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Researcher Trolls MMO, Surprised When Players Hate Him 895

Posted by Soulskill from the match-made-in-heaven dept.
D1gital_Prob3 writes with this excerpt from a story about David Myers, a Loyola professor who spent some time studying superhero MMO City of Heroes/Villains: "... he aimed the pointer at his opponent, the virtual comic book villain 'Syphris.' Myers, 55, flicked the buttons on his mouse and magically transported his opponent to the front of a cartoon robot execution squad. In an instant, the squad pulverized the player. Syphris fired an instant message at Myers moments later. 'If you kill me one more time I will come and kill you for real and I am not kidding.' ... As part of his experiment, Myers decided to play the game by the designers' rules — disregarding any customs set by the players. His character soon became very unpopular. At first, players tried to beat him in the game to make him quit. Myers was too skilled to be run off, however. They then made him an outcast, a World Wide Web pariah that the creator of Syphris — along with hundreds of other faceless gamers — detested."

Comment PAX is unlike E3 (Score 5, Informative) 101

by trevorrowe (#28224791) Attached to: Were The "Winners" of E3 Enough To Ensure Survival?
I live in the Seattle area and have attended the last 4 PAX events. PAX won't replace E3. Don't missunderstand, PAX is probably much more fun of an event than E3 ever will be. PAX is for the community of gamers, not for the publishers and developers. Sure, there is some spill-over, but PAX is overwhelmingly a gamer convention.
Math

The Myth of the Mathematics Gender Gap 588

Posted by kdawson from the where-we-haven't-looked-yet dept.
Coryoth writes "The widely held belief that there is disparity in the innate mathematical abilities of men and women has been steadily whittled down in recent years. The gender gap in basic mathematics skills closed some time ago, and recently the gap in high school mathematics has closed up as well, with as many girls as boys now taking high school calculus. Newsweek reports on a new study published in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that begins to lay to rest the remaining argument that it is at the highest levels of mathematics that the innate differences show. Certainly men dominate current academia, with 70% of mathematics Ph.D.s going to men; however that figure is down from 95% in the 1950s. Indeed, while there remain gaps in achievement between the genders, the study shows that not only are these gaps closing, but the size of the gap varies over differing cultures and correlates with the general degree of gender inequality in the culture (as defined by World Economic Forum measures). In all, this amounts to strong evidence that the differences in outcomes in mathematics between the genders is driven by sociocultural factors rather than innate differences in ability."
Social Networks

Dot-Communism Is Already Here 554

Posted by Soulskill from the no-in-soviet-russia-jokes-i-swear-to-god dept.
thanosk sends in a story at Wired Magazine about how online culture is, in many ways, trending toward communal behavior. Sharing and collaboration have become staples of active participation on the Internet, while not necessarily incorporating a particular ideology or involving a government. "Most people in the West, including myself, were indoctrinated with the notion that extending the power of individuals necessarily diminishes the power of the state, and vice versa. In practice, though, most polities socialize some resources and individualize others. Most free-market economies have socialized education, and even extremely socialized societies allow some private property. Rather than viewing technological socialism as one side of a zero-sum trade-off between free-market individualism and centralized authority, it can be seen as a cultural OS that elevates both the individual and the group at once. The largely unarticulated but intuitively understood goal of communitarian technology is this: to maximize both individual autonomy and the power of people working together. Thus, digital socialism can be viewed as a third way that renders irrelevant the old debates."
Linux Business

Submission + - Monitoring an employee who is running Linux? 1

Submitted by
An anonymous reader writes: OK slashdot, here's the deal. I have a small computer shop where we work for low-income people resurrecting dead hardware (mostly laptops) so they can get internet access. We have a quota that everyone has to meet. Recently we hired a new guy who is doing a lot of soldering and harder work so he doesn't consistently meet the quota. We are willing to overlook that, since the nature of the work is different. He also wants to run Linux instead of Windows on his PC, because he is a Linux user at home and is more used to that. Again, we let him do that. No sense in being mean. But now his performance is starting to get consistently worse. He doesn't always show up to work. Spends a lot of time on his PC but doesn't really get much done. With the other employees we have a monitoring software to keep audit logs of their internet usage. It doesn't work in Linux. First we started watching his network usage. Turns out there's a fair amount of data being sent to and from the PC but it's on the FTP port and encrypted. Obviously a tunnel. So we asked the guy to see his web browser history. He clears it, then gives me the cleared log. How nice of him. Now we're watching his shell history, but I'm not a big Linux user so I don't know what to be looking for. My boss (the owner) is jumping on me because of the low productivity. I don't want to fire him without some sort of clear evidence that he's screwing around on the clock, because he's talented and probably more useful to me than the next schmuck to come through the door. But I have to have some accountability to make the guy work. As a last resort, I can force him to install Windows, but I don't want to because I'd like to migrate the office to Linux later to save us money when we expand, and this issue would come back to haunt me. I'm working on learning Linux but I don't think I can get proficient fast enough to prevent this from being a problem. Can someone give me a pointer or some advice here?
Linux Business

Shuttleworth Says Ubuntu Can't Just Be Windows 710

Posted by timothy from the bsod-screensaver-must-suffice dept.
ruphus13 writes "When Mark Shuttleworth was asked what role WINE will play in Ubuntu's success, he said that Ubuntu cannot simply be a better platform to run Windows apps. From the post, according to Shuttleworth, '[Windows and Linux] both play an important role but fundamentally, the free software ecosystem needs to thrive on its own rules. it is *different* to the proprietary software universe. We need to make a success of our own platform on our own terms. if Linux is just another way to run Windows apps, we can't win. OS/2 tried that ...' The post goes on to say, 'Linux simply isn't Windows (nor is Windows Linux) and to expect fundamentally different approaches (and I'm not just thinking closed versus open) to look, feel, and operate the same way is senseless.'"
Security

Looking Back At the Other Kind of Virus 147

Posted by timothy from the shouldn't-this-be-a-list-of-13? dept.
Slatterz writes "All this panic over a strain of flu got these people thinking about some of the more virulent computer pandemics that have hit in recent years. While a computer virus pales in seriousness to a human outbreak, malware attacks can still take a huge toll on businesses throughout the world. This list of the top ten worst viruses includes some interesting trivia, including ARPANET's Creeper virus in 1971, how early attempts at copy protection resulted in Brain, and MyDoom's denial of service attack on SCO."
Education

Why Is It So Difficult To Fire Bad Teachers? 1322

Posted by timothy from the indeed-news-for-nerds dept.
Ant writes with this depressing story about how public schools sometimes work: "This six-page Los Angeles Times article shares its investigation to find 'the process [of firing poor teachers] so arduous that many school principals don't even try (One-page version), except in the very worst cases. Jettisoning a teacher solely because he or she can't teach is rare ...'"
Social Networks

Academics To Predict Next Twitter and Its Pitfalls 150

Posted by samzenpus from the peer-into-my-crystal-ball dept.
An anonymous reader writes "University researchers in the UK have put together a team tasked with predicting the next big thing in terms of communication technologies, in a bid to tackle ethical pitfalls before they become a problem. This is in the wake of the rise of social networking websites such as Facebook, Twitter and MySpace, which has led to a dramatic increase in the amount of personal information available online."
Windows

Ballmer Sets Loose Windows 7 Public Beta At CES 672

Posted by timothy from the conventional-wisdom-ranks-it-high dept.
CWmike writes "The rumors turned out to be true. Microsoft will release a public beta this week of its next desktop operating system, Windows 7, hoping it will address the problems that have made Windows Vista perhaps the least popular OS in its history. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer will launch the beta during his speech at the start of the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas on Wednesday. Preston Gralla reviewed Windows 7 beta 1, noting 'Fast and stable, Beta 1 of Windows 7 unveils some intriguing user-interface improvements, including the much-anticipated new task bar.' MSDN and Technet subscribers should be able to get the public data tonight. The general public will have to wait until Friday."
Handhelds

Submission + - People waiting in line for the iPhone already (willemtjerkstra.nl)

Submitted by
tsa
tsa writes: "A new low has been reached in the iPhone frenzy that's been hard to miss these past weeks. The first people to wait in line have been spotted last monday, in front of the Apple Store in Manhattan, four days before the iPhone will be released on Friday, june 29. AppleInsider has the scoop, with pictures and even a video of the first interview with the first person to wait in line for the iPhone."
Hardware Hacking

Submission + - Recovering computers after house fire? (neulinger.org)

Submitted by
Nathan Neulinger
Nathan Neulinger writes: "Today, my family and I experienced (after the fact — we were not home) a house fire that completely destroyed our kitchen, and caused significant smoke and heat damage throughout the rest of the house. I believe that the two more important computer systems in the house shut themselves down automatically when the power was cut, but I don't know how much smoke and soot was pulled into them.

I'm not terribly concerned about the machines themselves, but I'd like to pull the data off onto new media. I'm a long time unix admin, so recovery tools themselves are not an issue, but I am concerned about the hardware itself. Are there any things to watch out for in terms of powering the drives back up on another machine, or is this a "don't touch it, leave it to the pros" type of thing? I have not been able to look at the drives up close yet — waiting on insurance adjuster to approve messing with house's contents first."
Novell

Submission + - OpenSuSE to release Linux distro for educators (archive.org)

Submitted by
christian.einfeldt
christian.einfeldt writes: "The next version of openSUSE, due out in the fall, will include an add-on CD optimized for educators. According to the Education section of the openSUSE wiki, the openSUSE community sees the add-on as a way to make it easy for school administrators to create both networked systems and stand-alone desktops for teachers and students. To tailor the add-on CD to the needs of educators, the openSUSE community is asking educators and technologists to submit their software successes, applications used, and "HOW-TOs" for writing applications and using applications. Dubbed the SLEDucator, the package collection is being included as an add-on, as opposed to a new distro or a fork."

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