Slashdot is powered by your submissions, so send in your scoop

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×

Comment Re:Hmmm... (Score 2, Insightful) 444

by BRSloth (#27156997) Attached to: Could Fuller Take Trek Back To TV?

Sounds like you never saw ANY Star Trek. It never was about fighting, it always was "diplomacy whenever possible."

How many times Kirk had to discuss with some alien race (well, most of the time, Spock) about our "old, barbarian ways" and how we learnt how to be civilized.

How many times Q called humans "barbarians" to Picard?

Star Trek was always "brains over power", fight only when it really needs.
Microsoft

Microsoft To Open Retail Stores 535

Posted by kdawson from the world-class-shopping-experience dept.
chaz373 writes "CNET reports that Microsoft is going retail. In the 'Beyond Binary' blog Ina Fried reports, 'After years of brushing off the notion, Microsoft said on Thursday that it will open up its own line of retail stores. Without detailing the plans, Microsoft said it has hired David Porter, a 25-year Wal-Mart veteran, to lead the effort. Sources say that Porter's mission will be to develop the company's retail plans and that the effort is likely to start small with just a few locations.'"

Comment It's all about the API (Score 4, Insightful) 177

by BRSloth (#26422547) Attached to: Here Comes iPhone Nano, But Not In the US

As someone who worked with the iPhone SDK, I can say that iPhone Nano is not going to happen anytime soon. Reason: There is no layout managers in the SDK so, if you want your button to be in the right side, you have to provide a position in pixels from the left side. If Apple build a smaller version of the screen, about 90% of all AppStore applications would not work properly. Either that or you'd have very small buttons all over the place and it'd be really hard to read anything in the screen ('cause you need to keep same aspect ratio of the "normal" iPhone.)
Science

How the City Hurts Your Brain 439

Posted by kdawson from the but-not-paris dept.
Hugh Pickens writes "The city has always been an engine of intellectual life and the 'concentration of social interactions' is largely responsible for urban creativity and innovation. But now scientists are finding that being in an urban environment impairs our basic mental processes. After spending a few minutes on a crowded city street, the brain is less able to hold things in memory and suffers from reduced self-control. 'The mind is a limited machine,' says psychologist Marc Berman. 'And we're beginning to understand the different ways that a city can exceed those limitations.' Consider everything your brain has to keep track of as you walk down a busy city street. A city is so overstuffed with stimuli that we need to redirect our attention constantly so that we aren't distracted by irrelevant things. This sort of controlled perception — we are telling the mind what to pay attention to — takes energy and effort. Natural settings don't require the same amount of cognitive effort. A study at the University of Michigan found memory performance and attention spans improved by 20 percent after people spent an hour interacting with nature. 'It's not an accident that Central Park is in the middle of Manhattan,' says Berman. 'They needed to put a park there.'"
The Courts

RIAA Sues 19-Year-Old Transplant Patient 663

Posted by kdawson from the kicking-dogs-on-the-way-home dept.
NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "Just when you think they've reached rock bottom, it seems the RIAA always finds room to sink a little lower. This time they've sued an innocent, 19-year-old transplant patient, hospitalized with pancreatitis and needing islet cell transplants. Although the young Pittsburgh lady claims that she did not infringe any copyrights, she failed to answer the complaint in time, and a default judgment was taken against her. A Pittsburgh area lawyer has stated that he will represent her pro bono and make a motion to open up the default."
Education

Warner Music Pushing Music Tax For Universities 375

Posted by timothy from the randian-villains dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Warner Music is pitching the idea of a 'music tax' for various top universities. The idea is that students would be free to file share, but the university needs to monitor and track everything, create a pool of money, hand it over to a recording industry entity that promises to distribute the proceeds fairly. In exchange, the university gets a 'covenant not to sue' from the music labels. It's not a full license, just a basic promise that they won't sue. It's also claimed that this is 'voluntary' but the Warner Music guy says that they need to include all universities and all ISPs to really make it work. It's basically a music tax, where the recording industry gets to sit back and collect money."
Government

Red Flag Linux Forced On Chinese Internet Cafes 295

Posted by timothy from the billions-and-billions-served dept.
iamhigh writes "Reports are popping up that Chinese Internet Cafes are being required to switch to Red Flag Linux. Red Flag is China's biggest Linux distro and recently received headlines for their Olympic Edition release. The regulations, effective Nov. 5th, are aimed at combating piracy and require only that cafes install either a legal version of Windows or Red Flag. However, Radio Free Asia says that cafes are being forced to install Red Flag even if they have legal versions of Windows. Obviously questions about spying and surveillance have arisen, with no comment from the Chinese Government."
Data Storage

Real-World Benchmarks of Ext4 249

Posted by CmdrTaco from the but-i-live-in-a-fake-world dept.
Ashmash writes "Phoronix has put out a fresh series of benchmarks that show the real world performance of the Ext4 file-system. They ran 19 tests on Fedora 10 with changing out their primary partition to test Ext3, Ext4, Xfs, and ReiserFS. The Linux 2.6.27 kernel was used with the latest file-system support. In the disk benchmarks like Bonnie++ Ext4 was a clear winner but with the real world tests the results were much tighter and Xfs also possessed many wins. They conclude though that Ext4 is a nice upgrade over Ext3 due to the new features and just not improved performance in a few areas, but its lifespan may be short with btrfs coming soon."
The Internet

EU Strikes Down French "3 Strikes" Copyright Infringement Law 271

Posted by timothy from the mon-dieu dept.
Erris writes "Opendotdotdot has good news about laws in the EU: 'EU culture ministers yesterday (20 November) rejected French proposals to curb online piracy through compulsory measures against free downloading ... [and instead pushed] for "a fair balance between the various fundamental rights" while fighting online piracy, first listing "the right to personal data protection," then "the freedom of information" and only lastly "the protection of intellectual property." [This] indicates that the culture ministers and their advisers are beginning to understand the dynamics of the Net, that throttling its use through crude instruments like the "three strikes and you're out" is exactly the wrong thing to do.'"
Television

Google to Track TV Viewers More Closely 123

Posted by timothy from the from-each-according-to-his-quintile dept.
GalacticNoob writes "According to this post, Google is about to launch a TV advertising program that will let advertisers target audiences based on demographics including their household income. A satellite TV company called Echostar is working with credit-reporting company Equifax to cross-reference shows watched with income and buying habits (based on using Equifax's data)."
Television

Unhappy People Watch More TV 193

Posted by kdawson from the cause-or-effect-or-both dept.
Hugh Pickens writes "A new study by sociologists at the University of Maryland concludes that unhappy people watch more TV, while people who describe themselves as 'very happy' spend more time reading and socializing. 'TV doesn't really seem to satisfy people over the long haul the way that social involvement or reading a newspaper does,' says researcher John P. Robinson. 'It's more passive and may provide escape — especially when the news is as depressing as the economy itself. The data suggest to us that the TV habit may offer short-run pleasure at the expense of long-term malaise.' Unhappy people also liked their TV more: 'What viewers seem to be saying is that while TV in general is a waste of time and not particularly enjoyable, "the shows I saw tonight were pretty good."' The researchers analyzed two sets of data spanning nearly 30 years (PDF), gathered from nearly 30,000 adults, and found that unhappy people watch an estimated 20 percent more television than very happy people, after taking into account their education, income, age, and marital status — as well as other demographic predictors of both viewing and happiness. 'TV can become a kind of opiate in a way. It's habitual, and tuning in can be an easy way of tuning out.'"

Slashdot Top Deals

It's a naive, domestic operating system without any breeding, but I think you'll be amused by its presumption.

Close