Comment Re:Posting in the april fools article (Score 1) 1582
minchar
Conficker Worm Strike Reports Start Rolling In 508
Nieriko writes "Reports are trickling in about the impact from the Conficker worm, as infected systems passed zero hour at midnight and began downloading additional malicious components. Here are a couple of the more notable incidents caused by Conficker so far, according to published reports: — '... shortly after midnight local time, an ATM in the capital city of Reykjavik began spewing 100-Krona notes. ... A nuclear missile installation near Elmendorf Air force Base outside of Anchorage, Alaska briefly went on a full-scale military alert after technicians manning the bunker suspected that several of their control systems were infected with Conficker.'"
Slashdot Launches User Achievements 1582
In a concerted effort to compete with more popular MMOs like World of Warcraft, we've decided to add an Achievement system to Slashdot. We've retroactively granted around 900,000 achievements to our logged in users. You can view them from your user page, or you can see my list if you're curious what a REAL achiever looks like. Many achievements have been sprinkled throughout the system and are awaiting discovery by dedicated Slashdot users, but a starter list of achievements is in the FAQ. I'll toss you one freebie: you can register your wow main for points if you're that kind of person.
Now go forth and achieve!
Opera Launches Facial Gesture Capability 199
cstrep writes "Eight years ago, Opera introduced Mouse Gestures as a way to speed up your interaction with the browser, and focus on what's important: Content. In 2005, Voice Navigation was introduced, and more recently we've worked with Nintendo to create a browser that takes full advantage of the 'Wiimote' and later, the touchscreen in the DSi.
Today Opera introduces Face Gestures, a revolutionary technology designed to make interacting with Opera easier on computers with cameras. Face Gestures lets you perform frequent browsing operations with natural and easy to make face gestures. By using an internal technology dubbed 'Face Observation Opera Language,' we are able to recognize pre-determined facial expressions and match them to commands on the Opera browser."
NASA In Colbert Conundrum Over Space Station 398
After Stephen Colbert won the vote in NASA's contest to name a new module on the International Space Station, NASA found itself in a tough spot. According to Reuters, "Contest rules stipulate that the agency retains the right to basically do whatever it wants," but it may not be all that easy. At first NASA floated the idea of naming the new module's toilet "Colbert." But Last Thursday Congressman Chaka Fattah, D-Pa., urged the agency to respect the people's wishes. And Colbert turned up the heat on yesterday's weekly show: "So NASA, I urge you to heed Congressman Fattah's call for democracy in orbit. Either name that node after me, or I too will reject democracy and seize power as space's evil tyrant overlord. Ball's in your court."
Star Trek Sequel Already Planned 213
bowman9991 writes "Paramount Pictures are so confident about the box office potential of the upcoming Star Trek reboot directed by J. J. Abrams that they're already working on a sequel. They've hired Roberto Orci, Alex Kurtzman, and Damon Lindelof to write the screenplay. We're looking at a possible 2011 release for the next Star Trek movie with the same cast. Now that they've committed themselves, let's hope it lives up to expectations."
Irish Domain Registry Banning Adult Domains 222
Karate Sid writes "An Irish adult website has blogged about the Irish domain registry banning adult domain names, including porn.ie and pornography.ie. The IEDR's reasoning is that the words 'porn' and 'pornography' are offensive and immoral. Of interest is how Sex.ie took legal action against the IEDR — and proved that neither word is offensive — yet still lost the case, as the IEDR are the highest authority in Ireland when it comes to deciding what is and isn't an offensive domain."
Blizzard Asserts Rights Over Independent Add-Ons 344
bugnuts writes "Blizzard has announced a policy change regarding add-ons for the popular game World of Warcraft which asserts requirements on UI programmers, such as disallowing charging for the program, obfuscation, or soliciting donations. Add-ons are voluntarily-installed UI programs that add functionality to the game, programmed in Lua, which can do various tasks that hook into the WoW engine. The new policy has some obvious requirements, such as not loading the servers or spamming users, and it looks like an attempt to make things more accessible and free for the end user. But unlike FOSS, it adds other requirements that assert control over these independently coded programs, such as distribution and fees. Blizzard can already control the ultimate functionality of add-ons by changing the hooks into the WoW engine. They have exercised this ability in the past, e.g. to disable add-ons that automate movement and facilitate 'one-button' combat. Should they be able to make demands on independent programmers' copyrighted works, such as forbidding download fees or advertising, when those programmers are not under contract to code for Blizzard? Is this like Microsoft asserting control over what programmers may code for Windows?"
Game-Related Education On the Rise At Colleges 178
The LA Times has a story about the increased interest in learning how to make video games amongst college students, and the subsequent rise in game-related education as the schools respond to that demand. Some programs are gaining legitimacy, while others do perhaps more harm than good. Quoting:
"The surge in interest has led schools to add games to their menu — but not always to the benefit of its students. Recruiters say they often see 'mills' that run around-the-clock sessions to quickly churn out as many students as possible. Other programs teach specific skills but not how games are pulled together. 'It's a very hot academic growth area,' said Colleen McCreary, who runs EA's university relations program. 'I'm very worried about the number of community colleges and for-profit institutions, as well as four-year programs, that are using game design as a lure for students who are not going to be prepared for the real entry-level positions that the game industry wants.'"
National Debt Clock Overflowed, Extended By a Digit 696
hackingbear writes "The National Debt Counter, erected in 1989 when the US debt was 'merely' a tiny $2.7 trillion, has been moving so much that it recently ran out of digits to display the ballooning figure: $10,150,603,734,720, or roughly $10.2 trillion, as of Saturday afternoon. To accommodate the extra '1,' the clock was hacked: the '1' from "$10.2" has been moved left to the LCD square once occupied solely by the digital dollar sign. A non-digital, improvised dollar sign has been pasted next to the '1.' It will be replaced in 2009 with a new clock able to track debt up to a quadrillion dollars, which is a '1' followed by 15 zeros. That should be good enough for a few more months at least, I believe." Adds reader MarkusQ, "I know Dick Cheney has assured us that 'Deficits don't matter' but I can't help wondering if we should be fixing the problem rather than the sign."
Comment Re:So, how does one accumulate that much gold? (Score 2, Insightful) 479
One does not get that much gold. But that's the good thing about MMO's, you're rarely ever alone.
The first screenshot in the article is of Zxtreme, a guild master of the Blood Legion guild. http://bloodlegion.com/wow/
I believe this is the first guild to reach the gold limit and it was done simply through trade of rare items in the game. It is the money from the guild bank he is showing off.
A regular WoW guild got anywhere between 40 to 60 active players. If you take the gold limit of ~217k and divide it by 40 people, then it's only about ~5500 gold per player. I currently got around 8500 gold on my account and we got members in the guild with 20-30k gold on their accounts.
This article is a lot of fuss about nothing, gold in WoW has devaluated by a lot since the expansion pack.
The first screenshot in the article is of Zxtreme, a guild master of the Blood Legion guild. http://bloodlegion.com/wow/
I believe this is the first guild to reach the gold limit and it was done simply through trade of rare items in the game. It is the money from the guild bank he is showing off.
A regular WoW guild got anywhere between 40 to 60 active players. If you take the gold limit of ~217k and divide it by 40 people, then it's only about ~5500 gold per player. I currently got around 8500 gold on my account and we got members in the guild with 20-30k gold on their accounts.
This article is a lot of fuss about nothing, gold in WoW has devaluated by a lot since the expansion pack.
Is Commercialization Killing Open Source? 162
An anonymous reader writes "IBM, Sun, Novell, and Red Hat all have a very significant open source element to their businesses. In addition to these juggernauts, there is growing investment in various open source models. Will money flowing into open source destroy its roots? Mark Hinkle just posted an editorial asking the questions Is Commercialization Killing Open Source? in which he comments on 'opensville' and gives some actual investment data, and a lot of insight into the growing trend in 'open source commercialization'. Is there such a thing as 'too much money' when it comes to developing software?"
Submission + - PGP for HTTP: the death of phishing?
An anonymous reader writes: I was reading an interview published in the Free Software Magazine about Enigform. Author claims that signed http requests can stop man in the middle and phishing. What does the Slashdot community think?
Submission + - Open Source alternative to Java/Flash/Silverlight
dgym writes: Having applications that can be deployed on the net and run either in a browser or from a standalone player is an old idea, but still not one that has been done really well.
Java is one solution, but for various reasons hasn't attained ubiquity. Now that it is being open sourced it might find itself on more platforms, but it still may be too big for some devices, and too slow to start up to not be annoying.
Flash is geared towards video and animation, but can also lend itself to RIAs and it is certainly a very popular plugin. However, like any closed standard, it is only available on the platforms Adobe decide to support.
Silverlight might be a better platform for RIAs from a technical perspective, but is otherwise in the same position as Flash (only with even fewer platforms).
So why are there so many poor choices for such a simple problem? After all the requirements for developing applications are rather low:
The need is there, where is the open standard?
Java is one solution, but for various reasons hasn't attained ubiquity. Now that it is being open sourced it might find itself on more platforms, but it still may be too big for some devices, and too slow to start up to not be annoying.
Flash is geared towards video and animation, but can also lend itself to RIAs and it is certainly a very popular plugin. However, like any closed standard, it is only available on the platforms Adobe decide to support.
Silverlight might be a better platform for RIAs from a technical perspective, but is otherwise in the same position as Flash (only with even fewer platforms).
So why are there so many poor choices for such a simple problem? After all the requirements for developing applications are rather low:
- A sand boxed virtual machine for running client side code.
- A means to display information, i.e. graphics drawing primitives.
- Event handling for user input.
- Networking back to the originating server.
The need is there, where is the open standard?
Submission + - How safe is my webmail?
gnkieffer writes: "Recently a tiny number of GMail users lost their mailbox content. Apparently Google was able to restore most (or all?) of the e-mails from their backup systems.
I wonder what security measures webmail providers like Yahoo or Hotmail are taking to secure their customer's e-mails; tape backups? RAIDs? do they backup live or once a week? This seems to be a subject no one wants to talk about. Until now I guess that webmail losses have been something like thousand times less frequent than... let's say hard drive crashes, so one could say that webmail is *very* safe.
Still, e-mail providers advertise with big storage space and lifelong e-mail addresses but I have not seen one praising with e-mail safety."
I wonder what security measures webmail providers like Yahoo or Hotmail are taking to secure their customer's e-mails; tape backups? RAIDs? do they backup live or once a week? This seems to be a subject no one wants to talk about. Until now I guess that webmail losses have been something like thousand times less frequent than... let's say hard drive crashes, so one could say that webmail is *very* safe.
Still, e-mail providers advertise with big storage space and lifelong e-mail addresses but I have not seen one praising with e-mail safety."
