ElGanzoLoco - Slashdot User

Lack of Manpower May Kill VLC For Mac 398

Posted by timothy on Wednesday December 16, 2009 @05:53PM from the vlc-generally-rocks dept.

plasmacutter writes "The Video Lan dev team has recently come forward with a notice that the number of active developers for the project's MacOS X releases has dropped to zero, prompting a halt in the release schedule. There is now a disturbing possibility that support for Mac will be dropped as of 1.1.0. As the most versatile and user-friendly solution for bridging the video compatibility gap between OS X and windows, this will be a terrible loss for the Mac community. There is still hope, however, if the right volunteers come forward."

Saboteur Launch Plagued By Problems With ATI Cards 230

Posted by Soulskill on Wednesday December 09, 2009 @01:58AM from the more-or-less-finished dept.

An anonymous reader writes "So far, there are over 35 pages of people posting about why EA released Pandemic Studios' final game, Saboteur, to first the EU on December 4th and then, after knowing full well it did not work properly, to the Americas on December 8th. They have been promising to work on a patch that is apparently now in the QA stage of testing. It is not a small bug; rather, if you have an ATI video card and either Windows 7 or Windows Vista, the majority (90%) of users have the game crash after the title screen. Since the marketshare for ATI is nearly equal to that of Nvidia, and the ATI logo is adorning the front page of the Saboteur website, it seems like quite a large mistake to release the game in its current state."

Microsoft Game Software Preps Soldiers For Battle 44

Posted by Soulskill on Wednesday December 02, 2009 @02:14AM from the blue-screen-of-real-death dept.

coondoggie writes "Soldiers may go into battle better prepared to handle equipment and with a greater knowledge of their surroundings after an intellectual property licensing deal Monday between Microsoft and Lockheed Martin that will deepen the defense giant's access to visual simulation technology. The intellectual property agreement between the two focuses on Microsoft ESP, a games-based visual simulation software platform for the PC."

US Air Force Buying Another 2,200 PS3s 144

Posted by Soulskill on Wednesday November 25, 2009 @05:02AM from the quick-who-knows-a-good-ps3-flight-sim dept.

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."

Comment Rise in paid downloading? (Score 1) 251

by ElGanzoLoco on Tuesday September 01, 2009 @03:44AM (#29271121) Attached to: Drop in P2P Traffic Attributed to Traffic Shaping

Or could it also be that paid-for downloads and streaming audio and video have increased, thus decreasing the share of P2P traffic in the total?

(No I didn't RTFA, it's way too early for that)

The Broken Design of Microsoft's "Fix it" Tool 165

Posted by kdawson on Friday February 06, 2009 @12:52PM from the teething-problems dept.

$luggo writes "Curious about MS Fix It, I recently went hunting in the MS knowledge base for articles that provide the new EZ-button. After locating on few, I decided to click the button to download the Microsoft Installer package containing the executable and/or files that automatically enable the DVD Library feature in Windows Vista Home Premium and Ultimate — on my XP Media Center. 'Surely, MS will use some scripting, HTTP User-Agent sniffing, or even Genuine Windows validation to verify that I am running Vista,' I thought. It did not and I canceled the download when I received the prompt to save the file. So, I wonder: is there a Fix-it for Fix it? Because I can easily imagine someone doing what I did without scrolling to the bottom of the KB article and verifying that the article applies to their OS/version. This is a great example poor design. Why not simply use the download approach that other articles / fixes / service packs use, whereby the user must select the appropriate OS?"

Comment Re:eh hum.... (Score 5, Insightful) 287

by ElGanzoLoco on Tuesday December 30, 2008 @07:16PM (#26273477) Attached to: HP Accused of Illegal Exportation To Iran

I can't imagine that the Iran market is big enough to justify the risk of getting caught. But that's just me.

Yeah, that's just you. An oil-rich country with 70 million inhabitants, many of them middle-class, urbanized, literate, and under 30, is a gold mine.

Don't think Iran is anything like Afghanistan or Iraq. It is among the most developed countries in the Middle-East and Central Asia, and definitely the one with the best-educated population.

As a side note, finding common computing equipment and parts there is not a problem, and virtually everything imported to Iran either transits via Dubai or (more often than not) directly bought there to wholesale companies. The goods are then loaded on small wooden boats and shipped to Iran. Most of this trade escapes any sort of control (at least on the Dubai side of things).

In other words, the "US embargo on Iran" is a frigging joke, and a total waste of time.

Comment Re:Similar experience. (Score 1) 855

by ElGanzoLoco on Tuesday December 30, 2008 @05:44PM (#26272383) Attached to: Tales From the Support Crypt

Exactly. Similar story here, but with a twist: we bought a Mac for my grandmother, well into her eighties, and who hadn't ever touched a computer before.

But, being an avid bridge player, she wanted to play bridge online with her friends. Turns out they all use the same, Windows-only, bridge software from the French Federation of Bridge.

So I installed... Parallels and Windows XP on top of OS X. I was of course worried that the setup would be too complicated for her, so I made it as simple as possible (shortcuts in Dock etc). But she's got it mastered now, and I think she's even figured how to install other Windows software!

And seeing this 85 year old granny using a laptop with bleeding-edge virtual machine and 2 operating systems to play bridge online never ceases to amaze me.

Submission + - Windows for Warships nears frontline service

Submitted by demented on Monday February 26, 2007 @10:48AM

demented writes: The Register has a piece on Win2K server based combat control systems soon to be deployed on several UK Royal Navy vessels, including air defense ships and nuclear-powered submarines armed with Trident nuclear missiles. The article deals with some interesting problems regarding combat control systems in general and argues whether Microsoft's Windows 2000 Server is a suitable platform for this kind of software.

Submission + - Will Apollo mistakes be made with Mars?

Submitted by

MattSparkes

on Monday February 26, 2007 @10:10AM

MattSparkes writes: "In some ways the Apollo 11 mission was a great success; the astronauts got back to Earth safely after walking on the moon. However, it was a massive disaster in terms of quarantine procedures — the astronauts had to leave the landing capsule to enter the quarantine module, after it was found that the crane on board the ship wasn't strong enough to raise it. Would NASA be able to protect the Earth from Martian pathogens if it successfully returns soil samples from the Red Planet?"

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