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Comment: It's not only bad for business, it's illegal! (Score 1) 744

by Juju (#38868295) Attached to: Some Critics Suggest Apple Boycott Over Chinese Working Conditions
Not only will corporations try to maximize profits, they are forced to do so by law! The board's only accountability is toward it's shareholders. If they decide to give away money to improve the workers' conditions, they expose themselves to be sued by the shareholders...
Software

Preserving Virtual Worlds 122

Posted by Soulskill
from the how-will-they-play-starcon-2-in-2150 dept.
The Opposable Thumbs blog has an interview with Jerome McDonough of the University of Illinois, who is involved with the Preserving Virtual Worlds project. The goal of the project is to recognize video games as cultural artifacts and to make sure they're accessible by future generations. Here McDonough talks about some of the technical difficulties in doing so: "Take, for example, Star Raiders on the Atari 2600. If you're going to preserve this, you've got a couple of problems. The first is that it is on a cartridge that is designed to work on a particular system that is no longer manufactured. And as long as you've got a hardware dependency there, you're really not going to be able to preserve this material very long. What we have been looking at is how feasible is it for things that fundamentally all have some level of hardware dependency there — even Doom has dependencies on DLLs with an operating system, and on particular chipsets and architectures for playing. How do you take that and turn it into something that isn't as dependent on a particular physical piece of hardware. And to do that, you need information about that platform. You need technical specifications that allow you to basically reproduce a virtualization that may enable you to run the software in its original form in the future. So what we're trying to do is preserve not only the games, but preserve the knowledge that you would need to create a virtualization platform to play the game."

Comment: Re:Microsoft best innovation. (Score 1) 280

by Juju (#32299874) Attached to: Bill Gates's <em>The Road Ahead</em>, 15 Years Later

Amen to that.

I am a software developer, and I don't like VS, but I use it because even if it lacks features, it works for me since I use it at work and know how to use it. I am currently starting a "big" open source project, and getting it to work on Linux is difficult. Not the code, just the whole project management thingy. And this is not because it is harder per se, but just because I am used to VS, and not KDevelop. I am learning CMake and it's going fast, but still not fast enough for me to be comfortable with Linux as my main dev platform...
It's getting there, but it takes a real effort to adapt. And this is not a shortcoming on KDevelop's side, just an artifact of using MS for work and being used to it...

PC Games (Games)

Civilization V To Use Steamworks 295

Posted by Soulskill
from the hope-it-doesn't-get-you-in-hot-water dept.
sopssa writes "2K Games today announced that Civilization V will be using Steamworks for online matchmaking, automated updates, downloadable content and DRM for the game. Steam's Civ V store page is also available now, revealing some new information about the game. There will be an 'In-Game Community Hub' for online matchmaking, communication, and for sharing scenarios between players. While including Steamworks might put some people off, it might also indicate better online gameplay than in the previous Civilization games, where it was almost impossible to have a good game without playing with just friends."
The Almighty Buck

Gamer Wins $1M For Pitching Virtual "Perfect Game" 142

Posted by Soulskill
from the yes-it-was-against-the-mets dept.
A few months ago, 2K Sports announced a unique contest to promote a new game they were working on, Major League Baseball 2K10. They said whichever gamer was the first to pitch a perfect game and provide proof would win $1 million, with the contest running for two months. Reader yukk tips news that the two months have now passed, and 2K Sports has announced a winner. It turns out the prize was won on the very first day, by a player who had put less than an hour and a half of effort into it.

Comment: Re:Thunderbird Wishlist (Score 1) 203

by Juju (#14217393) Attached to: Mozilla Thunderbird Gets Firefox-style Tabs
This is not how opensource works!
There is no they, only people who decide to spend some time on their pet project...

I am pretty sure there is a bunch of paid people that are busy implementing all those required basic features for Thunderbird 1.5 or beyond.

I think it is likely that the person who implemented the tabs would not have spent his time implementing filtering of imap messages anyway. This is opensource, not a closed development team where adding one feature will always be at the expense of another one!

The real purpose of books is to trap the mind into doing its own thinking. -- Christopher Morley