Kluenitou - Slashdot User

Publishing a Commercial iPhone Game, Start To Finish 38

Posted by timothy on Thursday October 16, 2008 @02:04PM from the alger-would-be-proud dept.

Niklas Wahrman writes with this "motivational story on how a student and part-time developer was able to take an idea and turn it into an Android project and then port to iPhone for commercial release in less than a year. In the article, he focuses on how to get a game done — a problem many independent developers face. During the development of the game, Asterope, he took a lot of screenshots from many of the development stages that show how the game gradually came to life."

Playstation 3 Video DRM Only Allows One Download 316

Posted by Soulskill on Monday September 22, 2008 @03:09PM from the how-generous dept.

Nom du Keyboard points out an Ars Technica report that the Sony Video Store on the Playstation Network is running some rather restrictive DRM. When purchasing movies, users are allowed just one download — even if they delete the movie to make space and want to download it again on the same machine. A Sony representative told Ars that users could be issued an extra download as a "one-time courtesy" with help from customer support. Quoting: "When we're discussing a system that seems to release new hardware configurations every few months and a company that actively encourages you to swap hard drives yourself, it appears users are going to run into problems if they ever decide they want to switch out their hard drive or even upgrade into a larger system; the information on the back-up utility makes it clear that video content can't be moved over to new system, although new hard drives should be safe. Sony claims that the PS3 is operating on a 10-year timeline: is one extra download, which you need to contact customer service to apply for, good enough for the next decade?"

McCain Backs Nuclear Power 1563

Posted by CmdrTaco on Thursday June 19, 2008 @08:45AM from the all-it-takes-is-peak-oil dept.

bagsc writes "Senator John McCain set out another branch of his energy policy agenda today, with a key point: 45 new nuclear power plants by 2030." So it finally appears that this discussion is back on the table. I'm curious how Nevada feels about this, as well as the Obama campaign. All it took was $4/gallon gas I guess. When it hits $5, I figure one of the campaigns will start to promote Perpetual Motion.

Web Use In 2008 Campaigns Shatters Records 19

Posted by samzenpus on Wednesday June 18, 2008 @09:17PM from the president-of-the-internet dept.

CWmike writes "Heather Havenstein writes that the increased viewing of online political videos and the use of social networks to gather campaign data and online donations for candidates has fueled use of the Internet in this year's election cycle that is shattering records, according to a study released this week. (Download a PDF of the study.) A record-breaking 46% (compared with 31% in the last cycle) of Americans have used the Internet, e-mail or cell phone text messaging to get news about a campaign or to share their views, according to the "The Internet and the 2008 Election" report compiled by the Pew Internet & American Life Project. So far, according to the report, supporters of Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) are using online tools for election matters more often that those of rival Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.). Obama was an early supporter of Web 2.0 technologies, and that effort appears to be paying off, the study finds."

Man Fired When Laptop Malware Downloaded Porn 635

Posted by samzenpus on Wednesday June 18, 2008 @06:59PM from the your-computer-wants-porn dept.

Geoffrey.landis writes "The Massachusetts Department of Industrial Accidents fired worker Michael Fiola and initiated procedures to prosecute him for child pornography when they determined that internet temporary files on his laptop computer contained child porn. According to Fiola, 'My boss called me into his office at 9 a.m. The director of the Department of Industrial Accidents, my immediate supervisor, and the personnel director were there. They handed me a letter and said, "You are being fired for a violation of the computer usage policy. You have pornography on your computer. You're fired. Clean out your desk. Let's go."' Fiola said, 'They wouldn't talk to me. They said, "We've been advised by our attorney not to talk to you."' However, prosecutors dropped the case when a state investigation of his computer determined there was insufficient evidence to prove he had downloaded the files. Computer forensic analyst Tami Loehrs, who spent a month dissecting the computer for the defense, explained in a 30-page report that the laptop was running corrupted virus-protection software, and Fiola was hit by spammers and crackers bombarding its memory with images of incest and pre-teen porn not visible to the naked eye. The virus protection and software update functions on the laptop had been disabled, and apparently the laptop was 'crippled' by malware. According to Loehrs, 'When they gave him this laptop, it had belonged to another user, and they changed the user name for him, but forgot to change the SMS user name, so SMS was trying to connect to a user that no longer existed ... It was set up to do all of its security updates via the server, and none of that was happening because he was out in the field.' A malware script on the machine surfed foreign sites at a rate of up to 40 per minute whenever the machine was within range of a wireless site."

Comment Re:Wireless? (Score 0, Offtopic) 613

by Kluenitou on Monday June 04, 2007 @10:14AM (#19381459) Attached to: Pimping Out a New House

I myself use wireless for most of the computers in my house and I have many reasons to do so. I have my server hard-wired, but just about everything else is wireless.

First of all, my house was built in the 1950s so the walls are plaster and 1" thick. It's nearly impossible to get behind them without completely destroying the walls.

Second, on any reasonably large sized house, it is much more economical to go with wireless. We have a few laptops that are all wireless, and it kind of defeats their purpose to have to plug them in to get internet. Also, we have computers in just about every room of the house and we would have to buy hundreds of feet of cable in order to wire them. You can find decent wireless receivers for around $20 which is far less than we'd spend on the cabling to reach some of the far away rooms. And of course, we have the aforementioned problem of the thick walls we'd have to deal with.

Third, I don't know about you, but most of what I do at home is browse the internet doing nothing in particular, play games, and watch media off of my server. Security isn't my highest priority, I could care less if someone is able to intercept my transmission and see that I'm viewing the latest and stupidest video on Youtube. Not exactly something I'd need to keep intensely secure. If I had a top secret clearance and worked on important documents in my house, maybe that'd be a bit different. Anything secure I do at work during the day where my line is hard-wired.

Fourth, you mentioned lower speed. My wireless router is an 802.11G router, with theoretical speeds of 55 Mbps but in reality achieves around 15-20 Mbps. The uplink DSL to my house is a paltry 3Mbps. What point is there to do all this work to upgrade my internal network to 100 or 1000 Mbit when my total throughput to the outside world is capped at much lower? Unless I was doing a lot of transferring large files around inside my network which I seldom do, it seems like a lot of pointless work.

Last, there is of course a bit of the "lazy-factor," but it doesn't drive my decision, the other factors mentioned above do. But it is incredibly nice to know that I don't have to try and retrofit an entire house with new cables, redoing the walls where I try to snake the cable through, repainting them after I mess them up, buying cable and jacks and ends and spending hours and hours and hours trying to snake the cable throughout my entire house. You could call me another lazy American, but with the above reasons, I'd call running cables through my house creating a mess and a headache that aren't merited and have very little benefit.

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