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PlayStation (Games)

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

Submitted by
XueCast
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."
Software

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

Submitted by
hubertf
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."
Operating Systems

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

Submitted by
hubertf
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."
Security

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

Submitted by
juct
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."
PlayStation (Games)

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

Submitted by
javipas
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."

Feed Melamine Contaminant Found In Chicken Feed (sciencedaily.com)

From feed by sdfeed
The U.S. Department of Agriculture (UDSA) and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) have learned that byproducts from pet food manufactured with contaminated wheat gluten imported from China have been used in chicken feed on some farms in the state of Indiana.

Feed Electrode hats to exploit soldiers' subconscious powers (theregister.com)

From feed by registerfeed
Helmet mind-probe madness at DARPA

Those wacky boffins at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) have outdone themselves. The US military researchers are engaged in an effort to produce "soldier portable" digital imaging systems which can pick out "vehicle and dismount" threats 1-10 km away over a 120-degree or greater field of view, by scanning the user's brain.
Censorship

Digg.com Attempts To Suppress HD-DVD Revolt 1142

Posted by kdawson from the toothpaste-back-in-the-tube dept.
fieryprophet writes "An astonishing number of stories related to HD-DVD encryption keys have gone missing in action from digg.com, in many cases along with the account of the diggers who submitted them. Diggers are in open revolt against the moderators and are retaliating in clever and inventive ways. At one point, the entire front page comprised only stories that in one way or another were related to the hex number. Digg users quickly pointed to the HD DVD sponsorship of Diggnation, the Digg podcast show. Search digg for HD-DVD song lyrics, coffee mugs, shirts, and more for a small taste of the rebellion." Search Google for a broader picture; at this writing, about 283,000 pages contain the number with hyphens, and just under 10,000 without hyphens. There's a song. Several domain names including variations of the number have been reserved. Update: 05/02 05:44 GMT by J : New blog post from Kevin Rose of Digg to its users: "We hear you."
Graphics

Microsoft Move to be the End of JPEG? 447

Posted by CowboyNeal from the just-a-little-bit-better dept.
jcatcw writes "Microsoft Corp. will submit a new photo format to an international standards organization. The format, HD Photo (formerly known as Windows Media Photo), can accommodate lossless and lossy compression. Microsoft claims that adjustments can be made to color balance and exposure settings that won't discard or truncate data that occurs with other bit-map formats."
Sony

Sony Set to Market Blu-ray as Winner of Format War 353

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the self-serving-prophets dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Citing the recent sales numbers, Sony exec David Bishop is claiming that the high-def format war can officially be declared over. With a movie sale ratio of almost 2:1 Blu-ray discs are being declared the victor over rival HD-DVD by Blu-ray supporter Sony. 'And yet while all agree that it was a strong month for Blu-ray, opinion is split on whether the surge in sales is an indicator of stronger user adaption of Blu-ray compared to HD DVD, or simply a reflection of the larger number of new Blu-ray titles that hit the market over the month -- 25 new Blu-ray titles were released in January, compared to just 11 titles on HD DVD for the same period.'"

Dell Launches Free PC Recycling 110

Posted by Zonk from the there-should-be-free-as-in-beer-recycling dept.
digihome writes to mention the implementation of a free PC recycling service for all systems sold by the company. From the article: "The no-charge home pickup program was announced in June. Dell already offers similar programs in Europe and Canada. After enduring tough criticism over the years from environmental groups, tech companies have started offering more ways for consumers to properly dispose of computer gadgets and to conserve electricity while using computer gear. Among tech companies, environmental advocacy group Greenpeace has singled out Dell and mobile-phone maker Nokia for their ecologically conscientious policies."

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