WhiteRider - Slashdot User

Submission + - Jack Thompson Suspended 1

Submitted by Dr. Eggman on Monday September 10, 2007 @10:42AM

Dr. Eggman writes: GamePolitics.com has the story the Florida Bar has ordered Jack Thompson to undergo psychological testing and have suspended his license for 91 days. According to his 2005 book, he has been asked to undergo such testing by the bar before, but sued and successfully settled with the bar for $20,000.

Submission + - French Threat to ID Secret US Satellites (beskerming.com)

Submitted by

SkiifGeek

on Sunday September 09, 2007 @07:24PM

SkiifGeek writes: "Space.com has reported that the French have identified numerous objects in orbit that do not appear in the ephemeris data reported by the US Space Surveillance Network. Since the US has claimed that if it doesn't appear in the ephemeris data, then it doesn't exist, and the French claim that at least some of the objects have solar arrays, it seems that the French have found secret US satellites.

While the French don't plan to release the information publicly, they are planning to use it as leverage to get the US to suppress reporting of sensitive French satellites in their published ephemeris.

The Graves surveillance radar (the French system) and a comparable German system may form the basis of a pan-European Space Surveillance network — another system that the Europeans don't want to rely on the US for."

Submission + - Toddlers are smarter than chimps (sciencemag.org)

Submitted by

Lucas123

on Friday September 07, 2007 @04:01PM

Lucas123 writes: "The journal Science just posted the findings of a study today that showed two-year-old children are naturally more intelligent than chimps of vastly greater age. In one experiment, chimps tasked with opening a plastic tube to retrieve food or a toy inside bit it and tried to break it, while the children watched an example and copied it. "Children and chimpanzees had very similar cognitive skills for dealing with the physical world but ... the children had more sophisticated cognitive skills than either of the ape species for dealing with the social world.""

Submission + - Internet Wasteland - web development in song (eddyboston.com)

Submitted by

TheCoders

on Friday September 07, 2007 @01:37PM

TheCoders writes: "My latest song, based on the trials and tribulations of web development, may be the first to mention Ruby on Rails, AJAX, and the tables vs. DIVs debate. An excerpt: I don't care about your space; I can't even find mine. I've been lost since the days of America Online. And you ain't gonna find me, add me to your top eight friends, 'Cause I'm drowning in the bitstream of this internet wasteland.

Also available on SoundClick, to save my servers."

Submission + - What is the worst commute you have heard of?

Submitted by smitty_one_each on Friday September 07, 2007 @01:00PM

smitty_one_each writes: In these days where carbon neutrality is all the environmentally-friendly rage, I'm curious: who has the most brutal commute, in terms of hours sacrificed per day, on average, to the gods of transportation?
Let's define "commute" to be a work-related journey undertaken at least three times per week, over a minimum one-year time period. IOW, living in New Mexico and commuting by plane to New York on Monday, the flying home Friday does not count.
Under no circumstances will any postings be used in a punitive manner against the poster. There will be no carbon footprint calculations, and no speed traps set up based upon anything posted to this thread. This thread concerns morbid curiosity only.

Submission + - Tor spoofed by malware emails (eff.org)

Submitted by

Shava Nerad

on Friday September 07, 2007 @07:30AM

Shava Nerad writes: "The Tor Project, a US non-profit organisation producing Internet
privacy software, is issuing an urgent warning about a spam email
being circulated as a fake promotion for their software.

The real Tor software provides privacy on the Internet to journalists,
bloggers and human rights activists all over the world. The spam email
promotes the virtues of the software, but then directs people to a
series of fake websites that contain malicious code that will attempt
to take over visiting machines, and the downloaded software is fake
and equally dangerous to run.

The real website is hosted at http://tor.eff.org/ and the Tor
software can be downloaded from there. Users are able to check that
they have received the official version by following the instructions
at: http://wiki.noreply.org/noreply/TheOnionRouter/Ver ifyingSignatures

Shava Nerad, Development Director for the Tor Project said, "I am
disgusted that criminals who want to recruit more machines for their
illegal activities should trade on our reputation for providing
privacy on the Internet. Fortunately we already have systems in place
so that people can verify that they are downloading the official
software. But this is a distraction from our work that we could do
without.""

Submission + - Spreadsheets for Parallel Programming

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 06, 2007 @04:38PM

An anonymous reader writes: An interesting blog entry describes a spreadsheet compiler for FPGA, GPU and Multicore processors built by an MIT graduate student. The post links to an IIR filter and CPU emulator that run in Excel using circular reference. Is a spreadsheet a good model for developing parallel computing applications?

Submission + - AMD/ATi to release graphics specs

Submitted by Ganesh999 on Thursday September 06, 2007 @06:59AM

Ganesh999 writes: A recent Phoronix article hinted that despite the large number of substantially improved AMD/ATi drivers just released, there was more exciting news in the pipeline.

This seems to have been confirmed at the Linux kernel summit yesterday. From LWN :

'AMD's representative at the summit has announced that the company has made a decision to enable the development of open source drivers for all of its (ATI) graphics processors from the R500 going forward. There will be specifications available and a skeleton driver as well; a free 2D driver is anticipated by the end of the year. The rest will have to be written; freeing of the existing binary-only driver is not in the cards, and "that is better for everybody." Things are looking good on this front. More in the kernel summit report to come.'

General reaction from the kernel developers seems to be positive :

'It's definitely not a 'you're on your own' kind of proposition: this is exactly what was asked for, giving the community all the information it needs to complete a proper driver.'

Submission + - AMD to open ATI specs (0xdeadbeef.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 06, 2007 @02:25AM

An anonymous reader writes: AMD has announced they are releasing the specs for all new radeon chipsets, and will be working with the open source community to develop a fully functional 2d and 3d graphics driver. AMD appears to be following in Intel's footsteps with upcoming releases. If AMD is successfull NVidia will have real competition in the GNU/Linux gaming arena. While past support by ATI was unsatisfactory the new AMD buyout appears to be having some effect.

Submission + - What to do with OOXML files?

Submitted by on Wednesday September 05, 2007 @01:30PM

An anonymous reader writes: I just received my first OOXML file. I can't open it because I have not shelled out for Office 2007 — and I had no plans to. OpenOffice is unable to open it and from what I've seen, the import filter is still a ways off.

I replied with a quick note to the sender that I can't open the file, but I'm not sure how my response will be met. After all, the sender paid good money for his shiny new Office 2007, and is not likely to downgrade nor to bother with saving in "inferior" formats. I'd like to put it to the community then: how do you plan to deal with the coming onslaught of OOXML files?

Submission + - Opera 9.5 Alpha Released (opera.com)

Submitted by

Khuffie

on Tuesday September 04, 2007 @11:38AM

Khuffie writes: "Opera has finally released the long-awaited alpha of version 9.5, codenamed Kestrel. This release includes many new features, such as full history search (which searches the actual content of pages in your history), improved speed thanks to a brand new rendering engine, synchronized bookmarks and much more! You can download it for Windows, Mac and Linux."

Submission + - Sweeden's Vote on OOXML Invalidated (groklaw.net)

Submitted by

Groklaw Reader

on Thursday August 30, 2007 @04:18PM

Groklaw Reader writes: "After Microsoft's attempts to buy the Swedish vote on OOXML came to light, SIS declared its own vote invalid. SIS has therefore changed its vote from yes to abstain in a bid to restore their integrity after Microsoft's ballot stuffing. Apparently, not everyone can be bought."

Submission + - Internet growing too large for current hardware?

Submitted by

rkohutek

on Thursday August 30, 2007 @01:30PM

rkohutek writes: "There has been a very interesting discussion happening on the North American Network Operators Group (NANOG) mailling list about the scalability of today's Internet routers. A vast quantity of those routers support only 256,000 unique networks. According to the CIDR-Report, there are ~233,216 routes on the Internet, and at the current rate of 3,500 additional routes per month, we are going to be bumping into those hardware limits very quickly. Not many people are aware of the situation, and even fewer are prepared to perform the expensive upgrades. Has anybody already dealt with this and have solutions?"

Submission + - AMD Introduces SSE5 Instruction Set (amd.com)

Submitted by wildsurf on Thursday August 30, 2007 @03:44AM

wildsurf writes: With the introduction of SSE5, many new 128-bit instructions have been added to the existing instruction set detailed in the AMD64 Architecture Programmer's Manuals. Included are 46 base instructions that expand to 170 total instructions, enabling improved performance and reduced loads.

New instructions include:

Fused multiply accumulate (FMACxx) instructions
Integer multiply accumulate (IMAC, IMADC) instructions
Permutation and conditional move instructions
Vector compare and test instructions
Precision control, rounding, and conversion instructions

Download the full document to learn about new three-operand instructions, a new 128-bit media instruction format, and more.

Submission + - "Viacom hit me for infringing my own copyright (blogspot.com) 2

Submitted by

Chris Knight

on Wednesday August 29, 2007 @02:23PM

Chris Knight writes: "Long story short: I ran for school board where I live this past fall and created some TV commercials including this one with a "Star Wars" theme. A few months ago VH1 grabbed the commercial from YouTube and featured it in a segment of its show "Web Junk 2.0". Neither VH1 or its parent company Viacom told me they were doing this or asked my permission to use it, but I didn't mind it if they did. It was great to see the commercial was being enjoyed by a far wider audience than I'd expected. I was honored that they chose to use it and thought that Aries Spears's commentary about it was pretty hilarious, so I posted a clip of VH1's segment on YouTube so that I could put it on my blog. This morning I got an e-mail from YouTube saying that the video has been pulled because Viacom is claiming that I'm violating its copyright. Viacom used my video without permission on their commercial television show, and now says that I am infringing on THEIR copyright for showing the clip of the work that Viacom made in violation of my own copyright! Talk about chutzpah! Needless to say, I would like to fight this: not for any kind of monetary compensation, but just for the right to employ my own self-created material per Fair Use."

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