ziggy_az - Slashdot User

Paleontologists Discover World's Horniest Dinosaur 109

Posted by samzenpus on Wednesday September 22, 2010 @07:32PM from the overcompensatesaurus dept.

Ponca City, We love you writes "The Guardian reports that paleontologists have uncovered the remains of an ancient beast called Kosmoceratops richardsoni that stood 16 feet tall with a 6-foot skull equipped with 15 horns and lived 76 million years ago in the warm, wet swamps of what is now southern Utah. 'These animals are basically over-sized rhinos with a whole lot more horns on their heads. They had huge heads relative to their body size,' says Scott Sampson, a researcher at the Utah Museum of Natural History."

Company Presses Your Ashes Into Vinyl When You Die 101

Posted by samzenpus on Friday August 27, 2010 @01:48PM from the music-of-the-soul dept.

Lanxon writes "Music lovers can now be immortalized when they die by having their ashes baked into vinyl records to leave behind for loved ones, reports Wired. A UK company called And Vinyly is offering people the chance to press their ashes in a vinyl recording of their own voice, their favorite tunes or their last will and testament. Minimalist audiophiles might want to go for the simple option of having no tunes or voiceover, and simply pressing the ashes into the vinyl to result in pops and crackles."

Comment Prof is a retard (Score 1) 282

by ziggy_az on Tuesday January 05, 2010 @07:00PM (#30662212) Attached to: Does Cheap Tech Undermine Legal Privacy Protections?

I can buy audio receivers/amplifies and listen into my neighbors conversations from the street. Does that mean that, since I'm not looking *inside* their home, it's okay?

Here in the South West, we call that stalking.

Call To "Open Source" AIG Investigation 259

Posted by Soulskill on Sunday December 20, 2009 @10:33AM from the still-looking-for-somebody-to-crucify dept.

VValdo writes "As you may recall, the citizens of the US shelled out about $85 billion to bail out AIG and its creditors (Goldman Sachs in particular) last year. But as 80% owners of AIG, we still don't know what happened, exactly. That may change. In a new op-ed piece, former prosecutors (including former NY governor Eliot Spitzer) are calling for the US Treasury to force AIG to release its treasure-trove of emails to the public before allowing AIG to 'break free' of our control. As the prosecutors put it, 'By putting the evidence online, the government could establish a new form of "open source" investigation. Once the documents are available for everyone to inspect, a thousand journalistic flowers can bloom, as reporters, victims and angry citizens have a chance to piece together the story.' Good idea?"

EA Flip-Flops On Battlefield: Heroes Pricing, Fans Angry 221

Posted by Soulskill on Wednesday December 02, 2009 @07:50AM from the put-your-money-where-your-gun-is dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Ben Kuchera from Ars Technica is reporting that EA/DICE has substantially changed the game model of Battlefield: Heroes, increasing the cost of weapons in Valor Points (the in-game currency that you earn by playing) to levels that even hardcore players cannot afford, and making them available in BattleFunds (the in-game currency that you buy with real money). Other consumables in the game, such as bandages to heal the players, suffered the same fate, turning the game into a subscription or pay-to-play model if players want to remain competitive. This goes against the creators' earlier stated objectives of not providing combat advantage to paying customers. Ben Cousins, from EA/DICE, argued, 'We also frankly wanted to make buying Battlefunds more appealing. We have wages to pay here in the Heroes team and in order to keep a team large enough to make new free content like maps and other game features we need to increase the amount of BF that people buy. Battlefield Heroes is a business at the end of the day and for a company like EA who recently laid off 16% of their workforce, we need to keep an eye on the accounts and make sure we are doing our bit for the company.' The official forums discussion thread is full of angry responses from upset users, who feel this change is a betrayal of the original stated objectives of the game."

Infinity Ward Fights Against Modern Warfare 2 Cheaters 203

Posted by Soulskill on Tuesday December 01, 2009 @07:56AM from the be-careful-they-cheat dept.

Faithbleed writes "IW's Robert Bowling reports on his twitter account that Infinity Ward is giving 2,500 Modern Warfare 2 cheaters the boot. The news comes as the war between IW and MW2's fans rages over the decision to go with IWnet hosting instead of dedicated servers. Unhappy players were quick to come up with hacks that would allow their own servers and various other changes." Despite the dedicated-server complaints, Modern Warfare 2 has sold ridiculously well.

US Air Force Buying Another 2,200 PS3s 144

Posted by Soulskill on Wednesday November 25, 2009 @05:02AM from the quick-who-knows-a-good-ps3-flight-sim dept.

bleedingpegasus sends word that the US Air Force will be grabbing up 2,200 new PlayStation 3 consoles for research into supercomputing. They already have a cluster made from 336 of the old-style (non-Slim) consoles, which they've used for a variety of purposes, including "processing multiple radar images into higher resolution composite images (known as synthetic aperture radar image formation), high-def video processing, and 'neuromorphic computing.'" According to the Justification Review Document (DOC), "Once the hardware configuration is implemented, software code will be developed in-house for cluster implementation utilizing a Linux-based operating software."

Scientists Say a Dirty Child Is a Healthy Child 331

Posted by samzenpus on Tuesday November 24, 2009 @07:07PM from the snack-is-going-to-be-on-the-floor-today dept.

Researchers from the School of Medicine at the University of California have shown that the more germs a child is exposed to, the better their immune system in later life. Their study found that keeping a child's skin too clean impaired the skin's ability to heal itself. From the article: "'These germs are actually good for us,' said Professor Richard Gallo, who led the research. Common bacterial species, known as staphylococci, which can cause inflammation when under the skin, are 'good bacteria' when on the surface, where they can reduce inflammation."

Haskell 2010 Announced 173

Posted by kdawson on Tuesday November 24, 2009 @06:05PM from the eddie-and-the-beav dept.

paltemalte writes "Simon Marlow has posted an announcement of Haskell 2010, a new revision of the Haskell purely functional programming language. Good news for everyone interested in SMP and concurrency programming."

Will Books Be Napsterized? 350

Posted by Soulskill on Sunday October 04, 2009 @01:21PM from the not-in-america,-we-don't-read-books dept.

langelgjm writes "An article from yesterday's New York Times asks the question: will books be Napsterized? So far, piracy of books has not reached the degree of music or movie piracy, in part due to the lack of good equipment on which to read and enjoy pirated books. The article points to the growing adoption of e-book readers as the publishing industry's newest nemesis. With ever-cheaper ways to conveniently use pirated books, authors and publishers may be facing serious changes ahead. This is something I wrote about three months ago in my journal, where I called the Kindle DX an 'iPod for books.'"

Comment Sidewiki (Score 2, Interesting) 454

by ziggy_az on Sunday October 04, 2009 @11:54AM (#29635483) Attached to: Do Retailers Often Screen User Reviews?

The easy answer to this is http://www.google.com/support/toolbar/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=157109 Google Sidewiki. *IF* users start using sidewiki for reviewing products on vendor sites, the vendor has no ability to moderate the reviews. Doesn't mean they won't start astroturfing the sidewiki but it would make it more expensive :)

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.4 Released 110

Posted by timothy on Wednesday September 02, 2009 @04:07PM from the progress-continues dept.

An anonymous reader writes "The fourth update in the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 family is released. From the press release — this version includes kernel-based virtual machine (KVM) virtualization, alongside of Xen virtualization technology. The scalability of the Red Hat virtualization solution has been incremented to support 192 CPUs and 1GB hugepages. Other updates including GCC 4.4 and a new malloc(), clustered, high-availability filesystem to support Microsoft Windows storage needs on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. This article covers the upgrade procedure for RHEL 5.4 from the previous version."

Comment It's a lot simpler than most people think (Score 1) 1146

by ziggy_az on Wednesday August 05, 2009 @09:54AM (#28956575) Attached to: Navigating a Geek Marriage?

My wife and I (IT geek + Engineering Geek) have been married for just over 20 years. Here are the pearls of wisdom from my Grandfather which will always work: Marriage is NOT a 50/50 deal. If everyone puts in 100%, you will succeed.

Comment Re:This "kid" is 27 (Score 1) 1016

by ziggy_az on Tuesday August 04, 2009 @06:24PM (#28948599) Attached to: California Student Arrested For Console Hacking

What he's doing does not hurt me. What does hurt me/us/the whole country is when a vendor welds their device closed so that it cannot be modified by the rightful owner *or their agent*. He has the wrong approach. IMO, if the product is locked down so that I don't have the rights to do whatever the hell I want with it, I'd rather not buy it.

Comment Re:From the original disgruntled developer (Score 4, Insightful) 782

by ziggy_az on Saturday August 01, 2009 @04:46PM (#28911649) Attached to: The Ethics of Selling GPLed Software For the iPhone

The answer to this is simple: If you don't like the terms of the GPL V2, you should not have released your code under those terms. To quote the GPL "You may charge a fee for the physical act of transferring a copy, and you may at your option offer warranty protection in exchange for a fee."

Provided they are in compliance with every other part of the GPL, the fact that you don't think they are the appropriate vendor is irrelevant; get over yourself.

Slashdot Top Deals