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Comment UR DOING IT WRONG! (Score 2) 215

by celest (#36006142) Attached to: VMware Causes Second Outage While Recovering From First

You would think someone as big as VMware would have figured out, by now, that if "An inadvertent press of a key on a keyboard" can lead to "a full outage of the network infrastructure [including] all load balancers, routers, and firewalls [resulting] in a complete external loss of connectivity to [their Cloud service]" that they are DOING IT WRONG!

In other news, VMware announces they're releasing a new voting machine: http://xkcd.com/463/
Input Devices

Is the Line-in Jack On the Verge of Extinction? 411

Posted by timothy from the erasing-the-analog-hole dept.
SlashD0tter writes "Many older sound cards were shipped with line-out, microphone-in, and a line-in jacks. For years I've used such a line-in jack on an old Windows 2000 dinosaur desktop that I bought in 2000 (600 Mhz PIII) to capture the stereo audio signal from an old Technics receiver. I've used this arrangement to recover the audio from a slew of old vinyl LPs and even a few cassettes using some simple audio manipulating software from a small shop in Australia. I've noticed only recently, unfortunately, that all of the four laptops I've bought since then have omitted a line-in jack, forcing me to continue keeping this old desktop on life support. I've looked around for USB sound cards that include a line-in jack, but I haven't been too impressed by the selection. Is the line-in jack doomed to extinction, possibly due to lobbying from vested interests, or are there better thinking-outside-the-box alternatives available?"
Games

8-Year Fan-Made Game Project Shut Down By Activision 265

Posted by Soulskill from the of-doors-and-ways-out dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Activision, after acquiring Vivendi, became the new copyright holder of the classic King's Quest series of adventure game. They have now issued a cease and desist order to a team which has worked for eight years on a fan-made project initially dubbed a sequel to the last official installment, King's Quest 8. This stands against the fact that Vivendi granted a non-commercial license to the team, subject to Vivendi's approval of the game after submission. After the acquisition, key team members had indicated on the game's forums (now stripped of their original content by order of Activision) that Activision had given the indication that it intended to keep its current fan-game licenses, but was not interested in issuing new ones."
Bug

Saboteur Launch Plagued By Problems With ATI Cards 230

Posted by Soulskill from the more-or-less-finished dept.
An anonymous reader writes "So far, there are over 35 pages of people posting about why EA released Pandemic Studios' final game, Saboteur, to first the EU on December 4th and then, after knowing full well it did not work properly, to the Americas on December 8th. They have been promising to work on a patch that is apparently now in the QA stage of testing. It is not a small bug; rather, if you have an ATI video card and either Windows 7 or Windows Vista, the majority (90%) of users have the game crash after the title screen. Since the marketshare for ATI is nearly equal to that of Nvidia, and the ATI logo is adorning the front page of the Saboteur website, it seems like quite a large mistake to release the game in its current state."

Comment You can't teach people who don't want to learn (Score 5, Insightful) 932

by celest (#30074816) Attached to: Easing the Job of Family Tech Support?

In my experience, it is not an issue of easy-to-digest material, and explanations that they understand. It's a hard mental block. I've been in the same cycle for 10+ years, and my parents have said, flat out, they they "just can't learn". I've tried written, step-by-step instructions; I've tried demonstrating; I've tried tutorials. It's not the information or how it is presented. It's a mental block about learning new things.

"Why can't it just work?", and the fact that it doesn't is put on my shoulders as the "tech" generation. And that's that.

What really gets me angry is that they are helpless to do anything in their daily lives without their computer, and blame me for that fact (Cause *I* created all malware and put it on their computer, clearly), while simultaneously ridiculing my choice of career as worthless, because "technology is not important". The irony is lost on them. Completely.

The war you are facing is a cultural one, not a technical, or information/communication one. It's one better asked to a psychologist than Slashdot. Best of luck.

Comment How about a link with info on HOW to sign up? (Score 1) 232

by celest (#26385779) Attached to: More Brains Needed

Seriously.

Jokes are great, but I'm looking for information on HOW TO SIGN UP!

I WANT to donate my brain to science after I die, but I have no idea what paper work I have to fill out to do this in my province/country. (Ontario, Canada)

Anyone have the necessary information? Please post.
Businesses

Submission + - Open sourcing: How do average users respond?

Submitted by
Mekki MacAulay
Mekki MacAulay writes: "Developers get excited when closed source software gets released as open source. We see an opportunity to add new features, poke around in the code to figure out how it ticks, fix that annoying bug, or set it free. We have our own views on the open source debate. We've considered the trade offs. We've picked our sides.

But, how does the average user respond to open sourcing of software they use? How does it affect the their perception of the product? How they feel about the company? How they feel about the product's security? How more or less likely they are to recommend the product to a friend? Their performance expectations?

Think of the average user of Skype, MSN, Second Life, World of Warcraft, MS Office, Photoshop, Acrobat, Quicken, and so on. How do you think average users would respond to an announcement that their product was being open sourced? How would these views differ from the responses of developers?

If a business with a closed source product was considering open sourcing it, what would you tell them to expect the average user response to be?"

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