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PlayStation (Games)

PS3 Hacked via USB Dongle 337

Posted by CmdrTaco from the dongle-this dept.
dlove67 writes "PSX-scene.com reports that the first PS3 modchip has been tested and confirmed to be working. Running off of a USB dongle, it appears to be relatively user friendly and claims to not void your warranty. Online gameplay works (at least for the time being). It's been a long time coming; cheers to the PS Jailbreak Guys." The video is attached below if you're curious. Can't help but point out that this wouldn't have happened if Sony hadn't decided to yank the Boot Other OS option.
Wireless Networking

Tracking Down Wi-Fi Interference? 499

Posted by kdawson from the hello-fcc-i'd-like-to-report-hello?-hello? dept.
Nicros writes "Almost every evening, between 8:30 and 10:00, my Wi-Fi just dies. This, in itself, could be explained by a crappy Wi-Fi source or some hardware failure, except that I know both of my neighbors are experiencing the same loss of signal at the same time. While the Wi-Fi is down, the LAN is OK, and anything plugged into Cat5 can access the Internet just fine. One possibility comes to mind — perhaps some other neighbor arrives home and turns on their router from 8:30 to 10:00? And something in their signal is hosing our Wi-Fi? I have tried looking around for software to help identify the source of interference, but either the programs are ridiculously expensive for a home user, or else my card (Intel Link 1000 BGN) isn't supported. (Netstumbler is an example of the latter.) Any suggestions on how I can track this down?"
The Courts

FTC Takes Out Porn- and Botnet-Spewing ISP 263

Posted by timothy from the ayn-rand-would-approve dept.
coondoggie writes "The Federal Trade Commission today got a judge to effectively kill off the Internet service provider 3FN, which the agency said specialized in spam, porn, botnets, phishing, and all manner of malicious web content. The ISP's computer servers and other assets have been seized and will be sold by a court and the operation has been ordered give back $1.08 million to the FTC."
Media

Theora Development Continues Apace, VP8 Now Open Source 312

Posted by timothy from the long-term-vision dept.
SergeyKurdakov writes "Monty 'xiphmont' Montgomery of the Xiph Foundation says the latest action-packed, graph- and demo-clip-stuffed Theora project update page (demo 9) is now up for all and sundry! Catch up on what's gone into the new Theora encoder Ptalarbvorm over the last few months. It also instructs how to pronounce 'Ptalarbvorm.' Ptalarbvorm is not a finished release encoder yet, though I've personally been using it in production for a few months. Pace on improvements hasn't slowed down — the subjective psychovisual work being done by Tim Terriberry and Greg Maxwell has at least doubled-again on the improvements made by Thusnelda, and they're not anywhere near done yet. As a bonus Monty gathered all Xiph demo pages in one place." Also on the video codec front, and also with a Xiph connection, atamido writes "Google has released On2's VP8 video codec to the world, royalty-free. It is packaging it with Vorbis audio, in a subset of the Matroska container, and calling it WebM. It's not branded as an exclusively Google project — Mozilla and Opera are also contributors. Builds of your favorite browsers with full support are available." An anonymous reader points out this technical analysis of VP8.
Piracy

Rockstar Ships Max Payne 2 Cracked By Pirates 340

Posted by CmdrTaco from the its-getting-steamy-in-here dept.
Jamie noticed a fairly amazing little story about Rockstar shipping a version of Max Payne 2 via Steam that was actually cracked by pirates to remove the DRM. The going theory was that it was easier for them to simply use the pirate group's crack than to actually remove their DRM themselves.

Comment Re:People Still Use Ubuntu? (Score 1) 320

by WaXHeLL (#31931246) Attached to: Ubuntu LTS Experiences X.org Memory Leak

Overall though, if you ignore the name, and change your theme around to something a bit more pleasant, it's really pretty slick. If anything has a chance to get people adopt Linux for general usage, Ubuntu is it.

Either that or LinuxMint, which is effectively "Ubuntu with the ugly removed".

Kubuntu is a little bit prettier with it's KDE interface and still has the same polish, but I don't think anyone who is trying Linux for the first time would grab it over Ubuntu (as it's not that well advertised, I'm sure partially to not confuse first time users).

Comment Re:DotA legacy (Score 1) 118

by WaXHeLL (#31688864) Attached to: <em>Heroes of Newerth</em> Open Beta About To Start

League of Legends rewards 45 minutes of farming, and then seeing whoever is the better Ashe player.

This reeks of a player who hasn't gotten into the higher brackets of LoL's ELO system and probably has tried a few low level games. At higher ELO levels (which essentially is the rating system that LoL's matchmaking system uses to ensure that matches are as even as possible), the gameplay becomes very competitive and most of the teams you fight are premade teams with voice comms and everything.

-This gives all heroes certain roles, it allows for different strategies that must be executed right or you will lose the game.

The thing about HoN is exactly what the parent said -- the strategies must be executed right or you will lose the game (which is a lot like DoTA). LoL on the other hand has a lot of different strategies and you can be flexible on how you play each character -- you can build a lot of tanks as DPS, you can build some support characters as tanks or DPS, etc. The metagame in LoL definitely helps that part out.

DoTA and HoN snowball much quicker than LoL games typically, and there's a completely different dynamic in the 5v5 matches and 3v3 matches in LoL.

Oh yeah, did I mention having a real community rather than one filled up with a bunch of ragers and elitists helps?
Open Source

Delicious Details of Open Source Court Victory 202

Posted by CmdrTaco from the tooting-his-horn dept.
jammag writes "Open source advocate Bruce Perens tells the inside story of the recently concluded Jacobsen v. Katzer court case, in which an open source developer was awarded $100,000. Perens, an expert witness in the case, details the blow by blow, including how developers need to make sure they're using the correct open source license for legal protection. The actual court ruling is almost like some kind of Hollywood movie ending for Open Source, with the judge unequivocally siding with the underfunded open source developer."

Comment ISPs almost sound like trolls (Score 1) 461

by WaXHeLL (#31169540) Attached to: FCC Proposes 100Mbps Minimum Home Broadband Speed

From the article:

"First, we don't think the customer wants that. Secondly, if (Google has) invented some technology, we'd love to partner with them,"

Almost sounds like a troll to me. I think most consumers would love a 100Mbps connection -- assuming it was reasonably priced. That being said, Verizon already offers FiOS at speeds up to 50Mbps, so 100Mbps isn't that much of a stretch.

Sadly, I'm stuck in an area where it's either ADSL1.x or cable.

Comment CS centric (Score 1) 684

by WaXHeLL (#31113900) Attached to: How Easy Is It To Cheat In CS?

This is funny -- as its called "cheating" in the CS world, but in the EE world it's "working in a study group."

Of course, having impossibly hard EE homework at my university probably didn't help. It was not uncommon (and actually, quite frequent) that I encounter midterms/finals with average grades of 40% or less.

But that being said, most of the people who didn't learn the material didn't stay in the EE field after graduation.

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