Windows

86% of Windows 7 PCs Maxing Out Memory 613

Posted by samzenpus from the brand-new-resource-hog dept.
CWmike writes "Citing data from Devil Mountain Software's community-based Exo.performance.network (XPnet), Craig Barth, the company's chief technology officer, said that new metrics reveal an unsettling trend. On average, 86% of Windows 7 machines in the XPnet pool are regularly consuming 90%-95% of their available RAM, resulting in slow-downs as the systems were forced to increasingly turn to disk-based virtual memory to handle tasks. The 86% mark for Windows 7 is more than twice the average number of Windows XP machines that run at the memory 'saturation' point, and this comes despite more RAM being available on most Windows 7 machines. 'This is alarming,' Barth said of Windows 7 machines' resource consumption. 'For the OS to be pushing the hardware limits this quickly is amazing. Windows 7 is not the lean, mean version of Vista that you may think it is.'"
Australia

Nintendo Wins Lawsuit Over R4 Mod Chip Piracy 146

Posted by Soulskill from the sorry-about-your-luck dept.
schliz writes "The Federal Court has ordered an Australian distributor to pay Nintendo over half a million dollars for selling the R4 mod chip, which allows users to circumvent technology protection measures in Nintendo's DS consoles. The distributor, RSJ IT Solutions, has been ordered to cease selling the chip through its gadgetgear.com.au site and any other sites it controls, as well as paying Nintendo $520,000 in damages."
Image

Microsoft RickRolls Wi-Fi Network Leechers 165

Posted by samzenpus from the never-gonna-tell-a-lie-and-hurt-you dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Microsoft has revealed that it RickRolled users that were killing its TechEd conference Wi-Fi network last year by torrenting large files. Network administrators at the event quickly built a list of all of the top torrent trackers around and got the nod to add them all to the local DNS resolver and point them at a local Web server containing some Rick Roll scripts. According to the admin: 'It killed me that I didn't see anyone getting done by this first hand, but there were hundreds of impressions in the server logs containing the Rick Roll scripts so I did get a fair amount of satisfaction at least. It was the most evil of evil Rick Roll scripts too — worse than any that anyone has used to get me in the past.' Fun and games aside, it looks like the leechers will force quotas and traffic shaping for the first time in the event's history."
Games

Ubisoft's Constant Net Connection DRM Confirmed 631

Posted by Soulskill from the enjoy-getting-flamed-by-the-entire-internet dept.
A few weeks ago we discussed news of Ubisoft's DRM plans for future games, which reportedly went so far as to require a constant net connection, terminating your game if you get disconnected for any reason. Well, it's here; upon playing review copies of the PC version of Assassin's Creed 2 and Settlers VII, PCGamer found the DRM just as annoying as you might expect. Quoting: "If you get disconnected while playing, you're booted out of the game. All your progress since the last checkpoint or savegame is lost, and your only options are to quit to Windows or wait until you're reconnected. The game first starts the Ubisoft Game Launcher, which checks for updates. If you try to launch the game when you're not online, you hit an error message right away. So I tried a different test: start the game while online, play a little, then unplug my net cable. This is the same as what happens if your net connection drops momentarily, your router is rebooted, or the game loses its connection to Ubisoft's 'Master servers.' The game stopped, and I was dumped back to a menu screen — all my progress since it last autosaved was lost."
Enlightenment

Enlightenment Returns To Bring Ubuntu To ARM 198

Posted by samzenpus from the look-who's-back dept.
mu22le writes "Enlightenment, the daring window manager that disappeared from our collective radar years ago, is back to bring Ubuntu to ARM. The bet that E developers made years ago to neglect 3D, compositing, and make a fast and versatile 2.5d engine may have finally paid off. The current popularity of ARM-based devices could be a niche that the Enlightenment Foundation Libraries can fill comfortably."
Communications

White House Press Secretary's Tweets Archived 63

Posted by samzenpus from the for-future-generations dept.
RedTeflon writes "The White House spokesman, who has just started using Twitter, told reporters this afternoon that he met with government lawyers yesterday to determine whether his tweets would be archived along with emails and just about everything else produced at the White House. After deliberation, White House lawyers have decided that any and all tweets will be archived in keeping with the Presidential Records Act of 1978."
Programming

The 25 Most Dangerous Programming Errors 534

Posted by samzenpus from the spilling-your-soda dept.
Hugh Pickens writes "The Register reports that experts from some 30 organizations worldwide have compiled 2010's list of the 25 most dangerous programming errors along with a novel way to prevent them: by drafting contracts that hold developers responsible when bugs creep into applications. The 25 flaws are the cause of almost every major cyber attack in recent history, including the ones that recently struck Google and 33 other large companies, as well as breaches suffered by military systems and millions of small business and home users. The top 25 entries are prioritized using inputs from over 20 different organizations, who evaluated each weakness based on prevalence and importance. Interestingly enough the classic buffer overflow ranked 3rd in the list while Cross-site Scripting and SQL Injection are considered the 1-2 punch of security weaknesses in 2010. Security experts say business customers have the means to foster safer products by demanding that vendors follow common-sense safety measures such as verifying that all team members successfully clear a background investigation and be trained in secure programming techniques. 'As a customer, you have the power to influence vendors to provide more secure products by letting them know that security is important to you,' the introduction to the list states and includes a draft contract with the terms customers should request to enable buyers of custom software to make code writers responsible for checking the code and for fixing security flaws before software is delivered."
Google

PageRank-Type Algorithm From the 1940s Discovered 108

Posted by samzenpus from the oldest-google-juice dept.
KentuckyFC writes "The PageRank algorithm (pdf) behind Google's success was developed by Sergey Brin and Larry Page in 1998. It famously judges a page to be important if it is linked to by other important pages. This circular definition is the basis of an iterative mechanism for ranking pages. Now a paper tracing the history of iterative ranking algorithms describes a number of earlier examples. It discusses the famous HITS algorithm for ranking web pages as hubs and authorities developed by Jon Kleinberg a few years before PageRank. It also discusses various approaches from the 1960s and 70s for ranking individuals and journals based on the importance of those that endorse them. But the real surprise is the discovery of a PageRank-type algorithm for ranking sectors of an economy based on the importance of the sectors that supply them, a technique that was developed by the Harvard economist Wassily Leontief in 1941."
Bug

Outlook 2010 Bug Creates Monster Email Files 126

Posted by timothy from the rodents-of-unusual-size dept.
Julie188 writes with this snippet from Network World "Office 2010 is still in beta and a patch is already out. Microsoft is trying to fix a bug in the email program Outlook 2010 Beta that creates unusually large e-mail files that take up too much space. The Outlook product team has offered a bug fix for both 32-bit and 64-bit systems that fixes the problem going forward, although previous emails will remain super-sized. This could be a problem for email programs that limit message sizes, such as Gmail or BlackBerry."
Mozilla

Mozilla Debates Whether To Trust Chinese CA 276

Posted by timothy from the but-that-would-never-happen dept.
At his Freedom to Tinker blog, Ed Felten has a thoughtful, accessible piece on the debate at Mozilla about whether Firefox, by default, should trust a Chinese certificate authority (as it has since October). Felten explains in clear language why this is significant, and therefore controversial. An excerpt: "To see why this is worrisome, let's suppose, just for the sake of argument, that CNNIC were a puppet of the Chinese government. Then CNNIC's status as a trusted CA would give it the technical power to let the Chinese government spy on its citizens' 'secure' web connections. If a Chinese citizen tried to make a secure connection to Gmail, their connection could be directed to an impostor Gmail site run by the Chinese government, and CNNIC could give the impostor a cert saying that the government impostor was the real Gmail site."
Real Time Strategy (Games)

StarCraft II Closed Beta Begins 268

Posted by Soulskill from the rush-starts-now dept.
Blizzard announced today that the multiplayer beta test for StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty is now underway. The client downloader is available through Battle.net for people who have received invites, and the system requirements have been posted as well. A list of known issues is up on the official forums. StarCraft II and the revamped Battle.net are planned for release "in the first half of 2010."
Displays

No Glasses Needed For TI's New 3D Display 165

Posted by timothy from the you-may-still-need-them-for-driving dept.
adeelarshad82 writes "At the MWC, TI showed off a tablet-sized device with a 3D display that doesn't require glasses, running on an existing TI OMAP3 chipset. The 3D demo showed images and video in 3D by using a standard 120-Hz LCD with a special overlay film from 3M that can direct images either towards your left or right eye. By flickering two images very quickly, running at 60 frames per second rather than the usual 30, the display transmits a different picture to each eye, creating a simulated 3D image. The 3D picture can be created using a handheld with dual 3-megapixel cameras and an 800-MHz TI OMAP 3630 chipset."
The Military

Mock Cyber Attack Shows US Unpreparedness 148

Posted by timothy from the sir-we've-lost-amazon dept.
An anonymous reader writes with word that the outcome of the large-scale cyberattack simulation promised a few days ago isn't too rosy. From the Help Net Security article: "During the simulated cyber attack that took place yesterday in Washington and was recorded by CNN, one thing became clear: the US are still not ready to deflect or mitigate such an attack to an extent that would not affect considerably the everyday life of its citizens. The ballroom of the Washington's Mandarin Oriental Hotel was for this event transformed into the White House Situation Room, complete with three video screens displaying maps of the country, simulated updates and broadcasts by 'GNN,' an imaginary television network 'covering' the crisis."
Graphics

20 Years of Photoshop 289

Posted by timothy from the worth-it-for-the-screenshots dept.
benwiggy writes "Photoshop turned 20 on 10th February 2010. Here's an excellent history, including how the Knoll family created one of the biggest apps of all time. The article also has screenshots of the workspace through the versions."
Security

Time Bomb May Have Destroyed 800 Norfolk City PCs' Data 256

Posted by timothy from the philadelphia-experiment dept.
krebsonsecurity writes "The City of Norfolk, Virginia is reeling from a massive computer meltdown in which an unidentified family of malicious code destroyed data on nearly 800 computers citywide. The incident is still under investigation, but city officials say the attack may have been the result of a computer time bomb planted in advance by an insider or employee and designed to trigger at a specific date, according to krebsonsecurity.com. 'We don't believe it came in from the Internet. We don't know how it got into our system,' the city's IT director said. 'We speculate it could have been a time bomb waiting until a date or time to trigger. Whatever it was, it essentially destroyed these machines.'"

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