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Microsoft

Microsoft To Buy Minecraft Maker Mojang For $2.5 Billion 330

Posted by samzenpus from the big-fish dept.
jawtheshark writes The rumors were true. Mojang, the company behind Minecraft, is being sold to Microsoft. Of course, the promise is to keep all products supported as they are. From the article: "Microsoft said it has agreed to buy Mojang AB, the Swedish video game company behind the hit Minecraft game, boosting its mobile efforts and cementing control of another hit title for its Xbox console. Minecraft, which has notched about 50 million copies sold, will be purchased by Microsoft for $2.5 billion, the company said in a statement. The move marks the tech giant's most ambitious video game purchase and the largest acquisition for Satya Nadella, its new chief executive. Minecraft is more than a great game franchise - it is an open world platform, driven by a vibrant community we care deeply about, and rich with new opportunities for that community and for Microsoft,' Nadella said in a statement."
Iphone

iPhone 6 Sales Crush Means Late-Night Waits For Some Early Adopters 222

Posted by timothy from the who'd-a-thunk-it dept.
Even after the months of hype and speculation, the behind-the-scenes development and manufacture, and then the announcement Tuesday, it seems Apple's servers weren't quite ready for the workout they got from would-be early adopters of its newest iPhone. Preorders through Verizon Wireless and AT&T largely started without a hitch at midnight, though some customers on Twitter have since complained about issues. Those problems were nothing compared to the issues experienced by Sprint and T-Mobile customers. The Sprint and T-Mobile sites were still down for many users nearly two hours after presales were slated to start. Access to Sprint's site faded in and out, while the T-Mobile site continued to display a form to register for a reminder for when the preorders began. Some people joked on Twitter that they "might as well wait for the iPhone 6S now." Apple's store itself was down for a few hours, too.

Comment Check you address here (Score 3, Informative) 203

by bigjocker (#47874481) Attached to: 5 Million Gmail Passwords Leaked, Google Says No Evidence Of Compromise

Use this page to check if your address is in the leaked database. I'm using the list (without passwords) that was published here in slashdot in the above comments. I'm not capturing the email addresses of the people using the tool:

https://bigjocker.com/qd/googl...

If you don't trust me (and I don't blame you), just download the file posted a few comments above this one and grep yourself:

ngranek@trantor:~/Downloads$ grep bigjocker google_5000000.txt
ngranek@trantor:~/Downloads$

Comment Re: Again? (Score 2) 96

by StormReaver (#47861613) Attached to: European Commission Reopens Google Antitrust Investigation

Netscape was free too, and it was easy to switch from IE for anyone who wanted to...

Netscape wasn't free until Microsoft bundled Internet Explorer (IE) into Windows, which had (and still has) a (what should be illegal) monopoly on desktop operating systems. At that point, no one could charge for a browser. That was leveraging a monopoly in one area to gain a monopoly in another area, which is a felony (for which Microsoft was rightly convicted).

Switching from IE to anything else was almost impossible for most people, because Microsoft's browser dominance was so thorough that a huge number of web sites was created to fully work only with IE. Phoenix/Firefox broke Microsoft's stranglehold only through a rare convergence of events.

Comment Re:Again? (Score 3, Insightful) 96

by StormReaver (#47861507) Attached to: European Commission Reopens Google Antitrust Investigation

No matter what one thinks of Yelp, they were one of the first few place review services around. Then Google tried to buy them and, when that failed, copied their business model and turned it into Google Places which held top place in any location search.

I'm failing to see the problem. That is how competition is supposed to work: doing something better than someone else.

Did Google threaten anyone, or did Google just provided a better service/experience?

Did Google conspire with other companies to put Yelp out of business?

Did Google somehow leverage a monopoly position in search to gain a monopoly position in reviewing stuff?

As far as I know, Google is just a better competitor.
Censorship

Chinese Man Sues State-Owned Cell Phone Company For Blocking Google 78

Posted by timothy from the we-wish-him-much-luck dept.
jfruh writes China is notorious for censoring the Internet for its citizens, and access in the country became particularly spotty last year as the government tried to block any commemoration of the 25th anniversary of the Tiannamen Square massacre. But now one Chinese man is striking back through the courts. A 26-year-old legal practitioner is suing his cell phone company, the government-owned China Unicom, and demanding a refund for periods in which he was unable to access Gmail or Google's Hong Kong search page.
Earth

US Rust Belt Manufacturing Rebounds Via Fracking Boom 191

Posted by Soulskill from the headlines-that-mean-something-different-in-the-BSG-universe dept.
schnell writes: A NY Times article reports that Midwestern "Rust Belt" towns and their manufacturing economies in particular have rebounded greatly due to the U.S. resurgence in fossil fuel production. This resurgence is driven by production of shale gas and natural gas from "fracking" and other new technologies that recover previously unavailable fuel but are more invasive than traditional techniques. "Both Youngstown and Canton are places which experienced nothing but disinvestment for 40 years." "They're not ghost towns anymore," according to the article. But while many have decried the loss of traditional U.S. manufacturing jobs in a globalized world and the associated loss of high-wage, blue collar jobs, do the associated environmental risks of new "tight oil" extraction techniques outweigh the benefits to these depressed economic regions?

Comment Re:Huh? (Score 1) 282

by StormReaver (#47858981) Attached to: Is It Time To Split Linux Distros In Two?

Several years ago, a kernel developer submitted a patch that greatly increased Linux performance for desktop-oriented tasks; but the patch was rejected because it harmed server performance. In that case, there was no way to reconcile the needs of the two types of systems. Under that kind of situation, the logic for a server/desktop split increases.
Programming

Is It Time To Split Linux Distros In Two? 282

Posted by samzenpus from the programming-of-solomon dept.
snydeq writes Desktop workloads and server workloads have different needs, and it's high time Linux consider a split to more adequately address them, writes Deep End's Paul Venezia. You can take a Linux installation of nearly any distribution and turn it into a server, then back into a workstation by installing and uninstalling various packages. The OS core remains the same, and the stability and performance will be roughly the same, assuming you tune they system along the way. Those two workloads are very different, however, and as computing power continues to increase, the workloads are diverging even more. Maybe it's time Linux is split in two. I suggested this possibility last week when discussing systemd (or that FreeBSD could see higher server adoption), but it's more than systemd coming into play here. It's from the bootloader all the way up. The more we see Linux distributions trying to offer chimera-like operating systems that can be a server or a desktop at a whim, the more we tend to see the dilution of both. You can run stock Debian Jessie on your laptop or on a 64-way server. Does it not make sense to concentrate all efforts on one or the other?"
United States

L.A. Times National Security Reporter Cleared Stories With CIA Before Publishing 188

Posted by timothy from the bet-the-changes-were-mostly-in-one-direction dept.
New submitter Prune (557140) writes with a link to a story at The Intercept which might influence the way you look at media coverage of the kind of government activity that deserves rigorous press scrutiny. According to the story, "Email exchanges between CIA public affairs officers and Ken Dilanian, now an Associated Press intelligence reporter who previously covered the CIA for the Times, show that Dilanian enjoyed a closely collaborative relationship with the agency, explicitly promising positive news coverage and sometimes sending the press office entire story drafts for review prior to publication. In at least one instance, the CIA’s reaction appears to have led to significant changes in the story that was eventually published in the Times." Another telling excerpt: On Friday April 27, 2012, he emailed the press office a draft story that he and a colleague, David Cloud, were preparing. The subject line was “this is where we are headed,” and he asked if “you guys want to push back on any of this.” It appears the agency did push back. On May 2, 2012, he emailed the CIA a new opening to the story with a subject line that asked, “does this look better?” The piece ran on May 16, and while it bore similarities to the earlier versions, it had been significantly softened.

Comment Switching to AMD (Score 5, Informative) 110

Thankfully, the Open Source AMD video driver has progressed enough to use it for normal computing. I've been using it on cards I already had laying around, and it performs very well for daily use. It performs much better than Nouveau (which isn't surprising, since AMD released full specifications, and nVidia requires complete clean-room reverse engineering), and integrates into a Linux desktop cleaner than the nVidia proprietary driver (nVidia destroys the boot display, for example).

Now I have enough motivation to no longer use nVidia. Thank you, nVidia, for helping AMD gain some ground.
Cellphones

NVIDIA Sues Qualcomm and Samsung Seeking To Ban Import of Samsung Phones 110

Posted by samzenpus from the sue-baby-sue dept.
Calibax writes NVIDIA has filed complaints against Samsung and Qualcomm at the ITC and in the U.S. District court in Delaware. The suit alleges that the companies are both infringing NVIDIA GPU patents covering technology including programmable shading, unified shaders and multithreaded parallel processing. NVIDIA is seeking damages and a ban on U.S. import of a number of devices with Snapdragon and Exynos processors until there is an agreement on licensing.

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