zaf - Slashdot User

Hollywood Stock Exchange Set To Launch In April 100

Posted by samzenpus on Wednesday February 24 2010, @02:08PM
from the put-me-down-for-$10-on-portman dept.

You can buy and sell actor or movie "stock" for virtual cash on the website Hollywood Stock Exchange (HSX). Starting in April the company plans on letting you turn those movie performance predictions into real dollars. HSX filed with the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission for approval as an active trading site in November 2008 and has just entered the final phase of regulatory review. Richard Jaycobs, president of HSX's parent company, said, "The number of people who visit movie theaters each year and form opinions about a film's success is in the tens of millions. We believe that's the reason the public response to this product has been very positive."

Timmy O'Riley By L. Hadron and the Colliders 62

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Wednesday February 24 2010, @01:04PM
from the shameless-self-promotion dept.

Making music has never been quite this awesome! Using only ThinkGeek products (Bliptronic 5000, Guitar Shirt, Drumkit Shirt, Stylophone, and Otamatone Electronic Instrument) the ultra-geeks over at ThinkGeek have created this ultra-cool cover of The Who's Baba O'Reilly. This also qualifies as a full blown shameless plug since ThinkGeek shares a corporate overlord with Slashdot.

Comment: Doubt he's correct, but believe him anyway! (Score 4, Insightful) 837

by zaf on Monday April 27 2009, @08:47AM (#27729131) Attached to: Handmade vs. Commercially Produced Ethernet Cables

Wait a minute. Your boss is telling you to buy cables instead of toiling to make your own, and you're _complaining_? I don't think a self-terminated link of CAT6 will have the slightest trouble maintaining 20 megabits, but that's not the point.

Word of advice, take his word for him and nod. If he's willing to spend money to make your job easier, then keep that job!

Comment: Ask your users! (Score 1) 640

by zaf on Monday March 16 2009, @09:46AM (#27210115) Attached to: Morality of Throttling a Local ISP?

You've only got 400 users? Put it to a vote. Explain your company's predicament, and then send them each an email asking if they'd prefer to either:

A) Pay more for an increase in upstream bandwidth

or

B) Accept throttling based on service and content

Personally, I don't have a problem with QoS-based filtering. For example, give torrents a lower priority so they'll wait in line behind real-time apps like voice or even web browsing

A little transparency in your decision-making process will gain you a lot of respect with your customers, and make them feel like they are part of both the problem and solution

Comment: Re:Coming soon, (Score 2, Funny) 148

by zaf on Thursday March 12 2009, @03:54PM (#27172937) Attached to: Powering Restaurants WIth Deep Fried Fuel

Or the diners after they've eaten a big mac

Comment: Re:No no no no (Score 2, Interesting) 103

by zaf on Thursday February 26 2009, @10:40AM (#26998645) Attached to: <em>Blood Frontier</em> "Beta 1" Officially Released

Colors aside, why do they all have to play like Quake 1? How about some fresh ideas like we've seen from Valve recently.

It looks like you guys have done good with getting the engine running, now bring out some creativity beyond "futuristic shotgun, futuristic rocket launcher, futuristic plasma gun" and put some interesting mechanics that really give people a different experience.

Comment: Re:ummm ... printers? (Score 1) 287

by zaf on Tuesday December 30 2008, @05:26PM (#26272969) Attached to: HP Accused of Illegal Exportation To Iran

Nah
The prisoners are forced to troubleshoot printing problems with only the message "PC LOAD LETTER"

Virtual machines with individual hardware anybody?

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 28 2006, @10:09AM

An anonymous reader writes "My employer currently runs many machines (P3s or early P4s in the main) dedicated to single, simple, tasks like showing a video or running an interactive flash app under Win2000 or XP. I would like to consolidate a number of existing machines into a newer box to reduce the costs of replacing these machines as they fail, reduce rack usage and power demands and ease maintenance. I see that products like VMWare, QEMU and KVM allow virtualisation of windows images but none appear to be allow each virtual machine to address its own video, mouse and sound hardware (keyboard is not needed for most of these apps, touch screens are used instead via mouse port). Has anybody done this before or is it just a case of heavy work with a virtualising environment?"

Can Games Fly On Google Earth?

Submitted by simoniker on Thursday December 28 2006, @09:53AM

simoniker writes "A team at Intel have built a game prototype that works entirely within Google Earth, in which: "Martian robotic spacecraft are invading... Your mission is to decipher the messages, and blast these Martians before they can suck people off the planet." The engineers explain: "Existing games we found all require switching back and forth between a web browser window and Google Earth. Our goal was to develop a game with all the action inside a single window, similar to a traditional video game, leading to a more immersive and responsive experience." The gameplay is fairly simple as of yet — but could this be the start of a host of fully integrated Google Earth games?"

Yellow Dog Linux pre-installed on PS3

Submitted by marvin_pa on Tuesday December 12 2006, @03:16PM

marvin_pa writes "Terra Soft is accepting pre-orders for the PS3 with Yellow Dog Linux pre-installed, offering both the GameOS and Yellow Dog Linux at boot. From the press release: "More than a gamebox, the PLAYSTATION®3 with the multi-core Cell microprocessor was designed by Sony Computer Entertainment to function as a personal computer. Yellow Dog Linux offers this functionality with greater than 2000 applications, everything needed for a personal computer, Cell workstation, or light-duty cluster node.""