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Microsoft

Submission + - Gabe Newell Wants to Support Linux, Because Windows 8 is a 'Catastrophe' (kotaku.com)

Submitted by wasimkadak
wasimkadak writes: The head of Valve says his company is working to develop for Linux, calling Microsoft's Windows 8 a "catastrophe" that will lead product manufacturers to abandon the platform.

At a gaming event in Seattle last night, as reported by AllThingsD, Valve CEO Gabe Newell said the one thing holding back Linux is video game support.

"The big problem that is holding back Linux is games. People don't realize how critical games are in driving consumer purchasing behavior," Newell said, according to AllThingsD. "We want to make it as easy as possible for the 2,500 games on Steam to run on Linux as well. It's a hedging strategy. I think Windows 8 is a catastrophe for everyone in the PC space. I think we'll lose some of the top-tier PC/OEMs, who will exit the market. I think margins will be destroyed for a bunch of people. If that's true, then it will be good to have alternatives to hedge against that eventuality."
Microsoft

Submission + - Microsoft comes under fire for five-figure Xbox 360 "patch fee" (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by wasimkadak
wasimkadak writes: Developer Phil Fish knows there's a problem preventing some people from enjoying his Xbox 360 puzzle platformer Fez as intended. But he's not going to fix it, thanks to what he says is an exorbitant fee of "tens of thousands of dollars" that Microsoft would charge to recertify the game after a needed patch.

The issue started on June 22, when Fish released a patch intended to fix some outstanding gameplay and performance issues with Fez. That patch gave rise to new problems for some players, though, by causing their save files to appear as corrupted, in effect erasing their progress through the game.

Microsoft pulled the initial patch for the game mere hours after it first went up, to prevent the bug it contained from spreading too far. But even though Fish initially described the issue as "fairly widespread," he now says he estimates the progress-destroying problem only affects the less than one percent of players that have already completed the game (or come very close) before installing the patch.

Submission + - Alan Turing Plays Garry Kasparov At Chess 58 Years After His Death (chessbase.com) 1

Submitted by wasimkadak
wasimkadak writes: It is an amazing fact, Kasparov told a packed audience (at 09:00 a.m.!), that the very first chess program in history was written a few years before computers had been invented. It was designed by a visionary man who knew that programmable computers were coming and that, once they were built, they would be able to play chess. The man, of course, was Alan Turing, one of the greatest mathematicians who ever lived. Soon after the war he wrote the instructions that would enable a machine to play chess. Since there was as yet no machine that could execute the instructions he did so himself, acting as a human CPU and requiring more than half an hour per move. A single game is recorded, one in which Turing's "paper machine" lost to a colleague.

Kasparov sketched the historical context of Turing’s involvement in chess and then went on to describe how chess computer experts had reconstructed the paper machine to run on a modern day computer. The lecture was streamed live on the Internet. We will provide a link plus a full transcript and pictures in a special report this weekend.
Japan

Submission + - Robot Hand Beats You at Rock, Paper, Scissors 100% Of The Time (ieee.org)

Submitted by wasimkadak
wasimkadak writes: This robot hand will play a game of rock, paper, scissors with you. Sounds like fun, right? Not so much, because this particular robot wins every. Single. Time.

It only takes a single millisecond for the robot to recognize what shape your hand is in, and just a few more for it to make the shape that beats you, but it all happens so fast that it's more or less impossible to tell that the robot is waiting until you commit yourself before it makes its move, allowing it to win 100% of the time.

Submission + - Quad-GK104 Graphics Card Coming? (videocardz.com)

Submitted by wasimkadak
wasimkadak writes: Yes, you read that right. Hartware.net reports, that one of the NVIDIA’s AIB partner has prepared a new graphics card with four Kepler GPUs.

According to the source, one of the manufacturers has demonstrated behind closed doors during Computex, some mysterious card. This particular model would be powered by four GK104 GPUs, which is twice as many as the number of GPUs in GeForce GTX 690.

Hartware.net claims that this quad-gpu card would require 600 to 800 Watts. As the source further reports, manufacturer is doing it’s best to keep the Wattage as low as possible. This would obviously require some limitations to the clocks, which were not yet determined.

What do you think, is there a need for such card? If you were a wealthy PC enthusiast, would you buy one?
Piracy

Submission + - Open WiFi Owner Not Liable For Illegal File-Sharing, Court Rules (torrentfreak.com)

Submitted by wasimkadak
wasimkadak writes: Dependant on the side they’re representing, lawyers around the world have taken opposing stances when it comes to liability for infringement via open WiFi. When representing plaintiffs they speak of ‘a duty of care’ to rightsholders and when defending Internet users they insist that holding individuals responsible for the actions of others is a step too far. In a landmark case in Finland, a court has just agreed with the latter.
Intel

Submission + - Ivy Bridge heat issue indeed caused by thermal paste (hardware.info)

Submitted by wasimkadak
wasimkadak writes: During the launch of Intel's Ivy Bridge processors, it turned out that the processors were harder to keep cool than their Sandy Bridge predecessors. Late April, we reported that this was possibly caused by the chip being smaller with as a result heat being concentrated on a smaller surface. It was revealed that Intel had used thermal paste in the chips, instead of electrical non-conducting solder.

The Japanese website Impress PC Watch has since removed the Integrated Heatspreader (IHS) of an Intel Core i7-3770K processor and put it to the test. The white substance has been scraped off and replaced with OCZ thermal paste. The test was then repeated with Coollaboratory paste. According to the specifications, this Coollaboratory Liquid Pro thermal paste has a thermal conductivity of 82 watt per metre Kelvin (W/mK). The CPU cooler that was used is Thermalright's Silver Arrow SB-E, which features eight 6 millimetre heat pipes and both a 140 mm and 150 mm fan.
Your Rights Online

Submission + - Why Anonymous 'might well be the most powerful organization on Earth (nationalpost.com)

Submitted by wasimkadak
wasimkadak writes: Christopher Doyon, a.k.a. Commander X, sits atop a hillside in an undisclosed location in Canada, watching a reporter and photographer make their way along a narrow path to join him, away from the prying eyes of law enforcement.

It’s been a few weeks of encrypted emails back and forth, working out the security protocol to follow for interviewing Doyon, one of the brains behind Anonymous, now a fugitive from the FBI.

Doyon, who readily admits taking part in some of the highest-profile hacktivist attacks on websites last year — from Tunisia to Orlando, Sony to PayPal — was arrested in September for a comparatively minor assault on the county website of Santa Cruz, Calif., where he was living, in retaliation for the town forcibly removing a homeless encampment on the courthouse steps.

The “virtual sit-in” lasted half an hour. For that, Doyon is facing 15 years in jail.
Twitter

Submission + - 55.000+ Twitter usernames and passwords leaked (airdemon.net) 1

Submitted by wasimkadak
wasimkadak writes: Today anonymous hackers leaked more than 55.000 hacked twitter accounts username and password through Pastebin. It was very shocking to see such a massive number of Twitter accounts are hacked. Also celebrity accounts are hacked.

'The micro blogging platform is aware of this hack and was taking necessary actions to save those people’s account from malicious activity', said a Twitter insider.

It was huge, 55.000+ accounts has been hacked and it wasn’t possible to share such a huge pile of usernames and passwords in a single paste. So it took the hackers five Pastebin pages to leak the data. This hack is just an alert to other millions of Twitter users that they could be hacked anytime.

Submission + - MIT's laser-powered camera can detect objects hidden around corners (engadget.com)

Submitted by wasimkadak
wasimkadak writes: One of the most thrilling things about human existence is that you never know what's lurking around the corner. It could be a newborn baby, a sweet job, a delicious churro — doesn't really matter, because it's a surprise, and surprises are fun and surprising. Just don't tell that to the doldrum dwellers over at MIT, because apparently, they don't agree. The same team that created a camera with light-speed shutter rates has now expanded upon their project, with a camera capable of seeing around corners. Literally. To do this, the system uses a so-called femtosecond laser to send out extremely short light pulses — so short, in fact, that their entire lifespan is measured in quadrillionths of a second. To capture an object lurking around a corner, the device aims its laser at a nearby wall, thereby allowing the light to bounce around the room before eventually landing on the concealed object.
Security

Submission + - Duqu Trojan uses 'unknown programming language' (zdnet.com)

Submitted by wasimkadak
wasimkadak writes: The Duqu Trojan, referred to by some as Stuxnet 2.0, was partly written using an unknown programming language. The payload DLL, which communicates exclusively with the Command and Control (C&C) server so that the worm knows what to do once it has infected a system, has code that doesn’t resemble anything seen before. While secuirty researchers have worked out what the mystery code does, they aren’t sure about the syntax.

Some parts of it, including those for downloading and executing additional modules, were written in standard C++, but a big chunk of it was not. This particular section contains no references to any standard or user-written C++ functions, and may have been created by a different programming team. Security firm Kaspersky says the unusual code is unique to Duqu: many parts are directly borrowed from Stuxnet, but this one is new. The company has named it the Duqu Framework, and has noted that it is not written in C++, Objective C, Java, Python, Ada, Lua, and many other languages it checked. Unlike the rest of Duqu, it also wasn’t compiled with Microsoft’s Visual C++ 2008. All we know is that it’s object-oriented.
Your Rights Online

Submission + - You Can't Copyright Porn (torrentfreak.com)

Submitted by wasimkadak
wasimkadak writes: A woman who says she was incorrectly accused of sharing copyrighted material on BitTorrent has filed a harassment lawsuit against a copyright troll. Porn outfit Hard Drive productions had demanded $3,400 to make their threatened lawsuit go away but their target not only says she’s innocent and harassed, but also that porn cannot be copyrighted. So, does filmed sex promote scientific progress or constitute useful art? A court may soon have to decide.
Facebook

Submission + - The IM Conversation In Which 19-Year-Old Zuckerber (businessinsider.com)

Submitted by wasimkadak
wasimkadak writes: In one of these conversations, a 19-year-old Zuckerberg confers, during the fall of 2003, with his best friend from high school, Adam D'Angelo—who would become Facebook CTO and later cofound Quora—about which project he should focus on: a "dating site" he was asked to build for some Harvard seniors, or "the Facebook thing." Zuckerberg and D'Angelo discuss what "the Facebook thing" should be like.

Zuckerberg: So you know how I'm making that dating site

Zuckerberg: I wonder how similar that is to the Facebook thing

Zuckerberg: Because they're probably going to be released around the same time

Zuckerberg: Unless I fuck the dating site people over and quit on them right before I told them I'd have it done.

D'Angelo: haha

Zuckerberg: Like I don't think people would sign up for the facebook thing if they knew it was for dating
Apple

Submission + - Why Apple's products are 'Designed in California' (tuaw.com)

Submitted by wasimkadak
wasimkadak writes: Look at the back of your iPhone, or your iPad, or on the bottom of your Mac. You'll see the following words embossed somewhere: "Designed by Apple in California. Assembled in China." Many Americans, all the way up to the President himself, have wondered why Apple has outsourced virtually all of its manufacturing overseas. At a dinner with several top US technology executives last year, President Obama asked Steve Jobs flat out what it would take to bring those jobs back to the US. According to Jobs, there's simply no way for it to happen.

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Thus spake the master programmer: "After three days without programming, life becomes meaningless." -- Geoffrey James, "The Tao of Programming"

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