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The Internet

Enforced Ads Coming to Flash Video Players 397

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the advertising-ploy-to-rule-the-world dept.
Dominare writes "The BBC is reporting that Adobe is releasing new player software which will allow websites that use their Flash video player (such as YouTube) to force viewers to watch ads before the video they selected will play. 'But the big seller for Adobe is the ability to include in Flash movies so-called digital rights management (DRM) — allowing copyright holders to require the viewing of adverts, or restrict copying. "Adobe has created the first way for media companies to release video content, secure in the knowledge that advertising goes with it," James McQuivey, an analyst at Forrester Research said.' This seems to have been timed to coincide with Microsoft's release of their own competitor, Silverlight, to Adobe's dominance of online video."
Communications

Preparing for the Worst in IT 172

Posted by Zonk from the in-a-post-blah-blah-blah dept.
mplex writes "How vulnerable is the internet to terrorist attack? Is it robust enough to handle an outage on a massive scale? Should the commercial infrastructure that powers the internet be kept secret? These are the sorts of questions raised by Mark Gibbs in his latest column in Network World. 'There is an alternate route available for nearly all services through Las Vegas or Northern California serving all facilities-based carriers in Los Angeles -- all interconnected at numerous L.A. and L.A.-area fiber-optic terminals supporting both metro and long-distance cable.' Given that the internet thrives on open networks, it's hard to imagine keeping them a secret. At best, we must be prepared to deal with the worst."
It's funny. Laugh.

Submission + - Wil Wheaton Hottest Daddy at Bloggers Choice

Submitted by
Vincent Guihan
Vincent Guihan writes: "Wil Wheaton (formerly Star Trek's Wesley Crusher) is in the running (and presently, winning) at the Blogger's Choice Awards for Hottest Daddy Blogger (disclaimer, my blog is currently running second). Is it news that Wil is a hot daddy blogger? Not particularly. But I wanted to alert the /. community to this historic opportunity to to vote for Wil and/or any of a number of other father-bloggers out there."
United States

Submission + - Gary Kasparov is the Russian Martin Luther King?

Submitted by
reporter
reporter writes: "Like Martin Luther King of an older generation, gutsy Gary Kasparov has again defied authorities and lead a peace demonstration demanding basic civil rights and fair elections. Quoting Vladimir Ryzhkov, Bloomberg reports that the Russian police broke up the demonstration by "beating grandmothers and pensioners with billy clubs, hitting them in the back". Kasparov, a former chess champion, runs the risk of being permanently checkmated by President Vladimir Putin. Will Kasparov share the same untimely end that concluded King's life?"
The Internet

Submission + - How Slashdot can help Distributed Proofreaders

Submitted by
punicafides
punicafides writes: "How Slashdot helped Distributed Proofreaders, and how it can help again

Project Gutenberg is the largest free ebook library on the Internet, and its largest ebook supplier is Distributed Proofreaders International, which has uploaded its 10,000th ebook to Project Gutenberg on March, 27th, as previously announced on Slashdot. Distributed Proofreaders depends on volunteers using their Internet connection to proofread books. All you have to do is proofread a page when you feel like proofreading, like during your lunch hour. This tends to become quite addicting, or anyway I am becoming addicted as many other people.

In 2002, Distributed Proofreaders was slashdoted with a very positive effect, as you can read in a post from the Distributed Proofreaders forum:
  • So, over the course of that six days, membership on the site increased from 841 to 5156.... Thats 4315 new members, roughly a five hundred percent increase. That large an influx put a fairly severe strain on resources, both hardware and human, but they held up remarkably well.
  • That was a very exciting time in DP's history. I wish there were some way to convey to people who arrived later just how much positive energy there was going around the site. Within a very few months we had changed most of our production scheme, acquired important new tools, and really built a community. We had a sense that anything was possible if we just worked together on it. A very "can do" attitude. We all had a common goal — get the books onto PG — and everyone pushed towards it full speed ahead.
Now people from the Slashdot community can help again by signing up to the pledge I created at PledgeBank : http://www.pledgebank.com/booksnculture

People don't even need to be tech-savvy to understand how the site works. Actually, Distributed Proofreaders site is pretty much a Web 2.0 phenomenon, and this is what makes them akin to Wikipedia, but for ebooks.

It's great if people join us, and even better if they stay."
Biotech

Submission + - Lighting the nanoworld with nanolamps

Submitted by
Roland Piquepaille
Roland Piquepaille writes: "An interdisciplinary team of researchers at Cornell University (CU) has built 'nanolamps.' These extremely small light bulbs are made of light-emitting nanofibers about the size of a virus or the tiniest of bacteria. Using a technique called electrospinning, the researchers spun the fibers from a metallic element, the ruthenium, and a polymer. These nanofibers "are so small that they are less than the wavelength of the light they emit." Apparently, these nanofibers are easy to produce. But before they can be integrated into our increasingly smaller electronic devices, there still is a need to know how long these nanolamps can last. Read more for additional references and a picture of the orange glowing organic nanodevices."
Hardware Hacking

Submission + - New MoBo has IDE boot disabled - is there a fix?

Submitted by
wattsup
wattsup writes: "I recently purchased an MSI G965M-FI motherboard for a system upgrade. Overall the board is pretty good with lots of features, but it had one "unexpected feature" that I didn't know about when I bought it. The PATA100 IDE port won't allow you to install an operating system from a CD-ROM attached to it.

While its on their website, MSI doesn't tell you this on the retail packaging, until you break the seal on the static wrap and look at the motherboard. There, with a tiny labelplaced over the IDE connector to inform you "This IDE does not support OS installation in hard drive".

This made my out-of-box experience rather maddening, as I had to go get a USB based CD-ROM to install a fresh copy of XP.

This seems like a pretty lame way to save money, disabling functionality on an IDE port that's included. Some research shows me that other manufacturers are doing the same.

My question is; Does anybody know if this is an issue that can be fixed by upgrading the BIOS, or is this hard-wired?"
OS X

Why Apple Delayed Leopard for the iPhone 453

Posted by CowboyNeal from the next-big-things dept.
Ernest DeFarge writes "Apple recently announced that they've pulled several key programmers from the OS X 10.5 "Leopard" and assigned them to the iPhone in order to get it done on time. In doing so, they delayed Leopard for 4 months. Does that mean that the iPhone is more important to Apple than Mac OS? Or is it just capitalizing on the current state of Apple's fanbase?"
The Internet

Submission + - World's first true blogger comes forward

Submitted by
Ian
Ian writes: "Chris Knight is saying he didn't realize until this week that he may have been the first person ever to start and maintain a true blog in the modern sense. What's more is that he has a newspaper article from 1995 to back up the claim. Here's the article he posted to his blog yesterday where he discusses what led to the creation of 'Knight's Corner' in 1994, including reader comments and the first blog profile picture."

Feed Guidelines for autonomous killbots proposed (engadget.com)

From feed by engfeed

Filed under: Robots

Suggestions in regard to robotic rights seem to be flying off the shelves these days, but an engineer at the Naval Surface Warfare Centre has concocted an interesting set of guidelines catering to autonomous killbots of the future. Most likely, it's just a matter of time before machine-on-machine violence becomes commonplace, and John Canning's "Concept of Operations for Armed Autonomous Systems" outlines just how lethal robots should handle themselves when faced with potentially deadly conflicts. Interestingly, the document suggests the the bots should be allowed to make their own decisions when it comes to blasting or forgiving fellow robots, but before they pull the trigger on a human, it should request guidance from a flesh 'n blood friendly. Still, a definite loophole exists in the fact that these simple-minded killers could aim for a "human's weapon" without asking permission, and when his awful auto-aim programming leads to a costly casualty, it'll simply be deemed "collateral damage." Can't say we like the sound of that. [Warning: PDF read link]

[Via El Reg]

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Software

Submission + - Is Your Tax Software Accurate? Are you sure?

Submitted by
doppleclutch
doppleclutch writes: "Like millions of my fellow Americans, we're sequestered this weekend in a rush to pay Uncle Sam. Since my AGI qualifies me to free tax filing, I decided to use TaxCut Online. This is after I bought TaxCut at retail, using it to create my rough draft before using the online version to e-file for free.
Between the two systems, my taxable income was off by $2, which I attribute to rounding differences as I had depreciable property. Either way, my taxable income is between $26,250 and $26,300. The Online version says my tax is $3,549, but the software says $3,542. A swing of $2 results in $7 in additional tax?
Getting a sanity check from the IRS tax tables, I got $3,564, which is $15 MORE than the Online version, and $22 MORE than the Software.
The Online's $3,549 can be found 2 rows above in the tax table ($26,150-$26,200), but the Software's $3,541 can't be found at all. The closest entry would be $3,542, which is 3 rows above ($26,100-$26,150).
I suspect the hardcopy tax table was scanned and OCR-ed, and there may be recoginition errors between "1" and "2", row alignment errors, or a combination of both. Either way, I will have to to file a paper return this year lest I incur the wrath of the IRS. Anyone else doing their taxes now?"

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"More software projects have gone awry for lack of calendar time than for all other causes combined." -- Fred Brooks, Jr., _The Mythical Man Month_

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