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The Military

Submission + - Top General: Defense Department IT In 'Stone Age' (computerworld.com) 1

Submitted by
CWmike
CWmike writes: "U.S. Marine Corps Gen. James 'Hoss' Cartwright, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was sharply critical Tuesday of the the department is pretty much in the Stone Age as far as IT is concerned,' Cartwright said. He cited problems with proprietary systems that aren't connected to anything else and are unable to quickly adapt to changing needs. 'We have huge numbers of data links that move data between proprietary platforms — one point to another point,' he said. The most striking example of an IT failure came during the second Gulf War, where Marines and the Army were dispatched in southern Iraq, he said. 'It's crazy, we buy proprietary [and] we don't understand what it is we're buying into,' he said. 'It works great for an application, and then you come to conflict and you spend the rest of your time trying to modify it to actually do what it should do.'"
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Australian Visitors Must Declare Illegal Porn To Customs Officers 361

Posted by samzenpus from the don't-blunder-down-under dept.
Australian Justice Minister Brendan O'Connor has advised visitors to take a better safe than sorry policy when it comes to their porn stashes, and declare all porn that they think might be illegal with customs officers. From the article: "The government said it changed the wording on passenger arrival cards after becoming aware of confusion among travellers about what pornography to declare. 'People have a right to privacy and while some pornography is legal and does not need to be disclosed, all travellers should be aware that certain types of pornography are illegal and must be declared to customs,' Mr O'Connor said."
Games

The Problems With Video Game Voice Acting 251

Posted by Soulskill from the who-called-in-de-fleet dept.
The Guardian's Games blog explores the tendency of modern video games to suffer from poor voice acting, a flaw made all the more glaring by increasingly precise and impressive graphics. Quoting: "Due to the interactive nature of games, actors can't be given a standard film script from which they're able to gauge the throughline of their character and a feel for the dramatic development of the narrative. Instead, lines of dialogue need to be isolated into chunks so they can be accessed and triggered within the game in line with the actions of each individual player. Consequently, the performer will usually be presented with a spreadsheet jammed with hundreds of single lines of dialogue, with little sense of context or interaction. ... But according to David Sobolov, one of the most experienced videogame voice actors in the world (just check out his website), the significant time pressures mean that close, in-depth direction is not always possible. 'Often, there's a need to record a great number of lines, so to keep the session moving, once we've established the tone of the character we're performing, the director will silently direct us using the spreadsheet on the screen by simply moving the cursor down the page to indicate if he/she liked what we did. Or they'll make up a code, like typing an 'x' to ask us to give them another take.' It sounds, in effect, like a sort of acting battery farm, a grinding, dehumanizing production line of disembodied phrases, delivered for hours on end. Hardly conducive to Oscar-winning performances."
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Facebook Master Password Was "Chuck Norris" 319

Posted by samzenpus from the ad-nauseum-roundhouse dept.
I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "A Facebook employee has given a tell-all interview with some very interesting things about Facebook's internals. Especially interesting are all the things relating to Facebook privacy. Basically, you don't have any. Nearly everything you've ever done on the site is recorded into a database. While they fire employees for snooping, more than a few have done it. There's an internal system to let them log into anyone's profile, though they have to be able to defend their reason for doing so. And they used to have a master password that could log into any Facebook profile: 'Chuck Norris.' Bruce Schneier might be jealous of that one."

Comment Re:Search engine... (Score 1) 776

by mech_knight (#27160629) Attached to: Favorite on-screen calculator?
According to wikipedia, a full moon occurs about one a month for a given year, but in some years there are more than 12. The period between these years is roughly 2.71722874 years: (2.71722874 years)*(365 days/year)*(24 hours/day)*(60 minutes/hour)*(60 seconds/minute)= 85,690,525.54464 seconds To get frequency: 1/85,690,525.54464 seconds = 1.1669902E-8/sec

Comment Lectures are overrated (Score 1) 317

by mech_knight (#26439285) Attached to: MIT Moves Away From Massive Lecture Halls
By the time I was done with my GE classes and starting my engineering classes, I learned that I could skip most lectures and do self-study. I would pick up the syllabus on the first day to get the semester schedule. Then I would simply show up for quizzes, exams and the occasional lecture. The only classes I attended regularly were the labs--much more interesting. I didn't get perfect grades, but I didn't fail either. It took a little bit more discipline to self-study, but the benefits are enormous especially when struggling with a particularly difficult subject and you finally get it. You don't get that in most "spoon feeding" lectures.

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