a.d.venturer - Slashdot User

Submission + - Fossilized sea scorpion was larger than a person (www.cbc.ca)

Submitted by hereisnowhy on Tuesday November 20, 2007 @11:50PM

hereisnowhy writes: A giant fossilized claw discovered in Germany belonged to an ancient sea scorpion that was much bigger than the average man, an international team of geologists and archaeologists reported Tuesday. In a report in the Royal Society's journal Biology Letters, the team said the claw indicates that sea scorpion Jaekelopterus rhenania was almost 2.5 metres long, making it the largest arthropod — an animal with a segmented body, jointed limbs and a hard exoskelton — ever found. In the report, the authors said the scorpion exceeds previous size records for arthropods by almost half a metre.

Submission + - Why do games still have levels? (blogspot.com) 1

Submitted by a.d.venturer on Tuesday November 20, 2007 @11:46PM

a.d.venturer writes: Elite, the Metroid series, Dungeon Siege, God of War I and II, Half-Life (but not Half-Life 2), Shadow of the Colossus, the Grand Theft Auto series; some of the best games ever (and Dungeon Siege) have done away with the level mechanic and created uninterrupted game spaces devoid of loading screens and artificial breaks between periods of play. Much like cut scenes, level loads are anathema to enjoyment of game play, and a throwback to the era of the Vic-20 and Commodore 64 when games were stored on cassette tapes, and memory was measured in kilobytes. So in this era of multi-megabyte and gigabyte memory and fast access storage devices why do we continue to have games that are dominated by the level structure, be they commercial (Portal, Team Fortress 2), independent (Darwinia) and amateur (Nethack, Angband)? Why do games still have levels?

Submission + - 'Heroes 2' on French VOD a day after US broadcast (french-law.net)

Submitted by

njondet

on Thursday August 30, 2007 @05:48AM

njondet writes: "In an unprecedented move to curb piracy, French television broadcaster TF1 has announced yesterday that it will make episodes of the second series of Heroes available on its video-on-demand service 24 hours after their broadcast in the US. The deal between TF1 and NBC, (the US network which produces and distributes the series), ensures that the VOD service, TF1 vision, will offer the new episodes for download and streaming starting on September 25. The episodes will be subtitled in French and cost as little as 1.99 Euro ($2.70) each (dependent on the pay package chosen)."

Submission + - New Zealand Decides to Vote "No" For OOXML

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 30, 2007 @03:21AM

An anonymous reader writes: Following a two-day workshop, New Zealand has voted 'no' to OOXML as an ISO standard. Given the lively and emotional discussion amongst people who were there and people who care, I'm impressed that the fundamental technical objections seem to have won the day.

Submission + - Obesity linked to a variety of the common cold (webmd.com)

Submitted by

a.d.venturer

on Tuesday August 21, 2007 @06:30AM

a.d.venturer writes: "In a story that's sure to be spread widely, new research has established a direct link between a common cold virus adenovirus-36 or Ad-36 and obesity. Stem cells removed during liposuction and exposed to Ad-36 changed into fat cells, whereas stem cells that were not exposed did not. Spread the Slashdot load amongst multiple news sites while you're making jokes about it. In all seriousness though, this does provide a good explanation of the increasing obesity epidemic in third world countries."

Submission + - Microsoft gets company's code-signing cert revoked

Submitted by Beryllium Sphere(tm) on Tuesday August 21, 2007 @02:48AM

Beryllium Sphere(tm) writes: Australian firm Linchpin Labs released a free tool called Atsiv on July 20 to allow 64-bit Vista users to install unsigned drivers.

It was a simple hack: a signed driver that could install other drivers without checking their signatures.

By August 2, Microsoft had persuaded Verisign to revoke Linchpin's code signing certificate. The revocation takes effect the next time a computer is rebooted.

Scott Field of Microsoft said "Microsoft is committed to protecting its customers from potential as well as actual security threads[sic]".

History buffs may remember a similar incident from 1997 in which the author of an ActiveX control to shut down a computer found his certificate revoked.

Lockergnome coverage of the Linchpin Labs story.
Microsoft announcement of revoking Linchpin's certificate and adding them to the blacklist in Windows Defender as "potentially unwanted software".

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