mrmagos - Slashdot User

Submission + - First AMD Fusion notebook beginning to surface

Submitted by mrmagos on Thursday December 09, 2010 @03:26PM

mrmagos writes: It looks like one of the first laptops sporting the new AMD Fusion APUs is beginning to surface on some retail sites. The Acer AS5253-BZ602 appears to have the Zacate E350 APU (1.6Ghz dual-core) with 2GB ram, a 250GB hdd and a 15.6 1366x768 display along with other standard trappings for a notebook of this size (Optical drive, 802.11b/g/n, 1.3Mpixel webcam and Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit). I'm looking forward to some actual reviews and not just synthetic benchmarks on reference systems as we've seen in the past months.

Social Media Can Help You Fake Your Own Death 146

Posted by timothy on Tuesday September 14, 2010 @11:06PM from the you-never-read-this dept.

Julie188 writes "We are inundated with warnings that social media is systematically stripping away our privacy. But Frank Ahearn, the so-called 'Dear Abby' of disappearing, is attempting to show folks how to use those same technologies to regain your privacy, even helping you go as far as faking your own death. Ahearn is a professional skip-tracer who has hunted down people like Monica Lewinsky. In an interview with Ahearn on Network World, he says, 'One can legally disappear through the use of corporations and offshore corporations. The idea is to embrace technology and to become a virtual entity.' My favorite tip is that New Zealand is the place to land once you leap off the grid. Not only is it far from most of the rest of the English speaking world, he says, but it also has great beaches."

MythTV 0.23 Released 214

Posted by kdawson on Tuesday May 11, 2010 @04:49AM from the record-with-daring-and-whimsey dept.

An anonymous reader writes "After six months of our new accelerated development schedule, MythTV 0.23 is now available. MythTV 0.23 brings a new event system, brand new Python bindings, the beta MythNetvision Internet video plugin, new audio code and surround sound upmixer, several new themes (Arclight and Childish), a greatly improved H.264 decoder, and fixes for analog scanning, among many others. Work towards MythTV 0.24 is in full swing, and has be progressing very well for the last several months. If all goes according to plan, MythTV 0.24 will bring a new MythUI OSD, a nearly rewritten audio subsystem capable of handling 24- and 32-bit audio and up to 8 channels of output, Blu-ray disc and disc structure playback, and various other performance, usability, and flexibility improvements."

Visually Demonstrating Chrome's Rendering Speed 140

Posted by kdawson on Friday May 07, 2010 @11:22AM from the want-to-see-it-again dept.

eldavojohn writes "Recent betas of Google's Chrome browser are getting seriously fast. Couple that with better hardware, on average, and it's getting down to speeds that are difficult to demonstrate in a way users can appreciate. Which is why Google felt that some Rube Goldberg-ish demonstrations with slo-mo are in order. Gone are the days of boring millisecond response time metrics."

Nostalgic Elation — the Super Mario Crossover 67

Posted by Soulskill on Friday April 30, 2010 @04:28PM from the it'sa-me-megaman dept.

eldavojohn writes "Sure, they're stepping all over proprietary rights and copyright, but something must be said about the amount of bliss-filled nostalgia inside Exploding Rabbit's Super Mario Crossover. If the plumbers never really did it for you, you can now kill those goombas as Link, Mega Man, Samus, Simon Belmont, or Contra's Bill. Goodbye jumping and spitting; hello slicing, whipping, and shooting. Is this one of the early firsts in the new genre of video game mashups?"

Comment One word: Compliance (Score 2, Insightful) 490

by mrmagos on Thursday March 04, 2010 @12:53PM (#31359358) Attached to: A Public Funded "Microsoft Shop?"

I've worked IT for a health organization before. They're probably mandating this because whatever they've implemented to comply with HIPAA and/or other regulations is dependent on AD and Group Policy. I can tell you from experience that if you're operating on a limited budget and are already running and AD/Exchange environment, you don't have to spend any extra money to become HIPAA compliant. However, that does lock you in to using MS products, since they're the only ones (easily) supported by GP. Could other operating systems and software be introduced and still be compliant? Of course, but that would add administrative overhead supporting and auditing those systems and applications that fall outside control of your AD/GP domain.

The Web Way To Learn a Language 165

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Monday February 01, 2010 @10:48AM from the camgirl-charges-were-educational-hunny dept.

theodp writes "Thanks to Tim Berners-Lee, you can now sit in your underwear in Omaha and learn French from a tutor in Paris. The NY Times has a round-up of ways to learn a language over the Web. 'We offer modern-day pen pals facilitated with voice over I.P.,' said Tom Adams, CEO of RosettaStone, whose learning options include RosettaStudio, a place where a user can talk to a native speaker via video chat. TellMeMore offers a speech recognition component that analyzes pronunciation, graphs your speech, and suggests how to perfect it. Free-as-in-beer offerings include BBC Languages, where you'll find varying levels of instruction for 36 languages, with features including audio and video playback and translation. Things have certainly come a long way since the PLATO Foreign Languages Project of the '70s."

How To DDoS a Federal Wiretap 112

Posted by timothy on Thursday November 12, 2009 @03:15PM from the first-step-get-wiretapped dept.

alphadogg writes "Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania say they've discovered a way to circumvent the networking technology used by law enforcement to tap phone lines in the US. The flaws they've found 'represent a serious threat to the accuracy and completeness of wiretap records used for both criminal investigation and as evidence in trial,' the researchers say in their paper, set to be presented Thursday at a computer security conference in Chicago. Following up on earlier work on evading analog wiretap devices called loop extenders, the Penn researchers took a deep look at the newer technical standards used to enable wiretapping on telecommunication switches. They found that while these newer devices probably don't suffer from many of the bugs they'd found in the loop extender world, they do introduce new flaws. In fact, wiretaps could probably be rendered useless if the connection between the switches and law enforcement are overwhelmed with useless data, something known as a denial of service (DOS) attack."

MIT Grad To Make Digital "SixthSense" Open Source 151

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Monday November 09, 2009 @03:14PM from the enhanced-reality-is-the-only-way-to-roll dept.

yuveraj writes to mention that Pranav Mistry, the brain behind the innovative "SixthSense" application demoed earlier this year, plans to open source the technology in order to get this to the streets faster. "Mistry’s decision has meaning beyond Sixth Sense. The desire of inventors is always to get their work into the market as quickly as possible. Usually this means waiting for it to be turned into a useful, profitable invention. Mistry is bypassing this by going straight to open source. There is no report on which license he will use, but whichever one he does choose he has put paid to the canard that open source and innovation are incompatible, for all time."

Comment Re:Gmail is not ready. (Score 1) 266

by mrmagos on Thursday October 29, 2009 @11:25AM (#29910953) Attached to: Los Angeles Goes Google Apps With Microsoft Cash

Ok, lets be fair. If you're going to compare Gmail to Exchange, at least compare it to an Exchange implementation of similar scale - such as Hotmail. A cursory search turned up an outage from March and one from earlier this month.

Bookmark Start a LLC - Is it Right for Your Business? (startallcinfo.com)

by mrmagos on Monday October 26, 2009 @11:27PM

Netgear WNR3500L Open Source Router Announced 300

Posted by kdawson on Monday October 05, 2009 @07:41PM from the still-making-lemonade dept.

MyOpenRouter writes "Netgear has announced the WNR3500L, a brand new, open source, wireless-N gigabit router customizable with third party firmwares. MyOpenRouter is the dedicated source for Netgear open source routers, with the full scoop including a review with screenshots, how-to's, tutorials, firmware downloads, etc. Here's a review and the downloads page." The router can run popular open source firmware including DD-WRT, OpenWRT. and Tomato. It will list for $140.

Dow Chemical Rolling Out Solar Shingles Next Year 168

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Monday October 05, 2009 @06:51PM from the one-more-thing-to-break dept.

Several users wrote to tell us that Dow Chemical plans on selling solar shingles as early as next year. The solar version can be integrated with normal asphalt shingling and will be introduced in 2010, with a wider roll-out scheduled for 2011. "The shingle will use thin-film cells of copper indium gallium diselenide (CIGS), a photovoltaic material that typically is more efficient at turning sunlight into electricity than traditional polysilicon cells. Dow is using CIGS cells that operate at higher than 10 percent efficiency, below the efficiencies for the top polysilicon cells -- but would cost 10 to 15 percent less on a per-watt basis."

Teenager Invents Cheap Solar Panel From Human Hair 366

Posted by samzenpus on Wednesday September 09, 2009 @12:59PM from the 50-watt-shampoo dept.

Milan Karki, 18, who comes from a village in rural Nepal, believes he has found the solution to the developing world's energy needs. A solar panel made from human hair. The hair replaces silicon, a pricey component typically used in solar panels, and means the panels can be produced at a low cost for those with no access to power. The solar panel, which produces 9 volts (18 watts) of energy, costs around $38 US (£23) to make from raw materials. Gentlemen, start your beards. The future of hair farming is here!

Geeks Prefer Competence To Niceness 300

Posted by samzenpus on Wednesday September 09, 2009 @12:14PM from the catching-more-geeks-with-vinegar dept.

Death Metal writes "While everyone would like to work for a nice person who is always right, IT pros will prefer a jerk who is always right over a nice person who is always wrong. Wrong creates unnecessary work, impossible situations and major failures. Wrong is evil, and it must be defeated. Capacity for technical reasoning trumps all other professional factors, period."

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