fnord123 - Slashdot User

Comment Re:Well kinda depends (Score 1) 1018

by fnord123 on Tuesday November 30, 2010 @04:58PM (#34394712) Attached to: WikiLeaks Will Unveil Major Bank Scandal

If WikiLeaks primarily leaks things about the US, that is actually a GOOD thing. Doing so will help to force the US to enforce the laws on big banks (as opposed to wink win nudge nudge letting them off), ditto for big pharma, the military, etc. The US will be better off if we are a law-abiding, honest country. Hiding corruption does us no good. I want the US to be an honest country. If Europe or Asia is dishonest in comparison, because WikiLeaks ignores them, all the better for us.

Preserving Virtual Worlds 122

Posted by Soulskill on Tuesday June 22, 2010 @04:04AM from the how-will-they-play-starcon-2-in-2150 dept.

The Opposable Thumbs blog has an interview with Jerome McDonough of the University of Illinois, who is involved with the Preserving Virtual Worlds project. The goal of the project is to recognize video games as cultural artifacts and to make sure they're accessible by future generations. Here McDonough talks about some of the technical difficulties in doing so: "Take, for example, Star Raiders on the Atari 2600. If you're going to preserve this, you've got a couple of problems. The first is that it is on a cartridge that is designed to work on a particular system that is no longer manufactured. And as long as you've got a hardware dependency there, you're really not going to be able to preserve this material very long. What we have been looking at is how feasible is it for things that fundamentally all have some level of hardware dependency there — even Doom has dependencies on DLLs with an operating system, and on particular chipsets and architectures for playing. How do you take that and turn it into something that isn't as dependent on a particular physical piece of hardware. And to do that, you need information about that platform. You need technical specifications that allow you to basically reproduce a virtualization that may enable you to run the software in its original form in the future. So what we're trying to do is preserve not only the games, but preserve the knowledge that you would need to create a virtualization platform to play the game."

Zombie Pigs First, Hibernating Soldiers Next 193

Posted by samzenpus on Monday December 07, 2009 @07:06PM from the fattening-up-on-brains dept.

ColdWetDog writes "Wired is running a story on DARPA's effort to stave off battlefield casualties by turning injured soldiers into zombies by injecting them with a cocktail of one chemical or another (details to be announced). From the article, 'Dr. Fossum predicts that each soldier will carry a syringe into combat zones or remote areas, and medic teams will be equipped with several. A single injection will minimize metabolic needs, de-animating injured troops by shutting down brain and heart function. Once treatment can be carried out, they'll be "re-animated" and — hopefully — as good as new.' If it doesn't pan out we can at least get zombie bacon and spam."

Submission + - Turn any sound you can utter into a OS command

Submitted by IndioMan on Wednesday January 10, 2007 @05:20PM

IndioMan writes: Use the open source sndpeek program and a simple Perl script to read specific sequences of tonal events of your choice — literally you can whistle, burp or perform any sound at your computer — and run commands based on those tones.

Submission + - Black Diamonds from Outer Space

Submitted by tammad on Wednesday January 10, 2007 @05:16PM

tammad writes: According to the National Science Foundation, Geologists have discovered that black diamonds, or carbonado diamonds, may actually be of extra-terrestrial origin. According to the article:
"Trace elements critical to an 'ET' origin are nitrogen and hydrogen," said Haggerty. The presence of hydrogen in the carbonado diamonds indicates an origin in a hydrogen-rich interstellar space, he and colleagues believe."

Submission + - MS tech evangelist apologizes

Submitted by jcatcw on Wednesday January 10, 2007 @05:13PM

jcatcw writes: "James Plamondon, the former technical evangelist for Microsoft Corp. who in a 1996 speech called independent software developers "pawns," said today he now "regrets" using the metaphor. In an e-mail sent to Computerworld and posted at the site's recently launched Shark Bait, Plamondon called third-party developers "key industry influencers" who are "critical" to an IT company's success." See Developers As Pawns and One-Night Stands

Submission + - Confessions of a Steve Jobs Zombie

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 10, 2007 @04:59PM

An anonymous reader writes: Those of us who don't use Apple products sometimes wonder about the appeal of Steve Jobs. Chris Seibold offers insight of a Mac fan coming of age into full Apple zombieness. From the Article: When you go to see a Macworld keynote you're going because you want to be sold. I might have justified the trip because I have to know the news to write informed stuff for Apple Matters, except that the news was available as it was happening. Hence, the only reason I was at the keynote was to see Steve Jobs, to kowtow to his Steveness, to show personal gratitude for all the great products his leadership allowed me to buy.

Gates Pegs Nintendo, Not Sony, as Toughest Competition 178

Posted by Zonk on Wednesday January 10, 2007 @04:56PM from the when-white-plastic-fights dept.

njkid1 writes "Microsoft's Bill Gates thinks that because of the 'impressive strength' of the company and its new Wii console Nintendo is now Microsoft's biggest competition when it comes to videogames. This is somewhat understandable, given Nintendo's new projections for this year. The Japanese game maker plans to sell an impressive 100 Million DS games this year, along with 21 Million Wii games and some six million consoles. This may seem to be just more flack, to go along with Peter Moore's dismissive comments towards Sony at CES this week, but news of the Halo DS game that almost was puts credence to Microsoft's new priorities."

Submission + - Showdown Coming: Mass Media vs. the New Media

Submitted by

JonH_cargye

on Wednesday January 10, 2007 @04:52PM

JonH_cargye writes: "The big showdown between traditional mass media and the new media aggregators is coming. But not in the year 2011 as predicted in the flash-film cult classis "EPIC 2014" — it's happening in the next few weeks. In China, of all places. A copyright infringement lawsuit filed by one of China's largest newspapers is expected to be taken up soon by a court in Shanghai. The Beijing News is suing popular Internet site Tom.com seeking the modest sum of $400,000 in damages. But the suit has far-reaching significance. Just as they have in the U.S. and Europe, digital news media in China are putting the hurt on mass media, especially daily newspapers. Declining newspaper circulation leads to reduced advertising revenue, which leads inevitably to consolidation and downsizing — unless the newspapers fight back. For more, see: http://jon8332.typepad.com/force_for_good/2007/01/ epic_showdown_l.html"

Comment Re:XORP spawned from Click... (Score 1) 393

by fnord123 on Monday March 06, 2006 @09:57PM (#14863593) Attached to: Open-Source Router to Take on Cisco?

Actually the paper says, "we where inspired by prior work on extensible forwarding planes" and merely names Click as one example. Extensible forwarding planes and doing software-based routers have been around a long time. It isn't clear why this article was posted now, XORP project has been around for years already. It also has not made a dent in Cisco's business (nor was it intended to).

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