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Windows

British Royal Navy Submarines Now Run Windows 725

meist3r writes "On his Government blog, Microsoft's Ian McKenzie announced today that the Royal Navy was ahead of schedule for switching their nuclear submarines to a customized Microsoft Windows solution dubbed 'Submarine Command System Next Generation (SMCS NG)' which apparently consists of Windows 2000 network servers and XP workstations. In the article, it is claimed that this decision will save UK taxpayers £22m over the next ten years. The installation of the new system apparently took just 18 days on the HMS Vigilant. According to the BAE Systems press release from 2005, the overall cost of the rollout was £24.5m for all eleven nuclear submarines of the Vanguard, Trafalgar and Swiftsure classes. Talk about staying with the sinking ship."
Businesses

How Do I Manage Seasoned Programmers? 551

An anonymous reader writes "I have a technology background and worked as a programmer for a few years before slipping over to the dark side. I am now on the business side and have been given responsibility for a small team of Java programmers. While the technology aspect of what my team works on doesn't scare me, I need ideas to make sure the team stays motivated while reporting to me, a business-oriented guy. Perhaps I should mention I am in my early 30s while the majority of the team constitute an older, wiser generation. What advice should I follow to avoid turning into yet another Bill Lumbergh?"
The Almighty Buck

Used Game Market Affecting Price, Quality of New Titles 384

Gamasutra is running a feature discussing the used game market with various developers and analysts. The point has been raised by many members of the industry that used game sales are hurting developers and publishers even more lately, when they're already beleaguered by rising piracy rates and a struggling economy. Atari executives recently commented that used game sales are "extremely painful," while GameStop's CEO unsurprisingly came out in support of resales. We've recently discussed a few of the ways game designers are considering to limit used game sales. David Braben, chairman of UK-based developer Frontier Development had this to say: "Five years ago, a great game would have sold for a longer period of time than for a bad game — which was essentially our incentive to make great games. But no longer. Now publishers and developers just see revenue the initial few weeks regardless of the game's quality and then gamers start buying used copies which generates money that goes into GameStop's pocket, nobody else's."

Comment Re:Not quite there yet (Score 5, Funny) 245

Your post advocates a

(x) technical ( ) religious ( ) time travel

approach to resurrecting extinct species. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws.)

( ) Possibility of creating mutant monsters
( ) We are defenceless against brute force attacks
(x) People will not put up with giant stampy animals roaming about
(x) The police will not put up with giant stampy animals roaming about
( ) Requires too much cooperation from organised religion
(x) Requires immediate total cooperation from government regulators
( ) Time travel isn't possible
( ) Time travel into the past isn't possible without a wormhole which was (is) in the past already

Specifically, your plan fails to account for

(x) Laws expressly prohibiting it
(x) Lack of centrally controlling authority for mad scientists
(x) We haven't even sequenced the whole genome
(x) Being sued by Michael Crichton's estate
( ) Asshats
( ) Jurisdictional problems
( ) Unpopularity of weird old animals
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird old animals
( ) Huge existing animals occupying the evolutionary niche of the old ones
(x) Susceptibility of DNA to damage
(x) We don't even know how many chromosomes it should have
( ) Unavailability of any living relatives to carry the foetus to term

and the following philosophical objections may also apply:

(x) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever
been shown practical
(x) Religions will argue about playing god
(x) Pointlessness of an animal adapted for an ice age during a period of global warming
( ) What's dead should stay dead
(x) There are better things to spend the money on

Furthermore, this is what I think about you:

(x) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your
house down!

Comment Re:Big breaks start from small holes (Score 1) 67

I only know enough about networks to be dangerous but, experts correct me if I'm wrong, this has the potential to allow DNS query responses to be spoofed sending the victim to either a hostile website or through a hostile proxy? Also, I guess, by injecting fake ARP packets you could deny someone access to their own wireless network?

Comment Re:The biggest question (Score 1) 272

I saved it in case I started getting sick from the bite.

After a while of not getting sick I was tempted for a while to see what it tasted like, never did. But meat is meat.

You do know that once you start getting symptoms from Rabies you have one choice, kill yourself now or suffer an agonising death later.

Software

OpenOffice.org 3.0 Is Officially Here 284

SNate writes "After a grinding three-year development cycle, the OpenOffice.org team has finally squeezed out a new release. New features include support for the controversial Microsoft OOXML file format, multi-page views in Writer, and PDF import via an extension. Linux Format has an overview of the new release, asking the question: is it really worth the 3.0 label?"
Cellphones

Canadians File Class Actions Over Incoming SMS Fees 292

dontmakemethink writes "CTV reports that over the last couple of weeks class-action lawsuits have been filed against two major Canadian cellular service providers, Bell and Telus, for imposing fees on incoming text messages. While there has been very vocal opposition to the introduction of the fees, those who cannot change providers due to binding contracts feel the situation is actionable in court. Some of those not bound by contract, such as myself, have given their service provider notice that they will charge the provider for having to contact them to have charges reversed for unsolicited texts. Because service providers are aware of the volume of unsolicited texts, we feel they are liable for the inconvenience to their clients for preventing spam charges, and more importantly under no circumstances should service providers profit from spam. We also feel that requiring us to buy text bundles to avoid the inconvenience of reversing spam charges constitutes extortion. They can charge me for texts when they stop the spam."
Movies

Submission + - New DVD protection that stops (most) pc playback!

Lance Vick writes: "Well it would appear Warner Brothers has done it again. On at least our copy of 10,000 BC rented from RedBox at Wal-Mart... we found what appears to be some new variation of Sony's ARccoS ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARccOS_Protection ). A copy protection scheme where the disks actually ship with bad sectors which makes it difficult if not impossible for many pc ripping software and playback software to play the disk. Regular dvd players just blindly follow a set of instructions on the disk (like the ones that tell the player to show previews first no matter what). As such "most" consumer players are not affected... except for smarter ones that try to actually read the disk normally... they die.

In this case however we call it a variation because on 2 out of 3 machines in our office, the dvd-rom drives themselves came back with hardware errors trying to initialize the disk!

The two machines it did not work on resulted with a hardware output as follows:

ATAPI device hdc:
    Error: Illegal request — (Sense key=0x05)
    Logical block address out of range — (asc=0x21, ascq=0x00)
    The failed "Read 10" packet command was:
    "28 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 01 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 "

(^ this is a pretty standard error a linux kernel will spit out when a drive is unable to read a badly damaged disk or one that is just an unregognized format)

One failing machine is a desktop containing a "MAD DOG TF-DVDRW TSH652N".
The other is a laptop contianing a "MATASHITA DVD/CDRW UJDA770".

Since the hardware itself fails that means we do not even have the ability to try any software means to play back or rip the dvd we rented on those machines.
On the third machine (which contains a TSSTcorp CD/DVDW TS-L532U) It at least actually sees the disk as a dvd, however the protection still gave serious issues to most software.

VLC acted like it played the disc, but with no audio or video output.

unDVD, handbrake, and Thoggen all failed to be able to read through the bad sectors and the attempt would just die almost instantly.

Mplayer -will- play it however it takes a LONG time to seek before actually figureing the mess out and playing.( It actually took the video decoder 7 times to initialize before it actually was able to process!)

DVDrip however seems to be able to both play and rip the dvd without any issues. Way to go DVDrip team on supporting some new unknown copy protection!

We also have a uber generic consumer dvd player (a "Norcent np-315" we found beside a dumpster) in our workshop that plays the dvd flawlessly.

It seems this new ARccoS variant does a decent job of totally screwing up most attempts for a pc to read the virtually scratch free disk. That means we as legitimate holders of this disk with a right to play it, can not pop it into our main media machine and play it.

Bravo Warner Brothers, bravo. Way to encourage people to pirate.

We have yet to find any other information on this protection, nor anything regarding warner brothers releasing this mechanism. Hopefully someone else can shed some more light on this for us.

Please share any other experiences, tests, information, or thoughts regarding this.

-Lance Vick
Cross-Technical, LLC."

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