Slashdot Mirror

I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "Microsoft has patented a frustration-detection help system that would monitor your computer use and biometrics to figure out when you were frustrated. It could then offer to pair you up with someone else doing exactly the same thing who might be able to help you out. Interestingly, they don't appear to use speech recognition to detect abnormal levels of swear words, but that could be due to their past difficulties with speech recognition. 'Physical responses aren't the only things that could trigger this event--taking an abnormally long time to complete a task would do so also--but the biometric aspect is certainly the most unusual. Is this patent a harbinger of a dystopian future where computer users' biorhythms will be monitored to increase efficiency? Unlikely. The idea, which was birthed at Microsoft Research, is simply a more advanced version of user focus group testing that Microsoft (and most other software companies) have been doing for years now.'"

Lucas123 writes "According to a Computerworld survey of IT managers, data storage projects are the No. 2 project priority for corporations in 2008, up from No. 4 in 2007. IT teams are looking into clustered architectures and centralized storage-area networks as one way to control capacity growth, shifting away from big-iron storage and custom applications. The reason for the data avalanche? Archive data. In the private sector alone electronic archives will take up 27,000 petabytes (27 billion gigabytes) by 2010. E-mail growth accounts for much of that figure."

Kelson writes "After years of trying to figure out what to do with it, AOL is officially discontinuing the Netscape browser. In the four and a half years after they dismantled the development team and spun off the Mozilla Foundation as a lost cause, only to see Firefox take off, AOL has tried twice to reinvent Netscape. There was the chimera-like Netscape 8, which used both Mozilla's and IE's rendering engines, and just months ago they released Netscape 9, trying to ride the social networking wave. AOL will release security fixes through February 1, 2008, after which the browser will officially be dead. For the "nostalgic," they suggest using Firefox and installing a Netscape theme."

RenHoek writes "With heat death, the big crunch and quite a few other nasty ways in which the universe could see its demise, we can now add "running out of time" to the list. A team of scientists came up with a new theory that would solve the problem of the elusive dark energy that seems to be accelerating the expansion of the universe. They figure that the universe is not speeding up but we are, in relation to the outer regions of space, slowing down. Tests with the upcoming Large Hadron Collider will give more insight if we're going to end up frozen in time."

Gamespot, to accompany a piece on the art of pitching a game has up a companion article on a few good pitches from talented developers that never quite made it into games. My favorite of the three, from Will Wright: "I've always been fascinated with airships, and I wanted to do a game about the Hindenburg. And it was originally conceived as a cross between Myst and a flight simulator, if you can imagine that. You basically wake up on the Hindenburg. You're all alone. It's flying toward Lakehurst, New Jersey. You can walk anywhere on the ship. You can turn lights on and off. You can steer. You can adjust the engines. But every time you come into Lakehurst, it blows up. And you have to figure out why, and it becomes like this weird mystery flight simulator thing. I'd still love to do that."

Along with the news that more than half of the US is playing games, the November NPD numbers offer an interesting insight into the games industry. The ongoing console war was white hot, with record hardware sales. The Wii outsold the PS3 by half a million systems last month, and is quickly gaining on the Xbox 360's total sales figures. The big winners last month were software publishers, though, with a record $1.3 billion in sales. "Obviously Call of Duty 4 performed well on both the Xbox 360 and the PlayStation 3. It is now second only to Halo 3 for first-month sales numbers on the Xbox 360. On the PlayStation 3 no other game has launched as well as Call of Duty 4 in November. Super Mario Galaxy performed extremely well for its first month. Two new properties - Assassin's Creed and Mass Effect - sold well enough to make the top 10. Across both platforms, Assassin's Creed was actually the second best selling game of the month. It is amusing to note that despite the unprecedented Nintendo DS and PSP sales, no game for either system sold well enough to make the top 10 software list for November."

Sales news is starting to trickle out for some of the big Fall games, with the Xbox 360 so far looking very strong. BioWare's Mass Effect has sold a million copies, while Bungie's blockbuster Halo 3 has already sold over five million copies since its September 25th release date. That last figure comes from a GameDaily interview with Xbox Marketing VP Jeff Bell. Aside from noting this week's release of Halo 3's first downloadable map pack, Bell also connected these sales back to the console itself: "The reaction has been very positive. In fact, we saw incredible sales of Xbox 360 for the week of November 18, including Black Friday of more than 310,000 Xbox 360 in the U.S. alone. This is really strong momentum for us given that we're already in our third year on the market."

cybermage writes "The NY Times has a story about UPS using software to dramatically reduce the number of left turns their drivers take. With a fleet of vehicles their size, the time and money saved by pre-planning routes that try to eliminate left turns means big savings." Some CS major probably figured this out instead of traveling salesman.

Mass Defect writes "While the RIAA continues to sue people for p2p file sharing, the record labels have made an about-face and given their blessing to users sharing MP3s via the social networking site imeem.com. In May this year the site was being sued by Warner for allowing users to upload photos, videos, and music to share. However to everyone's amazement, instead of being flattened, imeem.com managed to convince the label that this free promotion was a good thing. In July imeem.com signed a deal with the label. Since then the site has added Sony, BMG, EMI, and now the biggest fish of them all, Universal. Imeem now has the royal flush of record labels supporting its media-sharing service, each getting a cut of the advertising revenues generated by their catalog. Finally someone has figured out a way to do 'YouTube for MP3s' without getting sued out of existence."

BotKicker writes "A Japanese team has created the first full-size humanoid robot that won't fall over if you push it. A video shows it staggering and regaining balance after blows from a researcher. Being able to withstand shoves and kicks is essential if robots are to truly be our buddies, they reckon. 'The robot's balancing ability depends on its joints. For one thing they are never kept rigid, even when standing still, meaning they yield slightly when the robot is pushed. Force sensors within each joint also work out the position and velocity of the robot's centre mass as it moves around. Control software rapidly figures out what forces the robot's feet need to exert on the ground to bring it back into balance, and tells the joints how to act.'"

Alberto G writes "As Jammie Thomas appeals the $222,000 copyright infringement verdict against her, the Department of Justice has weighed in on a central facet of her appeal: whether the $9,250-per-song damages were unconstitutionally excessive and violated the Due Process Clause of the Constitution. The DoJ says that there's nothing wrong with the figure the jury arrived at: '[G]iven the findings of copyright infringement in this case, the damages awarded under the Copyright Act's statutory damages provision did not violate the Due Process Clause; they were not "so severe and oppressive as to be wholly disproportioned to the offense or obviously unreasonable."' The DoJ also appears to buy into the RIAA's argument that making a file available on a P2P network constitutes copyright infringement. 'It's also impossible for the true damages to be calculated, according to the brief, because it's unknown how many other users accessed the files in the KaZaA share in question and committed further acts of copyright infringement.'"

noiseordinance writes "I'd like to know everyone's opinion about which presidential candidate seems most likely to preserve Internet privacy." We haven't officially started election coverage on Slashdot yet, but I figured it wouldn't be a bad idea to start tossing out questions like this as we get closer to the primaries. Try to stay on the subject of on-line privacy- we can run more stories on other topics in the future.

Tech.Luver recommends a story unfolding at the FCC, where Chairman Kevin Martin delayed a vote on a report that would open the door to more agency control over the cable television industry. Analysts say that Martin lacked support to pass the measure. The delayed vote was on a draft report, backed by Martin, that found that cable companies control enough of the pay-TV market to warrant more oversight under the so-called "70/70" rule — 70% of US households passed by cable and 70% of those with access to cable service subscribing to it. The cable industry disputed the figures in the report, and Martin's two fellow Republican commission members also expressed doubts.

A number of readers suggest we check out Groklaw, where PJ is reporting that a bankruptcy judge has granted Novell's request to lift the stay so that its trial against SCO can proceed in Utah. The judge concluded that Judge Kimball is the best one to decide how much SCO owes Novell, and that SCO cannot make any "reorganization" plans — including any "fire sale" of assets — until it knows this figure.

An anonymous reader writes "Scientists can't figure out why these rocks — weighing up to several hundred pounds each — slide across a dry lake bed. The leading theory proposes that wind moves the rocks after a rain when the lake bed consists of soft and very slippery mud.

NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "The Court has ordered UMG Recordings, Warner Bros. Records, Interscope Records, Motown, and SONY BMG to disclose their expenses-per-download to the defendant's lawyers, in UMG v. Lindor, a case pending in Brooklyn. The Court held that the expense figures are relevant to the issue of whether the RIAA's attempt to recover damages of $750 or more per 99-cent song file, is an unconstitutional violation of due process."

DECS writes "Last winter, RDM detailed why Microsoft's iPod Killer would fail miserably. This year, the site argues, Microsoft will fail again, but for a new set of reasons. It is not obvious that the company has figured this out itself. 'Microsoft doesn't seem to learn from its mistakes in consumer electronics very well. When it does however, it frequently gets the timing wrong. This year, Microsoft appears set to compete against the Apple of 2006. It now offers two flash models, last year's leftover 30 GB unit, and new 80 GB version. The problem is that Apple moved the goalpost dramatically. Apple's new 3G Nano is ultra thin and small, but delivers the same video resolution as Microsoft's boxy flash Zunes at the same price. It also plays games.'"

stern writes "A security researcher at Cambridge was trying to figure out the password used by somebody who had hacked his Web site. He tried running a dictionary through the encryption hash function; no dice. Then he pasted the hacker's encrypted password into Google, and voila — there was his answer. Conclusion? Use no password that any other human being has ever used, or is ever likely to use, for any purpose. I think."

babyshiori writes "Users of Microsoft Windows Vista can rejoice in the fact that Microsoft just released a preview of the Windows Vista Service Pack 1 Release Candidate! The build is the lead-up to the actual service pack, which will be made available to even more testers at a later date. 'In our early tests with the beta, we saw some small improvements in boot time on an HP Compaq 8710p Core 2 Duo notebook. Before SP1, the laptop took 1 minute, 51 seconds to boot. After the update, that figure dropped by almost 20 seconds. Microsoft is also touting improvements in "the speed of copying and extracting files," so we tested a few of those scenarios. We noted a slight increase in the time required to copy 562 JPEG images totaling 1.9GB from an SD Card to the hard drive of the aforementioned HP Compaq notebook.'"

couch_warrior writes "Microsoft is now working on a system that will back up the contents of your brain. The pilot project lacks a direct brain interface, but "MyLifeBits" will provide a simulacrum of actual memories. No mention is made as to whether Microsoft will claim to own the digital rights to the content of your life, or what license fees you will have to pay to access your own memories." Honestly this looks like a bunch of hooey to me, but I figured others would be better suited to say.