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User: tuffy

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  1. taking Dell's own advice on Dell Said To Be In Buyout Talks With Private-Equity Firms · · Score: 5, Funny

    First they give the money back to the shareholders, then they shut the company down.

  2. updating software copyright notices on Ask Slashdot: What Is Your New Years Eve Tradition? · · Score: 2

    If I don't switch the numbers around on New Year's, I'm liable to forget until quite awhile later.

  3. Re:Linus is an asshat, imho on Linus Chews Up Kernel Maintainer For Introducing Userspace Bug · · Score: 5, Informative
    The Linux kernel management style is well documented.

    For example:

    Similarly, don't be too polite or subtle about things. Politeness easily ends up going overboard and hiding the problem, and as they say, "On the internet, nobody can hear you being subtle". Use a big blunt object to hammer the point in, because you can't really depend on people getting your point otherwise.

  4. Re:my 2 cents for the Mega Man franchise on Game Review: Street Fighter X Mega Man · · Score: 2

    I don't think Capcom knows what to do with Mega Man since they fired Keiji Inafune. Re-releases of old titles are still coming, but there's no sign of anything new since Mega Man Legends 3 was axed midway through development.

  5. a reaction to the 3DS launch on Nintendo's Wii U Will Be Sold At a Loss · · Score: 1

    The 3DS was profitable at $250, but it sold slowly so Nintendo reacted by cutting the price to spur sales and put 3rd party developers at ease. They're not going to make the same mistake twice, so launching the WiiU cheap at a temporary loss is a good way to keep sales brisk until component prices fall.

    Considering Gamestop alone has ~250k people on the wait list for the console, I think its chances are pretty good.

  6. Re:Nokia's fate is already sealed on Can Nokia Save Itself? · · Score: 1

    They're not going to buy Nokia. Microsoft will let Nokia take all the arrows in the back, then scavenge their corpse for useful patents before launching Windows Phone 9 hardware of their own.

  7. Re:Network conectivity on Once Valued at $1.8B, OnLive Was Sold For Only $5M · · Score: 1

    So long as the companies providing you internet are also in the business of providing content, there's always going to be a limit to how much competing content they'll allow over that internet connection. This manifests as bandwidth caps that only cap services other than the internet provider's.

  8. Re:I don't understand on Ask Slashdot: What Distros Have You Used, In What Order? · · Score: 1

    I swap things around because different distros have different maintenance windows and different degrees of "cutting edge" software versions. Machines I don't want to touch very often get slow-updating server-style distros. Machines I want to experiment with might get the shiniest desktop-oriented distro.

    I wouldn't want to swap out OSes every week, but it's nice to try out new stuff every few months and enjoy that new OS smell.

  9. Re:I generate my passwords on Hotmail No Longer Accepts Long Passwords, Shortens Them For You · · Score: 1

    I use something very similar but without the salt. The problem is that Slashdot and other sites limit passwords to fewer than the 28 characters of base64-encoded SHA1 hash. This is annoying because the password fields don't always have a limit, so I need to track that separately.

  10. Re:This again? on Can Nintendo Court the Casuals Again? · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Haha. No. The Wii/DS generation was extremely profitable for Nintendo and far more successful than the Gamecube/GBA generation before it. Now the 3DS hardware is profitable again and Wii U hardware is supposedly profitable right from the start, so Nintendo's prospects are pretty good.

    Sony, on the other hand, is in serious trouble. If anyone's getting out of the console business, they'll be first to go.

  11. already sold out on Can Nintendo Court the Casuals Again? · · Score: 4, Informative

    Best Buy and Target have already stopped taking orders for both the deluxe and regular systems, and Gamestop has sold out of the deluxe systems. So it's already eerily similar to the Wii's pre-launch situation, and that console was very hard to find for months.

    So no, there's little evidence that a rocky start is in store.

  12. nobody cares about UIs on How Apple Killed the Linux Desktop · · Score: 1

    Linux could have the best and most intuitive UI in the world, and it would make no difference in its desktop market penetration.

    People use UIs to get to their applications. And so long as Linux applications are also available on Windows and Mac OS X, there isn't going to be a "killer app" that gets people to stick with Linux on their desktops in favor of an OS that runs a lot of other stuff too.

  13. Re:Nokia -- why? on Nokia Closing Australian Office, Looking To Sell Qt Assets · · Score: 2

    Microsoft has already thrown Nokia under the bus once when they denied the Lumia an upgrade path to Windows 8. So rather than rescue this dying company (and all its debts) with a buyout, they'll just wait for Nokia to crash and burn before picking up the useful pieces at fire sale prices.

  14. Re:Car analogy on Fedora 18 To Feature the GNOME2 Fork MATE · · Score: 1

    Modern GUIs still have windows and scrollbars and buttons, just as a modern car has a steering wheel and pedals. That hasn't stopped some car makers from screwing up the shifters and radio knobs from one model to the next, just as OS makers do.

    One would hope these mistakes will lead us to better interfaces than before, but there's bound to be some setbacks along the way.

  15. Re:Hey look! An Ebay Auction. on Legend of Zelda NES Nintendo Prototype On Sale For $150K · · Score: 1

    You're quite right. I should've noticed it wasn't a Famicom cartridge earlier, but only saw the picture and read the description more thoroughly after my post.

  16. Re:Hey look! An Ebay Auction. on Legend of Zelda NES Nintendo Prototype On Sale For $150K · · Score: 3, Informative

    It's probably this prototype whose ROM is floating around the interwebs, but remains quite valuable as a physical cartridge.

  17. Re:what, no atari 2600? on $1.2 Million Ultimate Games Collection · · Score: 3, Informative

    It's obvious why just by looking at the pictures. The games are almost entirely Japanese, so US systems like Atari aren't represented.

  18. for collecting, not for playing on $1.2 Million Ultimate Games Collection · · Score: 5, Informative

    It's over 6,000 different games, many of which have never been opened. No one has enough free time to play them all, so the collecting itself becomes its own reward.

  19. Re:The REAL problem with Square on Review: Theatrhythm Final Fantasy Is Game Music Nostalgia At Its Best · · Score: 2

    They also seem to pick the wrong staff. Their portable division does much better - remember Crisis Core? Even Dissidia was pretty good. Even on a single-person level, Takeharu Ishimoto's a far better composer than Masashi Hamauzu

    Search around for "Bravely Default", another 3DS RPG from Square that has yet to have a western release announced. It's classic style and gameplay without the "corridors and cutscenes" that have plagued recent Final Fantasy titles. More evidence that their portable division is where they're strongest.

    And Dragon Quest XI will wind up on the 3DS also on the Enix side of things if the portable's Japanese sales rate continues.

  20. Re:still premature on Preparing For Life After the PC · · Score: 1

    People who are intimidated by computers, and all the associated computer maintenance, often do well with a dedicated all-in-one device like a tablet or smartphone. These people might just want to look at websites, check email and do messaging from the comfort of their couch. It's expanding beyond the demographics served by PCs in the past, basically.

  21. Re:C is great on What's To Love About C? · · Score: 1

    Efficiency matters. Python is great, but you don't want to use it for embedded work.

    Or, sometimes you need Python to do something very fast or using as little memory as possible. In those cases, it's easy to drop to C to handle some calculation bottleneck as an extension while letting slow, high-level Python take care of the rest.

  22. Re:PHP alternatives on The PHP Singularity · · Score: 1

    The gist of it is that you implement your own DB-based session handler to override the default one which uses temp files. O'Reilly's "PHP in a Nutshell" demonstrates a 1 page solution, but there's likely others floating around the web.

  23. Re:Wrong area of focus. on Fedora Introduces Offline Updates · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Seems to me adding features to the package system that can determine and possibly correct such things (ie, closing Firefox or Thunderbird) would be the better way to go rather than force me to have to reboot.

    This is exactly right. Look at the Flash updater on other systems. If a browser is running, Flash closes it down during an update. Fedora could easily detect Firefox is running and close that down during an update. If X11 needs an update, bounce the user to the console until it completes. And so forth. A whole boot mode just for installing "extra important" updates feels like the wrong approach to a more general problem.

  24. who do you trust? on Young Listeners Opt For Streaming Over Owning · · Score: 5, Insightful

    If you own your own fileserver, like files in particular format and tagged in just the right way, owning is the right option. You're trading the work of doing that yourself for the benefit of having your data the way you like it.

    For a lot of people who either aren't capable of managing files or just not interested in doing that work, offloading music to "the cloud" or some streaming service makes sense - trading control for convenience.

    I prefer the former option, but can understand the appeal of the latter.

  25. Nokia's death spiral continues on Nokia To Cut 10,000 Jobs and Close 3 Facilities · · Score: 5, Interesting
    I've found Tomi's ongoing saga of Nokia's downfall to be quite interesting. A choice quote about today's news:

    The worse news is the guidance about Q2 profit warning and Q3 smartphone sales problems, that was hidden in the story about layoffs. So before, in Nokia's profit warning, Nokia said it will have problems with the handset unit profitability (producing a loss) in both Q1 and Q2. The losses for handsets in Q2 were supposed to be similar to Q1 ie -3%. Now we hear that Q2 losses will be bigger than 3%. This is VERY BAD NEWS. It really means that Nokia is falling into the hole and the rate of the fall is only increasing.

    The gist of it being that Windows isn't working, and Elop is killing any possible "plan B" for the company.