PixelThis - Slashdot User

Comment Re:BBS (Score 1) 181

by PixelThis on Sunday November 13, 2016 @02:42PM (#53276645) Attached to: Re-Discovering The 'Lost Civilization' of Dial-Up BBS's

I ran a PCBoard BBS for almost 15 years, mid-80's to late 90's. Wrote a door game called Imperium and made a few thousand dollars from it. Used to have a folks running online-RPG's in the forums... I think that was why my board lasted as long as it did, the GM's and players just kept calling in and playing their games after most all of the door gamers had moved onto live-network games.

Comment Anonymous really? (Score 2) 85

by PixelThis on Friday April 25, 2014 @05:28PM (#46844569) Attached to: Verizon's Plan To Snoop On Its Customers

So they create an "anonymous, unique identifier" when you register on their website. Anonymous for who? They obviously have a link between you, the registration on the website, and this unique identifier. Where does the anonymous bit come in?

Submission + - Pay what you want: a sustainable business model?

Submitted by revealingheart on Thursday December 23, 2010 @06:14PM

revealingheart writes: As the 2010 comes to a close, this could be remembered as the year that pay-what-you-want pricing reached the mainstream. Along with the two Humble Indie Bundles, YAWMA offer a game and music bundle, and Rock, Paper and Shotgun reports on the curiously named Bundle of Wrong, made to help fund a developer who contracted pneumonia.

More examples include Reddit briefly offered their users to choose what to pay when they were in financial difficulties; the Indie Music Cancer Drive launched Songs for the Cure for cancer research; and Mavaru launched an online store where users can buy albums for any amount. Can pay-what-you-want become a sustainable mainstream business model? — or destined to be a continued experiment for smaller groups?

Submission + - Scientifically, You Are Likely In The Slowest Line (hothardware.com) 1

Submitted by

MojoKid

on Thursday December 23, 2010 @04:15PM

MojoKid writes: "As you wait in the checkout line for the holidays, your observation is most likely correct. That other line IS moving faster than yours. That's what Bill Hammack (the Engineer Guy), from the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at the University of Illinois — Urbana proves in this video. Ironically, the most efficient set-up is to have one line feed into several cashiers. This is because if any one line slows because of an issue, the entry queue continues to have customers reach check-out optimally. However, this is also perceived by customers as the least efficient, psychologically."

10 Dos and Don'ts To Make Sysadmins' Lives Easier 246

Posted by timothy on Thursday December 23, 2010 @03:57PM from the sorry-dave-can't-let-you-do-that dept.

CowboyRobot writes "Tom Limoncelli has a piece in 'Queue' summarizing the Computer-Human Interaction for Management of Information Technology's list of how to make software that is easy to install, maintain, and upgrade. FTA: '#2. DON'T make the administrative interface a GUI. System administrators need a command-line tool for constructing repeatable processes. Procedures are best documented by providing commands that we can copy and paste from the procedure document to the command line.'"

Submission + - Skype Slowly Restores Service To Users (computerworld.com)

Submitted by CWmike on Thursday December 23, 2010 @03:39PM

CWmike writes: Skype continues to slowly recover after an outage caused by problems with its peer-to-peer interconnection system. The latest estimates say that 10 million users are now online, according to a blog post. Skype's outage began on Wednesday. Skype continues to slowly recover after an outage caused by problems with its peer-to-peer interconnection system. The latest estimates say that 10 million users are now online, according to a blog post. Skype's outage began on Wednesday.

Submission + - FCC Chair Seeks Comcast-NBC Merger Conditions (huffingtonpost.com) 1

Submitted by Anarki2004 on Thursday December 23, 2010 @03:12PM

Anarki2004 writes: From the article: The head of the Federal Communications Commission proposed regulatory conditions Thursday to ensure that cable giant Comcast Corp. cannot stifle video competition once it takes control of NBC Universal. Comcast is seeking government approval to buy a 51 percent stake in NBC Universal from General Electric Co. for $13.8 billion in cash and assets. The deal would create a media powerhouse that both produces and distributes content.

Submission + - Will Patent Make NCAA Football Playoffs Impossible

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 23, 2010 @03:11PM

An anonymous reader writes: Mark Cuban recently announced plans to create a college football playoff system, which many people (including President Obama) have been claiming has been needed for years. However, after doing so, Cuban received an odd emails, claiming that he'd better watch out, because a college football playoff system is patented and anything he did would likely infringe. The patent wasn't named, but Techdirt believes it has found the patent in question, along with another pending patent application (which has some amusing errors in it — such as an abstract that says it's about a boat fender, rather than a sports playoff system). So is it really true that some random guy in Arizona is the only person who can legally set up such a college football playoff system?

Submission + - Aerial Video Footage of New York Taken By RC Plane (singularityhub.com)

Submitted by kkleiner on Thursday December 23, 2010 @02:59PM

kkleiner writes: Expert remote control pilot Raphael “Trappy” Pirker recently took his 54 inch Zephyr model plane on a harrowing tour of Manhattan and the surrounding area. The best part: his RC vehicle was fitted with a camera that wirelessly transmitted an amazing recording of everything it saw – Pirker was piloting his craft with this visual feed. As you can see in the video, the results were spectacular. The plane looks to be flying within a few feet of buildings and whizzing past bridges with ease. You have to check out around 2:01 when he starts to buzz right by the Statute of Liberty. Phenomenal! Could the new era of personal video recording be spreading to the sky?

Submission + - Navy uses railgun to launch jet fighters (coolest-gadgets.com)

Submitted by

Phoghat

on Wednesday December 22, 2010 @02:30PM

Phoghat writes: "In 2015 the aircraft carrier USS Gerald R. Ford will take to the seas and use an electric railgun to launch planes, instead of steam powered catapults."

Submission + - Audio and video patents haunt Apple and Android

Submitted by FlorianMueller on Wednesday December 22, 2010 @02:17PM

FlorianMueller writes: There seems to be no end to those smartphone patent suits. This week's special: audio and video patents that its owners claim are key to formats like MP3 and MPEG 2. The targets: Apple and Android. On Monday, Alcatel-Lucent subsidiary Multimedia Patent Trust filed a patent infringement suit in Southern California against Apple, LG (over 64 different phones including some Android-based ones), Canon and TiVo over four video patents. Fortunately for Apple and LG, none of the patents asserted against those two companies are likely to be in force by the time the judge decides, so there's no risk of an injunction. They may nevertheless have to pay for past damages. The same company once obtained a record $1.5 billion jury verdict against Microsoft but saw it slashed by a judge. And on Tuesday, Hybrid Audio LLC filed a suit in Eastern Texas, asserting a patent against various Apple products and certain Android-based products from HTC and Dell.

Submission + - Banknotes go electronic to outwit counterfeiters (newscientist.com)

Submitted by suraj.sun on Wednesday December 22, 2010 @01:09PM

suraj.sun writes: Modern banknotes contain up to 50 anti-counterfeiting features, but adding electronic circuits programmed to confirm the note's authenticity is perhaps the ultimate deterrent, and would also help to simplify banknote tracking.

A team of German and Japanese researchers created arrays of thin-film transistors (TFTs) by carefully depositing gold, aluminium oxide and organic molecules directly onto the notes through a patterned mask, building up the TFTs layer by layer. The result is an undamaged banknote containing around 100 organic TFTs, each of which is less than 250 nanometres thick and can be operated with voltages of just 3V. Such small voltages could be transmitted wirelessly by an external reader, such as the kind that communicates with the RFID tags found on many products

NewScientist: http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20827915.200-banknotes-go-electric-to-outwit-counterfeiters.html

Submission + - Is Net Neutrality really needed? (wsj.com) 1

Submitted by darrad on Wednesday December 22, 2010 @12:41PM

darrad writes: An opinion piece over at the Wall Street Journal lays out an alternate theory on why we have new regulations from the FCC on Net Neutrality. There is a lot of talk about this subject, particularly among the tech sector. Most of the talk centers around preventing companies from charging more for traffic or black holing other traffic. However, the question should be asked, is granting control over the Internet to political appointees the way to go? Regardless of your political point of view shouldn't the Internet remain free from regulation?

The World's Smallest Legible Font 280

Posted by samzenpus on Tuesday November 16, 2010 @04:25PM from the because-he-can dept.

hasanabbas1987 writes "From the article: 'Well 'technically' they aren't the smallest fonts in the world as if they were you wouldn't be able to read even a single letter, but, you should be able to read the entire paragraph in the picture given above... we did. A Computer science professor called Ken Perlin designed these tiny fonts and you can fit 500 reasonable words in a resolution of 320 x 240 space. There are at the moment the smallest legible fonts in the world.'"

Inventor Creates Flotation Device Bazooka 144

Posted by samzenpus on Wednesday October 06, 2010 @01:37PM from the point-shoot-and-save dept.

Australian inventor Sam Adeloju has won the £20,000 ($32,000) James Dyson Award for inventing the coolest piece of life-saving equipment ever. The Longreach is a modified bazooka which can fire an expanding flotation device up to 150m to a person in distress. From the article: "Mr Adeloju told NEWS.com.au that the Longreach was inspired by a grenade-launch training session with the Army Reserves. Weighing just 3.5kg, it shoots the rescue device 150m in a manner similar to the way the army uses a grenade launcher to deliver flares and aerial observation devices. Hitting the water activates an expanding foam unit in the Longreach rescue unit, which also incorporates LED illumination and a vortex air whistle."

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