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Games

Submission + - Katamari Hack for Chrome (and compatible browsers) (kathack.com) 1

Submitted by skaet
skaet writes: Using CSS3 transforms and HTML5 canvas, the Katamari Hack for Google Chrome (and other compatible browsers) allows you to turn any website into a game of Katamari Damacy! The script was created by Alex Leone, David Nufer, and David Truong, and won the 2011 Yahoo HackU contest at University of Washington. Don't like the new Slashdot design? Go to town on it!
Security

Submission + - Japan Battles Partial Nuclear Meltdown

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens writes
Hugh Pickens writes writes: "The Financial Times reports that Japanese nuclear experts are working to contain a partial meltdown at an earthquake-stricken nuclear power plant (reg. may be required) north of Tokyo, as fears grow that the death toll from Friday’s massive quake and tsunami could reach the tens of thousands. A partial meltdown, experts said, would likely mean that some portion of the reactors’ uranium fuel rods had cracked or warped from overheating, releasing radioactive particles into the reactors’ containment vessels. Some of those particles would have escaped into the air outside when engineers vented steam from the vessels to relieve pressure building up inside. Adding to problems at the site, hydrogen was building up inside the Number Three reactor’s outer building, threatening an explosion like the one that blew apart the Number One reactor building’s roof and outer walls on Saturday. However, it remains unclear how far radiation has spread from the facility. Some local residents and health workers were diagnosed with radiation poisoning in precautionary tests, but they show no outward symptoms of distress. "Even if you have a radiation release, although that’s not a good thing, it’s not automatically a harmful thing. It depends on what the level turns out to be," says Steve Kerekes, a spokesman for the Nuclear Energy Institute, a US industry group, adding that a person exposed to the highest radiation levels measured at the Fukushima site would absorb in two to three hours the same amount of radiation that he would normally absorb in 12 months – a significant but not necessarily injurious amount, especially if exposure time was short."
Crime

Submission + - Prosecutors to Use Secret Code in NSA Leak Trial

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens writes
Hugh Pickens writes writes: "The Baltimore Sun reports that that the US government wants to invoke a little-used rule that allows prosecutors to use code words in the courtroom — making portions of a public trial private in the trial of Thomas Drake, an employee at the National Security Agency accused of sharing classified documents with journalist Siobhan Gorman that revealed that NSA's Trailblazer Program was was a boondoggle of sorts — and that the agency had removed several of the privacy safeguards that were put in place to protect domestic conversations and e-mails from being stored and monitored. The "silent witness rule," is meant to minimize the disclosure of classified information by allowing only those directly involved in a case — the judge, jury, witnesses, lawyers and defendants — to see the evidence. Any public discussion of the secret details must be done in code. "They literally have a key, a glossary, that the jury would have that the public would not," says Abbe D. Lowell, a Washington, DC defense attorney who gave an example of what the code would sound like: "When [the defendant] and I were talking about Country A, we discussed the fact that there was a possibility that Leader 1 might not appreciate the United States' sanction on Topic C." That's impossible for a jury to follow, and it will cripple a defendant's rights to really cross-examine and confront the evidence against him says Lowell. Drake's defense attorneys say Drake is more whistleblower than traitor. "The documents at issue in this case concern NSA's waste, fraud, and abuse," says Maryland federal public defender James Wyda, who represents Drake. "Most importantly, Mr. Drake's activities relating to these documents were intended to reveal the waste, fraud, and abuse that cost the taxpayers money, weakened our civil liberties, and hindered our nation's ability to identify potential threats against our security.""
Google

Submission + - Tech Expertise Not Important in Google Managers 1

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens writes
Hugh Pickens writes writes: "For much of its 13-year history, Google has taken a pretty simple approach to management: Leave people alone but if employees become stuck, they should ask their bosses, whose deep technical expertise propelled them into management in the first place. Now the NY Times reports that statisticians at Google looking for characteristics that define good managers have gathered more than 10,000 observations about managers — across more than 100 variables, from various performance reviews, feedback surveys and other reports and found that technical expertise ranks dead last among Google’s eight most important characteristics of good managers (reg. may be required). What Google employees value most are even-keeled bosses who made time for one-on-one meetings, who helped people puzzle through problems by asking questions, not dictating answers, and who took an interest in employees’ lives and careers. “In the Google context, we’d always believed that to be a manager, particularly on the engineering side, you need to be as deep or deeper a technical expert than the people who work for you,” says Laszlo Bock, Google’s vice president for “people operations,” which is Googlespeak for human resources. “It turns out that that’s absolutely the least important thing. It’s important, but pales in comparison. Much more important is just making that connection and being accessible.”"
Twitter

Submission + - Twitter discards client UI community (google.com)

Submitted by Antique Geekmeister
Antique Geekmeister writes: Twitter has just decided to discard the community of developers who've created interesting, innovative, and exciting to start-up company applications. The announcement at http://groups.google.com/group/twitter-api-announce/browse_thread/thread/c82cd59c7a87216a?hl=en shows that they intend to switch from the "bazaar" model of development to the "cathedral", with much tighter control of user interfaces for "security" and "consistency".
Iphone

Submission + - Pricing mobile apps: Why EA is losing money (wordpress.com)

Submitted by
Anonymous Coward
Anonymous Coward writes: "A blog belonging to a two-man Swiss company follows up on Slashdot's post "Crime Writer Makes a Killing With 99 Cent E-Books" and explains how publishing companies are getting it wrong with the pricing of e-products.

"Let'(TM)s take Dead Space by Electronic Arts as an example. It's an exceptional game, we love it. After launch it climbed up the top-grossing list, reaching the second place by the end of January 2011, right after Angry Birds, despite a 6.99$ on its price tag. One month later, Angry Birds is still on top, but where is Dead Space? It even disappeared from the top-10! Where did it land? Beyond place 50. So, what does Angry Birds have that Dead Space has not? This is the question that should keep Electronic Arts' management awake at night.""
Music

Submission + - Why we should buy music in FLAC (blogspot.com)

Submitted by
soodoo
soodoo writes: "We have plenty of HDD space and broadband internet. Why don't we demand full CD quality audio in an accessible format from online music stores?
The advantage of lossless is not only the small audio quality improvement, but better future proofing and converting capabilities. FLAC is a good, free and open format, well suited for this job."
Image

UK Police Force Posts All Its Calls On Twitter Screenshot-sm 66

Posted by samzenpus from the 140-crimes dept.
Stoobalou writes "One of the largest police forces in the UK is posting every incident reported to it today on Twitter. Greater Manchester Police began its 24-hour experiment this morning at 05:00 BST, tweeting all incident reports in the hope of highlighting the complexity of modern policing. 'Policing is often seen in very simple terms, with cops chasing robbers and locking them up,' Chief Constable Peter Fahy said in a statement. 'However the reality is that this accounts for only part of the work they have to deal with.'"
Advertising

Microsoft Admits OpenOffice.org Is a Contender 480

Posted by CmdrTaco from the first-you-ignore-them dept.
ChiefMonkeyGrinder writes "Microsoft has unwittingly admitted that OpenOffice.org is a rival, by launching a three-minute video of customers explaining why they switched to Microsoft Office from OpenOffice.org. Glyn Moody writes: 'You don't compare a rival's product with your own if it is not comparable. And you don't make this kind of attack video unless you are really, really worried about the growing success of a competitor. [Microsoft] has now clearly announced that OpenOffice.org is a serious rival to Microsoft Office, and should be seriously considered by anyone using the latter.'"

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