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Comment If we're talking Specialist Distros... (Score 3, Informative) 221

Surely BackTrack needs a mention. One stop shop for Penetration Testing, Ethical Hacking, Security Analysis and pretty much anything else security-related. It might not qualify as a fully-blown "distro" depending on your definition, but it's a lot more customised than your standard "Clonebuntu" variants.

If you are even remotely interested in Network Security or Penetration Testing, it's a really invaluable tool.

Databases

Cassandra and Voldemort Benchmarked 45

kreide33 writes "Key/Value storage systems are gaining in popularity, much because of features such as easy scalability and automatic replication. However, there are several to choose from and performance is an important deciding factor. This article compares the performance of two of the most well-known projects, Cassandra and Voldemort, using several different mixes of access types, and compares both throughput and latency."
Graphics

Submission + - Tired MMORPG Graphics Brought Back To Life (blogspot.com)

Lexical_Scope writes: Dark Age of Camelot was released just over 8 years ago and still has a relatively hardcore following. During the intervening years, it's graphics have started to look a little (okay, a lot!) dated in comparison to modern titles. Silakka has used some really innovative techniques to port some of the DAOC maps into the Crysis Graphics Engine with spectacular results. He discusses the technologies and tech used on his blog, which is well worth a read. WARNING: The videos might cause otherwise sane viewers to resub their DAOC accounts...I did :(

Comment Re:One-way encryption (Score 1) 554

"This file contains random-looking data and we suspect it to contain encrypted data with direct relevance to an ongoing National Security investigation. Please provide the decryption keys for the file '/dev/urandom' immediately or face 5 years in jail!"

Although, perhaps someone could write a tool that replaces /dev/random with some kind of encrypted device volume? Interesting...

Comment Dark Age of Camelot / Return to Zork (Score 2, Interesting) 282

No-one is gonna read this far down, but what the hell :)

The Return To Zork one might not be a glitch so much as just evil designers, but if you made a slight mistake on the FIRST SCREEN (cut instead of dig the plant) then you're blocked from completion of the game, but you don't find out until much (much) later!

Dark Age of Camelot is a still-breathing MMO that got roundly whooped by WoW despite having probably the best PvP of any MMO to date. The bane of this game was the sheer number and scale of Line-Of-Sight and NPC-pathing problems. It made certain situations in the game almost unplayable.

There were also a lot of questionable decisions made by the design team that led to some interesting game dynamics. Anyone who's played will remember the MoC3/RR5 Sorc combo, the Large Shield blockrate against Dual-Wield and various other fun bits and pieces.

Still loved that game though...

Biotech

Virtual Fence Could Modernize the Old West 216

Hugh Pickens writes "For more than a century, ranchers in the West have kept cattle in place with fences of barbed wire, split wood and, more recently, electrified wires. Now, animal science researchers with the Department of Agriculture are working on a system that will allow cowboys to herd their cattle remotely via radio by singing commands and whispering into their ears and tracking movements by satellite and computer. A video of Dean Anderson, a researcher at the USDA's Jornada Experimental Range at Las Cruces, NM., shows how he has built radios that attach to an animal's head that allow a person at the other end to issue a range of commands — gentle singing, sharp commands, or a buzz like a bee or snake — to get the cattle to move where one wants them to. Anderson says it would cost $900 today to put a radio device on one head of cattle, but he says costs will fall and the entire herd wouldn't have to be outfitted, just the 'leaders.' Much of the research has focused on how cattlemen can identify which cattle in their herds are the ones that the others follow."

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