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Comment Re:Naturally (Score 1) 223

by Nf1nk (#29779303) Attached to: The Changing Face of the Console Wars

There are still memory considerations. Consider GTA IV (now pretend that it isn't boring) at any given time there may be a couple of dozen cars on the road that you can see. It would be a major improvement if they could have a traffic jam with hundreds of cars and dense crowds on the sidewalks (it is unclear whether this would make it more fun, but it would be more real). This doesn't change the resolution of the screen, but it takes much more computing power than we have in the current generation of consoles.

Maybe I picked a poor game for an example, but imagine bustling market places and tropical reefs with thousands of fish.

Comment Are we guppies (Score 5, Interesting) 834

by Nf1nk (#28837403) Attached to: Are Women Getting More Beautiful?

This seems like the guppy phenomenon. Under a lack of predation the guppies self select to breed for beauty. Under heavy predation they breed to survive and quickly become plain. We are the guppies. We have no predators. It just takes longer to show up with us because our life cycle takes longer.

Comment Re:Humans (Score 1) 245

by Nf1nk (#22775888) Attached to: What's Your Favorite Monster?
See you worked in a shitty part of town. I work at a major retailer in a rich town, and the number of people I deal with that are monsters is huge.
In my experience most of the people in the shitty part of town tend to be decent, even the druggies tend to be pretty nice when they are coherent. The rich people, women mostly tend to be real assholes, and have changed my mind about the virtues of wealth. It seems being a monster is either a key to becoming rich or a symptom of being rich.
Government

UN Says Tasers Are a Form of Torture 816

Posted by kdawson from the just-don't-bro dept.
The use of Tasers "causes acute pain, constituting a form of torture," the UN's Committee Against Torture said. "In certain cases, they can even cause death, as has been shown by reliable studies and recent real-life events." Three men — all in their early 20s — died from after tasering in the United States this week, days after a Polish man died at Vancouver airport after being tasered by Canadian police. There have been 17 deaths in Canada following the use of Tasers since they were approved for use, and 275 deaths in the US. "According to Amnesty International, coroners have listed the Taser jolt as a contributing factor in more than 30 of those deaths."

Feed Engadget: Switched On: Comparing Apples and Blackberrys (Part 1) (engadget.com)

From feed by engfeed

Filed under: Cellphones


Each week Ross Rubin contributes Switched On, a column about technology, multimedia, and digital entertainment:

Apple has just introduced an incredibly promoted portable touch-screen device touted as revolutionizing an entire industry. Lines formed in anticipation of its release. The most controversial aspect of it, though, is its text-input method. And one more thing, the year is 1993 and the product is Newton (which shipped in early 1993). The disappointment of Newton's handwriting recognition resulted in negative reviews that left Apple with egg freckles on its face and the bold Newton MessagePad and its successors all but doomed.

Will history repeat itself with this year's model? The first sign that the iPhone's touch-screen keyboard may have a learning curve came during the Steve Jobs interview at the D: All Things Digital event when Apple's CEO offered to buy Walt Mossberg dinner if he wasn't happy with the iPhone's keyboard after coming up to speed on it.

Reinforcing that, in Apple's video walkthrough of the iPhone, the black-shirted narrator notes that "it's easiest to begin typing with just your index finger" but encourages that "as you get more proficient, migrate to using two thumbs" for the payoff that "in about a week, you'll be typing faster on iPhone than any other small keyboard. Perhaps the keyboard's tag line should be, "Give us a week. We'll take off the wait." Fortunately for Apple, most reviewers have not thrown Apple's baby out with its backspace.

Continue reading Switched On: Comparing Apples and Blackberrys (Part 1)

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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!
It's funny. Laugh.

Knight Rider Car for Sale 151

Posted by samzenpus from the I-work-for-the-knight-foundation dept.
It's time to put on your leather jacket and get ready to hit Turbo Boost. The talking 1982 Pontiac Trans Am from the 80's hit Knight Rider is up for sale. No word on if it comes with David Hasslehoff but with a price tag of $149,995 I'm sure it won't be on the lot for long. I wonder how much the Knight Foundation will give me on a trade in for Magnum PI's Ferrari?
Operating Systems

Windows Home Server Details 234

Posted by kdawson from the just-the-storage-ma'am dept.
phorest writes "Perhaps Microsoft read the comments from the Slashdot community on Windows Home Server? In any event Microsoft is opening up WHS for users to construct their own system after all; though I'd like to see the price of this OS release before making the jump. From the review: "At the 2007 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas this week... Microsoft previewed its long-awaited Windows Home Server product, a Windows Server 2003 R2-based server for consumers that dispenses with the complexities of most Windows Server versions and provides the core storage, sharing, and remote access functionality that digital media and home networking enthusiasts require... Microsoft will make WHS available in two ways: Bundled with new WHS hardware and software-only, the latter so that enthusiasts can install the system on the hardware of their choice... If you're building your own home server, Microsoft requires a 1 GHz processor or better, 512 MB of RAM or more, and as many disks as you think you need. The company will support multiple home servers on the same network, but it's still murky how that will work."
Media

Submission + - The best friend of DRM: Apple Inc.

Submitted by parvenu74
parvenu74 writes: Arstechnica is running an article pointing out that while some pockets of the entertainment industry are experimenting with DRM-free distrobution, Apple Inc, which announced that they have now sold over 2,000,000,000 songs on iTunes, are now the strongest pro-DRM force in digial media. From the article: "DRM is dying. It's a statement being echoed with increasing frequency around the Web over the last few weeks, and is perhaps best articulated in this Billboard article. But there's a powerful force standing in the way of this DRM-free panacea, and it might not be the one you expect: Apple, Inc."
Security

Submission + - PHP apps: security's low-hanging fruit

Submitted by
somersault
somersault writes: "There have been a lot of people on /. making jokes at the expense of PHP recently, but how many common security flaws in PHP are the fault of the language, and how many the fault of the developer? A recent Security Focus article (this version is from El Reg, the layout is better) has a brief discussion which suggests that PHP is no less secure than any other scripting language, and that it is the users of the language themselves who need to be educated. The other side of the story is that the developers of PHP themselves work on tightening up the language to make it more 'idiot proof' by default. Should the team developing PHP take a more active role in controlling the use of their language? What will it take to ensure that users of the language learn to use it securely, short of defacing every vulnerable website out there?"
Education

Submission + - Bit-torrent @ the U!

Submitted by
UM_Paul
UM_Paul writes: "Like most universities here in the backwater superpower of North America, the U blocks all P2P traffic. Recently however I've had several complaints about students network access being locked down and possibly terminated shortly after they finish an all night bender in Azeroth. After some investigation we found the Blizzard Background Downloader to be the culprit. As the person responsible for student affairs involving the network it falls squarely on me to find a resolution to this before I'm hung up by
my armor and sheepified.

I've managed to convince the administration to hear me out on why they should allow bit-torrent traffic on the network. I need your help. I need every reason, possibility, and excuse the Slashdot crowd can come up with as to why "they" should allow bit-torrent access to their users. Yes, everything. I have to give this presentation on Monday so you have until Sunday night to get me every reason there is and the best ways to present/argue the case.

Good luck and good hunting. See you the other side.

PS: in case even this doesn't work, is there a way to selectively filter torrent traffic so they can block the files they want without killing access altogether?"
Space

Submission + - Black diamonds come from space

Submitted by
Roland Piquepaille
Roland Piquepaille writes: "Two teams of U.S. researchers have found that carbonados — or black diamonds — come from outer space. Helped with funds from the National Science Foundation (NSF), they discovered nitrogen and hydrogen in these porous black diamonds found only in Brazil and the Central African Republic. And these elements are not found in conventional diamonds extracted from mines from volcanic rocks. They think these carbonados were part of asteroids which landed on Earth about 3 billion years ago. Read more for additional explanations and a picture of such a not-so-pretty diamond."

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