MartinB - Slashdot User

Submission + - Developing nations to test MIT $150 laptops

Submitted by

MattSparkes

on Tuesday February 13, 2007 @12:42PM

MattSparkes writes: "The non-profit "One Laptop per Child" project, founded by MIT academics, will roll out nearly 2500 of its $150-laptops to eight nations. The experiment is a prelude to mass production of the kid-friendly, lime-green-and-white laptops, scheduled to begin in July 2007, when five million will be built." The organisers say that the laptops can be remotely shut down to prevent sales on the black market, but admit that hackers will easily crack their code. "For people earning one dollar a day the temptation to sell it for $300 will be very strong"."

Submission + - Practical Applications of Fast NP Solving?

Submitted by CoolGuySteve on Tuesday February 13, 2007 @12:41PM

CoolGuySteve writes: Recently there has been news of quantum computers supposedly making certain NP algorithms much faster. Many of us have learned about NP in class or on our own with problems like Subset-Sum and Travelling Salesmen, but how would being able to quickly solve these types of problems improve everyday life?

If everyone had some kind of computing device in the far-off future, similar to a video or physics acceleration card, that could solve NP-complete problems in less than 1 ms, what new applications would we see? How would existing applications be made better?

Submission + - Beatles Compleat on iTMS Tomorrow

Submitted by

MartinB

on Tuesday February 13, 2007 @11:55AM

MartinB writes: "Neil Aspinall, head of Apple Corps, is reported as saying that the entire Beatles back catalogue will be available on the iTunes Store soon, possibly as early as Valentine's Day. However, the Fab Four aren't just sticking their toe in the download market — the catalogue will be available on all services."

Submission + - Saying I Luv U for Valentine's Day

Submitted by

theodp

on Tuesday February 13, 2007 @11:45AM

theodp writes: "According to the WSJ's Jeffrey Laslow, love letters ain't what they used to be. Passionate essays penned on Valentine's Days past have morphed into bursts of IM affection. Stacie Harb doesn't seem to mind. She treasures her boyfriend's 37-word declaration of love, keeping it in her phone's saved messages. 'It's not some drawn-out, 10-page letter professing his undying love,' Harb says. 'That would be creepy.'"

Submission + - AACS Processing Key discovered, HD DRM is toast.

Submitted by

passthecrackpipe

on Tuesday February 13, 2007 @10:54AM

passthecrackpipe writes: "The nice folks over at doom9 really don't like DRM. After the discovery of the individual title keys used for AACS "protection" a while back, and the subsequent release of a tool that makes it nice and simple for you to back up your (obviously legally purchased) HD-DVD or Blue-Ray discs, arnezami has found the processing keys — this key can be used to decrypt *all* titles as opposed to just a single title of which the key is known. His approach sounds actually pretty easy (but is probably a lot harder then it sounds):

what I wanted to do is "record" all changes in this part of memory during startup of the movie. Hopefully I would catch something insteresting. In the end I did something a little more effiecient: I used the hd dvd vuk extractor (thanks ape!) and adapted it to slow down the software player (while scanning its memory continously) and at the very moment the Media Key (which I now knew: my bottom-up approach really paid off here) was detected it halted the player. I then made a memdump with WinHex. I now had the feeling I had something. And I did. Not suprisingly the very first C-value was a hit. I then checked if everyting was correct, asked for confirmation and here we are. For me, the best part is imagining the insane amount of money the *IAA pumps into these braindead schemes to begin with.

Well done arnezami, beer's on me!"

Submission + - IT Spending on the Rise?

Submitted by Anonymous on Tuesday February 13, 2007 @10:50AM

Anonymous writes: While reports from Forrester Research and Gartner that say IT spending will see a significant slowdown this year, a survey just released from CIO Insight says spending is significantly up across the board. The report is based on a survey of 429 senior-level IT executives. The biggest areas of spending will be in storage virtualization, disaster recovery and web services.

Submission + - 100% mechanical digital sundial

Submitted by on Tuesday February 13, 2007 @10:39AM

An anonymous reader writes: Scientific American's link round up at sciam.com — http://tinyurl.com/23j8rd — includes a link to http://www.kirchersociety.org/blog/?p=1211 which describes a 100%-mechanical digital sundial which uses "An ingenious masking system translates the angle of the sun into digits."

Submission + - Study: P2P has no effect on legal music sales

Submitted by

phaedo00

on Tuesday February 13, 2007 @09:32AM

phaedo00 writes: "Ars Technica covers a very interesting paper published in the Journal of Political Economy by Felix Oberholzer-Gee and Koleman Strumpf that concludes that P2P has an effect on legal music sales that is pretty much statistically 0: "Using detailed records of transfers of digital music files, we find that file sharing has had no statistically significant effect on purchases of the average album in our sample," the study reports. "Even our most negative point estimate implies that a one-standard-deviation increase in file sharing reduces an album's weekly sales by a mere 368 copies, an effect that is too small to be statistically distinguishable from zero.""

Submission + - PVR on appleTV

Submitted by

MartinB

on Friday January 12, 2007 @08:34PM

MartinB writes: "The guys at elgato are completely confident that eyeTV will support appleTV. Turns out the key thing is exporting to iTunes in H.264 or MPEG-4. Now, can we please have a MythDVD-like DVD ripper that can do the same, so I can watch all my (legal) video content on the thing?"

Feed Language Fluency and Alzheimers (wired.com)

From feed by wiredfeed on Friday January 12, 2007 @08:12PM

A new Canadian study shows bilingualism may delay the onset of dementia. In Wired Science.

Submission + - Call Mangement/Trouble ticket software

Submitted by aussiedood on Friday January 12, 2007 @07:10PM

aussiedood writes: I've been running a small business providing PC support services to home users (think Geek Squad) for almost a year now and I am getting to the point where I need to bring on some extra techs. To this point it has just been me, so scheduling calls etc. has been a doddle. My question for the slashdot community (those who run a similar business in particular) is, what do you use to schedule calls and manage the day-to-day running of the business? I would prefer to use FOSS if possible, but recommendations of commercial tools are also welcome.

Submission + - Scientists prepare to move Doomsday Clock forward

Submitted by antikarma on Friday January 12, 2007 @06:23PM

antikarma writes: The keepers of the "Doomsday Clock" plan to move its hands forward next Wednesday to reflect what they call worsening nuclear and climate threats to the world. The symbolic clock, maintained by the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, currently is set at seven minutes to midnight, with midnight marking global catastrophe. The group did not say in which direction the hands would move. But in a news release previewing an event next Wednesday, they said the change was based on "worsening nuclear, climate threats" to the world.

Submission + - Clones, Zombies, Freaks

Submitted by

John H. Doe

on Friday January 12, 2007 @05:33PM

John H. Doe writes: "Article on Daily Mail talking about "farmyard freaks," like pigs who have been created like zombies so as not to mind cramped, boring conditions (genetically lobotomized, it would seem). The possibility exists so that, and I quote, "it might become technically possible to produce "animal vegetables" — beasts which are "highly prolific and oblivious to their physical and mental status"." Is this playing God? Or just a natural progression in the technology?"

Submission + - Exxon to Cut Ties w/ Global Warming Skeptics

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 12, 2007 @03:33PM

An anonymous reader writes: It seems Exxon has finally pulled its head out of the sand. According to this article [msn.com], Exxon Mobil Corp. "...has stopped funding groups skeptical of global warming claims...", and has engaged in talks regarding the reduction of greenhouse gasses. I know the /. crowd feels that major corporations can do no good, especially big oil, but this does seem to be a step in the right direction. The article also mentions that Exxon is forced to follow the Kyoto treaty in nations that abide by those regulations, and it is inefficient to have differing environmental standards by region.

Submission + - Year 2007 Problem - Daylight Saving Time Changes

Submitted by

bdognet

on Friday January 12, 2007 @02:48PM

bdognet writes: "On March 11 2007, Daylight Saving Time will start 4 weeks early. This article discusses the problem and provides links to the major vendor patches including Microsoft, Sun, RedHat, Ubuntu, Cisco, Oracle & MySQL. Many devices like PBXs and fax machines can't be patched and need manual settings. Also, don't forget your cell phone/PDA/smartphone. Windows Mobile requires a registry hack!"

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