Comment Here's hoping... (Score 4, Insightful) 115
This type of lawsuit can help regain some of the liberties the government has taken away, or at least some of the transparency. #WishfulThinking
Comment Re:A Series of Tubes (Score 2) 458
One of my neighbours in my apartment building uses "Get off my balcony!" (which I thought was hilarious).
Comment Re:WTF is TV? (Score 1) 443
Yes. You remember seeing your grandparents watching golf, Matlock, Murder She Wrote and The Price is Right? That was on a TV, not a computer. I know you don't believe me, but it was in 480i at best!!! And they'd have to sit through commericials and wait until the show started! At least it was free! Hahaha! It's true!
Comment Re:Broadcast TV (Score 2, Informative) 443
Exactly. In Canada, thanks to TV being completely digital now, there is no such thing as 'free tv' like there used to be - where having commercials made sense (they paid to show us their ads, while we didn't pay for channels). Now, we can't get TV for less than about $40 a month! Well guess what: I'm not watching commercials if I pay. PERIOD.
Next up we have the format. I can't be available to watch it exactly when they want me to watch it. I want to be able to watch it on whatever device I want, and I want to be able to pause it whenever the need arises. I have computers etc so I'm not paying for a PVR, especially when they don't have a lot of space and half time stick you with commercials, prevent FF through them, whatever.
Last, I'm sick of "them" (be they the channels, producers of the shows, whoever) thinking piracy is so bad - once upon a time you'd blast that shit free to everyone (see first point). Now you have proof people love it, and rather than pump out DVDs Blurays and merch, you'd rather spank people and get them to overpay for channels that play garbage and ads the other 99% of the time because otherwise you'll go broke even though you have a great show to provide?! GET A NEW BUSINESS MODEL. Many are still somewhat blind sheep, but too many have woken up and there simply is no going back. You can't fool all of the people all of the time.
Next up we have the format. I can't be available to watch it exactly when they want me to watch it. I want to be able to watch it on whatever device I want, and I want to be able to pause it whenever the need arises. I have computers etc so I'm not paying for a PVR, especially when they don't have a lot of space and half time stick you with commercials, prevent FF through them, whatever.
Last, I'm sick of "them" (be they the channels, producers of the shows, whoever) thinking piracy is so bad - once upon a time you'd blast that shit free to everyone (see first point). Now you have proof people love it, and rather than pump out DVDs Blurays and merch, you'd rather spank people and get them to overpay for channels that play garbage and ads the other 99% of the time because otherwise you'll go broke even though you have a great show to provide?! GET A NEW BUSINESS MODEL. Many are still somewhat blind sheep, but too many have woken up and there simply is no going back. You can't fool all of the people all of the time.
Comment Now I know why... (Score 1) 184
Now I know why I punch my air conditioner when it's not working!
Comment Re:AMD Shooting themselves in the foot (Score 1) 74
This answers the question I was about to ask... I figured if the PS4 was based on FreeBSD there *was* an AMD driver, but you point out well that it may not be one usable by the (freeBSD) PC gamer crowd. Boo.
Comment Edit (Score 1) 24
Although the kickstarter campaign is now done, they are still taking PayPal donations through their site http://satellitereign.com/pledge/
Submission + - Satellite Reign on Kickstarter, Spiritual Successor to Original Syndicate Games 24
static0verdrive writes: Satellite Reign, a game in development by 5 Lives Studios, is intended to be the "spiritual successor" and third installment (not counting EA's recent first-person disappointment) to Syndicate / Syndicate Wars from the late Bullfrog Studios. 5 Lives includes staff who worked on the original games. The kickstarter fundraising campaign, now in it's final 24 hours, highlights a few very interesting stretch goals as well. Satellite Reign will incorporate the same real-time strategy and dystopian setting that made the Syndicate series so popular. Gamer fans of any kind of cyberpunk, from Syndicate to the works of Philip K. Dick and William Gibson should check this project out!
Submission + - Google Engineer Wins NSA Award, Then Says NSA Should Be "Abolished" (tikkun.org)
MetalliQaZ writes: Last week, Dr. Joseph Bonneau learned that he had won the NSA’s first annual “Science of Security (SoS) Competition.” The competition, which aims to honor the best “scientific papers about national security” as a way to strengthen NSA collaboration with researchers in academia, honored Bonneau for his paper on the nature of passwords. And how did Bonneau respond to being honored by the NSA? By expressing, in an honest and bittersweet blog post, his revulsion at what the NSA has become: "Simply put, I don’t think a free society is compatible with an organisation like the NSA in its current form."
Submission + - English High Court bans scientific paper (wordpress.com)
An anonymous reader writes: The High Court — England's highest civil court — has temporarily banned the publication of a scientific paper that would reveal the details of a zero day vulnerability in vehicle immobilisers and, crucially, give details of how to crack the system. Motor manufacturers argued that revealing the details of the crack would allow criminals to steal cars. Could this presage the courts getting involved in what gets posted on your local Bugzilla? It certainly means that software giants who dislike security researchers publishing the full facts on vulnerabilities might want to consider a full legal route.
Submission + - Software-defined data centers might cost companies more than they save (datamation.com)
storagedude writes: As more and more companies move to virtualized, or software-defined, data centers, cost savings might not be one of the benefits. Sure, utilization rates might go up as resources are pooled, but if the end result is that IT resources become easier for end users to access and provision, they might end up using more resources, not less.
That's the view of Peder Ulander of Citrix, who cites the Jevons Paradox, a 150-year-old economic theory that arose from an observation about the relationship between coal efficiency and consumption. Making a resource easier to use leads to greater consumption, not less, says Ulander. As users can do more for themselves and don't have to wait for IT, they do more, so more gets used.
The real gain, then, might be that more gets accomplished as IT becomes less of a bottleneck. It won't mean cost savings, but it could mean higher revenues.
That's the view of Peder Ulander of Citrix, who cites the Jevons Paradox, a 150-year-old economic theory that arose from an observation about the relationship between coal efficiency and consumption. Making a resource easier to use leads to greater consumption, not less, says Ulander. As users can do more for themselves and don't have to wait for IT, they do more, so more gets used.
The real gain, then, might be that more gets accomplished as IT becomes less of a bottleneck. It won't mean cost savings, but it could mean higher revenues.
Comment Re:What about Apple? (Score 1) 92
Is that worse than buying competition to create a monopoly the way corporations like Microsoft do? IMO Patents aren't as much the issue so much as the laws surrounding corporations and their free run on power. Power derived from money. A good example is how they can do illegal/dangerous/harmful things if they want because often a fine is less than the profit they'll make. Shouldn't they be put out of business and their cash given back to the public or shareholders rather than scolded mildly so they can repeat the offense?
Comment Re:What about large companies' patent portfolios? (Score 1) 92
I can't imagine corporations with all their money and control (thanks largely to their money) will allow the system to be changed toward anything they don't like.
New Android Eyewear Wants To Compete With Google Glass 55
DeviceGuru writes with this excerpt from LinuxGizmos: "GlassUp, an Italian startup, has started taking pre-orders on Indiegogo for an Android eyewear display system billed as a simpler, lower-cost alternative to Google Glass. The GlassUp device is a receive-only Bluetooth accessory to a nearby mobile device, providing a monochrome, 320 x 240-pixel augmented reality display of incoming messages and notifications. GlassUp was unveiled at CeBit in March, and is now up for crowdfunding on Indiegogo, where pre-sales opened today ranging from $199 to $399, depending on whether it's a pre-release, pre-production, or full-production version. This is less than a quarter the price of the $1,500 Google Glass Developer Edition. Already almost two years in development, GlassUp is expected to ship to presales customers in Feb. 2014, around the same time Google Glass is expected to ship in commercial production form." And for Google Glass itself, there's at least one project to bring Google's own hardware an alternative operating system.
Comment Re:Doing what is right... (Score 1) 955
I guess it depends on if you think anything anti-government counts as treason. Some think the government is somewhat anti-freedom, which is another form of treason? In this case, I wonder about the secrecy of the documents he released myself. Just saying a document is "top secret" doesn't make it top secret, I'm sorry. It has to contain info that would endanger lives or the good of the country. You can't have douchebags marking every document "top secret" just to prevent it from being shared because they know it will incriminate them. Did these documents contain the info gathered or just let us know that info was being gathered?
