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Comment Hardrive size discrepencies (Score 1) 165

by slashmatteo (#41384047) Attached to: Sony Announces 'Superslim' PS3
Note that Sony US announced two models: one with a 250 GB hardrive and the other with a 500 GB one (link). Sony Europe announced a 12 GB model and an other one with a 500 GB HD (link). 12 GB seems quite suprising for modern games (GTA IV: 3.5 GB required... you won't install many games !) and sony pushing for the use of playstation network an the playstatin store...

Submission + - First full observable universe simulation

Submitted by slashmatteo
slashmatteo writes: The goal of the DEUS project (Dark Energy Universe Simulation) is to investigate the imprints of dark energy on cosmic structure formation through high-performance numerical simulations. In order to do so, the project has conducted a simulation of the structuring of the entire observable universe, from the Big Bang to the present day. Thanks to the Curie super-computer, the simulation has made it possible to follow the evolution of 550 billion particles. Two other complementary runs are scheduled by the end of May. More details on the press release.
Chrome

Submission + - Chrome hits 20% share as Microsoft continues slide (networkworld.com)

Submitted by
jbrodkin
jbrodkin writes: "Google Chrome's rise in popularity has been remarkably fast and it's just hit a new milestone: more than 20% of all browser usage, according to StatCounter. Chrome rose from only 2.8% in June 2009 to 20.7% worldwide in June 2011, while Microsoft's Internet Explorer fell from 59% to 44% in the same time frame. Firefox dropped only slightly in the past two years, from 30% to 28%. While other browser trackers show Chrome with a lower percentage, there's a reason: StatCounter tracks total surfing, not the number of users. It's the Web's power users who are pushing Chrome to new heights."
Windows

Microsoft Kills Support For XP SP2 315

Posted by timothy 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."
Role Playing (Games)

Genre Wars — the Downside of the RPG Takeover 248

Posted by Soulskill from the you-gain-1912-experience dept.
Phaethon360 writes "From Bioshock and Modern Warfare 2 to even Team Fortress 2, RPG elements are creeping into game genres that we never imagined they would. This change for the most part has managed to subtly improve upon genres that needed new life, but there's a cost that hasn't been tallied by the majority of game developers. 'The simple act of removing mod tools, along with the much discussed dedicated server issue, has made [MW2] a bit of a joke among competitive players. Gone are the days of "promod," and the only option you have is to play it their way. If Infinity Ward are so insistent on improving the variety of our experiences, they don’t have to do it at the expense of the experience that many of us already love. It really is that simple. If they don’t want to provide a good "back to basics experience," they could at least continue to provide the tools that allow us to do that for ourselves.'"

Comment Re:Metric: like the rest of the World! (Score 1) 1233

by slashmatteo (#29565051) Attached to: At What Temperature (F) Do You Prefer Your Nerd Cave?

Metric. by the way, is actually American. It was Ben Franklin who came up with the system

As with most of the things that are claimed without citing sources, this is dubious. Why would Benjamin Franklin name an International System "SI" as in the french: "Systeme International" ? Why not have a look in an encyclopedia and see what they say about that ?

Submission + - DragonFly 2.4 released

Submitted by
electrostaticcarrot
electrostaticcarrot writes: "DragonFly — that fourth major BSD — has had its 2.4 release. The "most invasive change" is the addition and usage of a DevFS for /dev; building on this, drives are now also recognized by serial number (along with /etc/devtab for aliases) as listed in /dev/serno. This is also the first release with a x86-64 ISO, stable but with limited pkgsrc support.

Other larger changes include a ported and feature-extended (with full hotplug and port multiplier support) AHCI driver (and SILI driver based on it) originally taken from OpenBSD, major NFS changes, and HAMMER updates. A pkgsrc GIT mirror has also been set up and put in use to make future pkgsrc updates quicker and smoother.

Two of the mirrors:
http://chlamydia.fs.ei.tum.de/pub/DragonFly/iso-images/
http://avalon.dragonflybsd.org/iso-images/"
Mozilla

Submission + - Porn collection put people off upgrading Firefox (pcpro.co.uk)

Submitted by
Barence
Barence writes: "Mozilla's Security team has disclosed a very interesting piece of research which suggests people refused to upgrade to Firefox 3 because they were afraid the browser would expose their porn collection. Mozilla's research found that the number one reason for not upgrading was the new location bar, and the fact that it delved into people's bookmark collections to suggest sites as they typed. "When we expanded the capabilities of the location bar to search against all history and bookmarks in Firefox 3, a lot of people contacted us to say that they had certain bookmarks they didn't really want to have displayed," Firefox's principal designer, Alex Faaborg, tactfully explains. "In some cases users had intentionally hidden these bookmarks in deep hierarchies of folders, somewhat similar to how one might hide a physical object.""
Programming

Dirty Coding Tricks To Make a Deadline 683

Posted by Soulskill from the it-ain't-pretty-but-it-ain't-crashing dept.
Gamasutra is running an article with a collection of anecdotes from game developers who had to employ some quick and dirty fixes to get their products to ship on time. Here's a brief excerpt: "Back at [company X] — I think it was near the end of [the project] — we had an object in one of the levels that needed to be hidden. We didn't want to re-export the level and we did not use checksum names. So right smack in the middle of the engine code we had something like the following. The game shipped with this in: if( level == 10 && object == 56 ) {HideObject();} Maybe a year later, an artist using our engine came to us very frustrated about why an object in their level was not showing up after exporting to what resolved to level 10. I wonder why?" Have you ever needed to insert terrible code to make something work at the last minute?
Microsoft

Microsoft Poland Photoshops Black Guy To White One 964

Posted by kdawson from the extreme-localization dept.
wanted writes "If you look at Microsoft's Poland business solutions Web site, you will probably not notice anything odd about the main picture. However, when you compare it with the original English version, you can see that someone decided that showing black people in Poland is probably not going to be convincing to business. They just Photoshopped the head of a white guy in for the black one, in an amateurish way, leaving his hand unchanged. (Here's a mirror in case something should happen to the original.)" We noted a few months back that the city of Toronto had done something similar.

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