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Games

Submission + - Xbox Kinect as seen through an infrared camera (gamepron.com)

Submitted by UgLyPuNk
UgLyPuNk writes: Kinect‘s motion-sensing technology relies pretty heavily on a whole lot of infra-red lights that it throws all over your living room. And we do mean a whole lot of them.

You’ll need night-vision goggles to check this one out for yourself, but fortunately for you, a clever New Zealander has some (they came free with Modern Warfare 2), as well as an Xbox 360 using Kinect and – importantly – a video camera.
Google

Submission + - Hulu, NBC, and other sites block Google TV (vortex.com)

Submitted by padarjohn
padarjohn writes: Imagine the protests that would ensue if Internet services arbitrarily blocked video only to Internet Explorer or Firefox browsers! Or if Hulu and the other networks decided they'd refuse to stream video to HP and Dell computers because those manufacturers hadn't made deals with the services to the latter's liking.

Submission + - Ask Slashdot: Coding boot camps for PHBs (slashdot.org)

Submitted by MrMarket
MrMarket writes: I am a PHB (marketing guy) with a hobbyist-level understanding of HTML and CSS that would like to learn how to build a web application. My employer has a sabbatical program that gives us six weeks paid leave to pursue an intensive area of study. I would like to use mine to build a basic consumer web application as a way to get learn HTML5, CSS, and javascript.

Can any one suggest a coder's bootcamp for people with little to no experience? Ideally it would be a program where I could come into the program with my idea (with detailed mock ups and business requirements) and have access to classes and labs sessions to choose the framework, set up the environment, and build the application with the help of a teacher. I know that most of you learned to code by "just doing it," but I could really benefit from some structure and mentoring to accelerate the process (or at least get a jump start on the foundation).
Science

Immaculate Conception In a Boa Constrictor 478

Posted by samzenpus from the gold-frankincense-and-mice dept.
crudmonkey writes "Researchers have discovered a biological shocker: female boa constrictors are capable of giving birth asexually. But the surprise doesn't end there. The study in Biology Letters found that boa babies produced through this asexual reproduction — also known as parthenogenesis — sport a chromosomal oddity that researchers thought was impossible in reptiles. While researchers admit that the female in the study may have been a genetic freak, they say the findings should press researchers to re-think reptile reproduction. Virgin birth among reptiles, especially primitive ones like boas, they argue may be far commoner than ever expected."

Submission + - Unpublished Iraq War Docs Trigger WikiLeaks Revolt (wired.com)

Submitted by Tootech
Tootech writes: A domino chain of resignations at the secret-spilling site WikiLeaks followed a unilateral decision by autocratic founder Julian Assange to schedule an October release of 392,000 classified U.S. documents from the war in Iraq, according to former WikiLeaks staffers.

Key members of WikiLeaks were angered to learn last month that Assange had secretly provided media outlets with embargoed access to the vast database, under an arrangement similar to the one WikiLeaks made with three newspapers that released documents from the Afghanistan war in July. WikiLeaks is set to release the Iraq trove on Oct. 18, according to ex-staffers — far too early, in the view of some of them, to properly redact the names of U.S. collaborators and informants in Iraq.

“The release date which was established was completely unrealistic,” says 25-year-old Herbert Snorrason, an Icelandic university student who until recently helped manage WikiLeaks’ secure chat room. “We found out that the level of redactions performed on the Afghanistan documents was not sufficient. I announced that if the next batch did not receive full attention, I would not be willing to cooperate.”

At least half a dozen WikiLeaks staffers have tendered their resignations in recent weeks, the most prominent of them being Daniel Domscheit-Berg, who, under the name Daniel Schmitt, served as WikiLeaks’ German spokesman.
Oracle

Submission + - OpenOffice declare their independence from Oracle (theregister.co.uk)

Submitted by Google85
Google85 writes: The OpenOffice.org Project has unveiled a major restructuring that separates itself from Oracle and that takes responsibility for OpenOffice away from a single company.
From now on, OpenOffice's development and direction will be decided by a steering committee of developers and national language project managers.
Driving home the changes, OpenOffice.org project is now The Document Foundation while the OpenOffice.org suite has been given the temporary name of LibreOffice.

Submission + - Xmarks closing down (xmarks.com)

Submitted by JLangbridge
JLangbridge writes: After years of service, 2 million users and 5 million browsers synchronised, Xmarks will be closing down, unable to gain the money necessary to keep surviving, and being squeezed out of business by other synchronisation software. Automated emails have been sent out saying goodbye, giving a service termination date (Jan 10) and providing a few links to other synchronisation software.
Politics

Submission + - Tea Party-Backed O'Donnell Wins Upset in Del. (go.com)

Submitted by
ksemlerK
ksemlerK writes: "Conservative activist Christine O'Donnell earned a stunning victory in Delaware's Republican Senate primary Tuesday, riding a wave of tea party anger and advertising dollars to oust U.S. Rep. Michael Castle.

O'Donnell's shocking win gave new energy to the tea party movement, which targeted Castle after victories by Republican tea party candidates in the Alaska and Nevada Senate primaries.

With 78 percent of precincts reporting, O'Donnell had 54 percent to 46 percent for Castle, a former two-term governor and the longest serving congressman in Delaware history."
Firefox

Submission + - Mozilla Unleashes the Kraken (mozilla.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Mozilla has released the first version a new browser benchmark called Kraken. Mozilla's Robert Sayre writes on his blog, 'More than Sunspider, V8, and Dromaeo, Kraken focuses on realistic workloads and forward-looking applications. We believe that the benchmarks used in Kraken are better in terms of reflecting realistic workloads for pushing the edge of browser performance forward. These are the things that people are saying are too slow to do with open web technologies today, and we want to have benchmarks that reflect progress against making these near-future apps universally available.' On my somewhat elderly x86_64 Linux system Google Chrome 6.0.472.55 beta completes the Kraken benchmark in 28638.1 milliseconds, Opera 10.62 completes it in 23612.4 milliseconds, and the current Firefox 4 nightly build completes it in 19897.5 milliseconds.
Google

Submission + - Google Engineer Spied On Teen Users (gawker.com)

Submitted by bonch
bonch writes: Former Google employee David Barksdale accessed user accounts to spy on call logs, chat transcripts, contact lists. As a Site Reliability Engineer, Barksdale had access to the company's most sensitive information and even unblocked himself from a teen's buddy list. He met the minors through a Seattle technology group. Angry parents cut off contact with him and complained to Google, who quietly fired him.
KDE

KDE 4.5 Released 302

Posted by Soulskill from the newer-and-shinier dept.
An anonymous reader writes "KDE 4.5.0 has been released to the world. See the release announcement for details. Highlights include a Webkit browser rendering option for Konqueror, a new caching mechanism for a faster experience and a re-worked notification system. Another new feature is Perl bindings, in addition to Python, Ruby and JavaScript support. The Phonon multimedia library now integrates with PulseAudio. See this interview with KDE developer and spokesperson Sebastian Kugler on how KDE can continue to be innovative in the KDE4 age. Packages should be available for most Linux distributions in the coming days. More than 16000 bug fixes were committed since 4.4."

Submission + - Artificial life forms evolve basic intelligence (newscientist.com)

Submitted by Calopteryx
Calopteryx writes: New Scientist has a story on how Avidians — digital organisms in a computer world called Avida — replicate, mutate and have evolved a rudimentary form of memory. They — or things like them — might eventually evolve to become artificially intelligent life forms.
Privacy

Submission + - Tech Specs Leaked For French Anti-Piracy Spying Ap (techdirt.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: With the "three strikes" law now in effect in France, the organization tasked with implementing it, Hadopi, has been working on technology specs for making the process work — and those specs have now leaked. It appears to involve client-side monitoring and controlling software, that would try to watch what you were doing online, and even warn you before you used any P2P protocol (must make Skype phone calls fun). It's hard to believe people will accept this kind of thing being installed on their computers, so I can't wait to see how Hadopi moves forward with it. It also appears to violate EU rules on privacy.

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