Comment All I'm going to say (Score 1) 127
That is so nucking futs!
Valve: Linux Better Than Windows 8 for Gaming 768
dartttt writes "In a presentation at Ubuntu Developer Summit currently going on in Denmark, Drew Bliss from Valve said that Linux is more viable than Windows 8 for gaming. Windows 8 ships with its own app store and it is not an open platform anymore and Linux has everything they need: good OpenGL, pulseaudio, OpenAL and input support."
Submission + - Microsoft's Clippy Rebels, Targets Dirty Clouds (slashdot.org)
Nerval's Lobster writes: "No, this isn’t some hellish Easter Egg designed into Windows 8. It’s the latest publicity stunt by Greenpeace, which has sent protesters dressed as Microsoft’s iconic character to Microsoft Stores to crash the Windows 8 launch.
“Connecting to the cloud is a great feature of Microsoft’s stuff,” Greenpeace wrote in a blog post last week. “We love the Internet! But as the Internet grows, it needs more electricity, and unfortunately, Microsoft’s getting the electricity for its cloud from old, dirty sources. The massive data centers that store and compute the data for Microsoft’s cloud use a lot of electricity, and much of it comes from dirty, dangerous old sources like coal and nuclear power.”
Microsoft’s most recent data-center announcements, the posting continued, “show that is it continuing to build in locations such as Wyoming and Virginia in the United States that are attached to dirty energy. Despite over 250,000 messages to Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer, Microsoft has yet to significantly invest in clean energy.”
The “250,000 messages” refers to an online petition to convince Microsoft that it needs to invest in green energy, not coal-fired power plants. The same petition was sent to Tim Cook, the chief executive of Apple, as well as Jeff Bezos, the chief executive of Amazon."
“Connecting to the cloud is a great feature of Microsoft’s stuff,” Greenpeace wrote in a blog post last week. “We love the Internet! But as the Internet grows, it needs more electricity, and unfortunately, Microsoft’s getting the electricity for its cloud from old, dirty sources. The massive data centers that store and compute the data for Microsoft’s cloud use a lot of electricity, and much of it comes from dirty, dangerous old sources like coal and nuclear power.”
Microsoft’s most recent data-center announcements, the posting continued, “show that is it continuing to build in locations such as Wyoming and Virginia in the United States that are attached to dirty energy. Despite over 250,000 messages to Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer, Microsoft has yet to significantly invest in clean energy.”
The “250,000 messages” refers to an online petition to convince Microsoft that it needs to invest in green energy, not coal-fired power plants. The same petition was sent to Tim Cook, the chief executive of Apple, as well as Jeff Bezos, the chief executive of Amazon."
Submission + - Ext4 scare was a tempest in a teacup: almost all of the userbase safe (gmane.org)
An anonymous reader writes: It turns out the ext4 problem only affects users of some very obscure mount options, and even them it depends on specific conditions to show up. If you DON'T use the mount options "journal_async_commit" or "journal_checksum", which are NEVER enabled by default (not by the system, and not by the distros), you will not see any corruption.
Comment Re:The real story... (Score 1) 73
Thanks for that comment. No go back into your troll-hole and read the book Knuckle Dragging for Cretins.
Politics being what it is, a politician will try to wrap themselves with the glory coming from a successful project. As with anyone they want to minimize the risk. Being a politician has nothing to do with their gender, only the glad-handing opportunism. To simplify it for your less developed neocortex:
- - Politicians want to look good
- - They will support projects with little risk
- - A politician can be a man or wormen
Being political is not for everyone, but having a politician who supports a large scale project, will ensure funding and support. If you tell your boss that a project will be successful and it will work and it doesn't. I would not be surprised if you do get a strip torn off since you made your boss look bad!
Comment Telidon aka videotex (Score 1) 326
Another example of prior art exists, and I quote from the IEEE article
One of the major improvements of Telidon over first generation videotex systems is its high-quality graphic capability. High resolution colour drawings, intricate shapes, even photographs are all possible through Telidon technology.
This was in 1981. In 1985 I did some work for a small Toronto based company, where they were developing both Telidon content and technology. I wrote a NAPLSP decoder/encoder written using C, lex and yacc. Everything was coded using a machine readable instruction set. Since everything was done using dialup modems, and 2400 baud was considered fast.
I also did a standalone NAPLSP server and browser that would display content. This was delivered to Xerox when they had their own retail stores in Toronto. It was commercialized to a certain degree.
There were several dozen public terminals in malls and other public areas in the city. It was a prime example of a technology that was a solution looking for a problem. Lack of bandwidth, and a lack of critical mass in terms of a wide spread adoption doomed it to failure. It was fun while it lasted.
It is regrettable that Michael Doyle had Microsoft settle with him. By settling with him, it gave him the war chest to proceed with further litigation. The concepts that he is claiming as his own, written up by Ted Nelson in Computer Lib (1974), and then became reality with Telidon (1981). Michaels patent is dated 1993. It is the interest of everyone to refute the patent by presenting prior art. Perhaps a Telidon terminal demonstration would be in order.
Why Amazon Can't Manufacture a Kindle In the US 598
theodp writes "Ever wonder why all those job listings for Amazon subsidiary Lab126 — the internal group behind the Kindle and, by all accounts, an upcoming Android tablet — have travel requirements? Over at Forbes, Steve Denning explains why Amazon can't make a Kindle in the U.S., and why that really does matter. 'The idea that there is a lot of outsourcing going on is hardly news', writes Denning. 'The idea that it is irreversible and destructive of the economy's ability to grow is less well known. Even so, it's not exactly new news: the HBR article that I cite is two years old. What is really new news is that (1) these fairly obvious truths haven't yet dawned on economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, CEOs, accountants, politicians, among others and (2) the way to manage in a radically different way to deal with these issues is now more fully articulated than it has been before.' Denning concludes his trilogy-of-management-terror by noting that the decline is also occurring in software."
Submission + - Web Doom Fragged (mozilla.org)
An anonymous reader writes: Back in May Slashdot covered a neat port of Doom to javascript, that could be played in a browser. Well, looks like the DMCA troll lawyers are at it again. The link has disappeared and now points to a copy of a DMCA takedown notice alleging that the page contravenes iD's copyright. But Doom is GPL'ed — so what's going on? Anyone from iD want to comment?
Submission + - Username charts of bot hacking attempts (ninetynine.be)
An anonymous reader writes: Michiel Vancoillie from Ninetynine.be posted an article on his blog after noticing approx. 20.000 failed SSH login attempts, probably by automated bots. He extracted the used usernames and put them into nice charts according to their frequency.
Submission + - Lava Lamps are for Pussies! (papercut.com)
cdance writes: "Traditional Lava Lamps, and of course email, are the tools of choice to notify your dev team that the build in your continuous integration system is broken. However, lava lamps, just like pink curtains and shag pile, don't really fit into the culture of many modern development teams. There is now a solution. Retaliation is a new Jenkins CI build monitor that automatically coordinates a foam missile counter-attack against the developer who breaks the build. It does this by playing a pre-programmed control sequence to a USB Foam Missile Launcher to target the offending code monkey. Development, unit testing and build scripts just got a little more fun and "productive"!"
Submission + - Earth Ejecta Could Seed Life on Europa (technologyreview.com)
KentuckyFC writes: "Various astronomers have studied how far rocks can travel through space after being ejected from Earth. Their conclusion is that it's relatively easy for bits of Earth to end up on the Moon or Venus. But very little would get to Mars because it would have to overcome both the Sun and the Earth's gravity. Now the biggest ever simulation of Earth ejecta confirms this result with a twist. The simulation shows that Jupiter is a much more likely destination than Mars. So bits of Earth could have ended up on Jovian satellites such as Europa. Astrobiologists estimate that Earth's hardiest organisms can survive up to 30,000 years in space, which means that if conditions are just right, Earth ejecta could seed life there."
Submission + - Exabit Transmission Speeds Maybe Possible
adeelarshad82 writes: Scientists at UC Berkeley were able to shrink a graphene optical modulator down to 25 square microns in size (small enough to include in silicon circuitry) and were able to modulate it at a speed of 1GHz. The researchers say that modulation speeds of up to 500GHz are theoretically possible. According to the research, due to the high modulation speeds, a graphene modulator can transmit a huge amount of data using spectral bandwidth that conventional modulators can only dream of. Professor Xiang Zhang, in an attempt to boil his group's new findings into consumer-speak, puts it this way: "I graphene modulators can actually operate at 500GHz, we could soon see networks that are capable of petabit or exabit transmission speeds, rather than megabits and gigabits."
Submission + - Diner Dash Strategy Video Game (mostfungameslist.com)
edwin1q2 writes: Diner Dash involves seating customers and guiding Flo around the restaurant to serve customers. Diner Dash is a strategy video game available in multiple platforms such as PC, Mac, consoles, and mobile
Consumer Device With Open CPU Out of Beta Soon 99
lekernel writes "After years of passionate and engaging development, the video synthesizer from the Milkymist project is expected to go out of beta in August. Dubbed 'Milkymist One,' it features as central component a system-on-chip made exclusively of IP cores licensed under the open source principles, and is aimed at use by a general audience of video performance artists, clubs and musicians. It is one of the first consumer electronics products putting forward open source semiconductor IP, open PCB design and open source software at the same time. The full source code is available for download from Github, and a few hardware kits are available from specialized electronics distributors."
Submission + - Creating a "force field" invisible touch interface (computerworld.com.au)
angry tapir writes: "Using infrared sensors like the ones on television remote controls, Texas A&M University students presented an inexpensive multitouch system at the Computer Human Interaction (CHI) conference in Vancouver. "I like to consider it an optical force field; it's like a picture frame where we shoot thousands of light beams across and we can detect anything that intersects that frame," said Jonathan Moeller, a research assistant in the Interface Ecology Lab at Texas A&M University. The frame is lined with 256 IR sensors, which are connected to a computer. When ZeroTouch is mounted over a traditional computer screen it turns the display into a multitouch surface. Taken one step further, if the screen is suspended then a user could paint a virtual canvas. (Pics and video in link.)"
