Slashdot

Xemu writes "On Tuesday, Slashdot reported that Microsoft bought Sweden's vote on OOXML. Late Thursday night, in a surprising move, the Swedish Standards Institue (SIS) decided to declare the vote 'invalid' on the formal grounds that the SIS president Lars Flink has determined with certainty that one person voted twice. The Swedish work group now says it is in practice impossible for Sweden to have time to vote again before Sunday, when the international vote is concluded. Sweden will abstain. (Hot of the presses, Swedish news sources only. Sorry)"
http://www.dn.se/DNet/jsp/polopoly.jsp?d=678&a=686933&rss=145

Skye-of-Cydonia writes "Recently, I seem to have been a target for art theft, having mysteriously discovered various pieces of my DeviantART gallery — usually digital art — scattered across the internet. I logged onto my account this morning to find a note: a notice that now, my work is being sold on eBay, without my permission. Obviously this is illegal, and against UK, Ireland and International law, so I took the action of reporting it to eBay in the hope that it will be sorted. Although, that might not stop them entirely from perhaps submitting it elsewhere — perhaps in places that I am unaware of. I was wondering, Slashdot, if there is perhaps a way that I could prevent this — or digitally alter my artwork to be 'encrypted' to some extent. The only issue with prevention of my work being stolen like that, is that people will not be able to view it where submitted. I've already altered all of the work in my DeviantART gallery to contain watermarks, so that they cannot be used. But that doesn't stop them from stealing work from my website, Moons of Mars. I'd hate to have to upload everything again and place watermarks on all of my work — so perhaps there might also be a way that I could do something much easier. I'm not entirely sure what to expect as a response, or suggestion, but right now, I'm desperately in need of a way of securing my art from further theft like this, and I'll blindly take any offers."

athloi writes "Microsoft's move this week to close down the AutoPatcher project, a project well known and supported here on Neowin, that allows users to update their computers without requiring an internet connection, has met with cries of outrage from members of the Neowin community, and IT professionals from around the world. http://www.neowin.net/index.php?act=view&id=42304"
http://www.neowin.net/index.php?act=view&id=42304

Today AMD unveiled its 128-Bit SSE5 Instruction Set. The big news is that it includes 3 operand instructions such as floating point and integer fused multiply add and permute.
AMD posted a press release and a PDF describing the new instructions.
http://developer.amd.com/sse5.jsp

Lucas123 writes "Samsung just announced it will begin selling an MP3 music player with high-resolution video capability. The 14.95-millimeter device comes with integrated stereo slide-and-tilt speakers and it includes a text viewer, photo viewer, flash game and Bluetooth connectivity. The company, which formerly only supported Blu-ray Disc format, also announced its first Duo HD disc player, the BD-UP5000, which supports Blu-ray Disc and HD DVD."
http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&taxonomyName=storage&articleId=9033799&taxonomyId=19&intsrc=kc_top

sbrown3820 writes "Stuck working from home for much of his life, saleman Sam Wang offers his thoughts on the ten horrors of working out of his SOHO. "Being in a technology field, working from home is universally accepted. Laptops, high speed Internet from home, VPNs and remote desktop all add up to a full and productive environment. And why not? But today, after working from home most of my career, I will provide some insight into the horrors of the virtual office.""
http://networkinstruments.wordpress.com/2007/08/30/top-ten-reasons-against-the-virtual-office/

Lopy writes "Everything about the process of buying DRM-free music from Wal-Mart is wrong. At one point they actually asked me to reveal my "baby's due date"! And that wasn't even the absurd part. I had to install support for Windows WMA protected music files just to download an MP3. The whole sad story is detailed on Medialoper.com"
http://www.medialoper.com/columns/actual-mileage/my-afternoon-in-wal-marts-mp3-download-hell/

An anonymous reader writes "What print magazines are left for developers? There used to be C/C++ Users Journal and so many other print magazines, but it seems they have all gone out of print. Any suggestions besides Dr. Dobbs? If one has to go to a e-zine, what are the quality online developer publications? I'm not particularly interested in 'sysadmin' type magazines. Thanks!"

— Blog service providers in China are "encouraged" to register users with their real names and contact information, according to a new government document that tones down an earlier proposal banning anonymous online blogging. At least 10 major Chinese blog service providers have agreed to sign the "self-discipline pledge" issued by the Internet Society of China, the state-run Xinhua News Agency reported Tuesday. Online bulletin boards and blogs are the only forum for most Chinese to express opinions before a large audience in a society where all media are state-controlled. China has the world's second-biggest population of Internet users after the United States, with 137 million people online. It also has 30 million registered bloggers, and more than 100 million Chinese Internet users visit blogs regularly, according to the ISC. The group is under the Ministry of Information Industry. The guidelines, issued Tuesday and effective immediately, "encouraged" real-name registration of users, according to a copy posted on the Internet group's Web site. The information — to be filed with the companies, not posted online — should include the user's name, address, contact numbers and e-mail address, it said.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20070822.wgtchinablog22/BNStory/Technology/home

AKAImBatman writes "According to GoNintendo, the popular Flash gaming site WiiCade has released a new version of their Wii Remote API under a combination of the GPL and LGPL licenses. To sweeten the pot, this new version offers cool new features like IR-Based Motion Sensing, 4 player support, control over Zooming, and partial Nunchuk support.

To celebrate, WiiCade released 5 new games that use these features. These games are Icy's Droplet Gathering Adventure, Space Shooting Mania, Asteroid Falldown, Bumper Car Madness, and Catch a Falling Star. I highly recommend Bumper Car Madness, especially with friends."
http://gonintendo.com/?p=23244

eldavojohn writes "You may remember the article covering AI on Wallstreet but there's an interesting problem that came with the recent 387 point drop in the Dow Jones — too many quant funds were trying to take the same exit door at the wrong time. From the article, "Last week, Goldman Sachs said its Global Alpha quant fund had lost 27 percent of its value this year because its computers failed to anticipate what the firm called '25 percent standard deviation moves' or events so rare Goldman had seen them only twice before in the firm's history." Quant funds normally thrive on tiny deviations in the market for short term trades but evidently this past deviation was not only too much but unforeseen. Is this a case of something that's too good to be true (30% return) becoming so big that everyone's doing it and it is too good to be true?"
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/08/20/AR2007082001846_pf.html

David7 writes "The Programmer's Guild has posted a YouTube video (direct link) of a lawyer teaching a course on how to hire immigrants while passing over qualified U.S. candidates. He describes the basics of the process, including what to put in a classified ad and what kind of publication to place it in. He also describes the methods used to interview qualified U.S. candidates but avoid actually hiring them so that a job can be passed along to an immigrant."
http://www.youtube.com/programmersguild