Vedanuzal - Slashdot User

Comment Captain Obvious (Score 2, Informative) 223

by Vedanuzal on Friday November 19, 2010 @07:18PM (#34287000) Attached to: Uncertainty Sets Limits On Quantum Nonlocality

From the Quantum Physics that I did at uni I would have thought that the relationship stated in the article was blindingly obvious, but then the way Scientists like to complicate Quantum Physics is one of the reasons I'm glad I never completed the degree in Applied Physics. They have the same problem lawyers do, the more complicated it sound the more important they feel.

Kuwait Issues Order To Block YouTube 180

Posted by timothy on Monday September 22, 2008 @09:53PM from the singed-and-composed dept.

Bashar Abdullah writes "Kuwait Ministry of Communications have issued orders to all ISPs to block YouTube, after some offensive videos to Quran and prophet were posted there. YouTube is 15% of Kuwaiti traffic, ranked #3 on Alexa for Kuwait. Funny thing is, those videos they refer to have been removed and I can't reach them anymore."

Bad Signs For Blu-ray 1276

Posted by timothy on Monday September 22, 2008 @09:38PM from the anguish-languish dept.

Ian Lamont writes "More than six months after HD-DVD gave up the ghost, there are several signs that Sony's rival Blu-ray format is struggling to gain consumer acceptance. According to recent sales data from Nielsen, market share for Blu-ray discs in the U.S. is declining, and Sony and its Blu-ray partners are trying several tactics to boost the format — including free trial discs bundled into magazines and cheap Blu-ray players that cost less than $200."

Stanford Teaching MBAs How To Fight Open Source 430

Posted by timothy on Monday September 22, 2008 @07:43PM from the then-they-fight-you dept.

mjasay writes "As if the proprietary software world needed any help, two business professors from Harvard and Stanford have combined to publish 'Divide and Conquer: Competing with Free Technology Under Network Effects,' a research paper dedicated to helping business executives fight the onslaught of open source software. The professors advise 'the commercial vendor ... to bring its product to market first, to judiciously improve its product features, to keep its product "closed" so the open source product cannot tap into the network already built by the commercial product, and to segment the market so it can take advantage of a divide-and-conquer strategy.' The professors also suggest that 'embrace and extend' is a great model for when the open source product gets to market first. Glad to see that $48,921 that Stanford MBAs pay being put to good use. Having said that, such research is perhaps a great, market-driven indication that open source is having a serious effect on proprietary technology vendors."

Mythic GM Talks Warhammer Launch, Banning Gold Sellers 251

Posted by Soulskill on Monday September 22, 2008 @07:20PM from the ban-early-and-often dept.

Gamasutra has an interview with Mark Jacobs, GM and co-founder of Mythic, about the recent launch of Warhammer Online. He talks about handling the heavy demands on the servers, and how the launch is going better than the opening of Dark Age of Camelot (during which "somebody parked a truck on our internet"). Jacobs also blogged about the glee with which he and his team have been banning gold spammers: "We don't wait and let them stay in the game and ban them en-masse, my guys ban their useless, time-consuming butts right away. We have a strike team whose sole job it is to get these guys off our servers as quickly as possible. This weekend, we unveiled a new wrinkle in the fight against them, the public ban message. Players on our Phoenix Throne server have been treated to special messages when a gold seller/spammer is banned. I've given them a wide leash to come up with creative messages to tell the entire community who has been banned and we keep it within the Warhammer universe."

How the LSB Keeps Linux One Big Happy Family 171

Posted by Soulskill on Monday September 22, 2008 @05:22PM from the behave-or-i'll-turn-this-distro-around-right-now dept.

blackbearnh writes "The Linux Standard Base is the grand attempt to create a binary-level interface that application developers can use to create software which will run on any distribution of Linux. Theodore Tso, who helps maintain the LSB, talked recently with O'Reilly News about what the LSB does behind the scenes, how it benefits ISVs and end users, and what the greatest challenges left on the plate are. 'One of the most vexing problems has been on the desktop where the Open Source community has been developing new desktop libraries faster than we can standardize them. And also ISVs want to use those latest desktop libraries even though they may not be stable yet and in some ways that's sort of us being a victim of our own success. The LSB desktop has been getting better and better and despite all the jokes that for every year since I don't know probably five years ago, every year has been promoted as the year of the Linux desktop. The fact of the matter is the Linux desktop has been making gains very, very quickly but sometimes as a result of that some of the bleeding edge interfaces for the Linux desktop haven't been as stable as say the C library. And so it's been challenging for ISVs because they want to actually ship products that will work across a wide range of Linux distributions and this is one of the places where the Linux upstream sources haven't stabilized themselves.'"

Playstation 3 Video DRM Only Allows One Download 316

Posted by Soulskill on Monday September 22, 2008 @03:09PM from the how-generous dept.

Nom du Keyboard points out an Ars Technica report that the Sony Video Store on the Playstation Network is running some rather restrictive DRM. When purchasing movies, users are allowed just one download — even if they delete the movie to make space and want to download it again on the same machine. A Sony representative told Ars that users could be issued an extra download as a "one-time courtesy" with help from customer support. Quoting: "When we're discussing a system that seems to release new hardware configurations every few months and a company that actively encourages you to swap hard drives yourself, it appears users are going to run into problems if they ever decide they want to switch out their hard drive or even upgrade into a larger system; the information on the back-up utility makes it clear that video content can't be moved over to new system, although new hard drives should be safe. Sony claims that the PS3 is operating on a 10-year timeline: is one extra download, which you need to contact customer service to apply for, good enough for the next decade?"

Comment Chrome memory eater (Score 1, Interesting) 114

by Vedanuzal on Friday September 12, 2008 @11:29PM (#24909805) Attached to: Development, Privacy, and Standards for Chrome

I read the comic book style chrome blurb that google put up and part of it proclaimed that chrome would not crash your system like other browsers cause it opens each tab in a separate process and you can just close the tab to release the memory.
Well being a software engineer i installed chrome, opened a few tabs and task manager and well i watched the memory grow. Instead of one process that leaks memory you now have numerous processes that leak memory.
And they all seemed to get to 10Mb very fast and you could just sit there and watch the Kb tick over, all while your not doing anything. (the first tab was at 25mb)
So if your like me and use a minimum of 5 tabs I bet the amount of memory that you use for chrome will actually be more than firefox as there will be a memory leak in each tab and they will all grow.
But at least it gives the google devs and excuse not to fix the memory leaks.

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