california – Page 75

John Romero On Reinventing the Shooter

An anonymous reader writes: John Romero helped bring us Doom, Quake, and Wolfenstein, but he’s also known for Daikatana — an immensely-hyped followup that flopped hard. After remaining on the periphery of game development since then, Romero announced last month that he’s coming back to the FPS genre with a new game in development. Today, he spoke with Develop Magazine about his thoughts on the future of shooters. Many players worry that the genre is stagnant, but Romero disagrees that this has to be the case. “Shooters have so many places to go, but people just copy the same thing over and over because they’re afraid to try something new. We’ve barely scratched the surface.” He also thinks the technology underpinning games matters less than ever. Romero says high poly counts and new shaders are a distraction from what’s important: good game design. “Look at Minecraft – it’s unbelievable that it was made by one person, right? And it shows there’s plenty of room for something that will innovate and change the whole industry. If some brilliant designers take the lessons of Minecraft, take the idea of creation and playing with an environment, and try to work out what the next version of that is, and then if other people start refining that, it’ll take Minecraft to an area where it will become a real genre, the creation game genre.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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John Romero On Reinventing the Shooter

Meet the tech company performing ad injections for Big Cable

Front Porch ad. A Northern California company that bills itself as the “worldwide leader in Wi-Fi monetization” is the vendor behind Comcast’s and other US cable companies’ promotional advertising campaign performed through JavaScript injection, Comcast said Monday. Comcast spokesman Charlie Douglas confirmed the vendor’s name, Front Porch of Sonora, hours after Ars reported that Comcast recently started serving Comcast ads to devices connected to one of its 3.5 million publicly accessible Wi-Fi hotspots across the US. We wrote that Comcast’s decision to inject data into the net raises security concerns and cuts to the heart of the ongoing net neutrality debate . As it turns out, Front Porch also does business with Cox, Time Warner, Bright House, and Cablevision in the US, Front Porch CTO Carlos Vazquez said in a telephone interview. Read 8 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Meet the tech company performing ad injections for Big Cable

Deadmau5 Accuses Disney of Pirating His Music

An anonymous reader writes After Disney objected to musician Joel Zimmerman [aka Deadmau5]’s trademark application in the U.S. (his logo is already properly trademarked in many other countries), a battle of trademarks and copyrights ensued. Apparently, Disney was (URL has since been disabled, as per DMCA law requires) hosting a video containing a remix of music which Zimmerman claims ownership of. Not only that, but the Deadmau5 logo was prominently displayed next to said video. The mouse fight was on and a few hours ago Deadmau5 retaliated with a rather surprising counter attack. As it turns out, Disney is hosting a Deadmau5 video on their website, without permission. “Disney prominently features the deadmau5 Mark next to the Infringing Video. implying a non-existent endorsement by Zimmerman, ” the letter reads. “Again. we are unaware of any license allowing you the right to reproduce, distribute or otherwise exploit the deadmau5 Mark or to exploit Zimmerman’s name and likeness in connection with same.” At the time of writing Disney hasn’t complied with the request, but it seems that they have no other option than to comply. Whether it will change anything in their stance towards the DJ’s mouse ear trademark application is doubtful though. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Deadmau5 Accuses Disney of Pirating His Music

Appeals court says Yelp’s ad sales tactics don’t extort small businesses

Robyn Lee On Tuesday, a California appeals court ruled that Yelp’s ad sales strategies do not extort small businesses and merely amount to “hard bargaining” by the company. Yelp lets anyone review a business, and businesses can’t opt out of being reviewed. So when Yelp’s ad sales team began calling around asking companies to buy advertising in exchange for displaying good reviews more prominently, some storefronts cried foul. In 2010, four small business owners banded together to sue Yelp for extortion after they refused to buy advertising from Yelp and allegedly found that bad reviews were displayed more prominently. Two of the business owners also alleged that Yelp authored negative reviews to induce them to advertise or in retaliation after the business declined to buy advertising. Read 8 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Appeals court says Yelp’s ad sales tactics don’t extort small businesses

Hitachi Developing Reactor That Burns Nuclear Waste

Zothecula writes The problem with nuclear waste is that it needs to be stored for many thousands of years before it’s safe, which is a tricky commitment for even the most stable civilization. To make this situation a bit more manageable, Hitachi, in partnership with MIT, the University of Michigan, and the University of California, Berkeley, is working on new reactor designs that use transuranic nuclear waste for fuel; leaving behind only short-lived radioactive elements. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Hitachi Developing Reactor That Burns Nuclear Waste

Judge mulls contempt charges in Microsoft’s e-mail privacy fight with US

Robert Scoble A federal judge is mulling whether to hold Microsoft in contempt of court for defying orders to give the US government e-mails stored on an overseas server. The case is the nation’s first testing the Obama administration’s position that any company with operations in the US must comply with valid warrants for data, even if the content is stored overseas. The US believes the e-mail on a Microsoft server in Dublin, Ireland is associated with narcotics trafficking. Microsoft on Tuesday reiterated its position that it was talking with US District Judge Loretta Preska, the judge who sided with the Obama administration on Friday. “We will not be turning over the e-mail,” Microsoft said in a statement. Read 11 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Judge mulls contempt charges in Microsoft’s e-mail privacy fight with US

Tripping through IBM’s astonishingly insane 1937 corporate songbook

The songbook of the damned—or at least of the employed. “For thirty-seven years,” reads the opening passage in the book, “the gatherings and conventions of our IBM workers have expressed in happy songs the fine spirit of loyal cooperation and good fellowship which has promoted the signal success of our great IBM Corporation in its truly International Service for the betterment of business and benefit to mankind.” That’s a hell of a mouthful, but it’s only the opening volley in the war on self-respect and decency that is the 1937 edition of Songs of the IBM , a booklet of corporate ditties first published in 1927 on the order of IBM company founder Thomas Watson, Sr. The 1937 edition of the songbook is a 54-page monument to glassey-eyed corporate inhumanity, with every page overflowing with trite praise to The Company and Its Men. The booklet reads like a terribly parody of a hymnal—one that praises not the traditional Christian trinity but the new corporate triumvirate of IBM the father, Watson the son, and American entrepreneurship as the holy spirit: Read 11 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Tripping through IBM’s astonishingly insane 1937 corporate songbook

Los Angeles cops do not need to hand over license plate reader data, judge finds

This LAPD patrol car is equipped with a LPR unit, mounted just in front of the light bar on the roof of the vehicle. Steve Devol A Los Angeles Superior Court judge will not force local law enforcement to release a week’s worth of all captured automated license plate reader (ALPR, also known as LPR) data to two activist groups that had sued for the release of the information, according to a decision issued on Thursday. In May 2013, the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California and the Electronic Frontier Foundation sued the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) and the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department (LASD) in an attempt to compel the agencies to release a week’s worth of LPR data from a certain week in August 2012. The organizations have not determined yet whether they will file an appeal. The organizations had claimed that these agencies were required to disclose the data under the California Public Records Act . In late July 2012, the ACLU and its affiliates sent requests to local police departments and state agencies across 38 states to request information on how LPRs are used. Read 15 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Haswell-E arrives, bringing a $999 8-core desktop CPU with it

Most of Intel’s announcements lately have focused on low-power chips, but every now and again it throws a bone to its high-end desktop users. Today we’re getting our first look at Haswell-E and a new Core i7 Extreme Edition CPU, a moniker reserved for the biggest and fastest of Intel’s consumer and workstation CPUs (if you want something faster than that, you’ll need to start looking at Xeons). We already got a little bit of information on these chips back in March , when Intel made announcements related to refreshed Haswell chips (“Devil’s Canyon”) and a handful of other desktop processors. Though much of today’s information has already leaked, we’ll run down the most important stuff for those of you who don’t follow every leaked slide that makes its way to the public. The CPUs Read 16 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Heartbleed is the gift that keeps on giving as servers remain unpatched

Within four days of the first public reports of a major flaw in OpenSSL’s software for securing communications on the Internet, mass attacks searched for and targeted vulnerable servers. In a report released this week, IBM found that while the attacks have died down, approximately half of the original 500,000 potentially vulnerable servers remain unpatched, leaving businesses at continuing risk of the Heartbleed flaw. On average, the company currently sees 7,000 daily attacks against its customers, down from a high of 300,000 attacks in a single 24-hour period in April, according to the report based on data from the company’s Managed Security Services division. “Despite the initial rush to patch systems, approximately 50 percent of potentially vulnerable servers have been left unpatched—making Heartbleed an ongoing, critical threat,” the report stated. Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Heartbleed is the gift that keeps on giving as servers remain unpatched

Ken May

Tag: california