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Slashdot's Vastu 386

Posted by Zonk from the we-go-vertical dept.
nanopolitan writes "Wired has a story on harmonious website design according to Vastu, 'the Indian counterpart of feng shui'. The graphic accompanying the story has an analysis of Slashdot's design by Dr. Smita Narang. Her verdict? This site is 'in desperate need of balance'." From the article: "Thirty-year-old Smita Narang is rapidly becoming one of India's hottest Web designers. Her method: applying vastu shastra, the Indian counterpart of feng shui, to the online realm. The process entails mapping page attributes - HTML, colors, graphics - to elements like fire, water, and air. 'Any disturbance of these established elements can cause an imbalance in the site that directly affects its business,' Narang says."

Ray Noorda Dead at 82 41

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the important-pieces-of-history dept.
HaeMaker writes to tell us that Ray Noorda passed away today at the age of 82. Noorda was best known for his leadership role at the helm of Novell Inc. Known to some as the "father of network computing" Noorda took the then small Novell from around 17 employees to well over 12,000.

Pirates Vs. Publishers 175

Posted by Zonk from the arr-avoid-the-choppy-waters-o-starforce dept.
1up is running a piece looking at the fight between pirates and publishers in the games industry. They use StarForce, and their frustrating copy protection scheme, as a basis for their discussion of both sides of the issue. From the article: "The goal isn't to encourage people to be honest, or to drive innovation in the hacker community, or to be an irritant because you've lost your CD and want to play. The goal of a publisher in picking a copy protection service is to make more money by selling more copies. The logic is that if it's impossible to pirate the game, then people have to buy it if they want it. Why doesn't that work? If your copy protection is StarForce, then it doesn't work because people are boycotting your copy protection. StarForce, which installs a hard-to-remove driver onto your computer, has an unproven but generally accepted track record of causing computers to slow down -- at best. Some reports have complained of permanently damaged physical drives or hard drives."

Wii Will Have an Updatable Linux OS 330

Posted by Zonk from the penguin-with-a-wand dept.
eldavojohn writes "There's bits and pieces of information floating around that revolve around Iwata Asks interviews on Nintendo's website. What I found interesting was the tidbit about the updatable operating system: 'Wii is the first system from Nintendo that we can continue to be involved in (via operating system updates) after the customer buys it. This means that Wii will greatly expand and diversify the ways in which people will enjoy games in the future.' The Wii is reported to operate on top of a proprietary form of the Linux kernel, although there are already efforts to make a GNU/Linux for the console. So, the answer to the age old question is that it already runs Linux."

64% of Online Gamers Are Female 187

Posted by Zonk from the good-news-everyone dept.
According to a report discussed on 1up, a new study by the Nielsen folks finds that more than half of the 117 Million U.S. online gamers are women. From the article: "The study's announcement release doesn't break down what games they're playing, though we expect sites like pogo.com, which feature a multitude of Flash-based games are rather high on the list. Even more surprising is how many older gamers are playing. While the teenage market dominates in numbers, the study says more than 15 million gamers, about 8%, are actually at least 45 years old."

A Look Inside the PlayStation 3 86

Posted by Zonk from the dark-in-there dept.
LifesBlood writes "GameDaily has a peek at an upgraded PS3 development kit, and gives hints as to how the final hardware will shape up. So, what can gamers expect? Robert Workman takes you through the controller, DVD player, GUI and pricing options for the two packages of the PS3."

The Story of the Pedophile-catching Hacker 363

Posted by Zonk from the small-world dept.
missing30 writes "A Turkish hacker seeding usenet groups with trojan horses has made it a habit to hunt down pedophiles trolling the groups. The cases go back to 2000, with the mysterious good samaritan responsible for several arrests. The man now has tacit approval from the FBI for his actions." From the article: "At the urging of Montgomery Police Capt. Kevin Murphy, '1069' eventually turned over more and more information that led back to a computer owned by Bradley Joseph Steiger, who had worked as an emergency room physician in Alabama. The hacker's finds included information from Steiger's AT&T WorldNet account, records from his checking account, and a list of directories on his computer's hard drive where sexually explicit photographs were stored."

ESR Says Linux Followers Should Compromise 540

Posted by Zonk from the wake-up-and-smell-the-penguin dept.
jpheasant writes "Eric Raymond argues time is running out to win over the iPod generation. To get there, he says the Linux community will need to make 'compromises.' For starters: 'Linux believers will have to reach out beyond self-absorbed geeks who learns Klingon and attends science fiction conventions in his spare time.'" From the article: "I mean that we need to be prepared to go to the rights holders for these proprietary codecs and say, we'll give you money, give us a license; and this is something that the Linux community has a huge antipathy to doing because we've got all this idealism about open source. And in the long run, I think that's true, I view comprising with the proprietary codec vendors as a tactical move designed to get us larger end user market shares, so that in the end we can push more things to the open."

Discussing a Private Buyout of Microsoft 315

Posted by Zonk from the that's-quite-a-deal dept.
PatriceVignon writes "Are private buyout companies setting their eyes on Microsoft? The Financial Times claims exactly that in an article called 'Private equity folk could do wonders with Microsoft', as ZDnet reports: 'Consider Microsoft, which has a balance sheet so inefficient that it would make a private equity investor weep ... The new management could take the axe to Microsoft's $6.6bn of wasteful research and development expenditure. The bloated workforce of more than 60,000 could be slashed, to the point where the huge resulting increase in cash flow would at last permit the company to borrow mega-billions.' Business Week, though, begs to differ: 'practically speaking, it's not going to happen,' and quotes Daniel Primack: 'Snakes on a Plane will win a best picture Oscar before Microsoft gets acquired by LBO firms.' What do you think?"

Perseid Meteor Shower To Peak This Weekend 118

Posted by Hemos from the go-out-and-watch-the-sights dept.
Krishna Dagli writes "This weekend provides one of the year's best opportunities to see some "shooting stars". The annual Perseid meteor display is expected to peak on Friday and Saturday night. Meteors are bits of dust or rock that plunge into the Earth's atmosphere and burn up, making bright streaks in the sky. It does not take a large object to produce a visible meteor — most are the size of a grain of sand or a small pebble."

Microsoft Port 25 interviews Miguel de Icaza 202

Posted by CmdrTaco from the something-to-read dept.
Ben Galliart writes "Microsoft's Port 25 blog, the voice of MS Linux Labs and a spin-off from the MS Channel 9 blog, has an interview with Miguel de Icaza where they discuss the Gnome and Mono projects. It is a nice change of pace to see Microsoft go from attacking Novell and Linux to interviewing a Novell employee about a Linux desktop system. Port 25 has come under some fire since they can not always be trusted. Port 25 has on occasion put out FUD such as claiming Microsoft is doing more to improve security than any other vendor and a security guide attacking Red Hat for not providing security updates for Red Hat v9 despite that Red Hat ended support back in 2004. They have also released a password synchronization daemon for Red Hat, AIX, HPUX and Solaris that must run as root and makes several calls to strcpy() (which violates Microsoft's guidelines for doing secure coding)."

Best Web Resource For Linux Help? 74

Posted by Cliff from the for-when-you-can't-help-yourself dept.
mikeswi asks: "I made the big switch to Linux from Windows about six months ago (SuSe Linux 10.0). Overall, I am very pleased with Linux. Every now and then, I run into a problem that I cannot puzzle out on my own. I am absolutely not a Linux expert and have no idea how to do certain things that expert Linux users take for granted. If a determined Google search turns up nothing, I plead for help at LinuxQuestions and someone there usually does a good job of helping me out. What web sites or other resources do Slashdot readers use, when they run into a Linux problem they can't handle themselves?"

Talking Mirror, Pirate Skull Security System 125

Posted by CowboyNeal from the makers-of-the-batcave dept.
junger writes "Themeaddicts, owned by a Hollywood animatronics guru famous for doing the T-rex in Jurassic Park, has created a home security system with a talking mirror (complete with floating head), talking pirate skull, and talking toucan. It informs the homeowner of things like a car coming up the driveway or the jacuzzi reaching the right temperature, and it turns into a surveillance camera."

U.S. Soldiers Recipients of Newest Prosthetic Technologies 287

Posted by Zonk from the more-than-meets-the-eye dept.
plaastik writes "The next generation of naturalistic and touch-sensitive artificial limbs are being worn by U.S. Soldiers. Instead of the old velcro strap and cup these new models are fused directly to the bone and are controlled by controlled by the wearer's brain. From the article: 'Future prosthetic arms will fuse to existing bone, eliminating the need for awkward attachment systems. These more naturalistic limbs will use bionic nerves attached to natural nerves to send and receive signals from the brain. Chips embedded in the user's brain will help command artificial-muscle-activated, touch-sensitive, fully articulating hands.'"

Linux 2.6.17 Released 444

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the spit-shine dept.
diegocgteleline.es writes "After almost three months, Linux 2.6.17 has been released. The changes include support for Sun Niagara CPUs, a new I/O mechanism called 'splice' which can improve the performance greatly for some applications, a scheduler domain optimized for multicore machines, driver for the widely used broadcom 43xx wifi chip (Apple's Airport Extreme and such), iptables support for the H.323 protocol, CCID2 support for DCCP, softmac layer for the wireless stack, block queue IO tracing, and many other changes listed at the changelog"

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