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Microsoft

Submission + - Windows Phone SMS attack discovered (winrumors.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: As announced on the Winrumors site: "Microsoft’s range of Windows Phone devices suffer from a denial-of-service attack that allows attackers to disable the messaging functionality on a device.

The flaw works simply by sending an SMS to a Windows Phone user. Windows Phone 7.5 devices will reboot and the messaging hub will not open despite repeat attempts. We have tested the attack on a range of Windows Phone devices, including HTC’s TITAN and Samsung’s Focus Flash. Some devices were running the 7740 version of Windows Phone 7.5, others were on Mango RTM build 7720. The attack is not device specific and appears to be an issue with the way the Windows Phone messaging hub handles messages. The bug is also triggered if a user sends a Facebook chat message or Windows Live Messenger message to a recipient."
Apple

Submission + - TextMate 2.0 Goes Alpha (macromates.com)

Submitted by scc
scc writes: After years of waiting, TextMate 2.0 has arrived, if only in alpha. Improved scopes and indenting, new character classes, buffer completion, more control in themes, nested snippets, and discontinuous selections are just a sample of the new machinery. It's been a long time coming, but it looks like it may have been worth the wait.
The Media

Submission + - Time's Person of the Year is 'The Protester'

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens writes
Hugh Pickens writes writes: "Time's editor Rick Stengel announced on 'The Today Show' that "The Protester" is Time Magazine's Person of the Year: From the Arab Spring to Athens, From Occupy Wall Street to Moscow. “For capturing and highlighting a global sense of restless promise, for upending governments and conventional wisdom, for combining the oldest of techniques with the newest of technologies to shine a light on human dignity and, finally, for steering the planet on a more democratic though sometimes more dangerous path for the 21st century." The initial gut reaction on Twitter seems to be one of derision, as Time has gone with a faceless human mass instead of picking a single person like Tunisian fruit vendor Mohamed Bouazizi who Time mentions in the story and is widely acknowledged as the person who set off the "Arab Spring." In 2006, Time chose "You" with a mirrored cover to much disappointment, picked the personal computer as "Machine of the Year" and Earth as "Planet of the Year," proving "that it should probably just be "Story of the Year" if they aren't going to acknowledge an actual person," writes Dashiell Bennett. "By not picking any one individual, they've basically chosen no one.""

Submission + - Amazon Silk revisited: Is it fast(er) yet? (extremetech.com)

Submitted by
MrSeb
MrSeb writes: "When the Kindle Fire came out last month, one of the biggest disappointments users had was that Amazon’s promise of “ultra-fast web browsing” seemed to be all talk. In our original testing, almost exactly one month ago, we found that Silk was actually slower going through the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud servers than just connecting to the web directly. Amazon’s position on the whole thing was that Silk would get faster as the back end accumulated more data to cache and predict user behavior. We’ve now been using Silk for a month — and the results are... interesting."
Classic Games (Games)

M.U.L.E. Is Back 110

Posted by Soulskill from the not-for-the-red-wings dept.
jmp_nyc writes "The developers at Turborilla have remade the 1983 classic game M.U.L.E. The game is free, and has slightly updated graphics, but more or less the same gameplay as the original version. As with the original game, up to four players can play against each other (or fewer than four with AI players taking the other spots). Unlike the original version, the four players can play against each other online. For those of you not familiar with M.U.L.E., it was one of the earliest economic simulation games, revolving around the colonization of the fictitious planet Irata (Atari spelled backwards). I have fond memories of spending what seemed like days at a time playing the game, as it's quite addictive, with the gameplay seeming simpler than it turns out to be. I'm sure I'm not the only Slashdotter who had a nasty M.U.L.E. addiction back in the day and would like a dose of nostalgia every now and then."
Programming

The State of Ruby VMs — Ruby Renaissance 89

Posted by Soulskill from the take-your-pick dept.
igrigorik writes "In the short span of just a couple of years, the Ruby VM space has evolved to more than just a handful of choices: MRI, JRuby, IronRuby, MacRuby, Rubinius, MagLev, REE and BlueRuby. Four of these VMs will hit 1.0 status in the upcoming year and will open up entirely new possibilities for the language — Mac apps via MacRuby, Ruby in the browser via Silverlight, object persistence via Smalltalk VM, and so forth. This article takes a detailed look at the past year, the progress of each project, and where the community is heading. It's an exciting time to be a Rubyist."
Cellphones

Submission + - The best Mobile Apps of 2007 (blogspot.com)

Submitted by 6
6 writes: With the launch of the iPhone, rumors of Android, and just the shear coolness value of a pocket node on a global network spanning bazzilions of text sending monkeys mobile phones are once again going to be he item of choice on many people's list to Santa this year.
If you aren't already convinced of the fun you can have on a phone; here, according to once source, is a list of the top mobile apps of 2007
Math

Submission + - An Optical Solution For an NP-Complete problem? (opticsexpress.org)

Submitted by 6
6 writes: Tobias Haist and Wolfgang Osten have proposed a novel idea for solving the traveling salesman problem...

We introduce an optical method based on white light interferometry in order to solve the well-known NP-complete traveling salesman problem. To our knowledge it is the first time that a method for the reduction of non-polynomial time to quadratic time has been proposed. We will show that this achievement is limited by the number of available photons for solving the problem. It will turn out that this number of photons is proportional to NN for a traveling salesman problem with N cities and that for large numbers of cities the method in practice therefore is limited by the signal-to-noise ratio. The proposed method is meant purely as a gedankenexperiment.
Biotech

Submission + - MIT Engineers World's First Schizophrenic Mice

Submitted by
Frosty Piss
Frosty Piss writes: "MIT researchers have created a schizophrenic mouse that pinpoints a gene variation predisposing people to schizophrenia. Research with the mouse may lead to the first genetically targeted drugs for the disease, which affects 1 percent of the population worldwide. This is the first study that uses animals who demonstrate an array of symptoms observed in schizophrenic patients to identify specific genes that predispose people to the disease."
The Almighty Buck

Submission + - How much are we paying for SMS?

Submitted by Komaji
Komaji writes: Many mobile prepaid service plans in the US still require a per SMS charge. Most charge for sending and receiving and include a premium charge for sending to other countries. Have you ever sat down to figure out how much you're really paying for this frictionless and convenient mode of communication?

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