rudegeek - Slashdot User

Submission + - id unveils Rage at QuakeCon 2007 (hothardware.com)

Submitted by

bigwophh

on Sunday August 05, 2007 @03:43PM

bigwophh writes: "During closed-door briefings at QuakeCon this past weekend, id revealed some details regarding their upcoming game Rage. The game is in simultaneous development for the PC, PS3, Xbox360 and Macintosh, and uses the 'id tech 5' engine which employs a second generation version of id's Megatexture technology. As you'll see in the trailer and screenshots available at HotHardware, Rage will involve a combination of shooting and driving, and the visuals are nothing short of amazing. Unfortunately, id hasn't given a solid release date, saying only that the game will ship "when it's done"."

Submission + - Automatix Activly Dangerous to Ubuntu

Submitted by exeme on Saturday August 04, 2007 @06:21AM

exeme writes: Ubuntu developer Matthew Garrett has recently analysed famed Ubuntu illegal software installer Automatix and found it to be actively dangerous to Ubuntu desktop systems. In a detailed report which only took Garrett a couple of hours he found many serious, show-stopper bugs and concluded that Ubuntu could not officially support Automatix in its current state. Garrett also goes on to say that simple Debian packages could provide all of the functionality of Automatix without any of the problems it exhibits.

Submission + - New way for singles to meet -- the digital zap (reuters.com)

Submitted by

Tech.Luver

on Saturday August 04, 2007 @05:15AM

Tech.Luver writes: "'Reuters Technology' reports about singles' mixers with a technological twist. " Before parties, guests register online and complete questionnaires. The answers are then transferred to digital memory devices — red, plastic squares slightly larger than a matchbox — that the guests wear like necklaces. During a party, people point their devices at one another to check how compatible they are. The devices flash red, yellow or green, depending on their level of compatibility. Green means go, and red? Stop. Web matchmaking has one main drawback — lack of personal contact. "There's no interaction anymore," said Duterte. "We're adding the human touch to a high-tech industry.""

Submission + - Indiana University Dumps Google for ChaCha

Submitted by

theodp

on Saturday August 04, 2007 @03:24AM

theodp writes: "Come Monday, no more Indiana University searches will be powered by computer-driven Google. Only by people-powered ChaCha. The move was announced by new IU President Michael McRobbie, who until recently sat on ChaCha's Board of Directors (5-29 SEC filing, PDF). IU will draft hundreds of librarians and IT employees to be ChaCha Guides for the university's websites, although a FAQ accompanying IU's press release tells librarians not to expect any checks for their efforts from ChaCha, which IU notes is backed by Amazon's Jeff Bezos and Compaq founder Rod Canion."

Submission + - Resident Evil 5 Trailer Spawns Racism/PC Debates

Submitted by on Friday August 03, 2007 @10:45PM

An anonymous reader writes: The Resident Evil 5 trailer shown at E3 2007 has received a largely positive response from gamers and the gaming-related media. However, a blog entry by an African-American woman (who's apparently not a gamer) is critical of the trailer's "depiction of Black people as inhuman savages, the killing of Black people by a white man in military clothing, and the fact that this video game is marketed to children and young adults. Start them young fearing, hating, and destroying Black people." Not surprisingly, forums and talkbacks have degenerated into allusions of racism, reverse-racism, and out-of-control political correctness. On the other hand, some blogs have started questioning the racial sensitivity of the trailer which shows the mass killing of Black zombies (who may look more "sick" than zombie-like) in a part of the world (Africa) that has been ravaged by AIDS and has a relatively recent brutal history of Black racism.

Submission + - New Study: Marijuana Does Not Cause Psychosis, Lun (evonet.ro)

Submitted by

goguaremere

on Friday August 03, 2007 @07:03AM

goguaremere writes: "I've performed a meta-analysis of various scare stories about marijuana appearing in major papers this week. The results of my research are as follows:

Hypothesis:

Alarmist reports about marijuana will turn out to be wildly exaggerated and in some cases completely fictitious. Obvious inconsistencies will be overlooked by the press and widely available contrary evidence will be ignored."

Submission + - BitTorrent 6.0 beta closed source, Windows only

Submitted by makomk on Friday August 03, 2007 @06:42AM

makomk writes: The BitTorrent (Mainline) 6.0 beta has been released, and it's a rebranded version of uTorrent. Unfortunately, it's also closed source and Windows-only. (Apparently, BitTorrent Inc always planned that the next version of Mainline would be closed-source, even before they decided to base it on uTorrent.) It also comes with a mysterious content delivery system called BitTorrent DNA, which appears to consist of a single invisible background task, dna.exe.

Does the original, open source BitTorrent client have a future, or is it time for its users to switch to one of the many other BitTorrent clients?

Submission + - Wozniak makes used car sales move

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 03, 2007 @06:36AM

An anonymous reader writes: Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak has lent support to online second-hand car sales company, Hotswap.com. http://www.macworld.co.uk/news/index.cfm?rss

Submission + - New PowerPC Product Kit Available in Latest AXIGEN

Submitted by

AXIGEN Team

on Wednesday April 25, 2007 @06:55AM

AXIGEN Team writes: "Bucharest, April 25, 2007 — AXIGEN (http://www.axigen.com), the professional messaging solution vendor, announced today the commercial release of a new version, AXIGEN 3.0.1. A premiere for AXIGEN Mail Server, this new version includes a beta product dedicated to PowerPC architectures. The Power architecture is the architecture of choice for embedded applications and is often employed by IBM on their server offerings for large businesses."

Submission + - Revolution OS -the award winning documentary

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 25, 2007 @06:07AM

An anonymous reader writes: This article calls Revolution OS the finest documentaries created which traces the path taken by GNU, Free Software, Open Source and Linux. The whole documentary all of 1 hour and 10 minutes long consists of bits and pieces of conversation with various leaders of the community which of course includes Linus Torvalds, Eric Raymond, Richard M Stallman, Bruce Perens and many others.

In the documentary, Linus Torvalds calls RMS the great philosopher of the movement and himself the engineer.

The documentary produced by J.T.S Moore also shows snippets of publicity the movement received in the main stream media such as in CNBC and The New York Times. Some prominent people from Slashdot also make their appearances in the documentary. The article goads you to watch and enjoy it and as a follow up buy the DVD to support the cause.

Submission + - Microsoft, Adobe Poised for Battle

Submitted by

David Kesmodel from WSJ

on Monday April 16, 2007 @11:18AM

David Kesmodel from WSJ writes: "Microsoft Corp. and Adobe Inc., which usually stay off each other's turf, are poised to do battle as they introduce software aimed at handling functions like video and animation on the Web, the Wall Street Journal reports. Microsoft today plans to unveil a test version of its Silverlight software that can be used to build advanced programs that run on the Web — an area Adobe has dominated with products like Flash — while Adobe plans to preview new video software called the Adobe Media Player, the WSJ reports."

Submission + - Enforced ad-watching coming to Flash video players

Submitted by Dominare on Monday April 16, 2007 @10:57AM

Dominare writes: The BBC is reporting that Adobe is releasing new player software which will allow websites that use their Flash video player (such as YouTube) e.g. to force viewers to watch ads before the video they selected will play. From TFA:

But the big seller for Adobe is the ability to include in Flash movies so-called digital rights management (DRM) — allowing copyright holders to require the viewing of adverts, or restrict copying. "Adobe has created the first way for media companies to release video content, secure in the knowledge that advertising goes with it," James McQuivey, an analyst at Forrester Research said.

This seems to have been timed to coincide with Microsoft's release of their own competitor, Silverlight, to Adobe's dominance of online video.

Submission + - Apple, Opera, and Mozilla Push for HTML5

Submitted by

foo fighter

on Thursday April 12, 2007 @10:00AM

foo fighter writes: "The insular World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has been slumbering the past several years: HTML was last updated in 1999, XHTML was last updated in 2002, and no one is taking their largely incompatible work on "next-generation" XHTML or "modularized" XHTML seriously. Both HTML and XHTML are in sorry need of removing deprecated items while being updated to reflect the current practices of web and browser developers yet remaining compatible with legacy Recommendations. The much more open and transparent WHATWG formed in 2004 to address this problem and has been hard at work on developing a draft spec for HTML5 to update and replace legacy versions of both HTML and XHTML. The quality of this work has reached the point that Apple, Opera, and Mozilla have requested the adoption of HTML5 as the new "W3C Recommendation" for web development."

Kurt Vonnegut Jr. Dies At 84 380

Posted by kdawson on Thursday April 12, 2007 @09:57AM from the unstuck-in-time dept.

At least twenty-two readers took the trouble to make sure we knew that Kurt Vonnegut has died at 84. From the Times obituary: "Kurt Vonnegut, whose dark comic talent and urgent moral vision in novels like 'Slaughterhouse-Five,' 'Cat's Cradle' and 'God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater' caught the temper of his times and the imagination of a generation, died last night in Manhattan... Mr. Vonnegut suffered irreversible brain injuries as a result of a fall several weeks ago, according to his wife, Jill Krementz." Reader SPK adds: "He will be remembered not only as a great writer, but also as a staunch civil libertarian (long-term member of the ACLU) and as a 'mainstream/literary' author who integrated science fiction concepts into his writing. So it goes."

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