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Comment: Re:"Oh noes! The people keep voting it down!" (Score 2, Insightful) 153

by PFactor (#43434541) Attached to: Google, Apple Lead Massive List of Companies Supporting CISPA
That will only work for maybe 200 years. Example: the 2nd amendment's "shall not be infringed" bit that's been blatantly ignored for the last few decades. The founding fathers made that as clear as they could, yet we're still screwing it up. What makes you think we can make our intentions any clearer for any longer?
Nintendo

Nintendo To Cancel Weather, News, and Other Built-In Wii Apps In June 175

Posted by Soulskill
from the end-of-life dept.
damn_registrars writes "Nintendo has announced that at the end of June it will be canceling the services of several of the channels that are built in to the original Wii, including the Weather, News, Everybody Votes, and Mii Contest. This will also affect the WiiConnect24 services, though should not affect the Wii shopping channel. They added: 'Exchange of Wii messages on the Wii Message Board, exchange of Mii characters on the Mii Channel and message/data exchange within some games will be disabled.'"
PlayStation (Games)

Bethesda: We Can't Make Dawnguard Work On the PS3 371

Posted by Soulskill
from the have-you-tried-turning-it-off-and-on-again dept.
An anonymous reader sends this quote from Geek.com: "PS3 gamers may now never get access to the content in Skyrim's Dawnguard DLC. That's the news coming out of Bethesda via their forums. Administrator and global community lead Gstaff posted an update on the state of PS3 DLC for the game, and it's not looking great. Gstaff explains that releasing sizeable DLC is a complex issue, and it seems like for the PS3 it might be just a bit too complex. No detail is given as to what the specific problem is, but Bethesda is preparing PS3 gamers for the reality that Dawnguard, and for that matter any other Skyrim DLC, may never reach the platform. I'd like to know what the exact problem is they can't overcome, but I'd also like to know if this is a failing on Bethesda's part or a shortcoming of the PS3 architecture. Maybe Sony should pay Bethesda a visit and see what's going on." In other Skyrim news, a mod for the game that attempted to recreate J.R.R. Tolkien's Middle Earth, has received a Cease & Desist letter from Warner Bros, causing development to stop.

Comment: Highlights the importance of risk management (Score 1) 214

by PFactor (#40920581) Attached to: Could a Category 5 Hurricane Take Down East Coast Data Centers?
Here we have a risk that requires mitigation. If you owned the facilities in question you would know your disaster preparedness and would know how much effort you are willing and able to put into enhancing it.

But since you don't own these facilities you have to trust the companies that do own them to do what you would do (or better). The only real controls you have are in negotiating the initial contract (regarding SLAs, especially) and in designing your system to withstand a failure of one company to protect their facility. That means you have to either buy resources on both coasts from one company or buy resources from multiple companies whose facilities are geodispersed and make sure your code/platform understands and deals with losing one or more of them.

The leggy gal on the sales team won't tell you any of this. I think most people don't find out about it until the disaster actually happens. It's pretty much like any other piece of your tech stack: the vendors will whitewash the risks and your job is to see through that and manage it.

I submit this isn't a risk caused by the use of "the cloud" (egad, do I hate that term!) so much as a risk that's part of any IT project and you deal with it the same way.

So to answer the original question, maybe a CAT 5 hurricane can take those facilities down but the question you should be asking is, "Have we completely understood the risk to the business and have we taken appropriate steps to protect it?".
Role Playing (Games)

World of Warcraft: Mists of Pandaria Launches On September 25 247

Posted by Soulskill
from the getting-in-touch-with-your-fuzzy dept.
New submitter JestersGrind writes "Blizzard has announced that Mists of Pandaria, the latest expansion of the popular World of Warcraft MMO, will be launched on September 25, 2012 and can be pre-ordered now." The game page has a good deal of information about the new expansion. The level cap is increased to 90, there is a new race (Pandaren) and a new class (Monk), and the talent system has been completely redesigned. They've added Challenge Modes for dungeons, which normalizes player gear and lets them compete to see who can clear it the fastest. The MMO-Champion website keeps track of all the minor details, if you're interested.

The sooner you fall behind, the more time you have to catch up.

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