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Microsoft

Microsoft Asks Fed For Bailout 346

snydeq writes "Microsoft requested on Tuesday some $20 billion in bailout funds from the federal government, claiming that as the company controls an overwhelming share of the OS market, it is too big to fail. Low adoption rates for Vista, the ensuing ad campaign trying to convince people that they really do like Vista, and the increased need for development resources to rush Windows 7 to market to make people forget about Vista have necessitated the bailout, the company said. 'We want to make it absolutely clear that this is not a crisis of mismanagement,' said Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer in a prepared statement. 'This is simply a crisis of dollars — a crisis of not having enough dollars coming our way.'"
Games

Blizzard Shows Off Diablo III Archivist Class, WoW Dance-Off 119

It's been a busy day for the folks at Blizzard, who have released major announcements for several different games. The next Diablo III class has arrived: the Archivist. Despite their frail appearance and hunched, labored movement, they are quite deft at launching Quest Bolts at nearby foes, or conjuring a whirling Lore-nado of spinning books. Loud monsters can be silenced with a devastating Shush attack. Blizzard also put Starcraft II's latest unit on display, the Terra-Tron, which is a giant, robot uber-weapon assembled from the buildings in your base. Finally, for World of Warcraft they announced two features that have been requested by players for years: a battle of dances, where you can show off your avatar's hippest moves, and the ability to 'p1mp' your mounts. (Not sure exactly what that means, since I don't speak elvish, but there's a Nightsaber with a cannon — holy crap!)
Hardware

The Best Gaming PC Money Can Buy 360

SlappingOysters writes "Gameplayer has gone live with their best PC hardware configurations for Q1 2009. They've broken it into three tiers depending on the investor's budget. And while the prices are regional, it is comparative across the globe. The site has also detailed the 10 Hottest PC Games of 2009 to unveil the software on the horizon which may seduce gamers into an upgrade."

Comment Re:Probably coincidence. (Score 1) 480

It is inappropriate to ask "how likely was it for this server to have crashed", when there is nothing special about this server other than it is the one we already know has crashed. Once we carefully pick this crashed server from the set of all servers in the world, the "null hypothesis" is gone.

The correct question is "how likely was it for any server to have crashed", and I think the answer is that it was fairly likely.

It is unclear if being New Year's made a crash more likely, but I think we can agree it made it far more likely that we would hear about it.

Comment Re:Probably coincidence. (Score 2, Insightful) 480

Assuming your math is correct (I didn't bother to check it), that would be the odds of a random server failing in a random 20 second interval.

You didn't pick a random server, you picked one already known to have crashed. And you didn't pick a random 20 second interval either. The odds of that server crashing in that 20 second interval was 100%, because it was already known to have happened. This is a classic mis-application of statistics.

Admittedly, the interval right at New Year's is a bit suspicious, since there is some specific code to handle leap years, etc. But given that there wasn't a rash of outages reported, I am going along with the coincidence theory.

Comment Re:Victim's pain is less than a false allegation? (Score 2, Informative) 502

Seriously, what kind of ASSHOLE CHAUVINISTIC PIG would say that the person alleged of sexual assault should it not be true would be WORSE off than the victim were it true?

Read it again. He didn't say that at all. He said that the embarrassment of being publicly identified as a victim of sexual assault is less than the embarrassment of being publicly accused of being the assaulter. He was comparing the results of publication, not of the crime itself.

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