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The Internet

Time Warner Shelves Plans For Tiered Pricing 210

Posted by timothy
from the meek-will-continue-to-subsidize-the-bold dept.
The FNP writes "Time Warner has postponed their plans to test tiered data caps in Greensboro NC, Rochester NY, San Antonio TX, and Austin TX. This announcement comes shortly after the media started reporting on Eric Massa's opposition and protests planned for this Saturday outside of Time Warner's offices in Greensboro and Rochester." There's also a good piece at Ars on the fall of the current tiered-pricing plans.
The Military

North Korea Missile Launch Fails 609

Posted by timothy
from the one-of-the-strings-must-have-broken dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Remember the Intercontinental Ballistic Missile launch by the North Koreans last night? You know, the one that went over Japan and supposedly put a 'communications satellite' into orbit. Well, according to the US Northern Command and NORAD it has been a complete and utter failure, with the second stage and payload 'falling in the Pacific.'"
Biotech

Scientists Map Neanderthal Genome 229

Posted by timothy
from the first-draft-means-they-can-still-send-it-back dept.
goran72 writes "In a development which could reveal the links between modern humans and their prehistoric cousins, scientists said they have mapped a first draft of the Neanderthal genome. Researchers used DNA fragments extracted from three Croatian fossils to map out more than 60 percent of the entire Neanderthal genome by sequencing three billion bases of DNA."
Classic Games (Games)

Adventure Game Interfaces and Puzzle Theory 149

Posted by Soulskill
from the use-square-peg-on-round-hole dept.
MarkN writes "It seems like whenever broad topics of game design are discussed on Slashdot, a few people bring up examples of Adventure Games, possibly owing to the age and interests of our members. I'd be interested to hear the community's thoughts on a piece I wrote on Adventure Games, talking about the evolution they underwent in terms of interfaces, and how the choice of interface affects some aspects of the puzzles and design. My basic premise is that an Adventure Game is an exercise in abstract puzzle solving — you could represent the same game with a parser or a point and click interface and still have the same underlying puzzle structure, and required player actions. What the interface does affect is how the player specifies those actions. Point and click games typically have a bare handful of verbs compared to parser games, where the player is forced to describe the desired interaction much more precisely in a way that doesn't lend itself to brute force fiddling. It's a point Yahtzee has made in the past; he went so far as to design a modern graphic adventure game with a parser input to demonstrate its potential." Read on for the rest of MarkN's comments.
Hardware Hacking

Oil-Immersion Cooled PC Goes To Retail 210

Posted by ScuttleMonkey
from the next-up-hot-grits dept.
notthatwillsmith writes "Everyone's seen mods where someone super-cools a PC by submersing it in a non-conductive oil. It's a neat idea, but most components aren't designed to withstand a hot oil bath; after prolonged exposure materials break down and components begin to fail. Maximum PC has an exclusive hands-on, first look at the new Hardcore Computer Reactor, the first oil-cooled PC available for sale. Hardcore engineered the Reactor to withstand the oil, using space-age materials and proprietary oil. The Reactor's custom-manufactured motherboard, videocards, memory, and SSD drives are submersed in the oil, while the dry components sit outside the bulletproof tank. The motherboard lifts out of the oil bath on rails, giving you relatively easy access to components, and the overall design is simply jaw-dropping. Of course, we'd expect nothing less for a machine with a base price of $4000 that goes all the way up to $11k for a fully maxed out config."
United States

Dossia looking to reshape Healthcare in USA

Submitted by
adickerson0
adickerson0 writes "Applied Materials, BP America, Intel Corporation, Pitney Bowes, Wal-Mart and Cardinal Health have joined together to start Dossia. This group plans to create a free (beer) system that allows hospitals and clinics across the country to digitize and share patient records. Furthermore they plan to integrate this with EMT Services, Labs, and Pharmacies. One of the major voices in this movement is Lee Scott of Wal-Mart. Who in February announced the Better Health Care Together Coalition which involves Wal-Mart, AT&T, SEIU, CWA, Center for American Progress and the Howard Baker Center. All of which comes on the heels of the Wal-Mart $4 prescription drug plan and the opening of 76 in store health clinics (2000 planned in 5-7 years). With the support of so many large groups and what seems to be a developing health care network to support Dossia, what can the Linux community and Slashdot do to support this initiative? http://www.omnimedix.org/"
The Almighty Buck

Is "ad-supported free" really "free

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes "Another story about some free product or service that is ad-supported is making the rounds (google for "peter gabriel" and "we7" in case you missed it), but I am wondering ... ... the ads are payed for by companies whose products "we" buy (or are supposed to buy), so effectively by "our" money, only that we did not explicitly choose to put "our" money there!

So how free is free, if for everything that we buy there's an "ad tax" that we pay that goes towards paying everything ad-supported? Wouldn't everything be much cheaper if without the ad-tax that, in addition to paying for everything ad-supported, must also pay the advertising industry?

But the ad industry has probably done a good job of presenting itself as oil, rather than sand, in the cogworks of our economy ... although us community of all consumers feeding the ad-industry through the ad-tax on nearly everything that we buy seems to me like a communist-style solidarity, a sharing inmidst the otherwise egoistical capitalism. We could of course also call it vampirism?"
Databases

Storing international addresses

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes "In designing a database for a company that deals international, its important to store address information in a way that supports all types of address formats to be dealt with. What ways have people attempted to deal with storing international address information in a relational database?"
Spam

Is There Any Reason to Report Spammers to ISPs? 117

Posted by Cliff
from the does-it-do-any-good dept.
marko_ramius asks: "For years I've been a good netizen and reported spam that I get to the appropriate contacts at various ISPs. In the entire time that I've done this I've gotten (maybe) 5 or 6 responses from those ISPs informing me that they have taken action against the spammer. In recent years however, I haven't gotten any responses. Are the ISP's so overwhelmed with abuse reports that they aren't able to respond to the spam reports? Do they even bother acting on said reports? Is there any real reason to report spammers?"
Programming

fun open source communities

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes "I am looking for an open source project to contribute towards, a project using c/c++ or python.
Most importantly it should be made of a fun community, a welcoming community.

Some of the higher profile projects are hard to get patches into, get help from or are for are really run by companies.

what open source projects do you know of that have a nice, welcoming community, one of the spirit of the open source communities of old."
Programming

The point of the status meeting

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes "The company that I work for just finished up a phase of testing that was pretty intensive and required a lot of hours to complete on schedule. Each day we had a status meeting that consisted of twenty people sitting in a room and listening to one person talk about their progress or issues from the previous day. Most of the time the status discussed only helped about one or two people in the room while the rest of us just wasted an hour in which we could have been making progress. We ended up finishing our testing two months later than scheduled and I wonder if we didn't waste 100 man hours a week for six months on status if we would have met our goal. My question is how does your manager or company get status about an important phase in the software development cycle without sacrificing the productivity of the entire team?"

Odets, where is thy sting? -- George S. Kaufman