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Comment Re:AltSlashdot is coming (Score 3, Insightful) 23

Hey John, I'm going to parrot what a few others have said; you might want to re-think the site name a little to avoid trademark dispute and angering the Dice.com gods. Maybe something like afterslash.org (altslash, as mentioned earlier, is too similar I think to alterslash, an existing blogroll/summary site).

I'd help in any way I can. I'll contact you later.

Comment Re:Because they are expensive to make (Score 1) 384

Oh no, we understand that.

It's quite simple. If the game is any good, then there won't be any used copies to by simply because no one wants to sell it.

The publishers' main concern is that first initial rush to buy the game after its released; that translates into money for the developer. Long tail sales are irrelevant and the royalties are crap unless you wrote Starcraft. So if you can make your game last for four weeks before someone gets tired of it, you've succeeded, you will get ample cash money to fund development of the next one.

If your target market is reselling the product at a rate which competes with the all important initial sales in a significant way, THEN YOU SUCK AT MAKING GAMES GET A DIFFERENT JOB. I don't know, work for Hollywood, put those texture and explosion making skills to good use. Lord knows Hollywood doesn't pay anyone the big bucks for a movie because of solid writing.

Power

MSI Develops a Heat-Driven Cooler 173

V!NCENT tips us to a write-up about an addition to MSI's Ecolution motherboard which harvests heat from the chipset to power a fan. The device is based on a Stirling engine. The heat from the chipset expands a trapped gas, which pushes against a piston to generate power. The article contains a YouTube video of how the device works. According to MSI, the device has 70% efficiency.

Comment Re:measuring nanoseconds (Score 1) 429

It's relatively easy to get a time-to-digital converter (TDC) with ~tens of picosecond timing granularity, and if you work hard enough, you can get down to ~10 ps resolution or so. If you do insane things, like use superconducting electronics, you can get down to ~few picoseconds or so.

For the simple ~tens of picosecond TDCs, a simple method is just a capacitor with a switched constant-current source. The capacitor charges at a fixed rate, and then the voltage is read out with an ADC. The limiting factors there are the speed of the switch.
The Internet

The Top 100 Alternative Search Engines 108

ReadWriteWeb writes "Search Engine Optimizer (SEO) Charles S. Knight has compiled a list of the top 100 alternative search engines. The list includes Artificial Intelligence systems, Clustering engines, Recommendation Search engines, Metasearch, and many more hidden gems of search. People use four main search engines for 99.99% of their searches: Google, Yahoo!, MSN, and Ask.com (in that order). But Knight has discovered, via his work as an SEO, that in the other .01% lies a vast multitude of the most innovative and creative search engines around."

Drugs Eradicate the Need For Sleep 772

MattSparkes writes "New Scientist is running an article on lifestyle drugs that claim to help you function on little or no sleep. I'm dubious, but the interviewee in the article claims they work well. 'Yves (not his real name), a 31-year-old software developer from Seattle, often doesn't have time for a full night's sleep. So he swallows something to make sure he doesn't need one.'" But, sleep is where I'm a Viking!

Sys-Admins Reading the Bosses Mail? 398

PetManimal writes "Computerworld has an article about IT staff who have access to corner-office email. Systems administrators, database administrators, storage administrators and higher level IT super users are the types who may access sensitive executive information; one source quoted in the article says that in a company with 1,500 employees, there might typically be five to 10 administrators who have this access. As for how many abuse these priviledges, it's hard to tell, but rogue admins out for workplace revenge or personal gain can wreak havoc: '... Experts agree that the severity of these occurrences generally makes them more harmful than external attacks. One of the biggest obstacles to eliminating unauthorized access is determining how many people have it. Access lists are particularly difficult to formulate in both mature companies, where the number and power of administrators have expanded over periods of years, and small companies, where rapid growth leads to undocumented tangles of administrators who are able to maintain their access because nobody has time to assess their status.'"

Modding Nokia Cameraphone To Be Mouse 89

ozg333 writes "This guy had the very clever idea of modding a Nokia mobile phone to work as a mouse by using the built in camera. It uses the phone's built-in Bluetooth to link to the PC, so cool! There is also a video of it in action. I can't wait to get one of these, it would mean one less device to carry when I'm travelling."

MS Proposes JPEG Alternative 633

automatix writes "Microsoft's new competitor to the omnipresent JPEG format has been shown at WinHEC and is discussed on CNET. The Windows Media Photo format has many promises associated with it. The program manager is claiming 'We can do it in half the size of a JPEG file.'. While 'the philosophy has been that licensing should not be a restriction', it is interesting that the specification requires a click-through agreement to even read it."

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