Comment This article is the opposite from a few years ago (Score 2) 425
A handful of years ago Lego was going bankrupt and they were searching in vain for how to stop it. Then they figured out that open ended didn't sell so well. They created their Bionicle sets. Then they started the licensed sets with Harry potter and Star wars. It is the only reason lego even still exists. And now people decry that lego 'sold out'? Make up your minds...
Comment Piracy drives technology (Score 5, Informative) 320
In this case, I would be willing to be that the reason is that the pirate groups have now made x264 the defacto standard for standard definition TV. AVI is falling by the wayside, and therefore Mozilla is just keeping up with the tech savvy of the interwebs.
http://torrentfreak.com/bittorrent-pirates-go-nuts-after-tv-release-groups-dump-xvid-120303/
Comment Already Been done Before.. many times (Score 1) 248
I recall reading about "ceiling" jumps before. Air Force Captain Joseph Kittinger did this back in 1960. A helium balloon took him to over 100,000 feet at which point he stepped off, falling at well above 700mph due to the lack of atmosphere. Modern ceiling jumpers use a kevlar bodysuit, if I recall, to distribute the heat caused by friction when you hit the air curtain and a modified scuba system that provides air. Jumping anywhere above the air curtain means you break the sound barrier because there is no terminal velocity restraint from air.
How is this any different other than its a mile or two higher than previous jumps? This seems like bad reporting saying that this is somehow different than previous jumps.
Failed Games That Damaged Or Killed Their Companies 397
An anonymous reader writes "Develop has an excellent piece up profiling a bunch of average to awful titles that flopped so hard they harmed or sunk their studio or publisher. The list includes Haze, Enter The Matrix, Hellgate: London, Daikatana, Tabula Rasa, and — of course — Duke Nukem Forever. 'Daikatana was finally released in June 2000, over two and a half years late. Gamers weren't convinced the wait was worth it. A buggy game with sidekicks (touted as an innovation) who more often caused you hindrance than helped ... achieved an average rating of 53. By this time, Eidos is believed to have invested over $25 million in the studio. And they called it a day. Eidos closed the Dallas Ion Storm office in 2001.'"
Submission + - a real telemarketer filter
hate-those-telemarketers writes: I just had one of those telemarketers call me despite being on the do-not-call list. There's still organizations that don't need to adhere to that list. Having googled the caller-id I came accross http://www.whocalled.us/ that seems to be a very comprehensive database of annoying caller-id's calling. What's even better is that in the "about" tab there's a script for asterisk to check all calls against that database.
This is like a IP-list for spammers only for real telephony. Fantastic. I've implemented this and now I wish I weren't on the do-not-call list to see telemarketers deal with the very annoying Telemarket torture script that can be found on this site: http://www.voip-info.org/wiki/view/Asterisk+Telema rketer+Torture
woo-hoo!!!
