Comment Pron (Score 3, Interesting) 63
I can imagine the new porn that will come out... literally!
Comment Females (Score 5, Funny) 42
Old news... Cobwebs at my place have been repelling all kinds of females for a long time, not just my aunts.
Comment The future of Supercomputing? (Score 1) 1
The popularity of these GPUs baffles me. They are hard to program and very limited in what they can do, not to mention the horrible transfers to main memory, yet because there is no other foreseeable technology coming in the next 5 years or so they are becoming the standard for massively parallel programming on a budget. Any university and its dog has GPU projects, with wild performance claims, usually measuring a code they spend years optimizing for the GPU against the original code running un-optimized on one CPU thread. Yet in the real world there are very few applications of the GPU. The memory transfer bottleneck amplifies Amdahl's law. I work in an mission-critical supercomputing center and it will be years before we adopt the GPUs because of the manpower required to convert existing code, the uncertainty of the future of the technology, the quasi vendor lock-in situation that we have now with NVidia, and the fact that vendor support is not yet where it should be. Yet I am watching this technology being slowly adopted by everyone for lack of a better alternative. Thinking about it, it is pretty sad times that we live in term of supercomuting. Don't believe me? Ask the vendors what exciting new technology they have coming. They don't have any.
Submission + - Nvidia launches fastest "parallel processor" (computerworld.com.au) 1
angry tapir writes: "Nvidia has announced the Tesla M2090 graphics processor, which the company calls the world's fastest "parallel processor" for high-performance computing. The M2090 is a graphics processing unit that has 512 cores and is able to perform specific math and scientific calculations up to 30 percent faster than its predecessor, the Tesla M2070 GPU, which has 448 cores. The M2090 can deliver peak performance of around 1330 gigaflops, according to the company."
Submission + - Nine features we may see in Ubuntu 11.10 'Oneiric (arnnet.com.au) 1
splitenz writes: Canonical's Ubuntu 11.04 "Natty Narwhal" may still be occupying much of the Linux world's attention, but at last week's Ubuntu Developer Summit in Budapest, the next version of the free and open source Linux distribution began to take form.
A number of decisions were reportedly made about Ubuntu 11.10, or "Oneiric Ocelot," at the conference, while numerous other questions are still being debated.
Ready for a very early look at Oneiric Ocelot? Here's a roundup of what's been reported so far.
A number of decisions were reportedly made about Ubuntu 11.10, or "Oneiric Ocelot," at the conference, while numerous other questions are still being debated.
Ready for a very early look at Oneiric Ocelot? Here's a roundup of what's been reported so far.
Comment Re:What the hell? (Score 1) 374
Your operating system is Linux, not Ubuntu. You operating system is not worrying at all about how you should be buying mp3s, you can rest assure. Ubuntu is much more than an operating system, it's also a whole set of applications, a way to integrate them together and extra services as well. I doubt that you only want basic OS functionality, but if you do just install the server version of Ubuntu and your problem is solved.
Comment Re:That Article's Title Should Be... (Score 1) 392
Oracle did not kill OpenSolaris, Sun did. OpenSolaris will die because Sun did not make it truly open source. Had all the code of OpenSolaris been open, Oracle could not shut it down, it could happily fork and continue living.
Comment Unbreakable solaris (Score 2, Insightful) 392
It's not surprising at all that Oracle would shut down a free competing product to its unbreakable Linux. In fact it would be crazy for them to allow internal competition between two OSes to happen. What I am really disappointed about is the fact that *open*solaris was not really open and that now it will die. That's what sucks about the various half-assed open-source licenses and practices of former Sun. Had openSolaris been a complete open-source prject, not dependent on binary blobs, the closing of solaris itself would not be such a problem.
Doom-Like Video Surveillance For Ports In Development 56
oranghutan writes "A research and development group down under is working to develop an advanced video surveillance system for ports around the world that uses video superimposed onto a 3D map. With 16-megapixel high-definition cameras on a distributed (cabled) network and a proprietary system written in a variety of languages (C++, Python, SQL, etc.), the group from NICTA is aiming to allow security teams at the Port of Brisbane — which is 110km long — to monitor shipping movements, cargo and people. By scrolling along a 3D map, the security teams can click on a location and then get a real-time video feed superimposed onto the map. Authorities from around the world with the right permissions can then access the same system. The main difference from regular surveillance systems is the ability to switch views without having to know camera numbers/locations and the one screen view."
Infinity Ward Fights Against Modern Warfare 2 Cheaters 203
Faithbleed writes "IW's Robert Bowling reports on his twitter account that Infinity Ward is giving 2,500 Modern Warfare 2 cheaters the boot. The news comes as the war between IW and MW2's fans rages over the decision to go with IWnet hosting instead of dedicated servers. Unhappy players were quick to come up with hacks that would allow their own servers and various other changes."
Despite the dedicated-server complaints, Modern Warfare 2 has sold ridiculously well.
What's the Importance of Graphics In Video Games? 506
An anonymous reader writes "I develop games as a hobby. I've experimented with games on almost every platform available. For me, the gameplay is the most influential factor of a game, with history and graphics dividing second place. But, for some reason, it's not the technical beauty of the graphics that appeal to me. I have played Crysis, and I've played Pokémon games. The graphics of the Pokémon games entertain me as much as the graphics of Crysis. I think both are beautiful. So, why is the current generation of games giving so much importance to the realism in graphic games? I think it is sufficient for a game to have objects that are recognizable. For example, while the water in some games may not look as good as in Crysis, I can still tell it's water. What are your opinions on the current direction of game graphics? Do you prefer easy-to-render 3D scenes that leave space for beautiful effects, like with Radiosity, or more complex 3D scenes that try to be realistic?"
Comment Perfect platform for this (Score 1, Insightful) 275
This is a good idea for the Wii. This platform is not supposed to be for hardcore gamers and the focus is more on the general public. Take myself as an example: I play the Wii but unlike my kids I don't have time to repeat a game sequence hundreds of times until I get it right. If I get stuck somewhere in a game I don't waste my time and I move on (read I drop this particlar game). I'm looking forward to be able to skip a frustrating part and get on with the rest of the game. I am not playing to get frustrated
Understanding Addiction-Based Game Design 308
spidweb writes "The common theory is that games like World of Warcraft are addictive. But what are the exact qualities that make it so? Are there specific elements of the design that can be pulled out, distilled, and used at will to give a game drug-like properties? Is it wrong to do so? A new article at IGN RPG Vault attempts to isolates the exact qualities that go into making an addiction-based design. From the article: 'If a game uses rewards of any sort to entice you to experience highly repetitive content, you should see what it's trying to do and which of your buttons it's trying to press. If you don't mind, that's cool, but you should understand it.'"
Comment Re:Social Engineering first (Score 1) 1232
He should have softened them up first with a base level social engineering attack something like:
I completely disagree with you.
My first point is that you shouldn't lie to do something that you are perfectly allowed to do. You don't have to, you don't want to be that kind of person and you don't want to contribute to create a society where lying is better than not.
My second point is that by lying you are putting yourself in a position of wrongdoing. Now that you are lying, there is a case to be made that you are acting in bad faith. Your original intention when you were taking the pictures will then rightfully be questioned.
Comment Look at the problem differently (Score 2, Insightful) 209
I think that you are not putting your efforts where it matters.
What is important is that the critical services run properly on each server. Sure that can be affected by patching but also by many other factors. So don't focus solely on the patching, focus instead on making sure all the services are running properly.
You should have your own scripts that check that each server is responding as required. Make your test suite as strong as you can and improve it each time a new problem crops up that wasn't caught by your spying tools.
Once you have this in place, you can safely do daily automatic updates and stop second guessing the package maintainers. You will have a more reliable system and you will save yourself a lot of work too over the years.
