Comment Re:Plutocracy. (Score 1) 944
I totally agree with stripping corporations of their 'personal rights'. And from a quick read, I also agree with the STET tax.
Comment Corporatism? (Score 0) 944
Do we need a new word, Corporatism for it, or do we already have one, Capitalism?
4chan Declares War On Snow 201
With all the recent hacktivism in the news, Anonymous has decided to take on a new and powerful enemy: snow. On Sunday the group announced that it will "do everything in its power to shut snow down by attacking the Weather Channel and North Face websites, boycotting outerwear, and voting for the sun as Time’s 2010 Person Of The Year." I'm sure there are a lot of people in Minneapolis right now that would wish them luck.
Building a Telegraph Using Only Stone Age Materials 238
MMBK writes "It's the ultimate salvagepunk experiment, building a telegraph out of things found in the woods. From the article: 'During the summer of 2009, artist Jamie O’Shea of the organization Substitute Materials set out to test whether or not electronic communication could have been built at any time in history with the proper knowledge, and with only tools and materials found in the wilderness of New Jersey.'"
Comment If only I had a phone (Score 1) 215
Finally! Now when I am traveling around the world - which I do quite a bit, I can securely access my facebook account. That is, so long as my phone works where ever I am, and ummm, oh yeah! I need to buy a phone too.
Game Prices — a Historical Perspective 225
The Opposable Thumbs blog scrutinizes the common wisdom that video games are too expensive, or that they're more expensive than they were in the past. They found that while in some cases the sticker price has increased, it generally hasn't outpaced inflation, making 2010 a cheaper time to be a gamer than the '80s and '90s. Quoting:
"... we tracked down a press release putting the suggested retail price of both Mario 64 and Pilotwings 64 at $69.99. [Hal Halpin, president of the Entertainment Consumer's Association] says that the N64 launch game pricing only tells you part of the story. 'Yes, some N64 games retailed for as high as $80, but it was also the high end of a 60 to 80 dollar range,' he told Ars. 'Retailers had more flexibility with pricing back then — though they've consistently maintained that the Suggested Retail Price was/is just a guide. Adjusted for inflation, we're generally paying less now than we have historically. But to be fair, DLC isn't factored in.' He also points out all the different ways that we can now access games: you can buy a game used, rent a game, or play certain online games for free. There are multiple ways to sell your old console games, and the competition in the market causes prices to fall quickly."
Nuclear Energy Now More Expensive Than Solar 635
js_sebastian writes "According to an article on the New York Times, a historical cross-over has occurred because of the declining costs of solar vs. the increasing costs of nuclear energy: solar, hardly the cheapest of renewable technologies, is now cheaper than nuclear, at around 16 cents per kilowatt hour. Furthermore, the NY Times reports that financial markets will not finance the construction of nuclear power plants unless the risk of default (which is historically as high as 50 percent for the nuclear industry) is externalized to someone else through federal loan guarantees or ratepayer funding. The bottom line seems to be that nuclear is simply not competitive, and the push from the US government to subsidize it seems to be forcing the wrong choice on the market."
Valve Apologizes For 12,000 Erroneous Anti-Cheating Bans 202
Earlier this week, there were reports that large numbers of Modern Warfare 2 players on Steam were getting erroneously banned by Valve's Anti-Cheat software. While such claims are usually best taken with a grain of salt, the quantity and suddenness caused speculation that Valve's software wasn't operating correctly. A few days later, Valve president Gabe Newell sent out an email acknowledging that roughly 12,000 players had been inappropriately banned over the preceding two weeks. "The problem was that Steam would fail a signature check between the disk version of a DLL and a latent memory version. This was caused by a combination of conditions occurring while Steam was updating the disk image of a game." Valve reversed the bans and gave free copies of Left 4 Dead 2 to everyone who was affected.
New I/O Standard Bids To Replace Mini PCI Express 31
DeviceGuru writes "LinuxDevices reports that a group of companies today unveiled — and demonstrated products based on — a tiny new PCI Express expansion standard. Although it's somewhat larger than the PCI Express Mini Card, the tiny new 43mm x 65mm FeaturePak card's high density 230-pin edgecard connector provides twice the number of PCI Express and USB 2.0 channels to the host computer, plus 100 lines dedicated to general purpose I/O, of which 34 signal pairs are implemented with enhanced isolation for use in applications such as gigabit Ethernet or high-precision analog I/O. While FeaturePaks will certainly be used in all sorts of embedded devices (medical instruments, test equipment, etc.), the tiny cards could also be used for developing configurable consumer devices, for example to add an embedded firewall/router or security processor to laptop or notebook computers, or for modular functionality in TV set-top-boxes and Internet edge devices." The president of Diamond Systems, which invented the new card, said "Following the FeaturePak initiative's initial launch, we intend to turn the FeaturePak specification, trademark, and logo over to a suitable standards organization so it can become an industry-wide, open-architecture, embedded standard" (but to use the logo you have to join the organization).
Canadian Blood Services Promotes Pseudoscience 219
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."
US Air Force Buying Another 2,200 PS3s 144
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 My dislike of Microsoft (Score 1) 1540
Cliff,
I have been in the computer field for a few years. It is how I have made my living. My dislike of Microsoft comes from these experiences.
1. Apparent lack of quality. I pride myself on my work ethics. I do my best to fix a problem properly, not just put a band-aid on it. In my experience when clients brought a computer for me to repair, I knew it was just a matter of time before the Microsoft OS based computers came back again, for another computer. People with MACs, Linux based PCs, and looking back, Amigas, and so forth, had stable systems, meaning they did 'break down' BSOD or the equivalent, nearly as often. I hated working on someone's Microsoft based PC knowing when I returned it to them, that I would be seeing them again in another six months or so.
2. Bloat. In the late 80s, I was using a fully multi-tasking OS, on a high resolution, high colour, monitor, with a full GUI interface, being able to format a floppy, while rendering a 3D image, all doable without a harddrive. A single floppy drive and I could do all that on my Amiga. Microsoft did not offer most of features found in the Amiga OS, until Windows XP. Windows 2000 did offer a number of them. There are still at least one nice feature of the Amiga OS, that is not yet duplicated by Microsoft. Even now with all the abilities, Windows XP needs 128MB of RAM and a GB of hard drive space just to turn on. My old Amiga worked very nicely with only 512KB of RAM, and a single 880KB floppy. At 1/256th the RAM and less than 1/1024th the storage capacity, that old computer matched capabilities with a current low end XP. (Unfortunately, Commodore's inability to market successfully brought the company down.) Currently I use linux, a fully 64bit OS with almost if not all of my software built for 64bit processing. All my linux software takes up much less hard drive space, and seems to use less RAM than the equivalent MS products would.
3. I could go on about the system security, liking the underdog, and so forth, but I will leave it at that for now.
I have been in the computer field for a few years. It is how I have made my living. My dislike of Microsoft comes from these experiences.
1. Apparent lack of quality. I pride myself on my work ethics. I do my best to fix a problem properly, not just put a band-aid on it. In my experience when clients brought a computer for me to repair, I knew it was just a matter of time before the Microsoft OS based computers came back again, for another computer. People with MACs, Linux based PCs, and looking back, Amigas, and so forth, had stable systems, meaning they did 'break down' BSOD or the equivalent, nearly as often. I hated working on someone's Microsoft based PC knowing when I returned it to them, that I would be seeing them again in another six months or so.
2. Bloat. In the late 80s, I was using a fully multi-tasking OS, on a high resolution, high colour, monitor, with a full GUI interface, being able to format a floppy, while rendering a 3D image, all doable without a harddrive. A single floppy drive and I could do all that on my Amiga. Microsoft did not offer most of features found in the Amiga OS, until Windows XP. Windows 2000 did offer a number of them. There are still at least one nice feature of the Amiga OS, that is not yet duplicated by Microsoft. Even now with all the abilities, Windows XP needs 128MB of RAM and a GB of hard drive space just to turn on. My old Amiga worked very nicely with only 512KB of RAM, and a single 880KB floppy. At 1/256th the RAM and less than 1/1024th the storage capacity, that old computer matched capabilities with a current low end XP. (Unfortunately, Commodore's inability to market successfully brought the company down.) Currently I use linux, a fully 64bit OS with almost if not all of my software built for 64bit processing. All my linux software takes up much less hard drive space, and seems to use less RAM than the equivalent MS products would.
3. I could go on about the system security, liking the underdog, and so forth, but I will leave it at that for now.
