Comment Another great example (Score 1) 594
Click here to see one of my favorites
Comment Re:If you cant tell the difference.... (Score 1) 650
[If you can't tell the difference] between the Lincoln memorial and the FDR memorial you have no business going to Washington DC.
It sounds like the PP is saying that anyone who doesn't know enough about DC shouldn't go to DC and learn about it. That strikes me as weird.
However if you decide to go anyway, they do have still pre-printed maps checked for accuracy that sell at any gas station or book store.
Bingo. Yet another hissy-fit over nothing. Nobody is going to miss the Beck anti-Democrat rally. The two sites are less than half a mile apart. Glenn Beck fans and other people in DC speak the same language, so they could, y'know, ask for directions. Additionally, as the PP noted, it's not hard to find maps.
However, "teh Googlz iz in on teh conspiracy" is a convenient excuse if the turnout doesn't meet their expectations.
It doesn't help that Glenn Beck has his fans terrified, convinced that Obama and Democrats are enemies of the US and that Obama is just like Hitler. Conspiracy theories like "Google Maps doesn't want us to find the Lincoln Memorial and save America because Obama and Pelosi are controlling Google" are easier to believe when somebody on a channel called FOX News has been trying to convince them for years that Obama is destroying the USA and is about to put the white man down because he's an angry black radical, impose Sharia law because he's a Muslim, send people to Gulags and turn the USA into the Soviet Union because he's just like Stalin, or maybe he'll just turn into a genocidal expansionist dictator because he's just like Hitler.
On Tuesday, I checked maps.google.com.br to find the names of the streets that meet at the corner where I wanted a friend to meet me near the Berrini station of the São Paulo metropolitan train. Google Maps showed the station out in the middle of the Pinheiros River. I wonder if Obama and Pelosi were trying to drown me or poison me with the pollution in the Pinheiros...
Google Starts Charging a Signup Fee For Chrome Extension Developers 132
trooperer writes "On Thursday, Google introduced two significant changes in the Google Chrome Extensions Gallery: a developer signup fee and a domain verification system. The signup fee is a one-time payment of $5. The announcement says its purpose is to 'create better safeguards against fraudulent extensions in the gallery and limit the activity of malicious developer accounts.' Developers who already registered with the gallery can continue to update their extensions and publish new items without paying the fee."
Google also made available a developer preview for the Chrome Web Store.
Submission + - Patents Aren't Key To Success (echolinux.com) 1
echolinux writes: Gene Quinn over at IP Watchdog spent some time a few days back making the case for software patents. While calling open source advocates "ideological buffoons" with no business sense, Mr. Quinn points a finger at Red Hat, who he observed holds 263 US Patents and also are a successful company; ergo patents must be what made them successful. Rob Tiller, vice president and assistant general counsel at Red Hat, replied yesterday:
It is unfair, though, for him [Quinn] to suggest that this is a basic ingredient to Red Hat's success. That success rests primarily on its adoption of the power of open source – not patents. It's also unfair to discuss Red Hat's portfolio without including an explanation of Red Hat's Patent Promise in which it commits not to use its patents against open source. Red Hat has been a consistent and vigorous critic of software patents, and it is misleading to suggest otherwise.
It is unfair, though, for him [Quinn] to suggest that this is a basic ingredient to Red Hat's success. That success rests primarily on its adoption of the power of open source – not patents. It's also unfair to discuss Red Hat's portfolio without including an explanation of Red Hat's Patent Promise in which it commits not to use its patents against open source. Red Hat has been a consistent and vigorous critic of software patents, and it is misleading to suggest otherwise.
Tracking the Harm Games Do 118
Every so often, video games are accused of causing all sorts of negative behavior in children, teens, and adults. These accusations are typically predicated on statistics that sound much more damning than they actually are. In that vein, gaming website Rock, Paper, Shotgun did their own tongue-in-cheek statistical analysis, complete with pretty charts and graphs. Quoting:
"As part of my research I thought to compare the sales of each GTA game with what the divorce rate must have been when each came out. As you can see each new GTA game has been directly correlated with an increase in divorces. ... An often ignored statistic (and you have to ask why it’s being ignored by the games media, don’t you?) is the sheer volume of PC games being released. We’ve all noticed the British population is abandoning the church, turning instead toward shopping, DVDs and knife crime. But few have thought to check for a connection between PC sales and the numbers of people attending their local Church Of England church on a Sunday. When you look at the data there’s little doubt left that as the publishers continue to release more and more PC games each year, our nation’s faith is being increasingly eroded. And at what cost? If only a graph could tell us that."
Comment Re:Startrek (Score 4, Interesting) 145
Some friends and I (and lots of other 6th through 12th grade students) played that on terminals connected to our school's computer in 1980. I think the computer was a PDP-8/some letter, but I don't remember which letter. It was kept in the administrative building, while the student terminal room, which had a noisy teletype-style terminal, a newer and quieter terminal whose display was dot matrix printing, and three or four monocrome CRT terminals, was in a building with classrooms and the school library.
Trek was so popular at one point that I remember all the terminals surrounded by kids, and even the teletype-ish terminal pounding out the quadrant and sector maps. My friends and I figured out a few different ways of aiming photon torpedoes perfectly. One obvious one was a calculator with trig functions (and inverse trig functions), but at least we understood the trigonometry well enough to figure out how to use the calculator to help us kill Klingons. But I also remember three of us with protractors, rulers, and graph paper, getting the angle without using a calculator. The cool thing was when other kids saw us picking off the Klingons easily (and us celebrating each perfect shot), watched us for a while to understand how we did it, and then went off and did it themselves on other terminals. Some didn't care much about math like my friends and I did, but they cared enough about destroying Klingon ships represented by the letter K that they were willing to learn the math to do it.
Microsoft's Ad Team Trumps IE Developers' Privacy Aims 149
phantomfive writes "The company everyone loves to hate is after your private information, as the Wall Street Journal reports. The IE8 design team had planned on adding the best privacy features available, but the advertising executives wanted to track users. From the story: 'In the end, the product planners lost a key part of the debate. The winners: executives who argued that giving automatic privacy to consumers would make it tougher for Microsoft to profit from selling online ads. Microsoft built its browser so that users must deliberately turn on privacy settings every time they start up the software.'"
Chernobyl Area Survey Finds Lasting Problems For Wildlife 201
ninguna writes "The largest wildlife census of its kind conducted in Chernobyl has revealed that mammals are declining in the exclusion zone surrounding the nuclear power plant. While some stories seem to indicate nature is recovering, the actual picture isn't quite so great."
Submission + - Chernobyl Has Lasting Negative Impact (bbc.co.uk)
ninguna writes: The largest wildlife census of its kind conducted in Chernobyl has revealed that mammals are declining in the exclusion zone surrounding the nuclear power plant. While some stories seem to indicate Nature recovering. The actual picture isn't quite so great (does this really surprise anyone?).
Submission + - Pachter Explains Playstation Plus Profitability (deltaattack.com)
annexation writes: Is PlayStation Plus a profitable venture for Sony? Can we expect to see a boom of mod-driven console games in the wake of LittleBigPlanet’s success? Learn these and other secrets of the gaming universe as Pachter once more goes on the attack.
Silent, Easily Made Android Rootkit Released At DefCon 133
An anonymous reader writes with news that security experts from Spider Labs released a kernel level rootkit for Android devices at DefCon on Friday. "As a proof of concept, it is able to send an attacker a reverse TCP over 3G/WIFI shell upon receiving an incoming call from a 'trigger number.' This ultimately results in full root access on the Android device." The rootkit was developed over a period of two weeks, and has been handed out to DefCon attendees on DVD.
Fossil Fuel Subsidies Dwarf Support For Renewables 172
TravisTR sends word of research from Bloomberg New Energy Finance which found that direct subsidies for renewable energy from governments worldwide totaled $43-46 billion in 2009, an amount vastly outstripped by the $557 billion in fossil fuel subsidies during 2008.
"The BNEF preliminary analysis suggests the US is the top country, as measured in dollars deployed, in providing direct subsidies for clean energy with an estimated $18.2bn spent in total in 2009. Approximately 40% of this went toward supporting the US biofuels sector with the rest going towards renewables. The federal stimulus program played a key role; its Treasury Department grant program alone provided $3.8bn in support for clean energy projects. China, the world leader in new wind installations in 2009 with 14GW, provided approximately $2bn in direct subsidies, according to the preliminary analysis. This figure is deceptive, however, as much crucial support for clean energy in the country comes in form of low-interest loans from state-owned banks. State-run power generators and grid companies have also been strongly encouraged by the government to tap their balance sheets in support of renewables."
Submission + - Microsoft to Issue Emergency Fix for Windows Flaw (threatpost.com)
Trailrunner7 writes: Microsoft will issue an out-of-band patch on Monday for a critical vulnerability in all of the current versions of Windows. The company didn't identify which flaw it will be patching, but the description of the vulnerability is a close match to the LNK flaw that attackers have been exploiting for several weeks now, most notably with the Stuxnet malware.
The advance notification from Microsoft on Friday said that the company is patching a critical vulnerability that is being actively exploited in the wild and affects all supported Windows platforms. The LNK flaw in the Windows shell was first identified earlier this month when researchers discovered the Stuxnet worm spreading from infected USB drives to PCs. Stuxnet has turned out to be a rather interesting piece of malware as it not only uses the LNK zero day vulnerability to spread, but it had components that were signed using a legitimate digital certificate belonging to Realtek, a Taiwanese hardware manufacturer.
The advance notification from Microsoft on Friday said that the company is patching a critical vulnerability that is being actively exploited in the wild and affects all supported Windows platforms. The LNK flaw in the Windows shell was first identified earlier this month when researchers discovered the Stuxnet worm spreading from infected USB drives to PCs. Stuxnet has turned out to be a rather interesting piece of malware as it not only uses the LNK zero day vulnerability to spread, but it had components that were signed using a legitimate digital certificate belonging to Realtek, a Taiwanese hardware manufacturer.
Submission + - The Long-Term Impact of Developer Burnout (infoworld.com)
snydeq writes: "Fatal Exception's Neil McAllister discusses how today's 'disposable geek' mentality toward developers is certain to hurt companies in the long run. The mentality — fast contributing to developer burnout, most visibly in the gaming industry — see some of the smartest and most highly specialized members of the workforce treated like disposable labor, easily replaced by newer, cheaper recruits. 'When workplace conditions become unbearable, the brightest and most talented employees are usually the first to leave,' McAllister writes. 'As a result, the overall competency of development teams tends to sink to the lowest common denominator. In other words, the more managers pressure their developers to perform beyond their limits, the less effective their teams become in the long run.' Worse, the resulting conditions give companies incentive to offshore work, exacerbating the effect. 'The lower the quality of the in-house development team, the more tempting it is to replace them with low-cost outsourced development. But the more in-house developers feel they can easily be replaced, the less invested they will be in their work, the company, or its goals.'"
Comment Re:Excuse my ignorance... (Score 1) 8
I wonder if the VCs have gotten any smarter. I respect John Doerr greatly. In the late '90s, everyone "respected" him, but most of his "fans" didn't even understand what had made him so successful. Doerr invested in high-tech and internet businesses that made Kleiner Perkins a lot of money. But then all the VCs, instead of seeing that the businesses that made Doerr and KPCB a lot of money had viable revenue models and at least plausible paths to profitability, some by creating new niches. Instead of learning from how Doerr analyzes business plans to choose the ones he thinks will succeed, moron VCs simply thought "Doerr made assloads of money investing in web companies, so the way to make assloads of money is to invest in web companies." The result was the ridiculously large numbers of businesses that were just "[insert business here], only on teh intarwebz!," but received millions or even tens of millions in VC financing. I used to love to read Fuckedcompany.com and see the final result of these investments.
I remember when I was at a software startup in '99. We had done serious studies with multi-billion-dollar retailers, showing that our software could increase their profitability tremendously while giving them control over their overall pricing strategy and "image." I remember meetings with arrogant VCs. We'd show the proof that this software was tremendously valuable to retailers and that realistic revenue models showed the company making lots and lots of money and creating huge amounts of wealth for its shareholders. The arrogant and stupid VCs' eyes would glaze over. They'd sometimes wait for us to finish before dismissively saying "Uh huh... what's your internet story?" I suggested to the founder that we change the name of the company to "e-[orignal company name].com" and we'd be swimming in VC money. The saddest thing is that even though I was joking, I was probably right.
One of the reasons I so enjoyed Fuckedcompany.com was that I liked imagining the faces of these arrogant pricks in meetings with their bosses, trying to explain a portfolio of duds and why they thought investing $8MM on e-fifth-internet-pet-store.com and third-internet-gardening-supplies.com was such a good idea.
