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Microsoft

Submission + - SPAM: Windows 7 whooper and other bizarre Microsoft mark

Submitted by ChiefMonkeyGrinder
ChiefMonkeyGrinder writes: Repainting a Spanish town, launching a seven-patty tall Windows 7 Whopper burger in Japan, and giving away software to a sleepy Dutch village. Love or hate Microsoft, you have to admit that it has excelled itself in marketing campaigns around the world to mark the launch of Windows 7.
Link to Original Source

Submission + - Nokia sues Apple for iPhone patent infringement

Submitted by YouWantFriesWithThat
YouWantFriesWithThat writes: Nokia filed suit Thursday against Apple for patents infringed by the iPhone Details from a Reuters article:

"By refusing to agree appropriate terms for Nokia's intellectual property, Apple is attempting to get a free ride on the back of Nokia's innovation," Ilkka Rahnasto, Vice President for Legal & Intellectual Property at Nokia, said in a statement.

Nokia has ten patents that cover different technologies that the iPhone uses and stated that they include: "wireless data, speech coding, security and encryption and affect all Apple iPhone models shipped."

The story is developing, but is confirmed by multiple sources.

Submission + - Wall Street cheating proven impossible to detect (about.com)

Submitted by mrstrano
mrstrano writes: "A new paper by Princeton computer scientists and economists suggests that complex financial
derivatives are computationally intractable to detect: that is, once you have mixed together a bunch
  of weird-ass securities and derivatives, you literally can't tell if the resulting security is being
tampered with as it pays off (or doesn't)." A nice and simple explanation of the idea behind the paper is given by Richard J. Lipton.
The Internet

Submission + - SPAM: FCC takes first step toward net neutrality rules

Submitted by alphadogg
alphadogg writes: The Federal Communications Commission has taken the first step toward creating formal net neutrality rules, despite a huge lobbying effort from opposing groups in recent days. The FCC voted Thursday to open a rulemaking process and begin receiving comments on a proposal to create new net neutrality rules following a contentious debate on whether new regulations are needed. The FCC is still months away from voting on the final regulations, but the rules, as proposed, would allow Web users to run the legal applications and access the legal Web sites of their choice, while prohibiting broadband providers from selectively blocking or slowing Web content. Providers could use "reasonable" network management to reduce congestion and maintain quality of service, but the rules would require them to be transparent with consumers about their efforts.
Link to Original Source

Comment I personally like the new player (Score 2, Informative) 575

by sholsinger (#27036369) Attached to: Uproar Over Netflix's New Instant Viewer

The new player has marked improved video quality for me. Other improvements included are automatic resume from last playback, de-coupling from windows media player and, greater viability for cross-platform usability. It works on Mac OS X with Silverlight for Mac. I hear tell that there are plans to support Moonlight.

However, I don't think Linux folks have yet LOST anything they already have. So the best you can hope for is that they eventually do support Moonlight.
Games

Balancing Player Input and Developer Vision? 77

Posted by Soulskill from the customer-is-always-annoying dept.
Chris_Jefferson writes "I work on a simple iPhone puzzle game called Combination. Probably the most frequent request I get from users is for an in-game hint system, to help them out on the harder problems. However, when I tried beta testing such a system, almost every user would just hammer the hint button as soon as they got stuck for longer than 30 seconds, spoiling (I believe) their enjoyment of the game. Should games programmers decide they know what's best for users, and not give them features they are crying out for? Has anyone ever seen a good middle-ground, where users are helped, but can't just skip their way through the entire game?" This question can be generalized for just about any game that's being continually developed — where should the game's designer draw the line between responding to feedback and maintaining what they feel is is the greater source of entertainment?

Comment Re:It's going to take a moment... (Score 1) 420

by sholsinger (#26741245) Attached to: Users' Admin Logins Make Most Windows Malware Worse

Hardy worked fine for me. nvidia binary shipping with it worked great. Sound worked great. Then... Update Manager downloaded 2.6.27 and everything broke. Of course I didn't realize it was the kernel, otherwise I would have just gone back to using the previous ones.

Instead, like a n00b I installed the latest... 8.10, and it failed, big time. Video didn't work yet, and audio was still broken. I downloaded a fresh release that contained the exact failures that caused my problem before.

This is certainly enough to make me jump ship from Ubuntu. I like their goal, but they're not doing a very good job with it.

Scratch that, a large portion of the grandparents and total computer illiterates will be able to install Ubuntu just fine.

But the slightly advanced users that might want to get *both* of their monitors to work, or perhaps, even get 5.1 audio are screwed. -- That is, unless they, too become kernel hackers.

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