vaporakula - Slashdot User

Submission + - Dow Jones Plunge Fueled by Overwhelmed Computers

Submitted by

cloudscout

on Tuesday February 27, 2007 @11:47PM

cloudscout writes: "The Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped over 400 points today. While there were various valid financial reasons for such a decline, some of the blame is being placed on computer systems that couldn't keep up with the abnormally high volume at the New York Stock Exchange and the resulting tremor as they switched over to a backup system. In other words, Dow Jones got Slashdotted."

Submission + - Legal Battle For AACS Begins

Submitted by henrypijames on Tuesday February 27, 2007 @11:14PM

henrypijames writes: As widely expected, the MPAA has learned nothing from the debacle of its failed prosecution against DVD Jon (of DeCSS) and is now releasing its army of lawyers to fight against the circumvention of AACS (the successor of CSS): Upon the reception of a DMCA takedown notice, SourceForge has immediately terminated its hosting of BackupHDDVD (a tool to backup HD DVD movies, as its suggestes). The project leader is seeking advice on how to proceed.

Submission + - CompUSA to close half of its stores

Submitted by

silic0nsilence

on Tuesday February 27, 2007 @10:40PM

silic0nsilence writes: "Businesswire.com is reporting that CompUSA will be closing 126 stores, which is more than half of them. This comes months after a announcements that CompUSA may have been sold since it is not making much profit."

Submission + - Xbox360 Hypervisor Vulnerability - Homebrew on 360

Submitted by RedLine on Tuesday February 27, 2007 @09:10PM

RedLine writes: A new post on the BugTraq list released details on a critical vulnerability in Microsoft's Xbox360 that allows privilege escalation into hypervisor mode. Together with a method to inject data into non-privileged memory areas, this vulnerability allows an attacker with physical access to an Xbox 360 to run arbitrary code such as alternative operating systems with full privileges and full hardware access. The post is a follow-up on the anonymous presentation held on December 30th at the 23C3 Hacker Congress that suggested running homebrew code on Xbox360 would be possible soon. The vulnerability works in kernel 4532 and 4548 but was fixed by Microsoft in kernel 4552 (released on Jan 09, 2007) after they were notified about the exploit.

Submission + - Best practices for a lossless music archive

Submitted by Sparagmei on Tuesday February 27, 2007 @09:04PM

Sparagmei writes: I'm a big music fan, and I like listening to the music I own on various pieces of digital gear. Right now my library's at about 20,000 tracks, ripped from CDs to MP3 at 256kbps (enough that I can't tell the difference on my low-end playback gear).

However, with the MP3 judgment rippling through the world, I'm interested in perhaps moving to a different compression standard. Before I do that, I'd like to ask a question: what lossless format would you recommend for making a digital "master library", which could be (relatively) easily downsampled to a compressed format? Important factors would be true losslessness, filesize (smaller than PCM WAV would be nice), embedded metadata (id3v2-like), existence of automated ripper software, and (to a lesser extent) open-source implementation of such software. Widespread playback implementation of the lossless codec is not an issue for me; the lossless library would likely be burnt to archival DVD media and stored after being downsampling with the chosen compressor.

The reason I ask is this: I've got a 20,000-track re-ripping job ahead of me. I'd like to do that just once, lossless, so that years from now, when I decide to jump from Vorbis to "komprezzor_2039_1337" or whatever, I don't need to drag out the old plastic discs. Thanks!

Comment Re:the key is good communication (Score 2, Insightful) 134

by vaporakula on Monday February 12, 2007 @08:21PM (#17990638) Attached to: Why Online Multiplayer Isn't That Important

Agreed. You can have a great MP experience with anyone, as long as you communicate.

Anyways, the whole article is uninformed trolling, to be honest: check this out

FTA: "I'm also dubious about online competition being better than offline. It seems to me that if a computer were able to record a human playing and duplicate it, so that you thought you were playing against a human, you probably wouldn't know the difference. I think the real issue here is the AI in most games not acting human enough. It's a problem that I believe this generation of games may solve. "

Laughing. My. A**. Off.

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