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Firefox

Microsoft Hides Firefox Extension In Toolbar Update 285

Posted by CmdrTaco from the because-they-can dept.
Jan writes "As part of its regular Patch Tuesday, Microsoft released an update for its various toolbars, and this update came with more than just documented fixes. The update also installs an add-on for Internet Explorer and an extension for Mozilla Firefox, both without the user's permission."
Piracy

Study Claims $41.5 Billion In Portable Game Piracy Losses Over Five Years 316

Posted by Soulskill from the fair-and-balanced dept.
Gamasutra reports that Japan's Computer Entertainment Suppliers Association conducted a study to estimate the total amount of money lost to piracy on portable game consoles. The figure they arrived at? $41.5 billion from 2004 to 2009. Quoting: "CESA checked the download counts for the top 20 Japanese games at what it considers the top 114 piracy sites, recording those figures from 2004 to 2009. After calculating the total for handheld piracy in Japan with that method, the groups multiplied that number by four to reach the worldwide amount, presuming that Japan makes up 25 percent of the world's software market. CESA and Baba Lab did not take into account other popular distribution methods for pirated games like peer-to-peer sharing, so the groups admit that the actual figures for DS and PSP software piracy could be much higher than the ¥3.816 trillion amount the study found."

Comment Bigger question? (Score 1) 321

by hasu (#25433611) Attached to: iGoogle Users Irate About Portal's Changes
There's an obvious pattern emerging here. The same "outrage" with the New Facebook, Yahoo! Profiles, and iGoogle? I think the bigger question is whether or not these UI overhauls are actually "outrageous," or whether users are just extremely opposed to change.

And if these changes are really so horrible (or even if they're not), what purpose do they serve - to improve upon a service that users don't want improved upon? It could just be a vocal minority. On the other hand, what's the point of user feedback when it gets blatantly ignored? All three of the sites I mentioned have been pretty hard-asses about users accepting these changes in stride.
Supercomputing

Submission + - Brain-like Computer Made From Duroquinone

Submitted by hasu
hasu writes: Scientists at the National Institute for Materials Science at Tsukuba in Japan have created a device that can simultaneously carry out 16 times the operations of a normal computer transistor, and hope that eventually it will reach a level of about 1000 times the operations. Inspired by brain cells, a sharp needle sends an electrical pulse to a collection of molecules known as duroquinone. A single duroquinone is surrounded by sixteen others, and weak chemical bonds allow a pulse to the central duroquinone to shift all seventeen molecules in a variety of ways. Each duroquinone has four different "settings," so a single pulse can have 4^16 = 4.3 billion outcomes, as opposed to a normal 2-state bit setting.

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