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The Internet

The Pirate Bay Co-Founder Starting P2P-DNS 309

Posted by CmdrTaco from the whacamole-is-fun dept.
An anonymous reader writes "The Pirate Bay Co-Founder, Peter Sunde, has started a new project which will provide a decentralized p2p based DNS system. This is a direct result of the increasing control which the US government has over ICANN. The project is called P2P-DNS and according to the project's wiki, this is how the project is described: 'P2P-DNS is a community project that will free internet users from imperial control of DNS by ICANN. In order to prevent unjust prosecution or denial of service, P2P-DNS will operate as a distributed and less centralized service hosted by the users of DNS. Temporary substitutes, (as Alpha and Beta developments), are being made ready for deployment. A network with no centralized points of failure, (per the original design of the internet), remains our goal. P2P-DNS is developing rapidly.'"
Patents

Tandberg Attempts To Patent Open Source Code 187

Posted by Soulskill from the cut-and-paste-your-way-to-innovation dept.
An anonymous reader writes "As if the current situation with software patents wasn't bad enough, it appears a new phenomenon is emerging: companies are watching the commit logs of open source projects for ideas to patent. In this case, Tandberg filed a patent that was step-by-step identical to an algorithm developed by the x264 project — a mere two months after the original commit. The particular algorithm is a useful performance optimization in a wide variety of video encoders, including Theora."

Comment Re:Your needs differ as you get older... (Score 1) 418

by H3xx (#34343518) Attached to: Have I Lost My Gaming Mojo?

I feel I'm in the same boat as the OP; I used to game a lot when I was younger. I still remember fondly the first time I played DOOM for so long that I couldn't see straight. Then it was Blood, then Quake, then Half-Life.

The decline started when I decided I was going to uninstall Windows and switch to a completely Linux system six years ago; I decided it wasn't worth the effort to restart my computer and risk infection just so I could play Battlefield 1942 against bots for a few hours. At first I still tried to keep my favorite old games around via projects like prboom, ScummVM and the engines at icculus.org. (Little did I know, this was slowly turning me into a *NIX admin and guru.)

Then, a couple years ago I lost almost everything in a hard drive crash. I decided that was the winds of fate trying to tell me that I should just give up.

Now that I'm 25, I'm a coder by day and a musician/sound engineer by night. I find I don't even have the patience or the hand-eye coordination to play some of the flash games on Newgrounds.

MMORPs seem to be more addicting social habits than games.

I completely agree. I guess I'm lucky never to have gotten into the whole scene (not enough cash, having sex with girls, etc.).
IBM

Coder Accuses IBM of Patenting His Work 249

Posted by samzenpus from the do-your-own-work dept.
ttsiod writes "Back in 2001, I coded HeapCheck, a GPL library for Windows (inspired by ElectricFence) that detected invalid read/write accesses on any heap allocations at runtime — thus greatly helping my debugging sessions. I published it on my site, and got a few users who were kind enough to thank me — a Serbian programmer even sent me $250 as a thank you (I still have his mails). After a few years, Microsoft included very similar technology in the operating system itself, calling it PageHeap. I had more or less forgotten this stuff, since for the last 7 years I've been coding for UNIX/Linux, where valgrind superseded Efence/dmalloc/etc. Imagine my surprise when yesterday, Googling for references to my site, I found out that the technology I implemented, of runtime detection of invalid heap accesses, has been patented in the States, and to add insult to injury, even mentions my site (via a non-working link to an old version of my page) in the patent references! After the necessary 'WTFs' and 'bloody hells' I thought this merits (a) a Slashdotting, and (b) a set of honest questions: what should I do about this? I am not an American citizen, but the 'inventors' of this technology (see their names in the top of the patent) have apparently succeeded in passing this ludicrous patent in the States. If my code doesn't count as prior art, Bruce Perens's Efence (which I clearly state my code was inspired from) is at least 12 years prior! Suggestions/cursing patent trolls most welcome."

Comment Re:Big Cat Joke (Score 2, Interesting) 164

by H3xx (#34333620) Attached to: Apple 1 Computer Sells For $210,700

Apple users prefer the term "Cougar" ;)

"Cougar" is also a term for a middle-aged woman who seduces younger men. The Apple 1 seduced many young men as well, causing them to become obsessed and spend excess amounts of time with it (her?).

...except the Apple 1 is way sexier.
Facebook

The Queen Joins Facebook 155

Posted by samzenpus from the royal-farmville dept.
H3xx writes "The Queen is set to have an official presence on Facebook when a British Monarchy page launches on the internet-based social networking site. Buckingham Palace says it is not a personal profile page, but users can 'like' the service and receive updates on their news feed. The Queen has reportedly embraced the web and sends e-mails. A British Monarchy Twitter feed is also available. The Facebook page is due to go live from Monday morning. The page will also feature the Court Circular, recording the previous day's official engagements."
Facebook

Submission + - The Queen Joins Facebook (bbc.co.uk)

Submitted by H3xx
H3xx writes: The Queen is set to have an official presence on Facebook when a British Monarchy page launches on the internet-based social networking site. Buckingham Palace says it is not a personal profile page, but users can "like" the service and receive updates on their news feed.

The Queen has reportedly embraced the web and sends e-mails. A British Monarchy Twitter feed is also available.

The Facebook page is due to go live from Monday morning. The page will also feature the Court Circular, recording the previous day's official engagements.

Comment Re:The real question: (Score 0) 135

by H3xx (#34152140) Attached to: Failed Controller-Free Gaming Devices of the Past

I think the bigger story is that after all these iterations... developers still don't know how to properly use the hardware.

It'll be a dark day when companies release a "hands free" console and have the API locked down so tight that the only way to develop for them is to use their hands-free IDE.

Can you imagine what it would be like using a hands-free keyboard to write code?

Comment Artifacts (Score 0) 728

by H3xx (#34084220) Attached to: Mr. Pike, Tear Down This ASCII Wall!

I'm also wondering why we insist that:

  • our source code be able to be wrapped to 78 characters
  • a tab (0x09) character is equal to 8 spaces (unless you specify otherwise)
  • most major programming languages have function names that are in US English, even Ruby, which was developed by the Japanese, and Scilab's programming language which was developed by French scientists
  • POSIX regular expressions' [:alphanum:] character class is most often written as [A-z0-9]

The truth is that we programmers prefer to be able to type things quickly without having to memorize character codes for a variety of Unicode characters; we want to be able to type simple variable and function names using a standard set of glyphs and not have to worry about remembering which variation of a Chinese pictograph was used.

If it comes down to it, we could all just use Ook and not worry about language barriers (or getting much of anything done for that matter).

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