Comment Re:Merge (Score 3, Insightful) 153
God please no.
Comment Re:Why? (Score 1) 375
Uhm Office 2007 was a decent product, and came out before Windows 7. So is Office 2010. You put those in the list, and now you have 3 products in a row that customers love. Seriously, people love Office 2k7, Win7, and Office 2010. I think this breaks the "never two decent releases in a row" theory.
Comment Re:6990 (Score 2) 124
Because expecting the one line a submitter has to be write to be factually correct is pedantic? It even says 6990 in the story, for fuck's sake.
Yes, please fix this editors... it's 6990, not 5990 like it says in the title.
Comment Facebook overvalued? (Score 1) 295
From what I've learned from a CFO in the past, an offer to purchase on a good company is usually somewhere between 7-10x the revenue of the company annually. If that holds true, then FB could be bought for up to $16 billion reasonably. $50 billion is assuming 3x that much value. This is ridiculous. No wonder the investor was scratching his head.
Comment Re:Julian Paul Assange = founder of WikiLeaks (Score 0, Offtopic) 1020
Who needs a heart, when a heart can be broken?
Comment Greasing the skids... (Score 3, Informative) 76
"Gilder says the Lego robotics kits can only manage around 1.5 moves per second, whereas human players can make between 5 and 6 moves per second, amazingly enough."
Only if the cubes are greased well, otherwise they're stuck with wrestling the bloody things.
Comment Re:Doesn't believe in design? (Score 1) 224
You're right... I'm a douche for not English grammar checking. You're a douche because you can't help it...
To clarify:
At the time I worked at MS, the Hardware User Experience (UX) team was a leading force in UX design at Microsoft. During my employment at MS, I asked the folks who lead UX training for Microsofties who would I talk to at Microsoft to discuss some outside educational opportunities pertaining to UX in post-secondary education. They pointed me to the MS Hardware UX team, stating they would be the best team because they were considered leaders on the UX in Microsoft. This was prior to Windows 7 or Office 2010 hitting the market.
Things might be different now, as other teams within Microsoft have pushed hard to include UX principles in their products (Windows 7 and Office 2010 launched, and they are arguably better products than their predecessors have been). It's hard to say if the Hardware team is in a position of UX leadership today, but at the time, they were highly respected within the company (around 2007).
God, nitpickers are annoying. But useful at times
Comment Doesn't believe in design? (Score 2, Interesting) 224
The OP is full of sh*t. I worked in MS Hardware at one point, and the UX team there led the way in many aspects of UX in MS's hardware products at one point. This spilled over into their supporting software products too. The company as a whole has been pushing hard in the UX space for quite some time, and there just aren't enough UX specialists to go around... the industry has been in a deficit for quite some time. Apple learned early on the UX side and this has been a tenet for them for quite some time. This is blatant trolling to say MS doesn't believe in design... making broad statements without really knowing what they are talking about. Windows 7 and Office 2010 represent a new era of MS apps with a strong emphasis on UX. IMHO, I think they are great advances in making MS products better overall for the user.
New Adobe PDF Zero-Day Under Attack 203
Rahmmp writes "Adobe has sounded an alarm for a new zero-day flaw in its PDF Reader/Acrobat software, warning that hackers are actively exploiting the vulnerability in-the-wild. An Adobe spokeswoman described the attacks as 'limited' but warned that that could change with the availability of public samples and exploit code."
Prolonged Gaming Blamed For Rickets Rise 254
superapecommando writes "Too many hours spent playing videogames indoors is contributing to a rise in rickets, according to a new study by doctors. Professor Simon Pearce and Dr Tim Cheetham of Newcastle University have written a paper in the British Medical Journal which warns of the rickets uptake – a disease which sufferers get when deficient in Vitamin D. The study boils down to the fact that as more people play videogames indoors they don't get enough sunlight and this has meant the hospitals are now having to combat a disease that was last in the papers around the time Queen Victoria was on the throne." At least the kids are eating enough snacks with iodized salt that we don't have to worry about goiters.
ASCAP Seeks Licensing Fees For Guitar Hero Arcade 146
Self Bias Resistor writes "According to a post on the Arcade-Museum forums, ASCAP is demanding an annual $800 licensing fee from at least one operator of a Guitar Hero Arcade machine, citing ASCAP licensing regulations regarding jukeboxes. An ASCAP representative allegedly told the operator that she viewed the Guitar Hero machine as a jukebox of sorts. The operator told ASCAP to contact Raw Thrills, the company that sells the arcade units. The case is ongoing and GamePolitics is currently seeking clarification of the story from ASCAP."
Comment Too funny - the irony (Score 1) 2
LOLz
Zombie Pigs First, Hibernating Soldiers Next 193
ColdWetDog writes "Wired is running a story on DARPA's effort to stave off battlefield casualties by turning injured soldiers into zombies by injecting them with a cocktail of one chemical or another (details to be announced). From the article, 'Dr. Fossum predicts that each soldier will carry a syringe into combat zones or remote areas, and medic teams will be equipped with several. A single injection will minimize metabolic needs, de-animating injured troops by shutting down brain and heart function. Once treatment can be carried out, they'll be "re-animated" and — hopefully — as good as new.' If it doesn't pan out we can at least get zombie bacon and spam."
The State of Ruby VMs — Ruby Renaissance 89
igrigorik writes "In the short span of just a couple of years, the Ruby VM space has evolved to more than just a handful of choices: MRI, JRuby, IronRuby, MacRuby, Rubinius, MagLev, REE and BlueRuby. Four of these VMs will hit 1.0 status in the upcoming year and will open up entirely new possibilities for the language — Mac apps via MacRuby, Ruby in the browser via Silverlight, object persistence via Smalltalk VM, and so forth. This article takes a detailed look at the past year, the progress of each project, and where the community is heading. It's an exciting time to be a Rubyist."
Submission + - Chrome OS: Is it just about more AdWords? (koski.ca) 1
CokoBWare writes: There's a lot of hype about Chrome OS today in the news, because naturally, it was just released and is open source. Cory Koski suggests that Chrome OS isn't about the AdWords and all the advertising that is going to display in their new OS, but maybe it's more about getting third-parties to deploy their applications to the Google platform, to run on the Google App Engine (which we all know isn't free to third parties). Maybe this is Google's way of beating Microsoft to the punch. Microsoft may be right, and that applications will eventually run in the cloud, but Chrome OS seems to be poised to make sure the cloud we use is Google's cloud, not Microsoft's or Amazon's.
