filmchild - Slashdot User

The U.S. Navy's Doctrine of Laser Eye Surgery 547

Posted by timothy on Tuesday June 20, 2006 @12:00PM from the woodchipper-surgery dept.

The New York Times reports that laser eye surgery — now performed on nearly a third of every new class of midshipmen — is transforming Naval careers. Navy doctors are performing these operations with "assembly-line efficiency," allowing older pilots to continue flying, and those who might otherwise have been disqualified to pursue flight school. The number of procedures has reportedly climbed from 50 to 349 over the past five years. The Navy uses a different procedure than that used on civilians — grinding the cornea rather than cutting a flap — out of fears that the flap could come loose in supersonic combat.

WSJ on CraigsList and Zen of Classified Ads 278

Posted by timothy on Monday June 19, 2006 @03:45PM from the less-is-more dept.

prostoalex writes "Wall Street Journal profiles one of the Valley's most mysterious and secretive Web companies. A leader in online classifieds space and by some measures one of Web's top sites, CraigsList is ostensibly anti-ad and anti-self-promotion. From the article: "One industry analyst has estimated that Craigslist could generate 20 times that $25 million just by posting a couple of ads on each of its pages. If the estimate is to be believed, that's half a billion dollars a year being left on the table. What kind of company turns up its nose at $500 million?""

Jack Thompson's Violent Game Bill Signed Into Law 368

Posted by Zonk on Friday June 16, 2006 @03:31PM from the happy-day-for-media-savvy-lawyers dept.

simoniker writes "Louisiana Democratic Representative Roy Burrell's HB1381 bill, covering violent videogames, has been signed into law by Governor Kathleen Blanco. The law takes effect immediately, the latest in a very long line of video game-related bills specific to one U.S. State. The measure proposed by HB 1381, which was drafted with the help of controversial Florida attorney and anti-game activist Jack Thompson, allows a judge to rule on whether or not a videogame meets established criteria for being inappropriate for minors and be subsequently pulled from store shelves. A person found guilty of selling such a game to a minor would face fines ranging from $100 to $2,000, plus a prison term of up to one year. Needless to say, the ESA will likely be mounting a legal challenge to this bill in the very near future."

Blizzard, Square/Enix Ban Yet More Farmers 318

Posted by Zonk on Thursday June 15, 2006 @03:26PM from the rmt-for-the-lose dept.

Eurogamer has the news that both Blizzard and Square/Enix have banned another batch of players for farming. The number of accounts, and the amount of money removed from the economy, is astonishing. From the article: "According to the World of Warcraft website, some 30,000 accounts were banned last month - and, as a result, more than 30 million gold were removed from the economy across all realms ... Based on the results of this investigation, more than 250 [FFXI] accounts among those found to be involved in large-scale RMT operations have been terminated... Thanks to these measures, more than 250 billion gil has been removed from circulation."

Comment Linux and the average user... (Score 1, Interesting) 946

by filmchild on Tuesday December 27, 2005 @05:40PM (#14347805) Attached to: Linux's Difficulty with Names

As a person who is trying to get into Linux, I'm glad someone brought this issue up.

Coming fresh from a Windows environment to Linux, one of the first things you notice is the plethora of ridiculous and sometimes mystifing program and command names. I realize that to a programmer, code junkie, or any other overly technically inclined individual, the inside joke with the prefixes of G and K everywhere is chuckle-worthy. To everyone else, it seems like either a silly joke or deliberate obfuscation. To a new user, you feel like you're too stupid to get what the point of naming something 'Gaim', 'Xine' or 'LiVES' is. The worst offender (and shining case point) is GIMP.

This is not to say that this problem is universal with Linux software. There are plenty of examples of well-named, easy to remember, and relevant names in the Linux library. OpenOffice, MP3c, and Muse are all well named programs that have some relationship to the work they perform.

My point in all this is to say that if Linux is ever going to become mainstream (and by mainstream, I mean my mother and little sister use it): it's simply got to grow out of the Alpha Geek culture it was created in. I firmly believe the biggest problems with Linux right now is the lack of a truly slick GUI and the God-awful naming conventions. These two issues conspire to make Linux look like an out of control Ham Radio project to the average user. Regardless of the disdain that some people on /. have for average users, they are the people Linux will have to cater to if it will ever be anything more than a robust server platform and a hacker playground. It's a exercise in futility to attempt and point out the disassociative names used in Windows programs because more than a few of them already have become so popular that they have become synonyms of the functions they perform. Linux doesn't have that luxury. The attitude that these kinds of issues are only problems to people who haven't 'learned' Linux will keep Linux on the back burner.

Too bad I've got such horrible Karma, I doubt anyone will ever see this.

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