Comment JPEG (Score 5, Interesting) 241
Seems remarkably similar to how JPEG compression works. Not surprisingly, the resulting pictures look a lot like overcompressed JPEGs.
Comment Re:A Brazilian (Score 1) 96
Clearly, it should be spelled "Brazillion".
Record-Breaking Solar Cells Tailored To Location 133
Urchin writes "The quality of sunlight varies depending on where you live, but off-the-shelf solar cells are all identical. A new solar cell designed by UK firm Quantasol is easily tuned to adapt to the local light conditions, which boosts its long-term performance. Its short-term performance isn't bad though — the single junction solar cell has a peak efficiency greater than any previous device, beating a world record that's stood for 21 years."
Opera 10.0 Released, With Integrated Web Server Functionality 437
sherl0k writes "Opera 10.0, dubbed Opera Unite, has been released. Built into the Web browser is a full-fledged Web server, complete with nifty little gadgets such as a 'fridge' that people can post notes onto, a chat room, a widget to stream your music library anywhere, and a built-in file-sharing mechanism. It also scores 100/100 on the Acid3 test."
Readers fudreporter and TLS point to The Register's report on the new release and a
5-minute video demo, respectively. Update: 06/16 15:18 GMT by T: Roar Lauritzsen of Opera Software writes to point out that "release" isn't quite the right word here; though you can download it, version 10.0 is still in beta, and the version with Unite is a labs (experimental) release.
How To Help a Friend With an MMO Addiction? 811
sammydee writes "I have a friend who is addicted to an MMO (Pirates of the Burning Sea). On a typical day, he will wake up around 9am, browse the forums for a bit, then go online and stay online all day, playing until about 3am the following morning, taking only toilet breaks and stopping to eat ready-meals. While the rest of the house works hard revising for exams, this friend will be playing his MMO instead. Now, I am pretty confident that this comprises an unhealthy addiction; unfortunately, I have no idea what to do about it. Any attempt to physically prevent him from playing the game would most likely result in an outburst of anger and possibly physical violence. Attempts at telling him he has a problem have been met with derision and angry retorts. Slashdotters, what would you do to help out a friend in this situation? Perhaps you are a reformed addict yourself — if so, how did you break out of the habit? Or maybe I should just leave well enough alone and allow him to continue? Any thoughts are gratefully received."
ASCAP Starts To Act Like the RIAA 272
Scott Lockwood writes "Below Average Dave, a Dr. Demento style parody artist, has been shut down by the ASCAP. This collective, acting as badly as the RIAA, is now attempting to ignore the 2 Live Crew Supreme Court decision that parodies are new derivative works. Just like the RIAA, ASCAP seems intent on misrepresents the law. If you know anyone who can help BA Dave in his plight, please contact him." This artist doesn't have the resources to fight the ASCAP, even though the law is pretty clearly on his side. Anyone at the EFF or the ACLU interested?
Comment Re:It's not sockets, its bind() (Score 1) 230
If they'd done that we'd already be using IPv6 for everything because applications wouldn't have to know about the details of addresses because they'd just be arbitrary strings like file names already are.
I was under the impression that getaddrinfo() already served to easily provide support for IPv6.
A Monster LED Array For Irresponsible Fun 225
Tesladownunder writes "This huge LED is on steroids and then some. It is intended for use as a streetlight. It has a 7000 lumen output at 100W and will burn a hole in a CD case without focusing. And that's without the infrared that a halogen or discharge lamp has. Very efficient and low maintenance. Stronger than HID car headlights or a 500W halogen. Hit the site for lots of data and pics of it in action including burning and irresponsible bicycle luminosity. You'll want one to attach to your keyring, too."
Comment Meat currency (Score 1) 313
Perhaps they got the idea from Kingdom of Loathing?
Comment Re:So big, we have to use maths (Score 3, Informative) 233
Or, if you like big numbers with lots of commas, 340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,456 (compared to the 4,294,967,296 in IPv4). Of course, a very large number of those (but still an insignificantly small fraction) are reserved for various purposes and cannot be used for normal addresses, but the same is true for IPv4.
3-D Light System May Revolutionize Fingerprinting 71
coondoggie writes "The US Department of Homeland Security's Science & Technology Directorate recently awarded almost $420,000 to a Kentucky company to further develop a contactless finger print/biometric system. The goal is a machine that can snap 10 fingerprints in high resolution in less than 10 seconds, without human intervention. This goal is beginning to look feasible. FlashScan3D is working with the University of Kentucky's Center for Visualization and Virtual Environments, and has developed a technique called 'structured light illumination' (WIPO patent description), where a pattern of dots or stripes is projected onto a curved or irregular surface."
IE8 May Be End of the Line For Internet Explorer 380
snydeq writes "InfoWorld's Randall Kennedy reports on rumors that IE8 may be Internet Explorer's swan song: 'IE8 is the last version of the Internet Explorer Web browser,' Kennedy writes. 'It seems that Microsoft is preparing to throw in the towel on its Internet Explorer engine once and for all.' And what will replace it? Some are still claiming that Microsoft will go with WebKit, which is used by Safari and Chrome. The WebKit story, Kennedy contends, could be a feint and that Microsoft will instead adopt Gazelle, Microsoft Research's brand-new engine that thinks like an OS. 'This new engine will supposedly be more secure than Firefox or even Chrome, making copious use of sandboxing to keep its myriad plug-ins isolated and the overall browser process model protected.'" The sticking point will be what Microsoft does about compatibility for ActiveX apps.
Comment Re:What else can you do? (Score 0) 1246
Back when I was in high school, refusing to follow the rules usually resulted in Detention (or Suspension if you did something REALLY bad), not calling the police...
Comment Re:Obviously.... (Score 3, Informative) 758
The Windows 7 Beta does still have the Windows Classic style (just as Windows XP and Vista do, giving you the plain style titlebars/menus/taskbar/etc.) but it lacks the Classic Start Menu, so there's no way you can bring back the old nested menu structure first introduced in Windows 95 - instead, you're stuck with the Vista-style Start Menu and its scrolling treelist view.
Network Solutions Under Large-Scale DDoS Attack 139
netizen writes "CircleID is reporting a large-scale DDoS attack affecting all of Network Solutions' name servers for the past 48 hours, potentially affecting millions of websites and emails around the world hosting their domain names on the company's servers. The NANOG mailing list indicates that it is due to a very large-scale UDP/53 DDoS which Network Solutions has also confirmed: 'There is a spike in DNS query volumes that is causing latency for the delay in web sites resolving. This is a result of a DDOS attack. We are taking measures to mitigate the attack and speed up queries.""
