berboot - Slashdot User

Comment Re:What is wrong with Forumla One? (Score 2, Informative) 73

by berboot on Friday August 29, 2008 @07:06PM (#24803445) Attached to: Rocket Racing League Flights With Armadillo Engine

2008 is the last year they will have the grooved tires. Next year, they'll allow full slicks again, but the aero requirements will be much more stringent (I've heard some people say that the new cars will have half as much downforce). All of this is part of Bernie's plan to make F1 cheaper for the smaller teams to participate (see Super Aguri Honda's withdrawl from the series.)

Submission + - Firefox 3 AntiMalware does NOT send urls to Google (google.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 26, 2007 @12:08PM

An anonymous reader writes: The official developers guide of the Safe Browsing API by Google (here) indicates that there is no way you can query Google for a malware URL. Instead, you need to download the blacklist and ask for updates frequently. Then, you need to authenticate the list, canonicalize the URLs, split them into small parts, md5 hash them and compare them to the list. That does not sound like sending URLs to Google. You can also verify by looking at Firefox's source code. Last I heard, Firefox was open source.

Submission + - Electric Slide Creator Backs Off In EFF Victory (eff.org)

Submitted by chameleon_skin on Wednesday May 30, 2007 @11:13PM

chameleon_skin writes: Richard Silver, purported creator of the Electric Slide, has backed down from his earlier assertion that under the DMCA videos of the dance he supposedly created cannot be shown on YouTube without his explicit permission. In the face of an EFF lawsuit, Mr. Silver agreed in the settlement to release the rights to the dance under the Creative Commons License. Put on your dance shoes and fire up your video cameras!

Submission + - Phrack back from the dead - New Issue for May 2007

Submitted by

DarkOz

on Wednesday May 30, 2007 @01:47PM

DarkOz writes: "A new issue of Phrack was quietly released on May 27th, 2007. The long lived hacker magazine rises from the grave, again!"

Submission + - iTunes Plus Introduced With DRM-Free Music

Submitted by

Lethyos

on Wednesday May 30, 2007 @01:34PM

Lethyos writes: "The moment a lot of us have been waiting for: the largest online music vendor has finally made good on their promise to offer music without digital restrictions management. A visit to http://apple.com/ shows a splash page with the new service announcement. See the Apple press release on iTunes Plus for more details."

Submission + - CBS buys Last.fm

Submitted by

prostoalex

on Wednesday May 30, 2007 @01:31PM

prostoalex writes: "Last.fm, a social music site, has been purchased by CBS for $280 million. News.com.com.com analyzes the deal: "The service, which was founded in 2002, is popular, with more than 15 million active users worldwide. The acquisition gives CBS access to a young, tech- and music-savvy demographic, which is certainly a valuable asset. But according to Forrester Research analyst James McQuivey, the hefty price tag suggests that CBS may be after the scrobbling technology too.""

Submission + - The Stagnation of Virtual Game Development

Submitted by

eldavojohn

on Wednesday May 30, 2007 @01:29PM

eldavojohn writes: "In an egotistical yet concise blog entitled "Why Don't Game Developers Do What I Wan't?", IEEE takes a stab at why virtual worlds have evolved so little in the past decade or more. Aside from the obvious better resolution and colors, why aren't there huge 'Snow Crash'-esque advancements? From the blog: "Mostly, a world costs too much to make. A little over a decade ago, a game character in a AAA title could be painted by a single artist in a week or two. Now, it takes a team of artists months to model, texture, rig, animate, and script a single character. Back in the day, Non-Player Characters could be single full-screen images of a person who talks to you via box of text, and sells you groceries or swords or whatever. Now, NPCs take nearly as much effort as main characters, and overall may take more, because you need a lot of variety in the NPCs that fill your virtual world. It takes a lot of time." He follows it up nicely in the second part (with a more offensive title, "Are Developers Just Thick, Or Something?") about development with this short insightful comment: "The apparent improvement in computers has been rather less dramatic than players suppose, I think, because much of what they want is AI-complete: that is, the desires require that the central problem of true artificial intelligence be solved first. But even simpler problems can mean much more work than one might first assume, if only because there are a world of them to solve." I agree with him on the point that we are disappointed that games aren't further along in mimicking human behavior or challenging us on a psychological level ... yet we're still blown away by eye candy. This is one of the fundamental lackings in today's games."

Submission + - Is Place-Shifting Fair Use?

Submitted by Nom du Keyboard on Wednesday May 30, 2007 @12:40PM

Nom du Keyboard writes: Major League Baseball seems to want to control where you can watch their televised games, and they've set their sights on Slingbox. While you may be allowed to watch an ad-supported, or paid cable channel, of your team in your own home, MLB (and others) don't feel that includes watching it remotely in another city through your local broadcast. Although they call this "illegal distribution" (reminds you of the RIAA lawsuits), Sling Media has taken steps to ensure that only you can watch your own content, wherever you might be. While no one has yet been bold enough to actually test this in court (losing would be a disaster), does the content industry have the right to decide not only what and when (i.e. shows that can't be recorded for later viewing) you'll watch something, but where you have to watch it as well?

MySpace Gets False Positive In Sex Offender Search 345

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Wednesday May 30, 2007 @12:33PM from the not-if-but-when dept.

gbulmash writes "In its eagerness to clear sex offenders off its site and publish their identities, MySpace identified an innocent woman as a sex offender. She shares a name and birth month with a sex offender who lives in a neighboring state and that was apparently enough to get MySpace to wrongly brand her and completely ignore her protests."

OMB Website Exposes Thousands of SSNs 107

Posted by Zonk on Friday April 20, 2007 @04:39PM from the good-managing dept.

msblack writes "The New York Times is reporting that an Office of Management and Budget website accidentally exposed at least 30,000 social security numbers publicly online. As many as 100,000 to 150,000 individuals may have been affected. The cost to taxpayers just for notifications and credit monitoring is estimated to run $4 million. 'While there was no evidence to indicate whether anyone had in fact used the information improperly, officials at the Agriculture Department and the Census Bureau removed the Social Security numbers from the Census Web site last week. Officials at the Agriculture Department said Social Security numbers were included in the public database because doing so was the common practice years ago when the database was first created, before online identity theft was as well-known a threat as it is today. '"

Submission + - Women are fleeing IT jobs

Submitted by

Lucas123

on Friday April 20, 2007 @04:31PM

Lucas123 writes: "An alarming number of women are currently abandoning IT jobs that require workers to be on-call at all hours, according to a story in Computerworld. One study cited in the article states that by 2012, 40% of women now working in IT will leave for careers with more flexible hours. 'I think women in that regard are at a real disadvantage,' said Dot Brunette, network and storage manager at Meijer Inc., a Grand Rapids, Mich.-based retailer and a 30-year IT veteran. She noted that companies can fail to attract female workers, or see them leave key IT jobs because they fail to provide day care at work, or work-at-home options for someone who leaves to have a child.'"

Submission + - AMD reports $611 million loss

Submitted by mpfife on Friday April 20, 2007 @04:30PM

mpfife writes: Toms hardware reports that "Declining microprocessor sales as well as dropping average selling prices for its microprocessors have pushed AMD deeper into the red. The company reported a net loss of $611 million on revenues of $1.233 billion, which is more than 20% below the guidance the company expected at the end of Q4 2006. The loss includes charges related to the ATI acquisition in the amount of $113 million, but is mainly a result of the increasing competition with Intel in the microprocessor market."

Submission + - "Dark Side" of the H1-B Program

Submitted by TheGrapeApe on Friday April 20, 2007 @04:21PM

TheGrapeApe writes: Froma Harrop examines the "Dark Side" of the H1-B Visa program, and the subtle ways that corporations are using it to dismantle and extract American programming, graphic design and other service-sector jobs to overseas economies in this piece from the Seattle Times:

Ron Hira has studied the dark side of the H-1B program. A professor of public policy at the Rochester Institute of Technology, he notes that the top applicants for visas are outsourcing companies, such as Wipro Technologies of India and Bermuda-based Accenture.

The companies bring recruits in from, say, India to learn about American business. After three years here, the workers go home better able to interact with their U.S. customers.

In other cases, companies ask their U.S. employees to train H-1B workers who then replace them at lower pay. "This is euphemistically called, 'knowledge transfer,' " Hira says. "I call it, 'knowledge extraction.' "

Submission + - Splitting CO2 using Solar Energy

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 20, 2007 @02:27PM

An anonymous reader writes: From the article: "Chemists at the University of California, San Diego have demonstrated the feasibility of exploiting sunlight to transform a greenhouse gas into a useful product." The device "splits carbon dioxide to generate carbon monoxide and oxygen in a three-step process. The first step is the capture of solar energy photons by the semiconductor. The second step is the conversion of optical energy into electrical energy by the semiconductor. The third step is the deployment of electrical energy to the catalysts. The catalysts convert carbon dioxide to carbon monoxide on one side of the device and to oxygen on the other side." While not powerful enough on its own they are hoping to pair it with a better solar panel soon.

Submission + - Black Xbox 360 Confirmed

Submitted by

scott666

on Tuesday March 20, 2007 @01:28PM

scott666 writes: "Kotaku.com has a story repeating the April issue of Game Informer magazine confirming the existance of the Black Xbox 360. The new console with retail for $479, and include a HDMI port, HDMI cable and 120GB hard drive. It does not include an HD-DVD drive, as has been rumored because the "format's not proven.""

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