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Games

Pirates as a Marketplace 214

Posted by Soulskill from the marrrrrrrket-share dept.
John Riccitiello, the CEO of Electronic Arts, made some revealing comments in an interview with Kotaku about how the company's attitudes are shifting with regard to software piracy. Quoting: "Some of the people buying this DLC are not people who bought the game in a new shrink-wrapped box. That could be seen as a dark cloud, a mass of gamers who play a game without contributing a penny to EA. But around that cloud Riccitiello identified a silver lining: 'There's a sizable pirate market and a sizable second sale market and we want to try to generate revenue in that marketplace,' he said, pointing to DLC as a way to do it. The EA boss would prefer people bought their games, of course. 'I don't think anybody should pirate anything,' he said. 'I believe in the artistry of the people who build [the games industry.] I profoundly believe that. And when you steal from us, you steal from them. Having said that, there's a lot of people who do.' So encourage those pirates to pay for something, he figures. Riccitiello explained that EA's download services aren't perfect at distinguishing between used copies of games and pirated copies. As a result, he suggested, EA sells DLC to both communities of gamers. And that's how a pirate can turn into a paying customer."
Google

Submission + - Google News gets a separate web crawler and index

Submitted by markkezner
markkezner writes: In response to complaints by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. and others, Google has given Google News its own web crawler. The service had previously relied on the same web crawler that is used to index pages for regular web search. This change allows publishers to use robots.txt to finely control how Google News indexes their content without affecting how it is indexed for normal Google web searches. Before this change occurred, publishers could have contacted Google to specifically de-index content from Google News.

Submission + - Biodiesel Plant Explodes (king5.com)

Submitted by
WED Fan
" rel="nofollow">WED Fan writes: "A biodiesel plant in Grays Harbor, Washington has exploded and is leaking sulfuric acid into the atmosphere, causing local residents discomfort and wreaking a lot of environmental damage. Plant officials are still trying to figure out how to clean up the mess."

Submission + - SPAM: Sonyâ(TM)s Latest Single Lens 3D Camera

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The Explore Media Group team is very excited to have this groundbreaking opportunity as we are at the CEATEC Exhibition in Tokyo, Japan where Sony will unveil their first ever professional single lens 3D camera. We are in touch with the Sony crew and will be bringing you a video interview from CEATEC on this shortly.
Link to Original Source
Science

Submission + - Cryogenics Lab Workers Gone Wild? 1

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: So much for dignity in death. All Baseball Hall-of-Famer Ted Williams wanted was a simple departure from this earth and for his remains to be cremated and scattered over the deep waters of the Florida Keys. Instead, his wacky children had him frozen and his head cut off. And if that wasn't bad enough, a new book alleges workers at the Alcor Life Extension Foundation abused Williams' remains, posing for pictures a la Weekend at Bernie's. According to the book, crude equipment was used to cut off Williams head, which was then balanced on an empty can of Bumble Bee tuna and frozen in liquid nitrogen while workers recorded the sound of his brain cracking as the temperature dropped. The book further claims a worker lacking The Splendid Splinter's sweet swing later tried to dislodge the tuna can by whacking it with a monkey wrench, but instead smacked Williams' head, sending tiny pieces of frozen tissue flying around the room. Alcor is denying what it calls sensational and unfounded allegations.

Comment Re:So what if it's a cat? (Score 1) 874

by weapon (#26910365) Attached to: Don't Like EULAs? Get Your Cat To Agree To Them

With quite a few installer programs the licence is stored as a text file licence.txt, what is stopping me from modifying or replacing the license file with something else? I also recall either a program or registration on a web page where the licence was in a text box that was editable - so you could just select the whole license and delete it or change it as you saw fit.

To me it seems that you can't prove that someone accepted a EULA - or with a computer with multiple users, who accepted it. I think at least when you agree to an EULA, it needs to record your name and what you agreed to, and send it back to the company, ignoring the privacy issue for the moment, just so that the licenser has a copy of the agreement the licensee agreed to and who that licensee is.

IANAL, but I think that you need to agree to the license before you get the software, rather than after.
Security

Submission + - Hackers Exploit SafeDisc DRM in Windows XP

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: InfoWorld has a story on how hackers are taking advantage of a privilege escalation bug in the SafeDisc DRM that ships with Windows XP and Server 2003. What I wonder is why did Microsoft include this more subtle DRM at all, and can't users simply remove the secdrv.sys file and avoid what could be a slimy patch/secret DRM upgrade?

Read: http://www.infoworld.com/article/07/11/06/Hackers-exploiting-bug-in-DRM-shipped-with-Windows_1.html
Microsoft

Submission + - Microsoft fires its CIO after investigation

Submitted by Stony Stevenson
Stony Stevenson writes: Microsoft has fired its chief information officer, Stuart Scott. "We can confirm that Stuart Scott was terminated after an investigation for violation of company policies," the company said. "We have no further information to share." But according to this article, Microsoft is already looking for a replacement. Microsoft General Manager Shahla Aly and Alain Crozier, a Microsoft VP in charge of the company's CFO, sales, marketing and services group will take over Scott's duties while Microsoft looks around.
The Internet

Submission + - Do Frames Still Suck? 5

Submitted by Gonoff
Gonoff writes: Last year, I decided to broaden my abilities a little and started an evening, 2 year, university course. This year a major part of what I am doing is web development and I will be creating a website.

I had never used Dreamweaver before so I expected to have to learn but what caught my attention was the huge dislike I see the course leader has for frames.

I had already read Jakob Neilsens material but being keen to learn, I read it again. Much of what he put in seems completely out of date now.
The only browser I have that can't do frames is Lynx.
All major development packages do them a lot better than when that article was written — Dreamweaver, Frontpage or even Open Office do them fine. I find that it is not too hard in a text editor either...

Obviously, I will do it the way that I am instructed. I just can't see wanting to do it this way for real afterwards. Templates and layers seem much more complicated and I suspect that they are less simple to maintain once a site goes live. I know the need for maintainable source code. Surely maintainable HTML is the same?

What do other people think? Forget aesthetics and coolness. Can people convince me that this is a better way to work?

Comment Re:SI units (Score 1) 780

by weapon (#21208579) Attached to: Seagate Offers Refunds on 6.2 Million Hard Drives
I understand people complain because everywhere else in the SI system is base 10, except with computers who like to count in base 2. So therefore people think to be compatible with the SI system bytes need to be counted in base 10 instead of base 2. The obvious problem is that computers count in base 2, but what I find interesting is that bytes are not SI units nor could they be derived from the SI base units. Furthermore SI units are not always that consistent, for example, there are seconds and micro seconds, but never kilo or mega seconds. Also the base unit for mass is the Kilogram, not the gram, yet we don't have a milikilogram or a kilokilogram, maybe we should fix these up first before we look at bytes and bits.

It does not make sense for people to demand that bytes be scaled as a SI unit when they cannot even be related to the SI base units, and are not expressible in the SI system.

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