Comment pentium 300mhz (Score 1) 277
ah, i remember buying a blisteringly fast pentium II 300MHz PC just to be ready to play this. that was back in....1998 i think...i can't even remember anymore.
Comment practicalities (Score 4, Insightful) 152
i don't understand how the burglars were able to quickly trawl facebook to find :
a) the street addresses of the people who were on holiday, not normally stored in facebook?
b) who did not co-habit with people who were not on holiday
c) who had stuff worth stealing
d) living within easy driving distance of the burglar
e) no alarm, neighborhood watch, alert neighbours etc
f) the exact days of leaving and arriving back
burglars already have lots of ways to find a target house without data mining social networking sites, e.g. pushing flyers half-way into letter boxes then coming back in two days to see if any are still untouched, driving buy in the evening to see if lights are off etc etc.
is it possible that some of those got burgled who had posted about their holiday, and told the police "that must be the reason" ? I know TFA asserts that the police know the gang used facebook, but something does not add up here. seems like BS to me.
Comment Re:Is a live DVD OK? (Score 1) 211
And how often do you really see two candidates who are virtually identical?
Anecdotally, I have rarely seen this. But I often see hiring managers taking on the guy who ticks all the right keyword boxes, and to hell with whether he's got more *talent* than the others. That should be your major priority in an interview. Really, how long will it take the smartest candidate to train up on your CAD package, if he's already got generic experience? Training time will be minimal compared to his higher productivity over the course of his employment.
This attitude annoys me most when I'm on the other side of the fence, looking at recruitment adverts which screen out most of the possible candidates by insisting on various specific skills, instead of asking for the general competency that shows the guy can do the job.
Last time I had this problem I persuaded the company to interview me anyway, and was hired ahead of twelve other people who more closely matched the job spec.
Dubai Is Building a Refrigerated Beach 249
dataxtream writes "The world's first refrigerated beach is to be built at a luxury hotel in Dubai, located along the southern coast of the Persian Gulf. The beach will include heat-absorbing pipes under the sand along with large wind blowers, which will keep tourists cool and guard their feet against the hot sand. Half of me says these guys need a reality check, the other half wants to go there." I believe I've just thought of a way we could solve this whole global warming thing I've been hearing about.
Mediterranean Undersea Cables Cut, Again 329
miller60 writes "Three undersea cables in the Mediterranean Sea have failed within minutes of each other in an incident that is eerily similar to a series of cable cuts in the region in early 2008. The cable cuts are already causing serious service problems in the Middle East and Asia. See coverage at the Internet Storm Center, Data Center Knowledge and Bloomberg. The February 2008 cable cuts triggered rampant speculation about sabotage, but were later attributed to ships that dropped anchor in the wrong place."
"See-Through" Touchscreen Solves Fat Finger Problem 170
Urchin sends along a New Scientist writeup on Microsoft Research's nanoTouch prototype, a way of operating a touch screen from the rear (video here). The prototype will be presented at the Computer and Human Interaction conference in Boston, Mass., in April 2009. Coming soon to a wristwatch or neck pendant near you. "Electronic devices have been shrinking for years, but you might be forgiven for thinking that one that's only a centimeter across would be just too difficult to operate. Microsoft Research's new nanoTouch device suggests otherwise. Touch-screens are difficult to control with any precision — the fingers get in the way of the tiny targets you're trying to hit. But putting the touch interface on the rear of the screen instead gives users more precision because they can still see the whole screen as they interact with it. Microsoft Research has produced a prototype device called nanoTouch with a rear-mounted touch interface. User tests show it lets users accurately and reliably hit targets just 2 millimeters across on a screen under a centimeter across."
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