BStorm - Slashdot User

Submission + - Web Doom Fragged (mozilla.org)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 22, 2011 @08:38AM

An anonymous reader writes: Back in May Slashdot covered a neat port of Doom to javascript, that could be played in a browser. Well, looks like the DMCA troll lawyers are at it again. The link has disappeared and now points to a copy of a DMCA takedown notice alleging that the page contravenes iD's copyright. But Doom is GPL'ed — so what's going on? Anyone from iD want to comment?

Submission + - Username charts of bot hacking attempts (ninetynine.be)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 22, 2011 @08:34AM

An anonymous reader writes: Michiel Vancoillie from Ninetynine.be posted an article on his blog after noticing approx. 20.000 failed SSH login attempts, probably by automated bots. He extracted the used usernames and put them into nice charts according to their frequency.

Submission + - Lava Lamps are for Pussies! (papercut.com)

Submitted by

cdance

on Monday August 22, 2011 @08:14AM

cdance writes: "Traditional Lava Lamps, and of course email, are the tools of choice to notify your dev team that the build in your continuous integration system is broken. However, lava lamps, just like pink curtains and shag pile, don't really fit into the culture of many modern development teams. There is now a solution. Retaliation is a new Jenkins CI build monitor that automatically coordinates a foam missile counter-attack against the developer who breaks the build. It does this by playing a pre-programmed control sequence to a USB Foam Missile Launcher to target the offending code monkey. Development, unit testing and build scripts just got a little more fun and "productive"!"

Submission + - Earth Ejecta Could Seed Life on Europa (technologyreview.com)

Submitted by

KentuckyFC

on Monday August 22, 2011 @06:56AM

KentuckyFC writes: "Various astronomers have studied how far rocks can travel through space after being ejected from Earth. Their conclusion is that it's relatively easy for bits of Earth to end up on the Moon or Venus. But very little would get to Mars because it would have to overcome both the Sun and the Earth's gravity. Now the biggest ever simulation of Earth ejecta confirms this result with a twist. The simulation shows that Jupiter is a much more likely destination than Mars. So bits of Earth could have ended up on Jovian satellites such as Europa. Astrobiologists estimate that Earth's hardiest organisms can survive up to 30,000 years in space, which means that if conditions are just right, Earth ejecta could seed life there."

Submission + - Exabit Transmission Speeds Maybe Possible

Submitted by adeelarshad82 on Tuesday May 10, 2011 @07:32PM

adeelarshad82 writes: Scientists at UC Berkeley were able to shrink a graphene optical modulator down to 25 square microns in size (small enough to include in silicon circuitry) and were able to modulate it at a speed of 1GHz. The researchers say that modulation speeds of up to 500GHz are theoretically possible. According to the research, due to the high modulation speeds, a graphene modulator can transmit a huge amount of data using spectral bandwidth that conventional modulators can only dream of. Professor Xiang Zhang, in an attempt to boil his group's new findings into consumer-speak, puts it this way: "I graphene modulators can actually operate at 500GHz, we could soon see networks that are capable of petabit or exabit transmission speeds, rather than megabits and gigabits."

Submission + - Diner Dash Strategy Video Game (mostfungameslist.com)

Submitted by edwin1q2 on Tuesday May 10, 2011 @07:25PM

edwin1q2 writes: Diner Dash involves seating customers and guiding Flo around the restaurant to serve customers. Diner Dash is a strategy video game available in multiple platforms such as PC, Mac, consoles, and mobile

Consumer Device With Open CPU Out of Beta Soon 99

Posted by timothy on Tuesday May 10, 2011 @07:23PM from the for-finger-painting-in-public dept.

lekernel writes "After years of passionate and engaging development, the video synthesizer from the Milkymist project is expected to go out of beta in August. Dubbed 'Milkymist One,' it features as central component a system-on-chip made exclusively of IP cores licensed under the open source principles, and is aimed at use by a general audience of video performance artists, clubs and musicians. It is one of the first consumer electronics products putting forward open source semiconductor IP, open PCB design and open source software at the same time. The full source code is available for download from Github, and a few hardware kits are available from specialized electronics distributors."

Submission + - Creating a "force field" invisible touch interface (computerworld.com.au)

Submitted by

angry tapir

on Tuesday May 10, 2011 @07:15PM

angry tapir writes: "Using infrared sensors like the ones on television remote controls, Texas A&M University students presented an inexpensive multitouch system at the Computer Human Interaction (CHI) conference in Vancouver. "I like to consider it an optical force field; it's like a picture frame where we shoot thousands of light beams across and we can detect anything that intersects that frame," said Jonathan Moeller, a research assistant in the Interface Ecology Lab at Texas A&M University. The frame is lined with 256 IR sensors, which are connected to a computer. When ZeroTouch is mounted over a traditional computer screen it turns the display into a multitouch surface. Taken one step further, if the screen is suspended then a user could paint a virtual canvas. (Pics and video in link.)"

Cellphones Get Government Chips For Disaster Alert 374

Posted by timothy on Tuesday May 10, 2011 @06:44PM from the shouldn't-the-opt-out-go-the-other-way? dept.

Jeremiah Cornelius writes "The chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, Julius Genachowski, said the Commercial Mobile Alert System that Congress approved in 2006 will direct messages to cellphones in case of a terrorist attack, natural disaster, or other serious emergency. There will be at least three levels of messages, ranging from a critical national alert from the president to warnings about impending or occurring national disasters to alerts about missing or abducted children. The alert would show up on the phone's front screen, instead of the traditional text message inbox, and arrive with a distinct ring and probably a vibration. People will be able to opt out of receiving all but the presidential alerts."

Ugly Truth of Space Junk 185

Posted by CmdrTaco on Tuesday May 10, 2011 @06:01PM from the hands-off-my-junk dept.

fysdt writes "Dealing with the decades of detritus from using outer space — human-made orbital debris — is a global concern, but some experts are now questioning the feasibility of the wide range of 'solutions' sketched out to grapple with high-speed space litter. What may be shaping up is an 'abandon in place' posture for certain orbital altitudes — an outlook that flags the messy message resulting from countless bits of orbital refuse. US General William Shelton, commander of Air Force Space Command, underscored the worrisome issue of orbital debris during a presentation at the National Space Symposium on April 12, 2011. In a recent conference here, Gen. William Shelton, commander of the US Air Force Space Command, relayed his worries about rising amounts of human-made space junk."

Submission + - 82-yr-old Father of Cellphone gobbles up new ones (networkworld.com)

Submitted by alphadogg on Tuesday May 10, 2011 @05:57PM

alphadogg writes: Martin Cooper isn't just the father of the cellular phone — he's also an avid user. Cooper, who made the world's first cellular phone call as a Motorola executive in 1973 and who now serves as CEO of wireless software company ArrayComm, says he buys a new smartphone every two months just to keep himself up-to-date on the newest technological trends. Before he most recently bought the LTE-capable HTC Thunderbolt, he was the owner of a Motorola Droid X and an iPhone 4, which he promptly gave away to his grandson after making an upgrade. He speaks to Network World in this Q&A.

Submission + - Sony Could Face Developer Exodus on PSN (industrygamers.com)

Submitted by donniebaseball23 on Tuesday May 10, 2011 @02:23PM

donniebaseball23 writes: As the PlayStation Network outage continues, developers continue to feel the economic pinch. There's been no word from Sony on whether they'll compensate companies who produce games for PSN, but Capcom has already said it's losing potentially "millions" from the downtime. Worse yet, developers who rely on PSN revenues may jump ship if they aren't compensated, warns Dylan Cuthbert, creator of popular PSN game PixelJunk. "I have a feeling they [Sony] are thinking about doing something or they will lose developers which of course is pretty bad for them," he told IndustryGamers.

Submission + - Oracle Says Google Throws Its Users Under The Bus (blogspot.com) 3

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 09, 2011 @03:38PM

An anonymous reader writes: The heat is on between Oracle and Google in their patent and copyright lawsuit. Oracle's lawyers just told the court that 'Google now wants to throw its licensees and users under the bus' by refusing to be liable for every Android-based device out there. It's also about the burden of proof. Oracle has produced almost 400 pages of claim charts and other material to prove infringements based on the public codebase, but Google wants to see this for individual devices. Groklaw thinks Oracle 'saw the case as a slam dunk, and Google is not cooperating.' FOSS Patents (Florian Mueller) says Google is at the top of a billion-dollar pyramid, is projected to generate mobile advertising income to the tune of $1.3 billion next year thanks to Android, and should 'assume responsibility' and solve the problem 'for the entire ecosystem' because otherwise Oracle might sue device makers, operators, or even app developers or users.

Submission + - Nano--sized Energy Harvesters On Horizon (smartertechnology.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 09, 2011 @03:37PM

An anonymous reader writes: Gallium nitride has already enabled those ultra-bright LEDs that are replacing headlights with brighter, lower-power equivalents (except for the weird blue color), but these guys say that's only the beginning. Next will be tiny nano-sized energy harvesters for a new generation of ambient vibration powered mobile devices.

'Forget super-sizing. Nano-sizing is the future of energy harvesters, according to researchers who claim to have mathematical proof that battery-free electronic devices can be powered by mechanical energy from vehicle vibrations to body movements.'

Boosting the output of these tiny piezoelectric energy harvesters by 100-times should enable battery-free electronic devices to enter the mainstream soon.

Submission + - V-day tip: Name a roach after your sweetheart (mongabay.com) 1

Submitted by Damien1972 on Wednesday February 09, 2011 @03:32PM

Damien1972 writes: The Wildlife Conservation Society's Bronx Zoo is offering a unique opportunity this Valentine's Day: the right to name one of the zoo's giant Madagascar hissing cockroaches after a loved one—or perhaps an "ex". Each name costs $10. The zoo has tens of thousands of roaches in need of a name.

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