Comment Re:Better article headline (Score 1) 463
So gift-vouchers for services aren't worth anything to you?
Comment Re:Hi. Eve player here. (Score 1) 463
Useful post. But why the tinfoil?
There are allegations as well that CCP intentionally did this to drive up the price of PLEX (and in fact, just about every resource in the game)... which has happened.
Er.. instead of them just buying stuff off the market, to the same effect?
Or are you saying they're breaking their rules to avoid breaking their rules?
And is your 'has happened' actually the one time they did the exact opposite, with legitimate PLEX stocks, to their loss, to foil a playerbase-harming PLEX monopoly attempt?
And CCP has colluded with players before to give valuable assets out -- and admitted to this.
Tiny bit of context missing there, like what happened to that game admin when CCP caught him, seven *years* ago, and *why* it's never happened since.
Technology and Moral Panic 262
pbahra writes "Why do some technologies cause moral panic and others don't? Why was the introduction of electricity seen as a terrible thing, while nobody cared much about the fountain pen? According to Genevieve Bell, the director of Intel Corporation's Interaction and Experience Research, we have had moral panic over new technology for pretty well as long as we have had technology. It is one of the constants in our culture. '... moral panic is remarkably stable and it is always played out in the bodies of children and women,' she said. There was, she says, an initial pushback about electrifying homes in the U.S.: 'If you electrify homes you will make women and children vulnerable. Predators will be able to tell if they are home because the light will be on, and you will be able to see them. So electricity is going to make women vulnerable. Oh and children will be visible too and it will be predators, who seem to be lurking everywhere, who will attack.' 'There was some wonderful stuff about [railway trains] too in the U.S., that women's bodies were not designed to go at 50 miles an hour. Our uteruses would fly out of our bodies as they were accelerated to that speed,' she says."
Comment Re:Here we go again (SCO) (Score 5, Insightful) 675
Also after SCO - no lawfirm will be nearly as stupid as SCO's..
You mean represent an insanely deluded client who throws all of their money away at them?
The *lawfirms* would *fight* for that chance!
Comment Re:Best for headshots (Score 3, Informative) 452
WoW client works fine under wine (tad better than under Windows imho).
Really? And what is the major improvement/difference, besides running under wine/in linux?
Swap performance and VM handling, frankly. It's better at not putting things in swap it shouldn't, and quickly getting things off swap it needs. Generally less lumpy if you aren't swimming in memory like I'm not.
I also get the added benefit of instantly switching in and out of the game with virtual desktops, and being able to shut down all unnecessary systems and programs, and SIGSTOP/hibernate large things like firefox so they sink entirely out of memory until I call them back, and I have total scripting and file control over all my addons and logs and things.
Also, crashes won't take out the box, and if things get really gnarly, I log in behind my GUI remotely and shoot things. For some games that are going under due to game corruption, flicking to the CLI, Kill, restart, can get the game back before the server has given up on your connection. WAY faster than Windows.
Introducing the Invulnerable Evercookie 332
An anonymous reader writes "Using eight different techniques and locations, a 'security' guy has developed a cookie that is very, very hard to delete. If just one copy of the cookie remains, the other locations are rebuilt. My favorite storage location is in 'RGB values of auto-generated, force-cached PNGs using HTML5 Canvas tag to read pixels (cookies) back out' — awesome."
Did Google Go Instant Just To Show More Ads? 250
eldavojohn writes "Google, already the largest search engine in the United States, went instant a few weeks ago. MIT's Tech Review asks why Google went instant and is skeptical that users actually look at search results before they finish typing their query. Othar Hansson, Google's lead on the initiative, informs them otherwise and claims that Google's traffic monitors didn't even blink at the extra data being sent across — primarily because of its insignificance next to streaming one video on YouTube. Hansson also reveals that Google's search engine is no longer stateless and therefore takes up a little more memory in their server hives. The Tech Review claims that 'sources at the company say Google Instant's impact on ad sales was a primary focus in testing the service. Google only gets paid for an advertisement, or sponsored link, when a user clicks on the ad, and ads are targeted to specific searches. By displaying a search's ads onscreen a couple of seconds sooner, the frequency of users clicking on those ads could only go up.' So money seemed to be the prime motivator and the article also coyly notes that the average length of time a user spends between typing in any two characters is 300 milliseconds — much too fast for old JavaScript engines. Of course, you might recall Google's efforts to change all that with JavaScript speed wars. Do you find Google Instant to be useful in any way, or does it strike you as just more ad gravity for your mouse?"
Comment Sounds like a bitstream chip, but with more issues (Score 2, Interesting) 153
It's vaguely familiar, but since no two circuits are *truly* identical at the analog layer, *and* change as the temperature changes, people used digital instead where 'mostly 0' is still '0' and 'mostly 1' is still '1' regardless. Otherwise you can't mass produce them.
Of more interest is people using analog-alike bitstreams, where the average number of 1's vs 0's in a random stream is the amplitude of the analog wave. They then blend the input streams together to produce the output stream. I've mostly seen this done by Royal Holloway University to produce neural chips that *don't* need squillions of interconnections - they just blend probability streams. Looks like people are playing with optical ones now too. Why not put a story up about that instead?
Comment Now you're just being silly. (Score 2, Funny) 687
Why would the Iranian Cybercafe Army want to blow up Chinese dissidents? Besides, everyone knows it was the Illuminati.
Comment Re:And the lesson is... (Score 1) 687
Er, no. A MitM attack is easy against people who don't protect against a MitM attack. If you want to protect yourself, you can. This is Crypto 101.
Instead of trying to win a crypto war against the geeks of Google, China will just walk into a Chinese Google DataCentre, wave a badge, and swipe all the machines for whatever reason they want to pull out of their arse.
They will autopsy and reverse engineer them at their leisure, give the tech to Baidu. and then sue Google for patent infringement of Baidu intellectual property, and win.
Copyright Industries Oppose Treaty For the Blind 135
langelgjm sends in a piece from Wired, which details the background of a proposed treaty to allow cross-border sharing of books for the blind — a treaty which is opposed by an almost unified front of business interests in the US, with the exception of Google. "A broad swath of American enterprise ranging from major software makers to motion picture and music companies are joining forces to oppose a new international treaty that would make books more accessible to the blind. With the exception of Google, almost every major industry player has expressed disapproval of the treaty, which would allow cross-border sharing of digitized books accessible to the blind and visually impaired. Google's chief copyright counsel believes the industry-wide opposition is mainly due to 'opposition to a larger agenda of limitations and exceptions... We believe this is an unproductive approach to solving what is a discrete, long-standing problem that affects a group that needs and deserves the protections of the international community.'"
Scientists Say a Dirty Child Is a Healthy Child 331
Researchers from the School of Medicine at the University of California have shown that the more germs a child is exposed to, the better their immune system in later life. Their study found that keeping a child's skin too clean impaired the skin's ability to heal itself. From the article: "'These germs are actually good for us,' said Professor Richard Gallo, who led the research. Common bacterial species, known as staphylococci, which can cause inflammation when under the skin, are 'good bacteria' when on the surface, where they can reduce inflammation."
Can We Really Tell Lossless From MP3? 849
EddieSpinola writes "Everyone knows that lossless codecs like FLAC produce better sounding music than lossy codecs like MP3. Well that's the theory anyway. The reality is that most of us can't tell the difference between MP3 and FLAC. In this quick and dirty test, a worrying preponderance of subjects rated the MP3 encodes higher than the FLAC files. Very interesting, if slightly disturbing reading!" Visiting with adblock and flashblock is highly recommended, lest you be blinded. The article is spread over 6 pages and there is no print version.
The PS3's "Yellow Light of Death" 292
Xest writes "More and more reports are appearing about PlayStation 3 consoles failing in a similar way to the earlier models of the Xbox 360, except for Sony, it's the 'Yellow Light of Death.' The BBC has an interesting article which suggests the problem could be almost identical to that which caused the Red Ring of Death — poor soldering connections. From the article: 'Several of those businesses have told Watchdog that the vast majority of consoles they see with the "yellow light of death" can be repaired by heating up specific parts of the circuit board. This process is called solder re-flow. By heating the connections between the components and the circuit board to temperatures in excess of 200 Celsius, the metal solder joints melt, just like they did when the device was first assembled. Console repairers say that this process method is commonly used to repair fractured connections, or dry joints.' But that's not the only rule from Microsoft's playbook Sony has been following; while they have admitted 12,500 out of 2.5 million systems have failed (a convenient 0.5%), they refuse to release full figures of failure rates, citing them as being 'commercially sensitive.' Unfortunately, Sony does not appear to be following Microsoft's lead with regard to an extended warranty, stating that if a PS3 fails after 12 months, it is not their problem. In the UK at least, the Sale of Goods Act would disagree with that statement."
Comment Google *is* evil because..... (Score 1) 331
While we're here, does anyone know any reason for believing Google *is* evil? I ask people on occasion, but they're never able to point out anything rational, they just point into the darkness and tell me what *might* be out there...
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