Catch up on stories from the past week (and beyond) at the Slashdot story archive

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×
Emulation (Games)

Nintendo Upset Over Nokia Game Emulation Video 189

Posted by Soulskill from the super-mario-takedown dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Nintendo is investigating potential copyright infringement by Nokia during some video demos of their N900 phone, which can be seen emulating Nintendo games. Nintendo spokesman Robert Saunders says: 'We take rigorous steps to protect our IP and our legal team will examine this to determine if any infringement has taken place.' In the video, Nokia says, 'Most publishers allow individual title usage, provided that the user is in possession of the original title.'"

Submission + - Swedish Hackerspace raided by the police (forskningsavd.se) 4

Submitted by intedinmamma
intedinmamma writes: At 20.45 on Saturday the 28th of November the police raided the social centre Utkanten in Malmö, where the hackerspace Forskningsavdelningen is housed. Twenty officers in full riot gear and ski masks broke into the space, using crowbars. The official reason for the raid was to do a “pub check” because of the suspicion that there was illegal selling of alcohol going on at a punk concert. After the raid the cops confiscated a lot of stuff, being indiscriminate as to whose effects were removed. A lot of equipment from Forskningsavdelningen were taken, and also some personal belongings, even though the hackerspace was unaffiliated with the group arranging the concert downstairs.
Graphics

Submission + - Inkscape 0.47 is released

Submitted by ScislaC
ScislaC writes: After over a year of intensive development and refactoring, Inkscape 0.47 is out. This version of the SVG-based vector graphics editor brings improved performance and tons of new features, some of which are as follows: Timed autosave, Spiro splines, Auto-smooth nodes, Eraser tool, New modes in Tweak tool, Snapping toolbar & greater snapping abilities, New Live Path Effects (including Envelope), A huge collection of preset filters, New cairo-based PS and EPS export, Spell checker, Many new extensions, Optimized SVG code options, and much more. Additionally, it would be wrong to not mention the hundreds of bug fixes as well. Check out the full release notes for more information about what has changed, enjoy the screenshots, or just jump right to downloading your package for Windows, Linux or Mac OS X.
Programming

On the Humble Default 339

Posted by kdawson from the ne-pas-décider-c'est-décider dept.
Hugh Pickens sends along Kevin Kelly's paean to the default. "One of the greatest unappreciated inventions of modern life is the default. 'Default' is a technical concept first used in computer science in the 1960s to indicate a preset standard. ... Today the notion of a default has spread beyond computer science to the culture at large. It seems such a small thing, but the idea of the default is fundamental... It's hard to remember a time when defaults were not part of life. But defaults only arose as computing spread; they are an attribute of complex technological systems. There were no defaults in the industrial age. ... The hallmark of flexible technological systems is the ease by which they can be rewired, modified, reprogrammed, adapted, and changed to suit new uses and new users. Many (not all) of their assumptions can be altered. The upside to endless flexibility and multiple defaults lies in the genuine choice that an individual now has, if one wants it. ... Choices materialize when summoned. But these abundant choices never appeared in fixed designs. ... In properly designed default system, I always have my full freedoms, yet my choices are presented to me in a way that encourages taking those choices in time — in an incremental and educated manner. Defaults are a tool that tame expanding choice."
Hardware Hacking

GPL Firmware For Canon 5D Mk II Adds Features For Filmmakers 117

Posted by timothy from the a-little-magic-never-hurt-anyone dept.
tramm writes "I've released an extension for the Canon 5D Mark II DSLR's video mode to enable functions that are useful for independent film makers. While the camera produces a great movie out of the box, the audio is a severely limited. My code adds features that should have been in the software, like on-screen stereo audio meters, live audio monitoring, reduced audio noise and crop marks for different formats. An introductory video shows the new features in use and an audio evaluation compares it to the stock firmware with very good results. It's similar to the incredibly flexible CHDK software for Canon's point-and-shoot cameras, but targeted at the film makers using the 5D. The Magic Lantern firmware is GPLed and new features will be written to make the camera even more useful on set. There is a wiki for documentation and development."
The Media

Print Subscribers Cry Foul Over WP's Online-Only Story 96

Posted by timothy from the wonder-how-they-feel-about-online-coupons dept.
Hugh Pickens writes "The decision by the Washington Post to publish an article exclusively online has angered many readers who still pay for the print edition of the newspaper and highlighted the thorny issues newspaper editors still face in serving both print and online audiences. The 7,000 word story about the slaying in 2006 of Robert Wone, a young lawyer who was found stabbed to death in a luxurious townhouse in the Dupont Circle neighborhood of Washington where a 'polyamorous family' of three men lived, is the sort of long-form reporting that newspaper editors say still justifies print in the digital age and many editors agree that print is still the place to publish deep investigative reporting, in part to give certain readers a reason to keep paying for news. 'If you're doing long form, you should do it in print,' said newspaper consultant Mark Potts. 'This just felt like a nice two-part series that they didn't have the room to put in the paper, so they just threw it on the Web.' Editors at The Post say they considered publishing the article in print, but they concluded it was too long at a time when the paper, like most others, was in dire financial straits and trying to scale back newsprint costs. 'Newspapers are going broke in part because news can be read, free of charge, on the Internet,' wrote one reader in a letter to the editor. 'As a nearly lifelong reader of The Post, I could not read this article in the paper I pay for and subscribe to; instead I came on it accidentally while scrolling online for business reasons.'"
Mozilla

Firefox 3.5RC2 Performance In Windows Vs. Linux 240

Posted by timothy from the tradeoffs-and-tradeoffs dept.
pizzutz writes "Andy Lawrence has posted a Javascript speed comparison for the recently released Firefox 3.5RC2 between Linux (Ubuntu 9.04) and Windows(XP SP3) using the SunSpider benchmark test. Firefox 3.5 will include the new Tracemonkey Javascript engine. The Windows build edges out Linux by just under 15%, though the Linux build is still twice as fast as the current 3.0.11 version which ships with Jaunty."
Google

Submission + - Google unleashes Wave on developers (zdnet.co.uk)

Submitted by
superglaze
superglaze writes: "Google has unveiled a distributed, P2P-based collaboration and conversation platform called Wave. Developers are being invited to join an open source project that has been formed to create a Google Wave Federation Protocol, which will underlie the system.

Anyone will be able to create a "wave", which is a type of hosted conversation, Google has said. Waves will essentially incorporate real-time dialogue, photos, videos, maps, documents and other information forms within a single, shared communications space.

Developers can also work on embedding waves into websites, or creating multimedia robots and gadgets that can be incorporated within the Google Wave client."
Graphics

Submission + - Lightweight C++ library for SVG using GDI+ (arosmagic.com) 1

Submitted by redblue
redblue writes: I would like to display vector graphics in my Windows C++ programs with minimal system requirements. Some of the possibilities are: 1. Enhanced Metafile Format format/EMF+, 2. Flash/SWG, 3. Silverlight/XAML, 4. SVG. The non-open proprietary nature of #2 & #3 make them unattractive. Since EMF+ is not amenable to easy editing, it leaves SVG as the only format worth pursuing. The trouble is that the major vendors have a lock on the market with their proprietary formats; leaving SVG high and dry with no easy native OS support. At least not on Windows. From what I could learn on the intertubes, Cairo is the best, if not only, reasonable system that may enable compiled SVG support. Unfortunately, AFAIK, it comes with a price tag of >2MB overhead and the C++ bindings are not straightforward.

In a flash of the NIH syndrome, I rolled my own SVG processing engine and it has addressed my needs. You can see the result on http://www.arosmagic.com/Solitaire. A simple breakdown is: Framework+CRT(150K), SVG engine(100k), SVG art(350k). My SVG library is sufficient for me for now. But I can't help wonder:
1. Is there a better SVG library out there already available for easy inclusion?
2. If not, is there a need, i.e. market demand, for a lightweight (~200K) C++ SVG library that does not have the baggage of Silverlight or Flash?

If the answers are No/Yes, it may be worth it to make this library fully SVG compliant and release it as an open source alternative to the offerings from the entities that we shall not name but just collectively refer to as The Microbe. Please help out by letting me know if such a component is something that you would personally want to use in your current/future projects.

Comment Re:Processing / "Visualizing Data" (Score 3, Interesting) 46

by karmac0ma (#28119501) Attached to: Beginning Python Visualization
There's already something very close to Processing using Python, BSD licensed, even though it's OSX only: Nodebox (http://www.nodebox.net/).

On the other hand, there's a GPL fork/port of this project that works on GNU/Linux and Windows -- Shoebot (http://www.tinkerhouse.net/shoebot) (Disclosure: i'm one of the authors)

Nodebox uses Cocoa as its graphics back-end, while Shoebot uses Cairo (http://www.cairographics.org/); our plans for it are to implement other graphics back-ends including OpenGL (via Pyglet or Pygame), so seeing the parent open-source their Python/OpenGL project would be a godsend to us. Hey, there's common goals and all, so no reason to keep it closed, right? ;-)

(do pardon me if the links come out wrong, it's my first post over here -- bonjour to all)

Slashdot Top Deals

If you want to put yourself on the map, publish your own map.

Close