ElGanzoLoco - Slashdot User

Lack of Manpower May Kill VLC For Mac 398

Posted by timothy on Wednesday December 16, 2009 @05:53PM from the vlc-generally-rocks dept.

plasmacutter writes "The Video Lan dev team has recently come forward with a notice that the number of active developers for the project's MacOS X releases has dropped to zero, prompting a halt in the release schedule. There is now a disturbing possibility that support for Mac will be dropped as of 1.1.0. As the most versatile and user-friendly solution for bridging the video compatibility gap between OS X and windows, this will be a terrible loss for the Mac community. There is still hope, however, if the right volunteers come forward."

Saboteur Launch Plagued By Problems With ATI Cards 230

Posted by Soulskill on Wednesday December 09, 2009 @01:58AM from the more-or-less-finished dept.

An anonymous reader writes "So far, there are over 35 pages of people posting about why EA released Pandemic Studios' final game, Saboteur, to first the EU on December 4th and then, after knowing full well it did not work properly, to the Americas on December 8th. They have been promising to work on a patch that is apparently now in the QA stage of testing. It is not a small bug; rather, if you have an ATI video card and either Windows 7 or Windows Vista, the majority (90%) of users have the game crash after the title screen. Since the marketshare for ATI is nearly equal to that of Nvidia, and the ATI logo is adorning the front page of the Saboteur website, it seems like quite a large mistake to release the game in its current state."

Microsoft Game Software Preps Soldiers For Battle 44

Posted by Soulskill on Wednesday December 02, 2009 @02:14AM from the blue-screen-of-real-death dept.

coondoggie writes "Soldiers may go into battle better prepared to handle equipment and with a greater knowledge of their surroundings after an intellectual property licensing deal Monday between Microsoft and Lockheed Martin that will deepen the defense giant's access to visual simulation technology. The intellectual property agreement between the two focuses on Microsoft ESP, a games-based visual simulation software platform for the PC."

US Air Force Buying Another 2,200 PS3s 144

Posted by Soulskill on Wednesday November 25, 2009 @05:02AM from the quick-who-knows-a-good-ps3-flight-sim dept.

bleedingpegasus sends word that the US Air Force will be grabbing up 2,200 new PlayStation 3 consoles for research into supercomputing. They already have a cluster made from 336 of the old-style (non-Slim) consoles, which they've used for a variety of purposes, including "processing multiple radar images into higher resolution composite images (known as synthetic aperture radar image formation), high-def video processing, and 'neuromorphic computing.'" According to the Justification Review Document (DOC), "Once the hardware configuration is implemented, software code will be developed in-house for cluster implementation utilizing a Linux-based operating software."

Apple Patents "Enforceable" Ad Viewing On Devices 439

Posted by CmdrTaco on Monday November 16, 2009 @10:39AM from the touch-the-lizard dept.

Rexdude writes "Apple has filed a patent that forces users to interact with an ad. FTFA: 'Its distinctive feature is a design that doesn't simply invite a user to pay attention to an ad — it also compels attention. The technology can freeze the device until the user clicks a button or answers a test question to demonstrate that he or she has dutifully noticed the commercial message. Because this technology would be embedded in the innermost core of the device, the ads could appear on the screen at any time, no matter what one is doing.'" We've been following this story for awhile now but it seems to have broken into the mainstream.

Comment Rise in paid downloading? (Score 1) 251

by ElGanzoLoco on Tuesday September 01, 2009 @03:44AM (#29271121) Attached to: Drop in P2P Traffic Attributed to Traffic Shaping

Or could it also be that paid-for downloads and streaming audio and video have increased, thus decreasing the share of P2P traffic in the total?

(No I didn't RTFA, it's way too early for that)

Delete Data On Netbook If Stolen? 459

Posted by kdawson on Tuesday July 21, 2009 @02:18AM from the grab-brick-smash-window dept.

An anonymous reader writes "I have just moved overseas on a 2-year working holiday visa and so I picked up a netbook for the interim, an MSI Wind U100 Plus running WinXP. I love it to bits. But as I am traveling around I am somewhat worried about theft. Most of my important stuff is in Gmail and Google Docs; however, I don't always have Net access and find it useful to gear up the offline versions for both. Ideally I would like to securely delete all the offline data from the hard drive if it were stolen. Since it is backed up in the cloud, and the netbook is so cheap I don't really care about recovery, a solution that bricks it would be fine — and indeed would give me a warm glow knowing a prospective thief would have wasted their time. But it's not good if they can extract the HD and get at the data some other way. All thief-foiling suggestions are welcome, be they software, hardware, or other."

Eye In the Sky For City Crime Fighting 389

Posted by kdawson on Friday July 10, 2009 @09:33AM from the lawn-forcement-panopticon dept.

Tiger4 writes "The mayor of the City of Lancaster in the Antelope Valley of southern California is considering a high-definition video flying platform to aid in crime fighting. The aircraft, would circle the city constantly, able to zoom in on activity spots instantly. 'You never know when you are being watched or followed. It would be stupid to commit a crime. You see it with such detail,' said Mayor R. Rex Parris, who took a ride last week in a camera-equipped airplane with pilot Dick Rutan. 'I have every hope that Lancaster will be the first city to deploy it. I've never been so excited about anything.' Dick Rutan is the same pilot who flew around the world non-stop in the Voyager, custom built by his brother Burt Rutan at Scaled Composites in Mojave." The aircraft is nothing special, a garden-variety Cessna or the like, but "the camera is an example of technology developed for and used by the military making a transition to civilian applications, Rutan said."

Emigrating To a Freer Country? 1359

Posted by Soulskill on Saturday June 27, 2009 @12:09AM from the all-my-recommendations-require-time-machines dept.

puroresu writes "I currently reside in the UK. In recent years I've seen privacy, free expression and civil liberties steadily eroded, and I can't see anything changing for the better any time soon. With people being banned from the UK for expressing (admittedly reprehensible) opinions, the continuing efforts to implement mandatory ID cards and the prospect of a Conservative government in the near future, I'm seriously considering emigrating to a less restrictive country. Which countries would you recommend in terms of freedom and privacy? Distance is not an issue, though a reasonable level of stability and provision of public services would be a bonus."

The Broken Design of Microsoft's "Fix it" Tool 165

Posted by kdawson on Friday February 06, 2009 @12:52PM from the teething-problems dept.

$luggo writes "Curious about MS Fix It, I recently went hunting in the MS knowledge base for articles that provide the new EZ-button. After locating on few, I decided to click the button to download the Microsoft Installer package containing the executable and/or files that automatically enable the DVD Library feature in Windows Vista Home Premium and Ultimate — on my XP Media Center. 'Surely, MS will use some scripting, HTTP User-Agent sniffing, or even Genuine Windows validation to verify that I am running Vista,' I thought. It did not and I canceled the download when I received the prompt to save the file. So, I wonder: is there a Fix-it for Fix it? Because I can easily imagine someone doing what I did without scrolling to the bottom of the KB article and verifying that the article applies to their OS/version. This is a great example poor design. Why not simply use the download approach that other articles / fixes / service packs use, whereby the user must select the appropriate OS?"

Why the Mediterranean Is the Net's Achilles' Heel 195

Posted by kdawson on Tuesday January 13, 2009 @03:56PM from the raise-plow-blade dept.

An anonymous reader writes "A spate of broken cables has brought disruption for many of the world's Web users in 2008 — and the Med has been at the center of the problems. For political reasons, the Mediterranean Sea is an Internet bottleneck through which the majority of traffic between Europe and Asia is squeezed. That traffic must run the gauntlet of earthquakes and heavy maritime traffic to reach its destination. Better and stronger cables are urgently needed to avoid a re-occurrence of the 2008 outages."

Comment Re:eh hum.... (Score 5, Insightful) 287

by ElGanzoLoco on Tuesday December 30, 2008 @07:16PM (#26273477) Attached to: HP Accused of Illegal Exportation To Iran

I can't imagine that the Iran market is big enough to justify the risk of getting caught. But that's just me.

Yeah, that's just you. An oil-rich country with 70 million inhabitants, many of them middle-class, urbanized, literate, and under 30, is a gold mine.

Don't think Iran is anything like Afghanistan or Iraq. It is among the most developed countries in the Middle-East and Central Asia, and definitely the one with the best-educated population.

As a side note, finding common computing equipment and parts there is not a problem, and virtually everything imported to Iran either transits via Dubai or (more often than not) directly bought there to wholesale companies. The goods are then loaded on small wooden boats and shipped to Iran. Most of this trade escapes any sort of control (at least on the Dubai side of things).

In other words, the "US embargo on Iran" is a frigging joke, and a total waste of time.

Comment Re:Similar experience. (Score 1) 855

by ElGanzoLoco on Tuesday December 30, 2008 @05:44PM (#26272383) Attached to: Tales From the Support Crypt

Exactly. Similar story here, but with a twist: we bought a Mac for my grandmother, well into her eighties, and who hadn't ever touched a computer before.

But, being an avid bridge player, she wanted to play bridge online with her friends. Turns out they all use the same, Windows-only, bridge software from the French Federation of Bridge.

So I installed... Parallels and Windows XP on top of OS X. I was of course worried that the setup would be too complicated for her, so I made it as simple as possible (shortcuts in Dock etc). But she's got it mastered now, and I think she's even figured how to install other Windows software!

And seeing this 85 year old granny using a laptop with bleeding-edge virtual machine and 2 operating systems to play bridge online never ceases to amaze me.

Oregon Governor Proposes Vehicle Mileage Tax 713

Posted by timothy on Tuesday December 30, 2008 @04:38PM from the if-you-have-nothing-to-hide dept.

tiedyejeremy writes "As covered by the Crosscut Blog, the Governor of Oregon, Ted Kulongoski, is proposing a change in the funding of the Oregonian transportation system that drops gasoline taxes and, by way of GPS tracking, taxes the number of miles driven, to the tune of 1.2 cents per mile. The reason for the proposed change is that lower fuel consumption via fuel efficiency will leave the system underfunded. The concerns involve government tracking of the movements of vehicles within the state, though this has been denied by ODOT official, James Whitty. I'm wondering how this affects people using the Interstate System and private roads, and if the outputs can or will be used by law enforcement to check alibis."

Mediterranean Undersea Cables Cut, Again 329

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Friday December 19, 2008 @04:11PM from the cut-me-twice-shame-on-you dept.

miller60 writes "Three undersea cables in the Mediterranean Sea have failed within minutes of each other in an incident that is eerily similar to a series of cable cuts in the region in early 2008. The cable cuts are already causing serious service problems in the Middle East and Asia. See coverage at the Internet Storm Center, Data Center Knowledge and Bloomberg. The February 2008 cable cuts triggered rampant speculation about sabotage, but were later attributed to ships that dropped anchor in the wrong place."

Slashdot Top Deals