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Windows

Submission + - FSF's Windows 7 Sins Campaign Violates Own Beliefs

Submitted by
Bryant
Bryant writes: "It seems the Free Software Foundation, in their latest campaign against closed source, may have committed an egregious sin of their own. The content of their latest campaign is licensed, perhaps against their own ideals, under the Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 License (ironically, their choice of license does not prohibit commercial redistribution of their work). Furthermore, they may have actually nullified their own license by infringing on Microsoft's intellectual property. The campaign itself leads some to question whether the FSF might be squandering funds on what may come off as a campaign of fear, uncertainty, and doubt, an accusation perhaps given credibility by their latest efforts to contact Fortune 500 companies, a step typically unusual for them. What are your thoughts: is the Free Software Foundation doing free open source software any good with their campaigns, or might their campaigns simply be causing more problems than they solve?"
PlayStation (Games)

Submission + - Atari is stealing music

Submitted by
An anonymous reader writes: A few month after the fight when Atari was claimed to left out graphic artist Dan Schoening in the final credits of the game Ghostbusters: The Video Game, even though Sony / Sierra had given them his word he would be in the final credits.... Atari does it again. Swedish musician Jonne Dahlberg, also known as "svenzzon" , famous for his underground demoscene music found in many scene related productions, can now find his music in the videogame. No credits, no compensation. The music is played during a visit in the Arcade hall: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oJVFntSiuWA and reflects the old commodore days. The music is actually a remix of Chris Huelsbecks old intro music to Turrican 2. Huelsbeck is also the legal owner to the Turrican music and he also confirms that no credits has been given to him, or Jonne Dahlberg. Its funny, these big publishers like Sony that stands for strict copyrights when asked about sites like The Pirate Bay, but when it comes to their own products, stealing is not an issue.
Businesses

Submission + - Unchain the Office Computers! 3

Submitted by
theodp
theodp writes: "During a town hall meeting for State Dept. workers, Hillary Clinton was asked this question: 'Can you please let the staff use an alternative Web browser called Firefox?' The room erupted in cheers. But then an aide stepped in to explain that the free program was too expensive — 'it has to be administered, the patches have to be loaded.' Slate's Farhad Manjoo has had-it-up-to-here with this kind of IT tyranny, and argues that corporate IT should let us browse any way we want. 'The restrictions infantilize workers,' explains Manjoo. 'They foster resentment, reduce morale, lock people into inefficient routines, and, worst of all, they kill our incentives to work productively. In the information age, most companies' success depends entirely on the creativity and drive of their workers. IT restrictions are corrosive to that creativity — they keep everyone under the thumb of people who have no idea which tools we need to do our jobs but who are charged with deciding anyway.' Can he get an 'Amen', Brothers and Sisters?"
Mozilla

Submission + - Porn collection put people off upgrading Firefox (pcpro.co.uk)

Submitted by
Barence
Barence writes: "Mozilla's Security team has disclosed a very interesting piece of research which suggests people refused to upgrade to Firefox 3 because they were afraid the browser would expose their porn collection. Mozilla's research found that the number one reason for not upgrading was the new location bar, and the fact that it delved into people's bookmark collections to suggest sites as they typed. "When we expanded the capabilities of the location bar to search against all history and bookmarks in Firefox 3, a lot of people contacted us to say that they had certain bookmarks they didn't really want to have displayed," Firefox's principal designer, Alex Faaborg, tactfully explains. "In some cases users had intentionally hidden these bookmarks in deep hierarchies of folders, somewhat similar to how one might hide a physical object.""
Programming

Dirty Coding Tricks To Make a Deadline 683

Posted by Soulskill from the it-ain't-pretty-but-it-ain't-crashing dept.
Gamasutra is running an article with a collection of anecdotes from game developers who had to employ some quick and dirty fixes to get their products to ship on time. Here's a brief excerpt: "Back at [company X] — I think it was near the end of [the project] — we had an object in one of the levels that needed to be hidden. We didn't want to re-export the level and we did not use checksum names. So right smack in the middle of the engine code we had something like the following. The game shipped with this in: if( level == 10 && object == 56 ) {HideObject();} Maybe a year later, an artist using our engine came to us very frustrated about why an object in their level was not showing up after exporting to what resolved to level 10. I wonder why?" Have you ever needed to insert terrible code to make something work at the last minute?
Microsoft

Microsoft Poland Photoshops Black Guy To White One 964

Posted by kdawson from the extreme-localization dept.
wanted writes "If you look at Microsoft's Poland business solutions Web site, you will probably not notice anything odd about the main picture. However, when you compare it with the original English version, you can see that someone decided that showing black people in Poland is probably not going to be convincing to business. They just Photoshopped the head of a white guy in for the black one, in an amateurish way, leaving his hand unchanged. (Here's a mirror in case something should happen to the original.)" We noted a few months back that the city of Toronto had done something similar.

Comment Why do you care ? (Score 1) 368

by slashmatteo (#29183357) Attached to: Blizzard Answers Your Questions and More
I really enjoyed Blizzard games up to Starcraft included. But then WoW was out, and in a same way that many WoW players seem disconnected from reallity, it disconnected Blizzard from reallity. They now live in a world where millions of people are giving them 10 bucks a month in order to connect to a MMORPG, making them feel that if a player buys a game that he can play for 18 months, he will be willing to pay $180, that no LAN connection is no big deal, etc. They just do not live in the same world as we do. The main reason I won't play Starcraft 2 by the way is not about money or LAN, but on a lower level: no linux port.

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