jmcneill - Slashdot User

Submission + - Harmonix: Activision Is Preventing Rock Band Patch (xuecast.com) 1

Submitted by

XueCast

on Wednesday December 12, 2007 @06:55PM

XueCast writes: "Many gamers have asked for guitar controller compatibility between Guitar Hero and Rock Band, because of that, Harmonix had developed a patch that can make that happen. The compatibility patch has allegedly been approved by Sony Computer Entertainment, and is ready to be released. But Activision, the publisher of the Guitar Hero series is not very happy with the patch at all, and the patch's release is currently being blocked by the Santa Monica based video game publisher company."

Submission + - Ten years of pkgsrc - Interviews (netbsd.org)

Submitted by

hubertf

on Saturday October 20, 2007 @10:02AM

hubertf writes: "10 years ago — on October 3rd 1997 — the pkgsrc software management system was created by Alistair Crooks and Hubert Feyrer. pkgsrc, the NetBSD Packages Collection, was intended primarily as a packaging system for NetBSD. Derived from the FreeBSD Ports system, pkgsrc became a success story. Today, pkgsrc is a cross-platform framework, running on the BSDs, Linux, Solaris, Mac OS X, many Unix derivatives, and even on QNX and Windows.

Mark Weinem has made inverviews with lots of developers of pkgsrc and related projects, among them the original pkgsrc creators, but also users and developers of pkgsrc and related projects, like the FreeBSD and OpenBSD ports collection as well as MacPorts.

Overall, this article is a fine lesson in history of source based packaging system that also goes much beyond pkgsrc itself."

Submission + - NetBSD boosts MySQL performance (feyrer.de)

Submitted by

hubertf

on Sunday September 30, 2007 @09:10PM

hubertf writes: "Andrew Doran, who was recently hired by the NetBSD project to work on NetBSD's SMP implementation, has done a lot of good work, and he has merged some of his work from the vmlocking-branch into NetBSD-current. Effects of this are that time for build.sh on a quad-Opteron went down by ~10%.

Andrew also updated his previous benchmarks, and posted about his recent results: ``Most of the sysbench runs that I've seen to date have sysbench running on the same machine as the database. That's a good test but with the exception of small installations and out-of-band activity, production setups rarely look like that. So I ran sysbench itself on a seperate dual core system.''

There are images that compare NetBSD 3 with NetBSD-current (where most of Andrew's changes are now), and NetBSD-current compared to Linux, FreeBSD, and OpenBSD.

The original benchmarks didn't include Solaris/x86, so Jaime Fournier sat down and repeated the test (on a single system). The results show that NetBSD beats Solaris by ~25% in the ReadOnly test, and that they're about on par in the ReadWrite test, with NetBSD kicking in earlier WRT the number of client threads, but Solaris keeping up longer before they both degrade. The courves are quite similar, and my guess is that there is some room for finetuning there."

Submission + - NetBSD 4.0 RC1 Released (netbsd.org)

Submitted by

Daniel Sieger

on Tuesday September 04, 2007 @02:36PM

Daniel Sieger writes: "The NetBSD Release Engineering Team announced the release of NetBSD 4.0 RC1 today. The release candidate is directly available from the project's FTP server. A list of significant changes and features can be found here."

Submission + - Password exposure in Lotus Notes (heise-security.co.uk)

Submitted by

juct

on Thursday July 19, 2007 @09:54AM

juct writes: "A debug function in version 5 and up of Lotus Notes can be used to write a file containing the new password in plain text when a user password is changed. This function has been designed to bring more transparency into password quality verification. If two additional lines are entered in the Notes.INI configuration file, Notes will log the evaluation. Accordings to heise Security the configuration change can even be activated from remote by an administrator."

Submission + - Universal downgrade for Sony PSP (noobz.eu)

Submitted by

javipas

on Sunday June 24, 2007 @07:36AM

javipas writes: "The PlayStation Portable made by Sony is a wonderful device for all its user base, but it's even more great for those that have been able to run homebrew applications. The firmware upgrading roadmap had made impossible to downgrade certain consoles to a 'homebrewable' firmware, but a new exploit called Illuminati has been discovered to allow this task. Using a Lumines original game UMD anyone can now access the kernel mode that allows to run any kind of homebrew application. For the moment only a little "Hello World!" demo has been released, but soon a universal downgrader will allow any PSP user to access any kind of homebrew application/task. Running games from the memory card included, of course."

Submission + - Wii not really "shit" admits flip-flopping

Submitted by thefickler on Friday March 09, 2007 @09:27PM

thefickler writes: Technology Fellow at Maxis/Electronic Arts, Chris Hecker, has changed his mind, and apparently the Wii isn't shit after all. In fact he thinks it's rather innovative. I think someone's mouth is bigger than his balls.

Submission + - Hans Reiser to Stand Trial for Wife's Murder

Submitted by Matt Perry on Friday March 09, 2007 @09:20PM

Matt Perry writes: A judge has ruled that the murder trail against Hans Reiser is to go forward. Even so, the judge questioned some of the evidence against Reiser. No matter the outcome, Reiser will most likely sell his company to fund his defense (see previous Slashdot story). What might this mean for the future of ResierFS4?

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