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One Year Later, USPS Looks Into Gamefly Complaint 183

Posted by Soulskill from the good-luck-answering-in-less-than-a-year dept.
Last April, we discussed news that video game rental service GameFly had complained to the USPS that a large quantity of their game discs were broken in transit, accusing the postal service of giving preferential treatment to more traditional DVD rental companies like Netflix. Now, just over a year later, an anonymous reader sends word that the USPS has responded with a detailed inquiry into GameFly's situation (PDF). The inquiry's 46 questions (many of which are multi-part) cover just about everything you could imagine concerning GameFly's distribution methods. Most of them are simple, yet painstaking, in a way only government agencies can manage. Here are a few of them: "What threshold does GameFly consider to be an acceptable loss/theft rate? Please provide the research that determined this rate. ... What is the transportation cost incurred by GameFly to transport its mail from each GameFly distribution center to the postal facility used by that distribution center? ... Please describe the total cost that GameFly would incur if it expanded its distribution network to sixty or one hundred twenty locations. In your answer, please itemize costs separately. ... Does the age of a gaming DVD or the number of times played have more effect on the average life cycle of a gaming DVD?"

Comment Re:Summary Misleading (Score 1) 246

by Utopia (#32089764) Attached to: Microsoft<nobr> <wbr></nobr>.Net Libraries Not Acting "Open Source"

1. It's true that the reference source site has been down for several days but now appears to be up again
2. It's also true that NOBODY from MS has been responding to questions about the lack of .Net 4.0 source code, or any other question for that matter about reference source

I'm not bashing MS in general; in fact, I make my living by developing solutions centered around MS technology. However, I'm extremely annoyed at the lack of proper maintenance of the reference source archive. Not only about the bits that have never made it there to begin with, but that almost a month after the release of .Net 4.0/VS 2010, there's still no code for .Net 4.0. !

The lack of of .Net 4.0 code bugs me too. But fortunately VS 2010 supports .Net 3.5 too, so its easy to figure out the issue by debugging using 3.5
When the reference site was down even that was possible.

Unless you are using the new concurrent stuff or other .Net 4.0 specific stuff, debugging in 3.5 works fine.
I used to clean the my symbols cache folder periodically., but I have figured out how valuable it can be when Microsoft site goes down.
Microsoft

Submission + - Microsoft Office 2010, Dissected (computerworld.com)

Submitted by CWmike
CWmike writes: Preston Gralla writes: I review plenty of software packages throughout the course of a year, and it's rare that I come across one that I believe will truly make a difference in the way that I work or use my computer. With Office 2010, which recently hit RTM status, it is one of those times. The main attraction, as far as I'm concerned, is the Outlook makeover that makes it far easier to cut through e-mail overload and keep up with your ever-expanding group of contacts on social networking sites. There's also an improved Ribbon that now works across all Office applications, and some very useful new PowerPoint tools for giving Internet-based presentations and handling video. Question is: Is Office 2010 good enough to stop the defection to Google Apps? Some large enterprises are seriously considering jumping from Exchange to Gmail, or already have, reports Robert Mitchell. The final version of Microsoft Office Web Apps, the Web-based version of Office, isn't yet available but is expected before summer. Microsoft has beat Google in one race, to deliver its office suite to Facebook users first.

Submission + - IdeaPad U1 what we wanted the iPad to be (engadget.com)

Submitted by Xanator
Xanator writes: With the announcement of the iPad the Lenovo IdeaPad U1 Hybrid appears to go unnoticed, but maybe we ought to pay it more attention, a netbook with a removable screen that turns it into a tablet (swithching OS from Windows 7 to a tablet OS within 3 seconds) looks that it offers what many of us wanted from the iPad, quoting engadget: "When docked, the U1 looks and feels like any other laptop, with an Intel CULV processor and a 128GB SSD running Windows 7 Home Premium. You actually wouldn't know there's a slate hiding in there — until you pull it out and watch it switch to Lenovo's Skylight UI, a process that was smooth and quick for us. Lenovo says the goal is for the full switch to occur in under 3 seconds"
Bug

Submission + - New Laser System Targets Mosquitoes (wsj.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: In the Cold War the so-called "Star Wars defense system" proposed using lasers to destroy incoming Soviet missiles. In a 2007 brainstorming session aimed at combating malaria, Dr. Lowell Wood, the architect of that system, proposed modifying his original idea to kill mosquitoes. The cover of today's Wall Street Journal contains an article that highlights this initiative as well as a few others, like using a giant flashlight to disrupt mosquitoes' vision and using the insects to vaccinate, in the war against malaria. The system is intelligent enough to avoid noncombatants like humans and butterflies and can even tell the difference between females, the blood-drinkers, and males. My favorite quote: "We'd be delighted if we destabilize the human-mosquito balance of power."
Microsoft

Google Calls For More Limits On Microsoft 270

Posted by kdawson from the keeping-watch-a-while-longer dept.
teh_commodore writes "Scientific American is reporting that Google is now asking a Federal judge to extend the government's anti-trust oversight of Microsoft, specifically with regard to desktop search software. Microsoft had already agreed to modify Vista to allow rival desktop search engines, but Google says that this remedy will come too late — specifically, after (most of) the anti-trust agreement expires in November. What makes this political maneuver interesting is that Google went over the heads of the Department of Justice and US state regulators, who had found Microsoft's compromise acceptable, to appeal directly to the Federal judge overseeing the anti-trust settlement." Update: 06/26 17:20 GMT by KD : The judge is unwilling to play along with Google; she said she will likely defer to an agreement on desktop search forged between Microsoft and the plaintiffs in the case: i.e. Justice and the states.
Apple

Jobs Responds to Greenpeace FUD 531

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the apple-huggers dept.
EccentricAnomaly writes "Steve Jobs has posted a response on the Apple homepage to the Greenpeace Green My Apple campaign in which he basically makes a case for the Greenpeace campaign being a heaping pile of FUD. On one hand, you could say that Greenpeace shouldn't expect a company that has spent years battling Microsoft to just roll over. On the other, it looks like Apple is agreeing to do most of what Greenpeace has been demanding."
OS X

Apple Delays Leopard to October 545

Posted by Zonk from the sad-panda-err-leopard dept.
SuperMog2002 writes "Apple Insider has the sad news that Mac OS X Leopard has been delayed until October. Apparantly software engineers and QA had to be reassigned to the iPhone in order to get it out on time, costing Leopard its release at WWDC. For now the original press release from Apple can be found on the 'Hot News' part of their site, though Apple did not provide a permanent link to the story. 'While Leopard's features will be complete by June, the Cupertino-based company said it cannot deliver the quality release expected by its customers within that time. Apple now plans to show its developers a near final version of Leopard at the conference, give them a beta copy to take home so they can do their final testing, and ship the software in October.'"

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