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Classic Games (Games)

The Return of (Old) PC Graphic Adventures 93

Posted by Soulskill from the back-to-the-past-ure dept.
KingofGnG writes "Though they belong to a genre already considered defunct and inadequate for the mainstream video game market, adventure games have a glorious past, a past that deserves to be remembered, and, of course, replayed. At the center of a good part of this effort of collective memory, there is ScummVM, the virtual machine which acts like an interface between the feelings and the puzzles from the good old times and the modern operating systems. As already highlighted before, the ScummVM target has grown immensely over time, going from the simple support of the 'classic' adventure games par excellence published by Lucasfilm/Lucasarts, to a range that includes virtually any single puzzle-solving game developed from the beginning of time up to the advent of the (Windows) NT platform. The last video game engine added to ScummVM within the past few days is Groovie, created by the software house Trilobyte for its first title released in 1993, The 7th Guest ."
Mozilla

Firefox 2 and Gecko 1.8 End of Life 138

Posted by Soulskill from the out-with-the-old dept.
vm writes "According to Mozilla and other sources, Firefox 2 and Gecko 1.8 will soon be left behind some time in mid-December. The end result: no future security or stability updates. This will affect Thunderbird 2, SeaMonkey 1.1, Camino 1.5, and any other projects based on Gecko 1.8. So, if you haven't already upgraded, there's no time like the present."
Data Storage

Researcher Warns of "Digital Dark Age" 367

Posted by Soulskill from the evaporating-digital-culture dept.
alphadogg writes "A assistant professor from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is sounding a warning that companies, the government and researchers need to come up with a plan for preserving our increasingly digitized data in light of shifting document management and other software platforms (think WordPerfect and floppy disks). Jerome P. McDonough, who teaches at the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, says there exists about 369 exabytes worth of data, and that includes some pretty hard to replace stuff, including tax files, email and photos. Open standards could play a key role in any preservation effort, he says. 'If we can't keep today's information alive for future generations, we will lose a lot of our culture,' McDonough said. Even over the course of 10 years, you can have a rapid enough evolution in the ways people store digital information and the programs they use to access it that file formats can fall out of date.'"
Sci-Fi

Submission + - Is Ridley Scott a born again science fiction fan? (sffmedia.com)

Submitted by
bowman9991
bowman9991 writes: "Ridley Scott's back flip on science fiction has been significant. The director of the genre classics Alien and Blade Runner is now working on not one, but two new science fiction adaptations: Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, staring Leonardo DiCaprio, and Joe Haldeman's The Forever War. SFFMedia details the two new movies and asks why Ridley Scott has had this sudden change of heart. Last year he said science fiction films were as dead as westerns, now after more than 25 he's directing two of them. What happened?"
The Internet

Submission + - Linux and Mac to get BBC iPlayer downloads (cnet.co.uk)

Submitted by Jonas
Jonas writes: It may have taken them forever, but the Beeb is officially bringing BBC iPlayer downloads to Linux and Macs. The technology will be powered by Adobe's AIR platform, though will still be wrapped in the DRM present in Windows downloads. The iPlayer has seen massive improvements since its initial launch, including the move to Flash instead of streaming Windows Media Video, and the utilisation of the H.264 codec to make streaming a more attractive option. Downloads are also now available specifically for portable devices, including Nokia phones and Archos handhelds, and there's talk of the entire back catalogues of current shows becoming permanently available for download.

Comment Suggestion (Score 1) 2

by WibbleOnMars (#25381115) Attached to: Alternative to GIMP for new Linux User?

Try asking this same question in a more newbie friendly environment, such as www.linuxquestions.org.

The folk on slashdot are generally very clued up, but if this gets onto the main /. site you'll get all sorts of discussion about why Gimp is good afterall, and the actual useful answers to your question will get lost in the fuzz.

I know that there are programs that do exactly what you need because I've seen them, but I don't know them by name, nor well enough to make a recommendation.

Anyway, just a suggestion. I hope you get your question answered, but I do feel that /. is probably the wrong place to ask. :-)

All the best!
Software

Submission + - Alternative to GIMP for new Linux User? 2

Submitted by corporal_clegg
corporal_clegg writes: I have been trying for more than a year to get my wife to move to Linux on her HP laptop. She is a technophobe and is adverse to change though good technology quickly wins her over if it is easy to use. Yesterday a trojan wrecked the laptop (don't ask — kids *sigh*) and with a little cajoling I was able to convince her to give my favorite OS a try. I dropped Fedora 9 (with GNOME) on the system last night, resolved a couple of minor issues and proudly gave her a brand new shiny system. Her chief complaint? She hates GIMP — and when I say hates, I mean she despises it with the fiery passion that only a woman scorned can express. She used it a few times on my system in the past, decided she hated it and now it seems that the lack of a simple image program on her laptop may drive her back to Windows. If I can get a image manipulation program for her that meets her needs, I am certain she will be won over. More importantly, her opinion will help drive her parents and their friends to Linux and relieve me of no end of toil in maintaining their Windows systems. Thus making her happy is more than just about increasing marital bliss, it means moving at least another 3 families to Linux.

Her requirements are very simple: she wants to be able to select a photo, make a simple choice to print it as 8x10, 5x7, contact sheet or the like (without worrying about aspect ratios) and do cropping. Automatic red eye removal is a plus but not a requirement. She has been using the Windows "photo printing wizard" built in to XP and needs no more functionality than that. So, what robust (bugs and quirks are probably not acceptable unless they are very minor) image printing packages are out there that meet this very basic need?
Mozilla

Submission + - Opera develops search engine for web developers (itpro.co.uk)

Submitted by nk497
nk497 writes: The Metadata Analysis and Mining Application (MAMA) doesn't index content like a standard search engine, but looks at markup, style, scripting and the technology behind pages. Based on those existing MAMA-ed pages, 80.4 per cent of sites use cascading style sheets (CSS), while the average web page has 47 markup errors and 16,400 characters. Should you want to know which country is using the AJAX component XMLHttpRequest the most, MAMA can tell you that it's Norway, with 10.2 per cent of the data set.
Software

Submission + - Dillo 2.0 released

Submitted by steltho
steltho writes: The long awaited Dillo-2.0 is out. This version is based on fltk2, and the developers claim a 50% reduction in Dillo's memory footprint. You can get it here: http://www.dillo.org/download.html
Security

Submission + - WorldBank Under CyberSiege in Unprecedented Crisis (foxnews.com) 1

Submitted by JagsLive
JagsLive writes: The World Bank Group's computer network — one of the largest repositories of sensitive data about the economies of every nation — has been raided repeatedly by outsiders for more than a year, FOX News has learned.

It is still not known how much information was stolen. But sources inside the bank confirm that servers in the institution's highly-restricted treasury unit were deeply penetrated with spy software last April. Invaders also had full access to the rest of the bank's network for nearly a month in June and July.

In total, at least six major intrusions — two of them using the same group of IP addresses originating from China — have been detected at the World Bank since the summer of 2007, with the most recent breach occurring just last month.

In a frantic midnight e-mail to colleagues, the bank's senior technology manager referred to the situation as an "unprecedented crisis." In fact, it may be the worst security breach ever at a global financial institution. And it has left bank officials scrambling to try to understand the nature of the year-long cyber-assault, while also trying to keep the news from leaking to the public.
Networking

Journal Journal: No IPv6 for UK broadband users

Journal by farnz
BT (the incumbent telephone company in the United Kingdom) are in the process of spending millions of pounds on upgrading their network to an all-IP core. However, they have failed to consider 21st Century protocol support, preferring to insist that IPv4 is enough for everyone. Haven't they noticed the IPv4 exhaustion report yet?
Space

Submission + - Unbelievably large telescopes on the Moon? (spacefellowship.com)

Submitted by
Matt_dk
Matt_dk writes: "A team of internationally renowned astronomers and opticians may have found a way to make "unbelievably large" telescopes on the Moon.

"It's so simple," says Ermanno F. Borra, physics professor at the Optics Laboratory of Laval University in Quebec, Canada. "Isaac Newton knew that any liquid, if put into a shallow container and set spinning, naturally assumes a parabolic shape, the same shape needed by a telescope mirror to bring starlight to a focus. This could be the key to making a giant lunar observatory.""
Mozilla

Submission + - Firefox 3.1 uses Skyhook to figure out location (bbc.co.uk)

Submitted by rallymatte
rallymatte writes: According to an article on BBC's online Firefox 3.1 will include a new feature that will allow the browser to figure out your computers location from nearby wireless networks.
From the article:
The Geode project is an experimental add-on ahead of a full blown launch of geolocation technology in version 3.1 of Firefox.
Users will have control over how much location information they give.
Transportation

Submission + - Transparent Cockpit Removes Car Blind Spots

Submitted by
Ponca City, We love you
Ponca City, We love you writes: "Solid features such as dashboard and doors can conceal road hazards such as other vehicles and pedestrians but now engineers have come up with a way to make the car's solid features disappear from the driver's point of view. A pair of stereo cameras mounted on the passenger-side wing mirror capture scenery usually hidden from the driver by the dashboard and the solid parts of doors while a headset worn by the driver projects the cameras' output onto the solid features, displaying a clear view of what hides behind them as if they were transparent. "These sort of systems have been talked about for years, but this the best example of its kind that I've seen so far," says Andrew Parkes, who performs behavoural studies on drivers at the Transport Research Laboratory in the UK. Letting the driver see usually hidden hazards is better than alarm systems that can be hard to interpret, says Parkes, "but there's a long way to go before deciding whether it would be beneficial in practice.""
Spam

Submission + - Using e-mail spam as CAPTCHAS

Submitted by
Anonymous Coward
Anonymous Coward writes: "With much recent talk about failure of CAPTCHA systems to keep out spammers (e.g., [1], [2]), I wonder whether it would be possible to turn the spammers' own devices against them. E-mail spam thrives by leaving so few clues that even the most finely tuned Bayesian filter cannot reliably detect and weed them all out; put another way, the spammers are able to create emails that *only a human* can discern as spam... So, why not compile spam that gets through the filters and find a way to use these spam as CAPTCHAS? For example, create CAPTCHAS that consist of asking a human to state what the subject of a certain spam message is (e.g., penis enlargement, debt consolidation, etc.). Pass the results of these efforts through some statistical tests to weed out poor responses (whether by human or machine). To amplify the effect, these very results of the CAPTCHA efforts could subsequently be used as input to spam filters. Hoist them on their own petard, as it were. Could it work? What does the Slashdot community think?"

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