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Comment Re:Pro-piracy (Score 1) 287

Not as low-hanging as you seem to think. They would have to buy those mod-chips, do some reverse-engineering, test the updates to make sure it doesn't break any revision of the Wii hardware; and still most mod-chips seem to be upgradeable anyway; and it's not like buying new mod-chip costs more than a Wii game anyway.

In short, it's too risky, will cost too much, and will be mostly ineffective (everyone that bought one mod-chip won't mind buying a second one that is resistant to said mod-chip-killer update.)

Comment Re:I have to give props to Nintendo for (Score 1) 164

There are a few others you should count in (like the Paper Mario series, and Yoshi's Story.) I tried playing Super Paper Mario Wii once, and gave up about 10 minutes or so into the game, tired of just pressing A to proceed to the next dialog line. I didn't play any of it. I would call that a miss too. It's amazing how many game designers think the player needs to be schooled for minutes on the mechanics and/or story before can start enjoying it; and even more when it's Nintendo committing the blunder with their very mascot. New Super Mario Bros goes back to the origins (once again) where you just play it.

Comment Re:One of the few games I bought (Score 1) 164

Really? Because the only thing that I dislike is actually the multiplayer mode. Almost every interaction between the characters is meant to be disruptive. Either you stay far away from your ally, or one will accidentally end up killing the other. Maybe the fun is in obstructing the other player? Well, not for me, or anyone I invited to play with me. Good'n old Contra is much more enjoyable.

Comment Re:Alternative? (Score 1) 71

On the NVIDIA side, CUDA performance and usage flexibility is still typically and substantially higher than is achievable via OpenCL, since obviously CUDA exists to fairly optimally exploit their GPU architectural capabilities whereas OpenCL is a generic GPU-vendor / architecture "neutral" platform that doesn't give as much card specific control as CUDA (or CAL in AMD's case).

That's not true. I've run many equivalent CUDA and OpenCL kernels on NVIDIA cards, and they perform both the same. Pretty much in accordance with those benchmarks.

There's no reason for OpenCL code to be any slower than CUDA code (the same compiler is used, only with small changes in the frontend). Maintainability on the other hand... with CUDA you can launch a kernel just like you were calling a function; with OpenCL you have almost a dozen of setup steps (reminds me of programming Win32 applications directly with raw Win32 api calls). Function and operator overloading, templates... those are nice things to have at your disposal when you need it. Let's hope they make an "OpenCL++" standard too.

Comment Re:Silly (Score 1) 127

Uh... no, you are wrong. Quadros and GeForces have a lot of differences in the internal hardware. Just because they "do the same thing" (they draw triangles really, really fast) it doesn't mean they are the same. GeForces, for example, don't have optimizations for drawing points and lines, nor assume you are abusing of obsolete APIs, like immediate mode drawing; both are common in CAD applications, and almost useless in games.

Hardware

Tokyo Students Design a New Robotic Muscle Suit 55

angry tapir writes "Students at Tokyo's University of Science have developed a new version of their muscle suit, a wearable robotic suit that assists the muscles when carrying out strenuous tasks. The original version of the suit, which has been in production for several years, provides assistance to the arms and back but the new version provides assistance to the back only. That means it is lighter and more compact than the original model."

Comment Re:How does it compare to Ubuntu? (Score 1) 267

Are you suggesting people to use XFS? Why would you do that? That's beyond mean.

I tried migrating all my data to XFS once. About a month later I was desperately migrating it all back to ext3. Not only XFS has serious design flaws that make it one of the most fragile FS around, the driver implementation is even able to corrupt the stored data (that is, not just the directory structure, but the file contents too) even during normal operation. Two weeks after setting up a server with XFS, I had to shut it down to fix the file system errors; another 2 weeks uptime, I had to do it again, but this time only so i could back the data up and reinstall the system on an ext3 partition (same disk, not a single badblock up to this day).

Pirate Bay Closure Sparked P2P Explosion 560

Barence writes to share that the closure of The Pirate Bay seems to have done nothing to stem the flow of potentially copyrighted materials. In fact, there has been an estimated 300% increase in the number of sites providing access to copyright files, according to McAfee. "In August, Swedish courts ordered that all traffic be blocked from Pirate Bay, but any hope of scotching the piracy of music, software and films over the web vanished as copycat sites sprung up and the content took on a life of its own. 'This was a true "cloud computing" effort,' the company said in its Threats Report for the third quarter. 'The masses stepped up to make this database of torrents available to others.'"
OS X

Apple Blurs the Server Line With Mac Mini Server 557

Toe, The writes "Today Apple announced several new hardware offerings, including a new Mac mini, their (almost-literally) pint-sized desktop computer. In a bizarre twist, they are now also offering a Mac mini with Mac OS X Server bundled in, along with a two hard drives somehow stuffed into the tiny package. Undoubtedly, many in the IT community will scoff at the thought of calling such a device a 'server.' However, with the robust capabilities of Snow Leopard Server (a true, if highly GUI-fied, UNIX server), it seems likely to find a niche in small businesses and even enthusiasts' homes. The almost completely guided setup process means that people can set up relatively sophisticated services without the assistance of someone who actually knows what they are doing. What the results will be in terms of security, etc. will be... interesting to watch as they develop." El Reg has a good roundup article of the many announcements; the multi-touch Magic Mouse is right up there on the techno-lust-inspiration scale.
IT

How Do You Manage Dev/Test/Production Environments? 244

An anonymous reader writes "I am a n00b system administrator for a small web development company that builds and hosts OSS CMSes on a few LAMP servers (mostly Drupal). I've written a few scripts that check out dev/test/production environments from our repository, so web developers can access the site they're working on from a URL (ex: site1.developer.example.com). Developers also get FTP access and MySQL access (through phpMyAdmin). Additional scripts check in files to the repository and move files/DBs through the different environments. I'm finding as our company grows (we currently host 50+ sites) it is cumbersome to manage all sites by hacking away at the command prompt. I would like to find a solution with a relatively easy-to-use user interface that provisions dev/test/live environments. The Aegir project is a close fit, but is only for Drupal sites and still under heavy development. Another option is to completely rewrite the scripts (or hire someone to do it for me), but I would much rather use something OSS so I can give back to the community. How have fellow slashdotters managed this process, what systems/scripts have you used, and what advice do you have?"

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