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Comment Some further detail (Score 2) 132

My parents were very good friends with the victim and his wife. His death had a large impact on his family and those that knew him. His death occurred only a few months ago. He was in otherwise good health until recently. Doctor's suspected something neurological but only diagnosed him with probable CJD *after* exploratory brain surgery. Needless to say, the entire hospital and staff were exposed; which prompted immediate attention from state and federal health officials. I'm actually surprised that news of this incident hasn't been publicized until now.

The family does believe that he contracted the disease during his out of the country travels, and *not* in Texas. As a previous poster mentioned, CJD is a tragic way to go. To the family, it was a sudden shock and a rapid deterioration with absolutely no hope for recovery. I have great admiration for his wife who stood by his side the entire time as she stood by and cared for him until the end.

PC Games (Games)

Blizzard Boss Says Restrictive DRM Is a Waste of Time 563

Stoobalou writes "Blizzard co-founder Frank Pearce reckons that fighting piracy with DRM is a losing battle. His company — which is responsible for one of the biggest video games of all time, the addictive online fantasy role player World of Warcraft — is to release StarCraft 2 on July 27, and Pearce has told Videogamer that the title won't be hobbled with the kind of crazy copy protection schemes that have made Ubisoft very unpopular in gaming circles of late. StarCraft 2 will require a single online activation using the company's Battle.net servers, after which players will be allowed to play the single-player game to their hearts' content, without being forced to have a persistent Internet connection."

Comment Re:Document Management Systems (Score 1) 152

Highly recommend Documentum. I just finished writing a white paper on the ROI for our company's implementation between SharePoint and Documentum. Documentum comes out so far ahead in three and five year ROI figures it's not funny.

I always hear that Documentum is expensive, and at first glance it appears to be. However, considering that you get a true *and* complete enterprise content managment platform, you end up paying up front for what you need. SharePoint is a full-featured collaboration platform and a *basic* content managment system. Cheap at first, but you end up paying extra for third-party content and support for what you need later. SP is fine for some small companies, but it simply does not scale.

SharePoint is fine for departments to use for project management or collaboration. Anything else, including business process management, and you're going to pay for it later. If your IT wants to use it, that's okay as long as you have something else like Documentum, FileNet, or Alfresco to fill in the gaps.

PC Games (Games)

Game Devs On the Future of PC Gaming 375

Shacknews wraps up a developer panel at PAX East discussing the future of gaming on the PC. They cover topics including DRM, digital download platforms and cloud-based gaming services. "Joe Kreiner of Terminal Reality: 'If you look at it from a giant publisher perspective, then the numbers on the PC just really don't make financial sense for you to bother with it. But if you start out with the mindset — you know, you're targeting that group, you make a niched product that's going [to] do well, if you look at a lot of the titles on Steam, Torchlight's a really good example — as long as you know that's your audience to begin with, and you make something inside of a budget that you know you're going to be selling those kinds of numbers, you can be very successful. I think it just takes a targeted developer. ... There is no [PC] platform, really. It's just a mish-mosh of hardware, an operating system that kind of supports games. The problem with that platform is, there's no standards and piracy is rampant, so why would we want to make a video game for that platform unless you had some sort of draconian DRM thing to keep it from being stolen?"
PC Games (Games)

EA Shutting Down Video Game Servers Prematurely 341

Spacezilla writes "EA is dropping the bomb on a number of their video game servers, shutting down the online fun for many of their Xbox 360, PC and PlayStation 3 games. Not only is the inclusion of PS3 and Xbox 360 titles odd, the date the games were released is even more surprising. Yes, Madden 07 and 08 are included in the shutdown... but Madden 09 on all consoles as well?"
First Person Shooters (Games)

Infinity Ward Fights Against Modern Warfare 2 Cheaters 203

Faithbleed writes "IW's Robert Bowling reports on his twitter account that Infinity Ward is giving 2,500 Modern Warfare 2 cheaters the boot. The news comes as the war between IW and MW2's fans rages over the decision to go with IWnet hosting instead of dedicated servers. Unhappy players were quick to come up with hacks that would allow their own servers and various other changes." Despite the dedicated-server complaints, Modern Warfare 2 has sold ridiculously well.
PlayStation (Games)

US Air Force Buying Another 2,200 PS3s 144

bleedingpegasus sends word that the US Air Force will be grabbing up 2,200 new PlayStation 3 consoles for research into supercomputing. They already have a cluster made from 336 of the old-style (non-Slim) consoles, which they've used for a variety of purposes, including "processing multiple radar images into higher resolution composite images (known as synthetic aperture radar image formation), high-def video processing, and 'neuromorphic computing.'" According to the Justification Review Document (DOC), "Once the hardware configuration is implemented, software code will be developed in-house for cluster implementation utilizing a Linux-based operating software."
NASA

Virtual Telescope Zooms In On Milky Way Black Hole 181

FiReaNGeL writes "An international team has obtained the closest views ever of what is believed to be a super-massive black hole at the center of the Milky Way galaxy. The astronomers used radio dishes in Hawaii, Arizona and California to create a virtual telescope more than 2,800 miles across that is capable of seeing details more than 1,000 times finer than the Hubble Space Telescope. The target of the observations was the source known as Sagittarius A* ("A-star"), long thought to mark the position of a black hole whose mass is 4 million times greater than the sun. Though Sagittarius A* was discovered 30 years ago, the new observations for the first time have an angular resolution, or ability to observe small details, that is matched to the size of the event horizon."
Robotics

Monkey's Thoughts Make Robot Walk 146

geekbits writes "For all those who have at one time or another been too lazy to get up off the couch and go to the fridge and get a beer, heat up some pizza, or change the channel when the remote is missing, we may be one step closer to being able to keep our tushes parked just a little while longer. There may also be some slightly more noble implications here. According to an article in The New York Times, in an experiment at Duke University, a 12-pound, 32-inch monkey made a 200-pound, 5-foot humanoid robot walk on a treadmill using only her brain activity. She was in North Carolina, and the robot was in Japan."
Republicans

Netcraft Shows Smartech Running Ohio Election Servers 688

goombah99 writes "Netcraft is showing that an event happened in the Ohio 2004 election that is difficult to explain. The Secretary of State's website, which handles election reporting, normally is directed to an Ohio-based IP address hosted by the Ohio Supercomputer Center. On Nov. 3 2004, Netcraft shows the website pointing out of state to a server owned by Smartech Corp. According to the American Registry on Internet Numbers, Smartech's block of IP addresses 64.203.96.0 – 64.203.111.255 encompasses the entire range of addresses owned by the Republican National Committee. Smartech hosted the recently notorious gbw43.com domain used from the White House in apparent violation of the Presidential Records Act, from which thousands of White House emails vanished." Update: 04/25 01:24 GMT by KD : ePluribus Media published a piece called Ken Blackwell Outsources Ohio Election Results to GOP Internet Operatives, Again on election eve 2006, when a similar DNS switch to Smartech occurred. They have been investigating the larger story of IT on Capitol Hill and elsewhere for two years.
Mozilla

Submission + - Firefox Co-Founder Blake Ross on Firefox and Opera

Kelson writes: "Opera Watch recently interviewed Blake Ross, co-founder of Firefox. Ross spoke on Firefox's evolution, how it can improve, its relationship with Opera and other browsers, implications of IE7, and the state of the web today. When asked about the fan rivalry between Firefox and Opera, he called it "ridiculous," adding that "Millions of people out there rely on us to make the Web better, not have pissing contests." Asked to describe Opera in three words, he said, "Our best ally.""

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