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Submission + - Slashdot Announces Early End To April Fools

Submitted by
forkazoo
forkazoo writes: "A number of you have posted expressing concern about Slashdot's enthusiasm for April Fools jokes. Since Slashdot has always striven to be perceived as a legitimate news source, we have had an internal discussion, and decided to immediately end all our articles which are not fully verified for today. This site was never about just personal amusement. The point has always been to provide absolutely articulate, well edited articles to inform the IT community about new events which could effect their jobs. Because the April Fools jokes make this site look like some sort of personal blog for CmdrTaco, I am happy to announce that we declare that we will never violate the trust that you have in us ever again. For the rest of the day, you will be able to enjoy the carfully edited, duplicate-pruned, always relevant articles which you have come to know and explectr."
Graphics

Nvidia To Recall Every 8800 GTX/GTS Card 134

Posted by Zonk from the cardtastrophie dept.
SlashRating©
42
slashdottit! tm
Bill Stubbs writes "NVIDIA has admitted to a killer bug in all GeForce 8800GTX/GTS cards, and will recall all affected cards and replace them. 'An NVIDIA engineer, who wishes to remain anonymous, has just clued us in on the whole deal. This engineer claims that while allegations of poor gaming performance are correct, the reason is not really poor drivers. Brace yourself for the truth: Right after the G80 was taped out, NVIDIA discovered a bug in the vertex shader that causes the GPU to generate slightly incorrect geometry transformation data. The difference was minimal enough to escape attention but it was significant enough to render a scene incorrectly.' The article also links to a secret website which will allow gamers to purchase Nvidia cards at cost."
Google

Submission + - Apple, Google join forces for 'ultimate phone'

Submitted by
passthecrackpipe
passthecrackpipe writes: "The Register has the scoop on a collaboration between Apple and Google on a new phone:

Apple and Google have abandoned their individual mobile phone projects for a joint venture, The Register has learned.

Apple will mothball its iPhone, announced in January, in favour of a new device that serves as a platform for Google's contextual advertising business.

Work on the project, codenamed "ID", began shortly after Google CEO Eric Schmidt joined Apple's board of directors last August. Sneak pictures of the device, below, show the fruits of the joint venture. It's now possible to see how the iPhone was merely an early concept prototype for the ideas the two companies were developing.

In keeping with the iPod tradition, the "ID" has no power switch. In fact, there are no buttons at all. More surprisingly, Jonathan Ives' industrial design means there's no room for a SIM card, or any embedded cellullar radio circuitry.

As a consequence, the "ID" is incapable of making or receiving telephone calls — but Apple says this is a feature most of its target market won't miss.

"People said they wanted an iPhone above all, to make a statement about themselves," an Apple engineering source told us. "Let's face it, they don't like talking and most of them have no one to call anyway."

"When you take the 'Phone' from 'iPhone' you're left with er, 'I'," a senior Apple source told us. "So we've focussed on satisfying the I"."
Sci-Fi

Submission + - Fan-made Battlestar Galactica Mod Released

Submitted by WMCoolmon
WMCoolmon writes: Beyond the Red Line, a fan-made total conversion set in the Battlestar Galactica universe, has just made its first demo release. Beyond the Red Line is a total conversion based on the upgraded, open-source version of the Freespace 2 engine, known as FS2_Open. The demo features a three-mission singleplayer campaign, as well as full multiplayer support. It is fully voice-acted and has a significant amount of original music. Screenshots and videos may be found on the project's website.

So far, only a Windows installer has been released, but OS X and Linux installers are planned as well.

And no, this is not an April Fool's Day joke. ;)
Biotech

MIT Shows How to Shut Down Brain With Light 223

Posted by samzenpus from the men-in-black dept.
An anonymous reader writes "The MIT home-page story today is about a way to use light to shut down brain activity. "Scientists at the MIT Media Lab have invented a way to reversibly silence brain cells using pulses of yellow light, offering the prospect of controlling the haywire neuron activity that occurs in diseases such as epilepsy and Parkinson's disease."

"Market Share" "Installed Base" and Consumer Electronics 264

Posted by CmdrTaco from the something-to-think-about dept.
redrum writes "Analysts and reporters like to talk about market share statistics, but the conclusions they draw are often misleading, RDM reports. Market Share Myth 2007: iPod vs Zune and Mac vs PC takes a look at how numbers are used to paint grossly inaccurate portrayals of the market share of the Zune among iPods, and alternatively the Mac among PCs. A follow up article, Market Share vs Installed Base: iPod vs Zune, Mac vs PC demonstrates how the conventional wisdom of market share reporting can be turned upside down by simply comparing what vendors actually sell. An eye opening, in depth look at the real numbers behind PCs, music players, and console games."
Announcements

Submission + - Australia Outlaws Incandescent Lightbulb

Submitted by
passthecrackpipe
passthecrackpipe writes: "The Australian Government is planning on making the incandescent ligtbulb a thing of the past. In three years time, standard lightbulbs will no longer be available for sale in the shops in Australia (expect a roaring grey market) and everybody will be forced to switch to more energy efficient Fluorescent bulbs. In this move to try and curb emissions, the incandescent bulb — which converts the majority of used energy to heat rather then light — will be phased out. Environmental groups have given this plan a lukewarm reception. They feel Australia should sign on to the Kyoto protocol first. (Article in Dutch). A similar plan was created together with Phillips, one of the worlds largest lighting manufacturers. What do other slashdotters think? Is this a move in the right direction? Will this boost the development of better fluorescent bulbs? Improve the design and lower the costs of LED lightbulbs? Will this plan make a big difference to the environment at all?"
Announcements

Submission + - AACS Processing Key discovered, HD DRM is toast.

Submitted by
passthecrackpipe
passthecrackpipe writes: "The nice folks over at doom9 really don't like DRM. After the discovery of the individual title keys used for AACS "protection" a while back, and the subsequent release of a tool that makes it nice and simple for you to back up your (obviously legally purchased) HD-DVD or Blue-Ray discs, arnezami has found the processing keys — this key can be used to decrypt *all* titles as opposed to just a single title of which the key is known. His approach sounds actually pretty easy (but is probably a lot harder then it sounds):

what I wanted to do is "record" all changes in this part of memory during startup of the movie. Hopefully I would catch something insteresting. In the end I did something a little more effiecient: I used the hd dvd vuk extractor (thanks ape!) and adapted it to slow down the software player (while scanning its memory continously) and at the very moment the Media Key (which I now knew: my bottom-up approach really paid off here) was detected it halted the player. I then made a memdump with WinHex. I now had the feeling I had something.

And I did. Not suprisingly the very first C-value was a hit. I then checked if everyting was correct, asked for confirmation and here we are.

For me, the best part is imagining the insane amount of money the *IAA pumps into these braindead schemes to begin with.

Well done arnezami, beer's on me!"
Microsoft

Apple, the New Microsoft? 703

Posted by Zonk from the rolling-stone-obviously-an-authority-on-this dept.
VE3OGG writes "Apple, the ultimate source of cool. The marketers of slick. The next 'evil empire'? While it might sound goofy at first, Rolling Stone magazine is running an article that summarizes some very interesting points that detail how Apple could become the next technology bad guy. Among the reasons given: Apple's call to be rid of DRM (while continuing to use it in iTunes); Apple's perceived arrogance when they warned consumers not to upgrade to Vista, while not rushing to fix the problem themselves; and Apple's seemingly unstoppable market dominance in the form of the iPod. The iPhone featured heavily as well, a product that is months from release but steals the press from more competitive products. What do you think, could Apple eventually take the place of Microsoft?"
Politics

British E-Voting Pilots Announced 166

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the progressive-thinking dept.
rimberg writes "The Department for Constitutional Affairs has announced it is going to trial Electronic voting using the internet and/or telephone. Bridget Prentice, Elections Minister at the department said 'We need to make sure that people can vote in more convenient ways consistent with a modern lifestyle. [...] More and more people, and particularly young people, are using the internet everyday. We need to see if we can use this to encourage people even more to participate in the democratic process.' The Open Rights Group (Think British EFF) have responded by saying 'E-voting threatens the integrity of our elections and we oppose its use in our democracy.'"
Communications

Submission + - Inside the Lucasfilm datacenter

Submitted by
passthecrackpipe
passthecrackpipe writes: "Where can you find a (rhetorical) 11.38 petabits per second bandwidth? It appears to be inside the Lucasfilm Datacenter. At least, that is the headline figure mentioned in this report on a tour of the datacenter. The story is a bit light on the down-and-dirty details, but mentions a 10 gig ethernet backbone (adding up the bandwidth of a load of network connections seems to be how they derived the 11.38 petabits p/s figure. In that case, I have a 45 gig network at home.) Power utilisation is a key differentiator when buying hardware, a "legacy" cycle of a couple of months, and 300TB of storage in a 10.000 square foot datacenter. To me, the story comes across as somewhat hyped up — "look at us, we have a large datacenter" kind of thing, "look how cool we are". Over the last couple of years, I have been in many datacenters, for banks, pharma and large enterprise to name a few, that have somewhat larger and more complex setups.

It used to be so that the the SFX industry had the largest, coolest, hottest technology around. Is this still the case?"
Microsoft

Submission + - MS copies feature, then patents it

Submitted by
jbgreer
jbgreer writes: "Michael Kölling, a senior lecturer at the University of Kent and one of the developers of BlueJ, an educational development environment, realized last year that Microsoft had copied one of the BlueJ features into Visual Studio. Flattery, right? Recently he was informed that Microsoft has filed a patent describing the very same feature. For more details, read Michael's blog entry."

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