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Comment Re:Wow. (Score 1) 693

by SalaSSin (#34270942) Attached to: 200 Students Admit Cheating After Professor's Online Rant
Exactly!

At my university we luckily did have a Bill, stating what the rights and obligations were for all parties.

On one occasion, i had two exams on the same day, studied hard for one of them, figuring i could pass the second one in September, because that was the easier one. The professor didn't show up, and so i would have to redo both tests. I went to the other professor (of the easier course), told him why i couldn't take his test, and also told him my misfortune. He advised me to go to the Exam Board and demand a grade for the difficult one, as the other prof didn't live up to his part of the contract. Done, and won. Got a 12/20 (which is the minimum to pass) for that test :-)

Btw: i did pass the second one in september :-D
Crime

Thief Returns Stolen Laptop Contents On USB Stick 352

Posted by samzenpus from the it's-been-a-pleasure-being-your-victim dept.
While it's true that Sweden is responsible for unleashing IKEA and ABBA on humanity, not everything they produce is terrible. Their thieves are some of the most considerate in the world. An unnamed professor at Umeå University received a USB stick with all his data after his laptop was stolen. From the article: "The professor, who teaches at Umeå University in northern Sweden, was devastated when ten years of work stored on his laptop was stolen. But to his surprise, a week after the theft, the entire contents of his laptop were posted to him on a USB stick. 'I am very happy,' the unnamed professor told the local Västerbottens-Kuriren newspaper. 'This story makes me feel hope for humanity.'"
Microsoft

Xbox Live Pricing To Go Up To $60 Per Year 199

Posted by Soulskill from the nickles-and-dimes dept.
donniebaseball23 writes "Microsoft has raised the annual price of Xbox Live Gold to $60, which is a price hike of $10. The new price goes into effect on November 1, but gamers can lock in the current Xbox Live price by renewing now. EEDAR analyst Jesse Divnich is not surprised by the move, nor does he think it will really have much impact on the Xbox momentum."

Comment Re:XP SP3 (Score 1) 233

by SalaSSin (#31961250) Attached to: McAfee Retracts Lowball Bug Damage Estimate
Same here.

I'm actually the person in charge of our security, and, as we take security quite serious, the auto-update is set hourly (which is btw the default). McAfee let the faulty DAT 4 hours (!) online, ...

I got it offline about 20 minutes after the first machine "hit the ground", but by then 95% of my machines had the update (550 machines over the whole of our country).

With the IT team we figured out a solution about 2 hours after it hit, even before McAfee came with a solution (which, at that time, wasn't even working...) and we had everything cleared up in 7 hours time, but i can tell you, those were hell...

Luckily, the whole it team is on Windows 7, for testing purposes, so we were able to continue to work and coordinate the "rescue mission".

I don't even want to imagine what the damage would have been if it also affected 2008 machines, which meant all our servers...
Google

Google Renames Itself "Topeka" 84

Posted by CmdrTaco from the not-as-much-zazz dept.
techmuse was one of several readers to note Google's official response to recent news that a town in Kansas would rename itself Google. The search engine company has announced a name change of its own, although I'm not sure saying "Let me Topeka that" has quite the same ring to it.
Slashdot.org

Slashdot Discussions Now Include Roulette Video Chat 192

Posted by CmdrTaco from the let's-keep-this-rated-pg dept.
It's been a long time coming, but we're pleased to announce the latest updates to our discussion software. We've been paying a lot of attention to what other websites have been doing in the space, and as we are only too happy to steal good ideas, from now on all Slashdot stories will now be accompanied by a Roulette-style webcam video chat. In testing, we've discovered that Slashdot users are amazingly likely to engage in informative, troll-free discussion when presented with the video image of one of their peers. This new addition to Slashdot nicely rounds out and improves the discussion experience for all users.
Games

The Problems With Video Game Voice Acting 251

Posted by Soulskill from the who-called-in-de-fleet dept.
The Guardian's Games blog explores the tendency of modern video games to suffer from poor voice acting, a flaw made all the more glaring by increasingly precise and impressive graphics. Quoting: "Due to the interactive nature of games, actors can't be given a standard film script from which they're able to gauge the throughline of their character and a feel for the dramatic development of the narrative. Instead, lines of dialogue need to be isolated into chunks so they can be accessed and triggered within the game in line with the actions of each individual player. Consequently, the performer will usually be presented with a spreadsheet jammed with hundreds of single lines of dialogue, with little sense of context or interaction. ... But according to David Sobolov, one of the most experienced videogame voice actors in the world (just check out his website), the significant time pressures mean that close, in-depth direction is not always possible. 'Often, there's a need to record a great number of lines, so to keep the session moving, once we've established the tone of the character we're performing, the director will silently direct us using the spreadsheet on the screen by simply moving the cursor down the page to indicate if he/she liked what we did. Or they'll make up a code, like typing an 'x' to ask us to give them another take.' It sounds, in effect, like a sort of acting battery farm, a grinding, dehumanizing production line of disembodied phrases, delivered for hours on end. Hardly conducive to Oscar-winning performances."

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