Thaddeus - Slashdot User

Woman Claims Ubuntu Kept Her From Online Classes 1654

Posted by samzenpus on Thursday January 15, 2009 @11:54AM from the learning-is-hard dept.

stonedcat writes "A Wisconsin woman has claimed that Dell computers and Ubuntu have kept her from going back to school via online classes. She says she has called Dell to request Windows instead however was talked out of it. Her current claim is that she was unaware that she couldn't install her Verizon online disk to access the Internet, nor could she use Microsoft Word to type up her papers."

Crayon Physics Combines Science and Puzzles 78

Posted by Soulskill on Thursday January 15, 2009 @03:11AM from the and-nobody-can-tell-how-bad-you-are-at-drawing dept.

IamAHack writes "NPR covered a new game that seems like it would have great appeal to Slashdot readers: Crayon Physics. Quoting: 'A new computer game went on sale this week. It's not a blockbuster like Halo or World of Warcraft. There's no first-person shooting, no sports, no guitar, no microphone. Instead, there's a crayon. The game is Crayon Physics Deluxe. It's a simple, mesmerizing game created by a 25-year-old independent games designer from Finland named Petri Purho. "It's a game where your crayon drawings come to life,' Purho tells NPR's Melissa Block. 'You draw stuff and your drawings behave physically correctly. As soon as you release the last button, the laws of physics are applied to your drawing."' A demo is available, and Opposable Thumbs has a review of the game."

Is the Gaming PC Dead? 417

Posted by Soulskill on Wednesday December 24, 2008 @03:48AM from the no-way-dude-check-out-my-$8000-alienware dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Rahul Sood, HP's CTO of gaming, argues that the days of a market that wants PCs running three $500 GPUs is history; he argues that it's really a tough or impossible sell. '... let's face it, high-end hardware has delivered diminishing returns in terms of value. This is why you don't see ridiculous offerings like Quad SLI and 2-kilowatt power supplies coming from our company.' But don't the ideas of customization and market pricing for components tend to undercut that? Is the gaming PC dead?"

Thieves Take the Cake 91

Posted by samzenpus on Monday December 22, 2008 @06:39PM from the just-eat-it dept.

Two very hungry German couriers ate a fruit cake destined for a German newspaper and in its place mailed a box of credit card data. The data including names, addresses and card transactions ended up at the Frankfurter Rundschau daily. The mix-up triggered an alarm, and police advised credit card customers with Landesbank Berlin to check their accounts for inconsistencies. Fruitcake must be different in Germany for people to want to use it as something other than a paperweight.

How To Make Money With Free Software 81

Posted by kdawson on Monday November 03, 2008 @09:14AM from the coin-of-the-realm dept.

bmsleight writes "The Dutch Ministry of Finance organized an architecture competition to design not a building, but rather the new 5-Euro commemorative coin. The theme was 'Netherlands and Architecture'. The winning design was made 100% with free software, mainly Python, but also including The Gimp, Inkscape, Phatch, and Ubuntu. The design is amazing — the head of Queen Beatrix is made up of the names of architects based on their popularity in Yahoo searches (rendered in a font of the artist's own devising). In the end the artist, Stani Michiels, had to collaborate closely on location with technicians of the Royal Dutch Mint, so all the last bits were done on his Asus Eee PC. Soon, 350,000 Dutch people will use and enjoy the fruits of free software."

Comment Re:could someone do back-of-envelope calculation (Score 2, Informative) 251

by Thaddeus on Thursday July 20, 2006 @09:04AM (#15749144) Attached to: Growing Insulin

Like someone else said, diet sodas don't contain HFCS (though most create a whole different health issue by containing aspartame - exceptions that use sucralose include Diet RC, Diet Rite, Diet 7UP, and Pepsi One). Regular Coke is made with sucrose instead (not that it's much better for you). Remember New Coke? That was their attempt to switch to HFCS and it failed. Companies like to use HFCS because it's cheaper than sucrose. All non-diet Pepsi-brand sodas are made with it.

Microsoft's IE7 Search Box Bugs Google 803

Posted by CmdrTaco on Monday May 01, 2006 @12:38PM from the now-wait-a-minute dept.

tessaiga writes "The New York Times reports that Google is crying foul over a new IE7 search box feature that defaults to MSN Search. Although the feature can be modified to use Google or other search engines, Google asserts that "The best way to handle the search box [...] would be to give users a choice when they first start up Internet Explorer 7." Google goes on to assert that the move "limits consumer choice and is reminiscent of the tactics that got Microsoft into antitrust trouble in the late 1990s". I notice that in my version of Firefox the search box defaults to Google, and that the pulldown menu of pre-entered options doesn't even include MSN Search, but Google seems to have been oddly quiet on that front for the many years prior to IE7 that Firefox has made this feature available."

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