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PlayStation (Games)

Submission + - US Air Force Buying another 2200 PS3. 1

Submitted by bleedingpegasus
bleedingpegasus writes: US Air Force apparently buying another batch of PS3, 2200 to be exact. This is after a machine that under development by the Air Force, codenamed "Roadrunner" rumoured to have bought 300 PS3 (old-big version) only to be dismantled and its Cell processor combined to make some kind of neuromorphic brain for combining images to form higher resolution radar's results looks to be successful.

What tickles me most is not the idea behind it — but why Cell processor by Sony? And why not just buy the processor directly, won't that be any cheaper?
Privacy

Submission + - Shedding Your Identity in the Digital Age (wired.com)

Submitted by newscloud
newscloud writes: Writer Evan Ratliff tells how he managed to hide from Wired readers for 27 days. The first person to find him and photograph him would claim a $5,000 prize. In addition to hiding out as a roadie with indy band, the Hermit Thrushes, for a week, Ratliff donned a variety of increasingly impressive disguises. It's an interesting read on how to disappear in the digital age:

August 13, 6:40 PM: Im driving East out of San Francisco on I-80, fleeing my life under the cover of dusk. Having come to the interstate by a circuitous route, full of quick turns and double backs, I’m reasonably sure that no one is following me. I keep checking the rearview mirror anyway. From this point on, there’s no such thing as sure. Being too sure will get me caught. About 25 minutes later, as the California Department of Transportation database will record, my green 1999 Honda Civic, California plates 4MUN509, passes through the tollbooth on the far side of the Carquinez Bridge, setting off the FasTrak toll device, and continues east toward Lake Tahoe. What the digital trail will not reflect is that a few miles past the bridge I pull off the road, detach the FasTrak, and stuff it into the duffle bag in my trunk, where its signal can’t be detected. There will be no digital record that at 4 am I hit Primm, Nevada, a sad little gambling town about 40 minutes from Vegas, where $15 cash gets me a room with a view of a gravel pile...

Spoiler alert: Slashdot previously reported on the final days of the contest.
Games

Submission + - "Band-O-Beer" Myths and Rumors

Submitted by DaveInCincinnati
DaveInCincinnati writes: The Bud Light Tailgate Approved marketing campaign has spawned a set of farcical commercials, online and print advertisements, as well as a contest on ESPN.COM. The online contest involves contestant suggestions for new and funny Tailgate Approved items like those featured in the campaign, and the Grand Prize (actually the only prize) is a trip to Miami for the Super Bowl. Currently the contest is in its final stages where the entries posted by the four finalists have been made into mini commercials and the winner will be determined by the entry receiving the most online votes.

The online voting takes place at http://promo.espn.go.com/espn/contests/budlight09/ and will continue until December 7th, 2009. Votes may be cast more than once and currently there is a tight race between all the entries.

As the inventor of the “Band-O-Beer”, I would like to dispel any rumors that alien technology was used in this design. And too, it has been suggested by some that my background is with black projects or off-budget CIA controlled developments, but that is also untrue. Additionally, I can personally guarantee that no ancient artifacts were used and no animals were harmed during this development project.

As the inventor of the “Band-O-Beer”, I am of course very proud of my accomplishment. Though I have yet to be notified, I would not be surprised to be offered, but I will decline, the Nobel prize for this work, and though it is a very nice gesture I cannot accept the undergarments that Britney Spears has offered.

In truth the only reward that I desire is for my fellow programmers, engineers, and IT professionals to acknowledge my work by casting their votes in the affirmative. Yes, there is nothing that I would find more satisfying than for everyone to go to http://promo.espn.go.com/espn/contests/budlight09/ and vote for my baby, the “Band-O-Beer”.

As a final note, I cannot confirm nor deny the existence of a somewhat spectacular and shocking Eater Egg in the video. I guess that if there was one then it would involve voting many times in order to find it.

Please consider what was discussed here private and confidential, but feel free to share it with your friends.
The Internet

Submission + - Spain Codifies 'The Right to Broadband' (pcmag.com)

Submitted by adeelarshad82
adeelarshad82 writes: Country's industry minister announced that Spanish citizens will have a legal right from 2011 to be able to buy broadband internet of at least one megabyte per second at a regulated price wherever they live. The telecoms operator holding the so-called "universal service" contract would have to guarantee it could offer "reasonably" priced broadband throughout Spain.
Security

Submission + - 64-bit Windows safer, claims Microsoft (computerworld.com)

Submitted by CWmike
CWmike writes: Windows users running 64-bit versions of the OS are less likely to get infected by attack code, Microsoft's security team said on Monday. But that doesn't mean they won't, countered an outside security researcher. "64-bit Windows has some of the lowest reported malware infection rates in the first half of 2009," said Joe Faulhaber of the Microsoft Malware Protection Center in a post to the group's blog yesterday. Windows 64-bit is safer to run, he argued, in large part because malware, which is written for the much more widely used 32-bit versions of Windows, is "confused by 64-bit." That's not necessarily true, said Alfred Huger, formerly with Symantec and currently vice president of engineering at security start-up Immunet. "There's a lot of 64-bit malware," said Huger. "They can run their code in compatibility mode, or they can compile it for 64-bit. The reason they're not is that there's still not a lot of 64-bit deployment. There's 64-bit malware out there, just like there's Mac OS malware out there. But right now, [64-bit] is just not as opportune a target as 32-bit."

Submission + - FOSS Alternative to Exchange for Small Business (slashdot.org) 2

Submitted by
CelticWhisper
CelticWhisper writes: "I'm the one-man IT department for a small manufacturing company. Recently, our support company (who provided all our IT support until I was called in, and still helps out with application development, ERP, etc.) has been making rumblings about installing Exchange to move our E-mail system off of the dedicated appliance it's on now and onto a proper mail server. I'm hoping to avoid this, as I've seen Exchange used in the past and it caused the sysadmins at that place no shortage of problems. Additionally there are the obvious matters of licensing costs. Thing is, while I've been here a year and a half, I'm still not as well established as the support company is and so countermanding one of their suggestions, while by no means impossible, has to be a careful process and I need a solid plan of action. What I'm hoping to do is introduce a FOSS alternative to Exchange that has E-mail and shared calendars at a minimum, is easy to administer and maintain, and plays nice with as many E-mail clients as possible (or, if not, whose native client is at least marginally Outlook-like). This way I can say to the management that not only will there be an improvement to E-mail/collaboration software, it will be done with significantly smaller licensing fees, or none at all.

I can't stress enough, though, that it needs to be easy to administer. Easy. Easy easy easy. I am still a one-person department and my time is extremely limited most days. I do not have the luxury of R'ing TFM for too long to figure out a problem or how to do something, and calls to the support company (who tend to be Microsoft-centric) are $150/hour. I don't want to install this thing and then realize we're stranded.

So, to recap, I'm looking for a recommendation for a FOSS alternative to MS Exchange that's reliable and easy to setup and use, has shared calendars, and will cause minimal user annoyance if/when the users are moved off of Outlook. Bonus points if it runs on Windows servers but I can get a Linux server in here if need be. Also, I'll deal with office-politics issues myself as needed. I'd like to keep this article to the technology as much as possible."

Submission + - Password protected emails 1

Submitted by DeanLearner
DeanLearner writes: I've been asked to look into whether it's possible to password protect an email so that a password has to be entered to read the content. Ideally, the recipient (members of the public; so varying computer skills) will not have to modify their email client at all to perform this.

The most popular solution googling seems to show is, attach a password protected document and go from there, but I'd like to avoid this as it relies on the recipient having certain document reading software.

My suggested solution was to email them a link to our website, once the password (which is told over the phone) is correctly entered, the message is shown. But the powers that be are keen to avoid this if possible.

Personally, I can't see anything easier/quicker than my solution, but if anyone out there thinks otherwise, please let me know.
Apple

Submission + - GPU-Accelerated Flash for Smartphones and Windows (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by N!NJA
N!NJA writes: from ArsTechnica:

[...] the update to the rather ubiquitous browser plugin will finally synchronize the Flash experience on all platforms with the exception of arguably one of the most successful smartphones: Apple's iPhone. [...] The company announced today that RIM is joining the project and will collaborate with Adobe to bring Flash Player 10.1 to its BlackBerry operating system. Adobe said that betas of Flash Player 10.1 will available for Windows Mobile and Palm's webOS later this year, and expects betas for Google Android and SymbianOS to be ready in early 2010. It will be optimized for netbooks and so-called "smartbooks" in addition to smartphone platforms, and will utilize GPU acceleration whenever possible.

-----------------------

from The Register
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/11/17/flash_mobile_10_point_one_air_2_betas

Today, Adobe made Flash Player 10.1 and AIR 2.0 available for beta, but only for use on familiar old PCs, laptops and notebooks running Windows, Linux, or Mac. [...] Tom Barclay, Adobe Flash platform senior product marketing manager, said a lot of the work done tuning the player for mobile will also benefit developers and users of desktops. [...] A subset of Flash is already on mobile devices, but Flash Player 10.1 will bring the full player to Symbian S60, Google Android, Palm Web OS, and Windows Mobile 6.5. Apple's iPhone browser will not be supported, although developers will be able to build content using Creative Suite 5 and post applications to Apple's AppStore for download. [...] In lieu of mobile-operating support today, Barclay instead called out features in the Flash 10.1 and AIR 2.0 beta built for mobile but suited to PCs, notebooks and nethooks. These included H.264 hardware acceleration for video on chipsets that Barclay said is significant for netbooks, because it delivers smooth-quality video on relatively inexpensive machines without soaking up the battery life or CPU.

---------------------

from Adobe
http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flashplayer/articles/fplayer10.1_hardware_acceleration.html

Hardware-accelerated H.264 decoding is supported on some video cards and drivers running on Windows XP, Windows Vista, and Windows 7. Linux and Mac OS X hardware-accelerated decoding is not supported in this version. See the Flash Player 10.1 public beta release notes (http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashplayer10/releasenotes.pdf) for supported hardware and links to download supported drivers.
Intel

Submission + - OS X Update Officially Kills Intel Atom Support (osxdaily.com)

Submitted by bonch
bonch writes: After apparently disabling and then re-enabling support for the Atom chipset in test builds of their 10.6.2 update, Apple has officially disabled support for the chipset in the final update released yesterday. This makes it impossible for OSX86 users to run 10.6.2 on their Atom-based netbooks until a modified kernel shows up. One important issue fixed in the update is a data deletion bug.

Submission + - SPAM: How Open Source Changes Software Acquisition

Submitted by itwbennett
itwbennett writes: We're trained to distrust people who are trying to sell us things. Vendors are shady, afterall. 'So businesspeople engage in expertise exchange ('What do you use? How do you like it?') and social networking ('My cousin's brother found someone he liked...'), and they ask for product recommendations from their peers,' says Esther Schindler in a recent blog post. But how does the equation change when the software is free? 'It shows off how poorly people make technology decisions,' says Schindler. Too often 'free' becomes the deciding factor instead of what is the 'right' solution for your business.
Link to Original Source

Submission + - Legal Status for Climate change Belief (telegraph.co.uk)

Submitted by xirusmom
xirusmom writes: In the UK, climate change belief was given same legal status as religion.
The London Telegraph reports that an executive has won the right to sue his employer, on the basis that he was unfairly dismissed for his green views. A judge ruled that environmentalism had the same weight in law as religious and philosophical beliefs.

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