Please create an account to participate in the Slashdot moderation system

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×

Comment Re:Angry? (Score 2, Informative) 569

"A "Brand" is something that requires a large scale organization to be effective."

Nonsense. A business with one single person still has a brand. Even if you have no logo, your name, your reputation, how you present yourself to customers, how you communicate, all form part of your brand identity. A brand does not equal a logo, the logo is simply a symbol that helps communicate elements of your brand identity. Many individual business people use Facebook, twitter, and blogging as a way to market themselves and contribute to that identity, sometimes very effectively.

Comment Re:Competition is a good thing (Score 1) 1184

You are better off with a better quality picture to start with, not more pixels. More pixels of a bad quality image downsampled still gives a bad quality image. In fact, increasing the density of a sensor reduces the size of the receptors, reducing the number of photons reaching the receptor and leading to noise and quality issues. It's especially apparent in the small sensors used in point and shoot cameras and in cell phone cameras. It is possible to actually make an image worse through nothing more than increasing the sensor density.

Image

Son Sues Mother Over Facebook Posts 428

Most kids hate having their parents join in on a discussion on Facebook, but one 16-year-old in Arkansas hates it so much he has filed suit against his mother, charging her with harassment. From the article: "An Arkadelphia mother is charged with harassment for making entries on her son's Facebook page. Denise New's 16-year-old son filed charges against her last month and requested a no-contact order after he claims she posted slanderous entries about him on the social networking site. New says she was just trying to monitor what he was posting." Seems like he could just unfriend her.
Role Playing (Games)

The City of Heroes Expansion & the Issues of User-Created Content 150

eldavojohn writes "Wired has a piece on the new City of Heroes content that is created by players — or rather the severe abuse of it. Namely, creating missions for the characters. The problem is that gamers game this system, even though Paragon City has tried to maintain a good risk/reward ratio for experience in these missions. Making the situation even worse is that people who architect highly-rated missions get architect awards, which are redeemable for prizes — almost ensuring experience farming missions. Eric Heimburg (lead engineer and producer of Asheron's Call and the upcoming Star Trek MMO) comments on this: 'It may seem sad that giving the players what they want is detrimental to the player's overall length of enjoyment of the game, but that's the truth. Once you reached that top of the hill, if there's nothing left to do or see, players are likely to move on. Length of enjoyment (equals) amount of money earned, so developers have a strong incentive to keep players from gaining power and levels too quickly.' Matt Miller (lead designer of CoH), addressed the community on this very topic. This is resulting in an unexplained ban/loss of experience if you are determined to be abusing the mission architect, causing an uproar in the community. Is user-generated content a dead end for an MMORPG?" Update: 05/20 20:27 GMT by T : Rather than lead engineer of Asheron's Call or the Star Trek MMO, a correction at Wired says rather that "Heimburg worked as Star Trek Online's systems designer at Perpetual Entertainment, prior to the game's transfer to Cryptic Studio."
Image

External Airbag Designed to Protect Pedestrians 253

Thanks to researchers at Cranfield University, you don't have to feel bad when you plow into a group of pedestrians who are crossing the street too slowly. They have designed an external airbag that mounts to your hood at the base of the windshield. Research shows that this is the area where a pedestrian's head is most likely to hit in an accident. "Test results indicate that the system works extremely well. When fitted to a demonstrator vehicle not originally designed with pedestrian protection in mind, the results were well inside all current legal criteria for pedestrian protection currently in force in Europe," Roger Hardy of the university's Cranfield Impact Centre said.

Comment Re:YAN... Oh, never mind. (Score 2, Insightful) 1240

Absolutely. Even if she actually had pot or worse, a strip search is totally inappropriate. It's a violation and can cause major emotional damage. Why were the parents not called? What kind of school is this where kids are treated as criminals? How can this possibly be justified? As a parent, I would be absolutely irate to hear that a school would even consider strip searches, much less actually apply them. Kids do need rules and structure, but more than anything they need people who care and who support them and provide a safety net. This kind of act from people the kids should be looking up to utterly destroys that sense of safety.

Technology (Apple)

Submission + - Re : Thoughts On Music - Steve Jobs

luna6 writes: "Steve Jobs recent open letter on embracing DRM free music, if the record companies agreed, is a noble idea. Yet, this article asks the question if Mr. Jobs really embraces the idea of music being able to be played on all hardware, why not allow iTunes to play all music formats? http://lunapark6.com/?p=2956"
Media (Apple)

Submission + - DVD jon on Job's "give up DRM if I could"

Whiney Mac Fanboy writes: ""Dvd" Jon Johansen has posted several sceptical blog entries reacting to Steve Job's blog posting about DRM. One post questions Job's misuse of statistics that attempts to prove consumers aren't tied to iPods through ITMS.

Many iPod owners have never bought anything from the iTunes Store. Some have bought hundreds of songs. Some have bought thousands. At the 2004 Macworld Expo, Steve revealed that one customer had bought $29,500 worth of music.
The other question's the DRM-free in a heartbeat claim. There are apparantly, many Indie artists who would love to sell DRM-free music on iTunes, but Apple will not allow them.

It should not take Apple's iTunes team more than 2-3 days to implement a solution for not wrapping content with FairPlay when the content owner does not mandate DRM. This could be done in a completely transparent way and would not be confusing to the users.
"
Security

Submission + - DNS Attack only a warning shot?

ancientribe writes: The attack on the Internet infrastructure yesterday may signal a hint of bigger things to come: the distributed denial-of-service (DDOS) attack on the Domain Name System (DNS) root servers was likely a test-run for a potentially larger and more disruptive attack.

It was the latest in a series of DDOS attacks on DNS servers that began late last year with attacks on EveryDNS and EasyDNS. Experts had predicted it was only a matter of time before botnet operators hit a bigger and higher-profile DNS target, and that's just what happened yesterday, according to this article in Dark Reading.

http://www.darkreading.com/document.asp?doc_id=116 685&WT.svl=news1_1
Windows

Submission + - Apple mocks Vista - Cancel or Allow?

An anonymous reader writes: Apple has posted a new "Get a Mac" ad that hilariously mocks the security features in Windows Vista. I haven't laughed so hard in ages.

Slashdot Top Deals

"May your future be limited only by your dreams." -- Christa McAuliffe

Working...