elwin_windleaf - Slashdot User

Submission + - Oldest Submerged City Visualized with CGI and Ster (nottingham.ac.uk)

Submitted by

Stirling Newberry

on Friday October 07, 2011 @03:54PM

Stirling Newberry writes: "Nottingham University's Pavlopetri project spent months measuring an city that sank beneath the waves 3000 years ago, perhaps in a tsunamai.

The result is a BBC documentary that features a detailed CGI reconstruction. The Independent chimes in about the oldest known submerged city first inhabited 5000 years ago and was rediscovered in 1967. Of course, Slashdot readers will want to dig into the (pdf) how stereo mapping was used to create the map in the first place."

Submission + - China DDOS an online petition to free Ai Weiwei (change.org) 3

Submitted by

decora

on Thursday April 21, 2011 @03:05PM

decora writes: "If you are reading this on April 21, 2011, then you probably won't be able to connect to the linked story. That is because: "For the past three days, the Change.org website has been repeatedly targeted by cyber attacks coming from China that aim to bring our site down, which would keep people from signing the petition.", which demands the release of artist Ai Weiwei."

Submission + - Woman Busted Selling $2M of Counterfeit Software (securityweek.com)

Submitted by wiredmikey on Thursday April 21, 2011 @02:58PM

wiredmikey writes: A Michigan woman pleaded guilty yesterday to selling counterfeit computer software which reportedly earned her over $400,000. According to court documents, between July 2008 and January 2010, Jones sold more than 7,000 copies of pirated business software at discounted prices through the website cheapdl.com. The software, published by several companies including Microsoft, Adobe, Intuit and Symantec had a retail value of more than $2 million.

Submission + - Gnome 3 Released (gnome.org)

Submitted by

elwin_windleaf

on Wednesday April 06, 2011 @02:19PM

elwin_windleaf writes: "Looks like the Gnome developers deserve a big hand for pushing out the latest version of the Gnome Desktop Environment, Gnome 3."

Submission + - France Outlaws Hashed Passwords (bbc.co.uk) 3

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 06, 2011 @01:46PM

An anonymous reader writes: Storing passwords as hashes instead of plain text is now illegal in France, according to a draconian new data retention law. According to the BBC, "[t]he law obliges a range of e-commerce sites, video and music services and webmail providers to keep a host of data on customers. This includes users' full names, postal addresses, telephone numbers and passwords. The data must be handed over to the authorities if demanded." If the law survives a pending legal challenge by Google, Ebay and others, it may well keep some major services out of the country entirely.

Submission + - Is IIS disappearing from the web? (netcraft.com)

Submitted by blanford_robinson on Wednesday April 06, 2011 @01:25PM

blanford_robinson writes: I have been watching market share among web servers for many years now. It seems as though enthusiasm for the Microsoft platform on the web has fallen to critical lows. The web appears to be migrating to a uniform standard of dynamic type dominated by php, python, ruby, and perl. Might we expect that the Microsoft web platform consisting of IIS, .NET, and MS SQL Server will drop below 5% in the near future?

Submission + - Gamestop To Build its Own Gaming Tablet? (itworld.com)

Submitted by

itwbennett

on Wednesday April 06, 2011 @12:54PM

itwbennett writes: "Gamestop has been on a roll lately, purchasing both Impulse and Spawn Labs in the past week. Now it's ready to go after those casual gaming dollars, but first it needs to put a gaming tablet in your hands. Gamestop President Tony Bartel told CNBC that his chain is going to start selling tablets later this year:
If we can work with our partners and the OEMs and they come up with a great tablet that is enabled with a great gaming experience and coupled with a bluetooth controller, then there's no need to go out and develop our own. But if we can't find one that's great for gaming, then we will create our own.
"

Comment Glaring omission? (Score 1) 648

by elwin_windleaf on Tuesday April 05, 2011 @11:42PM (#35729034) Attached to: Bashing MS 'Like Kicking a Puppy,' Says Jim Zemlin

"With the one glaring exception of the desktop computer" sounds a lot like "Besides that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?"

Comment Re:I know what will make it better (Score 4, Interesting) 89

by elwin_windleaf on Friday November 19, 2010 @03:03AM (#34279040) Attached to: <em>RuneScape</em> Developer Victorious Over Patent Troll

A simple way to donate back would be to buy one of their upgraded accounts for a little while. While RuneScape is a free MMORPG, I think their business model revolves around these upgraded accounts, and that would probably be the easiest way to support them.

Otherwise, their corporate site has a contact page (http://www.jagex.com/corporate/Contact/contact.ws) with a bunch of email addresses. I imagine that any one of them would work, especially if the message was "I have this money I'd like you to have". :)

Submission + - Workarounds Not Enough to Stop ASP.NET Attacks (threatpost.com)

Submitted by Trailrunner7 on Monday September 27, 2010 @02:11PM

Trailrunner7 writes: Microsoft has released updated workaround guidance for the ASP.NET padding oracle vulnerability, suggesting that customers use a technique to block requests that specify an application error. However, the researchers who developed the attack on ASP.NET have said that the workaround is not sufficient to prevent the attack. Juliano Rizzo and Thai Duong, the researchers who developed the attack against ASP.NET, have said that their technique doesn't require the error messages, they simply make the attack easier. Of course, easy is always better than hard, but the researchers say that customers will not be fully protected until Microsoft releases a patch for the flaw.

Comment Just in case anybody else doesn't know... (Score 3, Informative) 272

by elwin_windleaf on Wednesday September 01, 2010 @02:01PM (#33438582) Attached to: Yale Researchers Prove That ACID Is Scalable

From the Wikipedia Article (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ACID)

"In computer science, ACID (atomicity, consistency, isolation, durability) is a set of properties that guarantee database transactions are processed reliably. In the context of databases, a single logical operation on the data is called a transaction."

Comment Re:Steam on Linux (Score 1) 256

by elwin_windleaf on Thursday April 22, 2010 @10:18AM (#31939048) Attached to: More Evidence For Steam Games On Linux

Sure, most games won't run natively just yet - only games based on Valve's source engine.

But when I'm on Steam (and I own dozens and dozens of games, put out by several different publishers), 99% of the time I'll be playing a Valve game. I currently have 300+ hours racked up in Team Fortress 2 alone.

If I can format my Windows gaming partition, and only play Valve games on Linux, I'd say it's a sacrifice I'd be willing to make. I suppose Valve will be the only publisher to get my purchases from now on.

Submission + - Bleep Labs Brings You Arduino-based Nebulophone (engadget.com)

Submitted by

ScuttleMonkey

on Friday January 29, 2010 @03:53PM

ScuttleMonkey writes: "Bleep Labs, the same people who brought you the Thingamagoop (and now Thingamagoop2!), have released a new fun gadget — the Arduino-based Nebulophone. "What do you get when you mash together an Arduino-based synth with a Stylophone-like keyboard? A month ago, even we wouldn't have known, but now that Handmade Music Austin has come and gone, we're happy to say that this beautiful concoction leads to the creation of a Nebulophone. Unfortunately, there's no video (yet) to showcase what this musical wonder can do, but we're told that it has 'adjustable waveforms, a light controlled analog filter, LFO and an arpeggiator that can be clocked over IR.'""

Submission + - Cops arrest ATM skimmer (bostonherald.com)

Submitted by Julie188 on Friday January 29, 2010 @03:07PM

Julie188 writes: Ivaylo Todorov Hristov, 28, is being held on $1 million cash bail after being charged with scamming bank customers in Massachusetts. Hristov snatched ATM card numbers by inserting a skimmer device in the ATM slot. He also installed miniature cameras at ATMs that recorded customers punching in their PINs. Hristov and at least two others created phony ATM cards to rip off those people, including the cop that arrested him.

Submission + - Evolving robots learn to prey on each other (plosbiology.org)

Submitted by quaith on Friday January 29, 2010 @12:36PM

quaith writes: Dario Floreano and Laurent Keller report in PLoS ONE how their robots were able to rapidly evolve complex behaviors such as collision-free movement, homing, predator versus prey strategies, cooperation, and even altruism. A hundred generations of selection controlled by a simple neural network were sufficient to allow robots to evolve these behaviors. Their robots initially exhibited completely uncoordinated behavior, but as they evolved, the robots were able to orientate, escape predators, and even cooperate. The authors point out that this confirms a proposal by Alan Turing who suggested in the 1950s that building machines capable of adaptation and learning would be too difficult for a human designer and could instead
be done using an evolutionary process. The robots aren't yet ready to compete in Robot Wars, but they're still pretty impressive.

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