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Comment Re:backward compatibility (Score 1) 288

by gblues (#26759297) Attached to: Intel To Design PlayStation 4 GPU

Not true. Early PS3s had the complete PS2 chipset included, so in those cases the PS2 games were being run natively. Later model PS3s had only the GS in hardware, and used software emulation for the EE. The newest models have neither the EE nor the GS, and these are the models that have no backwards compatibility at all. The main problem is that the GS had features that the PS3 chipset doesn't have.
Unix

Why Do We Name Servers the Way We Do? 1397

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the just-no-more-muppets-please dept.
jfruhlinger writes "If you use a Unix machine, it probably has a funny name. And if you work in an environment where there are multiple Unix machines, they probably have funny names that are variations on a theme. No, you're not the only one! This article explores the phenomenon, showing that even the CIA uses a whimsical server naming scheme." What are some of your best (worst?) naming schemes?
The Internet

Network Solutions Under Large-Scale DDoS Attack 139

Posted by Soulskill from the but-they're-so-friendly dept.
netizen writes "CircleID is reporting a large-scale DDoS attack affecting all of Network Solutions' name servers for the past 48 hours, potentially affecting millions of websites and emails around the world hosting their domain names on the company's servers. The NANOG mailing list indicates that it is due to a very large-scale UDP/53 DDoS which Network Solutions has also confirmed: 'There is a spike in DNS query volumes that is causing latency for the delay in web sites resolving. This is a result of a DDOS attack. We are taking measures to mitigate the attack and speed up queries.""

Comment Re:It's still Windows (Score 1) 864

by gblues (#26508839) Attached to: Windows 7's Media Hype Having the Opposite Effect As Vista's

Interestingly enough, Windows 7 doesn't really need drive letters anymore.

When I installed the beta, I noticed that while I could see the Windows 7 drive from XP, I couldn't see the XP drive from Windows 7. What I found was that the Windows 7 installer simply hadn't assigned a drive letter to the XP drive. It could see the partition in the disk manager, though.

When I went to mount the drive, I noticed that I had the option of mounting it to a directory instead of assigning a drive letter; I wasn't sure if giving it a drive letter would mess anything up in XP, so I opted for the folder mount; I created an empty C:\XP folder and mounted the drive there. It works pretty much the same as the 'mount' command in UNIX, except that it only needs to be done once; the link is stored in the filesystem, not in a mount table, so when I go into XP I can access XP's C: drive via the vista drive letter if I want to.

It's a really neat feature; the technology has been in NTFS since Windows 2000, but the UI exposure is fairly new (don't know if it's in Vista or not).

As far as the other OS features--process creation, case sensitivity, the backslash--I'm sorry, I can't get on board with you there either. Process creation is something developers care about, not users. The backslash is just legacy UI--if you want to use forward slashes, you can compile Bash for win32. And really, I can't think of a single reason for having a case-sensitive filesystem. "Oh, the reason your PC stopped booting was because you named the boot file 'AUTOEXEC.BAT'. It needs to be 'AutoExec.bat' for it to work."
The Courts

Apple Believes Someone Is Behind Psystar 606

Posted by CmdrTaco from the put-on-your-foil-hats dept.
rgraham writes "From the article on Growler: 'Apple apparently believes that somebody else is behind Psystar, which might help to explain why a major law firm would take on what seems like a fly-by-night's case; also why Psystar has been so bold in continuing to sell its products. I knew this thing felt funny. As Alice in Wonderland might put it, "It gets interestinger and interestinger."'"
Patents

Rewriting a Software Product After Quitting a Job? 604

Posted by kdawson from the clean-room-white-coats dept.
hi_caramba_2008 writes "We are a bunch of good friends at a large software company. The product we work on is under-budgeted and over-hyped by the sales drones. The code quality sucks, and management keeps pulling in different direction. Discussing this among ourselves, we talked about leaving the company and rebuilding the code from scratch over a few months. We are not taking any code with us. We are not taking customer lists (we probably will aim at different customers anyway). The code architecture will also be different — hosted vs. stand-alone, different modules and APIs. But at the feature level, we will imitate this product. Can we be sued for IP infringement, theft, or whatever? Are workers allowed to imitate the product they were working on? We know we have to deal with the non-compete clause in our employment contracts, but in our state this clause has been very difficult to enforce. We are more concerned with other IP legal aspects."
Earth

Reducing the Risk of Human Extinction 399

Posted by kdawson from the doing-the-numbers dept.
wiredog sends in a study from the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center Center For Biosecurity, assessing risks of human extinction and the costs of preventing it. "In this century a number of events could extinguish humanity. The probability of these events may be very low, but the expected value of preventing them could be high, as it represents the value of all future human lives."
Government

Congress May Kill NIH Open Access Research Rules 105

Posted by kdawson from the you-paid-for-it-now-we-own-it dept.
Savuka writes "A policy that mandates public, open access to all National Institutes of Health research is in danger. The House of Representatives is considering legislation that would change the open access policy to make it more publisher-friendly, under the false pretense of protecting copyrights. The Ars author paints the new legislation as somewhat reflective of a turf battle in Congress: 'The Intellectual Property Subcommittee clearly felt that it had been ignored during the original passage of the bill that compelled the NIH's open access policy...' The article concludes: 'Currently, the disruptions wrought by the Internet and expectations of open access are too new for a viable alternative to traditional publishing to have emerged. But it doesn't appear that the NIH policy is making a significant contribution to that disruption, and the benefits of the policy appear likely to be significant. If Congress rolls back that policy in response to disagreements with other countries over film piracy, then it could really be throwing the baby out with the bathwater.'"
Space

Study Concludes "Planet" Was Just Stellar Spots 132

Posted by timothy from the waste-of-missiles dept.
Kligat writes "Back in January, it was reported that the youngest planet ever to be discovered, about ten times the mass of Jupiter, was orbiting the eight- to ten-million-year-old star TW Hydrae. Now a Spanish research team has concluded that TW Hydrae b doesn't exist, and that cold spots on the star's surface actually produced the dip in brightness instead of a transiting planet. Not as cool as if a planet had actually been there, but refutations are science, too, right?"
Role Playing (Games)

Second Life Faces Open Source Challenges 198

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the war-on-two-fronts-is-never-good dept.
ruphus13 writes "Linden Labs has talked about Open Sourcing aspects of their platform for a while, but have not always followed through. Now, the OpenSimulator project has been gathering some solid momentum, and this was followed by an announcement by IBM that showed interoperability between OpenSimulator and Linden Servers. What this means is that you can use a Second Life client to log on to an OpenSim server. Beyond that, anyone can run their own server. 'Working with the protocols derived from the official Second Life client, and a knowledge of how Second Life works, these people have implemented their own compatible server code.' It is only a matter of time before users will be able to move profiles, virtual goods, and other elements of their 'second life' on to any server in a truly open world, thereby threatening Linden Labs' virtual world experience. With Google and Sun at the fringes of this space, things are going to get very interesting, virtually speaking."
Microsoft

MS To Become Open Source Friendly Post Gates 424

Posted by timothy from the certainly-possible dept.
ruphus13 writes "Now that Gates has 'retired' from Microsoft, ZDNet is speculating that Microsoft will become much more Open Source friendly. From the article, 'We already see quite a different approach to dealing with OSS and OSS companies from Sam Ramji's group [which is] doing a great job in establishing dialog,' said Rafael Laguna, CEO of Open-Xchange and a former marketing exec at SUSE Linux. 'With Gates' departure, the only mammoth remaining is Ballmer. With him away in a near future, Microsoft will definitely open up. They have to.'" Microsoft could become the world's largest open source company; they've certainly made some concessions to it lately.
Businesses

Non-Compete Pacts Called Bad For Tech Innovation 190

Posted by kdawson from the we-know-we-know dept.
carusoj writes in with NetworkWorld reporting from a panel at Harvard last week. It concluded that employee non-compete agreements have stifled tech startup development in Massachusetts, where the pacts are aggressively enforced, but failed to hold back the tech industry boom in states like California, where they are mostly unenforceable. We've discussed non-competes often here in the past; Techdirt made much the same point a year and a half back.

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