like_pilate - Slashdot User

Scientists Find Tears Are the Anti-Viagra 207

Posted by samzenpus on Sunday January 09, 2011 @08:59PM from the blood-hound-gang-is-wrong dept.

An anonymous reader writes "The male test subjects didn't know what they were smelling, they were just given little vials of clear liquid and told to sniff. But when those vials contained a woman's tears (collected while she watched a sad movie), the men rated pictures of women's faces as less sexually attractive, and their saliva contained less testosterone. Is this proof that humans make and respond to pheromones? The researcher behind the study doesn't use that controversial word, but he says his findings do prove that tears contain meaningful chemical messages."

Minecraft Reaches Beta Status, Price Goes Up 279

Posted by Soulskill on Tuesday December 21, 2010 @07:23AM from the another-notch-in-the-belt dept.

Eric writes "After over a year of development, Minecraft has hit Beta status today. Minecraft was developed for about a week before its public release on May 17, 2009. With the new milestone, the price of the game has increased to €14.95; when Minecraft moves beyond beta status, it will sell for €20.00. The beta is more focused on polish and content. The aim is to add proper modding support via a stable API, some kind of non-intrusive narrative to help drive the game experience early on, and a late-game goal. Updates will be less frequent, so as to make sure stability is maintained thanks to more extended testing. Despite this, there have already been two beta releases: client and server Beta 1.0 followed quickly by client 1.0_01."

The New Reality of Gaming 122

Posted by Soulskill on Tuesday December 07, 2010 @02:23AM from the i-blame-the-schools dept.

Hugh Pickens writes "Video games used to be about fighting aliens and rescuing princesses, writes Rohin Dharmakumar in Forbes, but the most popular games today have you tilling your farm, hiring waiting staff and devising menus for your restaurant or taking your pets out for walks while maintaining cordial relations with the neighbors. 'Reality, it would seem, is the new escapism.' Video games of the pre-social network era were mostly played by boys or young men but 'now the core audience of social network games are girls and young women,' says Alok Kejriwal, founder and CEO of games2win, an online gaming company. The tipping point in the US came in 2008 when women outnumbered men on the Internet. Combined with millions of parents and grandparents who're new to the Internet, the traditional face of the gamer is changing from that of a 25-year-old male to a band stretching from 16 to 40 years comprising men and women in almost equal numbers, says Sebastien de Halleux, one of the co-founders of Playfish, who predicts that someone is going to create a social game very shortly that pulls in a billion dollars a year. Gaming for this new set of players is less about breathtaking graphics, pulsating sound or edge-of-the-seat action and more about strengthening existing real world relations through frequent casual gaming. 'Think of these games as a sandbox where everybody has the same tools, yet everyone achieves different results,' says de Halleux."

Microsoft Kills Support For XP SP2 315

Posted by timothy on Thursday May 13, 2010 @02:41PM from the too-soon? dept.

Trailrunner7 writes "Microsoft's announcement this week that it is preparing to end support for machines running Windows XP SP2 not only represents a challenge for the thousands of businesses still running SP2, but also is the end of an era for both Microsoft and its customers. It wasn't until 2004 that the final release of XP SP2 hit the streets, but when it did, it represented a huge step forward in security for Windows users. It wasn't necessarily the feature set that mattered as much as the fact that the protections were enabled by default and taken out of the users' hands."

Comment Re:older developers... (Score 1) 742

by like_pilate on Monday April 19, 2010 @10:33AM (#31895892) Attached to: Why Linux Is Not Attracting Young Developers

I agree with this sentiment. I graduated with a CS degree from a major UK university almost two years ago, and I find myself technically ignorant. I did well in classes covering data structures, programming paradigms, logic, and so forth, but ask me about spinlock or whatever and you'll be lucky to get a blank stare. I find myself moving away from programming/technical work as I've started working. I'm not very good at self-teaching so working through something like 'The C Programming Language' to try to understand low-level concepts is frustrating, and looking for help just seems to solicite responses of 'don't bother if you don't understand'. Companies these days put emphasis on experience on most roles, when what I really want - in a way - is guidance and apprenticeship. It's probably not going to happen, so I might as well stick with the Excel and Powerpoint work that's getting me a paycheque.

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