mechanism.

Essentially, if certain molecules are excited by light, electrons can jump between them to their neighbors. That can create pairs of molecules with a single electron each, known as a radical pair. If the electrons in those molecules have matching spin states, they will undergo chemical reactions slowly, and if they’re opposites the reactions occur faster. Since magnetic fields can influence electron spin states, they could induce chemical reactions that change an animals’ behavior. In the living cells of animals with magnetoreception, proteins called cryptochromes are thought to be the molecules that undergo this radical pair mechanism. And now, researchers at the University of Tokyo have observed cryptochromes responding to magnetic fields for the first time.

Comment Customer time's more important than developer time (Score 1) 84

Most of us have heard the common saying: "programmer time is expensive, hardware is cheap" -- the justification to buy better servers and to buy the developers high-end workstations because developers can get more work done in less time.
Another phrase IMO ought to become commonly understood by businesses: user time is more important than developer time.
Sure programmers are expensive, but users seldom have the fastest mobile devices or workstations and they won't get the same experience as developers.
I don't use messenger but am pleased to see that Facebook has saved even a half a second a day for a billion active users.

Comment Re:They're both wrong (Score 1) 567

Progressives bellyached and clamoured for free speech for decades. Now progressives deride it as "freeze peach" and are pretty happy to take on the libertarian position of "don't like it? build your own platform then :^)"
If you count yourself among them, then you are a worm. An eel. An absolute shit-heel.

Comment Show me the money! (Score 1) 118

This isn't the first time I've heard of reversible computing and its purported benefits, and over the years every time I looked it up I haven't seen significant advancements or implementations. This article is no exception. And I'm still not convinced there exists any design of a reversible-logic processor is practical or useful for general purpose computing, assuming that the physical hardware problems have been solved.

I would be quite happy to see a software simulation of an 8 bit processor with a simple instruction set and a small amount of RAM, all implemented in simulated reversible-logic gates. Does anyone know if such a simulation exists? Or is the answer "well, it's complicated" which means probably not?

Comment Re:Not me, not in California (Score 1) 940

Here in BC, Canada, we are only allowed to raise the rent a couple percent each year.

So what I did was raise the rent every time I was eligible, then give them a cash rebate for 'being good tenants' to keep the rent where it was.

Later the family fell apart and the tenant turned into total jerks, partying, etc, and I was able to simply stop 'rebating' that money and effectively raising the rent 15% in the space of a month.

Comment Re:This is the dumbest research I've seen this yea (Score 1) 486

>This is the dumbest research I've seen in 2015. There was actually no computation involved -- they just wanted to write a long string to disk. They concluded that adding the superfluous step of concatenating strings in memory, then writing to disk, was slower. Well duh! That's not what memory is for!

Agreed with you on the uselessness of their research, but that is most definitely one important and common use of memory: buffer caches used by the operating system.

Effectively, they unintentionally tested the speed of the OS to concatenate strings vs Java or Python. The researchers are wrong right out of the gate: they say "Heavy Disk Usage" in their research headline, but at no point did they actually test disk performance, everything they did is being handled by the OS buffer cache.

All the researchers have shown is that string concatenation operations in Java and Python are atrociously slow. The java example used the naive form a=a+b; to concatenate strings, which is one of the slowest ways to do it in Java if you are doing repeated concatenations to a string.

If, in their tests, they had also done a string concatenation in C by allocating a buffer and appending to it using a pointer (not strcat) the speed difference doing that vs. 1 million write calls would have been negligible.

Also, if they sync'd after each of a million 1-byte writes to test how slow "Heavy Disk Usage" is compared to a single write of a million bytes, they wouldn't have bothered finishing this paper at all because it's so damn obvious that memory is faster.

Comment Re:I don't get it... (Score 3, Insightful) 98

Let's also keep in mind that apple apps ONLY run in a sandbox, and this virus does not break out of it. The worst the app can do is be installed if you don't actually go into it and do stuff.

The main danger is that the app could masquarade as a legit app like browser/banking etc and maybe trick you into using it.

But the sheer number of steps needed to install it, then almost crazy foolishly using it afterwards, it isn't much of a threat.

Slashdot Top Deals

"Take that, you hostile sons-of-bitches!" -- James Coburn, in the finale of _The_President's_Analyst_

Working...