smmoulder - Slashdot User

Comment Fox will just be give a cut somewhere.... (Score 1) 220

by smmoulder on Wednesday August 20, 2008 @12:39PM (#24676109) Attached to: Watchmen Delayed, Or Worse

That's right. Fox will simply want their cut (whether Fox really deserves it or not, if Fox can show some legal encumbrance or become a big enough pain, WB will buy them off). WB will argue that Fox has put no money into this production and deserves nothing, so that will be an interesting tug of war. It's possible that a clever exec at WB will offer Fox a cut of licensing royalties in lieu of movie participation. Why? Because the Watchmen isn't a kids property and licensing dollars will be modest. Contrast with Disney-Pixar's Cars which was a mediocre performer (relative to other Pixar movies), but has been a licensing/toy machine with good staying power.

My Job Went To India 396

Posted by samzenpus on Wednesday August 20, 2008 @12:11PM from the read-all-about-it dept.

Josh Skillings writes "The author, Chad Fowler, draws upon his experiences as a software engineer, a team leader over a group of Indian developers, and as a jazz musician, to describe 52 ways or tips that will help you to become a more valuable employee. These tips are described in two or three pages each, and are usually illustrated by a practical example or story. The tips are well thought-out, well-explained and make sense. Chad draws upon the open source movement as well, highlighting ways that contributing to and learning from open source can improve your career. These tips gave me greater respect and appreciation for the open source movement in general." Read on for the rest of Josh's review.

Apple's IPhone 3G Firmware Update Bombs 423

Posted by CmdrTaco on Wednesday August 20, 2008 @10:37AM from the oops-they-did-it-again dept.

JagsLive writes "After lots of complaints about iPhone 3G connection issues, Apple released a firmware update Monday with hopes it would fix the issues. But early reports suggest it didn't work as planned. Complaints have included dropped calls, abrupt network switches, poor reception, and service interruptions. Apple declined to offer details about its iPhone 2.0.1 update, other than saying it included 'bug fixes.' However, comments in Apple's support forum say plenty about the latest attempt to rectify poor user experiences. In fact, the update seems to be causing new issues, apparently interfering with the GPS function, among others."

Hacker Uncovers Chinese Olympic Fraud 1275

Posted by CmdrTaco on Wednesday August 20, 2008 @09:48AM from the that's-a-helluva-home-court-advantage dept.

SkeptOlympics writes "A new chapter in the ongoing controversy surrounding China's women's gymnastics team opened today, as search engine hacker stryde.hax found surviving copies of official registration documents issued by China's General Administration of Sport of China. The incriminating documents, expunged by censors from the official site and from Google's document cache, still appear in the document translation cache of Chinese search giant Baidu, here (1) and here (2), showing the age of one of China's gold medal winning gymnasts to be 14 instead of 16, the minimum age for competition presented on her government-issued passport. Now that official government documentation is available, how long will the IOC be able to keep a lid on this scandal?" I imagine the answer is "Forever."

Watchmen Delayed, Or Worse 220

Posted by CmdrTaco on Wednesday August 20, 2008 @09:00AM from the this-isn't-gonna-be-good dept.

whisper_jeff writes "Due to some potential copyright issues, The Watchmen might be delayed, or worse. It seems that Fox claims it still owns copyrights which would prevent Warner Bros from releasing the movie. US District Court Judge Gary Feess decided that Fox had enough of a case that he's willing to hear things out. The geek in me hopes that it will be resolved quickly and the movie will hit theaters on time."

Magpies Are Self-Aware 591

Posted by kdawson on Wednesday August 20, 2008 @06:08AM from the who-you-callin'-birdbrain dept.

FireStormZ writes "Magpies can recognize themselves in a mirror, confounding the notion that self-awareness is the exclusive preserve of humans and a few higher mammals. It had been thought only four species of apes, bottlenose dolphins, and Asian elephants shared the human ability to recognize their own bodies in a mirror. But German scientists reported on Tuesday that magpies, a species with a brain structure very different from mammals, could also identify themselves. It had been thought that the neocortex brain area found in mammals was crucial to self-recognition. Yet birds, which last shared a common ancestor with mammals 300 million years ago, don't have a neocortex, suggesting that higher cognitive skills can develop in other ways."

Why Corporates Hate Perl 963

Posted by kdawson on Wednesday August 20, 2008 @04:02AM from the not-such-a-shiny-new-thing dept.

Anti-Globalism recommends a posting up at O'Reilly's ONLamp on reasons that some companies are turning away from Perl. "[In one company] [m]anagement have started to refer to Perl-based systems as 'legacy' and to generally disparage it. This attitude has seeped through to non-technical business users who have started to worry if developers mention a system that is written in Perl. Business users, of course, don't want nasty old, broken Perl code. They want the shiny new technologies. I don't deny at all that this company (like many others) has a large amount of badly written and hard-to-maintain Perl code. But I maintain that this isn't directly due to the code being written in Perl. Its because the Perl code has developed piecemeal over the last ten or so years in an environment where there was no design authority.. Many of these systems date back to this company's first steps onto the Internet and were made by separate departments who had no interaction with each other. Its not really a surprise that the systems don't interact well and a lot of the code is hard to maintain."

Japan Demands Probe of iPod Nano Flameouts 339

Posted by kdawson on Tuesday August 19, 2008 @11:41PM from the hot-pockets dept.

iminplaya sends in an item from TechNewsWorld that begins, "Several incidents of iPod Nanos bursting into flames have created consumer jitters in gadget-happy Japan. Apple is downplaying the problem, pointing out that no major injuries or damage have been reported. The problem is due to defective batteries, the company said, and only a tiny percentage of the devices have caught on fire." Japan has seen 14 such incidents so far, two in recent days. iminplaya adds, "I like that. Only a 'tiny percentage'... Is anybody beginning to understand why I would prefer that these devices not be allowed on airplanes?"

Adobe Flash Ads Launching Clipboard Hijack Attacks 353

Posted by kdawson on Tuesday August 19, 2008 @09:54PM from the poisoning-the-ad-pool dept.

bullyBEEF writes "Malicious hackers are using booby-trapped Flash banner ads to hijack clipboards for use in rogue security software attacks. In the Web attacks, which affect Mac, Windows, and Linux users running Firefox, IE, and Safari, bad guys are seizing control of the machine's clipboard (probably using the Flash command setClipboard) and inserting a hard-to-delete URL that points to a fake anti-virus program. A number of legitimate sites have been seen to host ads carrying the attack — including Newsweek, Digg, and MSNBC.com. Researcher Aviv Raff offers a harmless demo of how it's done."

New Multi-GPU Technology With No Strings Attached 179

Posted by kdawson on Tuesday August 19, 2008 @08:08PM from the here-process-this dept.

Vigile writes "Multi-GPU technology from both NVIDIA and ATI has long been dependent on many factors including specific motherboard chipsets and forcing gamers to buy similar GPUs within a single generation. A new company called Lucid Logix is showing off a product that could potentially allow vastly different GPUs to work in tandem while still promising near-linear scaling on up to four chips. The HYDRA Engine is dedicated silicon that dissects DirectX and OpenGL calls and modifies them directly to be distributed among the available graphics processors. That means the aging GeForce 6800 GT card in your closet might be useful once again and the future of one motherboard supporting both AMD and NVIDIA multi-GPU configurations could be very near."

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