jjg - Slashdot User

UK Video Game Tax Cuts Sabotaged? 123

Posted by Soulskill on Monday June 28, 2010 @02:20AM from the i-wonder-if-it-rhymes-with-shmactivision dept.

ninjacheeseburger writes "Develop recently published an article claiming that the UK government was put under pressure by one of the biggest game companies in the world to cancel planned tax breaks for video game developers. This company had apparently viewed game tax relief as a measure that would have given the UK an unfair advantage over other nations."

Preserving Virtual Worlds 122

Posted by Soulskill on Tuesday June 22, 2010 @04:04AM from the how-will-they-play-starcon-2-in-2150 dept.

The Opposable Thumbs blog has an interview with Jerome McDonough of the University of Illinois, who is involved with the Preserving Virtual Worlds project. The goal of the project is to recognize video games as cultural artifacts and to make sure they're accessible by future generations. Here McDonough talks about some of the technical difficulties in doing so: "Take, for example, Star Raiders on the Atari 2600. If you're going to preserve this, you've got a couple of problems. The first is that it is on a cartridge that is designed to work on a particular system that is no longer manufactured. And as long as you've got a hardware dependency there, you're really not going to be able to preserve this material very long. What we have been looking at is how feasible is it for things that fundamentally all have some level of hardware dependency there — even Doom has dependencies on DLLs with an operating system, and on particular chipsets and architectures for playing. How do you take that and turn it into something that isn't as dependent on a particular physical piece of hardware. And to do that, you need information about that platform. You need technical specifications that allow you to basically reproduce a virtualization that may enable you to run the software in its original form in the future. So what we're trying to do is preserve not only the games, but preserve the knowledge that you would need to create a virtualization platform to play the game."

Cutting Umbilical Cord Early Eliminates Stem Cells 139

Posted by timothy on Wednesday May 26, 2010 @02:40PM from the just-leave-it-on-a-few-years dept.

GeneralSoh writes "Delaying clamping the umbilical cord at birth may have far-reaching benefits for your baby, according to researchers at the University of South Florida's Center of Excellence for Aging and Brain Repair — and should be delayed for at least a few minutes longer after birth. This new recommendation published in the most recent Journal of Cellular and Molecular Medicine (14:3) notes that delaying clamping the umbilical cord allows more umbilical cord blood and crucial stem cells to transfer from mama to baby."

Judge Chin Says He Will Cut the Google Book Settlement 38

Posted by timothy on Thursday April 01, 2010 @07:42PM from the why-not-horizontally dept.

Miracle Jones writes "In a move that has shocked the publishing world, Judge Denny Chin has filed a brief saying that he has decided to cut the Google Book Settlement in half, letting Google host the first half of every book the company has scanned, and letting other interested stakeholders fight for the rights to the rest. 'We think this is a hard decision, but a fair one,' said John Peter Franks for Google. 'We would like to be able to host and control whole books, but at least we get the front half.'"

The Future of Wind Power May Be Underground 223

Posted by samzenpus on Thursday March 11, 2010 @03:20AM from the blow-from-down-below dept.

Hugh Pickens writes "When the wind is blowing, it is usually the cheapest peaking power available. However utilities need consistent always-on power from large, cheap coal and nuclear power plants that are the backbone of the electric grid. Wired reports that operators are looking at Compressed Air Energy Storage (CAES) using abandoned mines and sandstones of the Midwest to store compressed-air. This converts the intermittent motions of the air into a steady power source by using it to run air compressors to pump air into an underground cave where it's stored under pressure. The first CAES plant in the United States actually went online in McIntosh, Alabama in 1991 where engineers created a geological pocket 900 feet long and up to 238 feet wide in a dome by pumping water into it to dissolve the rock salt. When the (briny) water was pumped back out, the salt resealed itself and they had an air-tight container."

Tricked Into Buying OpenOffice.org? 543

Posted by timothy on Thursday January 15, 2009 @05:03PM from the sucker-born-jede-Minute dept.

mldkfa writes "Recently I told a friend about OpenOffice and how it was a great alternative to the big name pay office suites. She went home and searched on Google for it and thought she found the website, filled typical registration information, and downloaded OpenOffice.org 3.0. The next time she opened her e-mail she found a request for 98 [Euro] for her 1-year subscription to OpenOffice.org 3.0 from the company that she downloaded it from. Apparently the EULA stated this cost and here in Germany she is required to pay up. So I thought I would ask Slashdot, should she pay? On the OpenOffice.org German website there is a warning of these schemes being legal. Shouldn't Sun change the license of OpenOffice.org to protect their fans or are they doing this to protect someone else? It has really made me think about recommending it to any more friends." Below, read Google's translation of the warning; it wouldn't be the first time that open source software has been lightly repackaged and sold in ways that should raise eyebrows among anyone familiar with the wide, free availability of the same apps.

Comment Re:Why GSM Sucks for America (Score 1) 141

by jjg on Friday October 05, 2001 @04:13PM (#2393518) Attached to: Voicestream Quietly Releases GPRS In The U.S.

Note that the above figure that it takes 3.5 times more towers to operate GSM than CDMA is based on the cited page's metric named "maximum talk range from a tower (pls. note you will need a carkit for both to achieve these numbers)". I doubt carkit ranges are an effective measure of number of towers needed to cover an area.

More important limiting factors on tower coverage are issues like how many channels can be used per slice of radio spectrum, and how many slices of spectrum are created out of a provider's licensed spectrum bands (at least in America), which is affected by relative size of the provider's licensed spectrum are in a given market, etc etc.

To provide enough coverage in non-rural areas, a provider puts up more cells in an area with a smaller transmission radius, no matter which technology. So, the limiting factors become how many towers (cells) in an area, and how efficiently the technology uses however much radio spectrum it has.

As far as I have heard, CDMA made a great many promises on its future abilities, but has not grown as much as GSM has. I'm sure that can be disputed, but my main point here is that the above post is incorrect in its main point. It's also funny in that the link cited seems to be much more in favor of GSM than CDMA. And I can definitely say from experience that CDMA voice quality leaves a lot to be desired in what I've heard.

--Jim

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