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Stories · 3,462
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Neowin interviews Ben Goodger, Justin Frankel
mr_tommy writes "Neowin has had the pleasure of talking to two prominent figures in the I.T. world. First, Ben Goodger, chief developer of the excellent browser Firefox, and secondly, Justin Frankel, creator of Winamp and many other products for Nullsoft. We've got Ben talking about Firefox, XUL, and the future at Mozilla; equally, Justin talks (humorously) about his past, Winamp, AOL, music, and what he's up to at the moment. Also, read on for some of his projects he thought about doing when he left Winamp, including setting up an interesting alternative to Windows 2000 based on Open Source software, similar to ReactOS."
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The Good and Bad of Data Collection
Nephilium writes "Reason magazine has dedicated their latest issue to a discussion of privacy and data collection. They sent subscribers a customized cover of the magazine [as previously covered on Slashdot]. Some good points as to the benefits and drawbacks of who is sharing your information." The sample targeted advertisements are for non-profit organizations, but it may not be long until someone figures out how much companies will pay to utilize this sort of targeting.
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Nintendo To Debut Next-Gen Console At E3 2005
An anonymous reader writes "According to Reuters, Nintendo has indicated it will debut its next-generation console at next May's E3, as part of financial results in which the company showed net profit of 70 billion yen ($625 million) - this figure still 'fell by half in the past business year, hurt by disappointing sales of its GameCube console and currency losses, but [Nintendo] predicted earnings would bounce back this year.' The company also indicated 'target shipments of 3.5 million 'DS' machines', with Nintendo's Yoshihiro Mori saying: 'In order to have the DS out by Christmas, we plan to start production late summer or early fall and boost production every month.'"
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Symptoms of Mac OS X Hack?
goatbar asks: "Many of you have probably dealt with computer intrusion before, but this is the first time for me with Mac OS X. I've got a machine where the passwords have been altered. If this were Linux, I would drop in Knoppix, figure out which way I got hacked, backup the system, reinstall, secure it and be back up in a couple hours. However, with OSX what can I do? Does anyone have strategies for regaining access to the machine and doing a post-mortem? I'm going to bring up the system drive on a laptop, but then what? I can back it up, but other than the system logs, where to look beyond the usual '.BitchX' and '...' directories. How do I easily tell what other annoying little things have been installed?"
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Finally Geeks Available in Action Figure Form
Treebiter1 writes "Happy Worker, a specialty toy developer, has introduced a new action figure the "GeekMan Action Figure." Billed as the "a hunk o' hunk of nerdly love." His "super powers" include ungodly coding abilities; opposite sex repulsion; analytical reasoning; ability to create technical acronyms; less than ideal personal hygiene routine. This is kind of an oddity, perhpas I should say it is an oddity, but it might make a funny gag gift."
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Hollywood Courting the Gaming Industry
beatleadam writes "In a trend that we all seem to already be hyper-aware of... 'The video game industry was once an afterthought in Hollywood, at most an ancillary source of revenue like action figures. The people passionately developing the computer-based form of entertainment were seen as dorks compared with the celebrities. Not anymore. Now that games have matured into a $11 billion business, topping movie box-office sales and siphoning television viewers, the lucrative and increasingly influential genre has attracted more star power than ever.'" We did another story about this a month ago.
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Trained Rats for Mine Detection
rikomatic writes "The dangerous profession of anti-personnel mine detection is getting a surprising new tool: giant Gambian rats (NY Times reg). Some resourceful Belgians have figured out how to train these 30-inch rodents to hunt out landmines. They are cheaper and work harder than dogs and are more reliable than metal detectors. Plus, if one of them blows up, who's going to cry?"
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Economics of Online Gaming
PGillingwater writes "The Walrus has a nice article up about the economics of on-line gaming communities. Starting with the original 2001 paper which shows that Everquest has a GNP greater than India, Bulgaria and China, and going on to the billionaires of Ultima Online and the Mafia takeover of The Sims. "He began calculating frantically. He gathered data on 616 auctions, observing how much each item sold for in U.S. dollars. When he averaged the results, he was stunned to discover that the EverQuest platinum piece was worth about one cent U.S. -- higher than the Japanese yen or the Italian lira. With that information, he could figure out how fast the EverQuest economy was growing. Since players were killing monsters or skinning bunnies every day, they were, in effect, creating wealth. Crunching more numbers, Castronova found that the average player was generating 319 platinum pieces each hour he or she was in the game -- the equivalent of $3.42 (U.S.) per hour. "That's higher than the minimum wage in most countries," he marvelled.""
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Sony, IBM Announce Cell Workstation For PS3 Dev
Thanks to GamesIndustry.biz for its article discussing the little-heralded Sony announcement of a Sony and IBM co-developed, Cell-based workstation for PlayStation 3 (and other) content creation. The article explains: "The workstation, which will ship before the end of the year, will feature an architecture based on the parallel processing Cell chip [also to be used in the PlayStation 3], and will be designed to power digital content creation for movies, television and videogames." GI.Biz also quotes an un-named industry figure as suggesting: "Microsoft should be really worried by this... They've been touting Xbox 2 to their partners and talking about the kind of content they want to see created on the platform - more polygons, higher resolutions, more effects - and our response has been that the tools to create this stuff for games don't really exist yet. Now Sony has effectively created those tools."
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Safe "Engineered" Fugu, Sans Gene Manipulation
zlel writes "Did anyone figure that you could get clean, poison-free Fugu without genetic engineering? According to this story, a group of researchers at Nagasaki University managed to do just that - they bred Fugu by giving them poison-free feed. They tried to get Japan to modify its ban on the sale of Fugu liver - but authorities felt that this was too big a risk - so in the meantime, you gotta trust your chefs." Anyone willing to translate for the Japanese-impaired?
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Locally Secure Email Clients?
Mattcelt asks: "I share my PC with my roommates, two of whom don't have their own PCs. In order to keep things simple, I have Windows98 running on it - they are used to the interface; it runs the programs they need to run from the University; and I refuse to pay the money to Microsoft to upgrade to a newer Windows OS. Unfortunately, there are some issues with privacy, and though I trust my roommates, there are work-related things I wouldn't want them to stumble into. Has anyone seen an email client other than Outlook that has -local- file security? Outlook has a feature to allow the password protecting of .pst files on the local drive, but it seems that every other email client figures that once the mail is on your machine, you don't need it protected any longer. Is there another email client with integrated password protection?"
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What Makes a Good CD/DVD Duplicator?
zachjb asks: "With all of the recent articles and buzz in the technology community regarding recordable/pressed optical disks being an unreliable medium to backup your data on, I figured the best way to keep my data alive is to duplicate my CDs/DVDs every few years. I've searched Froogle for CD/DVD duplicators, but I have no idea what I should be looking for. Does anyone in the Slashdot community have a lot experience with this type of equipment? Is this a reasonable solution to the problem or is there a more cost effective one?"
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On The Evolution Of Dance Dance Revolution
Thanks to Gaming-Age for its feature discussing the continued popularity of Konami's Dance Dance Revolution series, which starts out by noting "the DDR series now has had nearly 50 different releases, all territories figured in", and interviews Konami's Yasumi Takase about the possibility of being able to use any music CD in a DDR game ("Having access to your personal music CDs is great, but coming up with your own step data for these songs is not so easy unless you are an expert player"), before talking to female DDR player 'Lyra' about her views of female players ("We do tend to have a lot more guy players than girls, the only girls we ever get are people who either try it out once, or sluts who are trying to get a guy.") Elsewhere, DDRFreak points to an academic essay on the history of DDR (PDF link), produced for Stanford University's History Of Computer Game Design class.
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Electronic Arts - Resistance Is Futile?
Thanks to USNews.com for its feature discussing the increasing dominance of videogame publisher Electronic Arts, pointing out that, using figures from its recent financial results, that: "In 1999, EA had eight platinum, or million-plus-selling, titles. In the past year, it produced 27 of them. Back then, EA possessed 10 percent of the North American game market. Today, it has captured 22 percent of it." The article discusses EA's wish "to double the size of the company every four or five years", and also talks about revenues from online gaming, where it's hoped "some 15 to 20 percent of EA revenue should come from... during the next console cycle", despite the "costly failure" of The Sims Online - however, EA CEO Larry Probst "...guesses that future online gaming will follow the cable television model, where you will pay a subscription to access various 'channels' of gaming services"),
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How Many Google Machines, Really?
BoneThugND writes "I found this article on TNL.NET. It takes information from the S-1 Filing to reverse engineer how many machines Google has (hint: a lot more than 10,000). 'According to calculations by the IEE, in a paper about the Google cluster, a rack with 88 dual-CPU machines used to cost about $278,000. If you divide the $250 million figure from the S-1 filing by $278,000, you end up with a bit over 899 racks. Assuming that each rack holds 88 machines, you end up with 79,000 machines.'" An anonymous source claims over 100,000.
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Engaging Debate on Piracy and Videogaming
koworld writes "WotR have put out a really intriguing issue on piracy this week. It has Jeff Minter arguing that piracy robs developers of their livelihoods and then a senior industry figure (writing under a pseudonym) offers the counter that piracy has done more to expand the overall videogaming market than any other factor. Just to round off the debate a number of insightful personal accounts of piracy and its effects are also included."
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Gentoo Linux Musings
ChaserPnk writes "Gentoo has been in the news recently. First with the news that Daniel Robbins leaving Gentoo and then with Gentoo Linux 2004.1 being recently released. Have you ever wondered how Gentoo got started? An article at IBM DeveloperWorks explains how. Get to know the history of Gentoo." darthcamaro wrote in with a related story that suggests that Gentoo is preparing to change directions soon: "Is Gentoo gearing up to be the third major enterprise distro? That's what an article running on internetnews.com points to. They talked to the head of Gentoo's enterprise efforts. For those that think that Gentoo Enterprise is far off, Gentoo's guy figures if they had the cash they'd be up and running in 6 months."
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Build Your Own Imperial Star Destroyer
tashanna writes "I got an e-mail from my brother with a link to this. Someone has built an Imperial Star Destroyer model from the original Star Wars movie that's appropriately-sized for the 4" action figures. The guy made it with an armory, bridge, cell bay, computer room, engineering (split over 2 levels), Darth Vader's chamber, conference room, troop rest room, medical bay and it measures 2 meters, by 1.5 meters, by 1 meter and is for sale on Ebay. There are interior photos on the eBay site. Ummm... WOW!"
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One Third of Email Now Spam
Himanshu writes "The volume of spam received by business has doubled over the last two years and it's going to get worse. Analysts IDC reckons that spam represented 32 per cent of all email sent on an average day in North America in 2003, doubling from 2001. That figure is less than the 50 per cent or more junk mail statistic commonly cited by email-filtering firms like MessageLabs and Brightmail but it still represents a serious problem,"
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Nintendo e-Reader Gets Homebrew Dot-Code Games
figa writes "Tim Schuerewegen announced that the Reed Solomon error correction used by the Nintendo Game Boy Advance e-Reader has been figured out. This was the last remaining obstacle to creating custom dot-code printouts for use with the GBA e-Reader (more info), which scans special Nintendo trading cards to load in mini-games on your Game Boy Advance. This should be a boon to homebrew GBA developers who want to print their own games - Schuerewegen has examples and documentation on his site, and has released a dot-code version of the homebrew BombSweeper game by SnowBro."