Slashdot

cgenman writes "Legendarily panned game to film adapter Uwe Boll has said in a FEARnet interview that a million signature petition would sufficiently convince him to retire. The petition is currently only 970,000 signatures short, but has increased by 10k in the last day alone."
http://www.joystiq.com/2008/04/06/one-million-signatures-to-end-uwe-bolls-directing-career/

pasquafa writes "Dan Solove earlier showed us why "I've Got Nothing to Hide" is a foolish reason to brush off privacy concerns. Now his book The Future of Reputation shows us that we've all got a lot to fear from new surveillance technologies. In past articles, Solove's done a great job advocating for individual rights against big data aggregators like Choicepoint, banks, and the government. His latest book breaks new ground because it focuses on a harder issue: how to deal with Web 2.0's swarm of privacy-invading individuals. When it comes to privacy, we may well be our own worst enemies. Against the tide of knee-jerk libertarianism, Solove demonstrates that there are some baseline norms that should govern the spread of personally identifiable information, gossip, and rumors. He even offers hope that the blogosphere can become a more fair, decent, and perhaps even public-minded place."
http://docs.law.gwu.edu/facweb/dsolove/Future-of-Reputation/

Gonoff writes "Last year, I decided to broaden my abilities a little and started an evening, 2 year, university course. This year a major part of what I am doing is web development and I will be creating a website.

I had never used Dreamweaver before so I expected to have to learn but what caught my attention was the huge dislike I see the course leader has for frames.

I had already read Jakob Neilsens material but being keen to learn, I read it again. Much of what he put in seems completely out of date now.
The only browser I have that can't do frames is Lynx.
All major development packages do them a lot better than when that article was written — Dreamweaver, Frontpage or even Open Office do them fine. I find that it is not too hard in a text editor either...

Obviously, I will do it the way that I am instructed. I just can't see wanting to do it this way for real afterwards. Templates and layers seem much more complicated and I suspect that they are less simple to maintain once a site goes live. I know the need for maintainable source code. Surely maintainable HTML is the same?

What do other people think? Forget aesthetics and coolness. Can people convince me that this is a better way to work?"

Mike writes "Microsoft acknowledged that hackers are exploiting a bug in the driver 'secdrv.sys' shipped on versions of Windows Server 2003, Windows XP, and Windows Vista. Symantec researcher Elia Florio first revealed the vulnerability in fully-patched XP and Server 2003 machines and noted that it was being exploited in the wild. "At the moment, it's still not clear how the driver is used by Windows because this file does not have the typical Microsoft file properties present in other Windows system files," Florio wrote in a posting to the Symantec security blog."
http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9045660

neil1237 writes "A senior U.S. envoy who spent this weekend in North Korea says authorities there are cooperating in the process of disabling the country's nuclear facilities. As VOA's Kurt Achin reports from Seoul, the shutdown is part of a wider diplomatic process aimed at ending Pyongyang's nuclear weapons capabilities for good."
http://voanews.com/english/2007-11-06-voa9.cfm

Filed under: Gaming

187 MAME-emulated games, a 24-inch LCD, cupholders and a built-in kegerator? If it was up to us, the Gamerator would be the only piece of furniture in our living room. Yours now for $2K on eBay.

[Via TechDigest]

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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!

http://feeds.engadget.com/~r/weblogsinc/engadget/~3/180818788/

enharmonix writes "A bit of an update on the recent Digg revolt over AACS. The NYTimes has taken notice and written quite a decent article that actually acknowledges that the take-down notices amount to censorship and documents instances of the infamous key appearing in purely expressive form. I was pleased to see the similarity to 2600 and deCSS was not lost on the Times either. More interesting is that the EFF's Fred von Lohmann blames the digg revolt on lawyers. And in an opinion piece, John Dvorak expands on that theme."

JimZim writes "Uninterruptible power supplies can generally handle 6-10 servers. However, they have only one serial/USB port to connect to one server for power failure notification. A graceful shutdown is important for all servers to prevent data loss in the event of a power outage. Is there any networked power-failure-shutdown software? Should sysadmins script some kind of automatic cascading shutdown? What are your best practices to ensure that all your systems are nicely powered off before the battery runs out?"

Intel has reclaimed Google as a server customer . According to Pat Gelsinger, a co-general manager of Intel's Digital Enterprise Group, "Google has begun buying Intel server components in high volume." On Gelsinger's blog, he said, "Intel had to create custom equipment to win back the business." Google "went to the competitor's platform for the last four quarters of deployments, largely on the (operational cost) model they use to judge their purchases," Gelsinger said, a model that takes into account power and cooling costs, server performance, memory costs and other factors. Intel design teams "have been maniacal as we designed a unique board for them, developing a unique memory module with them, working every angle of the cost equation and engaging with our sales teams to get the business," Gelsinger said.

WaltonNews writes "The Mars Express spacecraft, from the European Space Agency (ESA), has indicated to scientists that the dry atmosphere and surface on the planet Mars does not necessarily mean Mars is dry underneath the surface. In fact, a huge storehouse of water and carbon dioxide could be found in underground reservoirs. More of the story appears at: http://www.itwire.com.au/content/view/8959/1066/."

An anonymous reader writes "Via is readying a media-oriented motherboard in what could be the next popular size for small form-factor PCs: Pico-ITX. The 'Epia PX' board measures 3.9 x 2.8 inches and features a 1GHz C7 processor, along with rich audio/video I/O, albeit mostly on pin headers. pico-ITX measure 3.9 x 2.8 inches (10 x 7.2 cm) — exactly half the surface area of Via's already small 4.7 x 4.7-inch (12 x 12cm) Nano-ITX standard, and considerably smaller than the original 6.7-inch square (17 x 17cm) mini-ITX standard."

BizInside writes "Though developers and players alike lament the rise of game development costs, one firm is actually using the trend to their advantage by releasing an online first-person shooter called War Rock that is completely free to play. Call it Battlefield light, or America's Army minus boot camp. Interesting thing is, the game plans to make money through a voluntary pay subscription plan and microtransactions, both of which give players access to some neat perks. Amped News takes a critical eye towards K2 Network's bizarre business model and chats with War Rock producer Matt Norton about what makes the game so significant."

adamstew writes "According to PC world, Nintendo's Wii console is being updated on Saturday to provide the Wii News channel. The Wii news channel will provide stories from the AP.

Also, According to GameSpy: "You'll pick out news from different regions via an interactive map the world. Eventually the AP would like to enhance the news feed with multimedia presentations and other features."

"Thanks to a two-year contract Nintendo has signed with The Associated Press, the Wii News Channel, which debuts this Saturday, will feature news stories and photos from the news organization.""

K7DAN writes "It appears that state-of-the-art connectivity in Boeing's newest aircraft means a wired, not wireless network. The Seattle Times reports that Boeing has abandoned plans to bring entertainment and information to passengers through a wireless system in its 787 Dreamliner due to possible production delays and potential conflicts with other radios services. A side benefit is an actual reduction in weight using the wired system. Amazingly, the LAN cables needed to connect every seat in the aircraft weigh 150lbs less than all the wireless antennae, access points and thickened ceiling panels required to accommodate a wireless network."

Ashraf Al Shafaki writes "The word 'tags' is the one in common use on the Web today and is one of the distinctive features of Web 2.0. Ever since Gmail came out, Google has decided to use the term 'label' instead of the term 'tag' despite they are basically the exact same thing and have the exact same function. Why is Google using inconsistent terminology in its products for such an important term? Is there a real difference between a tag and a label?"