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The Internet

Submission + - All the TV News Since 2009, now Available in the Internet Archive (nytimes.com) 1

Submitted by 6
6 writes: As of Tuesday, the archive’s online collection will include every morsel of news produced in the last three years by 20 different channels, encompassing more than 1,000 news series that have generated more than 350,000 separate programs devoted to news.

Submission + - GeeXboX 3.0 is out ! (geexbox.org)

Submitted by tomlohave
tomlohave writes: A shiny new GeeXboX release has arrived! GeeXboX 3.0 is a major upgrade that integrates XBMC 11 “Eden” and adds the long-requested PVR functionality. This means you can finally use GeeXboX to watch and record live TV too! In addition to our usual x86 ISOs, this release is also available for several embedded platforms, with working full HD video and graphics acceleration for most of them.

A year in the making, this new GeeXboX 3.0 release is the accomplishment of hours, days, months of efforts from a lot of people. The ISO image of “GeeXboX for PC” edition grew up to 140 MB, mostly due to additional firmware and drivers to improve hardware support. We still think of GeeXboX as a lightweight distro, aiming at targeting the most PCs and devices as possible. The whole base system has been overhauled as usual, with countless package upgrades for improved stability and functionality, also benefitting from several improvements to the underlying OpenBricks build system.

GeeXboX also support many embedded devices running ARM SoCs (such as TI OMAP4 Pandaboard, nVidia Tegra 2, Solid-Run Cubox powered by Marvell Armada, ST-Ericsson Snowball), and more will be coming soon. Preliminary support for Toshiba AC100 (Tegra2-based netbook) and Raspberry Pi is already integrated in the development tree.
Science

Submission + - The Rock of Gibraltar: Neanderthals' Last Refuge (smithsonianmag.com)

Submitted by
DevotedSkeptic
DevotedSkeptic writes: "Government officials have applied for Unesco World Heritage status for the caves near Gibralter. Gibraltar certainly deserves that distinction. The southwestern tip of Europe’s Iberian Peninsula, Gibraltar was home to the last-surviving Neanderthals. And then tens of thousands of years later, it became the site of one of the first Neanderthal fossil discoveries.

That discovery occurred at Forbes’ Quarry in 1848. During mining operations, an officer in the British Royal Navy, Captain Edmund Flint, uncovered an adult female skull (called Gibraltar 1). At the time, Neanderthals were not yet known to science, and the skull was given to the Gibraltar Scientific Society. Although Neanderthals were recognized by the 1860s, it wasn’t until the the first decade of the 20th century that anatomists realized Gibraltar 1 was indeed a Neanderthal. Additional Neanderthal discoveries came in the 1910s and 1920s at the Devil’s Tower rock shelter, which appeared to be a Neanderthal occupation site. In 1926, archaeologist Dorothy Garrod unearthed the skull of a Neanderthal child near flaked stone tools from the Mousterian industry. In all, archaeologists have found eight Neanderthal sites at Gibraltar."

Submission + - Watch the wind across the US in real time (hint.fm)

Submitted by 6
6 writes: An invisible, ancient source of energy surrounds us—energy that powered the first explorations of the world, and that may be a key to the future.
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

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