Author: kenmay

Valve pulls games after studio plans to sue critical players

If you ran a game studio and faced a slew of very negative (and sometimes threatening) user reviews, what would you do? Strive to improve your work? Rig the reviews ? Ignore the haters? Digital Homicide decided that it would be better to sue the reviewers … and now, it’s facing the consequences. Valve has pulled all of Digital Homicide’s games from Steam in response to a developer subpoena forcing Valve to reveal the identities of 100 users who posted harsh reviews, paving the way for an $18 million personal injury lawsuit. Digital Homicide’s legal action is “hostile to Steam, ” a Valve spokesperson says. The lawsuit, filed by Digital Homicide’s James Romine, comes alongside a separate claim against YouTuber Jim Sterling, whose videos have frequently roasted the developer’s games. Some of Sterling’s fans have supposedly harassed both James and his brother Robert through the mail. Not surprisingly, Digital Homicide has a different take on the situation. It claims that it’s only suing after Valve did little to moderate user game reviews, at least some of which included death threats. The company deserves a “safe environment” to do business, it says, and Valve is reportedly showing a “reckless disregard” for the Steam community. The truth might be somewhere in between the Valve and Digital Homicide positions. There’s no question that at least some of the reviews are uncalled for, and that Valve didn’t clamp down on them quickly (even if they weren’t likely serious). However, it’s not clear that all of the reviews were so hostile, and Digital Homicide doesn’t exactly have a squeaky-clean reputation. It has been waging a war against Sterling for many months, including doxxing and questionable YouTube takedown requests, in response to videos that do little more than highlight the studio’s shady practices. On top of producing shovelware (it posted 18 games on Steam Greenlight in one year), Digital Homicide has allegedly masqueraded as different developers and offered game keys in exchange for rigging Greenlight votes. The company may have already been on the road to a Steam ban — the subpoena could just be the last straw. Via: Polygon Source: Rami Ismail (Twitter) , Digital Homicide , SidAlpha (YouTube)

See more here:
Valve pulls games after studio plans to sue critical players

Terabit fiber optic speeds just came closer to reality

Sure, researchers have been showing off terabit data speeds in fiber optics for years , but they’ve seldom been practical. That exotic technology may work over long distances, but it can quickly fall apart when you throw typical network loads in the mix. However, it’s about to become much more practical. Nokia Bell Labs, Deutsche Telekom and the Technical University of Munich have shown off 1Tbps data speeds in a field trial that involved “real conditions, ” with varying channel conditions and traffic levels. The secret was a new modulation technique, Probabilistic Constellation Shaping. Instead of using all the networking’s constellation points (the “alphabet of the transmission”) equally, like typical fiber, it prefers those points with lower amplitudes — the ones that are less susceptible to noise. That helps transmissions reach up to 30 percent further, since you can adapt the transmission rate to fit the channel. It’s so effective that the team got close to the theoretical peak data speeds possible for the fiber connection. You’re likely not going to see these terabit fiber lines in regular use for a while, since there’s a large gap between a field test and making commercially available lines. The timing might be ideal, mind you — 5G cellular data is just gathering momentum, and telecoms will need gobs of bandwidth to cope with the increased demands. A realistic 1Tbps fiber option would make sure that the internet’s wired backbones don’t collapse under the load. Via: FossBytes , ZDNet Source: TUM

Read More:
Terabit fiber optic speeds just came closer to reality

‘Mr. Robot’ star Rami Malek wins Outstanding Lead Actor Emmy

The USA series Mr. Robot has more than just surprisingly realistic hacking scenes , as it now can claim an Emmy win. Series star Rami Malek snagged the Outstanding Lead Actor award tonight, beating out Kevin Spacey, Bob Odenkirk and others. After double checking to make sure we were all seeing this too (good call), Malek said he wanted to “honor the Elliots…because there’s a little bit of Elliot in all of us.” What an #Emmys moment! @ItsRamiMalek of @whoismrrobot just won! pic.twitter.com/U4XdK2ue6V — Television Academy (@TelevisionAcad) September 19, 2016 One person can change the world. @ItsRamiMalek has won the Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actor. #MrRobot pic.twitter.com/CvHJrHw8G5 — Mr. Robot (@whoismrrobot) September 19, 2016 http://televisionacad.tumblr.com/post/150616888353/emmys-winner-for-outstanding-lead-actor-for-a Source: Emmys.com

More:
‘Mr. Robot’ star Rami Malek wins Outstanding Lead Actor Emmy

We Haven’t Seen This Many Comic Books in Stores Since 1996

The comic book industry spent years on the edge of irrelevance, struggling to find an audience after the boom of the 1990s ended. Nowadays, thanks in no small part to the surge in superhero movies, comic book distribution is higher than it’s been in decades. Read more…

See more here:
We Haven’t Seen This Many Comic Books in Stores Since 1996

Oldest-Ever Proteins Extracted From 3.8-Million-Year-Old Ostrich Shells

Slashdot reader sciencehabit writes: Scientists have smashed through another time barrier in their search for ancient proteins from fossilized teeth and bones, adding to growing excitement about the promise of using proteins to study extinct animals and humans that lived more than 1 million years ago. Until now, the oldest sequenced proteins are largely acknowledged to come from a 700, 000-year-old horse in Canada’s Yukon territory, despite claims of extraction from much older dinosaurs. Now geneticists report that they have extracted proteins from 3.8-million-year-old ostrich egg shells in Laetoli, Tanzania, and from the 1.7-million-year-old tooth enamel of several extinct animals in Dmanisi, Georgia…extinct horses, rhinos, and deer, This raises the inevitable question. If we ever could clone a prehistoric species…should we? Read more of this story at Slashdot.

View article:
Oldest-Ever Proteins Extracted From 3.8-Million-Year-Old Ostrich Shells

The Ham Radio Parity Act Unanimously Passed By US House

This week the U.S. House of Representatives unanimously passed “The Ham Radio Parity Act” — a huge victory for grass-roots advocates of amateur radio. Slashdot reader bobbied reports: This will allow for the reasonable accommodation of amateur radio antennas in many places where they are currently prohibited by homeowner associations or private land use restrictions… If this bill passes the Senate, we will be one step closer to allowing amateur radio operators, who provide emergency communications services, the right to erect reasonable antenna structures in places where they cannot do so now. The national ham radio association is now urging supporters to contact their Senators through a special web page. “This is not just a feel-good bill, ” said representative Joe Courtney, remembering how Hurricane Sandy brought down the power grid, and “we saw all the advanced communications we take for granted…completely fall by the wayside.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

More:
The Ham Radio Parity Act Unanimously Passed By US House

HP Printers Have A Pre-Programmed Failure Date For Non-HP Ink Cartridges

An anonymous reader quotes some harsh allegations from Myce.com: Thousands of HP printers around the world started to show error messages on the same day, the 13th of September… HP printers with non-HP cartridges started to show the error message, “One or more cartridges appear to be damaged. Remove them and replace them with new cartridges”… When [Dutch online retailer 123ink] emailed their customers asking them if they wanted to check if their printer also had issues, they received replies from more than 1, 000 customers confirming the issue… Consumers who complained to HP were told the error was caused by using non-HP cartridges. A day later HP withdrew that statement and explained the issues were a side effect of a firmware update, [but] printers without any internet access started to reject non-HP cartridges. Therefore it’s very unlikely that a firmware update caused the issues and the only other logical explanation is that HP programmed a date in its firmware on which non-HP cartridges would no longer be accepted. “Printer worked fine for nine months, ” complains one of many angry users on HP’s web site. “Then on 9/13 HP uploaded without my permission a firmware update that caused a message ‘damaged cartridge’ for all my cartridges and then it refused to print.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

More:
HP Printers Have A Pre-Programmed Failure Date For Non-HP Ink Cartridges

China’s Atomic Clock in Space Will Stay Accurate For a Billion Years

The space laboratory that China launched earlier this week has an atomic clock in it which is more accurate than the best timepiece operated by America’s National Institute of Standards and Technology, according to Chinese engineers. The atomic called, dubbed CACS or Cold Atomic Clock in Space, will slow down by only one second in a billion years. In comparison, the NIST’s F2 atomic clock, which serves as the United States’ primary time and frequency standard, loses a second every 300 million years. From an RT report:”It is the world’s first cold atomic clock to operate in space… it will have military and civilian applications, ” said Professor Xu Zhen from the Shanghai Institute of Optics and Fine Mechanics, who was involved in the CACS project. An atomic clock uses vibrations of atoms to measure time, which are very consistent as long as the atoms are held at constant temperature. In fact, since 1967 the definition of second has been “9, 192, 631, 770 vibrations of a cesium-133 atom.” In a cold atomic clock, the atoms are cooled down with a laser to decrease the effect of atom movement on the measurements. CACS goes even further and eliminates the pull of Earth’s gravity by being based in orbit. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Read More:
China’s Atomic Clock in Space Will Stay Accurate For a Billion Years

Run Android 6.0 Marshmallow on Your PC With Android-x86 6.0

This week saw the first stable release of Android-x86 6.0 (marshmallow-x86) — and a new version of Remix OS for PC, a PC-optimized version of Android. Slashdot reader prisoninmate quotes Softpedia: Android-x86 6.0 has been in the works since early this year, and it received a total of two RC (Release Candidate) builds during its entire development cycle, one in June and another in August. After joining the Remix OS team, Chih-Wei Huang now has all the reasons to update and improve its Android-x86 system for the latest Android releases. Therefore, as you might have guessed already, Android-x86 6.0 is the first stable version of the project to be based on Google’s Linux kernel-based Android 6.0 Marshmallow mobile operating system, and includes the most recent AOSP (Android Open Source Project) security updates too. Under the hood, Android-x86 6.0 is using the long-term supported Linux 4.4.20 kernel with an updated graphics stack based on Mesa 12.0.2 3D Graphics Library, and offers support for Samsung’s F2FS file system for SSD drives, better Wi-Fi support after resume and suspend, and initial HDMI audio support. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

See more here:
Run Android 6.0 Marshmallow on Your PC With Android-x86 6.0