Ouizardus - Slashdot User

UK ISP Disconnects Customers For File Sharing 311

Posted by kdawson on Friday July 24, 2009 @11:27AM from the one-strike-and-you're-dead dept.

think_nix writes "Karoo, an ISP in Hull, in the UK, is disconnecting subscribers without warning if they file-share, or are even suspected of file-sharing. Karoo is the only ISP in the area. Copyright owners are working with the ISP helping them identify and report suspected filesharers using their services. In order to get service restored, subscribers have to go to Karoo's office and sign a form admitting guilt and promising not to do it again. The article states that some subscribers have had their access cut off for more than two years." Update: 07/24 16:29 GMT by KD : The Register is reporting that Karoo has relented and has changed its policy. A spokesman said: "It is evident that we have been exceeding the expectation of copyright owners..."

Stock Market Manipulation By Millisecond Trading 624

Posted by kdawson on Friday July 24, 2009 @10:41AM from the other-people's-money dept.

cfa22 writes "Nice piece in the NY Times today on ultra-fast trading on the NYSE and other markets. The 'algos' that make autonomous trading decisions have to be fast, but I wonder: Is network speed ever a bottleneck? Can anyone with inside experience with millisecond trading provide some details for the curious among us regarding hardware architectures and networking used for such trading systems?" According to the article, high-frequency traders generated about $21 billion in profits last year.

Gaming On Windows 7 554

Posted by Soulskill on Friday July 24, 2009 @04:52AM from the extreme-minesweeper dept.

Jason Wilson writes "Windows 7 comes out Oct. 22, and many gamers are wondering whether it will be a boon for gaming, as Microsoft promised Vista would, or a disappointment (like Vista was at its launch). Former ExtremeTech editor Jason Cross, who's covered games and tech for 13 years, discusses the pluses and minuses of Windows 7 for gamers — how it differs from Vista, if it'll run older games, and the benefits of 64-bit computing. 'Windows 7 basically takes the Vista codebase and rewrites, refines, optimizes, and overhauls most of the internal stuff without making dramatic changes to the driver stacks that Vista did over WinXP. The changes to the fundamental driver models are small and mostly serve to improve performance. Plus, the hardware makers — especially the graphics guys — are on top of the changes this time around. Nvidia and ATI have been shipping quite good Win7 graphics drivers for months now.'"

East Africa Gets High-Speed Internet Access Via Undersea Cable 198

Posted by timothy on Friday July 24, 2009 @01:53AM from the not-a-panacea-but-good-still dept.

Abel Mebratu writes with this excerpt from the BBC: "The first undersea cable to bring high-speed internet access to East Africa has gone live. The fiber-optic cable, operated by African-owned firm Seacom, connects South Africa, Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda and Mozambique to Europe and Asia. The firm says the cable will help to boost the prospects of the region's industry and commerce. The cable — which is 17,000km long — took two years to lay and cost more than $650m."

Bookmark Ask Slashdot: How To Vet Clever Ideas Without Giving Them Away? (slashdot.org)

by Ouizardus on Thursday July 23, 2009 @06:23PM

How To Vet Clever Ideas Without Giving Them Away? 539

Posted by timothy on Thursday July 23, 2009 @06:00PM from the don't-clever-ideas-want-to-be-free? dept.

Rival writes "As an inquisitive and creative geek, I am constantly coming up with 'clever' ideas. Most often I discover fundamental or practical flaws lurking in the details, which I'm fine with. As Edison said, 'I haven't failed; I've found 10,000 ways that don't work.' Other times, I discover that someone else has beaten me to the idea. I'm fine with that, too. At least I know that I've come up with a great idea, even if I'm not the first. There are times, however, when I can find no flaws with an idea and nobody else seems to have thought of it. I'm not conceited enough to think my idea is genius; I just assume that I'm not knowledgeable enough to see what I'm missing. In these times, I often want to ask a subject matter expert for their thoughts. On the admittedly long chance that an idea is genius, however, what is the best way to ask for another's insights while mitigating the risk of them stealing or sharing the idea? Asking a stranger to sign a contract before discussing an idea seems like a good way to get a door closed on my face. What are your experiences and suggestions?"

Artificial Brain '10 Years Away' 539

Posted by samzenpus on Thursday July 23, 2009 @12:54AM from the batteries-not-included dept.

SpuriousLogic writes "A detailed, functional artificial human brain can be built within the next 10 years, a leading scientist has claimed. Henry Markram, director of the Blue Brain Project, has already built elements of a rat brain. He told the TED global conference in Oxford that a synthetic human brain would be of particular use finding treatments for mental illnesses. Around two billion people are thought to suffer some kind of brain impairment, he said. 'It is not impossible to build a human brain and we can do it in 10 years,' he said."

Windows 7 Hits RTM At Build 7600.16385 341

Posted by timothy on Wednesday July 22, 2009 @05:41PM from the finally-we-can-sleep-nights dept.

An anonymous reader links to Ars Technica's report that (quoting) "Microsoft today announced that Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 have hit the Release to Manufacturing (RTM) milestone. The software giant still has a lot of work to do, but the bigger responsibility now falls to OEMs that must get PCs ready, Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) that are testing their new apps, and Independent Hardware Vendors (IHVs) that are preparing their new hardware. The RTM build is 7600, but it is not the same one that leaked less than two weeks ago (7600.16384). We speculated that Microsoft may end up recompiling build 7600 until it is satisfied, but it only took the company one more shot to get it right: 7600.16385 is the final build number. Microsoft refused to share the full build string, but if you trust leaks from a few days ago, it's '6.1.7600.16385.090713-1255,' which indicates that the final build was compiled over a week ago: July 13, 2009, at 12:45pm. This would be in line with the rumored RTM date but it is also the day Microsoft stated that Windows 7 had not yet hit RTM. Although the final build had been compiled, Microsoft still had to put it through testing before christening it as RTM."

Researchers Use Salmon DNA To Make LED Lightbulbs 66

Posted by Soulskill on Wednesday July 22, 2009 @12:48PM from the bright-ideas-that-smell-fishy dept.

Al writes "Researchers from the University of Connecticut have created a new light-emitting material by doping spun strands of salmon DNA with fluorescent dyes. The material, which is robust because DNA is such a strong polymer, absorbs energy from ultraviolet light and gives off different colors depending on the amounts of dye it contains. A team led by chemistry professor Gregory Sotzing created the new material by mixing salmon DNA with two types of dye, then pumping the solution from a fine needle while a voltage is applied between the needle tip and a grounded copper plate covered with a glass slide. As the liquid jet comes out, it dries and forms long nanofibers that are deposited on the glass slide as a mat. The researchers then spin this nanofiber mat directly on the surface of an ultraviolet LED to make a white-light emitter. The color-tunable DNA material relies on an energy-transfer mechanism between two different fluorescent dyes, and the DNA keeps the dye molecules separated at a distance of 2 to 10 nanometers from each other."

Undercover Cameras Catch PC Repair Scams, Privacy Violations 665

Posted by Soulskill on Wednesday July 22, 2009 @12:17PM from the what's-in-your-e-wallet dept.

Barence writes "With help from readers of PC Pro, Sky News in the UK launched an undercover investigation into rogue PC repair shops. As a result, Sky's cameras caught technicians scouring through private photos, stealing passwords and over-charging for basic repairs. It was a simple enough job: 'To create the fault, we simply loosened one of the memory chips so Windows wouldn't load. To get things working again, one needs only push the chip back into the slot and reboot the machine. Any half-way competent engineers should fix it in minutes.' But these technicians had other ideas, stealing photos and documents, as well as login details for email and bank accounts."

Sam Raimi To Direct World of Warcraft Movie 298

Posted by Soulskill on Wednesday July 22, 2009 @10:33AM from the this-is-my-boomstick dept.

Decado writes "Blizzard has just announced that Sam Raimi is to direct the new World of Warcraft movie. 'Raimi, acclaimed director of the blockbuster Spider-Man series, will bring the forces of the Horde and the Alliance to life in epic live-action film. Charles Roven's Atlas Entertainment will produce alongside Raimi's Stars Road Entertaiment.' While it's still early in the process, does this offer hope that someone might finally make a good movie based on a game IP?"

Microsoft Makes Second GPLv2 Release 218

Posted by Soulskill on Wednesday July 22, 2009 @10:10AM from the baby-steps dept.

angry tapir writes "Microsoft has made its second release under the General Public License in two days with software for Moodle, an 'open-source course management system that teachers use to create online learning Web sites for their classes[, which] has about 30 million users in 207 countries.' It comes on the heels of Redmond contributing drivers to the Linux community. No reports as yet on dropping temperatures in hell."

Medieval UK Battle Records Released Online 178

Posted by kdawson on Tuesday July 21, 2009 @07:18PM from the next-year-at-agincourt dept.

eldavojohn writes "Do you have ancestors who served in the British military under Henry V or fought in the Hundred Years War? Look them up online now that 250,000 medieval battle records are online and available for searching. According to the project details (PDF): 'The main campaigns of the period were to France but there were others to Flanders, Spain, Portugal, Ireland, Wales and Scotland, a much wider geographical spectrum than before 1369. In addition, garrisons were maintained within England (such as that held at the Tower of London), the Channel Islands, Wales and the marches, as well as at Calais and in Gascony. In the fourteenth-century phase of the Hundred Years War, the English also held some garrisons in areas of northern France, and in the fifteenth century phase, there was a systematic garrison-based occupation of Normandy and surrounding regions...'"

40 Million Identities Up For Sale On the Web 245

Posted by kdawson on Tuesday July 21, 2009 @06:34PM from the big-fat-target dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Highly sensitive financial information, including credit card details, bank account numbers, telephone numbers, and even PINs are available to the highest bidder. The information being traded on the Web has been intercepted by a British company and collated into a single database for the first time. The Lucid Intelligence database contains the records of 40 million people worldwide, mostly Americans; four million are Britons. Security experts described the database as the largest of its kind in the world. The database is in the hands of Colin Holder, a retired senior Metropolitan police officer who served on the fraud squad. He has collected the information over the past four years. His sources include law enforcement from around the world, such as British police and the FBI, anti-phishing and hacking campaigners, and members of the public. Mr. Holder said he has invested £160,000 in the venture so far. He plans to offset the cost by charging members of the public for access to his database to check whether their data security has been breached."

Kingston Unveils $1000 USB Flash Drive 119

Posted by samzenpus on Tuesday July 21, 2009 @03:48PM from the because-they-can dept.

Barence writes "Kingston has unveiled the 'world's first' 256GB flash drive, raising flash drive storage to the kind of capacity you normally associate with laptop hard disks. Kingston claims the drive is 'ideal for netbook users who want to extend the limited capacity of their machines,' although given that the device costs about twice as much as a netbook, buyers could probably get more storage by purchasing two of the cheap ultraportables. The device is made on a build-to-order basis, with a suggested UK retail price of £650.52 including VAT — that's an astonishing $1074.69 at current exchange rates. Not exactly cheap and cheerful."

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