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PC Games (Games)

Multi Theft Auto - San Andreas Goes Open Source 127

Posted by timothy from the prometheus dept.
dan writes " Multi Theft Auto is a third-party modification for Rockstar's hit title Grand Theft Auto San Andreas — and it has become open-source after over four years of closed source development. As a (somewhat) regular player of MTA since the early days of GTAIII, this hit me by surprise, somewhat." (The news is on the project's front page, from which dan extracts more details, below.)

Comment Re:Preprocessing in C (Score 1) 60

by Charan (#25763069) Attached to: Distributed Compilation, a Programmer's Delight

Compiling each CPP in turn requires 10 - 100 files read off the disk each time.

Modern operating systems get around this issue with a disk cache. In reality, 100 files will be read off the disk for the first compile, and the rest of the compiles will just access the cached copy in memory (unless memory is in short supply on your system).
Media (Apple)

Submission + - iPhone gets a better battery life and more

Submitted by morpheus83
morpheus83 writes: Talk about last minute upgrades: In a press release today, Apple has revealed a number of significant upgrades to both the iPhone's battery life and touch screen. Instead of around 5 hours of video/talk and 16 hours of audio playback, Apple has updated the iPhone's battery life rating to the following numbers: up to 8 hours talk time, a whopping 250 hours of standby (over 10 days), 6 hours of internet use, 7 hours of video playback and 24 hours of audio playback. The original 3.5" plastic surface of the iPhone has been changed to "optical-quality" glass, which should bring some smiles to those who were concerned about the durability of the phone's primary feature and user interface.
Security

Submission + - Charles Schwab Picture Passwords Announced, Hacked

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: At the Internet Identity Workshop, Vidoop demonstrated a picture password scheme and announced that it will be used by Charles Schwab's online website. In August 2007, Charles Schwab customers will be able to login by choosing the correct images, such as a pizza or a car, from the Vidoop image grid. The company claims that the scheme is invulnerable to phishing, keyloggers and "all prevalent forms of hacking", according to their website and TV commercial on YouTube. At the same workshop, Harvard and Commercenet announced that Vidoop is vulnerable to a simple man-in-the-middle phishing attack, and they posted a video of the attack in progress. If Charles Schwab read Slashdot, they would already know about the related attack on Bank of America's SiteKey and the Harvard study showing how easily SiteKey users are phished, which we were talking about weeks ago...
Windows

Submission + - Has Windows Data Execution Protection(DEP) helped?

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: It has been about two and half years since Microsoft shipped XP Service Pack 2, which enabled software DEP and also supported the NX-bit for hardware-enforced DEP.

The software-enforced DEP was well known in 2004 for being part of the reason that SP2 was slower than SP1, especially on cache-limited CPUs. I myself have begun turning DEP off in the BOOT.INI file on older systems.

The question: Has DEP ever stopped anything, or is it just more useless overhead? I note that I haven't seen Microsoft mention DEP in any recent advisories and Windows continues to be exploited(like last weeks ANI Cursor bug) by system-level holes that DEP was supposed to catch.
Movies

Submission + - Homeland Security Seize TRON

Submitted by (y(list110
(y(list110 writes: It seems that the Department of Homeland Security want to take TRON off the shelves. According to the story "the Department of Homeland Security has designated the 1982 film TRON as 'sensitive', and ordered Walt Disney Studios to turn over all copies of the film", as some scenes in the film were shot at a Lawrence Livermore nuclear fusion facility known as Shiva. "the DHS declared the film 'sensitive' and demanded its surrender." I'm now concerned about the scenes that show WOPR in Wargames.
Linux Business

Submission + - Dell gives the go-ahead for Linux

Submitted by
LingNoi
LingNoi writes: "A report by the BBC states that Computer giant Dell will begin to sell PCs preinstalled with open source Linux operating systems".

Dell has not yet decided which GNU/Linux distribution to go with citing that "Driver Support is Key" on their Ideastorm update page and Direct2Dell blog..

Many of you posted comments to our Direct2Dell blog, indicating that you were less concerned about a specific distribution than you are about support at the kernel level and open driver support.
"
Biotech

Submission + - Smart fabric mimicking knights armors

Submitted by
Roland Piquepaille
Roland Piquepaille writes: "Researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) have created the world's smallest chain-mail fabric. This fabric looks like the chain-mail armor worn by medieval knights, but can embed much more recent sensors to create some smart textiles. This fabric, which consists of "a network of small rings about 500 microns in diameter and even smaller links about 400 microns long," has unique electrical properties. For example, such a smart fabric could detect movement or damage, and even generate electricity to power the sensors embedded into it. But don't expect to wear a dress or a jacket made with it anytime soon. Read more for additional references and pictures showing different views of this UIUC's chain-mail fabric."
Technology (Apple)

Submission + - Apple's iTV is Hot Hot Hot...literally

Submitted by Anonymous Howard
Anonymous Howard writes: After Apple's launch of iTV, there have been some reports of people worried about how hot the actual device is. Digital Trends actually went and did a heat test, including thermal images with the iTV next to a MacBook Pro and LaCie external hard drive. The conclude that the iTV actually gets up to 111F at its hottest, and averaging 104F! In sleep mode, the iTV is still 97.8F. That is amazingly hot.
Microsoft

Submission + - Microsoft gets ownd by its own Windows OneCare

Submitted by Stony Stevenson
Stony Stevenson writes: Microsoft has launched a marketing campaign that lets any student from an Australian university buy the Ultimate edition of Office 2007 (usually costs $1150) for only $75. A discount of about 93%. But when users go to the site, Microsoft Live OneCare pops up saying the site is a potential phishing scam.

From the article: When entering the site, some users have reported receiving a warning from Windows Live OneCare advising that the www.itsnotcheating.com.au site is a suspicious website.

The warning reads: "Phishing filter has determined this might be a phishing website. We recommend that you do not give any of your information to such websites. Phishing websites impersonate trustworthy websites for the purpose of obtaining your personal or financial information."

A Microsoft spokesperson said the company was unaware of the warning but pledged to amend it as soon as possible.
The Internet

Submission + - An end to Internet radio?

Submitted by b3gr33n
b3gr33n writes: Yesterday the Copyright Royalty Board announced new fees for Internet Radio broadcasting: "Earlier today, the Copyright Royalty Board, the group overseeing statutory licensing for US-based internet radio stations, announced the new royalty rates for streaming radio performance rights. The board rejected the arguments made by webcasters and instead chose to adopt the proposal put forth by industry-backed SoundExchange, a royalty fee collection agency created by the RIAA." http://www.save-internet-radio.com/2007/03/02/save -internet-radio/

We listen a lot to internet radio. It brings in local stations that have poor reception and has introduced us to music around the world. In the end we've bought a fair amount of CD's based on our listening. Many of the stations like Radio Paradise are small family run operations. There is no way they can afford these fees. The Save-Internet-Radio website reports that curiously enough, broadcast stations do not pay these fees. Is that true? Is this an attempt to squelch yet another form of free media?
Security

Submission + - Flash 9 Plugin Vulnerability

Submitted by
Aristotle's Fearless
Aristotle's Fearless writes: "The current Flash Player 9 plugin for IE and Firefox on Windows (9.0.28.0) has a serious bug. Certain bitmap draws using the BitmapData class in ActionScript 3 cause immediate page faults and close both IE and Firefox on all flavors of Windows.

This writer has isolated a proof of concept code fragment in AS3 and submitted a bug report to Adobe. Details are being withheld pending a reply from Adobe because of concerns this may be exploitable by buffer overrun code injection.

See this page for the proof of concept SWF. Be warned: your windows browser will exit with a page fault upon clicking the link on this page."

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