Catch up on stories from the past week (and beyond) at the Slashdot story archive

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×
XBox (Games)

Submission + - The Halo Bug (washingtonpost.com)

Submitted by Woody
Woody writes: The Washington Post reports... Halo 3 Takes Toll on Workforce

Call it the Halo holiday, or the Halo bug.

Some gamers are going to be a little sleepy this week at work or school, if they show up at all. With yesterday's release of Halo 3, the highly anticipated video game for the Xbox 360 console, many gamers are taking some personal time. "In my group of friends, we're all taking the day off," said one Halo fan waiting in line late Monday night at a GameStop store in Rockville.
Security

Submission + - Unisys investigated for covering up cyberattacks

Submitted by Stony Stevenson
Stony Stevenson writes: Unisys, a major government IT contractor, reportedly is being investigated for allegedly failing to detect cyberattacks, and then covering up its failings. Two US congressmen have called for an investigation into cyberattacks aimed at the Department of Homeland Security, along with a contractor charged with securing those networks.

In the letter they say the House Committee on Homeland Security's investigations led them to believe the department is under attack by foreign powers, and could be at risk because of "incompetent and possibly illegal activity" by a U.S. contractor. The congressmen didn't name the contractor in the letter. However, the Washington Post on Monday reported that the FBI is investigating Unisys, a major information technology firm with a US$1.7 billion Department of Homeland Security contract, for allegedly failing to detect cyber break-ins traced to a Chinese-language Web site and then trying to cover up its deficiencies.
Music

Submission + - Music industry wants credit card nums in ID3 tags (michaelrobertson.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: In an obituary for AnywhereCD which closes in one week, MP3.com founder Michael Robertson chronicles how at least one record label wanted him to put credit card numbers of buyers into songs. Fascinating story about how at least some of the labels still don't get it and why AnywhereCD is about to buried.
Patents

Submission + - Company selling IP rights to P2P spoofing on eBay (ebay.com)

Submitted by
tuomasr
tuomasr writes: "A Finnish software company Viralg is selling their IP rights to their software that provides "the necessary key technology for the only possible effective protection against illegal P2P sharing" on eBay. The company claims that the software can create fake files for P2P-networks with hashes identical to the real files, hence feeding garbage to the download."
Biotech

Submission + - Velociraptor had feathers (physorg.com)

Submitted by
Spy der Mann
Spy der Mann writes: "A new look at some old bones have shown that velociraptor, the dinosaur made famous in the movie Jurassic Park, had feathers. A paper describing the discovery, made by paleontologists at the American Museum of Natural History and the Field Museum of Natural History, appears in the Sept. 21 issue of the journal Science."
Sony

Submission + - Folding@home Petaflop Barrier Crossed (playstation.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The Folding@Home project has now passed the astounding 1 Petaflop barrier. The project run from Stanford University owes much of its success to the PlayStation 3 which joined the fight earlier this year. Around 80% of the total projects processing power is from the PS3 alone, outpacing the linux community by 22x despite having a similar user base working on project. With the recent introduction of the GPU clients 2 Petaflops wont be to far away.
OS X

Submission + - Workplace Shell replacement for Mac OS X?

Submitted by Qbertino
Qbertino writes: I'm proud owner of an older 12" G4 iBook (1,0 Ghz) from a few years ago, the one many geeks have and liked to use because of it's price/performance ratio for a subnotebook. Many people I met use it to run Debian Linux PPC or some other OSS operating system and do their programming on it. However I mostly do web developement where the OS hardly matter and I've come to like the benefits of running the native OS and the neat and frictionless hardware integration that comes with it. I do quite a lot of Flash developement aswell and need to be able to use the official Flash IDE from Adobe. The downside is that the desktop bogs down the systems performance which I'd like to use for other things by running a replacement of the Aqua Workplace Shell & desktop enviroment. There are quite a few wps replacements for windows — I've use Litestep with Windows 2000 — but I'm looking for one for OS X. What lightweigth WPS replacements are there for OS X and what other strategies are there to take some weight off an OS X desktop?
PlayStation (Games)

Submission + - Dualshock controller with Rumble feature released (hdtvinfo.eu)

Submitted by xbox360cooldown
xbox360cooldown writes: Sony Computer Entertainment Inc. (SCEI) announced that it would release DUALSHOCK®3 Wireless Controller, a new controller for PLAYSTATION®3 (PS3®) incorporating a rumble feature.

http://www.hdtvinfo.eu/news/game-consoles/sony-introduces-dualshock-controller-with-rumble-feature-for-the-ps3.html

In Japan in November as a separately sold accessory. It inherits the basic design and functionality of the popular PlayStation® controller, while keeping the high-precision, high response motion sensitive six-axis sensing system. Introduction to North American and European markets is expected in spring 2008.

The added rumble feature, combined with the highly realistic motion sensitive six-axis sensing system, takes gamers deeper into the world of interactivity, delivering a more intuitive, realistic and immersive game play experience. The new controller will also benefit PS3 content creators, by giving them the ability to further expand their creative imagination. PS3 titles that are already in the market may become compatible with the rumble feature through software update.
Quake

Submission + - Older Men + Younger Women = Longer Lifespan (go.com) 1

Submitted by
Ant
Ant writes: "According to this three page ABC News story, scientists say older men coupling with younger women increased human lifespan. Scientists think they've found one of the reasons why humans defy evolution theory and live well beyond their reproductive life. It's all those old guys latching on to younger women and passing their good genes down to their kids... Seen on Shacknews."
Encryption

Submission + - Australia cracked US combat aircraft codes (news.com.au)

Submitted by SpamSlapper
SpamSlapper writes: FORMER defence minister Kim Beazley has told how Australia cracked top-secret American combat aircraft codes to enable the shooting down of enemy aircraft in the 1980s. The radar on Australia's Hornets could not identify most potentially hostile aircraft in the region, but dispite many requests, the codes were not provided, so "In the end we spied on them and we extracted the codes ourselves". The Americans knew what the Australians were doing and were intrigued by the progress they made.
PlayStation (Games)

Submission + - Playstation: The Rumblepack returns

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Sony made a surprise announcement late on Wednesday, saying that it will introduce an new PS3 controller with rumble feature in spring of next year. Called Dualshock 3, the new controller will re-introduce the vibration functionality to the Playstation controller — a feature that had disappeared with the introduction of the Playstation 3 and the motion sensitive "Sixaxis" controller. It looks like that the new controller was made possible largely because Sony and Immersion resolved their patent dispute earlier this year. Back then, the two companies said that they had "entered into a new business agreement to explore the inclusion of Immersion technology in Playstation format products." Judging from today's announcement, the agreement apparently is bearing fruit.
The Media

Submission + - NBC drops the other shoe (nytimes.com) 2

Submitted by stekylsha
stekylsha writes: NBC has managed to figure out this internut thing after all. In a brilliant move, reminicent of Napoleon and his attack on Russia, NBC has decided to sell their award winning shows themselves which "NBC executives say they expect to become a viable competitor to iTunes." From the article:

"The NBC service, called NBC Direct, will begin a testing period in October with plans to be operational in November. The service will allow customers to download full episodes of NBC shows for seven days on Windows-based PCs. The file will expire after the seven days."

One must wonder why this business model hasn't been tried before.

Slashdot Top Deals

"Protozoa are small, and bacteria are small, but viruses are smaller than the both put together."

Close