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Intel, you've done what only you can do! With $6,000 worth of top-of-the-line processors, you've almost duplicated the performance of a $60 RADEON 2400XT. Except with better reflections. Although even pixel-perfect reflections of crappy textures are, by definition, crappy textures. You're going to crush nVidia any day! I feel it, keep smack-talking!

An anonymous reader writes "This morning at 02:43, Dattebayo staff member ImpSyn, also known as David Pryor, age 29, was pronounced dead. His death comes following a gunshot injury inflicted by a state police officer during the execution of a search and seizure warrant on his home yesterday afternoon"
http://www.dattebayo.com/pr/40

Teancum writes "The Wall Street Journal is reporting about an expanded role for the next generation of satellites in the telecommunication satellite constellation: Earth observation and weather data. The Group on Earth Observation is offering to partner in this endeavor, some of whose members will be paying for this new "service" of the Iridium network. There will be as many as "70 separate sensors on Iridium satellites, designed to measure everything from temperature changes in the atmosphere to changes in radiation and ozone levels to wave heights and ocean levels." This is a far cry from when there was some concerns about whether there would even be an Iridium constellation and the bankruptcy of the former company that operated this group of satellites. This appears to be a way to add an additional revenue stream to an already profitable company operating with most of its assets in space."

bheading writes "Recently a pal of mine logged into Wikipedia (where he has contributed many articles on Turkey, politics, amateur radio, and other matters over the past few years) to find that he'd been blocked as a sockpuppet — this despite the fact that he posts under his real name. So, he logged in at work to submit a request to be unblocked — and found that his work address was already blocked. He then submitted the request protesting his innocence as soon as he got home — but awoke the following morning to find that his home IP had also now been blocked as having been used by a sockpuppet. Then, Gerry blogged the matter to bring his problem to the attention of other friendly Netizens, others who weighted in to protest his innocence found themselves blocked as well. Further investigation has shown that the formal Wikipedia blocking process was not followed, leading to suspicions of political bias. Wikipedia's getting to be a rough place if you can be silenced for your political views, then silenced automatically for merely attempting to protest that decision — and then your friends get silenced for coming to your aid. Have any other Slashdotters encountered problems like this lately ?"

athloi writes "The little-known truth in corporate America is that there is no talent shortage, just a severe shortage of people and systems that recognize, recruit and retain talent. Hiring managers have been told repeatedly that there is a talent shortage across all industries and that they should lower their expectations. http://www.cio.com/article/123712/"
http://www.cio.com/article/123712/

moderatorrater writes "For the third time this year, the Wii and the DS have swept the ten top selling games in japan. From the article:

The domination of Nintendo formats continues until number fourteen, with Banpresto's Super Robot Wars: Original Generations — one of four PlayStation 2 games in the top fifty.

A lot of people are saying that the Wii is going to start showing a decline; when exactly was that supposed to happen?"
http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=14767

lazyl writes "From the article: A Canadian team has created a computer program that can win or draw any game, no matter who the opponent is. It took an average of 50 computers nearly two decades to sift through the 500 billion billion possible draughts positions to come up with the solution."
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/6907018.stm

John Chew writes "Jonathan Schaeffer et al. of the University of Alberta report in Science that their 18-year project to fully analyze the game of checkers is complete, and have proven that when correctly played the game always ends in a draw. Their perfect checkers player, Chinook, is available online."
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/1144079

Universe Today has a fascinating article discussing the difficulty of executing EDL (entry, descent, landing) on Mars for vehicles bigger than MER, Viking and Pathfinder, and for manned craft in particular. Airbags can't be used for obvious reasons, but the atmosphere is too thin to be used for parachutes or aerobraking by large heavy vehicles, and the stronger gravity (compared to the moon) makes an Apollo-style powered descent impossible. The best current idea is a huge inflatable torus called a hypercone.

Information Week has a feature article Are we facing an IT shortage of crisis proportions, or systematically destroying a skilled and capable homegrown workforce?
It is nice to see a feature article that entertains the possibility that there is no shortage. What I cannot understand is why American management thinks they can control this. Lenovo is the first, but it is only a question of time before these countries develop their own companies.

An anonymous reader writes "As voted for by servers which run the "denyhosts" software to block ssh brute-force password attacks:

http://stats.denyhosts.net/stats.html

A box (or group of boxes behind a proxy) at Oracle UK seems to have hit the top 10 of machines on the Internet for launching attacks on boxes which run SSH server software...

This would imply that not only has a computer (or multiple computers) at Oracle UK been compromised without them noticing, but the new owners have then spent the last 3 months using Oracle's bandwidth to hack other boxes elsewhere on the net.

http://denyhosts.sourceforge.net/

Not so hot for a company which "has built a reputation for delivering many of the industry's most secure solutions"

http://www.oracle.com/security/security-solutions. html"
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/07/13/oracle_ssh_shamelist_listing/

makohill writes "The EFF has been talking about tracking dots in printers for some time now. What we didn't know until now is that when people have asked the manufacturers of their printers to turn off the spy dots, they were ratted out by their printer makers and subsequently paid a visit by the secret service.

In response, the Computing Culture group at the MIT Media Lab is organizing folks to call in to their printer manufacturers to complain about the dots and to demand that they are turned off. If we all stand up together, the secret service can't visit us all. The whole story and information on how to call in is online at Seeing Yellow."
http://www.seeingyellow.com/

Rockstar has sent out a blast email allowing people to call into a radio station on the upcoming GTA IV Soundtrack. WKTT Talk Radio is accepting calls right now allowing people to voice their opinion about what is wrong with today's Liberty City and/or America. The number and more info can be found Here. Let the madness begin.

Natros writes "A data set is only as reliable as the instrumentation used to collect the data. One of the important data sets in the climate change field is the system of NOAA/NWS climate monitoring stations. The cumulative data from these stations shows warming trends nationwide. But what if the data from these stations is suspect? This blog has been documenting problems with weather station placement and maintenance that makes the data collected from some of these stations quite questionable. Among the most egregious errors: placing the station in the midst of A/C exhausts, and stations surrounded by asphalt parking lots. Whatever your position on the question of climate change, I think we can all agree that accurate measurement and reporting should be a priority of good science."
http://www.norcalblogs.com/watts/weather_stations/

An anonymous reader writes "You'd have thought that Sony would have learned the lessons of disclosure when their bogus PSP blog backfired on them last christmas, but they've gone and done it again. Hitting a new low in deceptive internet marketing, Sony along with several other movie studios backing the Blu-ray format today launched a content web site called "Hollywood in Hi-Def." The site claims to be a "comprehensive online resource created for consumers interested in high-definition home entertainment," but — what do you know — all of the content just happens to be positive to the Blu-ray format. Although the site's "About Us" page mentions that it is "supported by" Sony, Fox and Disney "among other companies," it doesn't disclose that all of those companies back the Blu-ray format, and that the mission of the site is to promote the format, not "cover" it. The site's editor explains as much in an article published this morning by Video Business Magazine, saying that "A lot of the companies that are supporting Blu-ray got together and decided to do something different and more *credible* than a promotional web site.""