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Comment Re:Guru meditation (Score 1) 289

Thanks for the explanation. I've been an avid amiga user for about 15 years, but didn't know this. My handle is also referencing to RAD: the persistant amiga Ram disk, is 'encoded' in it {RemADeus}
Amiga

The Amiga Turns 25 289

retsamxaw reminds us that yesterday was the 25th anniversary of the Amiga. "[The Amiga] debuted to rave reviews and great expectations — heck, InfoWorld said it might be the 'third milestone' in personal computing after the Apple II and the IBM PC. ... Commodore was a famously parsimonious outfit, but it splurged on the Amiga's introduction. The highlight of that Lincoln Center product launch was a demo in which pop art legend Andy Warhol used an Amiga to 'paint' Blondie's Debbie Harry. The exercise didn't prove much of anything other than that Warhol was able to use the paint program's fill command, but it was heady stuff... Other platforms and tech products would inspire similarly fanatical followings — most notably OS/2 and Linux... But Amiga nuts of the 1980s and early 1990s... remain the ultimate fanboys, even though it hadn't yet occurred to anyone to hurl that word at computer users."

Comment Re:Ok, honestly (Score 1) 244

The most [b]sneaky[/b] of all these evil interfaces are the ones which ask you for your mobile phone number (like in mafia wars) so they can verify the link between your identity and your name. I have made sure my FB account has garbage as info (I only use it for MW), and I laugh at the attempts to get any of my phone numbers through the appps

Comment Re:Justice (Score 1) 353

Actually, customer relations was one of the reasons Walmart failed in Europe (especially in Germany) when it tried to expand to over here a few years ago. ;-P

The other thing regarding this case might be that every retailer has to give a 2 year warranty on any product. One more important fact is that in the first 6 month after the purchase, the law specifies that a consumer that claims the product is at fault is right unless the retailer can PROVE that the product works as advertised, or the customer damaged it on purpose. So there would be not much to gain for the retailer by going to court, unless he can prove that in court.

For the remaining 18 month of the warranty the burden of proof is reversed, so there the customer would have to prove that the product was already defective by design when he bought it.

Comment Re:It's a freakin' PHONE (Score 1) 345

With rare exception, programs in the background are consuming little or no power in Android. This is Linux after all... a program that's not doing something or waiting to do something is sitting on a wait-task queue... it's not consuming any power until the thing it's waiting for (a timer, an I/O event, etc) happens. Sure, it's possible to write an evil application that sucks power in the background... I've seen one of these since I started using Android five months ago. The small win with multitasking is the ability to very rapidly switch between applications. I do this all the time, and it's dramatically more efficient than on any single tasking OS, like PalmOS or iPhoneOS. The big win is intentional background processes, eg, daemons in Linux-speak. So any application can stick around and do its job, monitoring other forms of communications, checking the weather, tracking or changing settings based on locale, or simply offering me the same ability in any old program (Pandora, Museek) that Apple reserves for just their apps on the iPhone.
Linux

Submission + - SPAM: root access on Linux based cellular devices

viralMeme writes: Security researchers have turned their attention to femtocells, and have discovered that gaining root on the tiny mobile base stations isn't as hard as one might hope

Whoever designed these devices should be sent back to computer school. An authentication device that can be bypassed is a contradiction in terms. Or as some pen pusher would put it in a report: an unantipicate security excursion. Did not anyone check these devices for security vulnerabilities. What are they teaching them in college nowadays ?

"Uh you've reached stewie and brian, we're not here right now, uh and if this is mom, uh send money because we're college students and we need money for books...and highlighters...and.... ramen noodles...and condoms, for sexual relations with our classmates"

Link to Original Source
Software

Submission + - 7 of the Best Free Linux Calculators (linuxlinks.com)

An anonymous reader writes: One of the basic utilities supplied with any operating system is a desktop calculator. These are often simple utilities that are perfectly adequate for basic use. They typically include trigonometric functions, logarithms, factorials, parentheses and a memory function.

However, the calculators featured in this article are significantly more sophisticated with the ability to process difficult mathematical functions, to plot graphs in 2D and 3D, and much more.

Occasionally, the calculator tool provided with an operating system did not engender any confidence. The classic example being the calculator shipped with Windows 3.1 which could not even reliably subtract two numbers. Rest assured, the calculators listed below are of precision quality.

Read more

Games

Heavy Rain Previews Show Promise 84

As the February release date for Quantic Dream's Heavy Rain nears, several publications have gotten a chance for some hands-on time with the game and seem to be intrigued by what they saw. Quoting the Opposable Thumbs blog: "The game grabs you during the quiet moments where nothing 'happens.' When you look at a picture your child drew. When you're questioning someone about a crime. When you're trying to figure out how to react to a violent situation. The preview we were sent put me in different situations as I played a small handful of characters, and each one provided a few tiny moments that were surprising in terms of storytelling or subtlety." Eurogamer's previewer had a similar reaction: "To my great delight as well — Heavy Rain isn't a mature game because it has unhappy families and moody lighting, it's a mature game because it anticipates an adult response from the player and is prepared to receive it."
Games

History In Video Games — a Closer Look 139

scruffybr writes "Whether it's World War 2, the American Wild West or ancient Greece, history has long provided a rich source of video game narrative. Historical fact has been painstakingly preserved in some games, yet distorted beyond all recognition in others. Whereas one game may be praised for its depiction of history, others have been lambasted for opening fresh wounds or glorifying tragic events of our near past. Games have utilized historical narrative extensively, but to what extent does the platform take liberties with, and perhaps misuse it?"
User Journal

Journal Journal: test

sys:/home/me$ ls -lR

[content witheld]

sys:/home/me$ ps xa

PlayStation (Games)

Submission + - Driving games make drivers dangerous

kilauea writes: "According to this BBC new story, some german scientists are telling us that playing driving games makes you take more risks while "doing the real thing". Sounds fishy to me. For one they state that people who play games are more likely to crash, well we already knew that the demographic here overlaps. Secondly they state they reaction times are a second slower, and there is more than enough science to suggest that playing games will actualy increas your reaction times. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/6457353.stm"

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