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Businesses

BioWare On Why Making a Blockbuster Game Is a Poor Goal 192

Posted by Soulskill from the do-as-we-say-not-as-we-do dept.
BioWare co-founder Greg Zeschuk spoke at the 2010 Develop Conference about the current focus within the video game industry on making huge, blockbuster titles, and why that is the wrong approach. Quoting Gamasutra's coverage: "'While blockbuster game creation is everything that most game developers working today growing up wanted to do, it's precisely the wrong thing to chase in gaming's contemporary landscape.' Risk-taking from publishers and investors has dramatically declined in recent times, the Mass Effect and Dragon Age studio-runner noted: 'As a result, innovation and creativity [are] being squeezed. Where the bottom of the market had dropped out at one point, now it’s the middle of the market has dropped out. Unless you can be in the top ten releases at one given time, it's unlikely that a triple-A game is going to make money.'" Zeschuk also commented that consoles aren't necessarily the future of game platforms, and that BioWare is experimenting with smaller scale MMO development in addition to working on their much larger upcoming Star Wars title.

Comment SugarCRM replacement ... (Score 1) 357

by kwandar (#32899470) Attached to: SugarCRM 6 Released, But Is It Open Source?
two years ago when looking for a system for our 200+ person company, I looked at SugarCRM. It was "okay", but there were licensing issues. Was it really open source? There were certainly questions at the time. Then I looked at VTiger. It was better than okay (and much improved since then, although I'm sure SugarCRM has improved too) and it was clearly open source.
Microsoft

Microsoft Patents "Fonts With Feelings" 150

Posted by timothy from the schoolhouse-rock-prior-art dept.
theodp writes "Seems like those old IBM flaming logo commercials (video) should count as prior art, but the USPTO granted Microsoft a patent Tuesday for inventing Fonts With Feelings. Giving font characters sound, motion, and altered appearance, Microsoft asserts, gives a user 'the impression the fonts have personalities,' thereby enhancing the user's understanding and/or fluency of words. From the patent: 'As a few non-limiting examples, the word 'giant' can get very large; the word 'lion' can morph into a line drawing of a lion; the word 'toss' can morph into a hand that animates a ball toss; the word 'bees' could show bees flying around with or without a 'buzz' sound effect'. If you're curious, Microsoft Research offers some explanations and examples of 'fontlings' in action — don't miss 'f' kicks 'a'!"
Image

New Hungarian Government OMGs All Gov Sites Screenshot-sm 59

Posted by samzenpus from the they-forgot-the-ponies dept.
An anonymous reader writes "The new Hungarian government chose to replace the home pages with a 'disclaimer' page on several governmental websites such as ministries or the Foreign Office. The title and the main message is 'OMG,' which is followed by an explanation that the inherited websites 'lack any kind of uniform structure' and this is 'unworthy of Hungary.' Today is the takeover day in most ministries for the new administration."
The Military

US Navy Considering Wii Fit and DDR For Boot Camp 104

Posted by Soulskill from the path-to-international-respect dept.
almehdaaol writes "New military recruits are coming in physically heavier and out of shape, so the US Navy has decided to take an interesting course of action by creating a new training regimen inspired by the fitness-centric Wii Fit and Dance Dance Revolution." This comes alongside a report confirming some of the BS we told our parents when we were growing up: "Bavelier said playing the kill-or-be-killed games can improve peripheral vision and the ability to see objects at dusk, and the games can even be used to treat amblyopia, or lazy eye, a disorder characterized by indistinct vision in one eye. She said she believes the games can improve math performance and other brain tasks."
Biotech

Crowdsourcing HIV Research 52

Posted by timothy from the work-backwards-to-zero dept.
biolgeek writes "In recent years, HIV has been managed with a collection of therapies. However, the virus will likely evolve around these drugs, making it crucially important to get a better understanding of the virus itself. An important step in understanding the virus is to get a handle on its genetic blueprint. William Dampier of Drexler University is taking a novel approach to this research by crowdsourcing his problem. He is hosting a bioinformatics competition, which requires contestants to find markers in the HIV sequence that predict a change in the severity of the infection (as measured by viral load). So far the best entry comes from Fontanelles, an HIV research group, which has been able to predict a change in viral load with 66% accuracy."

Comment Kicked Rogers Cable out 2 years ago ... (Score 2, Interesting) 502

by kwandar (#32059812) Attached to: One In Eight To Cut Cable and Satellite TV In 2010

.. and couldn't be happier.

It wasn't so much that we switched to internet (we did somewhat for my wife's foreign language programs) but a value for money proposition. We were getting close to zero value (unless you count our daughter's watching Treehouse or whatever it was .... and that was becoming a problem).

We have been better off financially without Rogers, and our daughter gets 2 movie nights a week and she is FAR better behaved/attentive/learning enabled without television. We're a few years behind (starting on Madmen now) but there are definite advantages to that. We don't waste time on crap,or ads.

Submission + - PS3 Singstar Online Protest Underway (playstation.com)

Submitted by kwandar
kwandar writes: One claim to fame the PS3 can arguably make (my 4 year old would agree) is its Singstar karaoke game. Users can pay to download music videos and perform in front of their PS3 eye cameras to upload it to the Sony Singstar universe to be rated.

Unfortunately some users have been stuffing the ballot box and spoiling the fun by voting through the creation of multiple IDs, a problem which Sony has failed to address

Users have taken it upon themselves to protest Sony's inaction with a "1 vote by PS3 — and not by ID-PSN" video that has inundated the video upload channel with protest signs. This will eventually have an effect on Sony's revenues for downloadable Singstar content ... unlike the removal of the alternate OS. Maybe that will motivate Sony to finally act.

Now if someone would just start a protest regarding the "Sony lock-in" that stops us from copying Singstar videos users make (ie.home movies) to other mediums

Submission + - Russian Hacker Selling 1.5M Facebook Accounts (nzherald.co.nz)

Submitted by Sir Codelot
Sir Codelot writes: A hacker who calls himself Kirllos has obtained and is now offering to sell 1.5 million Facebook IDs at astonishingly low prices — $25 per 1000 IDs for users with fewer than 10 friends and $45 per 1000 IDs for users with more than 10 friends. Looking at the numbers, Kirllos has stolen the IDs of one out of every 300 Facebook users.
Censorship

Submission + - Chinese Propaganda Official Pranked (chinasmack.com) 1

Submitted by
FGS
FGS writes: "Deputy Director Wu Hao, a Chinese propaganda official, was pranked during a speech by being showered by 50 cents RMB notes. For those who don't get the joke, the Chinese government hires people to make pro-government comments online, primarily on Chinese message boards. These people are said to be paid 50 cents RMB per post and, as such, are called the wu mao dang, or 'fifty cent party'. So, given the exchange rates, someone really does have a nickle for every time that happens. There has been no word yet on what happened to the guy who pulled this prank. This is the original story, for those who can read Chinese."

Submission + - Former nurse charged with aiding suicides via web

Submitted by mernil
mernil writes: A former US nurse has been charged with two counts of aiding suicides on the internet, US officials say. William Melchert-Dinkel, 47, is accused of encouraging the suicides of Mark Drybrough from Coventry, UK in 2005 and Canada's Nadia Kajouji in 2008. Mr Melchert-Dinkel from Minnesota allegedly posed as a female nurse, instructing people in suicide chatrooms how to take their lives. He reportedly admitted helping five or fewer people kill themselves. Some legal experts say it could be difficult to prosecute Mr Melchert-Dinkel under a rarely used law because he allegedly only encouraged the victims to kill themselves, without physically helping them to take their lives.

Submission + - India's copyright bill gets it right (boingboing.net)

Submitted by asp7yxia
asp7yxia writes: India's new copyright bill sounds like a pretty good piece of work: it declares private, personal copying to be "fair dealing" (like US fair use) and limits the prohibition on breaking DRM so that it's only illegal to do so if you're also violating copyright.
Operating Systems

Sony Refuses To Sanction PS3 "Other OS" Refunds 396

Posted by Soulskill from the you-paid-for-what-we-say-you-paid-for dept.
Stoobalou writes "Sony says that it has no intention of reimbursing retailers if they offer users partial refunds for fat PS3s. Last week, the first PS3 user successfully secured a partial refund from Amazon UK as compensation for the removal of the ability to run Linux on the console. The user quoted European law in order to persuade the online retailer that the goods he had bought in good faith were no longer fit for his purposes because of the enforcement of firmware update 3.21, which meant that users who chose to keep the Other OS functionality would lose the ability to play the latest games or connect to the PlayStation Network."

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