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Businesses

Facebook Mafiosi Go To the Mattresses vs. Zynga 102

Posted by Soulskill from the concrete-galoshes dept.
sympleko writes "Zynga has the lion's share of traffic in Facebook applications, and Mafia Wars is one of their most popular social games. Collapsing under the weight of over 26 million users, Zynga has been scrambling to thwart hard-core gamers who reverse-engineer URLs or script the game to optimize their enjoyment. Many of the workarounds have annoyed users who were accustomed to various game features, and even worse, the hastily-deployed changes have resulted in many players losing access to the game, in-game prizes, or statistics. Fed up with a software company seemingly bent on discouraging people from enjoying their product, a number of tagged players have organized a boycott of all Zynga games. The first 24-hour boycott on Sunday 12/13 resulted in an 11% decline in Daily Active Users, and an emergency thread on Zynga's forums (from which most of the flames were deleted). The current boycott, extending Wednesday through Sunday is being supported by a 428K strong Facebook group. At issue is the social contract between software companies and their devoted user base, as well as the nefarious tactics Zynga has used to raise cash."
Censorship

Craigslist Blocks Yahoo Pipes 164

Posted by kdawson from the nose-meet-knife dept.
Romy Maxwell posted a blog piece on Craigslist apparently shutting off access to Yahoo Pipes. Maxwell was working on a project, one of 2,111 using Craigslist as a data source, for a (non-commercial) Pipes-based mashup. He sent Craig Newmark an invitation to the alpha test, after a few rounds of friendly communication — "...as a rule of thumb, okay to use RSS feeds for noncommercial purposes." The apparent response, 4 days later, was for Craigslist to redirect any request with an HTTP referrer of pipes.yahoo.com to the Craigslist home page. Maxwell writes: "It's a sad day for me. I'm not too upset about my own project, as Flippity was already removing Craigslist as a data source. With the likes of eBay and Oodle not only providing open APIs but encouraging and rewarding developers, spending my time wrestling with Craigslist is just plain stupid and exhausting. I'm sure I'm not the only person to have come to that conclusion, and I wish it were different. ... If Craigslist wants to keep its doors shut to the world, so be it."
Data Storage

Synchronize Data Between Linux, OS X, and Windows? 305

Posted by timothy from the please-be-more-specific dept.
aaaaaaargh! writes "I'm using a laptop with Ubuntu 8.04 for work, a netbook with Ubuntu 9.10 when I'm outside, Mac OS X 10.5 for hobby projects, and Windows XP for gaming. For backups, I'm currently using Jungle Disk and Apple's Time Machine, and I use a local svn repository for my work data. Now I need to frequently exchange and synchronize OpenOffice and Latex files and source code in various cross-platform programming languages between one machine and another. Options range from putting everything online (but Jungle Disk disks seem to be too slow for anything else than backup), storing my data on external media like USB sticks or SD cards, or working with copies by synchronizing folders over the network. I don't want to give my data away to some server outside without strong encryption (controlled by me, including the source code) and external media like USB sticks are a bit too fragile according to my taste. The solution should be reliable, relatively failsafe, as simple as possible, and allow me to continue to use Jungle Disk for backup. So what would you recommend?"

Comment Re:Math cannot exist before wind. (Score 1) 221

by mctk (#30153332) Attached to: Tracking the World's Great Unsolved Math Mysteries

If you were to imagine an alien lifeform on some distant world, they'll have an identical math but their experience of it

I'm not sure if I'm on board with you here. That's quite a claim to make. Just because it's hard to imagine math that's not identical to our own, does not mean it does not exist. I can imagine a quantum sized life-form living in a probabilistic world, never coming up with the integers. Or maybe a universe-sized creature who has absolutely no need for the idea of oneness.

Since I'm posting, here's what I think is a fun problem:
2178*4 = 8712
21978*4 = 87912
219978*4 = 879912

There's one other family of numbers (i.e. a four digit number, expanded in a similar pattern) that does this, if we throw out palindromes and numbers with leading zeros. What is it and can you show that these are the only two such families?
Cellphones

Fujitsu's Latest Mobile Phone Splits In Two 140

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the i-lost-my-keyboard-now-what dept.
angry tapir writes with news of Fujitsu's new phone which is taking the sliding phone keyboard a step further by allowing it to detach completely. "The F-04B was announced as part of NTT DoCoMo's new line-up and is scheduled to hit Japanese shelves in March or April next year. At first glance it looks like a conventional slider cell phone: grab onto the bottom of the phone and a numeric keypad slides out. But decouple a catch and the entire back half of the phone can be pulled off."
Earth

Swarm of Giant Jellyfish Capsize 10-Ton Trawler 227

Posted by Soulskill from the we're-gonna-need-a-bigger-boat dept.
Hugh Pickens writes "The Telegraph reports that the Japanese trawler Diasan Shinsho-maru has capsized off the coast of China, as its three-man crew dragged their net through a swarm of giant jellyfish (which can grow up to six feet in diameter and travel in packs) and tried to haul up a net that was too heavy. The crew was thrown into the sea when the vessel capsized, but the three men were rescued by another trawler. Relatively little is known about Nomura's jellyfish, such as why some years see thousands of the creatures floating across the Sea of Japan on the Tsushima Current, but last year there were virtually no sightings. In 2007, there were 15,500 reports of damage to fishing equipment caused by the creatures. Experts believe that one contributing factor to the jellyfish becoming more frequent visitors to Japanese waters may be a decline in the number of predators, which include sea turtles and certain species of fish. 'Jellies have likely swum and swarmed in our seas for over 600 million years,' says scientist Monty Graham of the Dauphin Island Sea Lab in Alabama. 'When conditions are right, jelly swarms can form quickly. They appear to do this for sexual reproduction.'"
Image

What Does Google Suggest Suggest About Humanity? Screenshot-sm 513

Posted by samzenpus from the fire-makes-things-hot dept.
CNETNate writes "You'll laugh, but mostly you'll cry. Some of the questions Google gets asked to deliver results for is beyond worrying. 'Can you put peroxide in your ear?', 'Why would a pregnancy test be negative?', and 'Why can't I own a Canadian?' being just a selection of the truly baffling — and disturbing — questions Google is regularly forced to answer."
Image

Casino Denies Man $166 Million Jackpot Screenshot-sm 32

Posted by samzenpus from the glitch-in-your-winnings dept.
An anonymous reader writes 'After having played on the slot machine for over 30 minutes, Bill Seebeck was ecstatic when he hit the $166 million jackpot. However, The Seminole Hard Rock Hotel and Casino in Tampa was less than enthusiastic, telling Seeback his win was a mistake because the machine malfunctioned. Thus, the casino refused to pay Seebeck his prize as the machine was only supposed to have a maximum pay out of $99K. Currently, the casino refuses to pay out even that amount.'
Google

Dashboard Reveals What Google Knows About You 260

Posted by timothy from the born-4th-nov-8lbs-20-inches-smart dept.
CWmike writes "Ever wonder exactly what Google knows about you? Google took a step today to answer that question with the unveiling of Google Dashboard, which is designed to let users see and control the copious amounts of data that Google has stored in its servers about them. 'Over the past 11 years, Google has focused on building innovative products for our users. Today, with hundreds of millions of people using those products around the world, we are very aware of the trust that you have placed in us, and our responsibility to protect your privacy and data,' Google said in a blog post today. 'In an effort to provide you with greater transparency and control over their own data, we've built the Google Dashboard.' Dashboard is set up so that users can control the personal settings in each Google product that they use. Google said the tool supports more than 20 products, including Gmail, Calendar, Docs, Web History, YouTube, Picasa, Talk, Reader, Alerts and Google Latitude. Consumer Watchdog said in a statement today that it applauds Google for giving users a single place to go to manage their data. But at the same tine, the group also came down hard on Google, contending that it needs to give users a vehicle for stopping the company from collecting any personal data."

Pirate Bay Closure Sparked P2P Explosion 560

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the can't-stop-the-signal-mal dept.
Barence writes to share that the closure of The Pirate Bay seems to have done nothing to stem the flow of potentially copyrighted materials. In fact, there has been an estimated 300% increase in the number of sites providing access to copyright files, according to McAfee. "In August, Swedish courts ordered that all traffic be blocked from Pirate Bay, but any hope of scotching the piracy of music, software and films over the web vanished as copycat sites sprung up and the content took on a life of its own. 'This was a true "cloud computing" effort,' the company said in its Threats Report for the third quarter. 'The masses stepped up to make this database of torrents available to others.'"

Comment Re:pencil/paper (Score 4, Funny) 823

by mctk (#29916487) Attached to: How To Enter Equations Quickly In Class?
Other solutions that solve poster's problem without answering his quesiton:

1. Memorize as you go.
2. Screw lecture, just watch Square One.
3. Have friend audio-record lectures then have other friend convert them to notes then photocopy friend's notes and use OCR.
4. Drop out of school.
5. Prove the Reimann Hypothesis and skip right to that PhD.
6. Hire a plant to continually ask inane questions during lecture, giving you more time to input those equations in LaTeX.
7. Code up a Math Module for Dragon Naturally speaking.
8. ???
9. Dear aunt, let's set so double the killer delete select all

Wait... What were we talking about?
It's funny. Laugh.

What If They Turned Off the Internet? 511

Posted by timothy from the very-funny-now-where-is-slashdot dept.
theodp writes "It's the not-too-distant future. They've turned off the Internet. After the riots have settled down and the withdrawal symptoms have faded, how would you cope? Cracked.com asked readers to Photoshop what life would be like in an Internet-addicted society learning to cope without it. Better hope it never happens, or be prepared for dry-erase message boards, carrier pigeon-powered Twitter, block-long lines to get into adult video shops, door-to-door Rickrolling, Lolcats on Broadway, and $199.99 CDs."

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