hellgate - Slashdot User

Submission + - Map of the Internet

Submitted by

Wellington Grey

on Monday December 11, 2006 @03:43AM

Wellington Grey writes: "Author of the popular webcomic xkcd has put up a hand made map of the internet as today's comic. He also has an interesting blog entry detailing some of the work that went into it, such a pinging servers and creating a method of fractal mapping to display related regions as contiguous sections on the grid."

Submission + - The Environmental Cost of Your MMORPG Avatar

Submitted by

markmcb

on Sunday December 10, 2006 @01:08PM

markmcb writes: "Taking into consideration that people in developing countries use less than 2400 kWh a day; your MMORPG avatar may be consuming more energy to exist than a real person. Given the vast array of servers that must keep avatars in the newest games like Second Life alive, an MMORPG Avatar's Eco-Footprint is large, very large. Some math from the article, 'If the average PC uses 120 watts, and a server uses 200 watts, plus 50 more for air-conditioning, then (4,000 servers x 250 watts x 24 hours) + (12,500 avatars x 120 watts x 24 hours) = 60,000,000 watt-hours or 60,000 kilowatt-hours. That gives a per-capita usage of 60,000 / 12,500 = 4.8 kWh. Over a year's time that equates to 1752 kWh per avatar.'"

Submission + - Giant tent to be built in Astana, Kazakhstan

Submitted by aitsu on Sunday December 10, 2006 @05:02AM

aitsu writes: The BBC reports :"Kazakhstan has unveiled a new architectural project for its capital Astana — a giant transparent tent that will contain an indoor city. The 150m-high (500ft) dome, designed by UK architect Norman Foster, will be built in just over a year...Underneath, in an area larger than 10 football stadiums, will be a city with squares and cobbled streets, canals, shopping centres and golf courses.The idea is to recreate summer, so that when the outside temperature is -30C, the residents of the Kazakh capital can play outdoor tennis, take boat rides or sip coffee on the pavement cafes."

Journal Journal: Michelin and Dean Kamen Team up to End Tire Punctures 7

Journal by Philip K Dickhead on Friday December 08, 2006 @03:14AM

Enter the "Tweel" - the next generation of tires. Billed dramatically as "the first tire innovation for a century", the Tweel was designed by Michelin for Dean Kamen of Segway fame. They are "airless" and invulnerable to puncture and most wear. A pair of these made their public debut at the Philadelphia Ca

Submission + - Malaysian Open Source Procurement Policy Reversed

Submitted by

Ditesh

on Friday December 08, 2006 @02:06AM

Ditesh writes: "The Malaysian Open Source Masterplan, which favoured open source over proprietary public sector procurements when all other evaluations are equal, has been reversed to a purely "neutral technology platform" policy due to "negative reaction towards open source (from the IT market)". This comes after months of hard lobbying by Microsoft Malaysia. This reversal is certainly unfortunate, as the policy has helped raise comfort levels of other policy makers worldwide in pursuing similar goals. The Malaysian Open Source Alliance has published a position statement asking for clarification of the term "neutrality", and has received support from MNC's, local companies and free software developers in Malaysia."

Submission + - VC says Second Life is not sustainable

Submitted by

skoobafly

on Thursday December 07, 2006 @03:55PM

skoobafly writes: "Some VC calls Second Life an incredible innovator but won't be able to get mass market adoption and probably isn't sustainable. She's apparently an old text MUD developer and says that Second Life might be like Prodigy — a walled garden service that ultimately didn't have any long term staying power. Philip Rosedale, Second Life's CEO responds to the blog posts and admits that Second Life has some design flaws. What do you think? Do you think Second Life is all marketing hype? Do you think this is what the mass market wants? What do you think comes next in the virtual world space?"

Submission + - Sell your idle cpu cycles

Submitted by on Sunday December 03, 2006 @10:38AM

An anonymous reader writes: CPUShare is a research project created by Andrea Arcangeli with the goal of connecting together the computers of the Internet in order to create a general purpose Low Cost and World Wide Supercomputer available to everybody to use in a matter of minutes, controlled by a market for the CPU resources that chooses the price of the CPU resources using the supply and demand law in real time.

It allows the home users to profit from the significant power of their hardware that otherwise would be wasted every day, and is also the first technology that can recycle CPU cycles over the Internet without requiring donations (in terms of electric energy and aging of the CPU) from the home users.

CPUShare might give a NTCO (Negative Total Cost of Ownership) to all the Operative Systems that supports it.

Using the CPUCoins (the CPUCoins are a virtual credit, like in a video game), CPUShare can be optionally used as an energy accumulator, without requiring cash transactions to be useful. After accumulating CPUCoins, users can be allowed to share them with their friends, so that joint supercomputing projects can be developed too.

The CPUShare protocol is open and in turn it provides interoperability to all OS. Currently only x86, x86_64 and powerpc64 CPU resources can be sold with CPUShare, but all architectures can be allowed to join in the future.

CPUShare will contribute to the creation of Open Source Software that will run on top of the CPUShare system. Once a piece of software is ported on top of CPUShare it might cost the same price to run it for 24 hours on a single CPU or to run it for 1 hour on 24 CPUs.

Since all CPUShare development has to happen in the spare time in order to maintain overall profitability, CPUShare development is proceeding quite slow but it's steady.

Submission + - Six DMCA Exemptions Granted

Submitted by

Xenographic

on Thursday November 23, 2006 @03:59AM

Xenographic writes: "The US Copyright Office has just announced six new categories of works exempt from the DMCA's prohibition against circumvention of technological measures that control access to the copyrighted works. This is good news for anyone stuck with old computer dongles or games for game consoles that are no longer available, blind people trying to read ebooks, those trying to unlock cellphones, media studies professors, and anyone who was struck by Sony's rootkit. The bad news is that the exceptions are exceedingly narrow due to their limited authority to grant exceptions. For example, the rootkit exception apparently only allows you to circumvent the access controls caused by a rootkit-laden CD, but not to circumvent any usage controls, nor to circumvent the exact same access controls were they on a DVD instead of a CD..."

Submission + - Tagging the real world

Submitted by Emily on Thursday November 23, 2006 @02:51AM

Emily writes: The Guardian has an interesting story about two technologies that let people annotate the real world, allowing you to see what others have to say about a specific place when you pass nearby (even if you don't have a GPS in the case of Navizon). Now, that terrible meal you had can become a cautionary tale on someone else's mobile phone.
A question remains though: how long before the Axis of Evil (the same people that have brought us spam, hacking, spoofing and other similar goodies) will start getting interested by this, making your cell phone pop up like there's no tomorrow? Only time will tell... But in the meantime, this technology promises a lot of fun.

Submission + - Copyright Office Announces DMCA Exceptions

Submitted by Baricom on Thursday November 23, 2006 @02:47AM

Baricom writes: The Library of Congress Copyright Office published its triennial list of DMCA exceptions today, according to the Electronic Frontier Foundation. For the next three years, people can circumvent protections in copy-protected CDs, DVDs, video games, dongles, e-books, and cell phones under very limited circumstances. Unfortunately, space-shifting and DVD backups weren't among the exemptions.

Submission + - UK Police to get roadside fingerprinting tools

Submitted by mormop on Wednesday November 22, 2006 @05:44AM

mormop writes: According to the BBC, British Police will soon be given the tools and permission to finger print people stopped for driving offences using a hand held scanner by the side of the road. As usual the criteria for being scanned is limited but on every prior occasion these things always end up being put to widespread use a year or so down the line. Look at a Police Officer in a funny way and win a free trip onto the National Criminal Records Database.

Submission + - Software Engineering of GUI programming

Submitted by

cucucu

on Wednesday November 22, 2006 @05:14AM

cucucu writes: "After ten years of programming for the network, I started programming a GUI Desktop application.
My problem is most GUI tutorials out there are nothing more than a taxonomy of buttons, dialogs, and checkboxes. So as I checked GUI toolkits, I found that I can easily learn all the widgets, layouts, callbacks, etc and start coding a GUI application.
But very soon I found myself repeating code all over.
Is there a good guide for the Software Engineering aspects of GUI programming? How to reuse code, and build my class hierarchies over the toolkit's one?
An online guide would be great, although I am ready to shop online for a good book covering these aspects."

Submission + - Software Used to Finger Suspects

Submitted by

eldavojohn

on Saturday November 18, 2006 @04:11PM

eldavojohn writes: "In Holyoke, Massachusetts the police have a new member on the team. It's facial recognition software that will mine the 9.5 million state license images of Massachusetts residents. From the article, 'Police Chief Anthony R. Scott said yesterday he will take advantage of the state's offer to tap into a computer system that can identify suspects through the Registry of Motor Vehicle's Facial Recognition System.' The kicker is that it's been in use since May and has been successful."

Journal SPAM: Imperial History of the Middle East 2

Journal by Jeremiah Cornelius on Saturday November 18, 2006 @03:32PM

5000 years of history in 90 seconds.
LINK

Boy, that Israel was a flash in the pan...

Submission + - UK Biometric Passports cracked in minutes.

Submitted by Alranor on Friday November 17, 2006 @06:27AM

Alranor writes: In a piece of news which is unlikely to surprise anyone, the Guardian is reporting today that the new and much hyped as secure biometric passports issued by the UK government are surprisingly easy to crack.

Some choice quotes from the article:

I am sitting with my scary computer man and we have just sucked out all the supposedly secure data and biometric information from three new passports and displayed it all on a laptop computer.

"The Home Office has adopted a very high encryption technology called 3DES — that is, to a military-level data-encryption standard times three. So they are using strong cryptography to prevent conversations between the passport and the reader being eavesdropped, but they are then breaking one of the fundamental principles of encryption by using non-secret information actually published in the passport to create a 'secret key'. That is the equivalent of installing a solid steel front door to your house and then putting the key under the mat."

At this point, I have to ask, is there anything that the UK government have ever done in the IT / Computing field which they haven't royally messed up?

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