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Comment Re:Good for them!! (Score 1) 131

by theCat (#36266040) Attached to: NYSE Sends Cease and Desist Letter To News Organization

"Trolling idiot" works too. Tho I imagine this guy works for NYSE or their PR attack dogs.

NYSE is locked in a death spiral with the other Exchanges. Bad Things are happening to their revenue model. Cry me a river...

Oh, I actually wrote some fiction on the NYSE and high-freq trading. Totally fictitious all around (I've never even been there) but funny as heck IMO:

madscienceunlimited.com/fiction/theexchange.html

I guess I'll get a take-down order now lulz. But at least I didn't include a picture of the trading floor.

Comment Re:prior art (Score 1) 131

by theCat (#36265856) Attached to: NYSE Sends Cease and Desist Letter To News Organization

heheheh ... I got special mention! Slashtard of the Day!

Is 36K now "low index"? damn, I remember when it was still 1K to be low. Read a post maybe 10 years ago by a guy UIDed at around 300 and everyone changed the subject to "how did you first hear about /.?" Hey Commander Taco, those were the wild days, weren't they? Man look at all we've lost since then ...

Comment prior art (Score 1) 131

by theCat (#36264974) Attached to: NYSE Sends Cease and Desist Letter To News Organization

I'm pretty sure that "trading floor" goes back a ways. Like maybe 10,000 years or so. So does "a bunch of loud mouths standing around shouting prices". You can take a picture of people doing this kinda thing in every major city in the world, 24 hours a day, and could have do so at any time since the invention of the camera in 1837.

Prior art bitches.

Comment Weather is not climate (Score 0, Redundant) 1039

by theCat (#24698721) Attached to: 2008 Is the Coldest Year of the 21st Century

Anyone doing "climate predictions" on less than 80 years of data with 5 year smoothing, drawn from multiple data sources representing well dispersed sampling sites, is kidding themselves.

But go on, look for your ice age if that's what you want to do. Nature doesn't give a bent farthing what you want, you will get what you have coming to you, never fear. And once we hit 400ppm CO2 we're likely to get it up side the head, in spades, and with a twist of lemon.
Businesses

Jerry Seinfeld Will Plug Vista 776

Posted by timothy from the for-all-that-is-good-stop-sending-this-one dept.
Barence writes "Microsoft has signed up comedian Jerry Seinfeld to its $300 million Vista PR blitz, as it attempts to turn around the negative perception surrounding its operating system. Reports suggest Bill Gates will also appear in the ads, which, given the comedy timing he displayed in his 'Bill's Last Day' video, and the deadpan manner of Seinfeld, could result in a huge hit for the company." Reader Zarmanto notes in his journal that "Mac users might be quite amused, considering that (like many other TV shows) the set of Seinfeld always had a Macintosh prominently displayed in the background."
The Internet

Comcast Has 30 Days To 'Fess Up About P2P Throttling 262

Posted by timothy from the must-bring-enough-throttle-for-the-whole-class dept.
negRo_slim writes with some welcome news from Ars Technica: "Comcast has 30 days to disclose the details of its 'unreasonable network management practices' to the Federal Communications Commission, the agency warned Wednesday morning as it released its full, 67-page Order. As FCC Chair Kevin Martin said it would, the Commission's Order rejects the ISP giant's insistence that its handling of peer-to-peer applications was necessary. 'We conclude that the company's discriminatory and arbitrary practice unduly squelches the dynamic benefits of an open and accessible Internet,' the agency declares." And from reader JagsLive comes news that Comcast has a different plan in place to deal with heavy bandwidth users: slow traffic for up to 20 minutes at a time to users who are grabbing the most bits.
Mozilla

A Mozilla Plugin to Help Overcome IE Rendering Flaw 270

Posted by timothy from the like-a-screaming-monkey dept.
least_weasel writes "An article on Ars Technica reveals Mozilla's intention to create and release a plugin for Internet Explorer that would allow the often-criticized IE to utilize some of the cooler rendering code developed for Firefox. The current WIP focuses on rendering using HTML5 standards, but the plans seem to be more ambitious than just fixing this one small piece of IE. The article covers some of the plans, hurdles, and potential benefits. It also spills the beans on the code name for the project: Screaming Monkey."
PC Games (Games)

How Do I Prevent Lan Party Theft? 758

Posted by timothy from the have-it-at-the-neighbors'-place dept.
DragonTHC writes "I'm thinking about hosting a lan party open to the public. I'm aiming for approximately 60 people to attend. I can handle all the logistics of operation. The only thing I can't wrap my head around is: how do I prevent theft at the lan party? Do I hire security guards? Do I need security cameras? I don't know the people who will attend, and I don't know if they're trustworthy enough to not steal other people's equipment. What do I do?"
Businesses

Nvidia Rumored To Be Readying X86 Chip Release 307

Posted by timothy from the probably-not-for-wristwatch-computers dept.
jdb2 writes with the (honestly labeled) rumor from the Inquirer "that Nvidia is preparing to release an x86 microprocessor with its guns targeted directly at its two major rivals — Intel and AMD/ATI," and excerpts from the just-linked Inquirer article: "THE HOT RUMOR going around IDF ... [is] that the company will do an x86 part. The background whispers say that the part will be announced next week at Nvision ... Nvidia's men in white coats certainly have the brainpower to do it, but they also most certainly don't have a license to sell such a part. NV is basically locked out unless Intel and AMD both decide to be magnanimous, and we would not recommend holding your breath waiting for this to happen ... That leaves the lawsuit option open ... Any attempt to enter the market without a license would bring down Intel legal on them like flying monkeys blackening the sky. It would get ugly. Really ugly. Expensive too.""
Medicine

Research Suggests Polygamous Men Live Longer 483

Posted by timothy from the depends-which-part-of-utah dept.
Calopteryx writes "Want to live a little longer? Get a second wife. A study reported in New Scientist suggests that men from polygamous cultures outlive those from monogamous ones. After accounting for socioeconomic differences, men aged over 60 from 140 countries that practice polygamy to varying degrees lived on average 12% longer than men from 49 mostly monogamous nations."
Image

Lawmakers Say Electric Cars Are Too Quiet Screenshot-sm 28

Posted by samzenpus from the bring-the-noise dept.
California lawmakers are pushing a bill that would ensure electric vehicles make enough noise to be heard by blind and visually impaired people. The state senate has already passed the bill but the governator hasn't yet taken a position. If passed, the bill would establish a committee which would study ways electric vehicles could make more noise. The committee's recommendations would be due by 2010. May I suggest a siren or some baseball cards in the wheels.
Graphics

New Multi-GPU Technology With No Strings Attached 179

Posted by kdawson from the here-process-this dept.
Vigile writes "Multi-GPU technology from both NVIDIA and ATI has long been dependent on many factors including specific motherboard chipsets and forcing gamers to buy similar GPUs within a single generation. A new company called Lucid Logix is showing off a product that could potentially allow vastly different GPUs to work in tandem while still promising near-linear scaling on up to four chips. The HYDRA Engine is dedicated silicon that dissects DirectX and OpenGL calls and modifies them directly to be distributed among the available graphics processors. That means the aging GeForce 6800 GT card in your closet might be useful once again and the future of one motherboard supporting both AMD and NVIDIA multi-GPU configurations could be very near."
The Courts

Judge Rules Man Cannot Be Forced To Decrypt HD 775

Posted by kdawson from the cold-dead-fingers dept.
I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "In Vermont, US Magistrate Judge Jerome Niedermeier has ruled that forcing someone to divulge the password to decrypt their hard drive violates the 5th Amendment. Border guards testify that they saw child pornography on the defendant's laptop when the PC was on, but they made the mistake of turning it off and were unable to access it again because the drive was protected by PGP. Although prosecutors offered many ways to get around the 5th Amendment protections, the Judge would have none of that and quashed the grand jury subpoena requesting the defendant's PGP passphrase. A conviction is still likely because prosecutors have the testimony of the two border guards who saw the drive while it was open." The article stresses the potential importance of this ruling (which was issued last November but went unnoticed until now): "Especially if this ruling is appealed, US v. Boucher could become a landmark case. The question of whether a criminal defendant can be legally compelled to cough up his encryption passphrase remains an unsettled one, with law review articles for the last decade arguing the merits of either approach."

Update: 08/19 23:49 GMT by KD : Several readers have pointed out that this story in fact did not go unnoticed.
IBM

IBM and AMD Create First 22nm SRAM Cell 83

Posted by kdawson from the moore-and-moore-tiny dept.
arcticstoat notes an announcement from IBM that, along with technology partners, they have produced the first working sample of a SRAM cell built on a 22nm fabrication process. According to the article, this represents the next generation after 32nm process chips and won't be in products for some years. "The technology was developed with several partners, including AMD, Toshiba, STMicroelectronics and Freescale, as well as the College of Nanoscale Science and Engineering, where IBM performs a lot of its semiconductor research. IBM says that the cell's development involved 'novel fabrication processes,' including high-NA immersion lithography..., high-K metal gate stacks, extremely thin silicide, damascene copper contacts, and advanced activation techniques."
The Almighty Buck

Flagship Studios' Founder Discusses Its Demise 117

Posted by Soulskill from the beware-financial-icebergs dept.
1Up is running a lengthy interview with Bill Roper, founder of Flagship Studios. The game company, known primarily for its Hellgate: London and Mythos titles, announced massive layoffs last month, and is now simply winding down and taking care of a few final issues. Roper gives quite a bit of detail regarding the financial machinations of a game developer and the current status of the games' code. Co-founders Max Schaefer and Travis Baldree gave a related interview recently as well. "The subscription money we did get, we all poured directly into keeping the game online, keeping it up and running. But the development demands far outstripped the revenues. There just wasn't a good contemplation early on of how that would work. It wasn't like: This is the budget that comes in every month; we'll do whatever we can do with that. We just said [that] development will get done out of the revenues, and whoever pays for development, they get paid back out of the revenues. And there wasn't really enough revenues coming in to cover the expected and required development."

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