Slashdot

elrous0 writes "The Mythbusters are once again putting the much-disputed claim of Archimedes' famous "heat ray" to the test, and they're looking for 300 volunteers in the San Francisco area to help. As many of you may recall, the pair originally dispelled the ray as a myth, only to face a challenge from students at MIT, who claimed they could replicate the ancient superweapon. Unfortunately, the MIT students were unable to recreate the experiment under real-world conditions when the Mythbusters put them to the test in 2005. Now it looks like Adam and Jamie are back to the myth once again and need your help to put the issue to rest once and for all (or at least until the next group of would-be math geniuses comes along). Will you be one of the 300 to defend Greece?"
http://blog.wired.com/geekdad/2008/07/not-ready-the-m.html

Geoffrey.landis writes "The Massachusetts Department of Industrial Accidents fired worker Michael Fiola and initiated procedures to prosecute him for child pornography when they determined that internet temporary files on his laptop computer contained child porn. According to Fiola, 'My boss called me into his office at 9 a.m. The director of the Department of Industrial Accidents, my immediate supervisor, and the personnel director were there. They handed me a letter and said, "You are being fired for a violation of the computer usage policy. You have pornography on your computer. You're fired. Clean out your desk. Let's go."' Fiola said, 'They wouldn't talk to me. They said, "We've been advised by our attorney not to talk to you."' However, prosecutors dropped the case when a state investigation of his computer determined there was insufficient evidence to prove he had downloaded the files. Computer forensic analyst Tami Loehrs, who spent a month dissecting the computer for the defense, explained in a 30-page report that the laptop was running corrupted virus-protection software, and Fiola was hit by spammers and crackers bombarding its memory with images of incest and pre-teen porn not visible to the naked eye. The virus protection and software update functions on the laptop had been disabled, and apparently the laptop was 'crippled' by malware. According to Loehrs, 'When they gave him this laptop, it had belonged to another user, and they changed the user name for him, but forgot to change the SMS user name, so SMS was trying to connect to a user that no longer existed ... It was set up to do all of its security updates via the server, and none of that was happening because he was out in the field.' A malware script on the machine surfed foreign sites at a rate of up to 40 per minute whenever the machine was within range of a wireless site."

Esther Schindler writes "No matter what your political affiliation might be, you may want to note the technology under the hood of the major party websites. After all, they're an exercise in scalability and security functions, since these sites are high-profile, viewed by people who feel passionately about the content.

CIO.com interviewed the folks in charge of both the websites for the Democratic National Committee and the Republican party, looking at the software they're using to solve their unique IT problems.

Some of the challenges these sites have to solve include broadcasting their messages to viewers and providing a venue for question and answer sessions with convention delegates. Both use a combination of proprietary software and open source apps to reach their goals.

For example, the Democratic convention committee intends to use Microsoft's Silverlight to deliver interactive applications and videos. The site will run Apache servers on BSD Linux, along with Windows servers. Site content and staff blogs are handled by the open-source SilverStripe content management system.

On the Republican side, the goal of Max Everett, CIO for the Committee on Arrangements (a subset of the Republican National Committee) is "to use technology to make more of the convention appeal to the general voting public." They're planning Web-based video from the convention floor and other venues, provided by a variety of vendors, such as Google and YouTube. His Web strategy also opens the floor to the public with real-time question-and-answer chat sessions with convention delegates."

I honestly want to see pictures of that thing. I mean, every single packet that goes in and out of China goes through a giant box. That thing has to be huge to filter any sort of serious bandwidth.

Yesterday was the 25th anniversary of the release of WarGames and Christopher Knight has written a retrospective about the film and its impact on popular culture. In addition to discussing how the movie has held up over time, WarGames was responsible for what Knight calls the Great Hacking Scare of 1983. Some examples mentioned are 'one CBS Evening News report at the time that seriously questioned whether parents should allow their children to access the outside world via their personal computers at home. A magazine article suggested that computer modems be "locked up" just like firearms, to keep them out of the reach of teenagers. I even heard one pundit proclaim that there was no need for regular people to be able to log in to a remote system: that if you need to access your bank account, a friendly teller was just a short drive away. And Bill Gates once declared that the average person would never have a need for more than 640 kilobytes of memory in a personal computer, too.'

The AP reports (via Yahoo!) that Nintendo of America Inc. has been ordered to pay a small East Texas gaming company $21 million for infringing on a patent while designing controllers for its popular Wii and GameCube systems. No stranger to lawsuits over controller designs, a Nintendo spokesman said the company will seek an appeal. The suit was originally filed in 2006 and included Microsoft. Microsoft's aggressive legal push back apparently helped as they reached a (confidential) settlement agreement before the case went to trial.

We first heard about Splashtop back in October, when the instant-on Linux desktop was announced. At the time it was a really exciting concept but Asus only rolled out the technology on high-end motherboards. Splashtop just announced that Asus will be expanding the desktop to the P5Q motherboard family and later on to all Asus motherboards. That's embedded Linux shipping over over a million motherboards a month! The release also mentioned that the technology will be appearing on notebooks this year as well.

System will allow game developers to put their work right in front of players.
http://www.news.com/8301-13772_3-9941727-52.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-20

jcatcw writes "Microsoft Corp.'s attempt to reverse a lower court's ruling in the ongoing "Vista Capable" lawsuit was denied by an appeals court on Monday. The decision means the case can resume. Lawyers for the plaintiffs served subpoenas on 29 companies and individuals in a hunt for more information about the Vista Capable program. Among the companies and people told to produce e-mails and other documents were retailers like Best Buy and Wal-Mart, computer makers such as Dell and Hewlett-Packard Co., chip maker Intel Corp., and Jim Allchin, the former head of Windows development who resigned the day after Vista shipped in January 2007. Several of those companies filed objections to the subpoenas, calling the requests "harassing" and disruptive to their business."
http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9079518

allcar writes "A story on Network World provides scant details about an IBM customer (Harry and David) being sued by NCR for using WebSphere and Net.Commerce. It is not clear what versions of these applications infringe a patent, nor what patent is actually under discussion. IBM did not, allegedly, live up to it's promise to help out its customer in court and so are now being sued themselves.
Now, what I find odd in this story is that NCR should sue an end user, rather than the software vendor themselves. No doubt, Harry and David do not have IBM's impressive array of expensive lawyers, making them a more attractive target, but this just seems all wrong. What am I missing?
PS: I'm sure this is already obvious, but IANAL."

Until now, the received wisdom has been that GNU/Linux will never take off with general users because it's too complicated. One of the achievements of the popular new Asus Eee PC is that it has come up with a tab-based front end that hides the complexity. But maybe its real significance is that it has pushed down the price to the point where the extra cost of using Microsoft Windows over free software is so significant that ordinary users notice. As Moore's Law drives flash memory prices even lower, can ultraportables running Microsoft Windows compete?
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/mar/06/opensource.olpc

morgan_greywolf writes "Microsoft just cut prices on some of the various versions of Windows Vista, including dropping the suggested retail price of Vista Premium for $399 to $319 according to ZDNet's Adrian Kingsley-Hughes. Hughes says:

Good news for those looking to upgrade now SP1 is on the horizon. But if you read between the lines here, you'll notice something interesting going on. First off, notice no price drop for Vista Home Basic. The Tiny Tim version of Vista just got even less appealing for upgraders now that Home Premium is cheaper. Also, no price drop for the full retail version of Home Premium — maybe Microsoft is trying to make Ultimate more appealing.

Could this be further signs of Microsoft acknowledging that Vista has flopped?"
http://blogs.zdnet.com/hardware/?p=1393

Last April, Microsoft was sued over its 'Vista Capable' labeling, and in hearing last week, attorneys for the plaintiffs presented evidence that Microsoft employees were skeptical about the 'Vista Capable' marketing. Some of the most damning evidence comes from Microsoft executives: 'Mike Nash, currently a corporate vice president for Windows product management, wrote in an e-mail, "I PERSONALLY got burnt. ... Are we seeing this from a lot of customers? ... I now have a $2,100 e-mail machine." Jim Allchin, then the co-president of Microsoft's Platforms and Services Division, wrote in another e-mail, "We really botched this. ... You guys have to do a better job with our customers."' The judge in the case is currently considering the plaintiffs' request to make it a class-action lawsuit.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080211-vista-capable-scheme-was-panned-at-microsoft.html

Asks Supremes not to save changes

Microsoft is asking the Supreme Court to strike-out a multi-billion dollar word processing monopoly lawsuit from Novell.

http://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.co.uk/2008/01/21/microsoft_seeks_dismissal_wordperfect_lawsuit/