venturaville - Slashdot User

New Speed Cameras Catch You From Space 351

Posted by samzenpus on Wednesday April 21, 2010 @10:11AM from the no-place-to-run-or-speed dept.

A new kind of speed camera that uses satellites to measure average speed over long distances is being tested in Britain. The "Speedspike" system combines plate reading technology with a global positioning satellite receiver to calculate average speed between any two points in the area being monitored. From the article: "Details of the trials are contained in a House of Commons report. The company said in its evidence that the cameras enabled 'number plate capture in all weather conditions, 24 hours a day.' It also referred to the system's 'low cost' and ease of installation." I can't wait to see the episode of MythBusters where they try to avoid getting a speeding ticket from a satellite.

Can You Fight DRM With Patience? 309

Posted by Soulskill on Thursday March 18, 2010 @05:39AM from the napalm-works-better dept.

As modern DRM schemes get more annoying and invasive, the common wisdom is to vote with your wallet and avoid supporting developers and publishers who include such schemes with their games. Or, if you simply must play it, wait a while until outcry and complaints have caused the DRM restrictions to be loosened. But will any of that make game creators rethink their stance? An article at CNet argues that gamers are, in general, an impatient bunch, and that trait combined with the nature of the games industry means that progress fighting DRM will be slow or nonexistent. Quoting: "Increasingly so, the joke seems to be on the customers who end up buying this software when it first comes out. A simple look back at some controversial titles has shown us that after the initial sales come, the publisher later removes the vast majority of the DRM, leaving gamers to enjoy the software with fewer restrictions. ... Still, [waiting until later to purchase the game] isn't a good long-term solution. Early sales are often one of the big quantifiers in whether a studio will start working on a sequel, and if everyone were to wait to buy games once they hit the bargain price, publishers would simply stop making PC versions. There's also no promise that the really heavy bits of DRM will be stripped out at a later date, except for the fact that most publishers are unlikely to want to maintain the cost of running the activation, and/or online verification servers for older software."

Girls Wired To Fear Dangerous Animals 224

Posted by samzenpus on Monday September 14, 2009 @01:00PM from the don't-play-with-venomous-things dept.

Foot-in-Mouth writes "New Scientist reports that girls are more "primed" to fear spiders and snakes, compared to boys. Infant boys and girls were shown pairs of images, a fearful and a happy object (such as a spider and a flower), measuring the boys' and girls' dwell times on the images. And in another similar test, normally happy objects (such as a flower) were given a fearful face and fearful objects were given a happy face. The results of these two tests suggested to the researcher that girls are not wired to fear spiders, for example, but rather girls are wired to more quickly learn to fear dangerous animals. The researcher, David Rakison at CMU, 'attributes the difference to behavioural differences between men and women among our hunter-gatherer ancestors. An aversion to spiders may help women avoid dangerous animals, but in men evolution seems to have favoured more risk-taking behaviour for successful hunting.' This reminds one of men's obsession with video games. Will game designers use this information to tweak video games for gender, either to make the games more or less frightening?"

Unemployment Hits New High In Silicon Valley 338

Posted by timothy on Tuesday September 23, 2008 @08:58AM from the booms-and-busts dept.

Though there may be some degree of cushion for IT workers in the US generally, Slatterz writes "The steadily climbing unemployment rate in Silicon Valley has reached a shocking four-year high of 6.6 per cent. Recent statistics indicate that the percentage of unemployed workers in the sunny state of California has increased to 7.7 in August — up from 7.4 per cent in July. Jeffrey Lindsay of Bernstein Research explained that a number of Internet firms were chronically overstaffed."

New Speed Record For Magnetic Memory 26

Posted by timothy on Monday September 22, 2008 @11:49PM from the think-fast dept.

Iddo Genuth writes "An experiment performed at the Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt (PTB) in Germany has uncovered that a spin-torque switching of a nanomagnet is as fast as what is permitted according to the fundamental laws of physics' limit. This method of switching, also named ballistic switching, could allow for increased speeds in future non-volatile magnetic memories."

Bad Signs For Blu-ray 1276

Posted by timothy on Monday September 22, 2008 @09:38PM from the anguish-languish dept.

Ian Lamont writes "More than six months after HD-DVD gave up the ghost, there are several signs that Sony's rival Blu-ray format is struggling to gain consumer acceptance. According to recent sales data from Nielsen, market share for Blu-ray discs in the U.S. is declining, and Sony and its Blu-ray partners are trying several tactics to boost the format — including free trial discs bundled into magazines and cheap Blu-ray players that cost less than $200."

Stanford Teaching MBAs How To Fight Open Source 430

Posted by timothy on Monday September 22, 2008 @07:43PM from the then-they-fight-you dept.

mjasay writes "As if the proprietary software world needed any help, two business professors from Harvard and Stanford have combined to publish 'Divide and Conquer: Competing with Free Technology Under Network Effects,' a research paper dedicated to helping business executives fight the onslaught of open source software. The professors advise 'the commercial vendor ... to bring its product to market first, to judiciously improve its product features, to keep its product "closed" so the open source product cannot tap into the network already built by the commercial product, and to segment the market so it can take advantage of a divide-and-conquer strategy.' The professors also suggest that 'embrace and extend' is a great model for when the open source product gets to market first. Glad to see that $48,921 that Stanford MBAs pay being put to good use. Having said that, such research is perhaps a great, market-driven indication that open source is having a serious effect on proprietary technology vendors."

Comment How having a blackberry has affected me. (Score 1) 321

by venturaville on Friday December 14, 2007 @12:10PM (#21698112) Attached to: Does Constant Access Shatter the Home/Work Boundary?

I am in IT and I have to carry a phone for on-call purposes. I have seen the transition to blackberries happen at my own work. On the sum of things, I believe that the blackberry has been somewhat more beneficial for me as compared to those with whom I work. Unlike a lot of them, I turn off all email notifications. Instead I rely on SMS alerts for emergencies, and only read email when I feel like it. This keeps me from feeling stressed about having to answer every single email right when it comes in. There are other things you can do to control the email flow (filters, important/normal flags, etc.). The blackberry has helped me as I am able to be somewhat useful even when I am on the bus traveling into work. Blackberries (as well as an increasing number of other phones) can do a lot of what a wireless radio enabled laptop can do. Instant messaging, web browsing (including corporate networks), bluetooth headphones, as well as SSH, VPN, telnet in a pinch.

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