Nairoz - Slashdot User

Will 2009 Be the Turning Point For SSDs? 290

Posted by Soulskill on Saturday December 13, 2008 @06:09AM from the year-of-something-on-the-something dept.

Iddo Genuth writes "Since first entering the consumer market about two years ago, solid state drives (SSDs) have improved significantly. While prices remain substantially higher than conventional magnetic storage, it is predicted that in 2009 SSDs will finally make an impact on both the consumer and business markets bringing blazing fast speeds at reasonable prices for the first time — will it finally happen?" It seems likely, as Samsung began mass-producing both 128GB and 256GB SSDs this year. Intel and Micron have also posted recent breakthroughs which will help to bring the technology into the mainstream.

HP Pushes Open Source For Small Businesses 118

Posted by Soulskill on Saturday December 13, 2008 @03:28AM from the financial-motivation dept.

ruphus13 writes "HP finally begins to actively push open source in its products. From the post, 'HP has been quirky over the years when it comes to open source. It has been, traditionally, a company that supports open source — especially in larger enterprises... Wednesday, it announced two new open source products, geared to small businesses and educational institutions. HP plans on including its 'Mozilla Firefox for HP Virtual Solution' on more of its business class desktop PCs (to a total of seven models between the HP Compaq dc/dx lines in the US, eight models worldwide). Come December 15th, HP will also offer Novell's SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop on its HP Compaq dc5850 model. The base SLED-equipped model will cost $519, and features the usual open source suspects for the small business setting — OpenOffice, and mail clients such as Evolution.'"

Ubisoft Testing PC Prince of Persia Without DRM 254

Posted by Soulskill on Saturday December 13, 2008 @02:20AM from the good-on-ya dept.

Ars Technica reports that the upcoming PC version of Ubisoft's Prince of Persia will not feature any sort of copy protection. (Not including Steam downloads, of course.) After the backlash in recent months over the DRM in games like Spore and GTA IV, Ubisoft is giving gamers the chance to demonstrate that DRM actually increases piracy. One of Ubisoft's community reps had this to say about their decision: "You`re right when you say that when people want to pirate the game they will but DRM is there to make it as difficult as possible for pirates to make copies of our games. A lot of people complain that DRM is what forces people to pirate games but as PoP PC has no DRM we`ll see how truthful people actually are. Not very, I imagine. Console piracy is something else entirely and I`m sure we`ll see more steps in future to try to combat that."

Comment More than 2-3% of a population would benefit (Score 2, Interesting) 164

by Nairoz on Sunday June 17, 2007 @04:08PM (#19543449) Attached to: Closed Captioning In Web Video?

According to the Royal National Institute for Deaf People (A UK charity), there are nearly nine million people deaf and hard of hearing people in the UK alone. I'm sure a fair proportion of these would benefit from subtitling for online content - I certainly would. I am deaf in one ear, and wear a hearing aid to help boost what remains of my hearing in the other, and have difficulty understanding a lot of online content. I find the only reliable medium for subtitles to be DVDs - TV subtitling in the UK differs widely depending on network. And when the content is available online, for example from the BBC, subtitling is not present - even for content that was subtitled on TV!

Whilst it needs to be done, I doubt it will be - seems there's just not enough money in it. Guess I'll have to keep on buying those DVDs, or missing out on a lot of content.

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