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Games

Submission + - It's Official: Valve Releasing Linux Source Engine (phoronix.com) 1

Submitted by
l_bratch
l_bratch writes: "Valve Corporation has today rolled out their Steam Mac OS X client to the general public and confirmed something we have been reporting for two years: the Steam content delivery platform and Source Engine are coming to Linux. This news is coming days after we discovered proof in Steam's Mac OS X Client of Linux support and subsequently found more Linux references and even the unreleased Steam Linux client. The day has finally come and Linux gamers around the world have a reason to rejoice, as this is the biggest news for the Linux gaming community that sees very few tier-one titles."

Submission + - Kindle DX’s price will drop to fight IPad (tablettweet.com) 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: There is a big rumor about the Amazon’s market strategy against IPad pre-order which will starts from this Friday 12th. If you planing to buy a Kindle or Kindle DX global wireless maybe it’s good thing to wait for a while at least until the end of IPad pre-sale period. Some said that maybe the Kindle DX’s price will drop 20% from it’s current price, it’s mean you can buy 9.7 inch reading screen e-book reader for only 400 USD ! Worth to wait isn’t it ?
Hardware

Submission + - Computing Pioneer Thacker to Win Turing Award (wsj.com)

Submitted by btcoal
btcoal writes: The Wall Street Journal has a profileof Charles Thacker, of Alto fame. It reads, "The Association for Computing Machinery on Tuesday is naming Thacker the latest recipient of the A.M. Turing award, which comes with $250,000 and carries prestige akin to a Nobel Prize in the industry. Thacker is being recognized largely for the Alto, a machine developed in 1974 at Xerox’s famed Palo Alto Research Center that is often called the world’s first personal computer. The ACM is also citing Thacker’s contributions at Xerox PARC to the invention of Ethernet–the most widely used technology for local networks–as well as work on tablet-style computers since becoming a researcher at Microsoft in the 1990s.

'This guy is a real genius,' says Alan Kay, a researcher who worked with Thacker at PARC and a fellow Turing award winner. 'We don’t like to sling that word around in our field, but he is one. He is magic.'"

Submission + - Cybercrooks Surpassed Old School Bankrobbers in 09 (krebsonsecurity.com)

Submitted by krebsonsecurity
krebsonsecurity writes: Organized cyber criminal gangs stole $25 million in the 3rd quarter alone last year, by pilfering the online bank accounts of small to midsized businesses, the FDIC reported last week. In contrast, traditional bank robbers hauled just $9.4 million in 1,184 bank robberies during that same period, according to an analysis of FBI bank crime statistics by krebsonsecurity.com. From that story: "The federal government sure publishes a lot more information about physical bank robberies that it makes available about online stick-ups. Indeed, the FBI’s bank crime stats are extraordinarily detailed. For example, they can tell you that in the 3rd quarter of last year, bank robbers were more likely to hold up their local branch between the hours of 9 a.m. and 11 a.m. on a Wednesday than at any other time or day of the week; they can tell you the number of tear gas and dye packs taken with the loot, the number of security cameras activated, the number of food stamps taken, even what percentage of suspected perpetrators had illegal drug habits at the time of the robberies. About the only thing the stats don’t tell you is what brand of jeans the perpetrators were wearing and whether the getaway car had cool vanity plates. What do we get about e-crime statistics from the federal government? One guy from the FDIC giving a speech at the RSA conference.

Comment Re:A partial solution: (Score 1) 629

by btcoal (#31271568) Attached to: Beliefs Conform To Cultural Identities
Well said. It always amazes me that even among /.ers, a non-representative selection of the population in terms of intelligence, there is a lack of sound reasoning. That is, outside of the domain-specific knowlwedge of most /.ers. Take, for example, the immediate debunking of some sharlatan's claim that Windows 7 uses up all your available memory. That argument was torn apart with the first few posts. Take, as a counter-example, the discussion on Google's unwillingness to disclose the race, gender or nationality stats of its workforce. It seemed as if most posters came to the discussion with their own view of how the world works and their own biases about diversity. Not much useful insight was gained from this latter discussion. The difference: domain-specific knowledge. (I am making the assumption that most /.ers are experts in technology and not sociology, race/gender studies, or politics). That is upsetting. Logical thinking is one of the most highly transferable skills a human being can have.

Comment Re:Capitalism will find a way (Score 1) 844

by btcoal (#30905500) Attached to: Is Programming a Lucrative Profession?
Prove that. Based on what metrics were standard of living higher? Is the decline in SOL that you state uniform across the population or have some groups fared worse than others? If so, which groups? IF true, there other exogenous factors or confounding variables that can explain it? It would be nice of more engineers or just people in general took some econometrics courses or remembered basic statistics and experimental design. Or we could all just make decisions and observations about the universe based on our limited personal experience. Rant. Over.

Comment In Defense of Statistics (Score 5, Informative) 844

by btcoal (#30904306) Attached to: Is Programming a Lucrative Profession?
The only thing worse than a statistic is an anecdote. The author has his personal experience- fine. But my personal experience directly contradicts his. And the only statistics on the subject (from NACE and BLS) give a fairly Normal distribution of salaries between 57,000 and 151,000 (http://www.bls.gov/oco/ocos304.htm) Median annual wages of computer and information scientists were $97,970 in May 2008. The middle 50 percent earned between $75,340 and $124,370. The lowest 10 percent earned less than $57,480, and the highest 10 percent earned more than $151,250. Median annual wages of computer and information scientists employed in computer systems design and related services in May 2008 were $99,900.
Social Networks

Game Distribution Platforms Becoming Annoyingly Common 349

Posted by Soulskill from the looking-at-you-games-for-windows-live dept.
The Escapist's Shamus Young recently posted an article complaining about the proliferation of distribution platforms and social networks for video games. None of the companies who make these are "quite sure how games will be sold and played ten years from now," he writes, "but they all know they want to be the ones running the community or selling the titles." Young continues, "Remember how these systems usually work: The program sets itself up to run when Windows starts, and it must be running if you want to play the game. If you follow this scheme to its logical conclusion, you'll see that the system tray of every gaming PC would eventually end up clogged with loaders, patchers, helpers, and monitors. Every publisher would have a program for serving up content, connecting players, managing digital licenses, performing patches, and (most importantly) selling stuff. Some people don't mind having 'just one more' program running in the background. But what happens when you have programs from Valve, Stardock, Activision, 2k Games, Take-Two, Codemasters, Microsoft, Eidos, and Ubisoft? Sure, you could disable them. But then when you fire the thing up to play a game, it will want to spend fifteen minutes patching itself and the game before it will let you in. And imagine how fun it would be juggling accounts for all of them."
Businesses

Former Exec Says Electronic Arts "Is In the Wrong Business" 180

Posted by Soulskill from the inspiring-internet-outrage-is-a-bad-business-model dept.
Mitch Lasky was the executive vice president of Mobile and Online at Electronic Arts until leaving the publisher to work at an investment firm. He now has some harsh things to say about how EA has been run over the past several years, in particular criticizing the decisions of CEO John Riccitiello. Quoting: "EA is in the wrong business, with the wrong cost structure and the wrong team, but somehow they seem to think that it is going to be a smooth, two-year transition from packaged goods to digital. Think again. ... by far the greatest failure of Riccitiello's strategy has been the EA Games division. JR bet his tenure on EA's ability to 'grow their way through the transition' to digital/online with hit packaged goods titles. They honestly believed that they had a decade to make this transition (I think it's more like 2-3 years). Since the recurring-revenue sports titles were already 'booked' (i.e., fully accounted for in the Wall Street estimates) it fell to EA Games to make hits that could move the needle. It's been a very ugly scene, indeed. From Spore, to Dead Space, to Mirror's Edge, to Need for Speed: Undercover, it's been one expensive commercial disappointment for EA Games after another. Not to mention the shut-down of Pandemic, half of the justification for EA's $850MM acquisition of Bioware-Pandemic. And don't think that Dante's Inferno, or Knights of the Old Republic, is going to make it all better. It's a bankrupt strategy."
Wii

Wii Hardware Upgrade Won't Happen Soon 325

Posted by Soulskill from the can't-show-ugly-mario-in-hd dept.
As high-definition graphics become more and more entrenched in this generation of game consoles, Nintendo has had to deal with constant speculation about a new version of the Wii that would increase its capabilities. Today, Nintendo of America president Reggie Fils-Aime bluntly denied that a hardware revision was imminent, saying, "We are confident the Wii home entertainment console has a very long life in front of it." He added, "In terms of what the future holds, we've gone on record to say that the next step for Nintendo in home consoles will not be to simply make it HD, but to add more and more capability, and we'll do that when we've totally tapped out all of the experiences for the existing Wii. And we're nowhere near doing that yet."

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