Slashdot is powered by your submissions, so send in your scoop

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×

Comment Re:Secure protocols for home wifi? (Score 1, Offtopic) 322

Wired ethernet. Not only is it vastly more secure, it's also an order of magnitude or two faster than wireless.

Comments like this show up in nearly every thread about wifi, and it's about time people stop modding them up. Ethernet is not a direct substitute for wireless networking. If it was, wifi never would have been invented.

The advantages of wireless are pretty obvious, and the disadvantages are pretty minimal. The 600 Mbits/sec an n-router provides is more than enough for most uses, and most people don't actually need unbreakable encryption.

Of course wired LAN is still relevant, but suggesting everyone revert just because is trite and pointless.

Comment Re:Cool (Score 3, Insightful) 86

Who cares if their vision is not quite the same as ours!

The newly seeing adults might, once they get over the shock and realize they still can't get a driver's license, engage in sports or many other everyday activities to the same extent as normally sighted people.

Just because we've made progress doesn't mean there isn't more to be done.

Music

Opera Being Composed On Twitter 99

musefrog writes "The BBC is reporting that the UK's Royal Opera House is to stage an opera created through social networking site Twitter. 'Members of the public have been invited to submit their 'tweets' online — messages of up to 140 characters — which will form the new libretto.The first scene of the as-yet-untitled work has already been completed and features a man who has been kidnapped by a group of birds. Excerpts will be performed at the Royal Opera House in September.' I'm personally looking forward to lots of idiotic net memes and inane emo ramblings being trilled out by aging sopranos."

Comment Re:Sounds.... dumb. (Score 1) 52

Even tho i personally think its all rather stupid. I see alot of people who enjoy sports. But they are not the types of people who will sit and play a pc game for several hours.

The Madden and NCAA football franchises are among the hugest game franchises ever, and from what I've seen they're popular with people who enjoy playing and watching real football. Multiplayer sports games in general are a major segment of the video game market, so there's no reason to believe there would be no interest in sports MMOs.

Comment Re:Real sports (Score 1) 52

How about going outside and playing actual baseball? Wouldn't that be more fun?

You could (and people do) say the same thing about Guitar Hero. Playing guitar well is hard, and so is playing real baseball. Guitar Hero proved that people can have fun with a simplified version of a real life hobby if the learning curve is easy enough and the interface is a close enough approximation of the real thing. In fact, pretty much every video game ever simulates something you could do in real life if it were so inconvenient, dangerous, or time consuming.

Just because a game doesn't appeal to you, doesn't mean someone else can't have fun with it.

Microsoft

Microsoft Uses Human Computing Game To Tune Bing 119

Al writes "Microsoft researchers have come up with a novel way to fine-tune the algorithms behind the company's new search engine, Bing: a game that harnesses human computing power to improve the results. Called Page Hunt, the game (which of course requires Silverlight to run) shows users a web page and asks them to figure out a search query that should produce the page within the first five results. The idea is to better understand user behavior and expectations and ultimately improve its search algorithms. Other human-computing projects have sought to digitize out-of-print text (reCAPTCHA) and image labeling (Google Image Labeler). Can Microsoft use a similar approach to gain the edge over its rival? Or does Google already have the edge with SearchWiki, which lets searchers re-rank its results?"
Privacy

Facebook Lets Advertisers Use Pictures Without Permission 260

Krokz sends in an LA Times piece that begins "A warning is bouncing through cyberspace today, landing on the Facebook statuses of many of the social networking site's users. The message: 'Facebook has agreed to let third party advertisers use your posted pictures without your permission.' It continues with a prescription of how you can protect your photos." The attention-grabbing incident in this furor involved a married woman, whose photo appeared in an ad for a dating service that was presented to her husband to view. Fortunately, both husband and wife had a sense of humor about it.

Comment Re:10 years? (Score 1) 539

I've been listening "in 10 years we'll have X awesome technology", but time come and go and nothing has changed

If you haven't noticed any technological advancement since 1999, perhaps you should try opening your eyes sometime.

The Courts

ASCAP Wants To Be Paid When Your Phone Rings 461

gerddie notes a piece up on the EFF site outlining the fairly outlandish legal theories ASCAP is trying out in their court fight with AT&T. "ASCAP (the same folks who went after Girl Scouts for singing around a campfire) appears to believe that every time your musical ringtone rings in public, you're violating copyright law by 'publicly performing' it without a license. At least that's the import of a brief (PDF, 2.5 MB) it filed in ASCAP's court battle with mobile phone giant AT&T."

Comment Re:The machines charge 30% MORE than trading price (Score 1) 472

Am I missing something? Is there really such a demand for gold on the street that the convenience of being able to purchase it from a vending machine warrants a 30% markup?

The type of person who would make a spontaneous commodities investment at a vending machine probably isn't the type of person who's concerned with those kinds of details.

Slashdot Top Deals

I think there's a world market for about five computers. -- attr. Thomas J. Watson (Chairman of the Board, IBM), 1943

Working...