jkastner - Slashdot User

Comment I have a fun time with these calls (Score 2) 246

by jkastner on Saturday December 20, 2014 @09:39AM (#48641009) Attached to: 65,000 Complaints Later, Microsoft Files Suit Against Tech Support Scammers

I've gotten a half dozen calls and they were all great. Approaches I have taken include 1) Getting panicky because I can't find the Start button. "Did the virus make it go away?" Then asking if having a Mac was the reason I can't find it. 2) Asking if the virus was the reason I had so many pictures of naked men doing disgusting things to other naked men 3) Asking the female scammer if she was married. "Would you like to marry me?" she asked. "I dunno, we should get to know each other. What's your email address?" She gave me something that seemed sort of reasonable but it didn't actually work. What a surprise 4) Not being able to find the right key because I kept mixing up left from right, and top from bottom. 5) Asking "Are you proud of your job? Is this really the best job you could get? We know you are scamming people. Would your mother be proud of you?" I can't wait for the next call.

Bethesda Criticized Over Buggy Releases 397

Posted by Soulskill on Tuesday November 09, 2010 @07:43AM from the and-don't-kill-off-patrick-stewart-at-the-beginning dept.

SSDNINJA writes "This editorial discusses the habit of Bethesda Softworks to release broken and buggy games with plans to just fix the problems later. Following a trend of similar issues coming up in their games, the author begs gamers to stop supporting buggy games and to spread the idea that games should be finished and quality controlled before release – not weeks after."

Proving 0.999... Is Equal To 1 1260

Posted by CmdrTaco on Thursday October 14, 2010 @09:24AM from the nerds-like-math-right dept.

eldavojohn writes "Some of the juiciest parts of mathematics are the really simple statements that cause one to immediately pause and exclaim 'that can't be right!' But a recent 28 page paper in The Montana Mathematics Enthusiast (PDF) spends a great deal of time fielding questions by researchers who have explored this in depth and this seemingly impossibility is further explored in a brief history by Dev Gualtieri who presents the digit manipulation proof: Let a = 0.999... then we can multiply both sides by ten yielding 10a = 9.999... then subtracting a (which is 0.999...) from both sides we get 10a — a = 9.999... — 0.999... which reduces to 9a = 9 and thus a = 1. Mathematicians as far back as Euler have used various means to prove 0.999... = 1."

Why Warhammer Online Failed — an Insider Story 235

Posted by Soulskill on Thursday October 14, 2010 @01:06AM from the truth-or-dare dept.

sinij writes "An EA insider has aired dirty laundry over what went wrong with Warhammer and what could this mean for the upcoming Bioware Star Wars MMORPG. Quoting: 'We shouldn't have released when we did, everyone knows it. The game wasn't done, but EA gave us a deadline and threatened the leaders of Mythic with pink slips. We slipped so many times, it had to go out. We sold more than a million boxes, and only had 300k subs a month later. Going down ever since. It's 'stable' now, but guess what? Even Dark Age and Ultima have more subs than we have. How great is that? Games almost a decade [old] make more money than our biggest project." The (unverified) insider, who calls himself EA Louse (named after the EA Spouse who brought to light the company's excessive crunchtime practices) says similar trouble is ahead for the development of Star Wars: The Old Republic. EA has not commented yet. God of War creator David Jaffe has criticized the insider for having unrealistic expectations of working in the games industry.

NAMCO Takes Down Student Pac-man Project 218

Posted by Soulskill on Monday August 02, 2010 @06:30PM from the chasing-ghosts dept.

An anonymous reader writes "The core of how people first learn to do stuff — programming, music, writing, etc. — is to imitate others. It's one of the best ways to learn. Apparently a bunch of students using MIT's educational Scratch programming language understand this. But not everyone else does. NAMCO Bandai sent a takedown notice to MIT because some kids had recreated Pac-man with Scratch. The NAMCO letter is pretty condescending as well, noting that it understands the educational purpose of Scratch, but 'part of their education should include concern for the intellectual property of others.'"

New Mars Rover Rolls For the First Time 100

Posted by Soulskill on Friday July 30, 2010 @02:56PM from the keep-them-doggies-rollin dept.

wooferhound writes "Like proud parents savoring their baby's very first steps, mission team members gathered in a gallery above a clean room at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory to watch the Mars Curiosity rover roll for the first time. Engineers and technicians wore bunny suits while guiding Curiosity through its first steps, or more precisely, its first roll on the clean room floor. The rover moved forward and backward about 1 meter (3.3 feet). Mars Science Laboratory (aka Curiosity) is scheduled to launch in fall 2011 and land on the Red Planet in August 2012. Curiosity is the largest rover ever sent to Mars. It will carry 10 instruments that will help search an intriguing region of the Red Planet for two things: environments where life might have existed, and the capacity of those environments to preserve evidence of past life."

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