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GNOME

Submission + - Online Desktop: "We will have to include Windo (derstandard.at)

Submitted by
suka
suka writes: "During this years GUADEC Red Hat developer Havoc Pennington proposed his idea of an "Online Desktop" to the developers of the GNOME project. Through deep integration with web services and "zero-maintenance" the Open Source client aims to get the "perfect window to the Internet". During GUADEC Andreas Proschofsky had the chance to talk to Pennington about advantages and possible problems of the Online Desktop concept, the necessity of Windows-support and about Red Hats "return to the desktop"."
User Journal

Journal Journal: Running Mac OS X Apps on Linux 497

Journal by Anthony Baby

I have the urge to commit my 24" Core 2 Duo iMac to a single Linux operating system; thus giving up the goodness of my beloved Mac OS X. I am not a stranger to Linux, but I am a stranger to the concept of running Mac apps on Linux. On my PowerPC, I can use SheepShaver to run Classic apps. The Mac-on-Linux project can run OS X apps, but it requires a PowerPC, not x86.
Slashdot.org

Submission + - Slashdot References in Popular Culture? 1

Submitted by
The Living Fractal
The Living Fractal writes: "So I'm reading Century Rain, a great SF book by Welsh author Alastair Reynolds, and at about page 80 or so I stumble onto a hidden Slashdot reference. Reynolds' character "Niagara" runs a finger diagonally across his chest then 'dots' next to the slash, then goes on to talk about a community of progressive thinkers on one of the earliest computer networks (today's internet) who eventually founded his society. They're even called Slashers! Maybe old news to some of you, but a nice surprise for me nevertheless.
Does anyone else have /. easter eggs they've found that they can share with us?"
First Person Shooters (Games)

Submission + - Has the internet killed game AI?

Submitted by
iansmith
iansmith writes: "After the amazing AI and scripted plot of Half-Life my friends and I were looking forward to what would be next. It seemed that great things were on the way.

But what came next was, nothing. We have better graphics and more objects are physics enabled, but the AI is still in the stone age.

Next year Half-Life will be 10 years old. So the question is, why is the AI in FPS shooters so terrible? Why did it peak 9 years ago? I've been using the same trick of hide JUST behind a corner and shoot some poor grunts elbow until they die since Doom.

I understand AI is hard, I mean *REALLY* hard. Expecting fast improvement is not realistic, but I am not kidding when I say I don't think current AI is any better than it was 9 years ago, and thats just sad. A top of the line game machine today is a 3GHz dual-core machine with a powerful GPU vs the 233MHz machine I used with no hardware acceleration, so you can't tell me it's lack of processing power.

A possible answer is that with the rise of the internet, game developers got an out. Single player has become almost a second priority to multi-player deathmatch. Why bother creating good AI when you can just have people play against actual human opponents? There is just no incentive to spend time and money on improving the AI when you can just dodge the whole idea of it.

So can anyone point me to a ray of hope, or is the future just limited more of the same old FPS we all love and hate?"
It's funny. Laugh.

Submission + - SysAdmin/Developer Rivalry

Submitted by DA-MAN
DA-MAN writes: I've been a SysAdmin for about ten years now. During this time I have gone from working at a small organization to a much larger organization. I work hand in hand with developers to debug, find bottlenecks and in general assist. During this time I have never had any issues with developers, in fact one lead developer went to management and had me issued a monetary award for my "work" on his project. In the much larger organization, I am one of many sysadmins but I see that my peers also have good working relationships with the developers they work with. My question is, does the sysadmin/developer rivalry still exist? Has it gotten better in the past few months or am I and every sysadmin I've worked with "one of the good ones"?
Programming

Submission + - Wikia acquires Grub, releases it under open source (grub.org)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: This morning, during a keynote address at the O'Reilly Open Source Conference (OSCON), Jimmy Wales announced that Wikia has acquired Grub, the original visionary distributed search project, from LookSmart and released it under an open source license for the first time in four years. Grub operates under a model of users donating their personal computing resources towards a common goal, and is available today for download and testing at: http://www.grub.org/ .
Math

Journal Journal: Pay to the order of...: $e^(i*pi) +1 5

Journal by Otter
One of the Subversion heads received a bill from the Mathematical Association of America for $0.00. Naturally, he took the opportunity to send them a check for e^(i*pi)+1, which went tragically uncashed. Adding to the fun, it was check number 1729! (I'd provide clarification, but if you don't laugh at this as written, an explanation won't help...)
Software

Submission + - New P2P protocol faster than BitTorrent?

Submitted by
Jared
Jared writes: "New P2P system to be unveiled tomorrow configured to share not only identical files, but also similar ones. Called Similarity-Enhanced Transfer (SET), David G Andersen, assistant professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon, and Michael Kaminsky of Intel Research Pittsburgh, have designed a new P2P protocol they claim could significantly increase download speeds because it is configured to share not only identical files, but also similar ones. The two researchers behind SET, along with graduate student Himabindu Pucha of Purdue University, will present a paper describing SET and release the system code at the 4th Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation, on April 11th in Cambridge, Mass. http://www.zeropaid.com/news/8620/Faster+than+BitT orrent%3F"
The Courts

Lawsuit Against Google Dismissed 89

Posted by kdawson from the and-a-pony dept.
Weather Storm writes in with news from PCWorld that a US District Court judge has dismissed a lawsuit filed against Google by a company that accused them of manipulating search results for political and religious reasons and skewing results in favor of companies that compensate Google financially. The lawsuit (discussed on Slashdot last year) was filed by KinderStart, a parenting information Web site that claims it was illegally blocked from Google search results. The judge not only dismissed the lawsuit but granted a motion by Google to sanction KinderStart and one of its lawyers. Google can now seek "reasonable compensation" for attorney fees because KinderStart's lawyer filed claims that were factually baseless and did not perform an adequate investigation before filing the lawsuit.
Patents

Submission + - Creative Commons v3.0 licences launched

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Creative Commons announced the release of its licences on Friday 23 Feb 2007. Changes include "Clarifications Negotiated With Debian and MIT", CC-BY-SA "compatibility structure", endorsement control, etc.
The Internet

Submission + - Open Source Political Party in the making

Submitted by amesolaire
amesolaire writes: This is something most of us geeks have been contemplating on at least somewhat subconscious level since the day we started to realize the importance and the potential of community-based sites such as wikipedia, slashdot and digg. Now an undisclosed entity has put up a heartwarming manifesto with the stated intent to gauge the public interest in such an idea. Among the 10 points of the manifesto are: "wiki-style collaborative writing of proposed laws and bills" and "all politicians keep regularly updated blogs, with open comment systems, to maintain contact with their constituents". While it is slightly ironic that a site advocating openness and transparency misses to disclose the identities of the people behind the initiative and is all-around frugal on details, sparking serious discussion on the role of the "social Internet" in politics and government seems ever more pressing in the face of the failure that is the current US administration.
Security

Submission + - Can New York Times cause Identity Thefts ?

Submitted by
Vishal Mishra
Vishal Mishra writes: "This is regarding a recent and very well written New York Times story on SlashDot, about Identity Thefts. While the story provides a lot of useful information, it also directs users to a search site developed by a company TrustedID, that can help people know if they have already been a victim of identity fraud. This site can potentially steal social security numbers by the way it collects SSN for verification against its database. The site does not use hashing at all, but instead requires customers to send SSN or credit card information unhashed. Here is a link to the blog describing the attack and the right secured way to build such search sites — http://vmtech.blogspot.com"
Networking

Submission + - Improvements to the Download Process

Submitted by ant_tmwx
ant_tmwx writes: Metalinks collect information about files in an XML format used by programs that download. The information includes mirror lists, ways to retrieve the file on P2P networks, checksums for verifying and correcting downloads, operating system, language, and other details. Using Metalinks details the Free Software programs you can use to download them with. There are also clients on Mac and Windows. With a list of multiple ways to download a file, programs can switch to another method if one goes down. Or a file can be downloaded from multiple mirrors at once, usually making the download go much faster. Downloads can be repaired during transfer to guarantee no errors. All this makes things automatic which are usually not possible or at least difficult, and increases efficiency, availability, and reliability over regular download links. OpenOffice.org, openSUSE, and other Linux/BSD distributions use them for large downloads.

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