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Comment Siemens Patch Release (Score 1) 322

by JamJam (#33652516) Attached to: Stuxnet Worm May Have Targeted Iranian Reactor
Taking the tin foil hat off, it almost sounds like a "Siemens Patch" for the PLC device - then that got me thinking, wouldn't this be an interesting way to patch other (zero day) vulnerabilities in MSFT, Adobe Reader, and other products? Maybe that would only help for Joe Public who is not patching their software anyway...

Submission + - H.264 now free of royalties (businesswire.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Cowardus
Anonymous Cowardus writes: "MPEG LA announced today that its AVC Patent Portfolio License will continue not to charge royalties for Internet Video that is free to end users (known as "Internet Broadcast AVC Video") during the entire life of this License. MPEG LA previously announced it would not charge royalties for such video through December 31, 2015, and today'(TM)s announcement makes clear that royalties will continue not to be charged for such video beyond that time. Products and services other than Internet Broadcast AVC Video continue to be royalty-bearing."

I hope that now FireFox and Opera will both support H.264 and that Microsoft will add direct support to Internet Explorer. Google may have tipped the balance with their WebM project, but now we can all agree to use H.264 since almost all new and most of current hardware supports it and we already have the encoding tools for that format.

Let's also hope the W3 will also specify H.264 as the standard format for the HTML5 video tag so that we can finally stop using Flash, at least for video.
Security

Submission + - Trojan responsible for plane crash? FUD or fact? (electricalchemy.net)

Submitted by pariax
pariax writes: Tired of a week of stories hyping the role the malware infection may have played in the Spanair crash, a security consultant and pilot has dissected the official report on the incident and provides a detailed account of the chain of failures that led to the crash. AV vendors duck and cover!
Programming

Submission + - Sorting algorithms: boring until you add sound (geek.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Anyone who has ever done a programming course or tried to learn to code out of a book will have come across sorting algorithms. Bubble, heap, merge, there’s a long list of these methods of sorting data. The subject matter is fairly dry. Thankfully someone has found a way to not only make sorting more interesting, but easier to remember and understand too.
Software

Submission + - Multi-core, Threads and Message Passing (igvita.com) 1

Submitted by igrigorik
igrigorik writes: It's not a question of whether threads, events or message-passing is a better model — the hardware trends require that we use all of the above. If message passing is a choice today, then in all likelihood, it won't be in the future when we hit the diminishing returns of a shared memory model (too much communication). With that in mind, the more interesting question to explore is not which abstraction is "correct" or "more performant" (one can always craft an optimized workload), but rather how do we make all of these paradigms work together, in a context of a simple programming model? We need threads, we need events, and we need message passing — it is not a question of which is better.
Patents

Submission + - Apple Wants Patent on Videogame Play iBooks 2

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: Patently Apple reports that a new Apple patent application has surfaced describing an application that would record your personal journey through a video game and turn it into a custom comic or iBook when you're done playing. Imagine how thrilled little Billy's Mommy would have been had she only had the chance to read the story of her son's foray into Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas or see how he dealt with BioShock's Little Sisters.
Idle

Submission + - Boogie Babe Squashed but Awarded Millions

Submitted by JamJam
JamJam writes: A Vancouver BC woman was flattened by a colleague twice her size who fell on her during a dance floor accident at a nightclub. She was out celebrating with colleagues the completion of her articling program after a dinner sponsored by the law firm where she worked. The accident left the 110 lbs woman with severe headaches and a brain injury that made it difficult to concentrate. She has been awarded 5 million dollars for loss of future earnings.

Submission + - What to do with a surplus of old CRT monitors? 6

Submitted by AkaAnonymous
AkaAnonymous writes: I work in a company that sells and builds custom desktop solutions, and I have been charged with the duty of collecting some of our old stuff, and getting rid of it. Lots of old computer cases and heatsinks went to scrap metal, old PCB is being recycled or sent to somebody to recycle it, etc. The useful stuff is being sold in online auctions for some income, and if it doesn't sell, then it's more to recycle. The only problem I've reached is what to do with a surplus (about 100) of old CRT monitors. Lots of places charge to have them recycled at ridiculous rates, so I want to know if anyone has creative ideas to see what I could do about getting these things out the door without losing a lot of money.
Cellphones

Submission + - TI To Ship Dual-Core Smartphone Chip This Year (computerworld.com)

Submitted by CWmike
CWmike writes: If a 1.3Ghz single-core chip rumored to be coming to the Droid Pro before Christmas is not enough to delight you, then TI's dual-core bad boy might. Texas Instruments' OMAP4430 chip will deliver double the performance of existing single-core chips from the OMAP3 family. The chip will scream, and will also bring features like 1080p high-definition video playback to mobile devices, said TI's Robert Tolbert. The new dual-core chip will operate at a clock speed of up to 1GHz and draw up to 50% less power than its predecessors, allowing it to deliver 10 hours of 1080p video playback compared with OMAP3630's four hours of 720p video playback.

Submission + - Sharpie creates Liquid Pencil -permanent in 3 days (geek.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Sharpie has managed to flip what we all know about a pencil on its head. Your typical pencil is made of hard graphite and can easily be erased. Not so with the new Sharpie pencil, it is liquid and becomes permanent.

Something that writes like a pencil but can’t be erased isn’t that useful as you could just use a pen. But there’s a clever twist to Sharpie’s invention. The liquid pencil can be erased just like a normal pencil for up to three days. After that it is permanent.

Submission + - Gamer plays Doom for the first time (kotaku.com) 1

Submitted by
sfraggle
sfraggle writes: "kotaku.com has this interesting review of Doom (the original!) by Stephen Totilo, a gamer and FPS player who, until a few days ago, had gone through the game's 17 year history without playing it. He describes some of his first impressions, the surprises that he encountered, and how the game compares to modern FPSes."

Submission + - Alternatives Wireless LAN Controllers 2

Submitted by gollito
gollito writes: I do work for a large non-profit organization (summer camp) and they are looking for a way to control access to their wireless network. Camp staff all have laptops and need to be able to hop on the network to access the registration software from most anywhere on camp but they would also like to offer guest wireless in certain locations as well. Up until about 6 months ago they ran their wireless wide open so this summer we enable WPA2 on all the access points but that is easily defeated when staff members hand out the WPA key to pretty much anybody that asks (at our behest). I've priced out Cicso and HP WLC products and they both come in at around $15-20k for what we need. My question is: are there any cheap/free wireless lan controllers and if so, what are good, quality access points to run with it?

Submission + - Why Music From World War I Isn't The Public Domain (techdirt.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: While Disney and others have done a great job pushing the end date for works entering the public domain ever further forward, most people have assumed that anything from before 1923 is in the public domain. However, it turns out that this is not true for sound recordings, in part due to an accidental quirk in copyright law history — in that Congress, way back in 1909, believed that sound recordings could not be covered by copyright (they believed the Constitution did not allow recordings to be covered), and thus, some state laws stepped up to create special copyrights for sound recordings. A court ruling then said that these state rules were not overruled by federal copyright law. End result? ANY recorded work from before 1972 (no matter how early it was recorded) won't go into the public domain until 2049 at the earliest.
NASA

Submission + - NASA satellites take measure of world forests (networkworld.com)

Submitted by coondoggie
coondoggie writes: NASA today said three of its satellites have helped create a first-of-its kind height map of the world's forests. The data will help scientists measure how much carbon the world's forests store and how fast that carbon cycles through the environment and back into the atmosphere, the space agency stated. Based on data collected by NASA's Terra and Aqua satellites, along with the Ice, Cloud and land Elevation Satellite, or ICESat, the map is the first that spans the entire globe using one uniform method, NASA said. The map shows the world's tallest forests are clustered in North America's Pacific Northwest and portions of Southeast Asia. Shorter forests are found in broad swaths across northern Canada and Eurasia.

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