Astat1ne - Slashdot User

Submission + - EA CEO Out-- Sequel-itis, Stock Dips Blamed

Submitted by

wjamesau

on Monday February 26, 2007 @06:18PM

wjamesau writes: "After 2006's rollercoast stock performance and amid criticism that the giant publisher had become overreliant on sequels, Electronic Arts' CEO Jeff Probst has just stepped down. (One hundred Madden games too many?) Does this mean other publishers will feel pressure to develop more original IP too?"

Submission + - Adventuresome or "hands on" tech careers?

Submitted by omission9 on Monday February 26, 2007 @06:13PM

omission9 writes: For about 10 years I have worked mostly behind a desk in a cubicle and am starting to feel that this environment is making me miserable. The cheap fluorescent lights, the stuffy air, and the restless feeling I get from just sitting so long are starting to really annoy me. My background is mainly as a programmer but I started my career as a network engineer/network administrator. I am also a member of the US Naval Reserve and am cleared as high as Top Secret. Are there any jobs out there that match this sort of skill set(more or less programmer but generally excellent tech skills) that don't require being stuck behind a desk? Paying relatively well would be a major plus as would something that provides a solid career(20+ years of work). Anyone out there in /. land that is reading this from anywhere other than a cube farm that may have some advice?

Submission + - Benefits of Windows User Access Control

Submitted by

Abtin Forouzandeh

on Monday February 26, 2007 @04:20PM

Abtin Forouzandeh writes: "Having used Vista for a few months, something keeps nagging me about windows user account control. For UAC to be useful, the user needs to have a fair amount of knowledge about a) what UAC is, b) what application its blocking, c) the consequences of blocking the action, and d) an alternate approach if the blocked action did something useful. Anyone who has ever worked with end-users can tell you that they are generally disinterested in learning anything about computer usage beyond how to use word and make a spreadsheet. Frankly, even as a highly technical user, I nearly always approve the UAC dialog even if I don't know the consequences. Since users lack knowledge, and Vista keeps asking esoteric/ambiguous questions, then users will always approve UAC dialogs.

So my question is, since UAC so clearly fails in its goal of making computing more secure, and substantially increases complexity, why is it common wisdom that turning off UAC is "not recommended"? For 99% of users, is there any true downside? Or has the community come up with ways to make UAC useful?"

Submission + - big ram laptops? (beyond 4gb)

Submitted by Fubari on Sunday February 25, 2007 @03:48AM

Fubari writes: Anybody know when laptops over 4gb might be coming out? Some of the devtools I want to run are just obscene ram-pigs. On the desktop I'm using now (win2003), it sucks up 1.6gb just to boot. By the time I log in and start doing work, it is stretching 2gb.

Move that to vista, add a vm-ware session or two, and I'm worried I'll be pushing 4gb.

I'm torn between buying a 4gb-max laptop now, or some mini-desktop that can fit in a set of luggage wheels. A friend of mine suggested something like this, but my first choice would be something designed to be portable.

XP On 8-MHz Pentium With 20 MB RAM 410

Posted by kdawson on Sunday February 25, 2007 @01:55AM from the golden-hourglass dept.

swehack writes "The guys over at winhistory.de managed to get their Windows XP Professional running on a very minimal box: an Intel Pentium clocked down to 8 MHz with 20 MB of RAM. (The installer won't work with less than 64 MB, but after installing you can remove memory.) The link has plenty of pictures of their progress in achieving this dubious milestone. They deserve a Golden Hourglass award for 'extreme waste of time.' What obscure hardware configurations have you managed to get Windows running on?"

Journal SPAM: Former Federal Prosecutor Publishes Indictment Of Bush 1

Journal by Jeremiah Cornelius on Saturday February 24, 2007 @10:38PM

Former federal prosecutor Elizabeth Vega has written a book containing a draft indictment of the so-called president and other top administration officials for conspiracy to defraud the American people on the issue of whether or not we needed to invade Iraq. The book also includes a fictional grand jury proceeding based on that indictment.

Journal SPAM: Scramble for Iraq's oil begins as troops start to pull out 4

Journal by Jeremiah Cornelius on Saturday February 24, 2007 @10:35PM

We are about to find out if the invasion of Iraq really was a war for oil. The country is on the verge of passing a petroleum law, which will set down rules for investing in its oil industry. That will set off a race among the foreign oil giants, scrambling for their slice of Iraq's vast oil riches. Britain's two world-leading oil companies, BP and Shell, both say they want to enter Iraq. Exxon, ConocoPhillips, Total, Russia's Lukoil and the Chinese

Feed Digital Deprivation in a Land of Affluence (nytimes.com)

From feed by nytfeed on Saturday February 24, 2007 @10:12PM

In the state with the highest per-capita income in the country, there are still pockets of people without broadband.

Submission + - TV delays drive viewers to piracy

Submitted by Astat1ne on Saturday February 24, 2007 @09:56PM

Astat1ne writes: The Register has a story about the delays Australian TV viewers are experiencing with overseas-produced series and how it is driving many of them to download the shows via BitTorrent and other peer-to-peer networks. From the story: "According to a survey based on a sample of 119 current or recent free-to-air TV series', Australian viewers are waiting an average of almost 17 months for the first run series' first seen overseas. Over the past two years, average Australian broadcast delays for free-to-air television viewers have more than doubled from 7.9 to 16.7 months." According to the article, the situation is compounded by the fact that Australian viewers are unable to download legal copies of the episodes from the US iTunes website and are turning to unauthorised means to get copies of their favorite shows.

Submission + - Creative Commons v3.0 licences launched

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 24, 2007 @08:57PM

An anonymous reader writes: Creative Commons announced the release of its licences on Friday 23 Feb 2007. Changes include "Clarifications Negotiated With Debian and MIT", CC-BY-SA "compatibility structure", endorsement control, etc.

Mr. Ballmer, Show Us the Code 462

Posted by kdawson on Saturday February 24, 2007 @08:56PM from the open-letter dept.

DigDuality writes "A new campaign, Showusthecode.com, requests every leader in the Linux world, and companies invested in Linux, to stand up and demand that Steve Ballmer show the world where Linux violates Microsoft's intellectual property. He has been making these claims since the Novell-Microsoft deal. If Microsoft answers this challenge — by May 1st — then Linux developers will be able to modify the code so that it remains 'free' software. If such infringing code doesn't exist, we will have called Microsoft's bluff. And if the campaign garners enough attention and if Steve Ballmer maintains silence, then the community and companies behind Linux can take the silence for the admission that it is."

Journal Journal: A Review of the Positive Features of Windows Vista

Journal by Slithe on Saturday February 24, 2007 @08:21PM

I wrote this paper for a Freshman English 'Community Based Writing Assignment.' I was assigned to write about an issue pertinent to a specific community and give an argument about it. Since I picked the Slashdot community, I decided to give a (controversial) argument for the adoption of Windows Vista. Here it is.

Windows Vista - Blue Sky as Far as the Eye Can See

Submission + - Windows PowerShell in Action

Submitted by

jlcopeland

on Saturday February 24, 2007 @08:21PM

jlcopeland writes: "For two decades I've hated the command prompt in DOS and Windows. Inconsistencies abound and everything is a special case. The fallback on a Microsoft box has been running a Unix shell under Cygwin or installing Microsoft's own Services for Unix (or its predecessor, Softway's Interix), or by scripting in Perl, but those only get you so far. Having co-written nine years worth of trade rag columns using mostly Perl as the implementation language for the samples, and thinking of every problem that comes across my desk as an excuse to write a little bit of scripting code, I've got some well-formed views about scripting languages and what works and what doesn't. That means I've been eagerly watching the development of PowerShell since it was called Monad. It's got the advantage of being a unified command-line interface and scripting language for Windows, even if it does have a dorky name.

Bruce Payette's Windows PowerShell in Action is a great overview of PowerShell, aimed at an audience that's got some experience with other scripting languages. Bruce's book is a big improvement over Andy Oakley's earlier book, Monad, which I had been using: it's more complete and it's up-to-date for the first release of PowerShell. It's got great (and sometimes amusing) examples, and feels like the Perl Camel book in flow. When I was reading it in the gym or someplace else away from the keyboard, I kept wanting to run back to the office to try something out. There are also useful "why it works this way" digressions, which provide a lot of context. Since Bruce was on the original development team, wrote most of the commandlets, and was responsible for much of the language design, those digressions are more authoratitive than the directors' commentary tracks on most DVDs.

In outline, the nine chapters in the first part of the book build up as you'd expect: overview and concepts, to data types, to operators, to regular expressions, to syntax, to functions, to interpreting errors. It covers that ground better than many language books that now litter my shelves. The explanations are clear, and the examples are almost all exactly on point. It took me a second reading to realize that my complaints about the regular expression sub-chapter wasn't about the chapter itself, but about some of the implementation decisions — that's an argument about style more than substance, and an observation about me, not about Bruce's writing or PowerShell. The first part of the book is the "mandatory reading," if you will, to get the language down and begin exploring on your own.

The second part is where the real applications are covered. That's the part that you especially want to read sitting next to the keyboard. As you'd expect, the example code is available from the publisher's web site to start you off — look for "Example Code" under "Resources." There's a very good discussion of text processing and how-to-handle XML, complete with some not-obvious warnings about traps to avoid. I've been working very carefully through the really good chapter on using GUIs with PowerShell, "Getting Fancy — .NET and WinForms," and my own proof of concept for that has been rebuilding an old C++ data entry application into a much simpler PowerShell script. As a nice side effect, Bruce's book (and the WinForms chapter in particular) provide a gentle overview to some concepts in the .NET framework, which I hadn't had an opportunity to delve into. The appendix on using PowerShell as a management application will be especially useful to system managers — that was one of the original PoweShell target audiences, and the language achieved that goal very well. The appendix on the language's grammar is really useful, and I keep flipping back to it to check on things. It's helping to cement the language in my head.

After Oakley's Monad appeared, there was a long gap before the next PowerShell book appeared. Bruce's book looks to be the first of the post-release wave. If all it had going for it was the authoratative pedigree of the writer, it might be worth it, but it's also well-written, well-organized, and thorough, which I think makes it invaluable as both a learning tool and a reference.

[Requisite disclaimer: Bruce Payette and I have now worked together at two companies, and try to grab a cup of coffee and trade rumors about once a week. I was one of the technical reviewers of this book when it was in manuscript form. However, I approached PowerShell as a Unix and Perl bigot, and I've been surprised and pleased to see it answer nearly all of my objections.]"

Feed Software Exploited by Pirates Goes to Work for Hollywood (nytimes.com)

From feed by nytfeed on Saturday February 24, 2007 @06:12PM

Hollywood studios are going into business with one of their biggest tormentors: the peer-to-peer pioneer BitTorrent.

Are Unfinished Products Now the Norm? 111

Posted by Cliff on Saturday February 24, 2007 @05:44PM from the not-ready-for-prime-time dept.

Paul asks: "Long ago when digital synthesizers first became commonly available, I recall a reviewer lamenting how he was getting more and more products to test whose software was unfinished and buggy and would require updates and fixes (this, before the internet allowed easy downloads, would have meant a journey to a specialist repair center). The review also commented how this common problem with computer software was spreading (this was before Windows 95 was out), and asked if it was going to become the norm. These days it seems ubiquitous, with PDAs, digital cameras, PVRs and all manner of complex goods needing after-market firmware fixes often simply to make them have the features promised in the adverts, let alone add enhancements. Are we seeing this spread beyond computers and computer-based products; jokes apart, will we be booting our cars up and installing flash updates every week to prevent computer viruses getting into the control systems? Can anyone comment on any recent purchases where they've been badly let down by missing features, or are still waiting for promised updates even whilst a new model is now on the shelves? How can we make the manufacturers take better responsibility? Apart from reading every review possible before making a purchase, what strategy do you have, or propose, for not being caught out?"

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