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Hardware Hacking

Submission + - Has a US Nuke Just Been Stolen For Use in the USA? (blogspot.com)

Submitted by
Anonymous Coward
Anonymous Coward writes: "n-sphere is linking not just to the posting on The Geronimo Manifesto, in which Chuck Simpson reckons that the recent USAF B-52 blunder ("accidentally" flying across the USA with 5, no wait.... 6, no wait.... 5, nuclear-armed missiles) was in fact a (non-too slick, if you actually stop to PAY ATTENTION) bit of sleight-of-hand, resulting in the theft of a nuke, likely to be used for a "black flag" operation. Expect a city on the US mainland, with a population on the order of 100,000, with a Democrat mayor and in a Democrat-led state, to disappear in a blinding flash of light and a huge EM pulse. Oh and expect to hear that Iran was responsible and thus, Iran should also disappear a bit later, and also in a blinding flash of light and a huge EM pulse, no wait.... 10 blinding flashes....."
X

Submission + - AMD releases initial GPU specs (lwn.net)

Submitted by
mrcgran
mrcgran writes: "LWN.NET's corbet is reporting today: "As noted by David Airlie, AMD has made an initial set of specifications for ATI graphics processors available. These are 2D specifications, so they are not all that is needed to write a complete graphics driver, but they are a good start.""
Announcements

Submission + - Northwest Passage Now Open

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The Guardian is reporting that the Northwest Passage is now navigable due to arctic sea ice melting much faster than previously. This will only continue to get worse next year as the additional open water absorbs more heat and delays the refreezing of the water this winter.
AMD

Submission + - AMD/ATI's opensource efforts revealed

Submitted by mattaw
mattaw writes: Phoronix have revealed in some detail the plan of AMD/ATI to support a community written Radeon opensource driver.

To whit, they are releasing specs and some example code under NDA and an opensource library that connects to the card's BIOS. They already have XOrg developers onboard and have also attracted Jerome Glisse who reverse engineered ATI cards to make the Avivio driver (incidentally probably killing that driver but the new ATI open driver will surely benefit from his excellent work).

While not completely open, this is pretty open for starters, HOWEVER I for one am not certain of things like support for hardware video decoding or extra on board hardware (TV-Out etc.).

Checkout the final comments: "The aim of this open-source driver is not to overtake the fglrx driver but rather is designed for those who just want a working desktop with 3D capabilities and basic video playback. This new driver is ideal for FOSS enthusiasts and those wishing to run the latest development kernels and versions of X.Org."

Still there is no argument that this is a brilliant result.
Microsoft

Submission + - Microsoft coup against iso standards body (www.idg.se)

Submitted by
bytewize
bytewize writes: "Today the iso standards body here in Sweden has accepted ooxml as a standard. It seems that a number of Microsoft partners joined the body just before the vote and managed to swing the vote in Microsoft's faviour. IBM walked out and refused to vote. If this is what we can expect in the future then the iso standards body might just as well pack up and close shop. Nobody should be able to buy acceptance of a standard. It should become a standard based entirely on its own merits."
Windows

Submission + - Microsoft buys the Swedish vote on OOXML (os2world.com)

Submitted by CoolCat
CoolCat writes: From the site: "As bad as it sound it currently looks like that the vote that took place at the SIS, Swedish Standards Institute, was a total joke due to the facts that 23 new companies applied to take part of today's voting and most of them in favour of Microsoft agenda. One would think that SIS would not accept new companies to participate in the vote since they haven't been part of the earlier discussions and meetings. But according to SIS they didn't see any problem that new companies wanted to take part in this vote without prior notice. So what happened here is that Microsoft gather together a bunch of loyal partners that would vote yes to their standard without any questions."
Privacy

Submission + - Communits + Technology = Total Surveillance (nytimes.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Communists are well known for the total disrespect of the human rights for privacy. Chinese government recently woke up to the advances of the surveillance technology available and ordered all large cities to apply technology to police work. In the article http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/12/business/worldbu siness/12security.html NY Times reports that while use of surveillance technology in Britain is controversial, China does not have limits on police power and fewer legal protection to its citizens.
Operating Systems

Submission + - Cross-OS file system that sucks less?

Submitted by
An anonymous reader writes: I recently got an external harddisk with USB 2.0/Firewire/Firewire 800/eSATA to be used for backup and file exchange — my desktop runs Linux (with a Windows partition for games but no data worth saving), and the laptop is a MacBook Pro.

So the question popped up: what kind of filesystem is best for this kind of situation? Is there a filesystem that works good under Linux, MacOS X and Windows? Linux has HFS+ support but apparently doesn't support journaling and there's also an issue with the case-insensitivity of HFS+.

Are we stuck with shitty VFAT forever or are there efforts underway to bring a modern filesystem (I'm thinking something like ZFS, BeFS, or XFS) to all platforms our there? Or are there other clever solutions like storing ISO images and loop-mounting those?
United States

Submission + - Best Presidential Candidate for Geeks

Submitted by blast
blast writes: I was wondering who the community thinks best candidate for geeks. I.e, regarding the war on privacy, "total information awareness" or whatever they're calling it these days, Internet regulation and taxation, copyright/patent reform, the right to read, the right to secure communications, the right to tinker, etc.
United States

Submission + - Bush To Be Dictator In A Catastrophic Emergency

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: "The Bush administration has released a directive called the National Security and Homeland Security Presidential Directive. The directive released on May 9th, 2007 has gone almost unnoticed by the mainstream and alternative media. This is understandable considering the huge Ron Paul and immigration news but this story is equally as huge. In this directive, Bush declares that in the event of a "Catastrophic Emergency", the President will be entrusted with leading the activities to ensure constitutional government. The language in this directive would in effect make the President a dictator in the case of such an emergency." — Center for Research on Globalization, Canada
Intel

Submission + - Intel To Launch CPU Graphics

Submitted by Danny
Danny writes: Wolfdale and Penryn processors will be launched this Q3 and Q4 respectively by Intel. But the shocking news is Intel will be integrating graphics solutions into its CPUs which will be manufactured on the 45nm process. Will the graphics core come with some very fast onboard RAM? The bottom line is this will eventually cut into the OEM graphics market which is where the big money lies and certainly a potential concern for NVIDIA and ATI.
Novell

Submission + - Dell joins Microsoft, Novell Alliance.

Submitted by NotAgent86
NotAgent86 writes: Microsoft and Novell said Monday that Dell has become the first major system vendor to join their controversial technology and marketing alliance, agreeing to work with Microsoft to distribute SUSE Linux Enterprise Server certificates. Dell has also agreed to provide services and marketing programs to migrate new server customers to Novell's distribution of Linux.

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