Comment I must be from the future... (Score 1) 90
... because I have been streaming video from VLC on my Android phone for months. Using VLC Stream & Convert.
Comment Re:My experiences of Fallout: New Vegas bugs (Score 1) 397
If a game crashes, that means that it nearly wrote over memory it shouldn't have and could corrupt your data, your operating system, even your hardware. You were "saved" by things like DEP and similar but that doesn't mean it's acceptable.
Say what? The MMU prevents apps from writing crap onto the operating system, not DEP. If a game can corrupt your operating system or hardware, you should thank them for exposing critical flaws in your operating system or hardware.
Submission + - Google Releases WebP (google.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Google has released WebP, a lossy image format based on the image encoding used by VP8 (the video codec used in Google's WebM video format) to compress keyframes. According to the FAQ, WebP achieves an average 39% more compression than JPEG and JPEG 2000. A gallery on the WebP homepage has a selection of images which compare the original JPEG image with the WebP encoded image shown as a PNG. There's no information available yet on which browsers will support the WebP image format but I imagine it will be all the browsers which currently have native WebM support — Firefox, Chrome, and Opera.
Submission + - Super Hi-Vision TV (bbc.co.uk)
Thorfinn.au writes: BBC News and NHK demonstrate.
Super Hi-Vision TV, 16 times sharper than HDTV, has been developed by Japanese public broadcaster NHK.
The standard could be used on giant public viewing screens, some of which may be in place for the 2012 Olympics.
NHK hope to broadcast in Super Hi-Vision by 2020, although no television currently exists that can fully show off the 7680-by-4320 pixel signal.
The "full HD" currently available means a display of 1920 by 1080 pixels — a quarter the number of pixels both vertically and a quarter horizontally.
Super Hi-Vision TV, 16 times sharper than HDTV, has been developed by Japanese public broadcaster NHK.
The standard could be used on giant public viewing screens, some of which may be in place for the 2012 Olympics.
NHK hope to broadcast in Super Hi-Vision by 2020, although no television currently exists that can fully show off the 7680-by-4320 pixel signal.
The "full HD" currently available means a display of 1920 by 1080 pixels — a quarter the number of pixels both vertically and a quarter horizontally.
Comment 404 not found? (Score 1) 154
While I was browsing it, the censorship map suddenly went offline and now returns a 404 Not Found error. Google stepping on somebody's toes?
Submission + - Breathing new life to old DirectDraw games (gfxile.net)
An anonymous reader writes: I bought a bunch of old Wing Commander games for windows, and these use DirectDraw, which Microsoft has deprecated. They don't work too well under Windows 7, so I ended up reimplementing ddraw.dll, using OpenGL to output the games' graphics. I wrote an article describing the process and all the fun workarounds I had to come up with, and released all related source code for others to hack on.
Submission + - Czech Copyright Bill Undercuts Copyleft, Artists (edri.org)
Andorin writes: Earlier this month a copy of a draft of the Czech Republic's new Copyright Act [Czech PDF] was leaked to Pirate News. Among several disturbing provisions include new regulations of "public licenses" such as Creative Commons licenses and the GPL/BSD licenses. The amendment essentially requires that an artist wishing to use a public license must notify the administrator of a collecting agency, and must prove that they created the work in question. This goes against one of the strengths of Creative Commons and other licenses, namely the ease with which they can be applied. Additionally, collecting agencies will have increased jurisdiction over copylefted and orphaned works. ZeroPaid covers the story, noting that the amendment also reduces the royalties which artists receive from libraries by 40%, with that money instead going directly to publishers.
Submission + - Native ZFS Is Coming To Linux Next Month (phoronix.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Phoronix is reporting that an Indian technology company has been porting the ZFS filesystem to Linux and will be releasing it next month as a native kernel module without a dependence on FUSE. "In terms of how native ZFS for Linux is being handled by this Indian company, they are releasing their ported ZFS code under the Common Development & Distribution License and will not be attempting to go for mainline integration. Instead, this company will just be releasing their CDDL source-code as a build-able kernel module for users and ensuring it does not use any GPL-only symbols where there would be license conflicts. KQ Infotech also seems confident that Oracle will not attempt to take any legal action against them for this work."
Submission + - .Net on Android is safe, says Microsoft (techworld.com.au) 1
An anonymous reader writes: With Oracle suing Google over "unofficial" support for Java in Android, Microsoft has come out an said it has no intention of taking action against the Mono implementatoon of C# on the Linux-based mobile OS. That's good news for Novell, which is in the final stages of preparing MonoDroid for release. Miguel de Icaza is not concerned about legal challenges by Microsoft over .Net implementations and even recommends that Google switch from using Java. However, Microsoft’s Community Promise has been criticised by the Free Software Foundation for not going far enough to protect open source implementations from patent litigation, which is at the heart of the Oracle-Google case.
Submission + - FTC strikes blow against astroturfing (idg.com.au)
angry tapir writes: "The U.S. Federal Trade Commission has settled a complaint it made against a public relations firm accused of using employees to pose as ordinary customers to post reviews of video games on Apple's iTunes store. Reverb Communications, based in Twain Harte, California, has worked with several video game developers, and employees of the firm posted several positive reviews of their clients' video games at iTunes between November 2008 and May 2009. It is likely the first astroturfing case the FTC has settled."
Submission + - Hackers accidentally send their code to Microsoft (zdnet.com.au)
joshgnosis writes: When hackers crash Windows in the course of developing malware, they'll often accidentally agree to send the virus code straight to Microsoft, according to senior security architect Rory Heckman
Submission + - Intel Dual-Core Pineview Atom Bumped To 1.8GHz (hothardware.com)
MojoKid writes: "Although they typically offer excellent battery life, overall performance has been a common complaint among many current netbook users, due in large part to the prevalence of Intel's low-power Atom processor in the space. And that's regardless of whether users are running standard desktop, multimedia or gaming applications. Technology marches on though, especially with the endless resources of Intel's monstrous fabrication technologies, and as such, Intel's netbook processor has been evolving. This article take a breaking look at an evolution of Intel's new Pinetrail Atom platform and the integrated Pineview Atom processor architecture Intel first unveiled last December. However, in the iteration tested—the Pineview-D Aton D525—it has taken on not only another processor core, but also ramped up clock speed to a speedier 1.8GHz. As a result, performance of the platform is increased significantly."
Submission + - Pentagon confirms 2008 computer breach
jowifi writes: The New York Times [nytimes.com] reports that the Pentagon has confirmed that, in 2008, a foreign agent instigated "the most significant breach of U.S. military computers ever" using a USB flash drive. While the breach was previously reported on Wired.com [wired.com] and the LA Times [latimes.com], this is the first official confirmation of the attack that led to the banning of USB drives on government computers.
Comment Re:What is the actual cost to the ISP? (Score 1) 276
I wish I lived in your country. Here in New Zealand, we get data at NZ$1/GB. 2.7TB would cost us US$1900.
We currently download 180GB/month. If we had a truly unlimited data connection, we'd do our darnedest to pull 3TB!
Comment Wow! (Score 1) 154
I did the manual install linked in TFA. Using the web browser is so fast now, it's like having a whole new phone. I can read 10 pages in the time it used to take to browse through 3. I quite enjoyed some of the Flash games over at kongregate.com as well.
