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Bill Gates' Plan To Destroy Music, Note By Note 659

Posted by timothy from the too-insane-to-ignore-forever dept.
theodp writes "Remember Mr. Microphone? If you thought music couldn't get worse, think again. Perhaps with the help of R&D tax credits, Microsoft Research has spawned Songsmith, software that automatically creates a tinny, childish background track for your singing. And as bad as the pseudo-infomercial was, the use of the product in the wild is likely to be even scarier, as evidenced by these Songsmith'ed remakes of music by The Beatles, The Police, and The Notorious B.I.G.."
The Internet

Visualizing Searches Over Time 56

Posted by CowboyNeal from the half-past-chat dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Chris Harrison has built a visualization that explores what people are doing online over time. He explains, 'Search engines are the gateway to the internet for most people, and so search queries provide insight into what people are doing and thinking. In order to examine millions of search queries, I built a simple, cyclical, clock-like visualization that displays the top search terms over a 24-hour period.' Interesting to see that the masses online have fairly coherent and consistent search behaviors. He also investigates the notorious AOL dataset."
Power

Using Gym Rats' Body Power to Generate Electricity 338

Posted by CowboyNeal from the other-biodiesel-generators dept.
Carl Bialik from WSJ writes "A Hong Kong health club is hoping that a car battery, some StairMasters and dozens of gym rats can help ease the world's energy problems. It is just one of a wave of projects that are trying to tap the power of the human body, the Wall Street Journal reports. The article explains the impetus behind the project: 'The human power project at California Fitness was set in motion by Doug Woodring, a 41-year-old extreme-sports fanatic and renewable-energy entrepreneur, who pitched the experiment to the gym's management last May. "I've trained my whole life, and many megawatts have been wasted," says Mr. Woodring, who has worked out at the Hong Kong gym for years. "I wanted to do something with all that sweat."'"
Windows

Submission + - Vista activation cracked by brute force

Submitted by Bengt
Bengt writes: The Inquirer has a story about a brute force Vista key activation crack.

From TFA: The crack is a glorified guesser, and with the speed of modern PCs and the number of outstanding keys, the 25-digit serials are within range. The biggest problem for MS? If this gets widespread, and I hope it will, people will start activating legit keys that are owned by other people.

There is really no differentiating between a legit copy with a manually typed in wrong key and a hack attempt. Sure MS can throttle this by limiting key attempts to one a minute or so on new software, but the older variants are already burnt to disk. The cat is out of the bag. The crack was first mentioned on the Keznews forums, a step by step How-to can be found HERE
Science

Huge Reservoir Discovered Beneath Asia 273

Posted by samzenpus from the city-of-R'lyeh dept.
anthemaniac writes "Seismic observations reveal a huge reservoir of water in Earth's mantle beneath Asia. It's actually rock saturated with water, but it's an ocean's worth of water ... as much as is in the whole Arctic Ocean. How did it get there? A slab of water-laden crust sank, and the water evaporated out when it was heated, and then it was trapped, the thinking goes. The discovery fits neatly with the region's heavy seismic activity and fits neatly with the idea that the planet's moving crustal plates are lubricated with water."
Businesses

Is Network Engineering a Viable Career? 229

Posted by Cliff from the testing-the-waters dept.
An anonymous reader asks: "I'm fresh out of high school and interested in getting a job in networking. One option is a degree in networking, the alternative I've considered is just getting certificates (CCNA/P, A+, MCSA). A large factor in my decision is which route is most likely to land a secure and well-paid full time job. I'm located in Melbourne, Australia and I don't have any local contacts in the industry who can advise me, and so was hoping some other Australian (or international) readers could share their knowledge and experience with these issues."
Databases

Submission + - Free global virtual scientific library

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: More than 20,000 signatures, including several Nobel prize winners and 750 education, research, and cultural organisations from around the world came together to support free access to government funded research, "to create a freely available virtual scientific library available to the entire globe. The European Commission responded by committing more than $100m (£51m) towards facilitating greater open access through support for open access journals and for the building of the infrastructure needed to house institutional repositories that can store the millions of academic articles written each year. From the BBC article: "Last month five leading European research institutions launched a petition that called on the European Commission to establish a new policy that would require all government-funded research to be made available to the public shortly after publication. That requirement — called an open access principle — would leverage widespread internet connectivity with low-cost electronic publication to create a freely available virtual scientific library available to the entire globe." Isn't this the way its suppose to be?

Comment I don't want "plot" in video games. (Score 1) 242

by cribcage (#17518236) Attached to: Star Trek Legacy Review

It has to have a good plot...

I disagree. If I want a "good plot," I'll read a book. Part of the reason why Grand Theft Auto 3 was successful was the fact that its plot was incidental -- most players ignored it, and just drove around exploring and killing and blowing stuff up. It was amazing because it was a fully developed world where you could do (almost) anything.

I love playing the Ace Combat flighter-combat games for PS2. They all have plots, but I couldn't tell you what those plots are because I click through the exposition. I don't care about the stupid story; I want to fly a plane and blow shit up. The programmers spend a lot of time creating cinematic storyboards, when frankly, I'd rather they added a dozen more missions. I quit playing RPGs altogether because, while the original Final Fantasy was fun, its PlayStation sequels choked on storylines. I swear, during one I spent 10 minutes watching a bunch of CGI characters jumping off a train and breaking into a building and riding through a window on a motorcycle -- and meanwhile, I'm watching. Enough already, with the alien and the spaceship and my character's background...I just want to fight some dragons.

Go back to the paradigms, either Donkey Kong or Super Mario Bros: "The story is, there's a princess you need to rescue. GO!!!" Nobody played the game because they honestly gave a damn about rescuing the princess; they played it because it was fun. Imagine if some programmer applied the GTA3 dynamic to, say, TIE Fighter, and you could just randomly fly through space and attack squadrons, convoys, planets, whatever. Ditto here: How cool would it be if, instead of gluing your gameplay to a predetermined plot (probably culled from some rejected script), you could explore space with your starship and find new planets, encounter new species, decide to "tease" the Romulans around the Neutral Zone or decide to warp over to Delta Quadrant and start busting on the Borg?

I'd buy that game. Definitely knock off the A-list voice actors, and stop nailing everything that happens to some linear plotline. Fire all those people, and instead spend the money on innovating the gameplay.

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