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+ - Modern Warfare 2 PC with no dedicated servers->

Submitted by adinu79
adinu79 writes "Activision and Infinity Ward sparked a row over their new game Modern Warfare 2 PC when they announced that the game will not support user mods or dedicated servers.

Several users have expressed outrage, decided to cancel their preorders and a petition to get dedicated servers back in the game has gained tens of thousands of signatures in a very short time. Still no official comment on that from the Infinity Ward community manager fourzerotwo but this move is sure to hurt the sales of the PC version significantly."
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+ - Modern Warfare 2 shock: No servers or mods for PC -> 2

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes "Call of Duty community manager Rob Bowling, also known as 'fourzerotwo', has confirmed in a podcast that the PC version of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 will not support user-created mods. Worse, it will not support dedicated servers. PC gamers will have to suffer peer-to-peer connections, just like their console-owning cousins.

Mr. Bowling could offer no defence for this move, and simply stated that: "The team's focusing on having it very equal on every platform" and "We're doing a lot of work on the back end."

Previous PC versions of CoD have supported dedicated servers. Their absence will apparently make the game "much more accessible to the PC community as a whole."

You can listen to the podcast here; skip forward to around the 1:41 mark for the awful truth...

Check out our follow up story here, where Dice throws its two cents into the debate, as well as details about how you can have your say.

Petition: http://www.petitiononline.com/mod_perl/signed.cgi?dedis4mw"
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The Internet

+ - Microsoft produces hits for Google Ads->

Submitted by
cyberpromote
cyberpromote writes "Microsoft, caught napping, produces hits for Google AdWords and AdSense

December 18, 2007 — The German based search engine optimization firm cyberpromote (www.cyberpromote.com) recently detected curious links in the search engine results of MSN during analysis for their clients. The analysis revealed that these links happen to be paid links from Google's AdWords and AdSense programs.
"These are not singular cases, rather there are several million links within the MSN index," states Thomas Kaiser, CEO of cyberpromote.
Google may possibly be pleased that every click on these results could produce an increased number of hits within the Adwords and AdSense accounts. Questionable is whether or not Google examines the referrer of each hit. cyberpromote could not verify whether or not costs are incurred for clients due to these links.
Microsoft undoubtedly has no interest in having these links indexed in their MSN search engine. Furthermore, these occurrences are surprising since Google has enforced certain implementations to prevent these links from being indexed. The robots.txt file at http://www.google.com/robots.txt contains the relevant entries to prevent the indexing.
"It is incomprehensible why Google's robots.txt file is disregarded by MSN, especially due to the obvious reason that it is only detrimental towards Microsoft", continued Mr. Kaiser.
As a general rule, all search engines adhere to the entries within robots.txt files. In addition, AdSense links should not be indexed since the entries at http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/robots.txt clearly state not to index these links.
During analysis pertaining to specified keywords, cyberpromote found high search engine positions in the MSN results which belong to Google's Adwords and AdSense programs. Due to the strong positions of these links, it is relevant that they will usually result in a substantial number of hits.
After finding these existing links, cyberpromote's inquiries pertaining to Google's AdSense program produced more than one million links within the MSN index (see screenshots). The links for the AdWords program produced an even more startling number with over 4 million indexed results.
It is assumed that Microsoft will most likely delete these links shortly after the notification of these facts. In any case, it is also likely that Microsoft will investigate the reasons as to why the robots.txt files have been ignored. A problematic issue concerns MSN's lack of identifying these links clearly as advertising links. Conclusively, these links are advertisements, regardless of any unintentional forms.
For the clients of the AdWords and AdSense campaigns, it would be helpful if Google stated whether or not clicks from these links are calculated. Up until now the statements from Google pertaining to invalid clicks have been vague at best. On the other hand, one can also argue that regardless of whether or not these links are calculated, the quality of visitors may still be advantageous.
This press release including additional screen shots can be found at www.cyberpromote.de/presse/pres semitteilungen.htm."
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Republicans

+ - Ron Paul breaks fundraising record

Submitted by
Dead_Smiley
Dead_Smiley writes "Yesterday was another one-day Ron Paul campaign fund raising day. From the website: http://www.ronpaulgraphs.com/dec_16_extended_total.html it appears that Ron Paul supporters have raised approximately $6.2 million dollars in one day. This surpasses John Kerry's previous record of $5.7 million back in 2004.

This man has caputured my attention like no other. I am usually very apathetic about politics because it all seems to be business as usual. He has an strong following on the Internet and that seems to have the traditional media a bit baffled. I like it! For the record: Yes, I donated and I will vote for the man if he wins the Republican domination.

You can check out his campaign here http://www.ronpaul2008.com/ or just go to Youtube and Google.

On a side note, I selected Politics and Republicans but he's doesn't really follow the party line so my apologies for that..."
Operating Systems

+ - SAP chooses SUSE as its preferred Linux platform->

Submitted by
mjasay
mjasay writes "Novell appears to be on a strong rebound with its Linux revenue up 69% and now SAP announcing that its preferred Linux platform is SUSE Linux. Under the program the two companies will "optimiz[e] the price/performance of mission-critical workloads and includes volume discounts for application configurations." Small wonder that Novell's CEO said its patent pact with Microsoft has had a "halo effect" on its business, generally. As for SUSE's top competitor and the market leader, Red Hat, opinion is split on whether its business is rising or falling due to its acquisition of JBoss. Either way, we appear to have a truly competitive Linux market again for the first time in years, with Ubuntu also making inroads into the enterprise through deals with Dell and others. SAP may prefer SUSE, but the larger trend is more and better enterprise-class support for Linux."
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Wine

+ - Microsoft Office 2007 on Linux with Wine->

Submitted by
twickline
twickline writes "I installed Microsoft Office 2007 on a computer with Windows XP and then moved everything over to this box that has Linux on it. After moving Office 2007 over to the Linux box I had the joys of importing the registry settings from the XP install into Wine. After a week of working on this and tweaking Wine with dll overrides and registry settings I finally got most of Office 2007 to run in Wine.

This isn't a howto guide, this is only to show that its currently possible to run Office 2007 in Wine on Linux. In the future when I can put together a clean reproducible guide I will do so, so check back often if this is something that interest to you.

— With ScreenShots :D —"
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Data Storage

+ - Amazon offers SimpleDB - for-pay web data storage

Submitted by
firepoet
firepoet writes "Amazon has released a new web-services based storage engine that looks an awful lot like a directory service: SimpleDB. While not supporting SQL per se, they offer several Simple operations:
  • CREATE — to make a new domain,
  • GET, PUT, DELETE — to manipulate your domain, and
  • QUERY — to find things within the domain
Data is stored in cells, that contain multiple attributes. A single attribute may contain multiple values, for example: (name, bob), (favoriteFruit, apple), (favoriteFruit, banana).

Another interesting tidbit is the cost structure — you pay for how much data you store, how much you transfer, and how much CPU the database uses while manipulating your data. While I'm not convinced it'd be practical for systems that store lots of data and manipulate it constantly, one might imagine small apps that can cache their data effectively taking advantage of the service."
Social Networks

+ - Wikipedia COO was a Convicted Felon->

Submitted by
An anonymous reader writes "The Register writes:

"For more than six months, beginning in January of this year, Wikipedia's million-dollar check book was balanced by a convicted felon. When Carolyn Bothwell Doran was hired as the Chief Operating Officer (COO) of the Florida-based Wikimedia Foundation, she had a criminal record in three other states — Virginia, Maryland, and Texas — and she was still on parole for a DUI (driving under the influence of alcohol) hit and run that resulted in a fatality. Her record also included convictions for passing bad checks, theft, petty larceny, additional DUIs, and unlawfully wounding her boyfriend with a gun shot to the chest."
"
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Microsoft

+ - XP SP3 White paper released 1

Submitted by
duggi
duggi writes "XP SP3 has been released. Would you like to upgrade? Note that Microsoft is not rubbing its users on their heads with IE7 by not including it in this pack.If they want to make XP more secure, and IE7 is more secure, why are they not pushing it?"
Role Playing (Games)

+ - CCP destroys users' OS with patch->

Submitted by
An anonymous reader writes "CCP's new trinity patch for EVE Online has an option to upgrade to "premium graphics." However, the patching file that upgrades the game to premium graphics deletes the user's boot.ini file from the partition the game is installed in. For the less technically inclined (not the slashdot readership, but whatever) this makes the computer unable to boot up after restarting."
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Media (Apple)

+ - Unlocked iPhone price revealed in France

Submitted by kevinbr
kevinbr writes "Orange is offering iPhone at 549 to customers who do not wish to benefit from one of the four "Orange for iPhone" plans and at 649, without a plan. The cost of unlocking the handset is 100 euros during the six months following the acquisition of the iPhone, regardless of the package chosen.

http://www.companynewsgroup.com/communique.asp?co_id=129028"
Businesses

+ - ASUSTek committed to meet GPL->

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes "ASUSTek is committed to meet the requirements of the GNU General Public License

The open source code for EeePC is available here. To download the source code of all open source software packages that are included in the product, follow the steps listed below..."
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One good reason why computers can do more work than people is that they never have to stop and answer the phone.

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