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Translation: Not to start a flamewar, but let's talk about something off topic, since it's sure to be something that will get under the skin of the types of people who would read this particular article..

Maybe it's just me, but isn't that the definition of trying to start a flamewar?

Not to start a big flameware about games. I realize that World of Warcraft is a massive game, with much more in-game content (for now) - but in my personal opinion, Age of Conan is a much more interesting game.

The main reason, for my part, is that it's based on a much more interested universe that has been explored in (mature) comics for many, many years. Now, with the release of the game, a whole new part of the universe has opened. A universe I personally find way more interesting and appealing than the universe of World of Warcraft.

(Of course, there's still the stability bugs, the memory bugs, the lack of content in many areas - and even the lack of areas .. but all that will be fixed in a timely manner. :-)

Should that not be "The more you tighten your grip, Jobs, the more psystar systems will slip through your fingers!" :D

Talking to yourself is a sign of insanity.

Why the fuck is this message's parent being modded insightful? Seems to me it's obviously being ironic, like... people DO use that way of fact checking, but it's only cause they are fucking lazy/retarded, not because it is last century.

Completely unaware of the fact that I was about to be laid off, I had kicked of an elaborate SQL script on the live server just before my boss called me into his office. They killed my account with this script still running-- oops. A friend of mine who was still at the company said that the resulting zombie crashed the main Oracle server, requiring a reboot, three days after I left.

How very childish of you. I hope that story makes the rounds in your community and you have a hard time getting work.

Purposely thrashing a system helps no one. Being pissed that your being laid-off, that is understandable. Throwing a tantrum over it indicates the company was probably exercising good judgment in letting you go. Hell, the lay-off many have just been a convenient excuse.

You're an asshole.

paradoxSpirit writes "Physorg has a paper comparing the cost of text messaging versus the cost of getting data from Hubble Space Telescope. From the article: 'The maximum size for a text message is 160 characters, which takes 140 bytes because there are only 7 bits per character in the text messaging system, and we assume the average price for a text message is 5p. There are 1,048,576 bytes in a megabyte, so that's 1 million/140 = 7490 text messages to transmit one megabyte. At 5p each, that's £374.49 [$732.95] per MB — or about 4.4 times more expensive than the 'most pessimistic' estimate for Hubble Space Telescope transmission costs." "Hubble is by no means a cheap mission — but the mobile phone text costs were pretty astronomical!""

x86 processosr aren't x86 processors, and haven't been for many years. They all decode the x86 instruction set to microops which they execute internally. The x86 instruction decoder doesn't take up any significant space, and if there really was an advantage to direct microop code, producers would have offered a "native" microop mode long ago. SSE instructions has provided a lot of the explicit parallelism without touchnig the standard x86 set. The mathematical complexity doesn't get less than an ADD or MUL anyway, so it would have been all about arranging the queue inside the CPU. So yeah, ADD and MUL survives but like in mathematics it's just the symbols, in implementation it can be done with everything from microops to an abacus.

With the elections continually in the news there is constant discourse on what each candidate has done or will do. However, rarely do people get the chance to say what they would do. Here is your chance, you have been elected President of the US (god help us all), what items go to the head of the class and how would you handle them?

Invisible Pink Unicorn writes "UC Davis researchers have dated the earliest step in the formation of the solar system — when microscopic interstellar dust coalesced into mountain-sized chunks of rock — to 4,568 million years ago, within a range of about 2,080,000 years. In the second stage, mountain-sized masses grew quickly into about 20 Mars-sized planets and, in the third and final stage, these small planets smashed into each other in a series of giant collisions that left the planets we know today. The dates of these intermediary stages are well established. The article abstract is available from Astrophysical Journal Letters."

An anonymous reader writes "I am downright embarrassed by the quality of my code. It is buggy, slow, fragile, and a nightmare to maintain. Do you feel the same way? If so, then what is holding you back from realizing your full potential? More importantly, what if anything are you planning to do about it? I enjoy programming and have from a young age (cut my teeth on BASIC on an Apple IIe). I have worked for companies large and small in a variety of languages and platforms. Sadly the one constant in my career is that I am assigned to projects that drift, seemingly aimlessly, from inception to a point where the client runs out of funding. Have any developers here successfully lobbied their company to stop or cut back on 'cowboy coding' and adopt best practices? Has anyone convinced their superiors that the customer isn't always right and saying no once in awhile is the best course of action?"

theodp writes "PC Magazine's John C. Dvorak has a unique take on the cute One Laptop per Child XO-1, deeming the OLPC project a naive fiasco waiting to unfold that sends an insulting 'let them eat cake' message to the world's poor. When it comes down to a choice of providing African kids living in absolute poverty with access to Slashdot or a $200 truckload of rice, Dvorak votes for the latter. Buy ten OLPCs if it assuages your guilt, says Dvorak, but 'I'll donate my money to hunger relief.'"

An anonymous reader writes "CNETTV.co.uk has up a video interview with Charles Martinet, the voice of Mario. Charles talks about flying out to Japan to record five games, including Super Mario Galaxy, and about his gaming experiences pre-Mario, which were made up of Pong, Pac-Man and Tank. The most interesting part of the video has to be when Charles discusses how he came up with the voice of Mario, which didn't exactly start off sounding like the Mario we know and love today."

eldavojohn writes "Expect to see sites ending in .asia pop up soon, as ICANN has allowed DotAsia to recently open bidding on the new domain. A DotAsia representative is quoted as saying, 'Our research has found that Asia is one of the most searched-for terms and by having a .asia website, your ranking on Google or Yahoo will become much higher.' Is there really a need for more top level domains?"