BigLonn - Slashdot User

Submission + - Why iPhone Flipping Will Fail

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 30, 2007 @10:29AM

An anonymous reader writes: The press has reported how many of the customers on line last night for the iPhone had nothing more in mind than to look to make a quick buck reselling the units. The joke may be on them as MP3 Newswire points out. For there to a market amenable to this there has to be more than a great demand. There has to be a finite supply of an item. With concert tickets there is always a finite supply for a given night. Flipping a Playstation 3 was briefly profitable, because while Sony would over time make as many units as the market called for, there was a finite supply available for those who wanted it in time for Christmas. The Apple iPhone has no such time restraints, therefore on a theoretical level they have an infinite supply. The first wave of iPhones may sell out, but the great majority of consumers can wait until the supply catches up.

RIAA Wants Agreements to Stay Secret 196

Posted by CowboyNeal on Saturday June 30, 2007 @10:21AM from the don't-share-that-either dept.

NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "The RIAA is opposing Ms. Lindor's request for discovery into the agreements among the record company competitors by which they have agreed to settle and prosecute their cases together, by which she seeks to support her Fourth Affirmative Defense (pdf) alleging that 'The plaintiffs, who are competitors, are a cartel acting collusively in violation of the antitrust laws and of public policy, by tying their copyrights to each other, collusively litigating and settling all cases together, and by entering into an unlawful agreement among themselves to prosecute and to dispose of all cases in accordance with a uniform agreement, and through common lawyers, thus overreaching the bounds and scope of whatever copyrights they might have. ...As such, they are guilty of misuse of their copyrights.'"

Military Running a Parallel Earth Simulator 470

Posted by Zonk on Friday June 29, 2007 @10:22PM from the in-that-reality-i'm-an-ardent-fan-of-this dept.

Fantastic Lad writes "The US Department of Defense (DOD) may already be creating a copy of you in an alternate reality. Putting supercomputers to an innovative use, the military is simulating our planet in an effort to predict the outcome of different scenarios. They might run tests to see how long 'you' can go without food or water, or how 'you' will respond to televised propaganda. Billions of nodes are created in the system, intended to reflect every man, woman, and child. 'Called the Sentient World Simulation (SWS), it will be a "synthetic mirror of the real world with automated continuous calibration with respect to current real-world information", according to a concept paper for the project. Simulex is the company developing these systems, and they list pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly and defense contractor Lockheed Martin among their private sector clients. The U.S. military is their biggest customer, apparently now running the most complex version of the system. JFCOM-9 is now capable of running real-time simulations for up to 62 nations, including Iraq, Afghanistan, and China. The simulations gobble up breaking news, census data, economic indicators, and climactic events in the real world, along with proprietary information such as military intelligence."

Submission + - Germany Demands Changes to The Darkness (gamesindustry.biz) 1

Submitted by

HaymarketRiot

on Friday June 29, 2007 @09:18PM

HaymarketRiot writes: "GamesIndustry.biz is reporting that German officials have demanded several changes to Take-Two's new dark shooter. 'Nazi symbols, a finishing move and several mechanics relating to "Darklings" have had to be removed in order to satisfy the board's demands. The finishing move — a CGI sequence showing a human heart being ripped out — must be replaced by a yellowish-green-fog "soul absorption" instead.' Are these warranted changes, or just another instance of authorities overstepping their bounds?"

AMD Announces August Release Date for Barcelona 128

Posted by Zonk on Friday June 29, 2007 @05:50PM from the chip-love dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Rumors said the release wouldn't be until late Q4 but an August ship date is now promised for AMD's quad-core chips. They're only releasing up to 2.0 GHz processors at first, with the top speed devices coming out later in the year. 'AMD's Barcelona puts four cores on a single slice of silicon, an approach AMD calls native quad-core, and the company has argued that Barcelona will outperform the Xeon 5300. The only problem: that comparison soon will become obsolete. Intel's second-generation quad-core server processors, Harpertown a server member of Intel's Penryn family, will arrive this year, too, with the promise of better performance, lower power consumption and lower manufacturing costs by virtue of a manufacturing process with 45-nanometer features. AMD is only just now moving to a 65-nanometer process.'"

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