logic hack - Slashdot User

Canadian Blood Services Promotes Pseudoscience 219

Posted by samzenpus on Tuesday December 01, 2009 @07:49PM from the type-A-negative-personality dept.

trianglecat writes "The not-for-profit agency Canadian Blood Services has a section of their website based on the Japanese cultural belief of ketsueki-gata, which claims that a person's blood group determines or predicts their personality type. Disappointing for a self-proclaimed 'science-based' organization. The Ottawa Skeptics, based in the nation's capital, appear to be taking some action."

Star Guard — an Old-School Platformer Done Right 107

Posted by Soulskill on Saturday October 10, 2009 @12:12PM from the 39-deaths-i-am-terrible dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Rock, Paper, Shotgun points out a new game called Star Guard, a Flash-based platformer for Mac and PC that's a throwback to the early days of computer gaming, yet still entertaining. They describe it thus: 'Its greatest strength, to my mind, is throwing out the old-school traditions of difficulty. It does certainly get tricky, requiring the platformer standbys of carefully timed jumps and learning enemy patterns — there's something of a Metroid vibe to it. But you don't get punished for failing to meet one of its challenges — you're just plunged a few feet back to most recent checkpoint, and carry on. Lives are not finite, but the small mound of green pixels that mark your corpses are a maudlin testament to your ineptitude. However, death is useful — I ritually found myself sending in a suicide spaceman, taking out an enemy or a mine so that the path was clear for my next go. ... However, it doesn't leave people who pride themselves on their gaming skill, and demand their games to be hard, out in the cold. At the end of each level, your score alters dramatically depending on how many times you died.'"

Microsoft Exec Says, "You'll Miss Vista" 273

Posted by samzenpus on Friday July 24, 2009 @04:45PM from the cold-day-in-hell dept.

Oracle Goddess writes "'Years from now, when you've moved on to Windows 7, you'll look back at Windows Vista fondly. You'll remember its fabulous attributes, not its flaws.' That's the opinion of Steve Guggenheimer, vice president of the OEM division at Microsoft. 'I think people will look back on Vista after the Windows 7 release and realize that there were actually a bunch of good things there,' Guggenheimer said in a recent interview. 'So it'll actually be interesting to see in two years what the perception is of Vista.' A dissenting opinion comes from Bob Nitrio, president of system builder Ranvest Associates, doesn't believe organizations that skipped Vista will ever regret their decision. 'I don't think for a second that people are suddenly going to love Windows 7 so much that they will experience deep pangs of regret for not having adopted Vista,' said Nitrio. If I had to bet, I'd go with Bob's take on it." My first thought was, Steve meant Windows 7 is designed to be virtually unusable as payback for all the complaints about Vista, but I might be biased.

Best Mouse For Programming? 569

Posted by timothy on Thursday July 09, 2009 @05:14PM from the keep-it-away-from-cigarettes-and-drugs dept.

LosManos writes "Which is the best programming mouse? Mandatory musts are wireless, and that it doesn't clog up like old mechanical mice. Present personal preferences are for: lots of buttons, since if I have moved my hand away from the keyboard I can at least do something more than move the pointer; sturdy feeling; not too light, so it doesn't move around by me accidentally looking at it." What would you recommend?

Submission + - Users rage against China's 'Great Firewall'

Submitted by

slugo

on Tuesday June 19, 2007 @05:35PM

slugo writes: "Yang Zhou is no cyberdissident, but recent curbs on his Web surfing habits by China's censors have him fomenting discontent about China's "Great Firewall"."

Submission + - Illegal Monitoring at School

Submitted by

WyllDez

on Tuesday June 19, 2007 @05:30PM

WyllDez writes: "I had an incident today an a high school in Toronto (Northern Secondary School), and I am unsure how to act. The computers in our library are monitored using Net Support School (http://www.netsupportschool.com/ ). I was completely unaware until our librarian came up to me, showed me a print out of my browsing history, programs I ran, and all of my key strokes, including my passwords to several websites. I have talked to quite a few students at our school, and all of them where unaware that they have been monitored. I looked throughout the library, and there are no signs anywhere mentioning that they are being monitored. In our usage agreement, it said that we would be monitored at the board level, and only browsing history would be monitored through the board proxies. It should also be noted that all of the key logs are available to anyone who finds the folder! What can we do about this?"

Submission + - AMD considering getting out of fabrication busines (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by

mytrip

on Tuesday June 19, 2007 @05:16PM

mytrip writes: "2007 has not been kind to AMD. The company saw its workstation market share slip, has taken on $2 billion of new debt and lost almost $1.2 billion over the past two quarters.

Speculation is building in the analyst community that AMD will attempt to further cut costs by outsourcing more — or all — of its chip making as early as 2008. One Citigroup analyst is predicting a "transformational move" that would result in AMD's lower-end CPUs being manufactured by a third party and possibly selling off part or all of its Dresden, Germany facility. Another report from Goldman Sachs outlines the investment firm's belief that the company will leave manufacturing completely in the hands of third parties.

Getting out of manufacturing is certainly a plausible — if not likely — scenario for AMD"

Submission + - Nintedo Sued over Wii Patent Infringement (lawbean.com)

Submitted by

Spamicles

on Tuesday June 19, 2007 @05:05PM

Spamicles writes: "A Texas company has sued Nintendo's US branch, charging that it infringed on a patent in designing the Wii video game system. Lonestar Inventions has asked for triple damages, but no specific amount, and an injunction against Nintendo using the patented technology. Lonestar appears to be a very trigger happy company. They have successfully sued several other companies over the same patent including Texas Instruments, Broadcom, and others. They have also filed suit against Kodak."

24-hour Test Drive of PC-BSD 285

Posted by Zonk on Tuesday June 19, 2007 @04:11PM from the might-get-a-few-reluctant-IT-folks-on-board dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Ars Technica has a concise introduction to PC-BSD, a FreeBSD derivative that emphasizes ease of use and aims to convert Windows users. The review describes the installation process, articulates the advantages of PC-BSD,and reveal some of the challenges that the reviewer faced along the way. From the article: 'In the end, I would suggest this distribution to new users provided they had someone to call in case of a driver malfunction during installation. I would also recommend PC-BSD to seasoned Unix users that have never tried using FreeBSD before and would prefer a shallower learning curve before getting down to business.'"

Comment Re:What?! (Score 0) 191

by logic hack on Monday May 14, 2007 @01:53PM (#19117483) Attached to: Inside AMD's Phenom Architecture

I was thinking more along the lines of a universe where Win95 would actually run.

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