solcott - Slashdot User

Comment Re:Bye Bye Monopoly (Score 3, Insightful) 295

by solcott on Friday August 07, 2009 @11:04AM (#28986227) Attached to: Underground App Store Courts the Jailbroken

The problem is that you need jailbroken iphone, which wont be so easy for average joe. There wont be final resolution before Apple also learns that restricting so much is a bad decision.

Out of curiosity, have you even jailbroken an iPhone?

I'm going to say that for an average Joe, jailbreaking an iPhone is *not* a problem assuming said average Joe both knows how to read and owns a computer with internet access.

Maybe the "below-average" Joes who have an iPhone, but either do not know how to read or do not have a computer with internet access would have a problem figuring out how to jailbreak, but the truly average ones, they won't have any trouble at all.

Comment Re:rolleyes (Score 1) 288

by solcott on Wednesday June 24, 2009 @09:09AM (#28451429) Attached to: Has Google Broken JavaScript Spam Munging?

OP here (I guess I forgot to log in before) Actually, when I posted I was fully aware of the difference between cue and queue, but as referenced in #28442905 I was in fact referring to expecting a line of obfuscation != security posts to form, because /.ers really have some great arguments against it and I was hoping to get to read a lot of them.

Comment Re:"Bugs" fixed (Score 1, Insightful) 50

by solcott on Saturday May 23, 2009 @06:40AM (#28065291) Attached to: <em>Metroid Prime</em> Trilogy Being Updated For the Wii, Due In August

The games will most probably have all of the great tricks fixed that made Prime such an amazing game. Dash jumping, triple bomb jump, rapid fire missiles, and so on. It was great to take the game engine to its limits without technically cheating. Not only that, Prime1/2 had an amazing control scheme, 3 just used the wii remote as a gimmick IMO. For info check. http://www.metroid2002.com/home.php

Assuming that the US release of the "New Play Control" Metroid Prime is going to be mostly the same as the Japanese release that has been out for a while (and is easily playable in English by people with homebrew enabled Wii's) all of those things are still there.

I agree that the controls on the GC versions of Metroid were great, but they were the only first person perspective games on a console I could stand to play, and that was probably only *because* they were Metroid games.

The infrared aiming done by the Wiimote in MP3 is a lot more "keyboard and mouse" like, and once I got my hands on the Japanese remake of Metroid Prime and patched it to English I've only been able to even touch my GameCube Metroid discs once, and that was to see what it was like playing them with a controller instead of a Wiimote

What is was like was using a web browser without adblocking/mouse gestures/tabs once you have gotten used to having them. You just aren't able to go back to a clunky stiff and slow product once you have used a better version of it.

Comment Re:ummm... patches? (Score 0, Offtopic) 75

by solcott on Thursday May 21, 2009 @09:10AM (#28038291) Attached to: <em>Terminator Salvation</em> Game Launched, PC Version Recalled

I just discovered this game tonight, and it will REALLY surprise me if it comes back without being polished up - because yes... the game is boring. Your main mission is to save a couple of guys. Thats it. No big bosses, simple battles the whole way.

Is it just me, or does it seem confusing how it could be possible for the first post, with ACTUAL CONTENT in it and not just "I'm first fags!" could be modded Redundant?

I mean seriously, it's the first post, what posts came before it that it is repeating to be called redundant?

Dreamweaver Is Dying; Long Live Drupal! 318

Posted by timothy on Friday March 06, 2009 @07:18PM from the view-askew dept.

Barence writes "Here's an interesting blog post by a designer who reckons Dreamweaver is dying. It's not Dreamweaver's fault, though. Nor is the problem Adobe and its development team — the last Dreamweaver CS4 version was the most impressive release in years. Moreover, although Microsoft Expression Web poses a far more credible threat than FrontPage could muster, Dreamweaver remains the best HTML/CSS page-based editor available. The real problem for Dreamweaver and for its users is that the nature of the web is changing dramatically."

Is It Windows 7, Or KDE 4? 559

Posted by timothy on Friday February 06, 2009 @09:20AM from the spy-vs.-spy dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Is it Windows 7 or KDE 4? In this video, ZDNet takes to Sydney's streets to find out what people think of what they think is a Windows 7 demonstration. The results are surprising." Or maybe they're not surprising at all.

EA Unveils Two New Battlefield Games 54

Posted by Soulskill on Friday February 06, 2009 @06:43AM from the now-with-more-battles-and-extra-fields dept.

Electronic Arts announced at New York Comic Con that the Battlefield series would be getting two more titles. Battlefield 1943 will be focused on multiplayer, and it's due out for download this summer. It will be available through the PlayStation Network and Xbox Live, and there will be a PC version as well. A website has been launched for the game, and it contains a trailer. Battlefield: Bad Company 2 is scheduled for winter, and it will be available for the PC, PS3, and Xbox 360 also. Details for Bad Company 2 are sparse, though one exec said, "... it takes everything that players liked in the original and ups the ante — more vehicles, more destruction and more team play."

Left 4 Dead DLC, SDK Announced 66

Posted by Soulskill on Friday February 06, 2009 @01:15AM from the we-supply-the-tools-you-supply-the-braaaaains dept.

Today Valve announced plans for Left 4 Dead's first DLC, called The L4D Survival Pack. It will include a new game mode and two campaigns for Versus mode. The new content is coming to both the PC and Xbox 360 versions of the game (a PS3 port to the base game still seems unlikely). The press release goes on to say, "In addition, for PC gamers and aspiring developers, the first Left 4 Dead release for the Source Software Development Kit (Source SDK) will allow the creation of custom Left 4 Dead campaigns that will be discoverable via L4D's matchmaking system. The SDK update is also due for release this spring, and is free of charge to all owners of L4D on the PC." The Opposable Thumbs blog also reports on a way to play Left 4 Dead in 3D.

First-Person Shooter Modified For Fire Drill Simulation 158

Posted by Soulskill on Thursday February 05, 2009 @07:52AM from the crap-where's-a-medkit dept.

Hugh Pickens writes "Researchers at Durham University have modified a video game and turned it into a fire drill simulator using the Source engine (the 3D game engine used to drive Half-Life 2), and created a virtual model of one of the university's departments. Dr. Shamus Smith said that although 3D modeling software was available, modifying a video game was faster, more cost effective, and had better special effects. 'We were interested in using game technology over a customized application and the Source Engine, from Half-Life, is very versatile,' said Smith. 'We used the simulation to see how people behaved in an actual fire situation and to train people in "good practice" in a fire.' The team says the virtual environment helped familiarize people with evacuation routines and could also help identify problems with a building's layout. One problem, however, was that while the simulation worked for most people, those who played a lot of video games did some unusual things when using the simulation. 'If a door was on fire, [the gamers] would try and run through it, rather than look for a different exit,' said Smith." This makes me wonder to what extent entertainment software will fill the role of non-entertainment software as the tools and engines become more and more powerful. Ars mentions related news that the US Dept. of Naval Research is dumping millions of dollars into "virtual reality-like simulations of small-scale urban conflicts." It's unclear whether this is related to the US Army's similar program.

Setting Up Ubuntu On a PS3 For Emulation 81

Posted by Soulskill on Monday February 02, 2009 @01:20AM from the eight-bit-high-def dept.

Gizmodo is running a guide on how to install Ubuntu on a Playstation 3 and set it up to play vintage games through emulation. Quoting: "It still kind of surprises me (in a good way) that Sony was, from the start, very OK with PS3 owners tinkering with Linux on their PS3s. A modified release of Yellow Dog Linux was available from the very beginning, and some very handy hard drive partitioning and dual-boot utilities are baked right into the PS3's XMB; Ubuntu gets installed on an entirely separate partition of your PS3's hard disk, so your default system doesn't get touched and switching between Ubuntu and the XMB is a piece of cake. There is a flipside to this coin, however. Since the PS3's Cell Processor is PowerPC based, you won't be able to use any Linux software that's compiled for x86, which is, unfortunately, most of it. However, Ubuntu has always had a PPC distro, and most of the basic stuff will work just fine. You can even load up a PPC-compiled Super Nintendo Emulator, SNES9X, and play some classic games pretty easily on your Sixaxis controller paired via Bluetooth."

What's the Best Video Game Download Service? 227

Posted by Soulskill on Wednesday September 24, 2008 @12:34AM from the usenet-and-bittorrent-don't-count dept.

ThinSkin writes "Who needs a brick-and-mortar game shop when you have the world wide web of video game download services? Joel Durham Jr. over at ExtremeTech examines some game download services to decide once and for all which virtual storefront has the best deal for gamers. Among the services reviewed are: Steam, Impulse, Direct2Drive, Good Old Games, and WildTangent Orb. The most popular site in the roundup, Steam, was also the most favored because of its wide selection of popular titles, while Direct2Drive also scored top marks because it has 'just about every title in the universe.'" Which service(s) do you like the most, and what have your experiences with them been?

Diebold Voting Machines Vulnerable to Virus Attack 122

Posted by Zonk on Saturday August 04, 2007 @04:24PM from the maybe-they-should-install-macafee dept.

mcgrew writes "PC world is reporting that Diebold's super-popular voting machines are coming under even more scrutiny. A security review has revealed that they are simply 'not secure enough to guarantee a trustworthy election.' This is according to a report from the University of California Berkley, who did a two-month top-to-bottom review of all California e-voting systems. That's a subject we've discussed before, but Diebold's setup is truly unsettling. An attacker with access to a single machine could disrupt or change the outcome of an entire election using viruses. From the article: 'The report warned that a paper trail of votes cast is not sufficient to guarantee the integrity of an election using the machines. "Malicious code might be able to subtly influence close elections, and it could disrupt elections by causing widespread equipment failure on election day," it said. The source-code review went on to warn that commercial antivirus scanners do not offer adequate protection for the voting machines. "They are not designed to detect virally propagating malicious code that targets voting equipment and voting software," it said.' Oddly, my state of Illinois, long known for election fraud, has paper trails (at least in my county) and according to Black Box Voting doesn't use Diebold anywhere."

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