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PlayStation (Games)

Submission + - Porn Industry Warms Up to Blu-ray

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Just when you thought it was safe to buy an HD DVD player, the adult video industry has capitulated to Blu-ray. Digital Playground (DP), a technology trend-setter in the porn business, will ship its first Blu-ray title in a couple of weeks. The move augurs well for the high-def DVD format, which seemed all but dead in the influential porn world just one year ago. That's when DP dropped Blu-ray in favor of HD DVD. Having first embraced Blu-ray for its superior capacity and alleged content security, DP decided at the last hour to go with HD DVD instead and released its first four titles early this year. So why go with Blu-ray? DP founder Joone explains, "A lot of people were emailing that bought a PlayStation and they were basically saying, 'When are you guys going to release Blu-ray?'"
Sci-Fi

Submission + - Gravity Defying Carpet very much possible (newlaunches.com) 2

Submitted by
SK
SK writes: "A flying carpet, just like the one in Walt Disney's creation 'The Arabian Nights' may soon be a reality. Laminarayan Mahadevan along with his colleagues at Harvard studied the aerodynamics of a flexible, rippling sheet moving through a fluid. Based on their study, the researchers came to the conclusion that making a carpet that would stay aloft in air may be possible. Mahadevan says that to stay afloat in air, a sheet measuring about 10 centimetres long and 0.1 millimetres thick would need to vibrate at about 10 hertz with amplitude of about 0.25 millimetres."
Space

Submission + - Intergfalactic particle beam spotted

Submitted by sm62704 (mcgrew)
sm62704 (mcgrew) writes: New scientist lightheartedly reports:

A new weapon of intergalactic war has been found. A jet of hot gas and high-energy particles is shooting out from the core of a galaxy called 3C321 and hitting a neighbour, a new study reveals.

Galaxies have been known to ram into each other, but this is the first known example of attack by particle beam
It goes on with less jocularity to explain this phenomena. And before any of you quip 'that was no moon', actually it was a black hole.
Censorship

Submission + - Wikipedia COO was Convicted Felon (theregister.co.uk) 4

Submitted by
An anonymous reader writes: From the Register:

"For more than six months, beginning in January of this year, Wikipedia's million-dollar check book was balanced by a convicted felon. When Carolyn Bothwell Doran was hired as the Chief Operating Officer (COO) of the Florida-based Wikimedia Foundation, she had a criminal record in three other states — Virginia, Maryland, and Texas — and she was still on parole for a DUI (driving under the influence of alcohol) hit and run that resulted in a fatality. Her record also included convictions for passing bad checks, theft, petty larceny, additional DUIs, and unlawfully wounding her boyfriend with a gun shot to the chest."
Windows

Submission + - Antivirus: A waste of 50% of your HD throughput? (codinghorror.com)

Submitted by dwalsh
dwalsh writes: Are we wasting our (Windows) computers performance on a placebo? Jeff Atwood seems to think so:

"The performance cost of virus scanning (lose 50% of disk performance, plus some percent of CPU speed) does not justify the benefit of a 33% detection rate and marginal protection."

"Ask yourself this: why don't Mac users run anti-virus software? Why don't UNIX users run anti-virus software? Because they don't need to. They don't run as administrators."

The article is a criticism of AV as a blacklist approach, that mostly protects against last months viruses. How many Slashdot Windows users rely solely on a firewall, a decent web browser, and good common sense (like Momma used to make it) when it comes to attachments?
It's funny. Laugh.

Submission + - Slashdot Gems 1

Submitted by
Anonymous Coward
Anonymous Coward writes: "In the years I have read Slashdot, I have often enjoyed the cleverness and humor of some of the readers replies to the various stories. Take for instance one of the stories posted today about Iran building a supercomputer with 216 AMD processors, one wit quipped that 'Not only can they never be allowed to have nukes but it will be a cold day in hell before they are allowed to get the processing power to run Windows Vista!!!!!'

For the benefit of posterity, I recommend that these 'gems' should be collected and published in a book entitled 'Slashdot Gems.' However, if you feel this task would be quite an undertaking, a simplier way of sharing the mirth would be ask your readers for a list of their memorable Slashdot moments, and then post them in a story thread entitled 'The Best of Slashdot Humor'."
Programming

Submission + - Granny Hackers make History (go.com)

Submitted by
Catbus
Catbus writes: "During World War II the Army ran out of male mathematicians and turned to six women to program the world's first computer — ENIAC. Historian Kathy Kleiman has recorded oral histories of these women — now in their 80s — in her upcoming documentary film, "Invisible Computers.""
Security

Submission + - YouTube Vulnerability might be exploited for weeks (xssed.com)

Submitted by nickn4med
nickn4med writes: Security site xssed claims a critical cross-site scripting vulnerability affecting YouTube has been in the wild for weeks. "It is a query string XSS that appears in the video viewing page. Works only with IE and probably Konqueror. Malicious people can use it to spread malware, steal cookie based authentication credentials and redirect unaware users to phishing scam pages."
Security

Submission + - Security giants fail VB100 virus test

Submitted by Stony Stevenson
Stony Stevenson writes: Researchers at Virus Bulletin have released the results of the latest VB100 computer security test, highlighting failures at a number of leading security vendors. The December edition of the VB100 test subjected security software to 100 Windows 2000 viruses collected from labs and websites. In order to pass the test, vendors needed to identify 100 malware samples as well as avoid reporting false positives on clean samples. Kaspersky failed the test by missing one virus from the list, while Sophos missed eight. Trend Micro missed four virus samples, failing VB100 certification for the fourth time in five tests.
Space

Submission + - Astronauts test sex in space 3

Submitted by Arevazi
Arevazi writes: The Guardian has a story about a book confirming that US and Russian astronauts have had sex in space for research programmes. The book (The Final Mission: Mir, The Human Adventure by Pierre Kohler) cites a confidential Nasa report on a space shuttle mission in 1996. A project codenamed STS-XX was to explore sexual positions possible in a weightless atmosphere. The result: only four positions were found possible without "mechanical assistance". One of the principal findings was that the classic so-called missionary position, which is so easy on earth when gravity pushes one downwards, is simply not possible.
Businesses

What If Yoda Ran IBM? 205

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the and-green-gene-was-born dept.
Esther Schindler writes to mention that one IT leader who came from big business found himself in quite another world when he transitioned into a smaller business, specifically with respect to the amount of attention from their vendors. He presents an amusing approach with a familiar twist. "Not only are the IBMs of the world leaving money on the table, they're also risking future sales. The IT leaders at small organizations will in many cases be employed by larger organizations someday. Why alienate them? Vendors could engage IT leaders in small organizations now and build brand loyalty. How could they make such a business model work? Let's imagine (with apologies to George Lucas) what Yoda might do if he were running a large consultancy."
Enlightenment

Submission + - Top 10 Tech Letdowns of 2007 (cio.com)

Submitted by
knash
knash writes: "CIO.com put together a list and slideshow of tech letdowns this year, including green IT, Microsoft Vista and, yes, the iPhone. Find out why CIO picked what it picked, and you can add your own biggest moment of feeling utterly deflated in 2007...Here's an excerpt: We had much to hail this year, including rising IT salaries and better virtualization tools, but we also sighed over IT products and ideas that fell short. H-1B visa reform? Not likely. "Spam king" arrested? Yeah, that was a big help. We can't wait to buy a Palm Foleo! (Um, never mind.) Has your business deployed Microsoft Vista? And while environmentalists cheer Al Gore's Nobel, the green IT movement looks like a crawl. Read on about what's got us feeling cheated this year. And since misery loves company, please add your own bubble bursts. Or debate ours."

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