Universal to Offer Music for Free 356

Posted by Zonk from the not-free-as-in-anything dept.
wild_berry writes "The BBC reports that Universal Music has signed a deal to make its music available for a free and legally-licensed download. Available from a new music site called SpiralFrog, the deal will allow users in the USA and Canada to listen to Universal's music, which Reuters' news site reveals is paid for by targeted advertising, but no details of possible community or playlist sharing features of the SpiralFrog service. Is the immunity from litigation enough to make up for having targeted advertising on each page and not being able to write the music to CD or a portable player?"

DS Has 2 Million Wi-Fi Users Play 70 Million Times 63

Posted by Zonk from the brain-breaking dept.
Wowzer writes "Nintendo's wireless gaming service has reached two million unique DS players online. Together they logged more than 70 million individual game sessions in just more than nine months of operation. From the article: 'To put that number in perspective, the population of Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection users now surpasses the population of 15 different U.S. states, including Montana, Nebraska and New Mexico.' The more you know, right? Also mentioned are the DS online games released so far: Mario Kart DS, Tony Hawk's American Sk8land, Animal Crossing: Wild World, Tetris DS, LostMagic, Metroid Prime: Hunters, Tenchu: Dark Secret, and today Star Fox Command."

Windows Vista Prices and Release Date Leaked 378

Posted by Zonk from the keep-that-stuff-quiet-if-you-don't-want-us-to-know dept.
Nieske writes "Prices and the release date for Windows Vista have leaked online. Ed Bott's Microsoft Report has information on pricing, and the release date is currently January 30th, 2007. Are they really going to make the deadline this time?" From the ZDNet article: "In Canada, at least, the rumors of a 'modest' price increase were true, based on this list. Will these same relative prices hold true in the U.S.? Who knows? But if they do, then it's mostly good news for Windows customers. There's no price increase for Home Basic. Home Premium, the Vista version that maps most closely to the OEM-only Windows XP Media Center Edition, will finally be available as a retail product for a slight bump over the Home Basic product, similar to the $39 premium typically charged by large OEMs for Media Center upgrades. And Vista Business buyers will get a break with a small discount relative to XP Professional."

Does WoW Influence Warhammer Online? 69

Posted by Zonk from the many-ways dept.
OGX writes "While old school geeks & gamers know that Warhammer predated Warcraft, there are many MMORPG fanatics these days that don't know the history of both franchises, and comment that Warhammer Online resembles World of Warcraft. OGX has an article about this very question with some input from Mark Jacobs (Studio GM EA Mythic, VP EA)." From the article: "This history factors heavily in the present situation wherein the Warhammer Online game looks, to many, to be a descendant of the success of World of Warcraft in a market filled with many games trying to be just that. It's easy to see how this confusion would arise, and I asked Mark Jacobs, Studio GM EA Mythic, VP Electronic Arts, to share his thoughts about the situation." Warhammer may have influenced WoW, but WHO's interface still looks like a WoW rip-off to me.

Original Star Trek Getting CGI Makeover 378

Posted by Zonk from the this-is-what-we-get-instead-of-firefly dept.
Tony Pascale writes "Star Trek is the latest sci-fi classic to get the CGI 'special edition' treatment. According to rumors picked up by TrekMovie.com, CBS and Paramount have been secretly working on a new version of Star Trek: The Original Series for HDTV. The shows will feature the original episodes with brand new state-of-the-art CGI visual effects, including a a redone title sequence (with re-recorded music). The effects are likely to be limited to the space scenes and not effect the live action scenes, so Edith Keeler will not shoot first. The HDTV Star Trek series will begin broadcasting this fall just in time for the 40th Anniversary of Star Trek."

New Xbox 360 BackCompat Update 35

Posted by Zonk from the old-games-made-new-again dept.
docdude316 writes "Gamespot is reporting that the Xbox 360 got another backward compatibility update Monday. The article says 'Microsoft has updated its Xbox 360 backward-compatibility list, this time adding 39 new games and updating support for nine more. That brings the total number of Xbox games playable on the Xbox 360 up past the 250 mark.' More backward compatibility is a good thing, but where's Psychonauts and Conker?" No Pyschonauts yet == BOOOO! And where is Jet Set Radio Future?

Patent Review via Community Not Wiki-based 40

Posted by Zonk from the close-though dept.
Moe Napoli writes "Articles have recently surfaced (CNET/ZDnet, Fortune and a mention here at Slashdot) incorrectly identifying the recent USPTO pilot Community Patent Review program to be Wiki-based. While a number of Slashdotters have identified why such an approach would create more problems than solve, the program's architect, NYLS Prof. Beth Noveck, continues the discussion and further clarifies why the program is not Wiki-based, yet 'conveys the appropriate sense of openness, transparency and collaboration.'"

New Auto-Seeding Torrent Server Released 240

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the making-life-easier dept.
ludwigvan968 writes "The University of Texas New Media Initiative in association with Google's Summer of Code program have been working on a project to make sharing files over the internet easier than ever before. Summer of Code intern Evan Wilson just released Project Snakebite, the first fully automatic BitTorrent server. Just as with a normal webserver, you drop files in a folder to share them. Snakebite takes care of generating torrent files and running a tracker and a seeder for each file. Additionally, it builds a user-customizable link page with all of your files. It will even register your Snakebite server with an easy to remember URL for people that can't remember their IP. Snakebite is free and open software and is currently released for Debian. It's fully portable to both Windows and OS X and the developers just need some help packaging it."

Ubiquitous Computing — The Invisible Assistant 13

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the more-toys-the-better dept.
ChelleChelle writes "Rather than focusing so much on an explanation of ubiquitous computing and its history, this article presents an actual experimental system designed to operate within a cell biology lab. The application, known as Labscape, was intended to function as an 'invisible assistant,' using context to organize and record information and predicting what would be needed by the researchers as any point in time. The author nicely sums up the article at the end by providing several important lessons about building proactive applications."

Add Another Core for Faster Graphics 237

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the ray-tracing-still-fun dept.
Dzonatas writes "Need a reason for extra cores inside your box? How about faster graphics. Unlike traditional faster GPUs, raytraced graphics scale with extra cores. Brett Thomas writes in his article Parallel Worlds on Bit-Tech, 'But rather than working on that advancement, most of the commercial graphics industry has been intent on pushing raster-based graphics as far as they could go. Research has been slow in raytracing, whereas raster graphic research has continued to be milked for every approximate drop it closely resembles being worth. Of course, it is to be expected that current technology be pushed, and it was a bit of a pipe dream to think that the whole industry should redesign itself over raytracing.' A report by Intel about Ray Tracing shows that a single P4 3.2Ghz is capable of 100 million raysegs, which gives a comfortable 30fps. Intel further states 450 million raysegs is when it gets 'interesting.' Also, quad cores are dated to be available around the turn of the year. Would octacores bring us dual screen or separate right/left real-time raytraced 3D?"

12 Steps to Beat Your Service-Provider Addiction 71

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the worse-than-crack dept.
eastbayted writes "It starts off simply enough: Your company signs on an outside firm to help you finish an important app dev project on deadline. But then they convince you they can be of service in getting other work done at your company, and you agree. Before you know it, your organization has become far too dependent on this team of outsiders on whom you're wasting a ton of money and perhaps not getting much in the way of a return. InfoWorld has devised a 12-step program 'that can help wean you off unhealthy dependencies on service providers, consultants, and outsourcers — without having to check into the Betty Ford Clinic or make a tearful confession on Oprah.'"

Quitting the Graphics Field Over SIGGRAPH 71

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the instead-of-fighting-for-change dept.
An anonymous reader writes "A Professor at Stony Brook university has quit the field of computer graphics. He claims too much importance is given to one particular conference (SIGGRAPH) and that acceptance of papers in this conference has too much importance in terms of the careers (tenure, grants etc) of a researcher. Furthermore he claims the paper reviewing for SIGGRAPH is not fair and bright and novel papers are summarily rejected because they are either not from a 'hot' field or because the reviewer does not understand the concept and is not willing to spend time understanding it. He has started a discussion forum which has comments from several big names in the field including the papers chair of SIGGRAPH 2007."

Hardware Headaches Inevitable? 73

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the hardware-is-always-a-headache dept.
JaneWalker6847 writes "Don Becker, co-founder of the Beowulf project, describes the inevitability of hardware administration headaches and warns users not to expect a silver bullet to solve these problems." From the article: "We're about to see another revolution, which is in network adapters -- that we [will] talk directly to [them] from application level. That's a massive change in how you interface with them. And that brings about a new round of device drivers completely unlike the device drivers we had 10 years ago. So, that part of the world isn't going to stabilize anytime soon."

A New Kind of OS 393

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the dreams-and-things dept.
trader writes "OSWeekly.com discusses a possibility of futuristic OSes with both negatives and positives. From the article: 'Imagine if you will, a world where your ideas and perhaps, even your own creative works became part of the OS of tomorrow. Consider the obvious advantages to an operating system that actually morphed and adapted to the needs of the users instead of the other way around. Not only is there no such OS like this, the very idea goes against much of what we are currently seeing in the current OS options in the market.'"

Flickr Launches Drag and Drop Geotagging 80

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the fun-toys dept.
Thomas Hawk writes "Flickr today launched a mash up of sorts creating a tool in their organizer where users can use Yahoo! maps to geotag their photographs at Flickr. The new feature allows Flickr users the ability to simply drag and drop their photos onto a map, filter their photos by tags in order to geotag, and use interesting search technology to browse photos that have been geotagged on Flickr maps."

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