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Comment I Orders, and Why is This News? (Score 1, Informative) 285

I got one, took me a long time to get through the servers being jammed. But why is this news? I know, every time we we post a Slashdot story about hammering a server we should post it again! Brilliant! I just doubled the amount of stories on Slashdot. Maybe infinitely if we keep on crashing them.

Comment Re:DotA legacy (Score 1) 118

uh, there are plenty of changes to this game. Orb stacking change, new heroes, new unique abilities never seen in DoTA (Zephyr), courier abilities, reconnecting, stats, matchmaking, maps, new graphics for well known models, lots of balancing with items. Also your argument (I would say QQing) about casters not scaling in any meaningful way is bullshit. 1) Casters are more powerful early compared to carries and are usually support. 2) Carries (usually agility heroes) are underpowered at the beginning of the game. 3) It is your playground as a caster early game. You do good there, you are likely going to win. 4) Like hell you don't scale well. Zeus from DotA scaled to do more damage as everyone else got more powerful. There are lots of examples. 5) Caters are usually support. It's like you're complaining that you choose a cleric to heal in a MMO and can't dps well now. That is what is great, after 1 game you can pick a new hero. Full of crap again about not making a move. The ones who make move are the winners. A key gank one a hero. A tower push, an awesome ult pulled off to coordinate your team annihilating the other side. I could go on and on about other points... My guess is you're a n00b at the game still. Which is fine. The learning curve to this game hurts as much as Eve Online.
Piracy

Sony Joins the Offensive Against Pre-Owned Games 461

BanjoTed writes "In a move to counter sales of pre-owned games, EA recently revealed DLC perks for those who buy new copies of Mass Effect 2 and Battlefield: Bad Company 2. Now, PlayStation platform holder Sony has jumped on the bandwagon with similar plans for the PSP's SOCOM: Fireteam Bravo 3. '[Players] will need to register their game online before they are able to access the multiplayer component of the title. UMD copies will use a redeemable code while the digital version will authenticate automatically in the background. Furthermore ... anyone buying a pre-owned copy of the game will be forced to cough up $20 to obtain a code to play online."
PC Games (Games)

Valve's Battle Against Cheaters 336

wjousts writes "IEEE Spectrum takes a look behind the scenes at Valve's on-going efforts to battle cheaters in online games: 'Cheating is a superserious threat,' says [Steam's lead engineer, John] Cook. 'Cheating is more of a serious threat than piracy.' The company combats this with its own Valve Anti-Cheat System, which a user consents to install in the Steam subscriber agreement. Cook says the software gets around anti-virus programs by handling all the operations that require administrator access to the user's machine. So, how important is preventing cheating? How much privacy are you willing to sacrifice in the interests of a level playing field? 'Valve also looks for changes within the player's computer processor's memory, which might indicate that cheat code is running.'"

Windows 95 Almost Autodetected Floppy Disks 334

bonch writes "Windows 95 almost shipped with a technique for detecting whether a floppy disk was inserted without spinning up the drive. Microsoft's floppy driver developer discovered a sequence of commands that detected a disk without spinup — unfortunately, unspecified behavior in the floppy hardware specification meant that half the drives worked one way and half the other, each giving opposite results for the detection routine. Microsoft considered a dialog prompting the user to insert a disk to 'train' the routine, but the idea was scrapped."
The Military

Oldest Weapons-grade Plutonium Found In Dump 552

Urchin writes "Researchers have just identified the first batch of weapons-grade plutonium ever made. The batch was produced as part of the Manhattan Project, but predates Trinity — the first nuclear weapon test — by seven months. It was unearthed in a waste pit at Hanford, Washington, inside a beaten up old safe."
Image

Hippies Say WiFi Network Is Harming Their Chakras 432

Anti-Globalism writes "A group of hippies is complaining that a recently installed WiFi mesh network in the UK village of Glastonbury is causing health problems. To combat the signals from the Wi-Fi hotspots, the hippies have placed orgone generators around the antennae." Although there have been many studies that show no correlation between WiFi and health issues the hippies say, "Yeah, well, you know, that's just, like, your opinion, man."
Portables

OLPC Downsizes Half of Its Staff, Cuts Sugar 379

One Laptop Per Chewbacca writes "Nicholas Negroponte, the leader of the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project, has announced that the organization will be laying off half of its staff, cutting salaries of the remaining employees, and ending its involvement in Sugar development. The organization has had serious problems with production and deployment and has been fragmented by ideological debates as Negroponte shifts the agenda away from software freedom and towards Windows. Ars Technica concludes: 'The OLPC project's extreme dependence on economy of scale has proven to be a fatal error. The organization was not able to secure the large bulk orders that it had originally anticipated and fell short of meeting its target $100 per unit price. The worldwide economic slowdown has made it even more difficult for OLPC to find developing countries that have cash to spare on education technology.'"

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