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Submission + - Ubisoft DRM problems remain unsolved (ubi.com) 1

Submitted by
ocean_soul
ocean_soul writes: "More than three weeks after the release of The Settlers 7, with the controversial "always on-line" DRM, a lot of people still can't connect to Ubisoft's DRM servers. The forum threads where people can post if they are unable to connect keeps growing daily. The reason for the lack of fixes or responses from support seems to be that the people responsible were on vacation during the Easter holiday, despite the promis of 24/7 monitoring of the servers. The moral of this story seems to be that it is a bad idea to buy a game just before a major holiday. Something to keep in mind for Christmas shopping..."

Comment Re:Reminds me of those Magic Eye pictures (Score 1) 495

by Trifthen (#31826878) Attached to: Do You Have a Secret Immunity To 3D Movies?

And those are ridiculously easy once you get the trick. The first ones that were out, I remember, hit in the very early 90's in magazines like Popular Science. In those, you had two dots right above the picture, and the instructions were to visually split the dots and combine them in such a way there were now three. That achieved, look down at the picture.

Most, if not all of the later ones removed those instructions, and it became a game of "stare at this until you get it." For the really old-timers, we understood the real trick is to cross your eyes slightly and vary the degree until you hit the magic separation necessary to resolve the picture.

I'm not entirely convinced the effects are related to those used for 3D movies, since Magic Eye works through the transposition created by overlapping the two visual fields by crossing your eyes.

Comment Re:Red light cameras in St. Louis, Missouri (Score 1) 976

by dkuntz (#31826748) Attached to: Red-Light Camera Ticket Revenue and Short Yellows

This is essentially how it is in Athens, GA. My wife (several times, unfortunately) got tagged by one of the 4 red light cams in Athens. The letter (no video, or link to video... just a Print Page from IE, completely with a URL at the bottom) showing 2 pictures of her van. The "ticket" was for me to pay the $75 fine, as the van is in my name. She forgot to pay it, and called the courthouse to see what would happen. The person there said "nothing will happen, wont go on your record, no warrants will ever be issued... you will just keep getting letters to pay".

They dont even report to credit agencies there, as there's no clear way to tell who's driving... so they'll just send you monthly letters saying "PAY ME Or or or.. I'll tell you to pay me again!"

Comment ENCODERS IDOTS ! (Score 3, Insightful) 501

by johnjones (#31826448) Attached to: Google to Open Source the VP8 Codec

its all about the encoders !

google can quite easily make reference but until there is High quality encoders then its pretty pointless

making decoder plugins for IE and mac is actually pretty easy in comparison

hardware reference designes need to be seeded also to the likes of TI and STMicroelectronics before it will even start to be useful after all where do all the camera's now do mp4 come from...

its all about the encoders !

regards

John Jones
Robotics

Submission + - Robot grocery shopping helper 3-month live test (examiner.com)

Submitted by JoshuaInNippon
JoshuaInNippon writes: If you’ve ever wished you could have a four-foot tall metal robot that tells you it likes Mandarin oranges as a shopping helper for Grandma or Grandpa, your wish may just come true. A supermarket in Kyoto, Japan is carrying out live tests of a robotic shopping helper named Robovie-II, created by ATR, for the elderly and the disabled. Twenty elderly testers will be using Robovie-II until March of 2010 to see how well it interacts with them, as well as how useful it is. The robot will carry their shopping baskets and talk with them, making suggestions such as “Broccoli goes well with a salad,” or comments like, ““Mandarins oranges are tasty, aren’t they? I want to eat one.” One 67-year-old tester commented, “I felt like I was talking to a large grandchild, which is fun.” Now for a related question based on the video in the article, does anyone else see a strange resemblance with Johnny 5 from Short Circuit?

Submission + - AT&T's Net neutrality doublethink (infoworld.com)

Submitted by GMGruman
GMGruman writes: George Orwell would be proud of AT&T, as Bill Snyder explains in this blog, for saying it supports Net neutrality when in fact it is working actively to scuttle proposed FCC rules that would clearly ban discriminatory practices against different types of data, such as video streaming or VoIP. It's also trying to get government subsidies to build a substandard broadband network for the underserved areas of the U.S. If it and its carrier partners win, "Internet freedom" will mean freedom for carriers to be the 21st century's robber barons.
Space

Submission + - Virgin Galactic Spaceship the Tip of The Iceberg (popularmechanics.com)

Submitted by YIAAL
YIAAL writes: The Virgin Galactic Spaceship Two rollout got a fair amount of attention, but Rand Simberg, writing in Popular Mechanics, says it's just the beginning:

Despite all of the Virgin-focused hoopla, there is a lot more going on in Mojave these days than just Virgin Galactic and Scaled Composites. And even for those two companies, there is more to space going on in Mojave than suborbital tourism. . . . XCOR Aerospace, located next door to one of Scaled's hangars, continues to develop its own suborbital tourist vehicle, the Lynx. While it won't initially get all the way to the 62-mile altitude considered to be the threshold of space, it will still allow long weightless periods for its passenger and a smaller experiment, with the opportunity to go higher and longer with follow-on versions. Meanwhile, just a couple of blocks down the road, Masten Space Systems, fresh off its recent surprise win over Texas' Armadillo Aerospace in the Northrop Grumman Lunar Landing Challenge, plans to start flying to altitudes far beyond the meager few hundred feet needed to win that prize. According to business development manager Michael Mealling, "about half of next year's flights will be in the 1500- to 10,000-foot range. Toward the end of the year we'll be breaking through the 100,000-foot [about 20 miles, or about a third of the altitude needed for official spaceflight] barrier."

Are we seeing a critical mass of innovative space companies, something like the explosion of computer companies in the mid-1970s? Let's hope it's similarly fruitful.

Submission + - It's Official: Sun Debuts Java EE 6, (developer.com) 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Ten years after the first big J2EE release, Sun is now out with the latest J2EE specification. New profiles, dependency injection, annotations and RESTful Web Services are among the key new features. Fundamentally though it's about speed for development.

Tom Kincaid, executive director of Sun's Application Platform organization, added call that the key items that Java EE 6 enables are developer productivity, ease of application development, flexibility and extensibility. As an example, Kincaid said that a coding task that would take over 20 lines of code spread across several source files can now be done with two lines of code in a single source file.

Submission + - International Talk Like Sean Connery Day! (geekngamer.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Don't forget kids, this Saturday is International Talk Like Sean Connery Day! From the site: "International Talk Like Sean Connery Day, October 17th, is a chance for all of us for just one day a year to talk like the big man himself – the man whose amazing speech enhancement has seen him through some of the greatest performances drama has ever seen. Who could forget the Russian sub commander, with the Scottish lisp in Hunt For Red October, the Irish cop from the Untouchables (with a Scottish lisp), the eastern warrior in Highlander (who was actually an alien but had a Scottish lisp anyway) and his breathtaking cameo as Richard the Lionheart of England – WITH A SCOTTISH LISP." Get involved with the Facebook groups etc. all linked on the site! YESH.
Businesses

Submission + - Aggressive Trend of Selling Rogueware (net-security.org)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: PandaLabs has identified a new, more aggressive trend for selling fake antivirus programs or rogueware. Until now, when a computer was infected by this type of malware, users would typically see a series of warnings prompting them to buy a pay version of the program. Now, these technologies are being combined with ransomware, hijacking the computer and rendering it useless until victims complete the purchase. Firstly, users are tricked into paying money simply in order to use their computers; and secondly, these same users may believe that they have a genuine antivirus installed on the computer, thereby leaving the system unprotected.

Submission + - Modern man a wimp says anthropologist (reuters.com) 3

Submitted by GenThrift
GenThrift writes: An interesting article that boldly states and proves why "If you're reading this then you — or the male you have bought it for — are the worst man in history.

"No ifs, no buts — the worst man, period...As a class we are in fact the sorriest cohort of masculine Homo sapiens to ever walk the planet."

LONDON (Reuters) — Many prehistoric Australian aboriginals could have outrun world 100 and 200 meters record holder Usain Bolt in modern conditions.

Some Tutsi men in Rwanda exceeded the current world high jump record of 2.45 meters during initiation ceremonies in which they had to jump at least their own height to progress to manhood.

Any Neanderthal woman could have beaten former bodybuilder and current California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger in an arm wrestle.

Submission + - $5 Per Month Music Streaming Not Possible in US (wired.com)

Submitted by CodeBuster
CodeBuster writes: The social music network MOG has signed deals with all four major labels and indie aggregators to launch an unlimited on-demand streaming service that will cost $5 per month starting Thanksgiving Day, November 26. We first caught wind of this plan last December, when the company’s CEO David Hyman gave us a sneak preview. Back then, the plan was to offer this as a free, ad-supported service, but Hyman says that is not possible due to the high cost of licensing on-demand music for the United States.

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It's a naive, domestic operating system without any breeding, but I think you'll be amused by its presumption.

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