Miladinoski - Slashdot User

Comment Re:ROFL! looks like a 1989 amiga game (Score 1) 90

by Miladinoski on Monday March 23, 2009 @08:03AM (#27296397) Attached to: <em>Battle For Wesnoth</em> Version 1.6 Released

Huh?

Shining Force for one is a terribly old Sega Genesis game and it's still very playable and interesting.

The quality of the graphics isn't all to some people. Gameplay comes to mind more to some gamers than graphics.

Those can get this game, and others can play Crysis or whatever game that demands a lot of processing power just to display some "shining" effects ;)

Battle For Wesnoth Version 1.6 Released 90

Posted by Soulskill on Monday March 23, 2009 @03:58AM from the new-and-shiny dept.

bomanbot writes "The team for the great turn-based, open-source strategy game Battle for Wesnoth has just released the new stable version 1.6 of their popular title. Some of the new version's highlights include a new campaign, new multiplayer scenarios, improved graphics and user interface, and new background music. The full release notes have been posted, and the source code and binary downloads for many different platforms including Linux, Windows and Mac OS X are available as well."

Nanotube Muscles Are Strong As Steel, Light As Air 103

Posted by Soulskill on Saturday March 21, 2009 @05:11AM from the we-have-the-technology dept.

Al writes "Scientists from the University of Texas at Dallas have created nanotube-based artificial muscles that are light as air and work even under extreme temperatures. The 'muscles' expand width-wise by about 200 percent when a voltage is applied, but are stronger than steel lengthwise. The nanotubes within the fiber naturally stick together. Applying a voltage makes them obtain a charge and repel one another. The researchers created them by stretching bundles of entangled carbon nanotubes into long threads. Several cool videos show the strange stuff in action. Some experts, including one from NASA, believe that the nanotube muscles' ability to withstand extreme heat and cold could make them suitable shape-shifting materials for future space missions."

Submission + - Opera Turbo, Web Proxy Accelerator (opera.com)

Submitted by

Miladinoski

on Sunday March 15, 2009 @12:10PM

Miladinoski writes: "The developers over at Norway have developed a technology which compresses bandwidth consumption similar to what Opera Mini does in the mobile market. This feature is targeted to users with slow connections speeds in which you can drastically increase the speed with which the pages open.

According to Opera Labs it works on a:

... server-side optimization and compression technology that provides significant improvements in browsing speeds over limited-bandwidth connections by compressing network traffic.

It's still a lower than beta in quality release and builds are available for Windows, Mac and Unix/Linux."

Red Hat Patenting Around Open Standards 147

Posted by Soulskill on Sunday March 15, 2009 @11:58AM from the tread-lightly dept.

I Believe in Unicorns writes "Red Hat's patent policy says 'In an attempt to protect and promote the open source community, Red Hat has elected to... develop a corresponding portfolio of software patents for defensive purposes. We do so reluctantly...' Meanwhile, USPTO Application #: 20090063418, 'Method and an apparatus to deliver messages between applications,' claims a patent on routing messages using an XQuery match, which is an extension of the 'unencumbered' AMQP protocol that Red Hat is helping to make. Is this a defensive patent, or is Red Hat cynically staking out a software patent claim to an obvious extension of AMQP? Is Red Hat's promise to 'refrain from enforcing the infringed patent' against open source a reliable contract, or a trap for the unwary? Given the Microsoft-Red Hat deal in February, are we seeing Red Hat's 'Novell Moment?'" Reader Defeat_Globalism contributes a related story about an international research team who conducted experiments to "quantify the ways patent systems and market forces might influence someone to invent and solve intellectual problems." Their conclusion was that a system which doesn't restrict prizes to the winner provides more motivation for innovation.

JaikuEngine Gets Open Sourced 41

Posted by Soulskill on Sunday March 15, 2009 @10:43AM from the free-and-clear dept.

volume4 writes "The switch has been flipped and Jaiku has been moved to App Engine. Google will no longer be developing Jaiku, so the code and the future of Jaiku is in the hands of the open source community. From the Jaiku blog: 'Today, we are open sourcing the Jaiku code base under the Apache License 2.0. The code is available as JaikuEngine on Google Code Project Hosting as of now. Anyone can set up and run their own JaikuEngine instance on Google App Engine.'" We discussed Google's purchase of Jaiku in 2007, and their subsequent decision to halt development a few months ago.

Red Hat Enlists Community Help To Fight Patent Trolls 166

Posted by Soulskill on Saturday February 14, 2009 @09:19AM from the strength-in-numbers dept.

Stickster writes "Back in 2007, IP Innovation filed a lawsuit against Red Hat and Novell. IP Innovation is a subsidiary of Acacia Technologies. You may have heard of them — they're reported to be the most litigious patent troll in the USA, meaning they produce nothing of value other than money from those whom they sue (or threaten to sue) over patent issues. They're alleging infringement of patents on a user interface that has multiple workspaces. Hard to say just what they mean (which is often a problem in software patents), but it sounds a lot like functionality that pretty much all programmers and consumers use. That patent was filed back on March 25, 1987 by some folks at Xerox/PARC, which means that prior art dated before then is helpful — and art dated before March 25, 1986 is the most useful. (That means art found in a Linux distribution may not help, seeing as how Linus Torvalds first began the Linux kernel in 1991.) Red Hat has invited the community to join in the fight against the patent trolls by identifying prior art. They are coordinating efforts through the Post Issue Peer to Patent site, which is administered by the Center for Patent Innovations at the New York Law School, in conjunction with the US Patent and Trademark Office."

Comment Re:MSDN (Score 1) 332

by Miladinoski on Friday February 13, 2009 @07:03AM (#26841207) Attached to: Post-Beta Windows 7 Build Leaked With New IE8

I accidentally downloaded Vista

I too accidentally booted into a Ubuntu live CD and wiped Windows. I don't know how, but I was using it for a day...

Pirate Bay Operators Stand Trial On Monday 664

Posted by timothy on Friday February 13, 2009 @02:17AM from the stay-warm-date-a-swede dept.

Anonymous Pirate writes "Operators of The Pirate Bay stand trial on Monday in Stockholm. The four defendants from the popular file-sharing web site are charged with being accessories to breaking copyright law and may face fines or up to two years in prison if found guilty. The four defendants have run the site since 2004 after it was started in 2003 by the Swedish anti-copyright organization Piratbyrån. The Swedish public service television announced that they are going to send a live audio stream from the trial. It will be broadcast without editing or translation."

Moonlight 1.0 Brings Silverlight Content To Linux 346

Posted by timothy on Thursday February 12, 2009 @11:08PM from the cue-the-brouhaha dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Novell has unveiled some of the fruits of its technical collaboration with Microsoft in the form of Moonlight 1.0, a Firefox plug-in which will allow Linux users to access Microsoft Silverlight content. Officially created by the Mono project, it is available for all Linux distributions, including openSUSE, SUSE Linux Enterprise, Fedora, Red Hat and Ubuntu. Also included in Moonlight is the Windows Media pack, with support for Windows Media Video, Windows Media Audio and MP3 files."

Post-Beta Windows 7 Build Leaked With New IE8 332

Posted by timothy on Thursday February 12, 2009 @07:56PM from the seekret-leaks-from-nowhere-in-particular dept.

CWmike writes "A post-beta version of Windows 7, Build 7022, leaked to Internet file-sharing sites also includes an updated version of IE8, according to searches at several BitTorrent trackers. With Microsoft halting new Windows 7 beta downloads on Tuesday, and blocking all downloads as of noon (EST) today, users are again turning to illegal sources to get the new operating system."

Learning To Read With Click and Jane 115

Posted by kdawson on Saturday January 31, 2009 @05:55PM from the that's-no-book dept.

theodp writes "While earlier generations learned to Read with Dick and Jane, the NYT Magazine reports that today's tykes are getting their reading chops at online sites like Starfall (free) and One More Story (subscription). Quoting the Times Magazine: 'In their book "Freakonomics," Stephen J. Dubner and Steven D. Levitt write that kids who grow up in houses packed with books fare better on school tests than those who grow up with fewer books.' So how will kids who learn to read online fare when they grow up?"

Germany Legislates For Mandatory Web Filters 309

Posted by CmdrTaco on Thursday January 15, 2009 @12:37PM from the i-got-a-finger-you-can-filter dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Germany's Minister for Families has announced a legislative initiative to force ISPs to implement a government-mandated block list (in English), which will be updated daily. The BKA (Germany's equivalent of the FBI) will be in charge of generating and maintaining the list. As usual, this is being brought in under the 'fight child porn' guise. The minister is quoted as saying: 'We must not water down the problem' in reply to being challenged that this law and technology could be used to censor other content. She then went on to say: 'I can't know what wishes and plans future governments will develop.' She has agreed the principle of the legislation with the interior minister and the technology minister, which in German coalition government terms means it's pretty much a done deal."

Comment Dungeon Keeper 2 (Score 1) 381

by Miladinoski on Monday December 29, 2008 @06:46PM (#26262683) Attached to: Resurrecting Old Games, What Works?

Well, this actually isn't an old game (by the definition you gave - old games are games that are more than 12 years old :\ ) but I saw on a forum that it's abandonware because (by the forum poster):

You cannot buy this anywhere in the world
The makers have abandoned the IP (Dungeon Keeper)
The game is over 6 years old

Just Google for 'Dungeon Keeper 2 download' (sans quotes) because I don't want my comment to be removed because of abuse.

So in my opinion if they are abandoned (or they don't have to), the OSS approach works. Look what happened to WarZone2100 which was released in 2004 as open source :)

Submission + - SPAM: FBI: Crooks auto-dialing with hacked VoIP systems

Submitted by alphadogg on Saturday December 06, 2008 @06:57PM

alphadogg writes: Criminals are taking advantage of a bug in the Asterisk Internet telephony system that lets them pump out thousands of scam phone calls in an hour, the FBI has warned. The FBI didn't say which versions of Asterisk were vulnerable to the bug, but it advised users to upgrade to the latest version of the software. Asterisk is an open-source product that lets users turn a Linux computer into a VoIP telephone exchange. In so-called vishing attacks, scammers usually use a VoIP system to set up a phony call center and then use phishing e-mails to trick victims into calling the center. Once there, they are prompted to give private information. But in the scam described by the FBI, they apparently are taking over legitimate Asterisk systems in order to directly dial victims.
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