Wizard052 - Slashdot User

Seinfeld's Good Samaritan Law Now Reality? 735

Posted by samzenpus on Friday January 29, 2010 @12:48AM from the not-that-there-is-anything-wrong-with-that dept.

e3m4n writes "The fictitious 'good samaritan' law from the final episode of Seinfeld (the one that landed them in jail for a year) appears to be headed toward reality for California residents after the house passed this bill. There are some differences, such as direct action is not required, but the concept of guilt by association for not doing the right thing is still on the face of the bill."

Game Distribution Platforms Becoming Annoyingly Common 349

Posted by Soulskill on Tuesday January 26, 2010 @07:48AM from the looking-at-you-games-for-windows-live dept.

The Escapist's Shamus Young recently posted an article complaining about the proliferation of distribution platforms and social networks for video games. None of the companies who make these are "quite sure how games will be sold and played ten years from now," he writes, "but they all know they want to be the ones running the community or selling the titles." Young continues, "Remember how these systems usually work: The program sets itself up to run when Windows starts, and it must be running if you want to play the game. If you follow this scheme to its logical conclusion, you'll see that the system tray of every gaming PC would eventually end up clogged with loaders, patchers, helpers, and monitors. Every publisher would have a program for serving up content, connecting players, managing digital licenses, performing patches, and (most importantly) selling stuff. Some people don't mind having 'just one more' program running in the background. But what happens when you have programs from Valve, Stardock, Activision, 2k Games, Take-Two, Codemasters, Microsoft, Eidos, and Ubisoft? Sure, you could disable them. But then when you fire the thing up to play a game, it will want to spend fifteen minutes patching itself and the game before it will let you in. And imagine how fun it would be juggling accounts for all of them."

Interview With the Founder of a Video Game Rehab Clinic 59

Posted by Soulskill on Tuesday January 26, 2010 @05:03AM from the real-medicine dept.

Ten Ton Hammer has posted the transcript from an interview with Dr. Hilarie Cash, co-founder of the "reSTART Internet Addiction Recovery Program," a relatively new clinic that deals with adults who feel that they are addicted to video games. The interview contains some.. interesting nuggets of wisdom. If you want to avoid addiction, you'd better spend less than two hours per day on online entertainment! The good news is that she doesn't recommend beating people. "When people come, they come for 45 days. It is only for adults; patients must be 18 or older. When they first come, they come for a minimum 2 days to be interviewed and to interview us, because we don't want anyone there who doesn't want to be there. So if they decide they want to be there then they stay for 45 days or longer if they choose. During that time they don't have access to the internet. The idea is that it takes at least 30 days for the brain to make some adjustments it needs to make to get over this addiction, so the brain can begin to rewire back to normal. During that time we are helping them look at why they got addicted, what motivated their addiction and we're assessing to see what skills they are lacking so they can be successful in their adult lives. We try to make a good start at helping to build those skills."

New Super Mario Bros. Wii Tops 10 Million Sales 164

Posted by Soulskill on Tuesday January 26, 2010 @02:43AM from the it'sa-me-mario dept.

According to a report from Japanese publication Nikkei Net, Nintendo's New Super Mario Bros. Wii has now sold 10 million copies worldwide. The game needed only 45 days to pass the already impressive sales numbers of Super Mario Galaxy. Quoting Gamasutra: "NSMB Wii has sold 3 million units in Japan, where it launched on December 3; 3 million copies in Europe, where it launched November 20, and 4.5 million units in North America, where it launched November 15. Super Mario Galaxy has sold 4.1 million units in North America since 2007. The game's design hearkens back to the two-dimensional, side-scrolling style of earlier Mario titles ... The numbers would seem to suggest that these traits successfully generated more mass appeal for NSMB Wii than for the three-dimensional and far less familiar Super Mario Galaxy, which sent the plumber navigating more innovative spherical space environments."

Visual Studio 2010 Forces Tab Indenting 390

Posted by kdawson on Monday January 25, 2010 @12:26AM from the one-man's-readable dept.

An anonymous reader writes "For years, Microsoft has allowed Visual Studio users to define arbitrary tab widths, often to the dismay of those viewing the resultant code in other editors. With VS 2010, it appears that they have taken the next step of forcing tab width to be the same as the indent size in code. Two-space tabs anyone?"

Facebook Master Password Was "Chuck Norris" 319

Posted by samzenpus on Thursday January 21, 2010 @03:56PM from the ad-nauseum-roundhouse dept.

I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "A Facebook employee has given a tell-all interview with some very interesting things about Facebook's internals. Especially interesting are all the things relating to Facebook privacy. Basically, you don't have any. Nearly everything you've ever done on the site is recorded into a database. While they fire employees for snooping, more than a few have done it. There's an internal system to let them log into anyone's profile, though they have to be able to defend their reason for doing so. And they used to have a master password that could log into any Facebook profile: 'Chuck Norris.' Bruce Schneier might be jealous of that one."

Average Budget For Major, Multi-Platform Games Is $18-28 Million 157

Posted by Soulskill on Tuesday January 12, 2010 @07:26AM from the large-potatoes dept.

An anonymous reader passes along this excerpt from Develop: "The average development budget for a multiplatform next-gen game is $18-$28 million, according to new data. A study by entertainment analyst group M2 Research also puts development costs for single-platform projects at an average of $10 million. The figures themselves may not be too surprising, with high-profile games often breaking the $40 million barrier. Polyphony's Gran Turismo 5 budget is said to be hovering around the $60 million mark, while Modern Warfare 2's budget was said to be as high as $50 million."

Living In Tokyo's Capsule Hotels 269

Posted by samzenpus on Tuesday January 05, 2010 @05:34PM from the living-in-the-hive dept.

afabbro writes "Capsule Hotel Shinjuku 510 once offered a night’s refuge to salarymen who had missed the last train home. Now with Japan enduring its worst recession since World War II, it is becoming an affordable option for people with nowhere else to go. The Hotel 510’s capsules are only 6 1/2 feet long by 5 feet wide. Guests must keep possessions, like shirts and shaving cream, in lockers outside of the capsules. Atsushi Nakanishi, jobless since Christmas says, 'It’s just a place to crawl into and sleep. You get used to it.'”

Comment Great! One basket for all our eggs... (Score 1, Troll) 260

by Wizard052 on Friday November 06, 2009 @02:12AM (#30003316) Attached to: Dashboard Reveals What Google Knows About You

Not to look down on the efforts made by Google to prevent attacks, but doesn't this pose a huge security risk? The payload from being able to hack into a users profile from this service would be huge...

Volcanic Activity May Split Africa In Two 170

Posted by samzenpus on Thursday November 05, 2009 @05:04AM from the spit-up dept.

An anonymous reader writes 'Volcanic activity may split the African continent in two, creating a new ocean, say experts. This is due to a recent geological crack which has appeared in northeastern Ethiopia.'

Colleges Secretly Test Music-Industry Project 208

Posted by samzenpus on Thursday November 05, 2009 @04:32AM from the area-51-flavors-and-then-some dept.

An anonymous reader writes "The music industry is still pushing Choruss, a controversial blanket-licensing scheme, but it is far less innovative than first described. Six colleges are setting it up now, but they refuse to have their names released because the issue is a political landmine — and who wants to be associated with the recording industry?"

Comment Really Open Source? (Score 1) 137

by Wizard052 on Friday September 18, 2009 @08:26AM (#29464901) Attached to: The Credibility Issues of MS's CodePlex Foundation

"...a poorly crafted governance structure that concentrates authority at the top and leaves little power to others who might join the foundation." Doesn't look like it captures the OSS development spirit, to me...

Comment A live example (Score 1) 260

by Wizard052 on Friday September 18, 2009 @08:20AM (#29464861) Attached to: Security / Privacy Advice?

Giving a live example as an introduction, sort of like a case study, will make your presentation more interesting. They should see how they can relate the security / privacy issue to their specific context...even better is to hack something right there and then, before their very eyes! Everyone loves a performance, so, be a performer.

Comment Coming up soon... (Score 1) 198

by Wizard052 on Thursday January 15, 2009 @07:26AM (#26463819) Attached to: Can We Create Fun Games Automatically?

...the FUNGAME MANIFESTO v1.1!! All the Science behind every fun game there ever was, distilled in a nice, just mix-with-water, logic! 101 best practices for every game developer idiot and game developer dummy!...fun games guaran-teeed!!! ...then all the games get fun. Then it all gets boring. ...then one breaks out from the mold. And that's different. And it's fun. Fun is now redefined! Wowee!... ...And so the cycle continues..

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