Crazzaper - Slashdot User

Crytek Thinks Free Game Demos Will Soon Be Extinct 379

Posted by Soulskill on Friday April 16, 2010 @05:48PM from the not-like-we-could-run-a-crysis-2-demo-anyway dept.

An anonymous reader writes with this quote from Develop: "The CEO of indie studio Crytek has defended EA's divisive 'premium downloadable content' strategy, while also predicting the extinction of free game demos. ... Crytek's co-founder Cevat Yerli said he wasn't sure that a demo of Crysis 2 was going to be released. He said: 'A free demo is a luxury we have in the game industry that we don't have in other industries such as film. Because we've had this free luxury for so long, now there are plans to change this people are complaining about it. The reality is that we might not see any free game demos in the long term. ... Yes it is quite unpopular, but this is a messaging issue. The problem with any new strategy like this is it initially may appear as a blood-hungry, money-grabbing strategy. But I think there is a genuine interest here to give gamers something more than a small demo released for free. Really, what this is, is an attempt to salvage a problem. The industry is still losing a lot of money to piracy as the market becomes more online-based. So it’s encouraging to see strategies outlined to combat this.'"

Submission + - Google Drafts Cloud Printing Plan for Chrome OS (infoworld.com)

Submitted by

snydeq

on Friday April 16, 2010 @03:09PM

snydeq writes: "Google is unveiling early-stage designs, software code, and documentation of a project whose goal is to let users of the company's Chrome OS print documents to any printer from any application. Called Google Cloud Print, the technology would dispense with the need to install printer drivers by routing print jobs from Web, desktop, and mobile applications via a Chrome OS Web-hosted broker. 'Rather than rely on the local operating system — or drivers — to print, apps can use Google Cloud Print to submit and manage print jobs. Google Cloud Print will then be responsible for sending the print job to the appropriate printer with the particular options the user selected, and returning the job status to the app.'"

Submission + - Why Mozilla Needs to Go Into Survival Mode (tomshardware.com)

Submitted by Crazzaper on Friday April 09, 2010 @12:17PM

Crazzaper writes: I have been using Firefox for the longest time (many years), and the war of the browsers have been around for longer than that. It just so happens that now we have a lot of options out there, IE, FF, Chrome, Opera, Safari, and others. People are always talking about how one browser is going to take down another. But maybe that's not the issue at all. It seems very possible that a browser, like Firefox, can be taken down by multiple browsers at once, whether or not there was any intention to compete directly with Firefox or not. I hadn't seen it this way, but I do now.

Submission + - Webkit2 (appleinsider.com)

Submitted by 99BottlesOfBeerInMyF on Thursday April 08, 2010 @10:06PM

99BottlesOfBeerInMyF writes: Anders Carlsson and Sam Weinig over at Apple just announced Webkit2, a rework of the Webkit engine that powers Chrome and Safari. This new version of Webkit incorporates the same style of split process model that provides stability in Chrome, but built directly into the framework so all browsers based upon Webkit will be able to gain the same level of sandboxing and stability. Appleinsider has a writeup. Both Palm and the Epiphany team are going to be happy about this.

Submission + - Economist: Shorten copyright terms (economist.com)

Submitted by lxmota on Thursday April 08, 2010 @02:32PM

lxmota writes: The Economist says that long copyright terms are hindering creativity, and that shortening them is the way to go: 'Largely thanks to the entertainment industry’s lawyers and lobbyists, copyright’s scope and duration have vastly increased. In America, copyright holders get 95 years’ protection as a result of an extension granted in 1998, derided by critics as the "Mickey Mouse Protection Act". They are now calling for even greater protection, and there have been efforts to introduce similar terms in Europe. Such arguments should be resisted: it is time to tip the balance back.'

Microsoft Announces End of the Line For Itanium Support 227

Posted by Soulskill on Monday April 05, 2010 @05:37PM from the development-dollars-well-spent dept.

WrongSizeGlass writes "Ars Technica is reporting that Microsoft has announced on its Windows Server blog the end of its support for Itanium. 'Windows Server 2008 R2, SQL Server 2008 R2, and Visual Studio 2010 will represent the last versions to support Intel's Itanium architecture.' Does this mean the end of Itanium? Will it be missed, or was it destined to be another DEC Alpha waiting for its last sunset?"

Submission + - 5 reasons tablets suck, and you won't buy one (tomshardware.com)

Submitted by Crazzaper on Saturday March 20, 2010 @11:03AM

Crazzaper writes: When the iPad launched, a lot of people who didn't care about tablets came out to bash Apple's new device. These same people said "I would have bought it if it had a full OS" but in reality full OS tablets existed before the iPad rumors even started. This article gives an interesting perspective on why this happened, and argues that there's five big reasons why despite more powerful tablets exists but no one cares.

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