dikkietee - Slashdot User

Comment Coincidence! (Score 2, Informative) 5

by dikkietee on Thursday July 02, 2009 @08:24PM (#28566647) Attached to: A Ride On the Sorry Bus

In NZ (where I think this was taken - see the silver fern on the jersy in foreground and the anchor milk truck in background) the display on buses not in use alternates between "Sorry" and "Not in service". Sorry is quite possibly a coincidence.

Comment Re:really, no Left 4 Dead? (Score 1) 57

by dikkietee on Sunday March 22, 2009 @05:54PM (#27291655) Attached to: The Survival of Survival Horror

My boyfriend had NEVER played an FPS in his life, stumbled n00bishly through L4D on Easy, beat the campaign without a single death. To be fair though, L4D has an appeal to the non-FPS'er and has no tutorial mode, so a laughably easy mode is probably a good decision on Valve's part.

Why Windows Must (and Will) Go Open Source 555

Posted by timothy on Wednesday February 04, 2009 @07:00PM from the lacks-the-ring-of-inevitability dept.

Attila Dimedici writes "Charles Babcock of Information Week published an interesting article suggesting that Microsoft will have to at least to some degree take Windows open source if they want to stay in business. He suggests that the money to be made from the things MS builds on top of Windows (Office, Server, SQL Server, Exchange, Sharepoint, etc.) is so much greater than what can be made from Windows itself that MS will have to give up the revenue stream from Windows in order to maintain these other, more valuable, revenue streams."

Data Breaches Rose Sharply In 2008 43

Posted by CmdrTaco on Wednesday January 07, 2009 @12:44PM from the my-password-is-p4ssw0rd dept.

snydeq writes "According to the Identity Theft Resource Center, more than 35 million data records were breached in the US in 2008. Tracking media reports and disclosures companies are required to make by law, the ITRC noted a 47 percent increase in breaches last year at a range of well-known US companies and government entities. The majority of the lost data was neither encrypted nor protected by a password. A third of the breaches occurred at business entities. One in six breaches were attributed to insider theft, a figure that more than doubled between 2007 and 2008, ITRC said."

PC Grand Theft Auto IV Features SecuROM DRM 531

Posted by Soulskill on Friday November 28, 2008 @07:01PM from the players-are-pirates-qed dept.

arcticstoat writes "Game developer Rockstar has revealed that the forthcoming PC version of Grand Theft Auto IV will feature the controversial SecuROM 7 DRM system. Unlike some of EA's recent titles, such as Spore and Mass Effect, GTA IV won't limit the number of times that you can install the game, although SecuROM will be impossible to remove without leaving 'some traces' on your PC. Anyone hoping to avoid SecuROM by downloading the game form Steam will also be disappointed, as Rockstar says that all versions of the game will feature SecuROM, including digital versions online. On the plus side, Rockstar says that it's 'working with SecuROM to post information on our support pages regarding how to remove these inactive traces of the program for users who wish to do so.' Has Rockstar gotten a better balance between draconian DRM and fair copy protection here?"

Ethical Killing Machines 785

Posted by kdawson on Tuesday November 25, 2008 @03:53PM from the i-for-one-welcome dept.

ubermiester writes "The New York Times reports on research to develop autonomous battlefield robots that would 'behave more ethically in the battlefield than humans.' The researchers claim that these real-life terminators 'can be designed without an instinct for self-preservation and, as a result, no tendency to lash out in fear. They can be built without anger or recklessness ... and they can be made invulnerable to ... "scenario fulfillment," which causes people to absorb new information more easily if it agrees with their pre-existing ideas.' Based on a recent report stating that 'fewer than half of soldiers and marines serving in Iraq said that noncombatants should be treated with dignity and respect, and 17 percent said all civilians should be treated as insurgents,' this might not be all that dumb an idea."

Stardock Tried To Make Star Control, Master of Orion Sequels 125

Posted by Soulskill on Tuesday November 18, 2008 @12:16AM from the brought-to-you-by-frungy-the-sport-of-kings dept.

Gamasutra reports on comments from Stardock CEO Brad Wardell in which he described his efforts to revive two old but popular franchises: Star Control and Master of Orion. Quoting: "'I actually pitched Atari on a whole idea for a true successor to Star Control,' [he said], noting that the game would follow original series developer Toys for Bob's Star Control II rather than the Legend Entertainment-developed Star Control 3 ('We just pretend that never happened,' the CEO says of that release). ... Novato, California-based Toys for Bob has actually floated the idea of making its own Star Control II sequel, with co-creator Paul Reiche III indicating he has tossed potential design ideas around, but with the company now owned by publisher Activision the proposal seems to be stuck in limbo."

Square Enix Announces Supreme Commander 2 70

Posted by Soulskill on Wednesday November 12, 2008 @07:20PM from the branching-out dept.

arcticstoat writes "Supreme Commander 2 has now been officially announced, but with a surprise publishing partner on board — Square Enix. Gas Powered Games' original RTS game and its expansion pack, Forged Alliance, were published by THQ, who is no stranger to the RTS genre, but Square Enix has previously specialized in Japanese RPGs such as Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest. Explaining the move, Square Enix said in a statement that it 'has previously worked exclusively with Japanese development companies, so the decision to form strategic partnerships with developers located outside of Japan serves as a new cornerstone of its strategy to create games targeted primarily at consumers in Europe and North America. Additionally, Square Enix Group's foray into the real-time strategy genre is a significant expansion of its product lineup.'"

Researcher Warns of "Digital Dark Age" 367

Posted by Soulskill on Tuesday October 28, 2008 @07:10PM from the evaporating-digital-culture dept.

alphadogg writes "A assistant professor from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is sounding a warning that companies, the government and researchers need to come up with a plan for preserving our increasingly digitized data in light of shifting document management and other software platforms (think WordPerfect and floppy disks). Jerome P. McDonough, who teaches at the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, says there exists about 369 exabytes worth of data, and that includes some pretty hard to replace stuff, including tax files, email and photos. Open standards could play a key role in any preservation effort, he says. 'If we can't keep today's information alive for future generations, we will lose a lot of our culture,' McDonough said. Even over the course of 10 years, you can have a rapid enough evolution in the ways people store digital information and the programs they use to access it that file formats can fall out of date.'"

Judge Tells RIAA To Stop 'Bankrupting' Litigants 332

Posted by CmdrTaco on Tuesday October 28, 2008 @04:50PM from the also-bake-them-cookies dept.

NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "The Boston judge who has consolidated all of the RIAA's Massachusetts cases into a single case over which she has been presiding for the past 5 years delivered something of a rebuke to the RIAA's lawyers, we have learned. At a conference this past June, the transcript of which (PDF) has just been released, Judge Nancy Gertner said to them that they 'have an ethical obligation to fully understand that they are fighting people without lawyers ... to understand that the formalities of this are basically bankrupting people, and it's terribly critical that you stop it ...' She also acknowledged that 'there is a huge imbalance in these cases. The record companies are represented by large law firms with substantial resources,' while it is futile for self-represented defendants to resist. The judge did not seem to acknowledge any responsibility on her part, however, for having created the 'imbalance,' and also stated that the law is 'overwhelmingly on the side of the record companies,' even though she seems to recognize that for the past 5 years she has been hearing only one side of the legal story."

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