Comment smbc (Score 1) 316
Reminds me of this short
Comment Re:Regret is a standard term in economics (Score 0) 145
Right, economics lives in a world of games with artificial rules. Great for finding a strategy for a game with two colors of counters moving from column to column. Applying it to anything resembling real life is negligent at best.
Comment Re:1st and I hope last time on gizmodo (Score 1) 203
I think gp is refering to the nasa pix. A lot of the cloud formations in those pictures look doubled up.
AMD Demos Llano Fusion APU, Radeon 6800 Series 116
MojoKid writes "At a press event for the impending launch of AMD's new Radeon HD 6870 and HD 6850 series graphics cards, the company took the opportunity to provide an early look at the first, fully functional samples of their upcoming 'Llano' processor, or APU (Applications Processer Unit). For those unfamiliar with Llano, it's 32nm 'Fusion' product that integrates CPU, GPU, and Northbridge functions on a single die. The chip is a low-power derivative of the company's current Phenom II architecture fused with a GPU that will target a wide range of operating environments at speeds of 3GHz or higher. Test systems showed the integrated GPU had no trouble running Alien vs. Predator at a moderate resolution with DirectX 11 features enabled. In terms of the Radeon 6800 series, board shots have been unveiled today, as well as scenes from AMD's upcoming tech demo, Mecha Warrior, showcasing the new graphics technology and advanced effects from the open source Bullet Physics library."
Comment xkcd (Score 1, Funny) 118
obligatory xkcd
Submission + - reCAPTCHA.net has been officially solved. (n3on.org)
n3ond4x writes: reCAPTCHA.net algorithms have been developed to solve the current CAPTCHA at an efficacy of 30%. The algorithms were disclosed at DEFCON 18 over the weekend and have since been made available online. Also available is a video demonstration of random reCAPTCHA.net CAPTCHAs being subjected to the algorithms.
Comment Re:Analog special effects are cool, but... (Score 1) 196
You might be surprised how many mundane scenes are actually CGI:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=clnozSXyF4k
Comment Re:Wait. (Score 1) 155
According to TFA, it is already used in Ethiopia to denote sarcasm, and can be distinguished from the Spanish usage of the same character by its location at the end of a sentence rather than the beginning.
Droid X Gets Rooted 97
An anonymous reader writes "The Droid X forums have posted a procedure to root the new Motorola Droid X, putting to rest Andoid fans' fears that they would never gain access to the device's secrets due to a reported eFuse that would brick the phone if certain boot files were tampered with. Rooting the phone is the first step in gaining complete control over the device."
Comment Re:Who doesn't hash/encrypt passwords? (Score 1) 304
AppConstants.AUTH_KEY ? A salt that is Constant through out the App? That is not the same thing as a Random salt for every User.
The whole point of not storing plain text passwords is if somebody gets access to your DB. And in that case the only advantage of using one salt through out is that the attacker can't use a precomputed rainbow table for your hash function with out a salt. Instead they will have to compute ONE rainbow table for the one salt you used. When many salts are used rainbow tables are no longer useful. Just like GP said, two users with the same password will have the same hashed passwords in your DB, because they all use the same salt.
Again, if your not concerned about "Somebody getting a copy of my DB and getting the hash keys," then why are you bothering to hash the passwords?
Submission + - Microsoft Denies IE8 ASLR Bypass Flaw (threatpost.com)
Trailrunner7 writes: Microsoft on Friday said that a weakness in Internet Explorer 8 identified by security researcher Ruben Santamarta recently is not an exploitable vulnerability, but rather a "technique for bypassing ASLR." Santamarta, a researcher at Wintercore, a Spanish security company, recently published information on a flaw he found in mshtml.dll, the HTML viewer in IE 8. He said in his advisory that the problem could be exploited to leak a memory pointer in IE 8, which, when combined with some other data, could allow and attacker to run code on a remote machine. However, Jerry Bryant of Microsoft's Security Response Center said that the problem is not an exploitable vulnerability.
Best Format For OS X and Linux HDD? 253
dogmatixpsych writes "I work in a neuroimaging laboratory. We mainly use OS X but we have computers running Linux and we have colleagues using Linux. Some of the work we do with Magnetic Resonance Images produces files that are upwards of 80GB. Due to HIPAA constraints, IT differences between departments, and the size of files we create, storage on local and portable media is the best option for transporting images between laboratories. What disk file system do Slashdot readers recommend for our external HDDs so that we can readily read and write to them using OS X and Linux? My default is to use HFS+ without journaling but I'm looking to see if there are better suggestions that are reliable, fast, and allow read/write access in OS X and Linux."
Submission + - SPAM: Microsoft's sleep proxy lowers PC energy use
alphadogg writes: Microsoft researchers have slashed desktop energy use with a sleep proxy system that maintains a PC's network presence even when it is turned off or put into standby mode.
Microsoft has deployed the sleep proxy system to more than 50 active users in the Building 99 research facility in Redmond, Wash., according to the Microsoft Research Web site and a paper [spam URL stripped] that will be presented at the Usenix technical conference in Boston later this month.
"A number of studies have noted that most office machines are left on irrespective of user activity," Microsoft researchers write in a paper titled "Sleepless in Seattle no longer." "At Microsoft Research, we find hundreds of desktop machines awake, day or night – a significant waste of both energy and money. Indeed, potential savings can amount to millions of dollars per year for larger enterprises."
Sleep proxies allow machines to be turned off while keeping them connected to the network, waking the machines when a user or IT administrator attempts to access it remotely.
Link to Original Source
Microsoft has deployed the sleep proxy system to more than 50 active users in the Building 99 research facility in Redmond, Wash., according to the Microsoft Research Web site and a paper [spam URL stripped] that will be presented at the Usenix technical conference in Boston later this month.
"A number of studies have noted that most office machines are left on irrespective of user activity," Microsoft researchers write in a paper titled "Sleepless in Seattle no longer." "At Microsoft Research, we find hundreds of desktop machines awake, day or night – a significant waste of both energy and money. Indeed, potential savings can amount to millions of dollars per year for larger enterprises."
Sleep proxies allow machines to be turned off while keeping them connected to the network, waking the machines when a user or IT administrator attempts to access it remotely.
Link to Original Source
Submission + - Neil Gaiman 'Impressed at the Hive Mind of Twitter (bbc.co.uk)
eldavojohn writes: You don't often find a lot of love for Twitter but author Niel Gaiman spoke with the BBC about oddball things including a book he authored about Duran Duran and Twitter. For the summer, his book American Gods was selected to be read by thousands of Twitter users where they would work through it and tweet about the book. Surprisingly, Gaiman commented, "For me it was a very odd choice because American Gods is the book of mine that's won the most awards, but it's also the most divisive. I've been genuinely impressed at the hive mind of Twitter — how much wisdom and knowledge it has. It's fun as an author to realise how far this thing has travelled. It looks like there are people doing One Book, One Twitter from everywhere except the Antarctic and mainland China."
Submission + - Quant AI Better than Human (crossingwallstreet.com)
Mr_Blank writes: From Technology Review: The ability to predict the stock market is, as any Wall Street quantitative trader (or quant) will tell you, a license to print money. So it should be of no small interest to anyone who likes money that a new system that works in a radically different way than previous automated trading schemes appears to be able to beat Wall Street's best quantitative mutual funds at their own game. It's called the Arizona Financial Text system, or AZFinText, and it works by ingesting large quantities of financial news stories (in initial tests, from Yahoo Finance) along with minute-by-minute stock price data, and then using the former to figure out how to predict the latter. Then it buys, or shorts, every stock it believes will move more than 1% of its current price in the next 20 minutes — and it never holds a stock for longer.
