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Submission + - $3000 GeForce GTX TITAN Z Tested, Less Perf than $1500 R9 295X2 (pcper.com)

Submitted by Vigile
Vigile writes: NVIDIA announced its latest dual-GPU flagship card, the GeForce GTX Titan Z, at the GPU Technology Conference in late March with a staggering price point of $2999. Since that time, AMD announced and released the Radeon R9 295X2, its own dual-GPU card with a price tag of $1499. PC Perspective finally put the GTX Titan Z to the test and found that from a PC gamers view, the card is way overpriced for the performance it offers. At both 2560x1440 and 3840x2160 (4K) the R9 295X2 offered higher and more consistent frame rates sometimes by as much as 30%. The AMD card also only takes up two slots (though it does have a water cooling radiator to worry about) while the NVIDIA GTX Titan Z is a three-slot design. The Titan Z is quieter and uses much less power, but gamers considering a $1500 or $3000 graphics card selection are likely not overly concerned with power efficiency.

Submission + - Judge Says You Can Warn Others About Speed Traps

Submitted by cartechboy
cartechboy writes: Speeding is against the law, and yes, even going 5 mph over the speed limit is breaking the law. But everyone does it, right? You do it, your friends do it, heck, your grandmother does it. But what about when you see a cop? Some cops are ticketing people for notifying fellow motorists about speed traps. In Florida, Ryan Kintner simply flashed his high-beams to warning oncoming cars that there was a cop ahead. He was given a ticket for doing so. He went to court to fight the ticket, and a judge ruled that flashing lights are the equivalent of free speech, thus he had every right to flash his lights to warn oncoming cars. So what have we learned here? Basically, if you are a good Samaritan, flash your lights and warn oncoming traffic of speed traps, because this is America ,and we are allowed freedom of speech.

Submission + - Webkit.js - Who Needs A Browser? (i-programmer.info)

Submitted by mikejuk
mikejuk writes: Is this JavaScript's ultimate step towards world domination? Webkit is a full strength industrial HTML rendering engine — and guess what so is webkit.js, only it's a JavaScript program. So who needs a browser?
OK, I admit that webkit.js isn't actually "industrial strength" at the moment, but it is another example of what you can do when you think outside the box. The method is straightforward — take the current WebKit code and feed it through the Emscripten C++/C to JavaScript compiler and the rest is a matter of making it work. In this case "the rest" is quite a lot of work.
The final goal — a JavaScript browser that runs under node.js. Yes you could in theory get away with a "browser" that was 100% JavaScript. There would be no HTML rendering engine just a JavaScript engine and the rest would be JavaScript code. So just JavaScript — it's all you need.

Submission + - AMD's Chief Architect of Mantle on Asymmetric GPU Pairings and Graphics Pipeline

Submitted by Phopojijo
Phopojijo writes: Guennadi Riguer, chief architect of Mantle at AMD, answered a few questions about the technical details of their new graphics API. Of particular note, he discussed the potential for game developers to load balance across mismatched Mantle-supporting GPUs (for example, if an end user purchased a new video card and installed it alongside their old one). He also discussed how the graphics pipeline is evolving and the possibility of fixed-function hardware doing the same.

Submission + - Ask Slashdot: How to Protect Your Passwords from Amnesia.

Submitted by Phopojijo
Phopojijo writes: So, you can encrypt your password library using a client-side manager or encrypted file container. You could practice your password every day, keep no written record, and do everything else right. You then go in for a serious operation or get in a terrible accident and, when you wake up, suffer severe memory loss. Slashdot readers, what do you consider an acceptable trade-off between proper security and preventing a data-loss catastrophe? I will leave some details and assumptions up to interpretation (budget, whether you have friends or co-workers to rely on, whether your solution will defend against the Government, chance of success, and so forth). For instance, would you split your master password in pieces and pay an attourney to contact you with a piece of it in case of emergency? Would you get a safe deposit box? Some biometric device? Leave the password with your husband, wife, or significant other? What can Slashdot come up with?

Submission + - More Transistors on Chips than Neurons in our Brains Within 12 Years (ibtimes.co.uk)

Submitted by DavidGilbert99
DavidGilbert99 writes: Within the next 10-12 years, the chips powering our PCs will have more transistors on them than our brains have neurons — and that's around 100 billion in case you were wondering. However, Intel's Mooly Eden told an audience at CES 2014, than adding more transistors alone won't make computing better, that in order to do that we need to make computing more natural, intuitive and immersive.

Submission + - Are new technologies undermining the laws of war? (sagepub.com)

Submitted by Lasrick
Lasrick writes: This is a great read--as the author writes: 'Today, emerging military technologies—including unmanned aerial vehicles, directed-energy weapons, lethal autonomous robots, and cyber weapons—raise the prospect of upheavals in military practice so fundamental that they challenge assumptions underlying long-established international laws of war, particularly those relating to the primacy of the state and the geographic bounds of warfare. But the laws of war have been developed over a long period, with commentary and input from many cultures. What would seem appropriate in this age of extraordinary technological change, the author concludes, is a reconsideration of the laws of war in a deliberate and focused international dialogue that includes a range of cultural and institutional perspectives.'

Submission + - Bribe Devs To Improve Open Source Software (i-programmer.info) 1

Submitted by mikejuk
mikejuk writes: Bribe.io announces itself as:
A super easy way to bribe developers to fix bugs and add features in the software you're using.
Recognizing the fact that a lot of open source projects are maintained by developers working alone and in their spare time, the idea is to encourage other developers to by specifying a monetary value to a bug report or feature enhancement. Once an initial "Bribe" has been posted others can "chip in" and add to the financial incentive.
Obviously there are problems to overcome — will it lead to devs introducing bugs at the same time as new features just to get paid to fix them? Also how does this fit with the underlying ethos of open source software? I Can hear RMS already....

Submission + - AMD R9 290X "up to 1GHz" tests like 727 MHz (base), 850-880 MHz (boost).

Submitted by Phopojijo
Phopojijo writes: The recently released AMD Radeon R9 290X has an advertised shader clock rate of "up to 1GHz". The card brought formerly $1000-level performance down to a $550 price point. Its benchmarks tend to fluctuate wildly, however, based on the card's ability to maintain an intended maximum temperature of 95C. By analyzing across a variety of fan speeds, AMD's default settings are characteristic of a 727 MHz base clock with an average boost to 850-880 MHz. At these defaults, the card will not maintain 1GHz for more than a couple of minutes (or less).

Submission + - Battlefield 4 DRM Locking Part Of North America Out Of Its Release Date.

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: On the whole, Battlefield 4 had a reasonable launch. The have clearly learned from their past experiences with Battlefield 3 and, more notably, SimCity. Still, some customers are unable to access the game (until presumably October 30th at 7PM EDT, 39 hours after launch) because they are incorrectly flagged by region-locking. Do regional release dates help diminish all the work EA has been putting into Origin with their refund policy and live technical support? Should they just take our money and deliver the service before we change our minds?

Submission + - AMD Radeon R9 290X Fixes Pacing with New CrossFire

Submitted by Vigile
Vigile writes: AMD is releasing its fastest single GPU graphics card today, the $549 R9 290X based on a new, 6.2 billion transistor GPU called Hawaii. The brand new part has 2,816 stream processors and has a peak theoretical performance of 5.6 TFLOPS. PC Perspective has done a full round of testing on the card to see where it stacks up and it does in fact beat the GeForce GTX 780, a card that costs $100 more. In fact, it also compares well to the $999 GTX TITAN flagship. Maybe more interesting is the completely redesigned CrossFire integration that no longer uses a bridge and fixes the CrossFire + Eyefinity/4K pacing issues that have plagued AMD for some time. As it turns out, with this new hardware, 4K tiled display CrossFire appears to be corrected.

Submission + - Next Gen Graphics and Process Migration: 20 nm and Beyond (pcper.com)

Submitted by JoshMST
JoshMST writes: So why are we in the middle of GPU-renaming hell? AMD may be releasing a new 28 nm Hawaii chip in the next few days, it is still based on the same 28 nm process that the original HD 7970 debuted on nearly two years ago. Quick and easy (relative terms) process node transitions look to be a thing of the past with 20 nm lines applicable to large ASICs not being opened until mid-2014. This covers the issues that we have seen, that are present, and that which will be showing up in the years to come. It is amazing how far that industry has come in the past 18 years, but the challenges ahead are greater than ever.

Submission + - Bell Canada Will Begin Tracking All Customer Online Activity

Submitted by theshowmecanuck
theshowmecanuck writes: A report in the Financial Post says: "A move by BCE Inc. to track its cellular customers’ every move and use that information for marketing purposes has prompted public complaints along with an investigation by Canada’s privacy regulator. ... BCE plans to change its privacy policy on Nov. 16 and begin using account and network usage information to serve up personalized advertising it says will be more relevant to users. ... BCE’s policy states it will collect network usage information including: web pages users visit from their mobile devices or home Internet, search terms used, location, app usage, television viewing and calling patterns." BCE == Bell Canada Enterprises. Granted Google and Facebook do this already, but you have a choice to use them or not. With limited competition in the mobility market, when your service provider gets in on the act, it gets increasingly hard for people to opt out of corporate bother's ever watchful eye. Is VPN (or similar mechanism) for all mobile users the answer? Or do we just have to learn to eat whatever they feed us?

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