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Businesses

Submission + - New Game Trading Site (gamezola.com)

Submitted by
Frank
Frank writes: "Ever since launching a few months ago, Gamezola.com has been taking the gaming industry by storm. We have been featured in prominent gaming websites such as gamespress.com and gameplaymonthly.com. Recently we have been the gold winner of the 2007 WWW awards. We have thousands of gamers registered on our site, who are actively listing and trading video games. We have hundreds of listing on our site, from older to the hottest and latest video games.

In celebrating of E-4-All, Gamezola is launching a special deal of $1 per trade. That is a saving of over 40%. Also, look for us at E-4-All (Los Angeles Convention Center) with special coupons for free trades!"
Music

Submission + - Radiohead with "name your own price" LP7

Submitted by
JP
JP writes: "Radiohead have announced a new record http://www.inrainbows.com/ via their blog http://www.radiohead.com/deadairspace. The album is to be released ten days from now. What is particularly novel is that you can choose whatever price you wish to pay for the digital download only version of the record or you can purchase an LP/CD combo box. It's already sorta "slashdotted" via pitchfork and a million other news sites. Merge records also has seemed to follow this pattern of giving fans inexpensive downloads (with merge it's via emusic.com) or premium physical goods with high grade vinyl and artwork etc. I'm sure we are seeing the intermediate future of popular music distribution, although Radiohead have an obvious unique existing "marketshare" to be able to pull this off more easily."
Security

Submission + - VM-based rootkits proved easily detectable (stanford.edu)

Submitted by paleshadows
paleshadows writes: A year and a half has passed since SubVirt, the first VMM (virtual machine monitor) based rootkit, was introduced. The idea spawned two lively slashdot discussions: the first, which followed the initial report about SubVirt, and the second, which was conducted after Joanna Rutkowska has recycled the idea (apparently without giving credit to the initial authors). Conversely, in this year's HotOS workshop, researchers from Stanford, CMU, VMware, and XenSource have published a paper titled " Compatibility Is Not Transparency: VMM Detection Myths and Realities" which shows that VMM-based rootkits are actually easily detectable. The introduction of the paper explains that

"While commodity VMMs conform to the PC architecture, virtual implementations of this architecture differ substantially from physical implementations. These differences are not incidental: performance demands and practical engineering limitations necessitate divergences (sometimes radical ones) from native hardware, both in semantics and performance. Consequently, we believe the potential for preventing VMM detection under close scrutiny is illusory — and fundamentally in conflict with the technical limitations of virtualized platforms."

The paper concludes by saying that

"Perhaps the most concise argument against the utility of VMBRs (VM-based rootkits) is: "Why bother?" VMBRs change the malware defender's problem from a very difficult one (discovering whether the trusted computing base of a system has been compromised), to the much easier problem of detecting a VMM."
Operating Systems

Submission + - NetBSD boosts MySQL performance (feyrer.de)

Submitted by
hubertf
hubertf writes: "Andrew Doran, who was recently hired by the NetBSD project to work on NetBSD's SMP implementation, has done a lot of good work, and he has merged some of his work from the vmlocking-branch into NetBSD-current. Effects of this are that time for build.sh on a quad-Opteron went down by ~10%.

Andrew also updated his previous benchmarks, and posted about his recent results: ``Most of the sysbench runs that I've seen to date have sysbench running on the same machine as the database. That's a good test but with the exception of small installations and out-of-band activity, production setups rarely look like that. So I ran sysbench itself on a seperate dual core system.''

There are images that compare NetBSD 3 with NetBSD-current (where most of Andrew's changes are now), and NetBSD-current compared to Linux, FreeBSD, and OpenBSD.

The original benchmarks didn't include Solaris/x86, so Jaime Fournier sat down and repeated the test (on a single system). The results show that NetBSD beats Solaris by ~25% in the ReadOnly test, and that they're about on par in the ReadWrite test, with NetBSD kicking in earlier WRT the number of client threads, but Solaris keeping up longer before they both degrade. The courves are quite similar, and my guess is that there is some room for finetuning there."
Announcements

Submission + - Demonoid Going Down For Canadians (torrentfreak.com)

Submitted by Looce
Looce writes: TorrentFreak.com reports that people outside Canada will now see on the Demonoid.com homepage a news story saying:

We received a letter from a lawyer representing the CRIA, they were threatening with legal action and we need to start blocking Canadian traffic because of this. Thanks for your understanding, and sorry for any inconvenience.
... and people in Canada will see this instead, without the site navigation:

We received a letter from a lawyer represeting the CRIA, they were threatening with legal action and We need to start blocking Canadian traffic because of this. If you reside in Canada, that is the reason you are being redirected to this message. Thanks for your understanding, and sorry for any inconvenience.
The CRIA is the Canadian Recording Industry Association, an equivalent to the RIAA.
Education

Submission + - Student Attacked After Dropping Cake (infowars.net) 17

Submitted by
An anonymous reader writes: "School security guards in Palmdale, CA have been caught on camera assaulting a 16-year-old girl and breaking her arm after she spilled some cake during lunch and left some crumbs on the floor after cleaning it up. The girl, Pleajhai Mervin, told Fox News LA that she was bumped while queuing for lunch and dropped the cake. After being ordered to clean it up and then re-clean the spot three times, she attempted to leave the area out of embarrassment but was jumped on by security who forced her onto a table, breaking her wrist in the process."
Biotech

Submission + - Bringing Patients Back from the Dead (msn.com) 1

Submitted by FattyBoeBatty
FattyBoeBatty writes: Interesting article claiming that patients generally don't die from lack of oxygen — but from the rapid reintroduction of it. Cells without oxygen can conceivably live for upwards of an hour without any damage. While this idea is already proving successful in small ER trials, this may change the way emergency medicine is delivered around the world.
Editorial

Submission + - Greenpeace activists construct "coal plant"

Submitted by
gpsea
gpsea writes: "Greenpeace activists today constructed a four-meter replica of a (smoke-spewing) coal plant at the main entrance of the Asian Development Bank (ADB) headquarters in Manila.
The Bank has been under heavy criticism for its extensive funding of fossil fuel projects in Asia which have massively contributed to the region's greenhouse gas emissions and abetted dangerous climate change. The protest came two weeks ahead of the Bank's Annual Governors Meeting in Kyoto, birthplace of the Kyoto Protocol, the only legally-binging global agreement to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

"The Bank should accept this coal plant as a graphic reminder of the ADB's role in funding climate change in Asia. Since the ADB continues to finance the construction of a number of coal-fired power plants across Asia, we are building one right at its doorsteps. Coal plants should not be built here nor anywhere else, but because the Bank loves them so much we are presenting them this gift" said Jasper Inventor, Greenpeace Climate and Energy Campaigner.

The most recent report by the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has identified Asia as one of the regions most vulnerable to the grave impacts of climate change. Among those who will be the worst affected are Asia's poorest nations. The report suggests that between 1.1 billion and 3.2 billion people will face water shortages and between 200 million and 600 million will confront hunger by 2080 as global warming causes heat waves, fires, droughts and storms.

"The ADB's mission is to alleviate the plight of the poor in Asia. But, by financing some of the most polluting, carbon-intensive, greenhouse gas emitting power projects in Asia such as coal power plants, the ADB is guilty of causing climate change and exacerbating poverty in the region," said Inventor.

Fossil fuel energy sources are a major cause of climate change, with coal being the most carbon-intensive and climate-damaging. The ADB, however, has invested heavily in coal plants in Asia. In Thailand it financed the gigantic 2400 megawatt (MW) coal-fired plant in Mae Moh, and another 1434 MW power plant in Rayong. In the Philippines, the Bank directly financed the 600 MW Masinloc coal-fired power plant in Zambales Province and helped finance the transmission lines for the 1200 MW Sual coal plant.

The Bank's coal investments continue. In 2006, the ADB has approved the financing of two large coal projects in India: the 2,980 MW Sipat Super Thermal Power Project and the 1,500 MW Kahalgaon Super Thermal Power Project Stage II extension. It is looking at financing a 1,000 MW coal-fired power plant in Vietnam and a coal mine in Phulbari, Bangladesh that will displace over 50,000 people.

Asia's emissions represent nearly one-quarter of the global greenhouse gas emissions today compared to its previous one-tenth share in the early 70s. This is due to the steep increase in the region's energy consumption, which grew by 230% in the period 1973 to 2003, compared to the average 75% global increase.

Greenpeace asserts that global CO2 emission reductions of 50 percent by 2050 are required if we are to have a chance of preventing the worst impacts of climate change. Such cuts are technically and economically possible if we change the way we produce and use energy. What is lacking is the right policy framework and real leadership by multilateral institutions such as the ADB.

"The ADB has the power to jumpstart an energy revolution in Asia — a revolution that leaves behind climate-damaging fossil fuels and drives the massive expansion of renewable energy and energy efficiency programs. These are the real solutions that the ADB should support if it truly wants to fight poverty and provide its member countries with lasting energy security," said Inventor."
Space

Submission + - NASA signs memorandum of understanding with Virgin

Submitted by
caffiend666
caffiend666 writes: "Tuesday, NASA signed a memorandum of understanding with Virgin Galactic. Although not a partnership, it is interesting to see NASA work with even more private spaceflight companies. The cryptic agreement includes that 'The memorandum is only a framework to explore potential collaborations. It does not include training of NASA astronauts, an agreement to buy seats on a Virgin Galactic flight, or provision of technical advice by NASA to Virgin Galactic.'"
Music

Puretracks Music Store Drops DRM 236

Posted by kdawson from the apple-could-do-this dept.
khendron writes "The Canadian online music store Puretracks (a store I have generally avoided because of their Microsoft-specific solutions) has announced that it will immediately start selling part of its catalog as DRM-free MP3 files. The site's unprotected catalog, which includes artists such as The Barenaked Ladies and Sarah McLachlan, will initially feature only 50,000 of its 1.3 million tracks, but their number will grow weekly. The Globe and Mail says the move will likely profit Puretracks because its DRM-free-music will be playable on iPods. It quotes one industry watcher saying 'We're seeing the death of DRM.'" Essentially Puretracks is relaxing the major-label mandated DRM rules that it had initially applied to all labels, even the indies that wanted no part of DRM.
Linux Business

Submission + - Zaragoza migrate to Open Source

Submitted by pacoes
pacoes writes: The Council of Zaragoza (Spain, 660.000 souls), has decided to move all it software infrastructure to Linux (SuSE) and open technologies. The actual infrastructure is based in Windows 98-Office 97, that will be replaced begining with the office suite (OpenOffice over windows), then to SuSE linux.

The total amount is scheduled on euro 750.000, and will be drive by Novell, that will support the Council for 7 years.

In 2008 Zaragoza will show the Internationa Exhibition Expo Zaragoza 2008, centered in water and sustainable development.

Due Zaragoza is the 5th city in Spain and shows an evident economical growth, this is a very important hit in the expansion of the open source infrastructure.
Handhelds

Submission + - Heroic Slashdotter Mistakes Pron for Rape

Submitted by ObiWanStevobi
ObiWanStevobi writes: Ok, since this is considered an invasion case, I picked YRO. I also figured a sword qualifies as a handheld device.

A man who lives in his mother's basement, and has a sword collection, is being charged after breaking into his neighbor's house. He broke in after hearing what sounded like a woman being raped. He burst through the door weilding his sword with a +3 Dexterity adrenaline rush. The frightened wanker then proceeded to show him(James Van Iveren AKA Krunk the Slashdotter) that he was alone and just watching a porno. Van Iveren is now being charged on several counts such as trespassing and damage to property for breaking the door. LINK

PS Notice the URL, porn.sword.ap
Operating Systems

Submission + - ESR gives up on Fedora

Submitted by
greginnj
greginnj writes: "Noted Linux evangelist Eric S. Raymond (ESR) has publicly announced that he is giving up on Fedora and switching to Ubuntu: http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2 007-February/msg01006.html Not content to alert RedHat alone, it appears he has also sent out press releases to alert the media: http://www.linux.com/article.pl?sid=07/02/21/13402 37 . The announcement has already drawn smackbacks from David Cantrell of RedHat and Alan Cox."

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