earlydaysofsin - Slashdot User

Woman Creates 3-D Erotic Book For the Blind 113

Posted by samzenpus on Monday April 12, 2010 @06:49PM from the is-that-a-book-in-your-pocket-or-are-you-just-happy-to-see-me dept.

Lisa J. Murphy has written an erotic book with tactile images for that special visually impaired porn connoisseur in your life. Tactile Mind contains explicit softcore raised images, along with Braille text and photos. From the article: "A photographer with a certificate in Tactile Graphics from the Canadian National Institute for the Blind, Murphy learned to create touchable images of animals for books for visually impaired children. Then she realized that there was a lack of such books for adults only. 'There are no books of tactile pictures of nudes for adults, at least the last time I looked around,' says Murphy. 'We're breaking new ground. Playboy has [an edition with] Braille wording, but there are no pictures.' She says that while we live in a culture saturated with sexual images, the blind have been 'left out.'"

Aussie Attorney General Says Gamers Are Scarier Than Biker Gangs 409

Posted by Soulskill on Tuesday February 16, 2010 @02:31PM from the well-perhaps-in-some-senses dept.

Sasayaki writes "South Australian Attorney-General Michael Atkinson claims, in an interview with Good Game, that gamers were more of a threat to his family than biker gangs. This is the man who has been the biggest opponent to Australia receiving an R18+ rating for video games and who has the power to veto any such law introducing it."

EVE Online Battle Breaks Records (And Servers) 308

Posted by Soulskill on Tuesday January 05, 2010 @02:09AM from the blame-it-on-the-torrents dept.

captainktainer writes "In one of the largest tests of EVE Online's new player sovereignty system in the Dominion expansion pack, a fleet of ships attempting to retake a lost star system was effectively annihilated amidst controversy. Defenders IT Alliance, a coalition succeeding the infamous Band of Brothers alliance (whose disbanding was covered in a previous story), effectively annihilated the enemy fleet, destroying thousands of dollars' worth of in-game assets. A representative of the alliance claimed to have destroyed a minimum of four, possibly five or more of the game's most expensive and powerful ship class, known as Titans. Both official and unofficial forums are filled with debate about whether the one-sided battle was due to difference in player skill or the well-known network failures after the release of the expansion. One of the attackers, a member of the GoonSwarm alliance, claims that because of bad coding, 'Only 5% of [the attackers] loaded,' meaning that lag prevented the attackers from using their ships, even as the defenders were able to destroy those ships unopposed. Even members of the victorious IT Alliance expressed disappointment at the outcome of the battle. CCP, EVE Online's publisher, has recently acknowledged poor network performance, especially in the advertised 'large fleet battles' that Dominion was supposed to encourage, and has asked players to help them stress test their code on Tuesday. Despite the admitted network failure, leaders of the attacking force do not expect CCP to replace lost ships, claiming that it was their own fault for not accounting for server failures. The incident raises questions about CCP's ability to cope with the increased network use associated with their rapid growth in subscriptions."

Comment Re:First Thoughts ... (Score 1) 526

by earlydaysofsin on Wednesday March 18, 2009 @06:25PM (#27248771) Attached to: Sun In Talks To Be Acquired By IBM

They'll keep all three and run them on POWER. The SPARC architecture is what is most likely to see an immediate fall of in investment. IBM doesn't really care what OS you run as long as it is seeing a slice of the pie. For instance "IBM" (read IBM Software Group) will happily recommend Windows on a cluster of x86 servers if you are considering WebSphere, they don't even care if it's IBM hardware (the margins are poor anyway) .. all the more cores that you need to be licensed for. "IBM" (read IBM Hardware) will happily recommend AIX, OpenSolaris or Linux running on POWER for the same solution .. they don't (really) care if you use AIX, they may mutter something about it being superior but at the end of the day their commission is based on the tin. IBM is not one company. Not even the hardware division is one company, try asking your rep whether a System P solution or a System X x3950 x86 Nehalem solution is better for a DWH and watch them go apoplectic. They are getting better at showing a unified front but its still like dealing with 6 companies. My prediction: 1. POWER7 (2009?) will support Solaris 2. There will be no more development of SPARC based systems, the tech will be immediately raided for goodies for POWER/Cell. 3. Solaris on System X will be a supported config 4. By POWER8 (2010-11?) all of the Solaris goodies will be ported to AIX (Containers .. WPARs were half baked anyway, ZFS) and new customers wont choose Solaris unless they are ideologically bound. This will lead to eventual natural demise of Solaris by 2013-14. 5. Glassfish will either be gutted or rolled in to WebSphere CE. More likely to be gutted, IBM needs a better product to compete with JBoss at the low end of the market. 6. StorageTek will be immediately rolled into System Storage. 7. Netbeans will be rolled into Eclipse.

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