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Submission + - Linus Torvalds derides Slashdot (twit.tv) 4

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: In an otherwise fine interview in the popular TWIT FLOSS Weekly podcast, Linus Torvalds criticized Slashdot for, among other things, group think and a religious attitude towards Open Source. The interview did throw some insights on the life and times of Linus in Finland and in USA.

Submission + - NVidia Cripples PhysX "Open API" 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: In a foot-meet-bullet type move, NVidia is going to disable PhysX engine if you are using a display adapter other than one that came from their company. This despite the fact that you may have an NVidia card on your system specifically to do this type of processing. "For a variety of reasons some development expense, some quality assurance and some business reasons Nvidia will not support GPU accelerated PhysX with Nvidia GPUs while GPU rendering is happening on non-Nvidia GPUs." Time to say hello to Microsoft dx physics or Intel's Havok engine.
Operating Systems

Submission + - Microsoft releases new OS attempt, Barrelfish (networkworld.com)

Submitted by
Julie188
Julie188 writes: "You've likely heard of Microsoft's next-gen operating system projects Midori and Singularity, but earlier this month researchers released a prototye for another OS, code-named Barrelfish. Barrelfish is an OS written specifically for multicore environments. It hopes to improve the performance of boxes with such chips by creating a network bus, if you will, between cores. Today such systems tend to share resources like memory. As demand increases, performance of the box decreases as shared resources don't scale well. Barrelfish instead passes messages between cores on its bus, and reportedly uses a database-like approach to keep track of the hardware available."
AMD

AMD Radeon HD 5870 Adds DX11, Multi-Monitor Gaming 195

Posted by Soulskill from the still-won't-run-crysis dept.
Vigile writes "Few people will doubt that PC gaming is in need of a significant shot in the arm with the consistent encroachment of consoles and their dominating hold on developers. Today AMD is releasing the Radeon HD 5870 graphics card based on the Evergreen-series of GPUs first demonstrated in June. Besides offering best-in-class performance for a single-GPU graphics board, the new card is easily the most power efficient in terms of idle power consumption and performance per watt. Not only that, but AMD has introduced new features that could help keep PC gaming in the spotlight, including the first DirectX 11 implementation and a very impressive multi-monitor gaming technology, Eyefinity, which we discussed earlier this month. The review at PC Perspective includes the full gamut of gaming benchmarks in both single- and dual-GPU configurations as well as videos of Eyefinity running on three 30" displays."
Microsoft

Early Details On Courier, Microsoft's Take On a Tablet 175

Posted by Soulskill from the page-turners dept.
rbanffy points out an article on Gizmodo about Courier, a tablet (or more accurately, a booklet) in development at Microsoft. "The dual 7-inch (or so) screens are multitouch, and designed for writing, flicking and drawing with a stylus, in addition to fingers. They're connected by a hinge that holds a single iPhone-esque home button. Statuses, like wireless signal and battery life, are displayed along the rim of one of the screens. On the back cover is a camera, and it might charge through an inductive pad, like the Palm Touchstone charging dock for Pre." A concept video shows off the ability to use the two different screens for separate purposes, like browsing the web or a photo album on the left and using the right as a notepad or workspace.

Submission + - First public sighting of Larrabee (pcpro.co.uk)

Submitted by
darien
darien writes: "Intel has given the first public demo of Larrabee, its x86-based multi-core graphics system, at IDF in San Francisco. The demo showcased real-time ray traced reflections, but looked distinctly underwhelming compared to what's possible with current GPU technology — and no one was willing to talk about the technical details."

Comment Excerpt (Score 2, Informative) 181

by Eddy Luten (#29506791) Attached to: EU Funding "Orwellian" Artificial Intelligence Snooping System
For those who do not feel comfortable going to the Project INDECT site here's an excerpt:

Project Description

Intelligent information system supporting observation, searching and detection for security of citizens in urban environment.

The main objectives of the INDECT project are:

  • to develop a platform for: the registration and exchange of operational data, acquisition of multimedia content, intelligent processing of all information and automatic detection of threats and recognition of abnormal behaviour or violence,
  • to develop the prototype of an integrated, network-centric system supporting the operational activities of police officers, providing techniques and tools for observation of various mobile objects,
  • to develop a new type of search engine combining direct search of images and video based on watermarked contents, and the storage of metadata in the form of digital watermarks,

The main expected results of the INDECT project are:

  • to realise a trial installation of the monitoring and surveillance system in various points of city agglomeration and demonstration of the prototype of the system with 15 node stations,
  • implementation of a distributed computer system that is capable of acquisition, storage and effective sharing on demand of the data as well as intelligent processing, construction of a family of prototypes of devices used for mobile object tracking,
  • construction of a search engine for fast detection of persons and documents based on watermarking technology and utilising comprehensive research on watermarking technology used for semantic search,
  • construction of agents assigned to continuous and automatic monitoring of public resources such as: web sites, discussion forums, UseNet groups, file servers, p2p networks as well as individual computer systems,
  • elaboration of Internet based intelligence gathering system, both active and passive, and demonstrating its efficiency in a measurable way.

Sinister indeed.
Privacy

EU Funding "Orwellian" Artificial Intelligence Snooping System 181

Posted by timothy from the why-does-this-bother-you? dept.
leonbenjamin writes "Britain's Telegraph reports on a five-year research programme, called Project Indect, which aims to develop computer programmes which act as 'agents' to monitor and process information from web sites, discussion forums, file servers, peer-to-peer networks and even individual computers. Its main objectives include the 'automatic detection of threats and abnormal behaviour or violence.' Shami Chakrabarti, head of the UK's Liberty human-rights NGO, said: 'Profiling whole populations instead of monitoring individual suspects is a sinister step in any society. ... It's dangerous enough at national level, but on a Europe-wide scale the idea becomes positively chilling.'"

Submission + - SPAM: Court to scammer: Give up your house or go to jail 1

Submitted by
coondoggie
coondoggie writes: "Too many online scammers get away with what amounts to a wrist slap but a case if Las Vegas this week seems to be heading the right direction at least.

According to the Federal Trade Commission, a business opportunity scammer has been held in contempt for the second time by a federal court and ordered to turn over the title of his home in Las Vegas or face jail time.

The court found that the operator of the scam, Richard Neiswonger, failed to deliver marketable title to his home, in violation of a previous court order entering a $3.2 million judgment against him, the FTC stated. The FTC charged that the defendant deceived consumers with false promises that they could make a six-figure income by selling his "asset protection services" to those seeking to hide their assets from potential lawsuits or creditors.

[spam URL stripped]"
Link to Original Source

Comment Re:Help is easy to get. (Score 1) 360

by djk1024 (#29369605) Attached to: Bootstrapping a New Technology?
Sorry for the latency of the reply. My comment Karma ran out. I looked at long lists of Angel Clubs, but when that's when my insecurities regarding the execution of of the business kicks in. I really need a business guy/partner to carry this forward. Someone that would be comfortable with this phase of the start-up. I have what I think is a solid business plan and a strong patent on a novel technology, but frankly, I'm not the business guy to carry it off.

Comment Re:Nope, this is very 2000s (Score 1) 285

by commodore64_love (#29369395) Attached to: Microsoft Aims To Cure Server-Hugging Engineers

I knew I should have been a programmer. As each year goes by my hardware skills become less-and-less useful, because they keep moving the equipment to remote locations and handing-over control to programmers or administrators (or lawyers).

Oh well. (signs up for college). Time to earn that second degree (and maybe score with the ladies for a change).
Programming

Bjarne Stroustrup On Concepts, C++0x 346

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the down-and-out-but-not-over dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Danny Kalev has an interview with Bjarne Stroustrup about the failure of concepts, the technical issues of concepts, whether the ISO committee's days are over, and whether C++ is at a dead-end. 'I don't think that concepts were doomed to fail. Also, I don't think concepts were trying to fix many things or to transform C++ into an almost new language. They were introduced to do one thing: provide direct language support to the by-far dominant use of templates: generic programming. They were intended to allow direct expression of what people already state in comments, in design documents, and in documentation. Every well-designed template is written with a notion of what is required from its arguments. For good code, those requirements are documented (think of the standard's requirements tables). That is, today most templates are designed using an informal notion of concepts.'"

Comment Re:Isn't there a fundamental problem... (Score 1) 176

by Eddy Luten (#28985439) Attached to: AMD's OpenCL Allows GPU Code To Run On X86 CPUs

Nothing stops anyone from using the APIs, I'm talking about a working implementation.

OpenGL is supported on pretty much all available platforms and has a standard implementation on them: Windows has opengl32.dll, Linux has Mesa3d, and Apple also has a default implementation.

I guess the point I'm trying to make here that an API is worthless without an implementation: the library containing the actual functionality. What are you loading if you don't have a IHV implementation available? Nothing. Just like OpenGL, OpenCL will need a default, software, implementation supported on all platforms.

And I can promise you that Microsoft will not be jumping on this OpenCL bandwagon (providing a platform default software implementation) with their development Direct3D Compute Shaders and the fact that Microsoft is no longer a Khronos partner. If they do in the next version of Windows I'll be very pleasantly surprised.

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